Davos Reactions, Waymo’s Safety Case, Czinger 21C Hypercar Tour | Martin Shkreli, Bradley Tusk, Lukas Czinger, Andy McCune, Michael Broukhim, Aaron Katz

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (03:15) - Davos Reactions (25:17) - Waymo Safety (39:51) - Netflix's All-Cash Warner Deal (47:58) - OpenAI & ServiceNow Partner (52:31) - SAAS Sales in Japan (57:30) - Martin Shkreli, an American investor and former pharmaceutical executive, gained notoriety for significantly increasing the price of the antiparasitic drug Daraprim in 2015. In the conversation, he discusses his new role as a father, his company's recent $5 million seed funding, and his views on remote work, emphasizing the importance of in-person collaboration. He also touches on topics like prediction markets, the valuation of private companies, and the potential of photonic computing in drug discovery. (01:36:45) - Bradley Tusk is an American venture capitalist, political strategist, and author, known for founding Tusk Ventures and Tusk Strategies, and for his role as Uber's first political advisor. In the conversation, Tusk discusses his ownership of P&T Knitwear, an independent bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side, which also features a podcast studio and event space. He shares the inspiration behind the store's name, honoring his grandfather's 1950s knitwear business, and reflects on the challenges of running a bookstore in the current economic climate. (02:04:04) - Czinger 21C Hypercar Tour (02:20:59) - Lukas Czinger, co-founder and senior vice president of Czinger Vehicles and Divergent 3D, discusses the development of the 21C hypercar, emphasizing its innovative use of AI-driven design and 3D printing technologies. He highlights the car's impressive performance, including setting multiple track records, and its unique features such as the tandem seating arrangement and hybrid powertrain. Czinger also touches on the broader applications of their manufacturing system beyond automotive, including defense and aerospace industries. (02:36:21) - Andy McCune, co-founder of Cosmos, a visual search engine for creatives, discusses the platform's growth, including a recent $15 million Series A funding round, and its commitment to championing human creativity by allowing users to choose whether to view AI-generated content. He highlights the platform's collaborative features, such as clusters for organizing and sharing content, and its appeal to both professional designers and Gen Z users who enjoy mood boarding for personal inspiration. McCune also touches on future monetization strategies, focusing on serving creative teams and integrating commerce through inspiration-driven shopping experiences. (02:51:47) - Michael Broukhim, co-founder of FabFitFun and an active angel investor, has launched Deep33 Ventures, a $150 million deep-tech fund focusing on the U. S.-Israel corridor. In the conversation, he discusses the fund's emphasis on sectors like quantum computing, AI infrastructure, and energy, highlighting the unique opportunities within Israel's deep-tech ecosystem. Broukhim also elaborates on the fund's expert-first model, involving partners with domain expertise in key technological areas, and the strategic importance of fostering collaborations between U. S. and Israeli innovations to address global infrastructure challenges. (03:01:02) - Aaron Katz is the co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse, Inc., a company specializing in real-time analytics and data warehousing. He discusses the company's strong performance as the fiscal year concludes, emphasizing ClickHouse's pivotal role in AI workflows, with major AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic utilizing their database solutions. Katz highlights the shift towards real-time analytics, noting that users now expect immediate insights, and shares that ClickHouse's engineering team, originating from Yandex, has developed a highly scalable and efficient database system. (03:16:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://cisco.com Okta - https://www.okta.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://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Tuesday, January 20th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Down, the temple of technology, the forces of finance, the capital of capital. Ramp, time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Davos, not the best way to save money. Apparently very expensive if you go, but a lot of people have been and for good reason because there's a lot of news happening in Davos. Mainly, a lot of it's focused on Trump, a lot of it's focused on Greenland. I'll give you a little tour of the Wall Street Journal. Trump's amped up rhetoric on Greenland puts issue center stage at Davos.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you pull up the cover of the Financial Times, too?

• 0:41John Coogan?

  The Financial Times, you want me to do this bit? Here we go. Well, you know, the markets are in turmoil. The Dow slid 800 points, Treasury prices are dropping. You know that if you're investing, you got to do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, Treasuries, and more with damn great customer service.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  So, the front of the Financial Times, it says, Trump keeps seizure of Greenland by force on table as trade tensions mount. And so, this is one of the most aggressive images that I can imagine running on the front of a international newspaper. Now, the Financial Times, of course, is a British paper, so much less, just different dynamics with the current American administration. You know, Trump, I think, has a lawsuit going with the Wall Street Journal. There's a whole bunch of things that are going on with the American media. But over in the Financial Times, they print some wild stuff.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  And they printed this image of a Danish soldier pointing a gun at the camera. So, Danish soldiers exercising on Greenland.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that's been around guns knows that...

• 1:53John Coogan?

  You don't want to be looking down the barrel of them.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  Pointing a gun at anyone, even a photographer to get a cool picture, is typically just completely off limits.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so... What this says to me is that, you know, the Danes said, hey, the head of the army has been flown out to the autonomous territory. Danish troops are on the ground in Greenland, and we're doing a photo shoot. We're getting a soldier with a sniper rifle or an assault rifle. We're going to point that at a camera person. We're going to take that photo, and then we're going to send that to the editor of the Financial Times.

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  We're going to run it on the front page.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  We're going to run it on the front page. Of course, the Danes don't have the authority to just put anything on the front page, but they pitched it, and clearly, they sent the photo, and the Financial Times editor enjoyed it, so he put it on the front page. But it kind of gives you a little bit of a taste of what's going on. The Wall Street Journal's also covering it. Trump threats on Greenland mobilize allies. That is taking center stage at Davos. But this is a technology show. This is a business show, and we're focused on what Dario Amodei said at Davos. We will pull this up.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers, and databases. They run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in. So, let's pull up the clip of Dario Amodei onstage. He's the co-founder and CEO of Anthropic. He calls out Trump's policy around Nvidia and China. Let's play the clip.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  When we go out into the world, right, when we're, you know, competing against other companies for enterprise contracts, we see, just honestly and candidly, we see Google and we see OpenAI. Every once in a while, we see a couple other US players. I have almost never lost a deal, lost a contract to a Chinese model. But now you have the Trump administration, and I think you've already protested about this, giving high-speed chips, Nvidia chips, to the Chinese. That's right. That's right. The thing that is holding them back, and they've said it themselves, the CEOs of these companies say it's the embargo on chips that's holding us back. They explicitly say this. And now, indeed, you know, there are some policies,

• 4:03Speaker 02

  and I hope they change their mind, to, you know, to explicitly send not quite our latest generation of chips, although it was reported that even that was being considered, but, you know, the generation of chips that's just one back, that's still extremely powerful. And we are many years ahead of China in terms of our, in terms of our ability to make chips. So I think it would be a big mistake. To ship these chips. You know, the analogy I thought of, if you think about the incredible national security implications of building models that are essentially cognition, that are essentially intelligence, right? I've called where we're going with this, a country of geniuses in a data center, right?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  So imagine 100,000, 100 million people smarter than any Nobel Prize winner, and it's going to be under the control of one country or another. So I think this is crazy. I think it's, you know, it's a bit like, you know, I don't know, like selling, selling, you know, nuclear weapons to North Korea and, you know, bragging, oh yeah, Boeing made the case. So your friend David Sacks is basically arming the Chinese? I, no, I wouldn't refer to them.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Trying to put words in his mouth.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Is akin to. Yeah, it's not, not, not, well.

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Okay, I want Jordy's reaction, I want Tyler's reaction, but first, I want to tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data labeling factory behind the world's leading labs.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  Tyler.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's your reaction to that? How do you interpret that? How big of an issue is the China question right now? What are you reading into Dario's rhetoric there?

• 5:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's like fairly reasonable if you basically think that AI is going to be AGI, it's going to be this massive, we're going to get 10% GDP growth. Because at some point, it's like, if it's just like economy versus economy, like we got to be better.

• 6:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's something that's sort of lost.

• 6:09Speaker 03

  Worried about doom.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Because there's also the point where.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Just competition.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, like if you're worried about safety also, so there's like two ways, right? If you think AGI is going to be massive, you know, economically speaking, and then also on the safety issue, right? Because if you think, like, maybe China is going to be less concerned about safety, they're not going to be as worried about alignment, that's like, obviously, a massive danger. You don't want to, you don't want to give the technology to people who don't.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  You know, worry about the safety aspect.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  The funny thing about in America, we're like, AI could lead to 10% GDP growth. And China's like, oh, you mean what we did in 2007? When we were growing at 14% GDP growth? Or should we go back to 1970 when we grew at 19%? Or should we go back to 2004 when we were 10.1? Or 1992 when we were growing at 14.3%? Or even in 2021, they had an 8.6 GDP growth. They know 10% GDP growth over there.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  They felt it.

• 7:01John Coogan?

  They'll do it with or without AI chips. But obviously, AI chips are a big, are a big one.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  One dynamic that's interesting is China has the, obviously a massive advantage in robotics.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  And right now, we have an advantage in the models.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:15Jordi Hays?

  And if that kind of continues.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  But also, also the GPUs, like the data centers, like we are GPU rich.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  So I'm saying, I guess like robotic stack, AI stack.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  And it'll be interesting to see how, because obviously if you have an advantage in one area, that might help you gain an advantage in another area, right? But we'll see which one ends up being more impactful.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. We love Cisco. We're happy to be partnered with them. And let me also take you through the linear lineup today because we have some great guests on the show. We have Martin Shkreli joining at noon, Bradley Tusk at 12:30.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  If you're not familiar with Martin Shkreli, he's an American businessman.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  He's a businessman.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  And investor.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  Lucas Zinger is coming in. We have a surprise for everyone. We're going to be taking a look at his car. We're very excited about that. And then we have the land of lightning round. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents now. We're very excited to share that fact with you. Let's click it over to Palantir CEO Alex Karp, who shared some commercial lessons of AI on the battlefield. There's a clip from him from Davos. And there's a little Easter egg in this video for the true TBPN ball knowers, for the video, for the TBPN fans.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know what you're about to say.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  So watch this clip and you can tell me if you identify.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  A former guest.

• 8:40Speaker 04

  Enterprises in general, not all enterprises, tend to want to, over time, become like every other enterprise. So if you take five, you know, A enterprise and B enterprise and C enterprise, they're in the same market. Their tech infrastructure is trying to make them into the same enterprise. They have the same org chart.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:59Speaker 04

  They have presumably roughly the same, they don't have the same data infrastructure. And what you learn on the battlefield is that, and in life is that's, that's not particularly valuable. What is very valuable is an enterprise can do something no enterprise in the world can do. And so that is the goal of every single military intelligence service. In fact, all these intelligence services and militaries have their own specialization. And so when we went to commerce, like what we're saying is, how can we make your insurance cover the way you underwrite? How can we make that to your tribal knowledge about underwriting? How can we transform this to?

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  All right, pause. Okay, go back one second. Go back one second. Okay. Pause. Okay, it's very hard to see, but behind the guy to the right.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Behind Alex Karp.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  Behind Alex Karp, there's another man, and behind that man, next to the W E F logo, is a man who has been on the show.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Philip Johnston, this co-founder and CEO of Star Cloud.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were talking about Satya Nadella.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  I think that's Satya.

• 10:07John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, you think it's Satya? No, I'm talking about the guy right there that you can see. That's Philip from Star Cloud. I saw him go to Davos, so I was like, this guy's on a generational run.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  This whole time.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Is it not? Maybe it's not. I think it is. I'm really sorry, Philip, if I got this wrong, but I, that looks, that looks a lot like you.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  I might be getting it wrong, too.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  That looks a lot like you.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  We might just be seeing things.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  We might be seeing things, we might be hallucinating, but the one thing we're not hallucinating is Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Anyway, enough with the Easter things.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  This whole time, I thought you're, I thought I really was thinking the guy in the back.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Really?

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Satya's.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Kind of hard to clock.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  I don't think that's Satya. I think that's, I think that's Philip Johnston from Star Cloud. I did see him go to Davos, so it's not crazy, but he'll probably correct me if that's not him. Anyway, I would love an explainer from Rgav around the recession indicator, young boy never broke again. I, I'm familiar with NBA young boy, but I'm not familiar with the recession indicator. So I would love to get some more information from you folks on this. Let's dive in and dig into what Alex, what Dr. Karp actually said on. On the stage at Davos, but first, let me tell you about Finn, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  So it's an interesting pitch. It's particularly interesting talking about just more and more custom systems and this idea of, you know, software gets built. A whole bunch of companies are doing things a manual way. One company extracts that and sort of factors out that business process, turns it into enterprise SaaS, is sold to all the different companies. Now, what Karp is really saying, it sounds like, is that every company will have some sort of custom implementation that will be way more flexible and way more tuned to their specific businesses. And this is sort of the Palantir pitch. They'll come in and build something that's semi-custom, semi-on-top of their systems that they've already built.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  And it's an interesting, like, blurring of the lines from you want something that checks all your boxes, but in the future, will you really want, if you're a large enterprise, will you really want to be vibe coding your own solutions to everything? Maybe, but Going to need a You probably want some sort of foundational elements. And that's like the pitch for the ontology stack, understanding how the data links together. And then as you build on top of that, you have a more solid foundation. Seems like a good pitch. Would be interesting to see how this is like, where the rubber meets the road and at what level. The big question with Palantir right now is, you know, they work with the largest companies and

• 12:55John Coogan?

  organizations in the world. Obviously, the military among them. But will they go down the stack and have more, you know, they have AIP, they're bringing more startups onto the platform. Will there be a world where more sort of mid-market enterprises, sub $10 billion companies are thriving with a Palantir-backed system? Certainly would be good for the business to just have more customers on board, but will be, you know, a dynamic that grows. Anyway, 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And I got to give 11 Labs a shout out. Because yesterday, when we spent 45 minutes talking about X articles, I know everyone loved

• 13:38John Coogan?

  that because I did summarize it in a newsletter piece that you could have read in two minutes. But it was fun talking for 45 minutes. One of the things that I brought up was that maybe 11 Labs should do an article reader that would allow you, since there's articles all over X now, to just click a button and have 11 Labs read it to you. Well, they built it and it's already live. So, very, very exciting. 11 Reader is the account here. It says articles everywhere. You can save them with your Chrome extension. Listen on the web or sync to your phone in under 10 seconds. For the bookmarkers out there, for the people that are finding those articles and saying, "I'm going to book those," probably a pretty reasonable way to actually get through your stack of articles that you've been meaning to read, but you

• 14:23John Coogan?

  were busy and you just saw it. You saw that it got a lot of likes and a lot of engagement and you want to dig in, but you don't have the time. So, you're going to head over and do that. Anyway, vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Chinese Vice Premier He Li Feng over at Davos.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Okay, what did he say? China never seeks a trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, China hopes to become the world's market. Let's watch the Chinese Vice Premier.

• 14:54Speaker 05

  For economy and trade, we never seek trade surplus. On top of being the world's factory, we hope to be the world's market too. For economy and-

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  It was an accident. We didn't mean to do this. It was an accident. It was not our intention to develop a massive trade surplus with the world.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  I feel like, I mean, not to go back to 11 Labs, but you have a lot of flexibility with the translator that you choose at one of these events. How are you not going with an Arnold Schwarzenegger? You know?

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, like you could have anyone be your translator. So why not throw in a Morgan Freeman? Or, you know?

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Just, just any type of really like.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  A Joe Rogan.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Joe Rogan.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  He already is announcing UFC. Get him on the microphone, translate it for him, and then he reads it out to the audience. And it sounds like your Joe Rogan voice is out there.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I like it.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, I mean, I, I, I think this is positive. You know, we were just talking to Matt Grimm yesterday about, you know, the, the West versus China and, and global competition. And like, I think all of that stuff is important. I think what Dario is saying is important, but I still come back to this idea that like, no one wants war, no one wants, you know, everyone wants positive some relationships. And so it is good to see, you know, global leaders coming together better than everyone just being holed up and posting at each other on Red Book and Truth Social. I, I, I like, I like an economic forum. I'm, I'm, I'm, I think Davos is back. That, that, that's the real lesson from this year, I think. I think the fact that Trump was going was a big pull.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  There was a lot of coverage, a lot of interesting discussion around it. And Davos really, really pulled together a fantastic group this year and is, is definitely breaking through in the tech community, in the business community, in the political community in a way that I don't remember it being as important the, in last year. And so a little bit of a comeback, you love to see it. Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Lisan Al-Ghaib is quoting Dario at Davos, who also said, "We don't need to maximize engagement for a billion users." Of course.

• 17:13John Coogan?

  Taking shots.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Taking shots.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  Folks over at OpenAI.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  I threw this, I threw this question to both of you earlier today. What is the probability?

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that this is a shot too.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's like, he is acknowledging that they've developed.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Is he anti ads? Yeah, Anthropic is against slopping ads.

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  He said he's anti ads.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Wow, boo, this is hard. I, I, I was falling in love with Dario. I, I love so much about his rhetoric. Obviously the models are fantastic, but he has to come and stab me in the back like that with a shot on my favorite, favorite. A piece of the global economy, the advertising industry.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Very brutal, but hopefully we can bring them around.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  What other notes did you have from the conversation?

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so there's a bunch I took. So, yeah, these ones were from, he did a, like a Wall Street Journal Q and A this morning.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'll just read some quotes.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  He thinks we're gonna have very high GDP and very high unemployment and inequality.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  So, so when we, we, we've kind of ballparked this at like 10% GDP growth for America, that would be unprecedented, massive. We're typically at like 2% to 3%. 10% would be a significant acceleration.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then for the unemployment was like 10 to 20%.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  That's a lot. That's a lot. And we can debate this more, and I'm sure we will. We'll eventually formulate an entire structural presentation around this at some point, but for, continue.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then he said, um, there's gonna have to be some role for like, uh, for the government to intervene on some macro level to like, uh, you know, help, help with this displacement of labor.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  He says, um, ideology will not survive this technology.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Ideology will not survive this technology.

• 18:49Speaker 03

  Bit of a vague post.

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  Except his ideology. He's like, actually, mine is like, kind of got a straight shot here.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, what could be more ideological than being against advertising?

• 18:58Speaker 03

  He said, uh.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  He's a zealot. He's an anti-advertising zealot.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  He said, uh, AI is uniquely well-suited, uh, to autocracy.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Autocracy, okay.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is a TL take as well.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, this was in the context of like, why he's kind of anti-giving chips to China.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. AI is communist, crypto is libertarian, that take, yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then he, he kind of, uh, he said, like, Google and OpenAI are like firmly in consumer. It's kind of this existential, like, battle between them.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Uh, and Anthropic is firmly in enterprise. He's, he's very happy with that decision. He doesn't have to, you know, monetize the billion users or whatever, or monetize free users.

• 19:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 03

  He can just sell like, things to business that have very value.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  I'm so happy I don't have to worry about monetizing a billion users.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  He said, on the question of like, are they going to do generative stuff?

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 03

  They probably won't ever do it. I think Shulto said this too.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  But if they need to.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  There are enough models out there that Claude Code can go and sign you up for the Nano Banana API.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, like maybe there's a use case for images and like, you know, presentations or something. But then they can just kind of vend in some API they can contract to them.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  So my, I mean, my big question is, I think we all agree that ads in the Claude iOS app are a very low priority. Something we will likely not see this year. Oh, that's right. Thank you. Something we likely won't see this year just because they have such a good business going on the, on the enterprise side. And the user base for the Claude iOS app is not necessarily big enough to support a really healthy ad business. And they're sort of ideologically against it. But on the slop question, you can use Claude Code to generate slop. Like you can.

• 20:46Speaker 03

  Article slop.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Well, article slop, but also imagery. You can, you can wire it up to the Sora API, to the Nano Banana API. And you can go create a whole bunch of generative video and people, but, but that is the Shulto promise of like, it should be able to go and use other models, right? The question for me is, when will that functionality come to the Claude iOS app? Because Claude can write some code.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Very natural to like cowork. So I think when that comes to iOS.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. But so what will the cowork iOS product look like? How much flexibility will it have? Cause it won't have all the same APIs to go into your, your folders. Like the whole cleaning up your desktop, like meme on, on your MacBook Pro with Claude Code. That's something that would just be sort of inaccessible to the iOS ecosystem because the APIs aren't there. So even if they tried to build it, Apple just say, no, no, no, you're not rearranging icons on the desktop. Because that could be used maliciously and this is a privacy issue and this is a, a security issue. And so we're not giving you the hooks to do that. The question is like, how much can they do in the cloud and then vend back to you?

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Because if you have a virtual machine that's running Python and has, you know, Claude Code running and you're interfacing with it from the Claude. iOS app, you could do a bunch of crazy stuff, including generate images and go and sign up for a Nano Banana account.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  What if we have an AI safety incident this year where somebody leaves like a Claude code terminal kind of open and on, it just creates billions of social media accounts and it's flooding the internet with.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  I thought you were gonna say just like some kid, you know how like kids will download like Fortnite and then like spend too much on V bucks or they'll like get their parents' credit cards and like run up a bill? It'd be funny if someone like downloaded Claude on the iOS app and like accidentally kicked off something that like provisioned a ton of AWS servers and they just get a bill for like $400,000 and they go bankrupt? That'd be a sort of AI safety incident, that'd be funny. Anyway, Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build, create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. So, what else did Lisan Al-Gaib say about Davos? Some companies are essentially led by people who have a scientific background. That's my background, that's Demis's background.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  We had some love for Demis in the chat. Shout out to Demis over at DeepMind. Some of them are led by a generation of entrepreneurs that did social media, taking shots. Dario is like, he's on one.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, he's wildly entertaining.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Incredibly entertaining.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Because it's like, bold statement, jab.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Bold statement, jab.

• 23:26John Coogan?

  And then also people will hit him with the hard questions and he'll kind of be like, he'll acknowledge, he'll very quickly tell the interviewer, I know where you're going with that and I'm not going there, but in like a fun way that's not really adversarial. And he never flips it around, like takes shots at them and is like, why are you asking me that question? I'm not here to answer that question. He's like, no, no, I know what you're trying to get me to do, but I'm not gonna do it, I'm not gonna take the bait. But he like knows that it's bait, it's very entertaining.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  Interviewer trying to bait him into saying that David Sacks was arming the Chinese, it's crazy.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  That's crazy. He says, "There's a long tradition of scientists thinking about the effects of the technology that they built, of thinking of themselves as having responsibility for the technology they built, not ducking responsibility. They are motivated in the first place by creating something for the world, so they worry in the cases that something can go wrong. I think the motivation of entrepreneurs, particularly the generation of social media entrepreneurs, are very different. The way they interacted, you could say manipulated consumers is very different. I think that leads to different attitudes." He's taken some shots, potentially at Sam Altman, although is Sam Altman not really a social media entrepreneur, but I get that he's in that generation. Obviously, this is more directed at Mark Zuckerberg.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Was that a reference to looped?

• 24:38John Coogan?

  I mean, looped was technically social media, but I think of Sam Altman much more of YC, enterprise software, startups, Stripe. Like, he's never really been in-house at a major social media company that I'm aware of. I don't know. But I take Dario's point, and, you know, he's just trying to reinforce this idea that he does think talking about responsibility for the technology he's building is important. That's the anthropic vibe and brand, and it's served him very well. Anyway, Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending, now with AI.

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Waymo.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Let's do it. So, today, I wrote a quick piece. It was a reaction to a reaction, because David Zipper went in Bloomberg, and he wrote a piece that, "We still don't know if robo-taxis are safer than human drivers." Then Kelsey Piper went over to the argument and wrote a response to that, saying, "Yes, we do know." And her interesting point was that what David Zipper is doing is he's lumping all of the different robo-taxis together. So, Waymo, and Cruise, and Tesla, and Kama, and Zoox, and there's a whole bunch of other data that can go into this bucket, and they're not all created equal. Waymo's been doing

• 26:01John Coogan?

  it for decades at this point. They have insane CapEx and insane OpEx. There's, you know, humans in the loop a lot of times, and it's just like the most advanced team. It seems like it's, you know, the most advanced technology stack. There's a lot of advantages, and that's actually showing up in the data. And so... Her, her main dispute with Zipper is over what data, you know, she's including, uh, he, he's including in, in making this claim that, you know, hey, we don't know if robotaxis are actually safer than human drivers. And she gives this great analogy that I really, really enjoyed. So she says, imagine someone writes a piece and they say, we don't know if airplanes are safe. Some people say that crashes are extremely rare and others say

• 26:44John Coogan?

  that crashes happen, crashes happen every week. Um, and when you investigate this claim further, you learn what's, that what's going on is that commercial aviation crashes are extremely rare. This is true. Uh, while general aviation crashes, small, personal planes, including ones that you can build in your own garage are quite common. And so, yes, if you lump that together, you're going to get this muddy, muddy picture of aviation. But you shouldn't use that to sort of fear monger about getting on a 747 because 747s just so rarely crash. But yeah, if you build your own Cessna and you're modding it and you're taking it through the canyons, like you gotta watch out.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Ask any recreational pilot, if they've ever gotten into any hairy incidents, they'll tell you like, oh yeah, well this time I was flying and, and, uh, the wind came on super strong and I landed and I was basically, you know, 90 degrees.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  And a lot of times that counts as a crash. Like, I mean, Harrison Ford has, has like crash landed on a golf course and no, I believe no one was injured. I think, I think this happened multiple times actually.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  By Harrison Ford?

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Harrison Ford. Yeah. He flies his own planes, but he flies like old planes and stuff like, he's like a true enthusiast. Like he's, uh, he's, he's, he's like a plane guy.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  How many, on simpleflying.com, how many plane crashes has Harrison Ford had? In the last 25 years, the actor has been involved in several incidents involving emergency landings, rescues and runway incursions.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Exactly. Like it happens. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. I would never want to be in any sort of plane crash, but, uh, there's just way more, there's just way more planes flying around when you include those Cessnas. And it's not really fair to put that on United Airlines or American Airlines.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  13th of February, 2017, Santa Ana, California, single-engine Aviat Husky flown by Harrison Ford was cleared to land on runway 20L. Ford's aircraft reportedly landed on a parallel taxiway over flying American Airlines 737 that was holding short of runway 20L.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  5th of March 2015, Santa Monica. Ford was a pilot and sole occupant of Ryan ST3KR Recruit, a two-seat open cockpit aircraft that had-

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Open cockpit, open cockpit, think about that. You're flying and the wind's in your hair. Like, that's not a normal experience. That's not coach on American Airlines.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  The aircraft was used extensively as a training aircraft by the US military in World War II. According to a preliminary report, Ford reportedly reported a loss of engine power shortly after taking off and was attempting to return to runway three. So he ended up crashing into like a field. It looks like Ford chose to land on a nearby golf course, clipping the top of a tree before landing.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  If you just took Harrison Ford, he's probably more dangerous than like American Airlines.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  18th of June 2000, while landing in Lincoln, Nebraska, Ford's plane departed the runway due to a gust of wind. The aircraft sustained minor damage.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  23rd of October, 1999.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Wait, there's a fourth one? I thought I was exaggerating.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Ford was on a training flight in a Bell 206 helicopter when he and the instructor made an emergency landing in a dry riverbed near San Claro, California.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Although the helicopter rolled over on its left side, neither Ford or the instructor were injured. That's all that I can find.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Okay, I have another plane story.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, imagine four, four major incidents, like make it into the record. He's gotta have at least like 10 more than he's just like-

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Sketchy.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  Sketchy situation.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  No one wrote a piece about it. No one saw it. Let's not talk about that.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's agree that, you know-

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Hey, calls his PR person, "Hey, let's clean this up. Uh, how about you take a picture of me outside Arowan? We can get, call the Pats. I'm willing to get coffee with somebody."

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Give me an Arowan branded smoothie. We need a new story.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  You need a different story. I want to be on the front of the New York Post. I'll, I'll, I'll take the bad picture on the beach of me falling off or something. Anyway, cognition, they're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So, I actually have a friend, uh, who's been on the show. I'm not gonna dox him, but, uh, we, we have two friends, both of them fly. One of them's extremely serious, has, uh, you know, uh, IFR ratings. So there's VFR, which is visual flight rules. That's like, you take the plane up, it has to be clear, because if you get into clouds, you're not trained for that. You can't fly at night.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  You're not flying at night, yeah.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, IFR is you're flying on the instruments, i- i- instrument flight rules. And so, um- Uh, we have one, we have one friend who's like super by the book, super safe. And then we have another buddy who's a little bit wilder, VFR, and he will rent like the cheaper planes. And one time like the dial lights went out and he was landing at night. Shouldn't be flying at night at all, just like botched the schedule and didn't check sunset. And he has to use his phone flashlight while he's landing to look at the dials as he's coming in on this rickety like old plane that he's flying. People get crazy out there. They get confident. Uh, it is very dangerous. Uh, but the, just like if you're, if you're getting into, uh, personal aviation, flying your own planes.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Uh, the, the, the jump in safety from VFR to IFR is significant. Like the, the IFR guys like crash way, way less. So highly recommend that if you are getting into flying your own planes. Anyway, Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, so Waymo is funny to write about because, uh, there's still a class of people that are writing the stories about like, "Hey, Waymo's actually safe." And I'm like, "I, I completely buy it. I'm, I'm in. Roll the Waymos out everywhere. I've been in them. I feel safe in them. I've seen the data. I think they're safe." Like, I'm just like, my eyes glaze over when someone's like, "I'm gonna blow your brain out. I'm gonna blow your mind." Like, Waymos are safe. I'm like, "Yeah, I, I'm in. I'm totally in."

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Um, but, uh, there's still this debate. Most, most people in tech are debating about just Waymo's unit economics and like, can they beat Tesla? What happens there? Uh, and so typically I don't really wade into the safety thing because I think it's very safe. Um, but this Piper piece, this Piper, uh, this piece by Kelsey Piper, uh, did make me wonder about it. What happens if you further segment the human driver population? So we, we need to segment rate robotaxis into Waymo and everyone else because Waymo's so good. But how, how does Waymo compare against the best human drivers? And I wasn't thinking like the Lewis Hamiltons of the world. I'm sure Lewis Hamilton could, could be superhuman at driving if he needed to. Uh, I wanted to be, think about it more as like, if I'm an insurance agent and I'm underwriting a class, a group of people. What would that be going for?

• 33:14John Coogan?

  And are they better than Waymo? And you can't look at fatal crashes per 100 million miles, because there have been so few fatal crashes in Waymos, and there's just not enough data yet to look at that. So what you can look at is any injury crashes per million miles. And the Kelsey Piper piece is really good. It goes into a bunch of different methodologies for data collection, looking at incidents where Waymo's airbags release. Because that's a very binary moment, where there's a question about like, well, what's an injury? Like, if somebody like got motion sick, and then they had to go to the hospital, like, does that count as an injury? Or like, what if they were getting out of the car, and then they fall? Like, does that count? So there's all these things where it's like, does it count? So, anyway, the best data that we have on Waymo is all any injury, any injury crashes per million miles.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  For the average human, it's about four any injury crashes. So any injury that counts, four per million miles. Waymo is way better, way better. 0.75, so about five times safer than humans broadly. But there's one very specific case where humans, I believe, are safer. Now, there's debate about the data. I just had Claude like crunch it all together and try and pull a bunch of stuff together. But I think this holds. So, a married 60-year-old woman, who's college-educated and is driving a large luxury SUV in Massachusetts on a Tuesday morning, is closer to 0.5 injury crashes per million miles.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Is the Tuesday morning part real?

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Yes. So, the most dangerous time to drive, and I'll flip it around. The most dangerous time to drive is midnight on a Saturday, because that's when people are at the bars. They leave, they're drinking. And so, there's a, it's dark, it's the weekend, there's a lot more people on the road, they're driving much faster, they're getting places, they might be inebriated or under the influence of something. And so... Tuesday morning is the safest time to drive. And so basically, I looked at all the it's the government IHTSA data. It's the Transportation Authority. I'm getting the acronym wrong. But you look at all the different segments, and then you add all those together, and you get kind of like the synthetic safest driver cohort. It's a little loose, but it does seem

• 35:25John Coogan?

  like if you looked at that cohort, they're still beating Waymo. Humans still got it. At least like, kind of. It's pretty close. It's honestly neck and neck. But so none of this should take away anything. None of this should take away.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Feels like a Nathan Fielder episode in the making of like studying the women in Massachusetts.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, like what they do.

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  Safe drivers on the planet. Just interviewing all of them to like.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Married sixty year old college educated women.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Just like the exact wrong conclusion.

• 35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to. We need to get everyone married and college educated.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Every now, the conclusion is everyone needs to move to Massachusetts.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Well, it's the married sixty year old women that need to be the taxi drivers everywhere in the world. They need to be. It's like, instead of Waymo.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, he starts like a competitor to Waymo.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Ride hailing. That's just them.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's just them.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it only works in Massachusetts. So clearly, Waymo's are very safe. Rolling them out nationally would be a huge safety upgrade for our society broadly. But it's worth noting that the Massachusetts married women still got it. But if you want to know, if you want to flip this around and find the hypothetically riskiest driver profile, it's very funny. It's an eighteen year old, single male with a DUI, driving a Dodge Challenger at midnight on a Saturday in rural Mississippi. That's as risky as you can get. And that,

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  That kind of makes sense.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  And that's like, you know, an order of magnitude, or forty times as dangerous as the Massachusetts driver.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the interesting takeaway is that that you said earlier off the show was like Waymo's actually not super, a superhuman level driver.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Because, because in order to be that, you actually have to be better than the best human, right?

• 37:05John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So we need a word for, for not above average and in the top cohort of humans, but not better than any human ever. Because a lot of AI tools are getting there.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, I guess, okay, so I actually looked up.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  It's like top decile.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  So superhuman means having powers, abilities, or qualities beyond normal human capacity. So it's potentially these women in Massachusetts.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  They have superhuman.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  They're superhuman. And as well as Waymo.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  So maybe, maybe we do need to give Waymo a little more credit.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for superhuman payroll, payroll, head over to Gusto to unify the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of this show.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  It is. Max Hodak had a post about Waymo. He said, interesting benefit of Waymo. It always matches instantly since it, since it knows exactly what cars are available and that they will always accept. And it can also provide accurate wait times before requesting. And so lots of love for Waymo. Interesting to see where they'll roll out. The really interesting thing is that we've, we've had a number of people on the show advocate that rolling out Waymo is a societal good. It will reduce the number of traffic fatalities. That's all true. But if you really want to accelerate the impact that Waymo will have on safety, you got to deploy it in Mississippi before you bring it to Massachusetts, which, and I, I just feel like Waymo's coming to Boston before it comes to Vicksburg. But I don't know. It is fun.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  There's, there's other love for Waymo on the timeline. First, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. Mike Bullpe, he said, I have to say, I love that Waymo operates from San Francisco to the South Bay. So great. Some folks say the freeway driving is so, so. I hadn't heard that. The antidote to that is I get into an Uber and, and do the same drive. It's literally life threatening.

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  I was driving, I was driving with Paul the other day and I heard, he was telling me about the different modes that Tesla has. I've never owned a Tesla, so I wasn't familiar. But did you know that Tesla actually has something called Mad Max mode?

• 39:21John Coogan?

  No.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  The autopilot where it'll drive it, it'll drive it like roughly around 85 on the freeways. And it will, it'll, if, if you're in the fast lane and you come up to somebody, it will merge over into the, into the lane to the right, make a pass and go back to 85.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Somehow, somehow feels slightly illegal, but I like it.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Okay, MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with the best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. We have an update in the Warner Brothers Netflix deal. Netflix, they're going all cash. All cash deal. Netflix had said to Paramount, hey, what we want is an all cash deal. David Ellison and the Paramount crew, they brought Warner an all cash deal and Netflix or Warner was still saying, hey, we're going with Netflix. Now Netflix is upgraded. So we can read through a little bit of this from the Wall Street Journal.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  Warner Brothers Discovery and Netflix said Tuesday they struck a new all cash deal for Netflix to buy Warner Brothers Studios and HBO Max. Warner also released financial details on the cable network's business it plans to spin off. The all cash deal of $27.75 per share replaces Netflix's previous cash and stock deal. The sweetened offer comes as rival bidder Paramount continues pushing its all cash offer for all of Warner Discovery. The value of Netflix's offer remains $72 billion. Warner and Netflix said they expect the new structure to enable Warner shareholders to vote on the deal by April. The change could also help sway some shareholders who might be weighing its bid against Paramount's. Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said in a statement that revised agreement demonstrates our commitment

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  to the transaction and accelerates the process for Warner shareholders. The new Netflix agreement reduces by $260 million the amount of Warner debt being placed on Discovery Global, the company that will house cable channels including CNN, TNT and Food Network. There's also another, the next kind of thing that I was going to get to, interesting. CNN is doing $600 million in profit on revenue of $1.8 billion. So they are truly news maxing, quick sizing for CNN.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations to everyone in CNN.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  Not bad at all.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  Of course, of course, a ton of debt strapped to.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  The broader group.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  And Peter Kafka is saying that private equity should pick it up. It's a shrinking business that throws off cash. It's perfect for private equity. Let's give it up for private equity.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for Peter and private equity.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  I'm a big fan.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, somebody, you know, I was saying yesterday that maybe, maybe AI could save Hollywood.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  Somebody would, I knew, I knew that was going to piss a lot of people off for a lot of reasons.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  I wasn't really clocking what you were saying either. And so we should talk about it more, but continue.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, one of the critiques was like, you know, interesting to say that LA is dying as you're building a media business from LA.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  And my response is that we are in a huge complex. We're recording the show from a huge complex. And every other building in the complex is empty pretty much every single day.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Like, there's no, there's nothing going, there's the, when I, when I said LA is like dying, I was specifically talking about the context of the entertainment.

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's that, there's that Wall Street Journal report that just shows sound stages were, you know, typically leased 90% of the time. And it's just way off, off peak down to like 60%. And so there is like a, like a broad trend. Uh, and then just in general, like, I don't think we're necessarily at a phase in our life where we're like, okay, tabula rasa. Where's the best place to build this business? Let's go find that. It's like, we live here.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we didn't.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  We're not like, okay, we should go to Atlanta or something, or go to New York.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we certainly didn't say like, let's start a media company because we live in LA.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  It's like, the, the, the, the current struggles that LA is having are not going to hold us back. If anything, it's going to be easier because we can get space and hire people.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Rents, in, in, 10, 10 years ago, this space would have been like two, three times the price to rent.

• 43:38John Coogan?

  The bigger, the bigger question is, uh, you know, there, there are these blips in industry towns that have happened many times. New York famously in the, what, 70s and 80s went through a really rough patch. San Francisco during COVID, everyone was moving out and there was a real. There was a real vibe of like, oh, is San Francisco going to be less relevant in tech? And then it came roaring back with the AI labs. And I think most people don't, you know, debate that, that, you know, cities go through rough patches and then can come back. And so we certainly, we certainly hope that LA comes back. It'd be fantastic. But there are, there are a lot of changes that need to be made. And this has been said by a number of, a number of famous people in Hollywood and Hollywood actors

• 44:21John Coogan?

  who have talked about different tax regimes, different incentives, different changes structurally to the way content is made and distributed. There's a lot of different elements that are contributing to LA having a rough go. At the same time, it's a fantastic city. It's where I was born and raised. I love it. I'm not going anywhere. You're gonna have to pull me out of here.

• 44:39Jordi Hays?

  He's not leaving.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  In its Tuesday filing, Warner projected 17 billion of revenue in 2026. Adjusted, I won't explain EBITDA, but 5.4 billion of EBITDA. Those figures are expected to decline to 15.6 and 3.8 billion respectively in 2030. The only individual network projections were CNN, which I just shared. They're increasing, they're, they're expecting to increase revenue to 2.2 billion in 2030. And expecting to, yeah, continue to grow EBIT as well.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Well, Netflix seems to be doing everything right. As much as I enjoyed the David Ellison profile and learning more about how seriously he takes his business, it does feel like Netflix is just willing to pull out all the stops to get this across the finish line. And if they're able to match Paramount on the cash deal nature and all the different consideration, deal with the regulatory hurdles, it might take a long time, but it does, it does still feel like they will land on it.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And again, I mean, it just feels like I...

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm so curious to see how this works out because it felt like the Ellison's were just putting on this absolute masterclass and then this one and then kind of ran into a brick wall with this, right?

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  You could argue they overpaid by a ton for the UFC, which made sense if you had this, again, like if you have all these assets under one roof, it is going to be a really compelling consumer product.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Consumer subscription, but currently kind of unclear who the, who this kind of platform is really going to be for.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was also surprising to me because Netflix for 20 years has been pure play tech company, right? And many of the previous tech companies, when they come out, like they haven't done a lot of acquisitions of legacy assets that I'm aware of, maybe, but I'm just thinking like, social media sort of like disrupted the news business. They didn't, Meta didn't go out and acquire the New York Times. They could have done some sort of hostile takeover, they have the money, but that never really figured into the, into the business and they wound up just working together synergistically and now the New York Times has been growing across social media very effectively and they have, they've adapted their business model. Both businesses are doing well.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  They're sort of disruptive to each other, but ultimately they never decided to, to buy the legacy player. So it was always something that was never on my bingo card of, oh, Netflix is going to buy, you know, a TV channel or, you know, a movie studio or a traditional Hollywood player. That just didn't seem like something that was going to be, you know, logically happening anytime soon. And yet, here we are. And it makes a lot of sense when you think about the assets and the IP specifically and the longevity that that will bring when it comes, when you get Batman and Superman on Netflix, that's going to be exciting. Anyway. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Said.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  We got a deal. We got a pact. It's not just a deal, it's a pact. OpenAI and ServiceNow, they struck a deal to put AI agents into business software. ServiceNow, one of the greatest software companies in history, one of the few to reach revenues at their scale. The line from the Wall Street Journal is, "The AI model maker and business software provider, they signed a three-year pact." I like the word pact. That underscores how AI.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  The partnership is economy is over.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Yes, you gotta do.

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  Rest release economy is over.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  This is the packed economy.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  You get it. No more deal guys, no more deal Titans, deal makers, packed makers, packed guys. That's what's next. This is going to underscore how AI agents are increasingly being embedded in corporate software. You heard Dario talk about where he's potentially going up against other labs on corporate B to B deals. He said OpenAI, he said DeepMind. He didn't really say, he said no China labs have ever competed. Well, ServiceNow went with OpenAI on this one. So they signed a three-year deal that will integrate the AI models, ChatGPT's models, into ServiceNow's business software. The deal depends on customers using OpenAI's models within ServiceNow and also includes a revenue commitment from ServiceNow to OpenAI.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Enterprises want OpenAI's intelligence applied directly into ServiceNow workflow, said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI's chief operating officer. Look ahead. Customers are especially interested in agentic and multimodal experiences so they can work with AI like a true teammate inside of ServiceNow. We've seen a lot of other companies add. We've talked to Marc Benioff about Slackbot. We've talked to Satya Nadella about Copilot. Like, if you have one of these massive software suites, enterprise software suites with just so much surface area, you're going to want to vend LLMs and agents into every little nook and cranny. And you probably don't want to build your own lab because it's going to be incredibly

• 49:58John Coogan?

  expensive when OpenAI will go and marshal the capital and build the data centers and train the models. And then you can just focus on the implementation and delivering value for your customers. So Salesforce has already folded AI agents into its flagship sales and marketing tools. SAP and Workday have been similarly pitching businesses on the idea that their embedded AI agents are essentially getting, are essential to getting the value out of AI. The deal comes as OpenAI looks to build its enterprise business, both by selling direct access to its models and AI agents and through business software collaborations like with ServiceNow. It bases competition not just from rival AI model maker Anthropic and, but also Google and Microsoft's suite of enterprise AI tools. For ServiceNow.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  I want to find, I want to find a company. That is using the agents at ServiceNow or Salesforce or a company like that and saying, "I can't live without these agents. I love these agents. We gotta find, we gotta find one person."

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if it's, if it's just like really sort of like maybe a year or two behind on the actual invitation, but it's just like, oh, I get like daily summaries of what's going on in the system and it's a little bit nicer and neater. And I, I, yeah, I could probably extract all the data and write an agent that does that, but you know, it was just one click of a button to add it to my installation and I did it and it's adding a little bit of value. I don't think you're going to see anyone who's like, "It's transformational. It just works on its own. I don't do anything." It's more, it's much more incremental than that. It's, it's, it's still in like an autocomplete phase, little helper tools there. It's Clippy. Clippy's going into every piece of enterprise

• 51:45John Coogan?

  software. And so people are having fun. ServiceNow increased revenue 22% in the third quarter as AI demand from both existing customers and new customers grew, particularly in its customer relationship management business. The software company will report its fourth quarter earnings and full 2025 financial results on January 28th. We gotta do a deep dive that day. Anyway, app lovin', profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  What's, what SaaS founders should know about entering the Japanese market?

• 52:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I found this on Hacker News and I just thought it was interesting because we've talked to a few folks about expanding into Japan. It's not been on the top of the roadmap for many founders that we talked to, but I thought this was interesting and I thought we could go through just a, just a little bit of it and then you can read the article if you want. So this is from embedworkflow.com. "In one sentence, what's the difference between selling SaaS in Japan versus other countries?" And the answer is, "The process is different. You can't, you just can't treat sales and go to market as a whole in..." Japan the same way you would in North America or Europe.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  The SaaS sales process in Japan is structurally different from the United States and other Western markets, primarily in terms of pace, decision-making style, and buyer behavior. It's not that Japanese companies are unwilling to try new software, but rather that they prefer to do significant research before engaging directly with a vendor. So many successful SaaS companies in Japan structure their websites with two primary calls to action. So one is just for downloading product documentation. And then the second is for booking a demo and starting or starting a free trial. And most Japanese leads enter through the documentation path first. In America, we just want to get on the phone.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm not reading the instructions.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  I'm not reading the instructions.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  No way. I don't have time to understand how this thing works.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  I need to go straight to a steak dinner. Steak dinner first, then I'll figure out what your company does. But let's talk about golf first. Let's talk about a track day first. And then you can give me the pitch for your company.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  That would, that would honestly, the steak dinner button on a SaaS website, it's like you can try the product now where there's a button that's just like a steak emoji. And if you click that, you can get steak today.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  On demand.

• 54:11Jordi Hays?

  With somebody on the team.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yes. No matter where you are, no matter where you are. Agentically books a steak restaurant.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm tired, I'm tired of all these people that are like, oh, oh, you know, it just take, just take a demo and we'll give you some AirPods. Spend the money on steak. Take the AirPods budget and put a steak button on your website.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Steak button.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  And have the steak flow.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Stakeholders. Stakeholders need steak. So in the US, the typical flow is that a prospect visits a website, books a demo on their own, or drops off and is followed up aggressively by sales. A conversion happens quickly. A proof of concept or trial begins, and the deal either closes or the buyer moves to a competitor. The cycle is fast and transactional. Buyers are comfortable testing tools, replacing them, and switching vendors if something doesn't work. In Japan, the process is slower and more deliberate. A company will usually download product materials first. The vendor then reaches out and begins a longer engagement process focused on education and relationship building rather than pushing for an immediate demo or trial. The goal is to support the buyer's internal evaluation process.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  The lead will take the information back to their organization and begin internal discussion about whether or and how to proceed. So I just thought that was pretty interesting. How do you gain trust from the Japanese market? Part of it is showing your commitment to the Japanese market where things where simple things matter. Is your product localized? Is your documentation localized? Do you have a support person that I can speak Japanese with? That's one layer. And the other layer, which is harder to potentially navigate at first, is the social proof aspect. So you need to get some social proof.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd be so curious to know how like a company like Notion has done in Japan, right? It's product led. They do have enterprise as well, but again, it's a product that just kind of scales naturally. But yeah, for so many different kind of like vertical SaaS players, it would feel like unless unless the Japanese startup ecosystem is asleep at the wheel and not paying attention to what's working outside, like, can you imagine as a vertical SaaS player going and trying to compete in Japan against a local, like a talented local team?

• 56:21John Coogan?

  It feels like it'd be very hard.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  It feels like you just get smoked.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, Vanta automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  Max Hodak is on a tear.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  We gotta do this one before we bring in our guest.

• 56:35Jordi Hays?

  Fun fact, rather than asking Claude to double check its own work, you can lie to it and say Codex went romping through the code and left bugs and it should find them.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  I like the idea that somewhere in the weights, the all the drama of the AI lab battles are being encoded and creating bitter, deep rivalries. It's, yeah, it's very funny. I saw I saw something else about Claude just rejecting a prompt whole cloth. Did you see this? Somebody was like rewrite this entire app in jQuery. And Claude was just like, no, that's a bad decision, bad use of resources. I'm not doing it. I don't know if that's real, but I thought it was very, very funny. Uh, anyway, uh, we have our first guest of the show, Martin Scrawley in the restream waiting room. We will bring him in the TV panel show. Martin, how you doing?

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 57:26Martin Shkreli?

  What's up, guys?

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Happy New Year. How is your year going so far?

• 57:31Martin Shkreli?

  Great. I'm a new dad, so that's, uh,

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 57:34Martin Shkreli?

  They're pretty wild, yeah.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is it, has it, has it been wild or is it, uh?

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Where does it?

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it more, is it quite a bit more normal? Like to me, to me, parenting is, it does feel natural. And so there, some people, some people have this idea of like, oh, it's so, it's so insane. And, you know, it's so complicated and, and I have to read 20 books and other people is like, kind of follow, just follow kind of your own nature and just like, take, take care of your child. It, it is straightforward.

• 58:08Martin Shkreli?

  I'm following my nature. I mean, I'm following my nature. The kid's got to produce at some point. He started to come into work like once a month.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 58:14Martin Shkreli?

  You know, comes in, goes gagas, you know, entertains the troops here.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 58:19Martin Shkreli?

  But at some point, you know, some trades, something, do something.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:22Martin Shkreli?

  You know?

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  Put some trades on.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta find some alpha.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Have some, have some conviction.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how big, how, uh, what, what's the environment like in your office? You guys, uh, have remote component? Are you anti-remote?

• 58:39Martin Shkreli?

  No, remote, remote is, is evil. You know, I think that if you're going to war together, you can't go to war remotely. You know, it's, uh, you know, my, my people fought the Ottoman Empire and, you know, one, one man, you know, famous general, you know, stopped the Ottoman Empire largely by himself. And, uh, at least that's a legend, you know, and, and if we're gonna take on Bloomberg or whoever we're fighting, um, you know, I just don't think you could do it with some guy sitting in, you know, at home with this stuff.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  What's the current, what's the current battle that you guys are fighting and how is the war going overall?

• 59:13Martin Shkreli?

  War's going great. We just closed a seed round. We raised five.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Whoa. Right.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Good news, hostile news.

• 59:26Martin Shkreli?

  We raised two like a year ago.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 59:28Martin Shkreli?

  To get the ball rolling, or a year and a half ago. Raised five as a seed round. And then we'll probably do like a 10, 20, 30, something like that. This year it is an A. We have a lot of revenue. We're almost profitable.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 59:41Martin Shkreli?

  It's, you know, the interesting thing about financial software is traders want to try everything. Like they just, you know, it's the greatest business in the world. And, you know, you do have to have domain expertise, which nobody has. So I think that's a lot of fun. We also might get into.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  You mean, nobody in, nobody in tech has?

• 59:58Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, yeah. The people with, yeah, the, yeah. Our customers are brilliant. People who are in finance have financial expertise. Or at least many of them, you know, believe they do. Obviously, to some extent, it's like a casino and you're, you're sort of arming them with tools. A lot of the tools haven't changed. I do have this thing, I want to show you guys when I'm, when I'm ready. I think we're going to call it like sit or sit, sit rep or sit. It's going to be like the situation monitoring suite. That's just like Bloomberg has these like fake systems that are, they're pretty awful, but there's something where you could like see the map and you can kind of see different things happening, like earthquakes or whatever. But like, take that and actually make it really good.

• 1:00:41Martin Shkreli?

  I think people would, would truly want to monitor situations. I think that's a new, like, there's no situation.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a new hobby.

• 1:00:49Martin Shkreli?

  I mean, it's a new sector.

• 1:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it's a new, it's a new category. It's in, it's, and it's a prosumer category. Cause, cause, cause, cause people I think actually enjoy it so much that it's like camping where there, I, I think people will be willing to spend money. Like.

• 1:01:04Martin Shkreli?

  Oh, totally. So think, think about the revenue of Bloomberg with eight billion, 10 billion, whatever. A satellite constellation, maybe it's 100 mil. And imagine if you're sitting at Citadel or Millennium or some hedge fund or Fidelity or something and you, and you're literally tasking a satellite like, no, actually I want a satellite to point here. You know, and, and what margin difference would it make? You could probably pass through, you'd probably be accretive to EBITDA to have your own constellations like. Satellite constellation and then things like drones or maybe you know there's you know Bloomberg right now I think have like ships and shipping routes and flights and like kind of fairly boring stuff but you you can make it 100 times better so that'll be fun when it's ready and and again this is all inspired this whole sector started with the Bezos

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah that's right

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Really really did

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  What's your take on prediction markets or do you enjoy them do you think that they're valuable uses of information do you think it all just winds up being sports betting like where where does all this go?

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  And we will be we will be trading

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  On what you say

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  So

• 1:02:03Martin Shkreli?

  Do you guys get do you guys get paid?

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  No no no I yeah I'm super

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  I have a thousand X long on you saying biotech at some point during this

• 1:02:14Martin Shkreli?

  There you go all three dollars on it

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah exactly exactly no no but yeah what do you think on on prediction markets valuable useful do you use them do you trade?

• 1:02:24Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah it's great it's a great question I mean I think I think it's probably like social media like the first social media companies if you like go back into like that Steve Levy book about Facebook which I think is just fantastic like almost documenting you know every part of it there were a couple of very random even before Friendster you know a couple of these really proto social media companies and the sector exploded I think that's where we're at I don't think I mean I wish the companies the best of luck except for Calci but the two companies but I do think that you know markets have been around for you know hundreds of years if not longer and ICE and CBO and these other

• 1:03:08Martin Shkreli?

  companies are probably traded they don't sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say gee I you know I hope some creative new market comes along they make financial products all the time but you know they they innovate they add new things and then they actually take them down because they don't catch fire in Wall Street so if you want to be like that micro Kind of, you know, micro markets sort of pioneer. It's interesting, but it's sort of still like you get into scale problems with like, who actually arbitrates some of these bets? Obviously, sports is easy and some of these other things, but you know, how much are you just financializing for financializing sake?

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:43Martin Shkreli?

  And is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons of money to fight the arbitrage gradient? You know, if you're betting, so full disclosure, I've been running this spot on Polymarket that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15-minute markets, which are somewhat inefficient. And nobody needs to trade this, right? There's no actual, you know, benefit to trading this other than you can, you can take two to the N bets, so you get around, I guess, 96 bets a day. And if you somehow, you know, the money velocity of getting a lot of those right, you can compound insanely well. Of course, it's random, but you know, people, hope springs eternal that you could somehow get the rhythm of the market every 15 minutes.

• 1:04:27Martin Shkreli?

  And you can, I think somebody posted on Polymarket, they took a very small amount of money and a very large amount of money. So, you know, it is, it is kind of a, I think it's a bit of a waste of ingenuity and engineering. And we're, we're working on trying to sort of make a prediction market that might be more relevant, say, private companies. You know, right now, the binary outcomes of prediction markets have forced you into this box of like, will OpenAI go public this year? Well, SpaceX hit a trillion valuation. Why can't it just be dollar for dollar? Why not like, this, this is just a market that pays you N dollars per, you know, like a swap? So, and I'm sure that might be being worked on by other companies, but I think that's like an economically rational thing. So the spirit is there, like, we should have our own markets.

• 1:05:09Martin Shkreli?

  We should be able to deploy whatever we want, but actually make it make sense. And I think they're still trying to do that.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  What is the state of tracking large, late-stage, private companies' valuations? We have a ticker at the bottom with, you know, Mag7, big tech companies with market caps. I would love to add Andropic, OpenAI. But I saw some debate over, you know, how you actually get the data, how reliable it is.

• 1:05:35Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I got into it, I got into it with Lonsdale. I own Follin. I unfollowed him for five minutes because of it. I was so mad.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Worst five minutes of his life.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Worst five minutes.

• 1:05:46Martin Shkreli?

  I might have, I might have made a few days. Um, but eventually I, I, uh, relented, but.

• 1:05:52John Coogan?

  Capitulated.

• 1:05:52Martin Shkreli?

  I think, yeah, I think that what Lonzo's saying is right in that if he gets invited to a deal, per se, Ramp or whoever, you know, he was complaining that my ramp number was too low. And, okay, fine, that's, that's fine. But it's the same thing as insider info in the stock market. So you have insider info, great. You know Ramp's gonna trade up 50% higher than my number. He's like, your number's wrong. What's no different for me saying, well, you know, the, um, you know, the Nvidia number's wrong, but I know they're gonna have a blowout quarter.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:23Martin Shkreli?

  Well, you know, how am I supposed to know that? You know, my market only reflects the people trading on it, not, you know, um, the news you know before everyone else knows it, which is in private, as you know, guys know very well, in private world, that's, um, and that's, that's to be expected. Uh, the losing won't part with your money, but in the, in the public world, you're not supposed to have that information edge. So he's so used to having the information edge, because I'm sure he gets invited to many, many great deals, that, you know, he knows all the prices about to change. And so SpaceX is a really funny example. On our platform, SpaceX price has tripled. Because, you know, Elon sort of dropped this bomb that like, oh, we're gonna do a, uh, you know, do a, a buyback at this crazy price.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Martin Shkreli?

  Obviously not crazy to him, but to the marketplace, they're like, what WTF? It's like more than double than the last few months. Um, you know, just.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, and, and, and a lot of the stuff, late stage, if, if somebody, you know, there's so much demand and there's so little supply, that if somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I've got SpaceX at one and a half trillion, and somebody's like, do I, I'm really, if I believe Elon can get this thing out at one and a half trillion, sure, I'm gonna be flat over until they get out or whatever, but at least I'm in, right? So, I don't know. It, it, uh, people will start to be able to justify almost any, any price up until that point.

• 1:07:46Martin Shkreli?

  Sure. And I know Matt, Matt Grimm is on this, you know, warpath against these, um.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, SPV hustlers.

• 1:07:53Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, yeah. So I mean, I feel like the only solution is we have to have a private. We have to be able to trade like, just like polymarket, private, private companies. And there's, there's a big battle brewing behind the scenes of this. We'll see where, we'll see what comes of it.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Okay. Speaking of Elon, speaking of XAI, SpaceX, walk me through all of the internal secrets that you learned from the infamous podcast.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  First of all, if, if your most junior employee went on a, on a, on a cinematic podcast for, for 90 minutes and just told all about Godell and everything, would you?

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How would you react?

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  How would you react?

• 1:08:31Martin Shkreli?

  I, I think, you know, the first, my first like week in hedge funds, I thought this was a good idea. And I, I, my sense for asking the boss just like kicked in at the last second.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Like. Wait, so you were gonna call up Bloomberg and say like, I gotta tell you, we're working on some exciting stuff. I gotta tell you about some of our new trading strategies.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  This specific market is wildly mispriced and we're gonna make a killing.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  We're printing.

• 1:08:56Martin Shkreli?

  I was long the stock and the company told me, oh, we're doing this newspaper piece. Do you mind giving a quote for it since you're an investor? And I, I told our CFO, I said, I'm going to be doing this, just so you know. He's like, no.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  No, you will not be doing that. Okay. So what did you actually learn from, from the XAI deep dive?

• 1:09:16Martin Shkreli?

  I think it's less about learnings and more about like, just the gumption of like, the way you set your questions. I can understand like, look, you're an engineer or you should be able to go on a podcast. Questions come up about XAI, you probably see, look, I can't really talk about it. You might drop a few things, but you know, he was really like, people asked, the, the interviewer asked him, how is Optimus gonna roll out? And he was like, this is not me telling you. That's Elon's job, you know, it's not yours. And so the real reason I kinda came after this guy in a not so, like, kind of no belief way is he had, I looked, I looked up this guy, I have a lot of friends at XAI, I said, who is this guy? And he had blocked me. I said, oh, no, no, no, this is a big thing. So I could amplify.

• 1:09:58Martin Shkreli?

  You know that you did this and again, I mean, I think the guy was fired, you know, at least the second he went on the show. I doubt that I had any part to do with it, but I definitely didn't mind amplifying the insane kind of decision he made. And you know, if he blocked me, that's, that's, I mean, Ro Khanna.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  He blocked you too?

• 1:10:19Martin Shkreli?

  No, he came at me for absolutely no reason. I said, you know, I replied to his tweet like 80 million other people, like this is a bad move. And it wasn't a day. I was like, look, I think that the problem is that it's not the billionaires that, it's the billionaires and their teams, right? So if Peter leaves California, if Palmer leaves California, if Elon leaves California, it's not just them who leave. It's works for them. And that's, and it's every florist that works for those guys. I'm trying to find florists. It's every house cleaner.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah, because you have, you have the, the highly productive, high agency team members that are like, I want to be in the same building as my boss every single day because I don't want to go to war remotely, like you said, and if I'm going to be a serious player at this company, I need to be, have proximity to the person.

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, the, the average billionaire family office has got to be 50 employees, their families, like it, it gets pretty big when you think about the footprint.

• 1:11:17Martin Shkreli?

  Or even just the companies they're running, right? I mean, just the companies they're running, if it's, there has to be a ton of new employment in Texas because of this and I'm, it will only continue.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Our friend, our friend Jordan was just saying that, that, uh, he's like Ro Khanna's just rage baiting you guys and you just completely, you know, played into it. And, and I, I think that's, I'm, I'm sure Ro will use this to set up, you know, his next, uh, his next play, but it's still, it doesn't take away from the fact that you're going to leave. I don't care if you, like, if you're just using this as a, as a stepping stone to like, you know, go to the national stage, being like, I stood up against the California billionaires that weren't playing their fair share. Well, like, I live in California and I had, we still have to live with the consequences of like your political ambitions, right? And pushing something that, that's so obviously, you know, I said, like, what do you want California

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  to become? Like an agrarian society, you know, where it's just like agriculture and, and vineyards and tourism? Like, there's a lot of, like, every other state will be happy to take, take these jobs and, and, uh, you know, host these companies. Um, and I don't think we should just, you know, hand them all over.

• 1:12:27Martin Shkreli?

  What's really crazy is my partner's at one of the big AI labs and you know if she leaves California and then sells her stock, California will you know kind of come after you and someone just posted this um really almost like fascist letter that the California tax department sent them. I don't know if you guys saw this?

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw it. I saw it.

• 1:12:45Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, yeah, it was insane.

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Basically, the the the letter was like, we want to understand the narrative of why you left California. It was like, tell us, spin us a yarn. Give us, tell us a story on how you decided to, on how you had the audacity to leave this state.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Martin Shkreli?

  I'm shocked by it.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, on on on XAI, did the uh did the podcast make you more bullish on the strategy at open uh at at XAI specifically? Were there things that you thought were particularly exciting about what was what was laid out or things that you uh thought were maybe misunderstood or mispriced?

• 1:13:25Martin Shkreli?

  It's hard to tell from the junior engineer, you know, it's I think like, you know, you get a window, which is great, but it's also, it's Elon's show and like the risk of of over indexing to something like that is like, okay, this guy saw it, he worked there.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:38Martin Shkreli?

  That's cool, but what is Elon really thinking? And I think that there's this new thing coming from the AI companies that nobody's expecting and you know, I wanted to see if he was going to drop sort of that and I think all of the labs are gearing up to think about this uh and it's sort of this new um derivative of of kind of the outcomes of AGI and I think almost nobody in the market is talking about it. Um, so it's gonna be very interesting to see how the next, I'll just, you know, leave the teaser there, see how the next uh.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  No teasers, unpack it for us, break it down.

• 1:14:14Martin Shkreli?

  Five to 10 years, I can't.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  You can't, okay.

• 1:14:17Martin Shkreli?

  Next five to 10 years comes, but I I I think that the question is really what what can AI really do?

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Martin Shkreli?

  And I think that we've we're we very much over index to chatbots and LMS and like a good, a good new direction, you know, people have talked about endlessly is robotics.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:34Martin Shkreli?

  But imagine there's 50 new directions, you know, and I think that, you know, I hate to say something like this changes everything, but like there there's a couple of clever ones, I think, coming that are just haven't been seen yet and I think the smaller. Like the non-Google, non-meta, I'm sorry, non-Google, non-Microsoft type of players, you know, including X is kind of what I'm thinking about, are actually thinking about this very heavily. And macro hard, I guess macro hard is kind of, you know, an example of like, what is that really?

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Martin Shkreli?

  And what's really going to be macro hard as we see, you know, macro hard be revealed more and more. I think there's a lot more to that than, you know, in some ways, I think macro hard is going to be bigger than XAI. It's all one entity, if I'm not mistaken, but it macro hard is probably worth more than XAI. And I think that we just don't know what's coming out of that. We also know about Elon's gaming, AI gaming ambition, which I think,

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Martin Shkreli?

  And I don't know if you guys have seen Martin Posato's

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Martin Shkreli?

  uh, coding is very cool stuff.

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Martin Shkreli?

  And, uh, you know, it's amazing that guy can invest and, uh, do that stuff. And I think one leads to the other. I sort of do the same thing for my end. I want to talk to you about really fast, uh, this idea of photonic computing.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:46Martin Shkreli?

  Which I think is, time is coming.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:15:51Martin Shkreli?

  So, yeah, so photonic computing is, is what it sounds like. It's using light instead of electrons to compute.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:58Martin Shkreli?

  It's, it's been around for 50 years. It's sort of like quantum's ugly stepsister. But I think it's actually the belle of the ball because, and there are very few companies working on this. You probably know all about it from interconnects where, you know, and silicon photonics as well. But recently in nature and a few other like preeminent sort of journals, especially Chinese companies have shown that you can do matmoles with light.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 1:16:21Martin Shkreli?

  And it's actually pretty remarkable. Light goes to 100 terahertz. But it's more important than that. It actually is, is you can do 3D matmoles and they're all in one complexity. So it's a pretty insane speed up versus GPU. GPUs are great, but they're almost too general, which is why TPUs have Sort of been there, but if you throw out the need for, you know, lots of different instructions, you just need to do a matmole, which as you guys know is ninety-five, ninety, ninety-five percent of what a GPU chip is doing all the time. A matmole is done with light, very naturally, through constructive and destructive interference. It's, it just, nature does. So, I think this could be an interesting new space, and I'm spending a lot of time on it, and, you know, very curious about, you know, could there be a chip?

• 1:17:03Martin Shkreli?

  There's a couple of private companies, and I'm starting to dig around and, you know, see what's what here. I think most people stop short of actually making the full photonic computer, because they need revenue, they need earnings, they need something. And Celestial AI, got bought out by Marvel, you know, they, there's some, or Marvel, there's some attempt to, sort of, to push more and more of, like, we used to use copper wires to transmit information, now we use photonics and fiber. And more and more of the chip, and more and more of the entire global, kind of, computer infrastructure is going photonic. And maybe the whole thing goes photonic someday, and that electricity is actually the odd man out. Photons don't have some properties that are perfect for, you know, computing,

• 1:17:45Martin Shkreli?

  but others, like in the case of matmoles, which is now like most of the compute we need in the world, they're actually kind of perfect. So, you know, it's, it'll be interesting to see if, there's one, one private Chinese company called Light Intelligence, and it sort of has a foot in the rest of the world. They're in Singapore, but they're also a foot in China. They started at MIT, so they're privately held. There's Light Matter, which, it's not really clear that they're still pursuing, kind of, all-optical photonics, and then Microsoft's done a little bit in the space too. So, I'm, I'm really interested, this is the potential next, like, as we think as Grok, the acquisition of Grok has sort of, end the quantum insanity. This is kind of why I care about this in the first place, as a biotech guy. You know, this is very weird for me to think about this, but, um,

• 1:18:29Martin Shkreli?

  the Grok acquisition, twenty billion, the quantum crap that's trading for ten or twenty billion, people really want to think about what's next in compute. And of course, the unconventional, and their raise at five billion, just for a new co. That's, it's, it's all sort of clear that anything that can be an Nvidia matmole, in my opinion, could be a trillionaire.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  What's the state of the quantum computing market? It seems like the companies have not sold off, but you went viral on a podcast sort of breaking down your overall thesis. Is the market sort of waking up to your way of seeing the timelines around quantum computing? Or the impact of quantum computing? Or is there still more work to be done on your end?

• 1:19:14Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, so I think there's no more thinking that needs to be done. I think this is a war of attrition where both sides are right. And this is why I kind of started to look for other kinds of compute. And as you know, our great friend, Beth Gezos, has his own kind of compute. So like, the point is you've got a $5 trillion market cap. And if you bought a stock at $5 billion, which is not a small cap, that's a big company. Most of us would be very happy to exit at $5 billion. You can still get $1,000, right? If it's the next Nvidia. So if you even have a 0.1% chance that one of these quantum stupid companies is the next Nvidia, I mean, take a flyer, you'd get $1,000. So I feel like there kind of is a rational thinking there.

• 1:19:57Martin Shkreli?

  Even if it's impossible, you know, who's, what's the difference between 0.1 and 0.0? It's the kind of difference I think about, but most other people don't care. And so any chance to get, it's like the menu problem. What's on the menu for the average Joe versus what's on the menu for you and me? We might get in a Grok round, we might get in an unconventional round. The average person can't, but they can buy $2,000 Rigetti or D-Wave or Robinhood, and maybe they'll get the same kind of, you know, self-manifesting in some ways, you know, beta. But I'm also curious if you guys want to talk at some point, expand this and talk about biotech more.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I would love, I mean, like, give us a lay of the land currently, how you're thinking about the year broadly, what's exciting, what's maybe being oversold about AI's potential impact in biotech versus being underappreciated?

• 1:20:50Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I think that this that the Nvidia Lilly have made announced this big partnership.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:56Martin Shkreli?

  Um, and I've been thinking about drugs and AI more and more and more. And I feel like there is something to do here, but it's not the stuff that everyone thinks about. Like drug discovery itself, or small molecules, or even proteins. I'm not sure AI is very useful. We have great forcing functions for that, whether they're physical chemists or software. You don't need a 10x or 100x improvement of that. The actual part of drug discovery, and I can say this as a, you know, very worn out drug company CEO. The biggest problem of drug companies is the people. And there's fantastic people that work at drug companies. It's just that you have 10, 15, 20 different departments that have to talk to each other, whether it's toxicology.

• 1:21:39Martin Shkreli?

  You know, preclinical PK, you know, there's all these little subsections that all have to talk to each other. And everything gets lost in the translation. Project management is supposed to sit on all that. It just often makes it worse. And so you have this like impossible, I mean, you talk to anybody that works in big pharma and they'll tell you how ugly it is. Um, and so if you had a machine doing it, it'd probably probably work better. And I think that more and more companies are gonna, whether it's a drug company or law firm or anything else. There's going to be these sort of self organizing, you know, um, more decision making gets pushed down. You know, sometimes I ask chat GPT about, you know, what would be a better marketing strategy? Or how do I, how do I get more users? What should I do? It's like, oh, have you thought about, you know, this?

• 1:22:23Martin Shkreli?

  And, you know, sometimes you'll get something surprising. So I think that's sort of the angle I'd play for drug companies. There's so much inertia. Oftentimes a CEO will like kill a drug for no reason. He'll promote another drug for no reason. Data says no, the chief scientist, you know, has a personal vendetta with another company that really wants to push that drug. Like, there's all these irrational decisions that get made over what's basically hundreds of millions of dollars spent. And it's remarkably inefficient. So when Vive came in to try to really upset the apple cart here, um, as, as, as I did too, we started the same thing. It was a little tricky because. It's just not an industry that moves fast and breaks things. And for all the occasional luck

• 1:23:07Martin Shkreli?

  you get on a drug, there's a lot of that luck is distributed as well. So Vivek got a lot of bad luck sometimes with Roy Van. He got a couple of things of good luck. It's done fine. But like, it's very hard to get the compounding effects that you get. So Lilly has somehow been able to do it because that drug is not going to go generic. But again, the problem is you make a great drug, you have a good hit, you have 10 years to make money and that's it. And so, you know, none of these AI companies will be worth anything if in 10 years, they they all had to give up their assets because there was a generic AI company. So I feel like drugs still are in this perilous situation. The whole industry is sort of cooked because there's fewer and fewer drug

• 1:23:47Martin Shkreli?

  targets to go after. So we keep fighting over the smallest number of patients in these random diseases, sometimes like the slightest, skinniest slice of cancer where there's like 600 people have it. And there's like 12 drug companies that are developing a drug for it. And so there's overcapacity in the industry. I mean, the same thing happened in steel and some other places. And we arguably have too much going on. And the real fear right now is China. The China drug development capability has gotten so good that there's really no

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Who was it that was saying like, yeah, I would hate, I would hate, we all want to cure cancer, but I would hate if China cured it before us.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  It's a wild quote. On the AI impact in pharma drug discovery, what is the lever that we should be watching between, you know, more frontier models basically raising the IQ, making them smarter, more knowledgeable versus just speeding them up, getting the state of the art models running on Grok or Cerebrus so that it's faster, so you can do more? Or is it more of like a adoption diffusion training? You need to just get the CEO to actually like turn AI loose in the organization. It's like a change management problem.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I mean, I think you mentioned HR. And one thing I think XAI should do is take a little bit of macro hard and build an HR function that when employees say, hey, can I go on a podcast?

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  It just says no.

• 1:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Quickly, you know,

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  I think it'd just be an if statement.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, yeah, if Elon, yeah.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  If if podcast mentioned, say no. Anyway, it's keys to success in AI and bio.

• 1:25:26Martin Shkreli?

  I think that I think pharma is a misunderstood business. So there was a this this sort of drug goat, this guy named Paul Janssen. So he created a Janssen and Janssen was acquired by J and J. But Janssen himself just personally invented, you know, I think half a dozen to a dozen critical medicines, not like me twos or anything like that. But like, he personally discovered, you know, I think the first antipsychotic, fentanyl,

• 1:25:55Martin Shkreli?

  several like massive, massive.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  From the creator of fentanyl, we have anti.

• 1:26:00Martin Shkreli?

  It wasn't that back then, right?

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  No, it was good. It was it's very useful, yeah, in many cases.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  What are you? How are you? How are you processing the peptide boom?

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Martin Shkreli?

  Well, that whole thing is another story, but I want to get back to Paul. So there's there's statues in the sky, etc. We need more Paul Janssons, whether they're digital synthetic biol, synthetic sort of intelligence or not. The drug industry is an idea industry. It is not an industrial process. It's some guy sitting down saying, you know what I think would stop cancer? If we made an HDAC inhibitor. Well, actually, people tried that. It doesn't work. So and then somebody saying, I read a paper about this and, you know, actually, maybe this would do it.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  It's the same thing as like getting a digital Ilya, who can just go and try a bunch of AI research ideas. You get the AI researcher in a box, turn that loose, and then that unfurls into progress. Certainly a challenge. Is that constrained by hardware, compute, scale? Are you still scaling Peld? Or is there an idea that will will lead to that?

• 1:27:02Martin Shkreli?

  It's a good question because in the in the old days, if you wanted to run computer experiments, you didn't pay much cost. In fact, that was the traction. It's like you sit there and write code. And now it's like, no, no, I need a cluster. And for drugs, you know, it's it's sort of has always been an expensive capital, you know, thing. But in the scheme of things, you know, it's cheaper than AI.

• 1:27:26Martin Shkreli?

  You know, you could, you could probably get some proof of concept in, in animals and, and people for, you know, less than you might imagine. And then from there, you know, you could develop a portfolio of drugs. So I, I think that, you know, getting the idea part of the drug discovery industry more sort of capable is, is one thing AI can help a lot with. And that downstream makes less expenses in clinical trial development and also the decision making. Somebody looking at the data and saying, look, this drug is a dog. Let's not do a phase two. Let's not do a phase three. And oftentimes the scientists and the, the companies have like, I don't know, Wall Street wants to see it, see us in phase three. We can't really fall behind a rival. And, and they'll often push, I mean, I'd say up to a half of all

• 1:28:10Martin Shkreli?

  drugs in clinical trials shouldn't be in clinical trials. And, you know, that's a, that's a lot of money wasted. That's a lot of patient time wasted. And, and a lot of is pushed by other incentives and other things like that. So I, I think AI is a lot of, you know, potential for, for drug discovery. But every time I talk to somebody that wants to talk about AI and drug discovery, they've never been at a drug company. They've never actually done it. And when you do it, you realize it's much more about who's Paul Janssen discovering the next, you know, bunch of hits and who was lucky and got a one hit wonder. And then who just sucks in general, like Pfizer or something. And so you, you sort of have to like, generate those ideas. It's almost like an investor in hedge funds.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting because, because I feel like, I can't remember who exactly, but there was somebody on the show that was saying, we, we don't need, it's not that we don't need more ideas. We need a cost reduction across the rest, everything from that point.

• 1:29:01Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:29:02Martin Shkreli?

  But most of the cost is clinical trials. So.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. And so what you were saying is like, if you have these 15 departments and if you can somehow make it so that, you know, you, you can have, is it a, is it a headcount? Like, how much is like a headcount reduction actually going to impact overall cost?

• 1:29:19Martin Shkreli?

  I think it's all clinical trials. Like, so once you've invented a drug, say that costs 10 to 50 million, the next four or 500 million is going to find a bunch of people to try it and compare it to placebo, because you have to monitor those people so carefully and so closely that it ends up being this massive cost across, you know, tons of clinical trials. That's the hard part. If you could just take shots in goal for 50 million, 20 million, left and right, you know, you'd have a really productive drug industry. But unfortunately, getting 10,000 people to take a new diabetes drug is, it's pulling teeth. And you, you have to like really. You know, incentivize doctors and patients, meaning you have to pay them. And once they do that, you have to pay the company that collects the data, you have to pay the company that, you know, sort of puts it together, sends it to FPA, all that stuff is like just massive paperwork.

• 1:30:04Martin Shkreli?

  Uh, and it's, it's, it's a lot of it's done.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  How does, how is China's process for running clinical trials different than ours?

• 1:30:14Martin Shkreli?

  Very similar, but like, I think the wages that they pay the people to collect all the stuff is less. And I think that they, they sort of have it a little more streamlined. I mean, it's, it's amazing what they can do like. So one of the things that confused me about China, the first time I looked at it in biotech was like the average mid-sized American biotech is like a hundred people, 200 people, maybe 300. But in China, it's like 6,000 people or same market now. And I go, wow, wow, what are they doing? You know? It's like, no, we have like 800 chemists sitting here.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Is that just because of the structure in America? We have more like labs and consultants and we still employ 6,000 people, but it's all at secondary and third tier supply chain companies?

• 1:30:55Martin Shkreli?

  Maybe. I, I think might be more capital markets where it's like, they raise the same amount we raise in, in the Hong Kong markets. They raised 300 million. I was like, what is 300 million volume in China?

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  A lot more people.

• 1:31:06Martin Shkreli?

  Why is your 800 chemists?

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  800 chemists.

• 1:31:09Martin Shkreli?

  Why is your above 40 chemists in San Diego?

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's crazy.

• 1:31:12Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is your take on, uh, on the peptides boom?

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:17Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. Peptides are, you know, every time somebody asks me about it, I have to laugh because peptide is defined as a, a small protein. And so what you're really asking is what is my take on the unapproved self-medication boom? And you know, when you phrase it that way.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, no, no, no. And that's, that's like to me, to me, I, I, uh, I, I tried a peptide cycle probably five years ago and I was like, okay, this is like cool. And I noticed like a moderate effect. But I also acknowledge that like this is, I'm like administering, administering like effectively an experiment, like, uh, an experimental drug is not the right framing, but it's, it's not like the same as like walking into Arowan and getting some vitamin D and, you know, having, having a daily supplement. It's like you're like inject, you're, you're, you're, you're doing an injection. The source matters a ton. And it is, I, you know, far closer to, you know, taking a round of anabolic steroids than it is, you know,

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  uh, adding, adding some creatine to your smoothie.

• 1:32:22Martin Shkreli?

  I just think it's nuts. I mean, if you think it's a good idea to do your own research on medicine, self-medicate, and on uncontrolled substances that are manufactured on this where they have not been clinical trials, and I mean, I'm as libertarian as it gets, but I just don't understand why, what the impetus is to like, take foreign substances without like, some emergency need, and it just, it's, it boggles my mind, because, you know, people, there's some psychological phenomenon where people need to feel in control, or they need something in their life that they feel like they're taking a risk on, or, you know, it's nuts. I mean, why, why would you do it?

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, and, and, and explain why there probably will never be clinical trials for these drugs.

• 1:33:05Martin Shkreli?

  Right. There's this edge case where, you know, you have a cosmo-sudical, in essence, or kind of like, something that doesn't quite fit what's a disease to the FDA, so a good example is premature ejaculation. So the FDA does not consider that an illness. European drug regulators do. And so, you can get approved for impotence in America, because it actually is sort of a medical problem, where it's like, oh, if I can't, you know, copulate and produce, it's, it's a big medical, kind of, emergency in a sense. Premature ejaculation is sort of like, well, you have it, this is what it is. And, you know, so the FDA's never been willing to approve. A company, a long time ago, tried to get an old J&J drug called dioxine approved for premature ejaculation, and the FDA basically said,

• 1:33:47Martin Shkreli?

  there's no set of circumstances where we will approve this. And, you know, what's weird about that is, okay, well, what if you actually do supplement this? And it's a severe psychological detriment, as much as we joke about it. People joked about erectile dysfunction a long time ago, and it's, it's a serious, you know, illness to many. So, you, you sort of live in this twilight of like, well, like, I know what drug works, this drug dioxine actually does work, but I also know it'll never be FDA-approved, so what do I do? And in some ways... You know, you're sort of like, I'm taking an unapproved technically illegal substance, and I'm buying it off some shady, you know, third-party market. So eventually, I think we need to find a way, just like, almost like what we just talked about, prediction markets, you have these third markets, where it's like, yeah, you can bet on,

• 1:34:31Martin Shkreli?

  you know, what Trump's gonna say in a speech, and it's not registered stock exchange, but it's also more than just you and me making a stock bet. And it's the same thing with this, where it's like, depoxine's not a peptide, but, you know, I, depoxine is medically useful for that disease, if you call it a disease, FDA won't say no. So it's not like I'm taking some random poop, you know, it's a real medicine, but it's in this middle of like, what do you do with this thing? And so much of, you know, so much of what we do as investors or whatever is in that middle. Uber, you could sort of define Uber as in that weird middle as well. So I think eventually, you know, we need to address, like, it's not as insane as maybe I'm making it out to be, I think some of it is, but eventually you need to address this, like, how do we?

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, even, even like, yeah, BPC 157, like, there's no incentive to spend the tens of millions of dollars on trials, be, like, you would need some type of, like, you know, trade group or something in order to fund that, because if one company did it, then every company would get the benefit of it, so why would one company spend the tens of millions of dollars?

• 1:35:33Martin Shkreli?

  We have an app for that, in drug development, we have an app for that. We can take that drug, twist it, change it, figure out, make it better, you know, and then you get a new patent, and then you have an incentive. So there is sort of a way to do that, and that's not, that's not uncommon. I mean, you know, trolling around PubMed, looking for, oh, this drug actually does something, I'll make, you know, take it to my boss at Merck, boss says no patent, come back the next day and say, here's the same drug with a nitrogen atom coming out of here, it's gonna work the same way, and he says, all right, you know, maybe we should run with that.

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Run it.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  Run it.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  Always fun.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  For having on the show, so much fun. Come back soon.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come back on again soon, I have a bunch more questions I want to ask about Godell and everything, but, uh, good to see you.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  And happy new year.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Congrats on the progress, and congrats on the new, on becoming a father.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fatherhood, massive.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Massive news.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  Have a good one, goodbye. Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Our next guest is Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. You might know him from his work with Uber. Thank you so much for waiting. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:36:46Speaker 07

  Good. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  I am upset that it took us over a thousand guests.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  I know. Yeah.

• 1:36:52Speaker 07

  I know. I have, I have to say.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:36:55Speaker 07

  So you just hired a friend of mine. Jackson Fortis. Do you guys know him?

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  We love Jackson.

• 1:37:00Speaker 07

  So I literally had the like call with him a few weeks ago where he's like, what do I do with my life? And I said, take the job.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:37:07Speaker 07

  Those assholes have never had me on. And so those two things came together.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  Well, glad we could do it.

• 1:37:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you're getting an incredible person in that hire. So a really nice job there.

• 1:37:16John Coogan?

  That's great news. Tell us about the bookstore. I heard that you have a bookstore.

• 1:37:22Speaker 07

  I do. So first of all, anyone is looking to lose money, I highly recommend owning a bookstore. So, you know, I've written a couple of books. I had started this thing called the Gotham Book Prize in 2020. In fact, we announced the nominees for this year today. And I'd always thought like one day it'd be fun to own a bookstore, but the kind of thing you would just do later in life. And then during COVID, New York City just got whacked by everything. And we lost, you know, half a million jobs. And my thought was, look, if you're going to do something nice for the city from a retail perspective, because I knew I wasn't ever going to make money on it, like now's the time, right? Don't wait till you're 70 or whatever it is. And

• 1:38:04Speaker 07

  so we started looking for space. And we found one on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side, if anyone knows where that is. And it's a great spot. So it's about 3,500 square feet. It's an indie bookstore. It's a podcast studio that is free for anyone to use. You just go on our website and you can sign up and use it. If you guys are over in New York, you're welcome to the studio. We've got an event space. We built an amphitheater that seats about 80. So we have authors or different types of events like open mic teenage poetry or whatever, pretty much something every night, and a cafe. And the store has a funny name. And the reason why is, so when I leased the space, I texted my dad and said,

• 1:38:46Speaker 07

  Um, didn't the store that my grandfather started when they came to this country in nineteen fifty, wasn't it right around here? Because that store was closed before I was born, but I knew it was right around there. He's like, yeah, it was one block over on Allen Street. And I said, remind me the name. He said, P and T Knitwear, because uh, you know, if you were an uneducated Jew that survived World War Two, uh, the one job you could get in the U S, especially New York, was in the garment business. And so my grandfather started a sweater company.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:39:16Speaker 07

  And then my dad wrote P and T Knitwear, but you cannot name a bookstore P and T Knitwear. So of course, our store is called P and T Knitwear. So um, so that's our store and uh, yeah. Other than the fact that, you know, nobody buys books, it is uh, a really fun uh, business to own and run and a fun place to hang out. So anyone who is watching, yeah, but if you're in New York, you like bookstores, check us out.

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's it gonna take to get it profitable?

• 1:39:43John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:39:44Speaker 07

  I don't think it's possible. You know, there's not, there's actually not one. So, because I've looked at like, okay, let's say I ran it aggressively. We charge for the studio, we charge for the event space. We didn't give the employees healthcare, all this, you know, other stuff. We would still lose money. So I don't quite understand how somebody actually makes a living running a bookstore. I'm sure Manhattan's sort of the worst place to do it.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 07

  But still, but even like in L A, like my friend Zippy has a great bookstore in Santa Monica. But the same thing, she's, you know, lucky to, you know, have other money and she part of the way she uses it is to have this indie bookstore. So um, it does seem like sadly, you know, bookstore ownership these days is somewhat equated with philanthropy.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  Uh, well, yeah, let's get back to, let's get back to business. Um, I want to talk about uh, specifically uh, these businesses that you've been involved with, where you've been so helpful to founders on the local and state regulation level, how companies position themselves. Uh, it feels like every company right now is focused on uh, what's happening in D C, the federal level. Um, how do you, how are you, how do you think about what's different when you're working with a company at the local level? What are, what's the playbook? What works if you have a problem and you need to change local laws? What are you recommending to new founders?

• 1:41:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the first thing is, look, human beings naturally, or Americans at least, when you say the words government or politics, your mind kind of instinctively goes to DC. So you think about the Capitol, the White House, Trump, whatever it is. But the reality is, most regulation, including most tech regulation, does not happen at the federal level. Uh, there's some crypto, biotech, but by and large, most things that touch a consumer in some way, directly or indirectly, are regulated either by state government or local government. And that's actually a good thing. So what everyone thinks is, oh, I'd rather solve my problem at the federal level. It's a one-shot stopping, I, one-shot whatever, I got my thing done, I'm set.

• 1:41:49Speaker 07

  But, you know, the phrase and act of Congress is literally synonymous with a miracle, right? You can't base investment strategies on miracles. Whereas in states, um, and you guys had my friends, you know, uh, Adam and Matt from Doctronic on a few weeks ago. We worked with them to make Utah the first state to allow, uh, prescription via AI. Um, in states, you can get things done. And we don't necessarily win in every state every time, but like 50 bites at the apple, we can figure out this makes sense for a red state strategy, blue state, whatever it might be. It might not matter in that way. Um, and because states have sort of six-month legislative sessions in which typically a couple of hundred bills on average pass,

• 1:42:29Speaker 07

  you have a reasonable chance of getting your same thing done if you run a good campaign. And then once you establish precedent for it in one state, you have a stronger argument to then go forward in others. And so when we decide what we want to work on and what we want to invest in, we highly prioritize companies that can get their stuff done at the state and local level. Because I don't invest in stuff where I don't think that we can move the needle for the company itself. And I think our odds of doing that are so much better outside of Washington.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  How confident were you that you guys could get this, a deal like the one you got done in Utah with Doctronic?

• 1:43:07Speaker 07

  It was a little surprised.

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, cuz I was.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we kept having to be like, really? That's what happened? Really?

• 1:43:14Speaker 07

  I know, I know. Even we, we literally the people who do this for a living, right? They come with the only fund that does this. And even we were like, wow, that one was pretty cool. But, you know, there are states that are very thoughtful around AI regulation. And there are a couple of states, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Kentucky, that have created regulatory sandboxes. You guys know what that is?

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  A little bit.

• 1:43:41Speaker 07

  It's effectively like a, you know, saying, okay, you know what? There's this thing that we know is really important. We know it's gonna take experimentation. And rather than subjecting it to the political process, let's put together a team of experts who can, at least on a provisional basis, say, we're gonna try out these ideas in our state. And as long as it's working the way we thought, it'll keep going. And those are four states that have chosen to do that. And so those were the obvious places for us to start. Utah is just a really well-run state. Governor Cox is an excellent governor. And so, and they're not a typical state for a lot of reasons. And also, they're becoming a very, very tech-forward and friendly state.

• 1:44:22Speaker 07

  Because as you see migration, especially from California, let alone before the billionaires referendum tax thing happens. Utah is becoming, you know, Silicon Slopes, we're calling it. So, yeah, we're going to Texas next, which is a giant market, obviously the second biggest in the country. And, you know, once we start showing that it works, you know, even if you think, so the very first tech company that I worked with was Uber. Started doing that early 2011. And the thing that Travis Kalanick, who was the founder and CEO of Uber at the time, understood, and he was right about is, Just get the genie out of the bottle. I mean Travis didn't pretend to understand politics, but what he did know was that he had a product that was meaningfully better than the status quo.

• 1:45:05Speaker 07

  And if you guys think back to the first couple of times you used Uber, it was magic, right? You couldn't, kind of couldn't believe it. You just pressed a button and this nice car showed up and here they were and you have to like hail it down or deal with some crazy cab company or anything else. Um, and we knew that once people saw that it worked, they would fight for it and the arguments against it would get weaker and weaker and we were able to effectively mobilize our customer base.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, you have, you have the two, it's, it's both participants fighting for it too in the, in the, you got the drivers and, and the users, which is the most powerful dynamic.

• 1:45:40Speaker 07

  Right, right. And that's, so when you can do that, um, but you know, it's funny, there is a whole question as to when do you have a product or a service that people will fight for? And sometimes it's, you might have a really good company that's going to be a good investment, but it doesn't sort of excite people in that way. But what we found is, um, FanDuel worked really well, uh, Bird scooters worked really well. Ease, which is cannabis delivery worked really well. Crypto that works really well for, so you know, you have to think about if you're a founder, do I, you're obviously passionate about it because otherwise you wouldn't have founded the company in the first place and made all the sacrifices that you've made. But you have to be somewhat objective saying, okay, do regular people find this thing that I am doing truly critical and fascinating?

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  You said, you said Fan, you said FanDuel. So like, are there people out there that will stand up and protest their state government if they try to, yeah, for banning sports betting?

• 1:46:36Speaker 07

  We, we, we did that. So in 2016, um, the New York Times published an article effectively accusing employees at FanDuel and DraftKings of conducting a form of insider trading where according to the times, they were giving each other information to then put bets on the other's platform. It turned out to actually not be true, but putting that aside, it unleashed this total shitstorm where a couple of dozen states in the course of a few days, issued cease and desist orders to us saying you can no longer operate and we had to all of a sudden go all over America and either. Pass bills to legalize daily fantasy sports betting, or at least get them to understand that we were complying with the existing laws. And the way that we did that is we went to our customers and said, listen,

• 1:47:21Speaker 07

  if you like this product, we need you to fight for it. And every time they were on the app, we knew where they were located. And we'd say, hey, click here to tell your local state senator, state rep, whoever it might be, that you want FanDuel to stick around. And enough people did it that, you know, it shifted the political inputs. If you guys just take a half a step back, in politics, if there's one thing to take away from this interview, it's that every policy output is the result of a political input. Every politician makes every decision solely based on the next election and nothing else. And there are some exceptions. I was Mike Lindbergh's campaign manager when I was mayor of New York.

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Not for the good of the world?

• 1:48:02Speaker 07

  No, not on the slightest, right? Mike Lindbergh, that's pretty much it. So as a result, that's incredibly depressing, admitted. But it's also kind of a useful place to work from because then you have to understand, what can I do to make said politician feel like doing what I want will either help them win the next election? Or if they don't do what I want...

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  So the tech industry should tell Ro Khanna, we won't, we won't trash you in the next election cycle if you don't put our industry in the dirt.

• 1:48:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, or quite frankly, it's funny, just by, you know, Larry Page and others acting in their own self-interest and already saying, I'm moving to Florida, the billionaires referendum is already on the ropes because of that. So sure, if you, you know, if you think about why, let's say, a place like California, there are unions that just, SEIU, the teachers have so much power in Sacramento. It's because they have so much money that they can threaten any given politician and say, if you don't do what we want, we're going to spend a million dollars, five million dollars, whatever number they want against you in the next election. And everybody backs down because winning the next election is more important to them than any given policy or any given issue.

• 1:49:16Speaker 07

  So not every tech startup obviously has the kind of money that a union might have to throw around. So you have to be more creative about it. And that's where your customers can be really useful advocates.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:26Speaker 07

  Very interesting.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  What's your current outlook on the venture landscape broadly? We've been talking a lot about the K-shaped dynamic. There's a whole bunch of headlines around lower total venture funding, more SPV activity. What are you seeing?

• 1:49:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, a few things. So I kind of have it from both a deal-by-deal standpoint and then kind of a macro fund model standpoint. So on a deal-by-deal standpoint, I think we're in this very bifurcated world. So I started investing outside capital, my first fund in 2016. In fact, FanDuel was the first deal I ever did. And at that moment, there was a period of irrational zippers, right? Everything was incredible and everybody threw tons of money at everything. And every startup was going to be, you know, a unicorn or a deck of corn or whatever. Then 2021 came, everything fell off the cliff. And all of a sudden, things like unit economics and margins and, you know, burn and all of that stuff started to matter. And then AI came along.

• 1:50:22Speaker 07

  And then so for AI companies, we're back to the 2016 days where people are just having valuations to me that sometimes make no sense whatsoever. You know, I've seen seed companies, you know, with valuations in the hundreds of millions of dollars with no product.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:37Speaker 07

  Or certainly no revenue. That's crazy. And yet, some of the discipline that you saw post 2021 crash is still being applied to non-AI companies. And while I do think that overall, if you had an ETF of private AI startups, it would do well over time. That doesn't mean that any individual valuation is right simply because the letters AI are attached to it in some way. From a fund model standpoint, I really believe that there's effectively only two types of funds that could work if you were to start now. One would be a fund with billions of dollars of AUM, simply because at that point, the management fees are sufficient that the GPs can make a living from that alone.

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:18Speaker 07

  And as long as they can raise the next fund, you know, it doesn't really matter. Or a sub hundred million dollar fund, or even sub fifty, you can get away with it. Where the hurdle is relatively low, you can get into carry pretty quickly. You're not making much on the management fee, so that's certainly you've either got to have other resources or really be super scrappy.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you were, if you wanted to start a fund with the, the lowest chances of success, what would it be? For me, it would be a, a two hundred million dollar, series A only fund.

• 1:51:50Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah, generalist, generalist, with nothing differentiated. Yeah. You, even that sub hundred million still only works if you have something truly differentiated, right? So for me, uh, because we're the fund that does the regulatory stuff, for better or worse, we're the people you call if that's the, if, if that's your issue. And if you don't have a regulatory issue, we're useless.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  What's your framework? Because, because, uh, there's times where I've invested in a company where I'm like, okay, th- this, this founding team is fantastic. And they don't understand, but they don't, they're, they're good at all this stuff, but they don't understand marketing. I'm very good at marketing.

• 1:52:26Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:52:27Jordi Hays?

  I can invest and I can help. The problem is I'm, I'm gonna be in the room with them like less than one percent of the time, right? Like I'll do a handful of calls, I'll make intros, I'll help however I can, but I'm not actually on the team. And so I've ended up getting, I've, yeah, I've ended up getting burned because I'm just like, I, I can't, you know, one percent of my time is not enough to take them from bad at marketing to even good, right?

• 1:52:51Speaker 07

  Right. So for us, the first thing is, we ask two simple questions. Is there a gating regulatory issue or opportunity that if it were solved, could really drive growth and valuation? And then if so, can we solve it? And that's what led us to investing in companies like FanDuel, Lemonade, Bird, Row, Coinbase, Circle, that, so on. Um, and then the other part though is, so if you take DocTronic as an example, we are their GRPR department. Um, we effectively become the in-house group for a company until they get it to a point where it's like, okay, we're now big enough that we probably need an in-house team, in which case like Row is a really good example where when we started working with Row back at the seed, um.

• 1:53:35Speaker 07

  You know, it's funny with electronic because it's prescription via AI when it was Roe, which was really not that long ago. The question was, is tech, is prescription via text legal? Um, nobody knew, right? Because they had no till Z, no one had ever tried to do it before. Um, and he saw something that was incredible. And our job was to legalize this everywhere and we, we worked on that and did it. And then eventually it grew to a point where we helped them, you know, put together their kind of in-house people. And then we still talk to them all the time. We jump in on stuff, whether it's GLP one compounding rules, or when they want to be a COVID test provider, whatever it was. Um, but for those early rounds, we really are part of the team and that's why we take equity for our work.

• 1:54:18Speaker 07

  Um, because, you know, we're lucky to be in a position where I don't need to take cash usually because I have the, the resources to sort of fund it myself. But, uh, you know, we are there day to day.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Talk to me about mobile voting. Uh, we've heard about it for a long time. Do you think it's ever going to happen? What are you doing in the space? Why is it important? Okay, explain.

• 1:54:39Speaker 07

  So, all right, let's, let's start. It's important because in a world of gerrymandering, I'll make the assumption that the viewers know what that is. Um, the only election that matters is the primary. So the New York Times did a study of the 2024 general election. Only eight percent of congressional races were decided by five points or less. And only seven percent of state legislative races were decided by five points or less, which means well over 90% of elections are really determined in the primary. And the problem is primary turnout is incredibly low. It's usually about 10%. And so who were those 10%? They're the extremes, the far left or the far right, or there are different special interests, whether it's the NEA or the NRA, the either side, um, that effectively dictate what happens.

• 1:55:23Speaker 07

  And if you are a politician and all you want to do is stay in office, then you cater to those groups at the exclusion of everyone else. But because those groups are purists, they don't want compromise. They don't want consensus. They just want to sort of hold true to their principles, no matter what the cost is. And so nothing gets done. Uh, and the simplest way to solve that is to meaningfully increase primary turnout.

• 1:55:46Speaker 07

  But the only way to do that is to meet the voters where they are. Every single one of us has a supercomputer in our pocket. Um, and if you can allow people to vote um in at least state and local elections on their phones, you can get primary turnout from ten to say forty. And now all of a sudden, if in order to get reelected, you have to represent forty percent of your constituents instead of ten. That forty percent is much more moderate and they want things to get done. So if that means working with the other side to find a reasonable compromise on immigration or guns or healthcare or climate or whatever it is, you can do so. It's not that government doesn't know what the answers are. It's that embracing them in perilous reelection and they won't do that.

• 1:56:28Speaker 07

  And so um I started something called the Mobile Voting Project in twenty seventeen. And the first thing we did was test the hypothesis that I just laid out. And so we funded elections out of my foundation, this totally philanthropic, in seven different states. Where either people with disabilities or deployed military were able to vote in real elections on their phones.

• 1:56:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 07

  And the answer was, of course, as you guys know, when you make something a lot easier and you put on people's phones, they do it. So that was true. Then the next question became, okay, but is the tech really good enough to do this at scale? It was totally fine for two thousand soldiers from West Virginia, three thousand blind people in Oregon. But if we're trying to get every district from ten to forty. And the tech that was on the market at the time wasn't good enough for that. So we spent five years building our own mobile voting technology that is end-to-end encrypted, end-to-end verified, has biometric printing, multi-factor authentication, it's air gapped, and all of the code is open source, which means it's on GitHub right now. So it's totally transparent, totally audible.

• 1:57:27Speaker 07

  Um, and the next part is then, okay, getting government to say, yes, you can actually do it. So that's about to happen for the first time in April. Anchorage, Alaska is making mobile voting accessible to all of their voters.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, hit the gong for mobile voting. Overnight.

• 1:57:47Speaker 07

  Thank you. And um.

• 1:57:50Speaker 07

  We are running legislation now in five states, Minnesota, Colorado, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, that would allow cities in those states to start offering mobile voting as an option for local elections.

• 1:58:02Jordi Hays?

  So, citizens, I can imagine, are super excited about this. Who's not excited?

• 1:58:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, polls really well.

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, because you're just like, oh, no, I love going to the poll. I love taking, you know, an hour out of my day to go do this thing that...

• 1:58:17Speaker 07

  Right. So, there's the people, there are a few smaller opponents, and there's, in reality, the big one. So, the smaller ones are, there are some cryptographers who have said, "It's impossible, can never be done, something can go wrong." And they're not wrong, something could go wrong, but things go wrong at in-person ballot places all the time. Things go wrong with mail-in voting all the time. And the risk of inaction is where we are today, and this is not sustainable for 24 years. And there are groups like, this one called Verified Voting, that are kind of the anti-vaxers of voting. So, they're just like, in paper, on paper, in person, nothing else, you know, and they're the crazies, just like the anti-vax people, in my view, are a little crazy. But the real opponents,

• 1:59:02Speaker 07

  at the end of the day, are the status quo, because if you are an ideologue or a special interest, and primary turnout is 10%, you have a lot of power, because you, your threats go a long way.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and you look at who's showing, who's actually turning out for the primaries, and you can concentrate budget on influencing that subgroup, which is much better than having to appeal to an entire region, or, you know, a huge age range, so.

• 1:59:30Speaker 07

  Right, exactly. So, that's what we're really gonna have to fight through. But, you know, if you think about every major right in this country that's ever been won, women's right to vote, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, Same-Sex Maires, Americans with Disabilities Act, whatever it is, status quo didn't want to do any of those things, right? Enough people stood up loud enough and long enough and demanded their rights, and eventually they won, and it's not easy, and it takes a while, and it's expensive, but that's what we have to do here, too, and we're trying.

• 1:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Really quick, I I know we're mostly out of time. Uh, how do you think, uh, what do you think the dialogue will be around AI in the in the midterm elections?

• 2:00:09Speaker 07

  Uh, negative. I think it's gonna be pretty bad.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And and is this the kind of thing that cer- certain politicians are gonna make their entire brand anti-AI?

• 2:00:20Speaker 07

  Well, so I think what you're gonna see, we should see if we can get Kalshi or Polly Mark or someone to take take a set a line on this, is the word that will be cited the most in the midterms, by the way, not just Congress, there's thirty six governors, the state, most states legislatures, um, is affordability, right? So that's the word, right? You heard Trump say it, you heard Mondami here in New York say it, everyone's gonna say it. So then the question is, where does AI fit into the affordability puzzle? And it fits in in a couple ways. One is job loss. I do believe that some of the jobs data that we saw in twenty twenty five reflected layoffs typically kind of bigger tech companies that are the earliest adopters of of AI and new technology, using it, realizing this works pretty well. I don't necessarily need as many people to perform any given function.

• 2:01:05Speaker 07

  So you're gonna have layoffs. The second is the energy prices. So right now, and the way that data centers were conceived by the hyperscalers was, you know, we build these things and we would consume a lot of energy and that would be from the grid. And the problem is everyone else who's on that same grid then has to pay the price for that. And so there are a lot of states where AI data centers have already come online, where people are paying thirty, forty, fifty percent more in their energy bills every month. The problem is no consumer on either side of the aisle is interested in having to spend more money out of their pocket to help make Sam Altman or Johnson Wong a trillionaire, right? So politicians are starting to push back.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  When people were like, I want Uber in my area around where I live. Nobody's like, if I don't get a data center in my backyard, I can't use ChatGPT.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  ChatGPT is gonna work no matter where the data center is.

• 2:01:55Speaker 07

  It's gonna work. And by the way, the data centers don't even create that many jobs, right? So there's not even like you could mobilize that for it. And you see now a bunch of different states on both sides of the aisle start proposing legislation. That would find ways to curtail um the ability of the data centers to impose those costs and externalities on consumers, whether it's around having to use different types of energy or alternate forms of compute or water or whatever it might be. And so AI is going to get blamed, not wrongly in some ways, for both job loss and higher energy prices, along with things like mental health chatbots having weird problems with teenagers and things like that. And so I think it's going to be a huge attack vessel for challengers

• 2:02:40Speaker 07

  against incumbents, you know, in pretty much every election this year. And I think that, you know, when we in the tech world just think everyone loves AI because we love AI, that's not true. And if that is the mindset you take, you're gonna lose.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Agreed.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a really important story to follow this year. We'd love to have you back on the show to talk about it more.

• 2:03:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, but say anytime we'll talk about the stuff. So anytime it works for you guys, just let me know.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, expect emails in the morning when stories break.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  You gotta come on.

• 2:03:11Speaker 07

  You got it.

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm a real expert.

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  And thanks for pushing Jackson over the line.

• 2:03:16Speaker 07

  No, it's great. He's gonna love it.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:03:21Speaker 07

  All right, guys. Thank you.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  And Barnes and Noble is opening 60 stores. They're gonna IPO.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  So maybe there's a boom.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Somebody sent us.

• 2:03:27Speaker 07

  Maybe, yeah, maybe.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  So I think just don't, don't limit yourself, right? If, you know, make it up with scale, right? Open 50 more stores. Make it, make it up with volume.

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:03:37Speaker 07

  There we go. There we go. I just have to, you know, just make it. I need another Uber to be able to afford that. I'll work on it. So.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:03:44Speaker 07

  All right, guys. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have a very special segment on TBPN today. We have Lucas Zinger from Divergent in the Ultra Dome. He's actually outside the Ultra Dome. So we're gonna take a walk and we're gonna.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's do a little walk and talk.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  We're gonna do a walk and talk for, I think this is the first time we've ever done this. So I should be able to click over to the lav mic. Do you have the lav mic?

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  I have, uh, yeah, I think it's live.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Let's go see what's waiting for us outside of the Ultra Dome.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  We're getting audio from outside already.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  I think we have audio outside. Let's go and see. Okay, we are ready. Wow, look at this. Thank you so much for coming. Look at this. Walk us through what we're looking at. Reintroduce yourself for those who might not remember.

• 2:04:43Lukas Czinger?

  I'm Lucas Zinger. I'm the CEO of Divergent and Zinger Vehicles and you're looking at our first car, the 21C.

• 2:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow, you had to bring it, you had to bring it in green too.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for bringing this.

• 2:04:54Lukas Czinger?

  Matched outfit here for you.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  This is actually remarkable. I've watched the full video. I watched Doug DiMiro's review.

• 2:04:59Lukas Czinger?

  Okay.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  And seeing it in person, the scale is remarkable. It is a, it is a wonder.

• 2:05:04Lukas Czinger?

  It's a spacecraft for the road. It's a land jet. It's a hell of a car to take in traffic from Torrance to here.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Wait, did you drive this on the street here?

• 2:05:13Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  I was assuming you were in trailer.

• 2:05:15Lukas Czinger?

  No, no, we drove it. We drove it. An hour in traffic on the way over, so.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  I cannot believe you drove it.

• 2:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay, full carbon.

• 2:05:22Lukas Czinger?

  Full carbon body.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Before we go into the details, tell us the story of your journey with cars. Why did you want to build this car? When did this project start? This doesn't look like it was built in one day, but how long have you been working on this?

• 2:05:35Lukas Czinger?

  This is a 10-year building company from a vision moment. So we started as a family business. My father had the vision for Divergent. I joined him soon thereafter. And we have a business that has changed the way that we engineer and manufacture fundamentally. So when we talked last time, we talked about the defense application, the manufacturing application. That company is scaling right now, but Zinger was the first product within Divergent. So when we said, we've got new design software, new additive manufacturing technology, new robotics. How are we going to prove this, validate this? We turned to making our own car.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:15Lukas Czinger?

  Then that evolved into making our own car company. So Zinger Vehicles is about five years old.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  Five years old.

• 2:06:21Lukas Czinger?

  Within 10 years of what is the Divergent journey.

• 2:06:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:24Lukas Czinger?

  And now it's the world's fastest hypercar. It's American made. It's got five plus international track records. And it's road legal. And most excitingly, there's over 16 of these in the wild now. So they've been delivered, Los Angeles, Miami, London, all the usual suspects.

• 2:06:43John Coogan?

  This is remarkable.

• 2:06:46Lukas Czinger?

  And this car. It represents fully that 10-year journey.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Jordan was just making the joke with me today that you could build the ultimate American-made hypercar garage for remarkably cheap compared to an Italian hypercar collection or even a British, you know, hypercar. You've just raised the stakes significantly with this, I think. This is remarkable. So what has the testing been like? You said five records. Who's driving these cars? What tracks? What are the records that you're going for? What has stood out in the journey?

• 2:07:22Lukas Czinger?

  So Joel Miller has been our test pilot and he's an exceptional driver, factory driver for Ferrari, great coach. And we nailed five track records in five days, which has never been done before. We made a documentary of it and it was all about the street usability of the car and the performance envelope it has. So instead of showing up to a-

• 2:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so five in five days? What does that actually look like? You're getting a record, immediately packing it in a trailer, driving to the next track?

• 2:07:48Lukas Czinger?

  Driving.

• 2:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Driving it to the next track?

• 2:07:50Lukas Czinger?

  So that was the epic journey and we made a documentary called A California Gold Rush. And we drove from NorCal through SoCal and we hit every track on the way. And every day we'd set the track record. Every night, we'd get in the car and we'd drive a couple hundred miles to the next track, get in late, get some sleep, get up early the next morning and do another record. So it was as much of a human feat as a vehicle feat, but what it was meant to show was these hypercars can be driven on the road. This one can. It was built as a road car, not only a track car. And it's got so much performance that quite literally you can show up at the track on used tires and set a track record and not need a pro team next to you supporting it.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Talk about the decisions in usability. I see three pedals in there. Between, you know, the Carrera GT, super raw, no supports, extremely dangerous, to some of the more point and shoot, where did you want to land? Where did this car land?

• 2:08:46Lukas Czinger?

  So ultimately, this was about creating a road car that was otherworldly in the way that it drove on the street, but could beat the best on the track. And that's a hell of a design brief because usually those two worlds don't marry well together. We also wanted to create a vehicle- That was engaging as part of that otherworldly experience, right? You wanted something that wasn't numb at low speed. That was very, very lively on the road, but ultimately could shave 10 seconds off the thermal track record when you go 10 out of 10, right?

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  This has been the thermal?

• 2:09:18Lukas Czinger?

  Thermal, yeah. 10 seconds off the track record at thermal.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Do you know who had the previous record?

• 2:09:24Lukas Czinger?

  I won't say. That's too big of a margin to say, but we've had an epic back and forth.

• 2:09:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, because I've been in a Valkyrie at thermal with our friend.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  With our friend, yeah.

• 2:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Who I won't, I won't name them because he's someone private.

• 2:09:38Lukas Czinger?

  That's a great car as well.

• 2:09:39Jordi Hays?

  But I was in the Valkyrie at thermal, almost every single corner, I thought that I was gonna die.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  So 10 seconds faster than that?

• 2:09:48Jordi Hays?

  10 seconds faster than that is insane.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Sounds brutal.

• 2:09:50Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, you're pulling major Gs, the cornering, the acceleration. But back to your question, this car marries those two worlds. Track driving with road driving. It's one design brief. You got the center seating. That's of course intentional. That's based on the aero package. That allows for less frontal surface area.

• 2:10:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:06Lukas Czinger?

  It also gets you centered in the car, which is the best track driving position you can have, right? Your lefts feel the same as your right.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  I've always wondered why more manufacturers don't go with a center seating. I mean, it's iconic from the McLaren F1. And then maybe it's just a practicality thing?

• 2:10:22Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, yeah, the backseat, right? It looks a little tight in there. Your feet go outside of the front seat. So you actually have much more room than you think. You don't need to get your knees up behind that front seat.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:31Lukas Czinger?

  And when you're in there, you're packaged pilot, copilot. And it's a really dynamic driving experience. I mean, our customers that drive with their partners, they actually love the layout.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Lukas Czinger?

  And in terms of hybrid, strong hybrid.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:45Lukas Czinger?

  Ground up developed in the US as well. So we've got a V8 that we took all the way through California carb to road homologate. It's about 750 horsepower, twin turbo, 2.88 liter.

• 2:10:57Lukas Czinger?

  We have another spec that takes it up to 850 and then you get another 500 horsepower of the front wheel. So you're doing 1250 to 1350 total horsepower, all-wheel drive, 7-speed AMT, automatic manual transmission, but you have that EV fill on the front axle. You've got the middle EV motor, the MGU. So you have a really, really seamless gear shifting experience. It feels much more like a DCT than a single clutch, but you get the weight of a single clutch package.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  How early did the door design come together? It's, uh, it's pretty striking. I mean, people have done scissor doors, butterfly doors, all sorts of things, but there's something about how long these doors are that really stands out.

• 2:11:37Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, it had the record for the world's longest door for some time. And that's because, of course, you're opening the front and the rear at the same time. And you've got this 45-degree angle. It looks like wings coming up. It's part of the design brief, part of the functionality brief. We didn't want to split the passenger side into a separate, uh, door from a styling perspective and then-

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Can I, can I get in the cockpit for a second?

• 2:12:00Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, yeah. Let me show you how to do that real quick. Maybe spin around this side.

• 2:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 2:12:05Lukas Czinger?

  It's a two stepper. So you're gonna take a seat right here. So this is the battery box and then swing your legs in.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't want me to put my, my feet right on that exposed carbon.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:17Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, swing the feet. You got it. Nice.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:12:25Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, when you're in there, because you got the center seat, you actually have a lot of room. I mean, compared to the Valkyrie where you're pretty squished and you're also at an angle, this actually has a lot of headroom.

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Even when you have a helmet on in the Valkyrie, you, you hardly have any room.

• 2:12:39Lukas Czinger?

  You're probably touching a tiny bit. And that seat's almost all the way forward. You got seat controls on your left.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  What is the name of it? 21C?

• 2:12:47Lukas Czinger?

  So it stands for 21st century.

• 2:12:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:49Lukas Czinger?

  So divergence mission statement is build the 21st century industrial base.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:54Lukas Czinger?

  So this car represents the 21st century in the vehicle space.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Can I pull this down for a second?

• 2:12:59Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  How important are the materials? I mean, I imagine-

• 2:13:04Lukas Czinger?

  Put your foot on the brake.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  I see-

• 2:13:06Lukas Czinger?

  Do we have a key in here?

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 2:13:10Lukas Czinger?

  Oh, baby.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  I'll see you guys later.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  See you later.

• 2:13:16Lukas Czinger?

  Wow. Yeah, so you get a feel for it. You've got your different modes. You've got EV only mode. You've got a track mode. You've got a sport mode. And you're pulling gears on the steering wheel there. You've got all your controls on the wheel centralized. Cool features. You've got some 3D printed AC vents even. You've got your 3D printed, uh, speaker grills. You've got the wheel, the center node. And it's a full carbon body, but the full chassis then is printed underneath.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Can I help you?

• 2:13:48Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, lock them in there.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  There you go. Wow.

• 2:13:54Jordi Hays?

  Wow, it's such a different, such a different experience actually feeling like you're in a cockpit here. Insane.

• 2:14:00John Coogan?

  In the green.

• 2:14:02Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  Man, that urge to just throw it in reverse.

• 2:14:06Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, we should go for a drive. This America's hypercar.

• 2:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Maybe after the show. Insane.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How important are the materials? I imagine this door, if you made it out of steel, it'd be incredibly heavy. You couldn't lift it. What, what are you using as building materials and how important is that?

• 2:14:24Lukas Czinger?

  So the entire chassis architecture is what really differentiates the car as well. So when you look at it from an optimized system, we didn't just optimize rear frame, then front frame. We actually built a full vehicle model with our topology software.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:38Lukas Czinger?

  And what we're building on the chassis is additively manufactured aluminums, which are actually our own chemistries. So they have the right strength and durability, but also for auto elongation to absorb energy.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:49Lukas Czinger?

  So if you get in a rear impact, you need to have- A material that doesn't shear or break.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:56Lukas Czinger?

  And that's really, really hard to get in an additive material.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:59Lukas Czinger?

  We had to actually make that aluminum in-house.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:02Lukas Czinger?

  The body then is fully carbon fiber.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:04Lukas Czinger?

  So you're marrying essentially 3D-printed aluminums and ink canals.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:08Lukas Czinger?

  With a carbon fiber exterior for aero. You're taking all of your load cases, your main large forces.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:14Lukas Czinger?

  Through that additively manufactured chassis. And then all your aero load through the carbon body.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  And then what is, what pieces of the cars, I mean Michelin tires, you don't make the tires.

• 2:15:23Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  What are, what else is in the supply chain where you're buying instead of building?

• 2:15:27Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, we have great partners in the supply chain, right? We can't build every piece of this. So you named it tires, infotainment system.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:15:35Lukas Czinger?

  Right? We've got Apple CarPlay on there.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:15:37Lukas Czinger?

  That's the standard.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  You don't want to write your own software necessarily.

• 2:15:39Lukas Czinger?

  We have a partnership on our transmission where we actually did part of the design. We additively manufacture the housing.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:46Lukas Czinger?

  But then someone else cuts the gears for us and integrates it.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:49Lukas Czinger?

  On the engine side, we designed that V8 ground up.

• 2:15:53John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:15:53Lukas Czinger?

  And we actually build that V8 as well. John, did you get a look back there?

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go look at it right now.

• 2:15:56Lukas Czinger?

  On the battery side, we've got a partnership there. So almost every system on this car is bespoke. Either fully engineered and manufactured by Zinger.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Lukas Czinger?

  And Divergent or done in a JV where we have a partner where we've taken a design brief to them. Said, this has never been done before. Will you sign up to do it with us?

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  And then this sort of structure, this sort of structure, it looks very organic. Where did that come from? Whose idea was that? Is that someone in CAD? Is there AI involved? What's going on there?

• 2:16:23Lukas Czinger?

  So that's the computer's idea.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting.

• 2:16:25Lukas Czinger?

  That's not the designer's idea. So when we talk about Divergent process.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:29Lukas Czinger?

  Design, print, assemble. The design portion is a fully integrated set of microservices that takes requirements.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:36Lukas Czinger?

  And turns it into optimal CAD.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Okay, so you're setting parameters. You want the lightest weight for the most strength with this performance in this volume. Cause it can't be bigger.

• 2:16:45Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  And then it will go and try all sorts of things.

• 2:16:48Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:16:48John Coogan?

  And then you can finally use additive manufacturing to manufacture the part.

• 2:16:52Lukas Czinger?

  You got it. So 10 years ago, we started in machine learning.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Lukas Czinger?

  The basis of modern AI, right? And AI-based algorithms and prediction.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:00Lukas Czinger?

  To do a weighted optimization function for designing these parts. Importantly, we simulate the full manufacturing side as well. So once we've designed. Say this rear cross brace and that wing is going to interface directly on that point. So that entire rear cross brace is going to take the aero load of 5,000 plus pounds onto it.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:17:20Lukas Czinger?

  So you're, yes, so you're going to give it that force vector, that downforce.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Oh, and it just loads and then that just fuses across the whole.

• 2:17:27Lukas Czinger?

  So then you also give the software, the crash impulse case, the durability case, the load cases coming off the, the road, the vehicle, the tires, all into that functional system. The software actually then says add and subtract material against those requirements until we hit a Pareto optimal point.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 2:17:45Lukas Czinger?

  That means it's the lightest weight while meeting those requirements. And then the beauty is it's already simulated for manufacturing. So there's no design for manufacturing loop. We go through our MES, homegrown, and actually make that part and then assemble it with our robotic cell.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  So this is chassis 28 of 80.

• 2:18:02Lukas Czinger?

  Yes.

• 2:18:03John Coogan?

  You said there's 16 that are out in the wild already. You see 12 or something that are maybe ready to go, is that right?

• 2:18:09Lukas Czinger?

  Yes, so there's cars in between. This one's also a special number for us. Sometimes people request the exact number on a vehicle, but we're typically around 20 cars a year.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Uh, these are the records that this car has set specifically?

• 2:18:22Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, so this is Laguna Seca and Circuit of Americas, which are two of the main American iconic tracks. This is probably our best track in California. The beauty about this one is it's outdated. So we just had an epic back and forth with Koenigsegg.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:18:36Lukas Czinger?

  Swedish hypercar maker and we set a 122.3. So we beat our previous record by over two seconds, beat their record by almost two seconds, and put a whole new benchmark for Laguna.

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  I love that you can have a rivalry with Christian von Koenigsegg, but just settle it on the track. It's just beautiful. I don't know, it's industrialist for hundreds of years in America. Been building the fastest train, the fastest plane, now the fastest car.

• 2:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Is there any, is there any ambition to one day make? Make cars for everyday consumers or is it racing and?

• 2:19:09Lukas Czinger?

  So Zinger will stay at the tip of the spear. It's all about big R and D budgets, making a car that is a next step forward in terms of consumer experience and therefore it's got to be expensive. It just has to be. It's like, it's the most modern, high-performance niche that does develop systems that then do make their way into more mainstream vehicles. But Divergent is the company that's going to do, you know, the Ford F-150 one day on the chassis technology side.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  With partners.

• 2:19:39Lukas Czinger?

  Exactly. So that tier one supply, the volume game of doing millions of vehicles, that'll come through Divergent. The tip of the spear, highest performing vehicles in the world, that'll come through Zinger.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Very cool. Anything else we should know about the car? Should we go sit down inside, talk about business and how things are going?

• 2:19:58Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, let's talk about business a bit. I think next step for you all is to drive it.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  This view right here, Michael, you gotta get this view, this shot from this angle is just absolutely insane.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  What a beast.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Stunning.

• 2:20:16Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, that's real functional era.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. The scale of the car is just, is, is.

• 2:20:22Lukas Czinger?

  It's wide.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  It's just everything. It's wide, long, tall.

• 2:20:26Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, that front splitter. Yeah, you can put a lot of weight on that.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  It has such a presence.

• 2:20:31Lukas Czinger?

  Give you a quick shot here.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:20:39Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah. It's actually functional.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  It's got to.

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go sit down, we'll chat and dig in more. We are back in the UltraDome. We'll have you sit right here and.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  We're back. It's fascinating. I mean, I think we hang out long enough. Jordy's eventually going to browbeat you into doing the McLaren track and eventually making road cars or something.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Or, you know, just like.

• 2:21:12Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, just fully road legal.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:15Jordi Hays?

  What, how difficult is that process?

• 2:21:18Lukas Czinger?

  Oh, it's difficult.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:19Lukas Czinger?

  Because we went through, this is not an EV car. It's a strong hybrid, so it has an EV system, but a combustion engine as well.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:25Lukas Czinger?

  And we went through full California carbon emissions compliance on that V8. Just heard it start up, right? And that is a difficult process.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:33Lukas Czinger?

  Because they're looking at, while the car is running, when the car first starts, what the evaporation is of fuel or oil.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:40Lukas Czinger?

  In a, what they call shed test as well.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:42Lukas Czinger?

  So there's a huge amount of requirements to actually certify that car. I think the amount of fuel you actually burn in the certification process might not actually make it logical for cars that are this low volume.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:21:54Lukas Czinger?

  But you go through that and you show that this car is actually designed to be environmentally friendly with that V8.

• 2:22:00Jordi Hays?

  What would you do if you were making a track only version?

• 2:22:03Lukas Czinger?

  Oh, we would strip out a lot of weight and a lot of the safety monitoring software and systems. So first off, you're talking about, all your airbags go, all your passive safety.

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:15Lukas Czinger?

  Environment goes, a lot of electronics that are there for redundancy.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any that have like a full roll cage in them? Or was the intention just like, hey, we want to set.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Road car.

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Records with.

• 2:22:25Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, yeah. So road car, right? Maybe in the future, we'd make a track only car.

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:30Lukas Czinger?

  It would be different.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:32Lukas Czinger?

  Almost entirely.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Lukas Czinger?

  That roof design, the carbon A pillars that run all the way across, that is rated for a rollover. So you can roll that vehicle and have similar performance to a rollover cage, but integrate it there.

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:45Lukas Czinger?

  You don't want a roll cage in a road vehicle. Because it's a very hard surface in the car. And if you're not harnessed in. You're going to move more and you're going to hit your head against it if you get in a crash.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:22:55Lukas Czinger?

  So the roll cage on the track where you have the harness on and the helmet makes sense. But the roll cage without the harness and no helmet, it actually is is a major hazard on the road.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk more about the the safety approval, getting the car road legal. Is is there a hurry up and wait element while you're in the queue? There are other cars and there's a rate limiting factor there. Or is it more of a quick back and forth, but you're making dozens of changes constantly? What's the actual process like?

• 2:23:24Lukas Czinger?

  So it is an iterative process. It is known to be a real headache for certain OEMs in terms of the timing and attention that they get and how quickly they can iterate.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  And I'm sure if you're like Ford and you're like, there's a new Corolla coming, or that's Toyota. But there's a new, you know, there's a new F-150 coming every year with a refresh and we're changing this. They they have a whole system set up. It's it's not, it's not as bespoke, so they must have a whole team for it. You sort of have to build that up.

• 2:23:50Lukas Czinger?

  To California CARB's credit, I think they saw that this was one of the first new OEMs in America, period. And there was a narrative that they wanted to support there as well. And we managed to get their attention.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:03Lukas Czinger?

  And our team was able to work with them effectively.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:06Lukas Czinger?

  So I don't know.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  How much were you using this as a as part of the sales process when you're pitching, let's say, other OEMs to to make parts with you guys? Were you saying like, hey, if you don't believe me, get in the, let's like go for it.

• 2:24:19Lukas Czinger?

  Early on, it was like the proof is in the pudding moment, right? You come to our factory, you see our car, you can drive it. If you're Bugatti or McLaren or Aston Martin, you see that. And that's a huge benefit, right? So we use that a lot early on in the company as a sales tool.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:33Lukas Czinger?

  Now in defense, you know, we're hosting anyone from Secretary Hegseth to a CEO of a prime. When they see a company that can integrate a road legal vehicle and they see that manufacturing process, it just builds a lot of confidence, right? There's a cool narrative. Xeth loved revving that and Cara, but there's also a capability narrative and that systems engineering is proven out through that car.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how, I mean, I was looking at the, your, your careers website, you're hiring tons of people. How scaled is the, is the manufacturing plant? How large is the team? How large is the business? How are you growing these years?

• 2:25:10Lukas Czinger?

  So we've gone in the last three years from not being a defense-focused business and Divergent to being a defense-focused business. We're dual-use, dual-tech. So we do have our commercial arm, the auto business is growing, our supply to really the European luxury brands is growing, but the focus is on defense right now. Three years ago, we had zero contracts. Today, we're on over 40 active contracts. And that's what's really unique about Divergent is we're not competing head-to-head with Androl and Lockheed and Raytheon. Rather, we're servicing all of the primes. So you can build this horizontal manufacturing layer as a service to all of them. You can bet not on one to five programs record, but rather service 100 programs a record over time and be that manufacturing supplier for them.

• 2:25:54Lukas Czinger?

  We've gone through that journey of first refactoring the company to work on defense, winning our first contracts, delivering our first prototypes, flying those, proving the performance of a new technology, and then actually in the last six months, winning our first scaled production programs. Now, if you come to the facility, you'll see exit rates at around 100 a month of main bodies for large cruise missile systems. So 80 a month or 100 a month, it's not high volume for auto, but for our defense landscape, making 1,000 missiles per year, that's on the high-volume side of things. And that's what Divergence Factory in Torrance is already churning out. Now, we've almost gotten to full capacity on our Torrance facility with those contracts.

• 2:26:37Lukas Czinger?

  So we're starting to look at factory two, three, four, five. We've got multiple states that we're, you know, kind of shopping and partnering with right now. And then also looking at California, because it makes sense for especially the startup community here, which are great partners for us to have another manufacturing platform here.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about other applications outside of defense and automotive?

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  Maritime comes to mind. I can imagine a lot of that additive manufacturing technology being useful on high-speed boats, yachts, I don't know.

• 2:27:10Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  Aviation, planes. We were talking about Harrison Ford crashing, Cessnas all day long.

• 2:27:15Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Maybe it needs some more reliable manufacturing.

• 2:27:18Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  But what other areas have you at least thought about expansion into?

• 2:27:25Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, the TAM for this system is so large, and that's a blessing, but you need to be disciplined in what you address first and second and third. Right now, it's a primary focus on defense. Within that, looking at largely munitions systems and then looking at torpedoes.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:43Lukas Czinger?

  And similar structures, but on the Navy application side. Outside of defense, we look to space.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:50Lukas Czinger?

  So we're doing quite a bit of work in space. Optimization, mass saving there really matters. So you think about things like satellite buses, as we get more and more launch vehicles and they're carrying different payloads into space, what is the structure that essentially attaches those to the launch vehicle?

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:28:05Lukas Czinger?

  We've got several programs ongoing there. And then you look out at diversion over 10 years. Really, any metal structure that takes a complex load path, so has some sort of force that's interacting with, should be designed by the platform and manufactured by it. So you think commercial air, you think oil and gas.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:23Lukas Czinger?

  You think mining vehicles. You even think over time, as the prices come down enough, construction and where can it get into almost the city planning side of the equation as well.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  What is, what are you seeing on the hypersonic side? I know a lot of it's under wraps, but we've talked to Castilian and some other folks that are thinking about this, and just broadly, the defense industry has been talking about the hypersonic gap over the cruise missile. Are you excited about that? Are you following that story?

• 2:28:55Lukas Czinger?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:56Lukas Czinger?

  You know, we're working on multiple hypersonic programs right now, designing primary structure for these vehicles. You know, in terms of narrative, or when I zoom out a notch, you need both.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07Lukas Czinger?

  You need the affordable cruise missile, that's $200,000 instead of $3 million. You also need the hypersonics capability across different classes of hypersonics.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:16Lukas Czinger?

  And for us, what do we need to be good at? At Divergent, we need to be great with our material science.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:21Lukas Czinger?

  So we need the right nickel-based alloys that can get very hot and still perform. So that's different than aluminums that you saw mostly on the car. We've designed several of those materials. We have commercially available ones. We've got ones that the government has actually contracted us to do a special materials development for a higher performing version of what's commercially available today.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:41Lukas Czinger?

  And then we need to be able to print these at scale. A company like Castilian is really not only about hypersonics, but hypersonics at scale.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Lukas Czinger?

  Right. They want to make a lot of these.

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:50Lukas Czinger?

  They're down the road from us. We want to help them make a lot of them.

• 2:29:53John Coogan?

  That's cool. Talk about what's unique about additive manufacturing in aluminum, nickel. I think, you know, most people will be familiar with like 3D printed plastics. But is it, is it similar to just soldering lines of solder and just building up slowly? Like what else is going on?

• 2:30:12Lukas Czinger?

  It's the most advanced way to make a metal part.

• 2:30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:14Lukas Czinger?

  And it's the most controllable way as well.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:17Lukas Czinger?

  It's not really related to, in terms of technology, 3D printing of plastics.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:22Lukas Czinger?

  Right? Maybe the narratives are tied a bit together.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not like molten, pushed through a nozzle like a...

• 2:30:27Lukas Czinger?

  We do something called powder bed fusion. We have a powdered aluminum or ink enamel in a build chamber. That build chamber has no oxygen in it. It's got nitrogen instead, so it's nonreactive in there. And then you've got high-power lasers overhead.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:42Lukas Czinger?

  And those high-power lasers essentially melt, laser weld, one layer of that part at a time.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:48Lukas Czinger?

  You put a new layer of powder on top and you laser melt that layer to the layer below.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:52Lukas Czinger?

  So if you think about a part, think about it standing vertical.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Lukas Czinger?

  And think about it as a layer cake, maybe 5,000 layers. And you're laser welding with those lasers every single layer, layer by layer.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:03Lukas Czinger?

  And you're getting full data at every single layer. So maybe that one section of a defense product is 7,000 layers.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:11Lukas Czinger?

  I get 7,000 layers of information on that build.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  If it's going to be good, well, you need to adjust.

• 2:31:16Lukas Czinger?

  So this is the most controllable... Process in terms of in-process monitoring is the most advanced way to make a metal part. And you also end up being able to make exactly the net shape you want.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:26Lukas Czinger?

  Cause when you have a cross-section, you can do the exterior and the interior.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:30Lukas Czinger?

  And you have full control of that geometry. You vacuum away your unused powder.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:35Lukas Czinger?

  You end up with your net shape. So in terms of waste and efficiency of the process, you can get something that runs at a higher OEE. When we talk about manufacturing efficiency. And you can get something that actually performs better. So when we talk, you know, application focus, if you're a missile system.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:51Lukas Czinger?

  We typically are seeing about 30% lighter structures while hitting the requirements. And more importantly, we're able to functionally integrate that structure with the fuel tank, with the avionics mounting, that whole complex system. We're usually increasing fuel volume by about 30 to 40%.

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:32:07Lukas Czinger?

  So if you're a missile and you get 30, 40% more fuel volume.

• 2:32:10John Coogan?

  Game changer.

• 2:32:10Lukas Czinger?

  That's a real game changer. And that's what the customer looks at Divergent to do is one, get the best engineered product. And that's going to change in a positive way, the performance of your vehicle. And then two, scale the manufacturing. And that second part is where in the modern age of defense, where we are looking for volume is where there's a big gap right now. And that is part of the reason why Divergent has gotten one, so much business, but two, so much attention as well. Is it's starting to be viewed as that manufacturing layer, right? Our mission statement 10 years ago, build the 21st century industrial base is actually starting to happen now.

• 2:32:46John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, last question for me. Um, the, the pieces that seemed clearly made in your factory with additive manufacturing. They looked white, they didn't look like metal. Have they been coated? What's the post-processing once you make a product?

• 2:33:03Lukas Czinger?

  So our as printed aluminum comes out almost like a silvery white color.

• 2:33:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:08Lukas Czinger?

  So what you're seeing is probably some of that.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:10Lukas Czinger?

  But we do do coatings.

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:11Lukas Czinger?

  Especially on the defense side, we have a fully automated anodized line.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:15Lukas Czinger?

  So it's essentially. A process where you clean the part, dip the part, and then one of those stations, one of those tanks is actually electronically charged. So when you're anodizing, you're essentially plating that part with a certain coating.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:29Lukas Czinger?

  That makes it more corrosive or more resistant to corrosion.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  Got it, okay.

• 2:33:34Lukas Czinger?

  For Navy applications, but also depending on the system, once it's fully integrated, if it's a stealth system, there might be a special paint that goes over top. There might be a gap and flush process over it. And Divergent will either do that or partner with the prime to do it.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  At least prep the material so that it can go get the special paint that might be classified or something.

• 2:33:53Lukas Czinger?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  You're handing out.

• 2:33:55Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side. Want to understand the how local kind of politicians and how like what's your relationship like? How does Torrance think about kind of neo-primes and overall building up the manufacturing base in Torrance?

• 2:34:10Lukas Czinger?

  Yeah, we've had a strong relationship with the city, which is part of the reason we've been able to get fast permits for our factory. You can think about something like automated anodize. That's usually something that can take some years to stand up. We've been able to build relationships that allowed that to accelerate. Are there states that are lower cost and probably even faster for permitting and manufacturing? Absolutely. In terms of engineering headquarters, Los Angeles or the greater, you know, Southern California area is very special because we have the environment to create hardware and test hardware, and we've got some of the brightest people in the world all centralized. And now we have a VC community and general, I'd say, growth funding community that is

• 2:34:55Lukas Czinger?

  focused in this area as well. So Divergent will stay headquartered here. We will go through some serious scaled production here as well, but over time, you're going to see factories across all the states in the US. And some of those factories will be at a lower cost basis than the ones here.

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  It's so awesome. I love it. I just everything about this company is so fun. Congratulations on all the progress and seriously, thank you for bringing the car. What a treat. What a special moment.

• 2:35:22Jordi Hays?

  We've been wanting to do a TBN track day.

• 2:35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  You'll be one of the first to know.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:27Jordi Hays?

  A date and set. You gotta bring it out.

• 2:35:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can come out and smoke us all. Absolutely. Do laps around us. But thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  To come on the show. This is an absolute pleasure.

• 2:35:38Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  And yeah, I'm sure we'll be talking much more over this year as you roll out everything. Good to see you both. So great. We will talk to you soon. Yeah. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the drive.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  And I will tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we have our Lambda Lightning round starting in just a few minutes. We have Andy McCoon from Cosmos coming on first, then FabFitFun. The co-founder and CEO of that company has launched a venture fund. He's coming on. And Aaron Katz, the co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse is coming on. And it sounds like we have Andy in the restream waiting room. So let's kick off our Lambda Lightning round and let him in to the TBN Ultra.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:36:26Speaker 10

  What's up, guys?

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Welcome to the show. First time on the show, so please.

• 2:36:31Jordi Hays?

  For wearing green too.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:36:32Jordi Hays?

  A great sign of our stack.

• 2:36:33John Coogan?

  Green.

• 2:36:33Speaker 10

  It matches perfect. Cosmo racing jacket in honor of you guys.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  We just had a green hypercar.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:40Jordi Hays?

  We were doing a quick tour of.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, first time on the show, please kick us off with an introduction yourself and the company.

• 2:36:46Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. I'm Andy McCoon. We're based here in New York.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:36:51Speaker 10

  Twenty person team. Building, building the new home for inspiration on the internet. Visual search engine, just announced our Series A today. Super exciting. Fifteen million dollar round.

• 2:37:03Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 2:37:03Speaker 10

  And.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Yeah, there's so, so much to talk about right now. And it's such an interesting time to be building this company because there's so, there's just like an explosion of content. You can get a pretty picture now. You don't need, you don't need a camera. Anybody can generate one from their own home. Why don't maybe we start and you can give us kind of the history of the company, what the initial?

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Maybe even go back further, pre, about the previous company you worked on?

• 2:37:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. Um, yeah, in 2017, I founded a company called Unfold. So we are like a mobile content creation tool, kind of Canva adjacent. Ended up selling that company to Squarespace, did a few years there, leading creator product strategy and have been working on Cosmos for the last four years or so now. Um, and yeah, I'm, I'm a really creative person, always working on a lot of different creative projects and I very much grew up on Tumblr back in the day and ever since have been an obsessive collector and curator of things on the internet. Always just saving things to a million folders on my desktop and folders on my phone, things just in all of my different bookmarking folders on different platforms. And, um, so Cosmos just started out as me wanting to build a place where I could bring

• 2:38:21Speaker 10

  all of these references into one home, um, where everything would be tagged by AI so I could quickly search and resurface anything that I had saved. I wanted to be able to work with collaborators in these different projects. Um, so yeah, I mean, just started out as, as building a side project for myself as everything I ever built has kind of started out as, um, started getting into the hands of my most creative friends and people were like, this is awesome.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  And so were those friends, the ones that were uploading the original content? Were you scraping the internet to bring on the first and like seed the community? Like where was the actual content coming from?

• 2:38:55Speaker 10

  Yeah, we, we weren't scraping anything. It's always come from the users. We have great importing tools and people can upload links from a lot of different platforms and around the plate, around the internet. So yeah, all of the content is seeded by the community, which has grown in a really, really beautiful way. Tens of millions of images on platform now, an amazing global search, you know, all of the recommendation layer that you would expect from a product like this.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  And what were the early adopters looking for? Is it more like, because I, you know, when I think about image search, I think about people that are doing home renovations, but also designers that are looking for inspiration for clothing or web design. There are some people that just sit there and scroll just to enjoy their favorite images like you enjoy your favorite books. What were the early drivers of growth?

• 2:39:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think, you know, we amassed a weightless of a few hundred thousand folks before we launched the product. And I think if you look at the cohorts of users that were coming in really early, it was, you know, designers across every discipline. We're talking interior designers, architects, graphic designers, brand designers, photographers, folks like this, which really helped seed such an amazing, you know, original corpus of content. But really where we're seeing a lot of the growth come from now is sort of this, you know, Gen Z wave. You know, I call them kind of the next generation of Tumblr kid.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:13Speaker 10

  You know, they, they, they love to mood board for fun, you know, maybe they're not saving typographical references on a day to day basis because, you know, they need it for their client work, but maybe they're just dreaming up a version of themselves that they aspire to be. And they want to surround themselves with beautiful things.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then how is, how have you been grappling with the AI generation, image generation boom? For, you started the company four years ago, it's pretty much pre-AI content essentially. Now it's indistinguishable. What is, what's the journey been like for you?

• 2:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And there's so much pressure on each platform to take a stance. Right now, when you look at most of the platforms, the stance is like AI content is welcome here.

• 2:40:55John Coogan?

  Some of it gets tagged.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we may try to tag it.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  But it's being harder and harder.

• 2:41:00John Coogan?

  But for a lot of platforms, you just have to search, okay, I only want to see images before 2022.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  And it's like, almost like an archive that can be really good. But yeah, just how have you been processing it?

• 2:41:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of backlash within the ecosystem against a lot of other platforms where AI-generated content is kind of proliferating all of the feeds. And, you know, people are engaging with stuff that they don't even know is AI-generated content. And maybe they search the thing and then they click into it and they see that it's labeled by AI and they find that really frustrating.

• 2:41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:36Speaker 10

  And, you know, we're definitely, we're definitely growing a lot of users now that we kind of consider like refugees from this. You know, we really want to be a platform that champions human creativity and human-created content. Now, that's not to say that we're drawing a hard stance against AI-generated content, but I think that it's really important that people are able to decide what they want to see. And so we've done, you know, what some of these other platforms have done as well is every image that gets uploaded on platform, we're running it through, you know, multiple different algorithms to detect if that is AI-generated. And so every user has settings within their profile where they can choose to show or hide AI-generated content.

• 2:42:14Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Interesting. And then-

• 2:42:15Jordi Hays?

  How confident are you that you're catching all of it?

• 2:42:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, it's an uphill battle, right? I mean, it keeps getting better. You have to keep retraining the models. And it's only going to get more difficult. So, you know, I think that it's only a matter of time before it's, you know, pretty difficult to-

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  There's also some AI image models, I've noticed where I will upload an image, ask it to do something, and it kind of just spits out the exact same image, or maybe it just like adds a piece of text. And it feels like it didn't actually run a new diffusion model. It just sort of used some tool to like layer over text. And it's like, well, it's kind of just acting as an agentic Photoshop at that point. It's not really creating an AI image, like all of the details and fingers are the same, because it's literally the same pixels that it's just using. And so does that count? Yeah, it's going to be all hairy. I'm interested to know how you think about for you pages, algorithmic feeds versus search and being like more of a search engine. Is that line blurring? What are the important trade-offs?

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  What do you like and dislike about algorithm design?

• 2:43:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. So we have a for you page on Cosmos that learns your taste and learns your interests as you could say things. I think it's important that you have something like that so people have a new vector that they can discover content through. What's really interesting is the search problem is actually very similar to the for you problem, especially when you get into the world of serving people personalized search. So you train your for you, we have an idea of what your tastes and your aesthetic leanings are. And then when you search something, you're actually just adding that keyword over sort of this vectorized database of visual aesthetic that you've already identified with. So the problems are actually very related and intertwined. I think one thing that we've done that's really interesting is we've started developing in-house aesthetic prediction models. So

• 2:44:06Speaker 10

  we've actually been using all of our own data, user data, user uploaded content, and we've been training models that understand kind of like what good versus bad looks like. And we're using these aesthetic predictions to loosely re-rank our search results in our for you pages to try to keep the slop off of the platform. The slop wars.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  You're deep in the slop wars, frontline soldier here in the foxhole. I salute your service.

• 2:44:35Speaker 10

  I think we believe that your outputs are a reflection of your inputs. And so it's very philosophically important that we're feeding people high-quality inputs because so many creative projects start with the mood boarding phase. And so if the inputs are going to become the output, it's really important that we're giving people a place where they can find the highest-quality things.

• 2:44:53John Coogan?

  What's been the growth loop for you? What's been the key to growth? I know that you've been featured by Apple as one of the top 25 apps for 2025, you're 500,000 followers on Instagram. But is there a traditional referral flow? What are you using from the web 2.0 boom era versus viral social playbook? What's been the big growth engine? Have you had to just run ads? What's worked?

• 2:45:23Speaker 10

  Yeah, we haven't been running ads. I mean, it's really been organic up until this point.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:28Speaker 10

  You know, we had an early like invite friend flow, which was pretty successful for us. I think that that's not as successful as it was a few years ago when we ran it. But I think, you know, the nature of Cosmos is really collaborative. You know, you start what we call a clusters, like a collection. You start a you start a cluster, you start inviting, you know, your collaborators to those. The experience gets so much more valuable. And we're seeing really high density as well within some of the best creative teams in the world. I mean, we have, you know, hundreds of users on platform on nike.com emails. We have, you know, teams at Chanel using Cosmos, teams at Apple using Cosmos. So that density within creative teams has been really, really powerful for us.

• 2:46:06Jordi Hays?

  And then monetization, I feel like you're gonna be anti ad, just because as soon as you have an ad, it's hard to influence like, okay. Can't say like, well, you can only serve pretty ads.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  For $50,000, you can post the sloppiest AI slop with six fingers. But you're, we're gonna charge you a pretty penny. No, no, I want to know the real monetization strategy.

• 2:46:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. So we're not monetizing yet. I mean, we have a premium subscription right now, but it's pretty demoted within the product.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:46:35Speaker 10

  I think, you know, there will be a lot that that we have yet to reveal. But I think that where we're going is, you know, going deeper on sort of focusing on those those creative teams that are using Cosmos and how can we better serve those folks? And then we're also starting to build into commerce as well. So we launched a commerce pilot last year. And, you know, you can imagine, you know, we're running hundreds of thousands of searches a day right now on the platform. And if someone searches for brown leather couch, they're probably looking to buy a brown leather couch. And so how can we?

• 2:47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:04Speaker 10

  Yeah. How how can we create a compelling commerce experience that doesn't feel like we're trying to force products down your throat? But it's really commerce through through inspiration.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like aesthetic first, taste first, as opposed to like feature set, price, like all the filters that you see when you're on Google Shopping. It's a like, those are probably going to be way lower in the funnel than the aesthetic.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, shoppable mood board. You can think of people doing inspiration for, you know, interior design, their wardrobe, all this stuff. It's like, that's, that's a high intent moment when somebody's trying to.

• 2:47:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you can you explain a little bit more about the aesthetic trends that are popular? I've seen these different like phrases used to describe how certain people describe their whole aesthetic. Like, what is, how would you describe the communities that have formed around these like modern, sub-niche aesthetics?

• 2:48:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, we launched a new feature today. So we gave the profile a really big refresh. Historically, everything that you saved had to go within a cluster. The release that we put out today gives you a core feed of images that sit at the forefront of the profile, which is really akin to like your Tumblr blog back in the day. It's really like, you know, a snapshot of your taste and what you're into. We're starting to go really deep on, you know, the datas and the trends that we're seeing on the platform between, you know, what people are searching, what clusters are they creating, all of those sorts of things. And we're going to start putting out trend reports, which we're really excited for. And we've started sort of seeding these into our newsletter, which has been really, really fun. But yeah, it's been really cool to see these different

• 2:48:44Speaker 10

  sort of niche aesthetics blossom. I think historically, a lot of the usage has been just around, again, the core use cases that we were talking about, on like graphic design, interior design, whatever. But if you think about something like Tumblr, right, there was like fandoms that were popping off and, you know, like emo aesthetics and culture, right? So we're starting to see some of these pop up, but it's a little early to tell. But we're really excited to start publishing these more publicly.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Okay, last question for your personal aesthetic. The Pantone color of the year for 2026 is Cloud Dancer. It's a soft, lofty white that symbolizes calm, peace, and fresh starts. Underrated or overrated?

• 2:49:23Speaker 10

  You know, I'm a neutral palette guy, but I know it was really contentious within the creative community. I think we could have gone a little bit more creative with it, but I'm never gonna hate on a neutral palette. This is pretty out of pocket.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  Okay, so it sounds like Cloud Dancer might be working its way into your cosmos.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  It's a good name. E Spooky in the X chat says, how do you avoid creating an automatic house aesthetic if you're algorithmically filtering slop?

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any thoughts there? Like, is this, is part, is part of this, like, it is so

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a lot of the-

• 2:49:57Jordi Hays?

  Generated that somebody might have, like,

• 2:49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:00Jordi Hays?

  You're not trying to like have an overarching aesthetic Other than, like, somebody could come on and create a bunch of clusters for an aesthetic That, that is not aligned with your personal taste or taste of Cosmo.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  The art station look became the mid-journey look and then now that just looks like the AI art look. But, you know, what if you're actually just into like, you know, matte painting? Like, what, you're gonna get filtered, maybe? I don't know.

• 2:50:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think like, the point of the aesthetic prediction model is, is less to Pedal what we think is good and is more to set a bottom bound on what we think is bad. And so that bar is set pretty low. Um, but it's, it's a great question. You know, we're continuing to retrain the aesthetic, the aesthetic models that we have. Um, and we're kind of going through this right now, where we're trying to widen the aperture of that. Um, to service more folks and, and, and to reach a broader audience. Um, so I don't think there's a clean answer to it, other than just like, you know, continuing to iterate on your models And, and pass them into production and, and measure and, and learn from there.

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hop on the show. Great to meet you and good luck. Congratulations.

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. The New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And with that, we will, oh, you can hear, I hope you can hear it.

• 2:51:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if it's coming through the mic.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  The 21C has fired up. That B8 is roaring. Uh, and we have Michael from FabFitFun and Deep33 in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him to the TBN Ultra Dunk. How are you doing?

• 2:51:32Speaker 11

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:51:33Speaker 11

  Hey, guys, doing great. Good to be here.

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Uh, give us the news.

• 2:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Look at this jacket. First of all, this jacket is fantastic.

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  You have news for us.

• 2:51:43Speaker 11

  I mean, you guys are always dressed to impress and I didn't want to let you down, so.

• 2:51:46John Coogan?

  Thank you. Uh, you raised some money. How much did you raise?

• 2:51:50Speaker 11

  We've got a $150 million fund. We've closed.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  $150 million fund. What submarkets are you most interested in? What strategy? What stages? How are you thinking about focusing your investing work over the fund lifecycle?

• 2:52:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we are a deep tech fund focused on the US-Israel corridor. So we'll be investing across US and Israel. And so, you know, what's unique especially about the kind of the Israeli ecosystem focus is there isn't a deep tech fund, let's say, in the mold of what's, you know, an Eclipse, a DCVC, a Lux Capital.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:52:34Speaker 11

  Focus on that ecosystem. And we just think there's enormous opportunities.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  What are the great recruiting hubs for entrepreneurs in defense in Israel? We've heard about Talpiot and a few other groups. Where are you finding talent? Are they, you know, ex-founders themselves, repeat founders? Where are you sourcing deals from?

• 2:53:00Speaker 11

  So interestingly, actually, the former commander of Talpiot is actually one of my partners in the fund. There you go. For those of you who aren't familiar with Talpiot, you know, there's a lot of different elite units in the IDF, but Talpiot is the unit of the physicists. It was about the IDF made to really train physicists and combine that with the defense industry. So we do, we work closely with, you know, the different groups. Another of my partners is from 8200, which many of you might be familiar with, is kind of the cyber unit within the IDF. We have tentacles into those alumni groups and networks, as well as a lot of the institutions

• 2:53:44Speaker 11

  of higher learning, so Weitzman Institute, Technion, et cetera. You know, we're kind of, I'm actually the only non-Israeli on the team of five partners. So we're deep in that ecosystem.

• 2:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Five partners, that's cool. Out the gates, it's sort of the counter positioned pretty squarely against a solo.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Solo GP, yeah, there are a lot of people that were doing that. Yeah, how do you all meet? And what was the concept between the maybe larger partnership at this phase? I don't know.

• 2:54:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we have a what we call an expert first model. My main code GP is Leor Prossor, who has been a venture capitalist for 15 years. Decided to start a new platform because of the opportunities we thought were emanating specifically in deep tech and out of the Israel ecosystem. But to do deep tech right, you actually have to have, you know, significant capabilities to go deep on the technical side, to have people who are, you know, domain experts. And so three of our other partners are actually domain experts in the categories that we're most bullish on, one being quantum computing, the second being AI infrastructure, a third

• 2:54:54Speaker 11

  being energy, and then we also have a venture partner and advisor in the robotics side.

• 2:55:00John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about point solutions versus defense platform companies? Are you looking for a multi-product defense firm that can build sensor towers and drones and submarines? Or do you want to invest in a bunch of different teams that are doing small, like smaller product bets, see what works and then maybe scale out of that? Like, what's the current meta on the ground in Israel?

• 2:55:33Speaker 11

  Yes, so interestingly, although, you know, defense is an important part of the ecosystem and shoots off a lot of the innovation that we are investing into, we don't think of ourselves as a defense fund. In fact, we're not focused on kind of kinetic battlefield focused companies, although a byproduct of the types of companies and technologies that we're investing in oftentimes do have defense ramifications and capabilities on the battlefield. We just think that the commercial opportunities of those technologies, when they extend beyond... Defense kind of specific companies are much bigger, they can have much bigger outcomes. So there's a lot of dual use in the types of things that we're looking at and you know,

• 2:56:17Speaker 11

  what we're looking for is just, you know, insanely capable founding teams, really groundbreaking kind of technology and IP and enormous end markets and you know, when you look at the kind of the confluence of things that Israel has in terms of the defense industry, the institutions of higher learning, the concentration of elite scientists, RF industry, silicon industry, optics industry, et cetera, there's really, you know, the only other geography in the world that has that sort of concentration of those types of mixes of assets is really California and you see what California produces. So we think Israel is kind of this looming deep tech giant. In a lot of ways, the ecosystem there in deep tech is kind of where cybersecurity

• 2:57:02Speaker 11

  was maybe a decade ago in Israel and now it's this powerhouse that's producing these, you know, just insane outcomes. We think of the next decade, the deep tech outcomes from Israel are going to be right up there. Where did the name come from?

• 2:57:16John Coogan?

  Oh yeah.

• 2:57:17Speaker 11

  So I think deep speaks for itself, you know, one, we go deep and we're focused on deep tech and thirty-three is actually, it has a mystical connotation in Judaism. It's the day of Lag Baomer, which is a Jewish holiday where the kind of the depth of the hidden secrets of the universe were revealed for the first time and that's what we really think our founders are doing. Our founders, our companies and kind of the mission of the firm is to go into the technological and scientific frontiers and we think of that as a way of revealing hidden truths. The type of work that these companies are doing, what we're trying to build is really frontier tech and new innovation that, you

• 2:58:00Speaker 11

  know, moves the world forward and moves our understanding of the world forward.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  That's cool. Last question for me, energy, do you put that in the deep tech realm? Are there particular areas within energy that you're interested in? Solar, nuclear, wind, anything?

• 2:58:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a great question, absolutely. We actually have two energy companies already under our belt. We, you know, in particular, kind of our thesis on energy is where the point of production and the point of consumption are brought together.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:58:33Speaker 11

  So where can you create unique types of energy outputs on location, on site? So for instance, if one company we haven't announced is able to produce carbon fuels, carbon-based fuels out of a laboratory. And, you know, so, and there's a scale-up model around that that we think is extremely compelling. You know, the name of the game for a lot of, you know, US security interests, Israel security interests, and the shared interest between the two of them is this kind of supply chain resilience. We saw the president speaking at Davos and even, you know, describing maybe, you know,

• 2:59:18Speaker 11

  the kind of the counter swing of globalization is here, and that means people having these capabilities on site, being less reliant on any specific partner and trade for their national security. And so that ability to bring things on site becomes incredibly important.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations.

• 2:59:39Jordi Hays?

  Next time you join, you can join from Tel Aviv. I'm assuming you're, are you calling in from LA right now?

• 2:59:45Speaker 11

  I'm actually calling in from New York. We're here, it's Deep 33, you know, we're across LA, Tel Aviv, and New York, so the team all came together, you know, announced the fund and do some critical work together. So.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, I'm sure you'll be back soon.

• 3:00:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 3:00:01Speaker 11

  Thanks.

• 3:00:02Jordi Hays?

  Fun to have.

• 3:00:02John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. That's right. Up next, we have Aaron Katz. He's the co-founder and CEO of ClickHouse. He'll be joining in just a minute. In the meantime, let's head over to the timeline. Elon Musk has confirmed that he's unhappy with the Twitter algorithm. Data Hazard said, "The Twitter algo has gone to hell. I want to again see obscure technical posts from outside my follows." Not this cornucopia of low IQ rage slop. That's interesting coinage. Elon chimed in and said, "I agree. Sigh." So, that's the thing. Anytime that there's a bad day on the timeline, bad week on the timeline, I feel like they're pretty aggressive about just mixing it up.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  I don't know, you might not like the new thing, but it's gonna be different. Command Z. You're gonna see some doing stuff. And there's been some fantastic deep fakes of Elon Musk as the farmer from Babe, Pig in the City, looking at the slop and being sad. So, fun day on the timeline. Good that there will be some changes coming. Anyway, without further ado, we have Aaron Katz from ClickHouse. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Good to meet you. How's your year going so far?

• 3:01:17Speaker 08

  Well, the calendar year is behind us, but our fiscal year is about to finish the end of this month, and it's going really well. We got, you know, whatever, eight or nine days left, and, you know, we're off to a, off to a good start to finish the year in the fiscal quarter and get the new year up and running beginning of February.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  What's the theme of 2026 for the company? Is it just more AI? It feels like AI is so obvious, but also, what else are you gonna focus on?

• 3:01:44Speaker 08

  Well, you know, ClickHouse has been a backend database to a lot of agentic workflows over the past couple of years, even before the ChatGPT moment. You know, we're being used by Lovable, Cursor, Anthropic, OpenAI. Pretty much every leading AI company right now is using ClickHouse in some sort of capacity. So, but it's just not AI companies. I mean, we're the backend to technologies like Ramp, for example. They're your sponsor, if you talk to Eric. We power most of the analytical experiences if you're a Ramp customer. And so, it's just kind of doubling down on what's gotten us here. It's a very large surface area that we're going after and just kind of broadening the competitive landscape.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Have there been any challenges on actually scaling the business from an infrastructure size? You're at a scale where many AI companies are struggling with data centers, GPU poor. How has the actual build versus buy decision changed over the last few years? How has the infrastructure side of the business changed?

• 3:02:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, scalability is one of ClickHouse's strengths and always has been. I mean, we've got, you just talked about Elons. Many of Elon's companies are using ClickHouse. Tesla's a great example of that, where they're ingesting a billion events per second into ClickHouse. And there just isn't another database in the world.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  I think you need to know who's not using ClickHouse.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, just tell us who's not a customer, and then it'll be quicker.

• 3:03:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, fair enough. I mean, you just kind of get your head around the volume of data that these LLMs are generating, and the ability to ingest that in an efficient way, to be able to store and analyze that, you know, ClickHouse really shines. So scalability is something that we really promote and our customers talk about as one of the unique characteristics of ClickHouse.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about just walking through the ladder of different analytic suites and analytic functions and just case studies that can actually, that are best practice today? I mean, people are familiar with, you know, like Big Data, MapReduce, you know, count a bunch of things across a bunch of databases. We're in a much more modern era. What are you seeing companies do that's unique, surprising, interesting, or uniquely enabled by ClickHouse?

• 3:03:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, you mentioned MapReduce or any sort of kind of batch-oriented processing. It's all moving towards real time. And Ramp is a great example of that. If you're a user or a customer of Ramp and you want to run analytics on spend patterns inside of your company, you're not going to wait, you know, two to five seconds for that dashboard to render, that graph to update, or the report to produce results. You expect to see those in milliseconds. And so there's just this broad shift from an analytical perspective to real-time experiences. You batch processing, you know, even waiting, you know, three to five seconds for any sort of dashboard to refresh is just an eternity. And so that's a big pull to why people are moving towards ClickHouse.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  You're, oh, sorry.

• 3:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask about the engineering culture. Last week, we were at a dinner and somebody was telling me about I'll kind of mix up some of the details, but they were telling me about like that an investor was going through the diligence process with ClickHouse and Click, you guys had shared like that they couldn't believe how like how few engineers had created some of the early technology and they just honestly didn't believe it. So I wanted to ask about kind of the early engineering culture and how that's evolved and what you guys are doing on the talent side that has allowed you to, you know, work with so many of these, you know, massive, important companies.

• 3:05:23Speaker 08

  I mean, I love that question and I don't get it often enough. The engineering team at ClickHouse, the broader community behind ClickHouse, but the creators and the committers that are part of our company are the best engineers that I've ever worked with and I've been in the industry for quite some time. I know you've had Marc Benioff on your show several times. I spent 12 years at Salesforce that had an incredible engineering culture. The team that we've assembled here is specifically in infrastructure software is the best in the world. And you're right, it was a very small team of primarily Russian engineers inside of a company called Yandex, which was commonly referred to as the Google of Russia that actually created ClickHouse originally. My co-founder, Alexei Milavidov, who lives

• 3:06:07Speaker 08

  in Amsterdam, is the one that actually named it. It's short for ClickStream Data Warehouse. And so he was thinking about the data warehouse use case when he created the database itself and then made the brave decision to open source it in 2016. And that's essentially you just expose your source code to the world and then anybody can adopt and deploy the technology with no attribution to the creators of the software without any sort of commercial relationship. And it was a small team. It was a dozen engineers who were the primary committers that created this incredibly powerful, feature-rich database. And it's a total joy to work with this group. They're all in Holland, in the Netherlands now, all part of our company and continue to advance the project. And then we've built

• 3:06:52Speaker 08

  a managed service that runs in the cloud called ClickHouse Cloud that they're also contributing to. And that's the primary business model. And this is a managed service that runs on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft infrastructure. And then in Asia, primarily in China, we have a partnership with Alibaba.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about? The way that developers and teams are selecting database backends, data storage products in the age of agentic coding, I feel like we talked to a lot of folks who they go to an agentic coding solution. They say, I want to build this type of application. I want to build, you know, some custom piece of software and the database choice is sort of made for them by the by the coding agent. And and this feels like it's hyper relevant at the vibe coding, the the DIY hack project level. But is this something on your radar

• 3:07:53John Coogan?

  where you think that in a few years, maybe it's already happening, how you show up in LLM search results and how how the different AI agent coding models feel about ClickHouse will be important to your business?

• 3:08:09Speaker 08

  Well, you know, Anthropic spoke at our event last year in San Francisco. So did OpenAI and Tesla. And Anthropic discovered ClickHouse by asking Claude what they should be using for observability. And Claude said, you should be using ClickHouse. And I had a had a call with the CEO of a very large fintech company in Europe last week. And he said, every LLM we ask what we should be using for this new real time analytics product we're building suggests ClickHouse. And so, you know, fortunately, a lot of people are turning to these LLMs for guidance on what technologies they should be, they should be adopting. And I think, as everybody knows, like, you know, IT decision making has been completely turned on its head from kind of a tops down C level mandate, you're going

• 3:08:50Speaker 08

  to use Oracle, you're going to use IBM, now to a developer led evaluation. And open source creates such a fast path for a developer who's building an agentic application to deploy, experience, experiment with technology without any sort of vendor relationship. They can actually push it into production for some of these agentic applications without any sort of vendor relationship. Open source is completely disrupting, you know, how these LLM providers and enterprises are deploying these applications. And we made an acquisition Last week that we announced on Friday alongside our financing that we're super excited about, it's a company out of Berlin called Langfuse and they have built, you know, an

• 3:09:32Speaker 08

  industry-leading LLM observability application so that now enterprises can observe, you know, the types of experiences their users are developing on these LLM applications.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. How are you processing all the chaos in SaaS right now, the sell-off broadly, the industry's transition, you know, went through, you know, a couple decades where...

• 3:09:59John Coogan?

  A big question about the shift from seats to consumption or performance.

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's so many, I feel like, open questions, how much of a threat are new, you know, you probably laugh when people say like, "Oh, I made this database with the prompts" and you're like, "Okay, well, you're missing like, you know, the 100 other features that, you know, an enterprise is really going to care about." But after spending, you know, more than a decade at Salesforce and then running ClickHouse, I'm curious what your point of view is.

• 3:10:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know, John mentioned this move from a seat-based model to consumption or usage-based, which infrastructure isn't that unique. I mean, it's been around for quite some time. Like, our customers simply pay for what they use, which is a combination typically of storage and compute. And these are very kind of AI-intensive applications. And what's unique about our service is that it automatically scales up and down. So you don't need to provision all of the compute that you otherwise would because a lot of these analytical workloads are quite kind of spiky in nature and you want the application to be able to idle during periods of inactivity, for example. And so I do think that, you know, these traditional seat-based, although I think we should separate like traditional

• 3:11:11Speaker 08

  business applications like Salesforce and Workday from kind of infrastructure software, which is much more of kind of the plumbing of, you know, the internet and the stuff that you don't see necessarily when you look at a mobile app or you look at a business app or a consumer app. It's a lot of the processing that occurs. You know, behind the scenes is primarily where we exist. I'll give you an example is, you know, we, where I would historically use some sort of BI reporting to build a graph or a chart to show me how the business is performing, you know, build me a bar chart that shows revenue growth or build me a stack bar chart that shows regional revenue distribution, things like that. And I'd go to some data analyst and they'd go and find the source data and they'd spend a week pulling this together and we'd have like multiple reviews.

• 3:11:55Speaker 08

  I now simply ask Anthropic. We've integrated Anthropic's, you know, Claude, I think it's 4.5.

• 3:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:01Speaker 08

  Their latest model with our own MCP server and then a ClickHouse cloud service that has all of our customers, not our customers' data, but like our customers' use of our service. And I can ask that, I can ask that prompt, like build me a bar chart that shows these dimensions and it builds it in like five seconds. And it's just, and it cost me 20 cents, that single prompt. And that simple semantic search is generating like dozens of SQL queries. All of those SQL queries are all being stored in ClickHouse. And if you think about the characteristics of these agentic experiences, like the number one requirement is latency. They have to be low latency in terms of the interactivity between the text prompt, whether

• 3:12:43Speaker 08

  it's ChatGPT or anything else, where you put in that query and then the database itself that's actually storing the data that's providing the response.

• 3:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's fascinating how much of a global company ClickHouse is, the Alibaba partnership, the Russia, the history with Yandex. We were reading a post about selling software in Japan and how the Japan software buyer often will want to read a lot of documentation and details before jumping on a call with a sales associate. Does that match with your reality in Japan? What can you tell us about the difference of buyer across different, different countries that you've experienced throughout your career? Like, what's the key to global growth broadly?

• 3:13:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, so, you know, half of our employees are outside of the United States. We employ people in 22 different countries. Half of our customers are outside of North America. Half of our revenue comes from outside of the US. So the company is extremely diverse internationally. I had the good fortune in 2005, so 21 years ago, Marc Benioff asked me to move to Singapore, and I spent four years helping Salesforce expand across the Asia-Pacific region. And at the time, Japan, I believe, was the second largest country behind the US, ahead of the UK, Germany, France, in terms of revenue contribution. I don't think I could be quoted on that because I'm not necessarily true. It's number two or three, but it was like top five. And I would argue it was probably

• 3:14:12Speaker 08

  top two if my memory serves me correctly. And you could add South Korea to that same description of just how unique these markets operate and how localized the selling effort is. We recently did, and I've seen both models, and one being you do a joint venture, and where you partner with a local company, and you share the risk, and you share the economics, and you share the upside. And they leverage local relationships in the market and local market knowledge, et cetera. Or you try to do it yourselves and establish your own KK in Japan. And I've gone down both paths and learned a lot of lessons along the way. And so here at ClickHouse, we did a joint venture in Japan. We recently announced that with

• 3:14:54Speaker 08

  a firm called Japan Cloud. And they were previously Sunbridge, which is the firm that did Salesforce.com's joint venture. And so I've worked with these folks for, you know, two decades now. And so, yeah, it's a highly localized market. The buying behavior is very different in Japan and in South Korea than other parts of Southeast Asia, putting aside Greater China, or Australia, New Zealand, or the Indian subcontinent. So it's a huge market, but not many companies get it right, honestly. You know, they try to do it themselves versus leveraging local expertise. We also brought on some investors, a firm called Geodesic Capital, and that's run by an individual named John Rus. And John, I believe he's

• 3:15:36Speaker 08

  still on the board of Salesforce, but he was the previous ambassador for the United States to Japan. And just having those types of relationships are very important for a company like ours, that we frankly don't have the same level of awareness in Japan that we do here in Silicon Valley or, you know, in New York.

• 3:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Uh, Jordi, anything else?

• 3:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 3:15:57John Coogan?

  We'll let you get back to your day. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

• 3:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at this rate, I'm sure there'll be many reasons to hang back on this year.

• 3:16:02John Coogan?

  We have to ring the gong. There, uh, there's a recent fundraiser. Can you tell us the details?

• 3:16:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, happy to. Yeah, we, we weren't running a process or raising capital. There's a lot of investor interest and so we ended up pulling around together, uh, kind of over the holidays. That was led by Dragon Air, uh, here in San Francisco. Um, and, uh, we ended up raising 400 million. We had participation from a number of our existing investors and a few new investors.

• 3:16:32John Coogan?

  Pulled together over the holiday. We've talked to a lot of VCs who said that it was easier to do deals over the holidays. There were less distractions at the office and so plenty of time to hop on the phone with like a tight partnership, get something through. So congratulations.

• 3:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 3:16:46Speaker 08

  All right, well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

• 3:16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

• 3:16:51John Coogan?

  TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. It's fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 3:16:59Jordi Hays?

  We are puffing.

• 3:17:00John Coogan?

  We are puffing.

• 3:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Back to the timeline. Did we miss anything else today?

• 3:17:06John Coogan?

  Yes, we missed the fact that Keith Raboy has hit 5,000 berries classes. Some people would say that's too many. It's an incredible amount, uh, only possible, I think mathematically because he does multiple per day. But what an absolute generational run, sometimes a literal run on the berries treadmill from Keith Raboy. Demis Hassabis from Google told Alex Heath at Sources, uh, that, that he has no pla- no plans to put ads in Gemini. It's interesting they've gone for that so early. He said of OpenAI putting ads in ChatGPT, maybe they feel they need to make more revenue.

• 3:17:49John Coogan?

  What's interesting is I feel like, yes, it's like, it's like, at what level do the ads bake in? Because you can, you can access some level of Gemini model through the AI search overviews, the enhanced results that come from, come from Google searches and they've already monetized those and it doesn't ruffle any feathers. So of course, on this show, we're very pro ads and my answer, my, my response to Demis should be, let's do it, buddy. Let's put some ads in. I'm ready for ads in Gemini three pro. But of course, they're in a very different position. The business is much larger, much more, much more established and so they have

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  much more flexibility with timing these things. I do wonder, you know, the, the whole ads and chat GPT news cycle, it was released on a Friday. It was very much crowded out by the Elon OpenAI lawsuit. It had been rumored and discussed multiple times. Sam Altman had mentioned it in many different podcast appearances. He talked to Ben Thompson about what he liked about Instagram's ads. He had been messaging, Fiji Simo came on to find a couple of things and talked to us on our show about it. And so people, it was a very slow process of building up this idea that ads will be coming to chat GPT. And the benefit of that is that, you know, it's not just all of a sudden, hey, the thing that I like

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  now is stuffed full with ads. It's been a very slow rollout. I think it's been deliberate. I think it's smart. I think it works well. We've been discussing whether or not the first chat app to, in, to, in, to add digital advertising might get like branded with a scarlet letter of like, that's the one that has ads. And you always remember that one is the one that has ads, even if they all add them eventually. I don't know that that will happen, but I have yet to see any real backlash across the internet around, oh, ads are coming to chat GPT. It's bad. So in general, I feel like the rollout has been, has been handled well. I'm sure we'll see more interesting things when. The ads actually go live, people will be taking screenshots of them, sharing them.

• 3:19:59John Coogan?

  As long as they partner with good companies like the Ridge Wallet, I think they're gonna be, I think people are gonna be thrilled to see Ridge Wallet ads in ChatGPT.

• 3:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Imagine getting one of those like really sketchy like supplement ads, you know, they, they, they run these on like display.

• 3:20:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like some, some X-ray and it's like this one thing is destroying your metabolism.

• 3:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Doctors hate.

• 3:20:20John Coogan?

  Doctors hate this, yeah.

• 3:20:23John Coogan?

  The, the Bank of America CEO says he hired 2,000 recent graduates from 200,000 applications. I wonder how much of that is driven by AI applications, people. Yeah, some people are wondering like how many of those applications were duplicates. You apply to multiple jobs, you can only be hired once. But Bank of America clearly growing. Humans and the new Neo Lab founded by Exanthropic, XAI and Google staff. They're trying to build interactive AI, they raised.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  This is a Neo, Neo Lab.

• 3:20:56John Coogan?

  It's a Neo, it's a post Neo Lab. This is, they raised a 480 million dollar seed round from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos and others at a 4.48 billion dollar valuation. And it's in the New York Times, you can go check it out, Cade Metz has the story. So that's exciting, we, we have to do a proper deep dive on the Neo Lab landscape. What do you have for us, Tyler?

• 3:21:20Speaker 03

  I mean, okay, you, you said it was post Neo Lab, I think it's actually closer to like trad Neo Lab.

• 3:21:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:21:26Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, it's, it's kind of like, look, we're gonna release models, they're gonna be for consumers.

• 3:21:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:21:33Speaker 03

  We're gonna do it with this human centric view, but it's not like they're going, you know, that we're combining this with a bio wet lab or something like this is like.

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, like Fei Fei Lee's World Labs is many ways more of a post Neo Lab than this.

• 3:21:48Jordi Hays?

  So if I'm, if I'm getting this right, Tyler, this is less about, okay, I'm gonna send off this agent to go work for a week and, and I'll check in with it when it's done and more of this kind of like coworking approach.

• 3:22:01Speaker 03

  I believe, I mean, they haven't released much, but it seems like.

• 3:22:04Jordi Hays?

  You're the expert.

• 3:22:05Speaker 03

  Point is very interactive, I mean, like I'm the expert on what they've, they've put out, which is very little.

• 3:22:12John Coogan?

  So, so the name of the company is humans plural and then an ampersand, humans and. And Dylan Patel says, we are all calling this startup human sand. Sorry, I make the rules. It's a fire name.

• 3:22:25Speaker 03

  Nir says, um, what are you guys actually doing or what are you guys actually making? I literally cannot tell at all.

• 3:22:31John Coogan?

  Well, they haven't been on TVPN yet. They haven't broken it down for us like we're a bunch of venture capitalists.

• 3:22:36Jordi Hays?

  In other news, our very own Dylan Abriscado got a major scoop.

• 3:22:41John Coogan?

  Scoop master.

• 3:22:41Jordi Hays?

  Scoop in like a Ben and Jerry's employee. He figured out Instagram replaced the following tab or the following, uh, sort of.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  Word, keyword.

• 3:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Word with friends, which are followers you follow back.

• 3:22:54John Coogan?

  Yes. And this has implications. Explain.

• 3:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes. The implications here are that some people aren't following accounts because they want to keep, uh, they have some idea of what their follower to following ratio should be.

• 3:23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. If I, if I follow 800 people and I have a hundred thousand followers, it looks really elite. But if I'm, uh, but if I have a hundred thousand followers and a hundred thousand following, uh, followers following, um, it just looks like I reply, I'm like doing some scheme. I have some bot going or something. I mean, hilariously Barack Obama had a follow back bot on Twitter. I think throughout his entire presidency. So this comes up all the time because someone will find some crazy account and they'll be like, Barack Obama follows this? What's going on? And it's like, because he follows like three million people or something.

• 3:23:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Anyways, this is a continuation of the kind of product decision where they, they allow people to not show the number of likes a post has, right? They want people to post more. So if they're not showing the number of people that follow.

• 3:23:50John Coogan?

  That's why sometimes I just see a heart that's blank because they don't want to show me who, how many people like it?

• 3:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's the user gets to decide. I don't, I don't, I don't want to be, I don't want to be measured by how many people tapped, right? So the idea was to encourage people to post more because they're not feeling this pressure to put up crazy numbers.

• 3:24:07John Coogan?

  Oh, I always get a hundred. If I get 80, I won't feel good that day. So I will just turn that feature off entirely.

• 3:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Yes, correct. So I think they want people to follow more people. And yeah, we'll see. I don't, I don't think this is rolled out to everyone yet.

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  Yes. And, and, and the net effect that you believe will happen is that there will be more following activity on Instagram. So lots of accounts will be followed. Yes.

• 3:24:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I, I will say when I go on Instagram, I instead of seeing on this.

• 3:24:34John Coogan?

  This is a very limited test.

• 3:24:37Speaker 03

  And yes, but so I see friends.

• 3:24:39John Coogan?

  You do.

• 3:24:39Speaker 03

  I don't see the post number. I, I see the friends, the followers and following.

• 3:24:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:24:43Speaker 03

  Where in this screenshot, I think it was, I don't see it anymore, but it was posts.

• 3:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so maybe you're in another test.

• 3:24:49Speaker 03

  I'm in a different test. Yeah.

• 3:24:50John Coogan?

  Adam Mosseri is treating us all like guinea pigs over here, lab rats in his maze. It's great. Uh, anyway, is there anything else you want to talk about?

• 3:24:58Jordi Hays?

  We got to end on this. This is extremely important. This kid was sent to the principal's office for lying that his uncle was Superman. The next day, his uncle, Henry Cavill, dropped him off at school and Andrew Feldman said, dip S H I T school.

• 3:25:15John Coogan?

  Andrew Feldman, the CEO of Cerebrus, a $22 billion company, does not like that the school sent the kid to the principal's office, but justice was done. Henry Cavill showed up and stole the day. Uh, and it's the wholesome side of X. If your algorithm's all sloppy, maybe you need to adopt Andrew Feldman's algorithm because he's got some great posts and he's not afraid to reply to them.

• 3:25:38Jordi Hays?

  And last, but certainly not least, John Palmer says, the TVPN guys are just two Fortnite archetypes. John is maxed out stats, six foot eight, 230 pounds, zero V bucks, still on default skin after a year. No emotes, pure fundamentals. Jordy's mid cracked, only six foot one and absolutely loaded with V bucks. Rotates legendary skins, spams rare emotes on the soundboard every five minutes. That I do.

• 3:26:05John Coogan?

  This is extremely accurate.

• 3:26:06Jordi Hays?

  I certainly.

• 3:26:07John Coogan?

  I feel seen. I feel seen.

• 3:26:09Jordi Hays?

  John knows us well.

• 3:26:11John Coogan?

  Knows us well. I'm going to hit the repost on that one. That's a good one.

• 3:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, folks, thank you for tuning in today.

• 3:26:17John Coogan?

  Fun day.

• 3:26:18Jordi Hays?

  It's only Tuesday. We've got three more shows for you.

• 3:26:20John Coogan?

  Lots more in-person people, in-person guests this weekend or this week. Uh, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe at the TVPN newsletter at tbpn.com. Uh, we will.

• 3:26:32Jordi Hays?

  And have a wonderful afternoon, evening, wherever you are.

• 3:26:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:26:37Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:26:37John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:26:42Speaker 03

  Nice work brothers, I'll see you on the next one.

• 3:26:53John Coogan?

  You were about to slam on the gas like, you were like, I'm taking this for a spin.

• 3:26:59Jordi Hays?

  That'd be so funny.

• 3:27:01John Coogan?

  You were so close to doing it.