$1B GLP-1 Lessons, New AI Careers, China's 2030 Master Plan | Sam Broner, Jonathan Slotkin, Liz Hoffman, Bret Taylor, Ariyan Kabir, Atif Siddiqi

(02:28) - $1B GLP-1 Lessons (26:57) - China's Pork Problem (30:39) - America's Best New Weapon (38:59) - Inside OpenAI & Anthropic's Finances (44:48) - The New AI Careers (52:53) - China in the AI Talent Race (56:33) - China's 2030 Master Plan (01:06:13) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:15:41) - Sam Broner, co-founder of The Better Money Company, discusses raising $10 million to build a stablecoin clearinghouse aimed at facilitating seamless payments between different stablecoins. He explains that, similar to traditional clearinghouses connecting financial institutions, their platform will enable payments companies to handle stablecoin transactions more efficiently. Broner also highlights the impact of the GENIUS Act, which has spurred increased interest from large companies in adopting stablecoins for payments, leading to a surge in requests for stablecoin projects. (01:32:57) - Jonathan Slotkin, MD, is a practicing neurosurgeon and co-founder of Scrub Capital, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage healthcare investments. In the conversation, he critiques the portrayal of a health tech company in a recent article, emphasizing the need for deeper scrutiny of medical claims and regulatory compliance. He highlights the importance of distinguishing between genuine innovation and unsubstantiated marketing, particularly in the context of telemedicine and peptide therapies. (01:47:20) - Liz Hoffman, a seasoned journalist and business and finance editor at Semafor, discusses the launch of her new weekly interview show, "Compound Interest," which delves into the inner workings of significant economic sectors through conversations with industry leaders. She highlights recent episodes featuring David Ulevitch from Andreessen Horowitz on defense technology and the CEO of Oura discussing advancements in wearable health devices. Additionally, Hoffman shares insights on the U. S. labor market, emphasizing demographic shifts and the evolving impact of AI on employment trends. (02:00:44) - Bret Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur, known for co-creating Google Maps, serving as CTO of Facebook, and co-founding the AI startup Sierra. In the conversation, Taylor discusses Sierra's rapid growth to $100 million in annual recurring revenue within seven quarters, highlighting successful deployments with companies like Nordstrom, which implemented Sierra's AI solutions in just four weeks. He emphasizes the company's focus on accelerating customer success through AI-driven solutions, including the development of Ghostwriter, a product that reimagines the platform around AI to enhance user experience. (02:20:34) - Ariyan Kabir, co-founder and CEO of GrayMatter Robotics, discusses the critical need to enhance the U. S. industrial base, particularly in shipbuilding, to address significant labor shortages and maintain national security. He announces a partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries to integrate factory superintelligence into shipbuilding, aiming to automate labor-intensive processes like sanding, grinding, and painting through AI-powered robotic systems. Kabir emphasizes that this collaboration seeks to bridge the gap between increasing demand and limited production capacity by deploying autonomous robots capable of handling diverse manufacturing tasks, thereby improving efficiency and reducing reliance on manual labor. (02:27:14) - Atif Siddiqi, founder and CEO of Branch, leads a company that provides faster, more flexible payment solutions for hourly and gig workers, partnering with firms like Uber and Instacart. He discusses Branch's growth to over 230 employees, raising over $100 million in equity, and their focus on embedded finance offerings, including a recent integration with Stripe's Connect platform to offer digital wallets and debit cards. Siddiqi highlights the importance of improving workers' cash flow to enhance retention, noting that companies using Branch have seen a 60% increase in worker retention, and announces Branch's new end-to-end tax filing capabilities for 1099 workers. (02:35:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN all around the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Happy Easter to everyone. Celebrated yesterday. How was your weekend, Jordy?

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Good. A lot of egg hunting.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Oh, you did? Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see it, Tyler?

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Review. I did not see it. How was it?

• 0:23John Coogan?

  You haven't seen it? Ben, you saw it, right?

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  What was your review?

• 0:26Speaker 02

  It was great. I was telling you. I think it was, uh, it was fresh. It was fun.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  People put it on the...

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Will the View did not like it?

• 0:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. He didn't like it. He said it was interstellar for chuds, right? Isn't that what he said? He said something like that.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  You liked it, right?

• 0:37John Coogan?

  I thought it was great. It was very enjoyable watch. I don't know.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Should I see it?

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Yes, I think you should see it.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  In theater?

• 0:43John Coogan?

  In theater, for sure. It's definitely a good movie.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  That's a high bar.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  It's not too long. It's like two and a half hours. But it's a, it's an Andy Weir. It's, have you seen The Martian? Brutal. It's basically just like endless stream of problems and then like quick solutions. So there's some sort of problem they need to figure it out, problem they need to figure it out. All of it's, I don't know, like loosely like hard sci-fi, like somewhat believable. It does have aliens in it and stuff, but it's a fun time. Uh, anyway.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of real space, what's going on with Artemis 2?

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Artemis 2 is, uh, is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube, on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix. Um, and the stream title is just, "We are about to fly around the moon with authority from, from NASA." Uh, we can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now, uh, because I think it's happening like as we speak, like they are, they are up. Um, they also, uh, wrote a little bit of a retrospective on the...

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Can we get some sound?

• 1:47John Coogan?

  ...company. I have a spider on my...

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So one minute ago NASA posted that the crew, uh, are now the farthest any human has ever traveled. 252,000 miles from the earth.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  John is dealing with a little spider here on his microphone. Here we go.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Solved. Still living, too.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, still living. We'll take it out later.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  What do we got going on here?

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, can we get the audio on that? Oh, there's no audio? Oh, weird. I think there is audio on YouTube, but it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know. Sometimes there's like DRM stuff. Anyway, Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of MedVie. And we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have John Slotkin coming on, the chief medical officer from Geisinger to, or Geisinger, to talk about claims around oral GLP-1 drugs. We read the New York Times story on Thursday, and then over the weekend, there was a whole bunch more analysis about the company. And there were layers to the answer.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so interesting because you would think that someone else would write the one billion, the one person, one billion dollar company.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  And then the New York Times would take it down.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  But in this case, it happened in reverse.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  So, last week, the New York Times broke down the story of MedVie, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. And the framing was basically that this was the first time in history a single person had built, quote, "a billion dollar company." And that's what went viral. Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The small caveats were that, you know, the founder, Matthew Gallagher, had hired his younger brother, so technically it was a two-person startup. Most people were like, "Yeah, okay, we'll count that. It doesn't matter. It's a family member." Right? And then also, the other one question was...

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  It's only twice as many people as the original challenge.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  But they had almost twice the revenue, 1.8 billion. So, but the question was the valuation. So, the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year. And that "on track" is doing a lot of work, of course, because that's clearly an ARR number that's extrapolated out. And the GLP-1 market's moving very quickly. It's not like Ro and Hims and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition, although they might not go into this, which we'll go into. And it was insane scale, but companies don't unilaterally trade at 1X revenue. Like, that's sort of a given in this article.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, you would trade above a billion dollars. And so this counts as a billion dollar company. I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, valuation.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Not on revenue. Because you could do, you know, if you're, if you're going to say, you know, okay, any, any, any, just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really, really high. And you actually have a very, very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  And so, so there was always a question about the margins. And then also revenue durability matters. Like the, the, the ongoing question around building these, you know, one person, high growth companies is, is there durability? Because if you can do it, and then I can do it, and then Tyler can do it. And then, and then anyone with, you know, access to a coding model can build it. Very quickly, we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this, they might get to a point where they're like, yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth. I think there's something here. But at the same time, you could see someone like a private equity guy valuing this and saying, ah, well, I, I need to see.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  A lot of risk.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  I need to see durability.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  There's some lawsuits.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Exactly. And we'll get into that. So, uh, MedB uses two companies, Carevalidate and Open Loop Health, to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping and compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing. But, uh, that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course, that outsourcing, uh, takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors. You have to pay the pharmacies. You have to pay the shipping. You have to pay the compliance. And they're paying Carevalidate and Open Loop Health to flow that value through to those, you know, individual stakeholders. So it's still, it's still.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I started asking, what does this company actually do itself?

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Just marketing and maybe they're too aggressive about it. We'll get into it. So these GLP-1 drugs are so also aren't cheap. And when you sell them, even when you sell them legally, even as a telehealth wrapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  So you can, you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo that you, where you are taking a thin margin on top. You can get to big numbers, but the pharmaceutical companies are going to want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R and D, and they need to recoup that. So then the other question is you add in the CAC from digital ads. They were apparently spending a lot on Facebook to acquire customers. And you quickly get, you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate she'll shared, she'll Monat shared was like 15% or something like that.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  But it's, it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars, depending on how everything flows.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the same time, though, if they're outsourcing all of the kind of key areas of the business to these other players, open loop, et cetera. It's possible that of that, those very thin margins, right, the 15-ish percent, the margins on that are very, very extreme, right?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  So you could still get to a number that was in the hundreds of millions of dollars of, of EBITDA.

• 8:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. That is crazy. But we'll see what the FDA has to say long-term about that, whether there will be lawsuits or settlements. There was already a warning letter and this turned into a big drama about the company. The, the drama.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  And was there any mention of this in the original story?

• 8:25John Coogan?

  I don't think so. And so there were a lot of people that were, and I believe I pulled up the, the New York Times piece and there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more follow-on. I feel like the, the founder does need to, you know, respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. But even with all the drama, there were a ton of.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  You know, super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So, Ed B. received an FDA warning letter just two months ago for misbranding violations. So, warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, it can be pretty wide ranging. Like, sometimes it requires just a small change to marketing materials to remain compliant. And sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment. This happened a lot with the nicotine category with illegal vapor products.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  And sometimes, like, the warning letter would be, like, you are warned in that if you continue to sell these, like, we will put you out of business. And some of them are, okay, we're warning you about this particular claim on your website. You need to change this language. And it's pretty minimal. I went through this. Ten years ago, we started Lucy 2016, and while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors, like, anyone who you're partnering with would say, well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this? We were able to avoid all this, but one kind of concrete example is that we, like, Lucy

• 10:11John Coogan?

  cannot make quit claims about the nicotine gum product. So, even though most people think, oh, this is like Nicorette, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so, you can't run a digital ad that says, like, hey, you're a smoker, quit smoking with Lucy. That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking cessation aid is the term.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  And so, in the nicotine category, you would have companies create a product.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  Usually, there would be no founder associated with said product because people didn't want to put their face on it.

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  And they would do a lot of things. They would make sales grow incredibly quickly.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, making marketing claims, just where and how they decided to sell, et cetera, et cetera, the ad channels that they use. And so, they would go from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of revenue very, very quickly. But the enterprise value of the company would be Near zero.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Because no, nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. And so if you were going to value it, it'd be like, what is the like very, very, very near term, you know, sort of like revenue opportunity?

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the famous, the famous comparison is Juul versus puff bar. So Juul went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, put in FDA applications, got those applications denied, marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts. They set up a, I think their whole headquarters was in DC. They were working very closely with the FDA, truly engaging to sort of clean up the, you know, all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation, just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations. They were successful and they got approved as, not as a smoking cessation aid, so they still can't make the claim that Juul will

• 12:05John Coogan?

  help you quit smoking. They, they, but they did get approved as a tobacco product, you know, which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health, which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit, net good, that it's on the market, which is, you know, people can debate that back and forth. But, but back in the Juul days, they also could not say quit smoking with Juul. They wanted to put, say, they wanted, like, a lot of people that were, you know, were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul and they were pushing for that, but they couldn't actually make quit claims. So they used the word switch. They said, switch to Juul instead of quit with Juul. And that seemed fine for a long time. I think they, they, they eventually

• 12:50John Coogan?

  trademarked it and then I think they had to pull away from it at various points in time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing. Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  And what has MedVee been up to?

• 13:07John Coogan?

  We wound up playing it very safe, and that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.8 billion overnight, but I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now, MedVee appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP-1. Shiel Monat verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names like Tucker-

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  Doctor Tucker CarlzinMD.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  If you...

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Like, I feel... This is one of those things where I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  From Doctor Tucker CarlzinMD.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  But if you're getting your GLP-1s from Doctor Carl Tuckerzin, you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. It's clearly not above board, and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class-action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti-spam law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per-instance basis. So it'll be like, "Okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent." And it could be like you sent like, you know, 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law, and there might be a settlement, and they can figure out what the right damage is. If they are even guilty, they're still early in the process.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over-aggressive marketing tactics.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, so, so, pull up the actual picture of Shiel's post, because I think that you can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe a little bit older.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  You want to zoom in on one of those?

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, zoom in. You can just see. You see somebody that looks like a doctor.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they get the stuff.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  And if you're 70 years old on Facebook,

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  you're not necessarily putting it together. It's Doctor Tucker CarlzinMD.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  So my co-founder, Lucy, is... He has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  And so he's not a medical doctor, but he is a doctor of science from Caltech. Like he has a really good, uh, you know, background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him, like, we gotta put you in a stethoscope. We gotta take some photos of you in a stethoscope. Like the aura is so high. And he was like, no, that's like such bad practice. Like, we can't do that. Like, doctor is associated with medical doctor, even if you have a doctorate in something. It's like the famous like, I'm dying. Does anyone have a doctorate?

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  It's like, yeah, I have a doctor in a juris doctor or whatever.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  The other interesting thing, MedVee uses the dot O R G.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  What?

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  Domain.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Isn't that for nonprofits typically?

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  I would think so. I mean, I don't, I don't know if it's technically illegal to use it as a for-profit, but certainly when you add that to all the other.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you land on that site and then you think.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  It looks like, oh, a doctor advertised this to me. And now I'm on a nonprofit.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 16:13Jordi Hays?

  Medical website.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  Yes. So, uh, yeah, in general, I think the story is, uh, pushing over aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low headcount scaling. But, and this has happened for a long time, back in the old days, I want to say like 2014 Facebook era, uh, but the early days of online marketing, uh, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling, uh, on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for, for like mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, uh, if you could get it like, sort of like whitelisted or, or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So, once you were approved, you could say, you could spend a thousand dollars or you

• 16:58John Coogan?

  could spend 50 million dollars. And there wasn't, early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to like re, you know, uh, like re fact check. It was like, if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these, uh, Tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved, they changed the website and then, you know, all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out like, okay, we need to be scraping a layer deeper like consistently or like every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Scientist's Brain Pill and Johnny Depp all in one call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was like really scroll stopping.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  Pirates of the

• 17:56John Coogan?

  No, no, it was like a paparazzi photo, which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all. And then something about brain boosting or like making like limitless pill, make you a genius, that type of marketing would like, it's very general, like who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that. And then like Harvard Scientist would like lend its like credibility because oh, if it's from Harvard, like it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of like sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like a hundred million dollars of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these, a lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation.

• 18:37John Coogan?

  I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors, even just to sell like skincare supplements, sunscreens, really anything, the, the rate to, to advertise with an influencer who's a, who actually has some sort of medical credential is like way higher.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it's way more effective.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  And that, yeah, it's way more effective, but if you can just like fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that, but you shouldn't be.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  We have, we have two employees, but 800 fake doctors on Facebook.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Not great.

• 19:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we'll, we'll see how this works out. I, I think the press tour is probably like ended for, for the near term.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we're always welcome.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Founder's still welcome to come on.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  I, I think people have a lot of questions for the founder, Matthew Gallagher. We'd love to have him on the show and dig into all this because maybe there are some good, good context that is missing from all of the, all of the criticism that's been levied over the weekend, but we'll see. So I was reflecting on like, like We're still in pursuit broadly of this one person, one billion dollar company. It's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not?

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in my, in my head, it was always new startup is created.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Into like solo founder creates a hit product.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Raises a hundred on a billion. And that is the most, that is like the cleanest path.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Because for so many other paths, you just run into, yeah, maybe I want to be the one, one person, one billion dollar company, but I want to win more.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  So if adding incremental people helps me build a better company.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's random people to this point, right?

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why would I not add, add at least a handful of people?

• 20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Um, so yeah, I mean, I think, I think software is an interesting category, especially if it's open source software somehow, where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some, you know, sort of open platform or some sort of, you know, uh, some, uh, some sort of, uh, thing where, uh, the, the actual reporting and the analytics. I mean, apparently the, the New York Times did verify the run rate that they, that they used, so their, their money was flowing through the business. Um, but having, having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think would, would help. Uh, I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Um, and, and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So, um, couple of years ago, uh, in the, in the olden days when I had free time, uh, I got woefully addicted to a poker themed rogue-like deck building game called Bellatro, which I don't think anyone here has played. But this game is amazing, so much fun. Uh, so it's, you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes. There's no money, there's no microtransactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Banned for being anti gambling.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  No, no, banned for for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards. There's no real money. You pay like ten, fifteen dollars for the game and then you can just play unlimited. But it's done extremely well. So it sold over five million units. I saw some reporting that it might be seven million and maybe even more now because they've gone multi-platform. And I think at fifteen, twenty dollars a download, that might be close to a hundred million dollars in revenue. And it was made by a solo developer who goes by local thunk. Over a two and a half year period, he originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume. But it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology,

• 22:23John Coogan?

  you could probably underwrite Bellatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated a hundred million dollars of basically free cash flow. You know, there's obviously two and a half years of R and D, but that was just this developer's time. The future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merch, like you you get to a number that's close and you have to imagine that that his two and a half year development like life cycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre-AI period. So it came out.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Does it still have momentum?

• 22:58John Coogan?

  I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of you get to the end of the game after, I don't know, ten, twenty, fifty hours or something. And then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of like like try and break the game because you can get really, really crazy with like combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm moving on. And he never added microtransactions. He never added like any sort of live service model, subscription, anything like that. It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see. And so, yeah, this came out as a demo in twenty twenty-three and officially launched in January twenty twenty-four. So fully like pre-AI development.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  And there's lots of, there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI, specifically around the the art generation, like pixel art generation, all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly like replatforming, it took him, I want to say like a full year, and I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game because it was originally a PC game. And then I went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox and it's a perfect game to be everywhere. But that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software. And that's something where AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day one.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  And so the interesting thing is that Bellator broke through because it paired like this familiar design language with this wildly engagement engaging progression system. And so bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that like I'm really looking forward to. And we heard Sholto from Anthropic talking about like building his own RTS game. And obviously he has a full-time job, so this would be certainly something that would be like extra. We're we've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games. Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Game like.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  But but you have to imagine that that in the future, there'll be more and more game developers.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, some of the stuff that I've seen internally at TPN, it's like gonna blow.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Already vague posting.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Vague.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss yet?

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they all have abysses. And I feel like I feel like Abyss 101 is like, don't do not stare into it.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Like maybe.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  It's like first stand onboarding.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Where's the abyss?

• 25:21John Coogan?

  I think a glance is okay. And or maybe like like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine. But I would not stare into it. I think that's something.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's go over to the App Store.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  The App Store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's pour one out. Pour one out for the App Store review team.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:40Jordi Hays?

  In the most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here. Feel like everybody, everybody that I know outside of tech has has an app now. They're unconstrained.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  They have an app, but. At the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment, or the Bellatro moment, this like solo thing, even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral, like what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the, you know, the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts? Because right now, it just feels like the, the long tail of the app store is getting potentially fatter, because there's more single use apps, there's

• 26:44John Coogan?

  more small apps, but will we see one of those break out and become, you know, fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next, the next, you know, critical moment that I'm, I'm, you know, eagerly awaiting, but we'll see.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in China, John?

• 27:01John Coogan?

  The pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscrapers filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this. So, this is from The Economist, and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of the good life. The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve, and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry. It's like they gotta cover it like it's a horse race. Like, what's going on?

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  It's the pork race.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  No, it's serious. TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real, that's the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. The trough is active over there, literally. In 2018 to 2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof. Before long, the industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that it's doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now, all the news is- About overcapacity. She who sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions with the child. These days, she says, it's so cheap, people can have it whenever they fancy.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15-year low in March. Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have been aggressively expand, have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies save their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized, modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever. Modern farms are marvel of industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings. One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  Do we know why, why consumption is declining?

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Just oversupply. So they got hit with this, they got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying. And so they, instead of having them cross-pollinate in like open fields, they pushed them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall and.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  But I would assume over, over, over consumption, over production, you have oversupply, prices come down, but they're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Well, yes, so people are moving to chicken and seafood. Increasingly, middle-class, the middle-class Chinese see pork as less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply, a supply side story. That may be more pork than even China can eat. The average Chinese person guzzled 28 kilograms of it in 2024, but that was 2 kilograms less than in 2023. To boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to cull droves and told the pork reserve to buy more meat to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  That is wild.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead. Last year, it said it would bring the first high-rise, it would build the first high-rise in Vietnam, capable of rearing 1.6 million swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside, which is what, which is, you know. Winding up with like increased yields because the pigs aren't getting sick. Anyway, America's best new weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. You had asked about this on one interview we did with someone.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I forget who it was with, but I was, I was, you know, I was surprised to see the US copying the Shahed because it feels like.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  You were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it?

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  No, it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle tested, they're cheap. We have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reason that it makes sense, but I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree. To copy, you know, something that, you know, the enemy made.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful, low-cost attack drone the US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups and isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLM-136, or Lucas, as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets while better funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement. It is a victory for the US military, which went from blueprint to battle-ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  The creation of Lucas is an early proof point.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  That's a narrative violation.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  A new strategy of making cheap drones quickly and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I want to know so much more about like, so they're not subcontracting this at all? This is all, like, is the entire supply chain? The US military itself, are they milling the parts and factories that they've built?

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  During the Biden administration, a small group in the Defense Department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian Shahed, a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate. Russia, which is lobbing about 4,000 modified Shehads at Ukraine every month, according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a Shehad the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the US had reverse engineered another country's military technology for its own use, former defense officials said. The last time it was a Soviet-made pontoon bridge.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for low-cost unmanned combat attack system, as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top-end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of Lucas ranges from $10,000 to $55,000. That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman in line with the Iranian model. Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles, several hundred of which have been used in the war with Iran, cost at least $2 million apiece.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Hmm. The Defense Department is committed to scaling cost-effective autonomous solutions for the joint force, and Lucas continues to be a prime example, the spokesman said. Former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of the team that developed Lucas, said that other militaries had the ability to make their own low-cost long-range precision strike weapons. The issue was the US was spending nothing, $0, on that kind of system. He's now on the Council of Foreign Relations. Lucas was given a spot in 2024 in a Biden-era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons by last August. Its inclusion was controversial, said former military officials. Lucas wasn't just a mock-up, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross-section of second and third-tier manufacturers, who crank out the drones on demand during wartime. Little-known Scottsdale, Arizona-based Spectre Works and Huntsville, Alabama-based Integration Innovation were tapped to build the drones. So they are partnering with... With private companies to actually do build an assembly of these drones. A total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month, a former senior defense official familiar with the plan said. Spectre Works in integration innovation didn't respond to requests for comment.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  The Marine Corps was first to use the drones and then ordered around 6,000 destined for the Indo-Pacific, but then the war with Iran began. The drones were handed over to U.S. CENTCOM in February and made their first appearance in combat. The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the U.S. arsenal. In particular, an August decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind long-held requirements, processes for acquiring technology made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible, current and former defense officials say. Still, other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy, and it will take time to reorient America's to a new way of fighting wars, even as China

• 36:00John Coogan?

  is developing advanced ways to strike the U.S. While Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee. It will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, an electronic warfare expert said. In the Middle East, there is no meaningful jamming of GPS, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course. Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said. There's still a worrisome, there's also still a worrisome lack of cheap U.S. counter-drone technology, which has allowed Iranian-backed militias to continue using small drones to menace U.S. military bases in the Middle East. The small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  The absence of a broader supply of modern U.S., cheap U.S. systems in the Iran war has served as a wake-up call. We're not ready, said Julie Bush, co-founder of the defense tech firm Valenor Enterprises and a former Palantir Technologies executive, who's been on the show. The government doesn't have what it needs to scale that they.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  What it needs at the scale that they need.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you see that AGM post Antonio Garcia Martinez said about how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders?

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the estimate is around 10, 10 ships a day are going through, down from 100 pre-war.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  But there could be more that just aren't, that again, have their transponder turns off.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was saying something about like, people will turn off their transponders even when they find like, good fishing spots, because they don't want other people to find their good fishing spots. And so it's done more than, more than people think, I guess. But Sitrini is over there. Sitrini Research Analyst made it over to the Strait of Hormuz in an absolutely insane move and some real crazy investigative journalism going on. I'm hoping to have Sitrini on. I obviously want to be secure about whatever is shared, because it does seem like a risky proposition to be over there right now. But love seeing them, love seeing the reporting so far. Another tech news, Anthropic is making its own splash

• 38:18John Coogan?

  with an acquisition. This was on Thursday, April 2nd. $400 million for Coefficient Bio started last fall, developing an AI drug R and D platform. The startup's team will be joining Anthropic's Healthcare Life Sciences Group, which is aimed at developing tools for biotech workflows, ranging from drug discovery to clinical tests. Very exciting. Dimension Capital owned over 50%. Who is Dimension Capital? Have we had them on the show?

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so. We probably should.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  That feels like a multi-stage, research-oriented investment firm partnering with companies across the frontiers of science and compute. Well, huge win for them. Congrats.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not bad. Not bad at all for six months.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  There's also an article in the Wall Street Journal about OpenAI, Anthropic's finances reveal, challenge from Berber Gin, Scoop God. Open and Anthropic are racing toward potentially record-breaking IPOs by the end of the year. An inside look at the financials of both companies prior to funding rounds completed earlier this year show their Achilles heel, the soaring costs needed to train new AI models. OpenAI expects to spend $121 billion on computing power for AI research in 2028. That means the company anticipates burning $85 billion that year, even after almost doubling

• 39:39John Coogan?

  sales from the years prior. Such losses would dwarf that of virtually any other public company in history. Anthropic doesn't expect to spend nearly as much, but its rosiest forecasts tell a similar story of mounting computing costs. Both companies are releasing new versions of their AI models at a faster cadence than ever before, while pouring more resources into the training runs that create them. The arms race is showing no signs of slowing.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so pull up this chart from Andrew Curran. This is from the Wall Street Journal piece. "Projected OpenAI and Anthropic Model Training Spend For The Remainder Of This Decade In Billions." The Wall Street Journal says they got the data from financial documents shared with investors. So, yeah, I think, I mean, obviously, absolutely wild numbers here. I think this is for training specifically, which is a cost that can be adjusted.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is a question of like, yeah, like, each model by itself is profitable, but you keep having to spend more on the bigger model? Tyler, anything about that?

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is like emblematic of like the dwarf-cash critique of Dario, right? Where he's like, if you basically compare Open and Anthropic, like, Dario's being way more conservative about spending. Like, he's like, "Oh, well, we don't want to, you know, go broke, whatever." But, yeah, I mean, when you see the chart like this, it's like, pretty crazy.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  What was it, the YOLO philosophy? It does seem like there's a debate internal at OpenAI, according to the information around IPO timing. This is from the information from Anissa Gargizi and Amir Afati. OpenAI

• 41:20John Coogan?

  CEO and CFO diverge on IPO timing. Sam Altman has committed OpenAI to spend $600 billion in the next five years and privately said he wants to go public as soon as the fourth quarter despite expectations his company will burn more than 200 billion before it starts generating cash. Behind the scenes, according to the information, Sarah Fryer, his chief financial officer, has voiced concerns that reflect the tensions and risk inherent in the CEO's extraordinarily ambitious plans. OpenAI is committing billions of dollars a year in advance to help finance data centers. Fryer last year began reporting to the head of applications instead of Altman. Altman has excluded her from some conversations related to financial plans. And so you can go to the information to read more about that story.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  But it is, it is extremely high stakes. There's, in general, the AI companies have like, are they railroads? Are they SaaS companies? There's this incredible amount of CapEx. Are they both?

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  They electricity.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  How you, yeah, no one really has consensus here yet. And it feels like there's a, there's an ongoing divergence in how do you, how do you model these financially? How much risk should you, should you take? There's also this question of like the end of the curve, the end of this, of this, of the exponential. We're seeing this exponential growth in model capability relative to investment dollars. The scaling laws have held for a long time. But at the same time, you can't just throw endless money because at a certain point, you don't want to spend a trillion dollars to get like one more IQ point out of the model. There is a limit to this and so.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. If you're thinking about like hiring, if you're thinking about like hiring an employee. It's like, okay, so this, this one individual is, you know, their, their, their base salary is going to be 200K a year. Or you could, you could, you could hire this other person. And they're, they're one IQ point smarter, but you have to, you have, it's going to cost you five million.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Five trillion dollars.

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Five million dollars a year. The, the choice is, is obvious. So we'll see, we'll see when we get to that, see when we get to that point. Overall, I think like tensions between, this is not the first time there's been tension between a CFO and like an ambitious CEO and so.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Have you ever hired a CFO at any of your companies?

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Wow, coded.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Uh, we hired a CFO at our, at my first company and it was, it was an awesome experience, actually. But the tension was insane. But, but I was not, I was not the CEO. And so the CFO came in and she had taken multiple companies public and was like, this is just a widgets business. This is so simple, like we should just be like running this sufficiently. And of course there was like a big debate about that. But, uh, she's, uh, she is very, very formative in my, uh, early business career.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's interesting because that was, that was, you know, consumer packaged goods company, but with a lot of Silicon Valley venture capital.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  Jammed into it.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  So the pressure from the board was one thing.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  And then you have the CFO who's saying.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we're selling.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, and so much organic growth, but the, the, the, the nature of, uh, like Soylent and Consumer Packaged Goods, like it, it's not a fundamentally different business at the end of the day. Like it does just become a marketing manufacturing margin game. And you eventually trade on EBITDA. And so, um, the, uh, the, what do they call it? The, the reality distortion field doesn't quite apply. But when you're dealing with an entirely new technology, uh, it's a whole different discussion.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, there's another article in the Wall Street Journal about the new jobs that are being created by AI. Uh, let's go through this. So AI is raising big fears about, uh, employment losses, but it's also giving rise to new engineering and training jobs. And, uh, we're going to have, uh, Liz Hoffman from Semaphore on the show later to talk about the March jobs data. There was a massive jobs beat and a whole bunch of more jobs added to the economy, but the chart is crazy. It's like up and down every quarter, there's a.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tough thing that, you know, every single jobs report has been revised downwards so massively. It's hard to look at a new jobs report and, and actually get excited when you have a print like that.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, this time it's different.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  This time it's different.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  The last 12 have been revised downward.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  And then now you have a war and major geopolitical tensions and this weird dynamic where, uh, The oil prices are driving gas prices, which is driving inflation, which is maybe going to cause less driving-based vacations over the summer, less tourism. Like, you could see inflation plus some economic weakness, regardless of what the technology industry is doing. And so you could wind up in a situation where rates have to stay high, and so that creates unemployment, and it's a it's a rough time to be a Fed governor, I'm sure. But let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal is talking about, the where different jobs are playing a part here. So artificial intelligence has sparked fears it will become a job killer.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  There's also a research paper, I don't know, PDF from OpenAI today around the the social contract and how the government should be thinking about redistribution and the safety net in the age of AGI. It's a long document, and honestly, I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but we will go through some of it later this week.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  I saw one response. Someone just said, just put the just put the tokens in the bag, bro. But we'll we'll read it and we'll we'll cover it.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll figure it out. And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it maps on to like previous political platforms. Like, who picks it up? Because like, there's obviously a collection of political ideas, and and and various politicians might say, hey, I've been saying that for a long time. I like that. Or, hey, like, I don't, I completely disagree with that. I have a different philosophy. But we'll we'll work through it. So it's also AI is also fueling a crop of new careers. AI created 640,000 jobs between 2023 and 2025 in the US, according to an analysis by LinkedIn of job posting data, including new white-collar positions such as head of AI and AI engineer. That tally doesn't include the huge number

• 47:38John Coogan?

  of temporary construction jobs tied to building the mammoth data centers AI relies on. And I'm wondering how temporary will they be if the ramp, I mean, if the if the capex ramp continues and you know, you're going to build 10 times as many data centers, you would imagine there's

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, like, like, many construction jobs are temporary, right? You build, you build a house. Job is over. You move and build the next one.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. So LinkedIn's head of economics, Corey Cantenga, says, we're not talking enough about, we're not talking about enough jobs to change the direction of the labor market, but for AI roles, growth has been pretty much straight up. And Citadel had some

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and for and for roles like AI engineer, to me, that was just you were going to hire an engineer and you're slapping AI on the front of it because you want somebody that's excited about. Yeah, just somebody that's that's excited about AI.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, and maybe more greenfield projects, maybe something that's, you know, the it's it's like the new full stack, like, no longer are you hiring like a back end engineer, front end engineer necessarily, like, you you you might be hiring someone who's more flexible. What do you like?

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  I love how the the first example, this guy Zach, who they're who they're profiling in this, the first the first picture of him is just him with a surfboard running into the ocean.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  Hey, surfing after work. He's he's got a good work-life balance. Let's read it.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  That looks like the middle of the day to me. Look at the, you know, just look at, look at where the light is, John. That's not after work. Unless he's wrapping up work.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  Not another word about surfing. I don't want you getting canceled again for being anti-surfing.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  What were you? You were anti-surfing before work, after work?

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  Surfing in really cold water before work?

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Oh, it's bad.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Has not worked well for me.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Okay, for you.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, there's people out there that death threats.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you get death threats? No, you just got dunked on. It's fine. It happens. Zach Kinsler, who's 25 years old, got his master's degree in business analytics less than two years ago. He, in February, he assumed the title of head of human AI solutions at Bootlebox, an AI education startup based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His his job involves client training and using AI to speed up tasks for coworkers. That is a good gig. Kinsler works remotely from San Diego, wanted to work with AI and says he feels lucky to land in a growing field. The conversation about whether artificial intelligence is good or bad needs to go away because it's not going to go away, he said. One of the

• 50:10John Coogan?

  biggest questions facing a shaky US labor market has been that has been especially hard on white collar workers is whether AI's ability to mimic human skills like research, writing and coding will cause significant layoffs. Big cuts at Oracle this week, while the company invests heavily in AI data centers, underscored some of these worries. Corporate leaders, including some in the tech world, have issued grim forecasts about AI's potential to replace white collar workers at a massive scale. According to a recent Goldman Sachs research report, AI could automate tasks that account for a quarter of all working hours in the United States, especially in fields such as administrative support, legal work and architecture and engineering. One interesting pitch I was hearing, I think

• 50:53John Coogan?

  it was from the OpenAI doc, was like, you know, I think it was during the Industrial Revolution, the unions lobbied for the weekend, the idea of the weekend, and that just became a thing and stuck around forever, basically. And so there's a question about like, you know, do we pitch a four day work week somehow nationally, some like, you know, bigger thing? I don't know. There's all these interesting like competitive dynamics and obviously people wind up working on the weekends because they're like, I want to out compete.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  David Center is like, I want all my enemies to move to a four day work week immediately so they can properly relax and recover.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  I'd mandate that, actually. Mandate that for everyone, except me. Still, analysts say it's hard to judge how many job cuts thus far are genuinely attributable to AI and which are being made for financial or operational reasons. This is something we've been going back and forth on forever. A new survey of 750 chief financial officers found that AI had essentially no negative employment effect in 2025.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  But data show employers are increasingly hiring for AI talent. In 2023, AI-related roles made up only 1.6% of all job postings, according to an AI job tracker co-led by Anil Gupta, professor at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business and job market company, data company, LinkUp. Never heard of that before. Two years later, that figure had more than doubled to 3.4% of all AI, of all job postings being AI-related. One rising job is head of AI. That's a good gig. In the three years from 2023 to 2025, companies sought to fill 225,000 such jobs. There are now 225,000 heads of AI.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  You need 20 years of experience prior for most of these jobs, which is

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  tough. Tough to put that together. No, I'm joking. We should, we should talk about China's, what, what's happening in the Chinese AI talent race over in The Economist.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Yes. Dave Freeburg was talking about this on stage at Hill and Valley about how there's been this like big flipping, flipping from where research is coming from. The, the headline stat is something like 50% of, where is it? 50%? Okay. This was from Jensen Wong at Nvidia. He said, is it possible that the United States falls behind China? He asked himself a question during a question and answer session about artificial intelligence late last year. He says the, the answer is absolutely yes. That may seem surprising. For much of the last decade, America has been comfortably ahead in the AI race, home to the most advanced companies producing frontier models. Its engineers have access

• 53:39John Coogan?

  to deep pools of capital as well as a regular supply of Nvidia's cutting-edge chips. But Mr. Wong's concern

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Related to an equally important ingredient of innovation, human talent. Until recently, most leading AI research was produced by experts based in the West. That is changing. In 2025, for the first time, more studies presented at the world's top AI conference had lead authors based in China. Tyler, you have more?

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's just misleading, right?

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Okay, explain.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  A lot of the best researchers in the US are studying, but they're not putting that work into studies.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  You can see, if you scroll down on that article a little bit more, you can see a chart where the US, like, between 2015, 2020, it like, looks like it's starting to go exponential. And then it basically plateaus, right? Because all the best researchers basically go to the labs, then you don't publish anymore.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Wait, so which chart are you referring to? The one in?

• 54:35Speaker 02

  I'm looking in The Economist.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Is it called Active AI Researchers in the Thousands?

• 54:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  Student, early career. And so, in the United States, it's growing, and then up until 2021, and then it stagnates because all the labs went closed.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, and all the Chinese labs are still open source.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  Are still open source, yeah. So, yeah, I think that's a, I don't know, that's a very reasonable mitigating point here. There is just the question of, like, do you still need a pipeline of open source researchers, of a robust research practice? Also, like, if you're in the Ilya Sutskever camp of, like, the age of research, maybe you do need a bunch of bizarre ideas that are happening, and you get, like, more traction.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, Ilya is, like, definitely not publishing, right?

• 55:22John Coogan?

  Oh, true.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  He's, like, even more secretive.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but I think you could, like, expand from that into, like, the, like, there might be interesting, like, knock-on research that gets pulled from random places. And, like, the cross-pollination is valuable, and even if he's not a practitioner of that, you can still make the argument that research is valuable, and cross-pollination is also valuable, and China does have that advantage.

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just think, like, if you look at China, like, there's the anecdotal evidence of, like, what happened to the Qian researchers, right? Like, you know, the people running that company are just, like, not.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Do we ever find out, did they go to XAI or Meta?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  I don't think we know yet.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  We don't know yet.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  But, like, clearly, like... Something is like different about how they're thinking about researchers than in the US, right? Because those guys are like extremely good.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  And somehow there is some reorg happening.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  The chat is demanding an ad break. We'll, we'll figure it out. A lot of people are saying that, you know, the ads were, were part of the program. We will figure out a way to do something ad related. Until now, you have to put up with some random soundboard. And that's the best I can do for you. But there is a different article in The Economist. People who are just watching for the ads, I guess. China's new master plan for its tech economy in 2030 and beyond. And so they have, this is the 15th five-year plan for China's economic development. This was adopted in March and The Economist is breaking it down. It talks of industrial upgrading, new quality productive forces and the like, yet in plain

• 56:58John Coogan?

  language it translates into Elon Musk's fever dream. So China wants to build skies dotted with flying taxis, fusion power fueling factories manned by humanoid robots, unstoppable quantum computers, 6G mobile devices plugged directly into people's brains. It's a dream come true for you, Jordy. Are you gonna, you're gonna renounce your citizenship?

• 57:20Speaker 02

  What? Yeah.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  You're like, yeah, no comment.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, sign me up. Sign me up. No, but there's, I mean, obviously they're taking, they're taking like frontier sci-fi development very, very seriously and it has a lot of knock-on effects. So past plans also displayed gumption. In 2015, the most high-profile plan in years dubbed China made in 20, made in China 2025, set the goal of catching up with America and ending reliance on foreign technology. But catching up while China, which China has pulled off in areas like electric cars, clean energy, and even artificial intelligence is one thing. Dominating technologies of the future is another. Can they do it? One reason for this breathtaking ambition is the desire of Xi Jinping, China's leader, to rush, to usher in a modernized socialist state by 2035. Remember, he-

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Thinks he's going to live to, I think, one hundred and fifty. He was caught on maybe some hot mic saying so he's thinking in centuries still.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  A modernized Chinese socialist is generating.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's possible he knew he was mic'd up and he wanted to kind of downplay how he's thinking, right? He thought, he thought he, in his, in his head, he's like, oh, easily a thousand.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  Easily a thousand.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  If I don't hit one K.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he's like, I don't want to sound crazy.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  But I don't want to sound too crazy. Got to give him something believable.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Ballparking, ballparking. So currently, a modernized Chinese socialist is one generating between twenty thousand and thirty thousand USD in economic value per year. That's up from less than fourteen thousand dollars today. So in twenty thirty-five, they want to be more than double what they are today of fourteen thousand. Sorry, had that backwards. To meet that goal, it itself a step towards China becoming a modernized socialist world power by twenty forty-nine. The centennial of communist rule, GDP per person must grow four to eight percent a year in the next decade. With Chinese consumers in a dour mood and exporters facing geopolitical uncertainty,

• 59:23John Coogan?

  the party believes only world-beating technology and resulting productivity gains can ensure success. So that requires picking up the pace, says the economist. Whereas earlier plans set distinct objectives for strategic industries and for scientific innovation. Industrial policy is now being extended to out-there tech, notes Camille of Rhodium, a research firm. The latest plan ordains the commercialization of fledgling fields like AI robots, hydrogen power, and brain-computer interfaces, all in the next five years. Within another five, the party wants breakthroughs in applications.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  I hate to interrupt you, John, but the chat is saying, Ryan and Jeff are saying, put a scroller of the guest's schedule.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Put the guest's schedule on the scroller, which I think is good.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  And then Nick says, where should we go to save both time and money?

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  You guys already have the answer.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Rent.com, baby.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. You know I'm not gonna forget the ad reads. I still have them on the tip of my tongue.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  John rattled off a lot to me over the weekend.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Jordi Hays?

  It was just, it was just, just for the two of us.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Subliminal ad reads. This will happen. The point of the plan is to signal to officials and investors which initiatives to back this unlocks funds from central and local governments. Private capital follows on the assumption state involvement reduces risk. Research clusters attract not just technologists and money, but also marketers, lawyers and other professionals needed to take tech from the lab into markets. Host cities enlist armies of bureaucrats whom, who develop domain expertise. Proponents of Chinese techno planning point to AI as proof that it works for cutting edge innovation. When in 2017, China declared its intention to enter the global high end value chain for AI by 2025.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Foreigners scoffed. Have they, have they succeeded in entering the global high end value chain for AI by 2025?

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Global, I mean, the uh.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  When I think global high end value chain, I think.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Semiconductors?

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Not quite.

• 1:01:38Jordi Hays?

  I think like the actual end product.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  I mean, the video model is really good. See dance.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  But that's, maybe not the, maybe that doesn't count as the high end value chain? I don't know. Anyway, let's uh, let's see what the economists say. In January last year, Western markets shuddered when DeepSeek, an AI lab, released a model that rivaled top American ones. No one is scoffing at the new goal of turning China into, quote, "the world's primary AI innovation center." I'm scoffing. Are you scoffing?

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Scoffed up.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Scoffed up. What do you think?

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm scoffing.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  You're scoffing, right?

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  The whole reason that China, Chinese AI is good is because they're just distilling on American models. Like, we know this. This is like, true now. Like, we know this for sure.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  And, and the reason that the video models are good is because they don't, they don't follow IP?

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  This is not cope.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't think this is cope. I, I, I think the economist is coping.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Oh, well, they are. They are doing a lot of other things, though. So, early results in several other areas look encouraging, too. The low-altitude economy, ooh, new buzzword, new coinage. We got the orbital economy up in space. We got the low-altitude economy of delivery drones and flying cabs, born of private-sector ingenuity, took off after capturing the attention of officialdom around 2021. State imprimatur for brain-computer interfaces, first named a future industry in 2024 and a subject of its own plan in late 2025, has led universities to set up research projects and startups to launch products. Cities, host, specialist, industrial zones, and hospitals have published pricing guidelines for brain implants.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  That's, they're moving quick. I would, I would expect that the low-altitude economy does very, very well. I mean, DJI is super legit. Of course, they're going to have to compete with all of the different, I mean, not really compete, because I doubt that they're...

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, does DJI have any delivery-focused products?

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Um, I don't know, but, I mean, ZipLine just raised more money. They're doing very well. Google has a project, and there's, there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing drone delivery.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  DJI has DJI FlyCart 100.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Okay, I wonder what the scale is.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Specifically for, it's an 85-kilogram-max payload capacity.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  12-kilometer-max flight.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  But again, that's something that doesn't, I mean, it requires like innovation, but really, it's like a lot of manufacturing and regulatory. Like, it's not necessarily frontier research.

• 1:04:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I looked at, yeah, looking at the top of their, looking at the top of their plan, it's like they wanted to do electric cars, clean energy, and AI. They have absolutely crushed it, for the most part, so.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  For sure. Skepticism is warranted, however. Thank you, economist. We will be skeptics here. Earlier plans, including "Made in China 2025," missed many goals. It doesn't feel like it. It feels like they crushed that one. They made everything. China beats the world in renewables tech, renewables tech and electric cars, and matches it in AI, debatable, but lags behind in critical areas like advanced chips. Capital ends up wasted if it flows to places in which local official... Local officials duplicate efforts elsewhere, chase industries despite a lack of tech talent, or and or are loathe to abandon failures. China's apparent desire to dominate every emerging industry may spread resources too thinly. Making a hoo-ha about the plans does not help.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Uh-oh, we're in trouble. Made in China 2025 spooked America, which saw it as a challenge to its techno-economic dominance. It hobbled Chinese efforts in areas like chip making by restricting exports of crucial American inputs, the ASML lithography machines, of course. There is now talk of Made in China 2035, but any technology named in the latest plan can still expect a target on its back. Talk of using undefined unconventional measures to achieve the plan's goals will not put Americans' minds at ease. The biggest challenge for Chinese planners is a function of their catch-up success. Those occurred in fields where the technology, like photovoltaic cells or lithium-ion batteries, had been around for decades,

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  and the market for electricity or cars was mature. Moving to tech's bleeding edge involves a lot more unknowns. Is there a business case for hydrogen power? How many people will want brain implants?

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  This guy. This guy over here.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Sign me up. Can quantum computers and fusion even be made to work outside the lab? China's plans implies it knows the answer. Market forces may have other ideas. Interesting. Well, we have some advice for young men in China who are trying to unseat America's techno-capitalist dominance. This comes from Sean Frank. He gives 25 practical tips to improve your life. Let's run through them. He says he's about to have his first son, so congratulations to Sean Frank over at Ridge. Here's what he wished he learned earlier in life, and I want your agree or disagree. So, a $40 to $90 water flosser can save you a minimum of $4,000 on dental work. Use it every day. Are you a water pick guy?

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Does John have a?

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  He has bags.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Is John an investor in water pick?

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Wardless Advanced 2.0?

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. I've heard really good things. I've never done. Have you ever used a water pick?

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when I had braces, I used it.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  I do the analog. I actually, I actually floss, but I use the, the physical floss, but maybe, maybe I should get one of these. I don't know. He speaks highly of it.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Are you a big cavity guy?

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever got a cavity?

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Maybe once or something, but there, no, I do pretty well. I like brushing my teeth. I feel, I feel like it's refreshing. Two, learn something people will pay you for. Sports are awesome. College will be fun, but you need to learn a skill that the market values. It can be anything. A locksmith will have a better life than a master's in archaeology. Taking shots.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Didn't you take a dinosaur class?

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  I did. I did.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  Wow, okay.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  I studied.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  I studied.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  For at least one semester.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  For a specific requirement.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  You're basically an archaeologist.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  You should get a master's in archaeology.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is interesting because, because if you want to make, you know, forty thousand dollars a year and spend all your time thinking about dinosaurs.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  And that is what you qualify.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  As, as a great life, then you're probably going to have a much better time, much better life than, you know, being a locksmith, so.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  And, and I think we were predicting that, uh, like, you know, everyone's wondering like where, where, where will Jordy, where will John go as, as influencers? And I think like the logical place was that you'd become a, a member of the data sphere, sort of like the manosphere, but for fatherhood. And a, a true knowledge of dinosaurs is pretty key to rearing a child, especially a, a young boy.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say when I became a dad.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  I struggled intensely early on with pronouncing.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Names of the different dinosaurs, right? There's hundreds.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  They have these names that are all just kind of like mashed together. It seems like they're always making new dinosaurs. You're, you're getting.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  And they renamed a bunch of them too.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  You probably have like fit, over fifty different dinosaur books.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  We were lied to in Jurassic Park. The velociraptor is the size of a chicken.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  I know. That, that's one of the biggest, that's one of the biggest kind of like.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is, I think, I think they refer to it as like the red pill. It's like the red pill moment where you realize like everything you learned in school was a lie. Like when you learn velociraptor being the size of a chicken.

• 1:08:59Jordi Hays?

  With, you know, a bunch of feathers.

• 1:09:01John Coogan?

  It makes you question everything.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Makes you question everything. It starts a lot of conspiratorial thinking for sure.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Sure does.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Okay, what about this one? Number three, just buy timeless brands. Head to toe, Ralph Lauren looks good in nineteen ninety, two thousand, twenty ten, twenty twenty, and it will look good in twenty thirty. You have no idea when this photo was taken. Could be this week, last year, two thousand and four. It was two thousand and four. Uh, what do you think? Timeless brands? Bullish? Bearish?

• 1:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think a millennial, uh, late millennial, early Gen Z forgot about the timeless brands because there were so many new D to C brands for every possible category. But, uh, I think Ralph Lauren and, and some of the other classics have just continued, uh, continue to cook.

• 1:09:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, if it doesn't matter, buy a second hand. My best friend spends less than 500 per year on clothes and shoes, gets by just fine. This applies to most things. Oh, buy secondhand clothes, but your wedding suit, let's just buy new dude. Uh, be funny. Being funny is a skill. You can get funnier. You can learn to be funnier. Uh, people will like you more if you have a sense of humor. You will get dates by being funny. These, those dates will go better if you are funny. In 180 days, you will be top 5% funny and your life will be 60% better. How is that possible?

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Is he selling a?

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Humor? I, this is a crazy thing to learn.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  In 180 days, I can guarantee you will be in the top 5% funny or your money back.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Funny mastermind. Is he on intro.com? I, I want to sign up. We need to get him to coach us. This is, he's certainly funny with his posts. Uh, be the friend you wish you had. Everyone is lonely. Everyone is sitting at home more than they want. Just do things and invite people. It isn't weird or cringe if they feel that. It's on them. Text people out of nowhere and wish them well. Uh, don't wait around for someone to invite you on their adventure. Time for a side quest. You have to make the life you want. It's okay to leave everyone behind and go do something cool. Don't feel obligations to people who are trying to hold you back.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Forget about your date.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. He's taking insane shots at me.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  But before, I think that, I think I've figured out why Sean's doing this.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  He's a very busy guy.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  He has a kid, he's running a business with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. He's launching new brands, all this stuff. So, so I think this entire list is trying to, he sees some of, some of the young guns, kind of nipping at his heels a little bit. And he's like, I need to, I need to.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Distract them.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  I need to distract him. I need to, I need to throw him off the, uh, the scent.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  I believe it. Well, he's taking shots at me with number eight. He says, Being tall doesn't matter. Being lean does. Yeah, this is a good point, though. He says, you have no control over your height. And honestly, it's just cope to care. I'm five eight or five nine. And height has never been a factor in anything I do. But you do need to be physically strong. Everyone needs to be able to do a pull up. That's a good point. But with uh, with uh, inserts, he could be six one, six two, cowboy boots, cowboy hats. He could be up six, three, six.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sounds like, sounds like cope from Sean.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  He says, no one is thinking about you. Well, I'm thinking about you, Sean. Says, how often do you think about your old coworkers? Maybe once a year in passing? They aren't thinking about you either. Don't do things for the opinions of other people because those opinions are fleeting. That's a great point. Uh, it's okay to fail because only, uh, people only remember the wins. You can be a loser for 10 years in a row, failure after failure, bankrupt, but as soon as you hit a big win, everyone loves you. This is a common theme here. The uh, but other people's validation is worthless. Money is very important. Speed run makes, speed run, making as much money as possible. Leave jobs, move states, change careers, get equity and build leverage in your field, be an expert. Be vocal, share your learnings. Life gets easier.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Uh, don't choose a profession that is someone's passion. If you are competing with someone who would do it for free, get out of the field. Uh, you want to be one of one. Your profession has to be your passion. These are good, good mentions. And then he goes back to sunscreen. He's just giving like life wisdom and then he's just like, and here's two more screenshots from direct to consumer companies. Face moisturizer and better screen, UV serum. Is he, is he holding keels? Uh, he says, I use Keel sunscreen and Wild Roman. I, I do love Wild Roman. Shout out to Sal Hill Bloom. But anything is better than nothing. The cheapest $1 tube will put you in the 1% of men. Are you, are you a daily sunscreen guy? No. But uh, lotion, anything, moisturizer?

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll use, I'll use.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Sauna?

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  I'll use a moisturizer, but uh, yeah, sunscreen, I got kinda, I got kinda cooked this weekend.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Find your cohort. This is a group of people around your age in your chosen field, most often not school friends. Uh, he says drinking is bad. You should still try it and do it, but the risk reward is pretty low. It would be good to stop drinking by the time you're 25. Weed is bad and you should skip that. Agree. Maybe old school weed was fun and free, but now this new stuff is too strong and will make you crazy. Uh, that is a good point. Find your relationship with God. God is real and cool and great and everywhere, but someone can't just tell you that you gotta find it. This will take your whole life. Uh, never shame someone for doing what they have to do to survive. You don't know how easy you have it. Uh, you aren't better than anyone. The world, the world is built brick by brick by every single person doing their part. I don't

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  know how my microwave works or water treatment works, but I love a burrito and a shower. If someone earns less in a different way, that they are important. Just tip well. Uh, so much fighting and discourse about tipping getting out of hand. Uh, just forget it and tip well. We had this discussion earlier about when they turn the iPad around, you gotta just tip. Uh, be generous, but logical. I'll give anyone in my life money once. It's a gift. I'm never being paid back, but when they ask again, they think you are a piggyback. Uh, you are. Who you marry will be the most important decision of your life. My wife is my best friend. We are perfect partners and you better find that because you are with this person 12 plus hours

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  a day forever. Act with honesty in everything you do. You can be cutthroat. You can be swift and decisive, but never steal and don't lie. Uh, you are, you, uh, if you are going to beat someone, you tell them how and why ahead of time. And number 25, no one is coming to save you. You are a man. No one cares. Uh, you, if you are wronged, no one cares if something is unfair. You have to save yourself. Well, uh, Sahil.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  And Sean saved threads.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  He saved threads?

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we haven't seen a thread like this.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  In a long time.

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  This could have been an article, but he went back to the thread meta. I wonder if the thread meta is permanently, permanently back in vogue. I don't know. Uh, anyway, we have our first guest of the show in the waiting room. Let's bring in Sam Broner from Better Money. Sam, how you doing?

• 1:15:48Speaker 04

  I'm doing great guys, first guest of the day, fantastic.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Starting the week off strong.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  And kick us off, the whole problem we're facing is there's not enough noise, there's not enough soundboard, so kick us off with your news so I can slam the gong as hard as possible.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  Well, look, we raised $10 million to build a stablecoin clearinghouse. We're happy I hit that gong. Um, yeah, we're here to solve the problem of doing payments with stablecoins, making stablecoins really work for payments companies.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Okay, back up and explain, what is a clearinghouse broadly? Give me like the tradfi analogy.

• 1:16:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, you use clearinghouses all the time, like when you do an ACH, you're going from, you're sending money from one bank to another bank.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 04

  This is, a clearinghouse is just how you connect financial institutions. There's a bunch of them, they're used frequently in payments. Uh, today, just so you guys know, for stablecoins, when you want to go from one stablecoin to another, it's the equivalent of if you had to like sell Wells Fargo dollars to buy Bank of America dollars. And we know that's not how payments work, you probably have an intuitive understanding for that, uh, and if you're a trad payments company, you're confused by this. And so we solve that problem, we make, uh, stablecoins sort of work how trad payments companies expect them to work.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  And.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and is that, is that going from USDT to USDC, or are there a bunch of other pairs, what pairs actually matter?

• 1:17:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a bunch of pairs. So, we support, uh, the Genius Bill compliant stablecoins, and we work with a bunch of the stablecoin issuance platforms like Bridge, like Braille, we can work with, um, Agora, M0, and Frax, and so, we have a bunch of great partners that, uh, that we support their stablecoins.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  And walk me through the background, how you got to this moment, launching the company, all that.

• 1:17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, I, uh, I worked with the Boston Fed on their stablecoin initiative, pretty trad stuff, excellent institution, uh, and loved that experience. And then I was an investor at Andreessen Horowitz Crypto for three years, priced off the 300.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Explain Andreessen, explain Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, so A16.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Wait, what was the Boston Fed project technically like a CBDC?

• 1:18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was. It was. It's kind of controversial, by the way.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  Stablecoin land. They don't love CBDCs, but it was very interesting.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Have, have, it feels like the CBDC movement has like very much lost momentum. Is that your read? Or do you think there will be like a resurgence and central banks will actually play a role in the stablecoin ecosystem, maybe a few years down the line?

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that stablecoins work well now. And the fact that you can send any amount of money anywhere for a fraction of a penny is a good thing. And so the need might have dried up. Like, private stablecoins that are well-regulated are working.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Are there, are there people in government who, who are still like, oh, we gotta get, you know, the Fed to control this? Like, we just, like, as a matter of, like, political ideology, like, the, the Fed must, must have control over the issuance of, of something that looks like US dollars?

• 1:19:06Speaker 04

  I, I don't think that's a huge narrative right now, mostly because when you go to a bank, like, you're, you're relying on their balance sheet to do your banking. So this, the Fed doesn't really get involved with everyday consumer payments anyway. They like to work through these institutions. There's this big bill called the Genius Act that came out in, in July of 2025 that sets for the regulatory tone for, for stablecoins. And, and it builds into that, that meta, like, the, the Fed expects to work with other institutions to make it happen.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Walk, walk through the, the genius. You, you said it's, uh, it's like be, still being implemented. Like, we've covered it a few times, but like, where are we in the rollout and like the calcification of the actual law and rules that will all be downstreamed, that like wind up getting implemented into stablecoin platforms?

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah. So July, the legislation comes out and it has really widespread bipartisan support. Over the last few months, the rules are now getting made more specifically, like, you know, literally, how do you do the accounting? What is the compliance obligation? Where does the money have to sit? Um, the more interesting thing, though, is that, uh, big companies now feel very ready to adopt stablecoins. We hear about Multiple RFPs for stablecoin projects a week. You get to work with multiple.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  Uh, and that's actually for a breakneck pace for these big orders. Like they're not a big payments company is not accustomed to shipping a whole new product line on a whole new payment rail in seven months. But that's what's happening right now.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  So what, what, yeah, so, so a big institution is like, okay, the stablecoin seemed to be sticking around. I kind of need to create a strategy here. What are the things going through their head that they care about? In terms of actually, you know, integrating them into their product suite? I'm assuming they want to figure out how to make money from them. I'm assuming they, they are very risk averse early on. But how, how are they thinking about, um, you know, setting up a project?

• 1:21:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the first conversation probably is what should we do about stablecoins? And then, you know, that's not the right time, uh, to, to really launch into a, a new stablecoin project. You gotta identify a real need.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  And the real need is typically we can improve the quality of our treasury management, or we have a product that involves payments that we could do much better. So that might be remittances, it might be agentic payments. It might be streaming payments. It could be trade finance. Um, and, uh, you know, that, that's often what we need. But this is, this is the kind of thing that they're excited to improve on.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  At what level of abstraction is integration actually happening? Because I imagine if I'm like, if I'm a big company, can I just go to my bank and say, okay, I'm sick of like these ACH fees. I want you to figure out how to use stablecoins and then I want to pay less. Uh, or whatever platform they're using to move money. They like the platform probably jumps on it. Like at what point is a company that's not a financial institution integrating stablecoins?

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  So first, I just want to give a little

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:22:23Speaker 04

  context on this. There's been a long history of big enterprises getting deeper into the payment stack.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:30Speaker 04

  Airbnb, Shopify, Square, these companies like kind of own banks now because they want that additional level of control to make their product better.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  And they can do all of this interesting next generation stuff once they get that integrated. And so we see a similar thing where for many companies, going to your bank or your payment provider is the right place to start. Um, but there's a ton of ambitious tech and fintech payments and banking companies that want to get even closer to the rails. So they can optimize the, the quality of their product. Um, we'll see all things happen. I mean, there's always been retailers to simplify the stack.

• 1:23:07John Coogan?

  I remember it might've been Uber or maybe it was Airbnb, but there, there were a few companies that sort of launched like instant payouts for, uh, it happened a lot on like gig work platforms and it felt like the platform was basically just eating two days of working capital by paying for the service that's rendered immediately, even though they weren't going to get money from their customer for two days because of like the transfer. Uh, is that, is that the main motivation? Like speed?

• 1:23:35Speaker 04

  Uh, I love that you brought that up. By the way, that's like a pretty deep cut. Um, the, so that whole thing is unlocked by Durbin exempt debit cards. This is the ability to charge a higher fee on cards.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Totally a wonk thing.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  But there's this, um, this rule in the U S where if a bank has under a certain amount of assets, they can issue a debit card that takes a higher fee on swipes. That's how they pay for working capital in that example. Like they don't jump front the, the two days.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  I thought they were just like raising debt or so, or doing some financial engineering and just being like, look, it's going to be so valuable for our customers to pay on Monday. And then the gig worker that delivered the food or delivered the car on that day to get paid the same day that they were just like, yeah, and we'll just have this massive two day growing working capital bill. But it's interesting that they've already found a workaround. So then does that make the stable or current argument like weaker? Because they already figured out a hack or will stable coins allow them to like drop the cost of doing that project?

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  Okay, so I think it's both.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:38Speaker 04

  It's often about cross-selling. The Durban exempt card pays for part of that working capital bill, but not all of it. Yes, it takes for a more compelling product. But probably the most interesting part is to build that product takes a ton of engineers and a ton of money. And there's many businesses who can't afford that and would like to still offer that kind of compelling product.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  And mind you, that's a pretty limited product. We've only figured out instant payout for that one category, pay workers debit cards.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:07Speaker 04

  There's a ton of other places. Maybe it's buying groceries, maybe it's agent payments, where you might want that similar instant payout facility.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, what has the launch of the company looked like? Is it like, are you dealing with regulatory filings and getting banking licenses? Is it writing code? Like, what's the shape of the business?

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, we write a lot of code.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 04

  I'm an engineer, like, that's one of my favorite things to do. We rely on great partners for the regs, like, you know, they help us with that, so we build on their infrastructure. But the shape of the company is really figuring out how we can build better products for payments, codes, fintechs, money apps generally, where they get this one-to-one guarantee, one stablecoin equals $1, and they know when the money will arrive. Those are two things that don't exist right now for a lot of stablecoin offerings. Might be surprising, but that's something that payments companies really do require for them to run their business well.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the strength of the dollar broadly? Is that like an important thing to track? I mean, we saw the news about Tether buying like an insane amount of gold, and then there was this sort of narrative violation around the war causing actually a flight to the dollar and the dollar strengthening, even though obviously it's a very tumultuous time. Like, how have you been processing just the demand for the dollar generally? Because that's like, the entire stablecoin boom is sort of predicated on it.

• 1:26:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I'm unabashedly pro-dollar, but it's sort of besides the point. There's no product in the world that has more product market fit in the dollar. You could get, there's like, nothing you could give anyone in the world that they, everyone agree is valuable more than a dollar.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  And so, look, we can talk all day about whether that changes a little bit, but for now, people want dollars.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then in terms of your sort of go-to-market growth, are you focused on those big companies, Fortune 500 companies? Are you selling deeper in the stack, B2B or B2B2B? Like, how are you actually sourcing customers, growing the business?

• 1:27:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a little bit of all of that. Like, are, we see big companies who really want to be on stablecoins now because they can simplify a global treasury or build a new product. And we see a ton of very fast-moving and very savvy Vintex who want the same. Luckily for us, it's the same platform. It's a clearinghouse. And that's similar to how JP Morgan, Chase and Wells Fargo all use ACH, but so does Bridgewater Savings Bank and Seattle First Chemical Bank, you know, all types of money.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Sorry, we just had something fall on the studio, just a chair or something. I want to talk about particularly other movements to like stabilish things on chain. There was, there was talk like a few years ago about like mortgages on chain, real estate on chain. Yeah. Have you been tracking any of that? Yeah, RWA is was like the buzzword. Have you been tracking any of that? Is there progress?

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  There's a ton of progress.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Certainly, I think today, there's a big announcement about another large trading venue trying to do on-chain securities.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  I think it's likely to happen because people want access to 24/7 trading. There's events that happen outside of trading hours where it's helpful to have deep liquidity to react to it. Certainly, at A60C, you know, saw so many of these Bitcoin companies and so many of the RWA companies that were bringing the rest of finance on-chain. In the recent months, I've been pretty narrowly focused on payments, but they touch RWAs because often you're paying into a trading venue in order to do trading there. We'll see a slow drip over months. This is not the kind of infrastructure that gets built in a day, but I think it will surprise people by being the type of infrastructure that gets built in a year or in 18 months. And you start to see a lot more access soon.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, why is it slow? Is it? Because I understand with like Bitcoin, you know, you have this consensus of all these different developers. It takes a long time to get agreement, but at some point, it feels like the pace of acceleration in software needs to catch up. Are you feeling that at all?

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's definitely happening right now. I'll give you one little example. You own some public equity and you, once a quarter, get this thick booklet of paperwork from them that tells you all about their quarterly.

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:03Speaker 04

  This is a requirement. Like, when you own a stock, you are getting that paper in the mail with their quarterly earnings. And so you've got to bring all of that infrastructure to interact with on-chain ownership. And there's these little pieces that all need to be solved well in order to bring all these assets on-chain. A lot of financial assets still involve paperwork, and they just aren't situated for a digital world yet, but I think we're all going to enjoy it when they are.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, another way to think about it, like, bringing, bringing... Uh, you know, real estate on chain, right? It sounds like cool and futuristic, but then like for transactions, like somebody buying their own home, if somebody comes to them and says, hey, I can help you buy your home on chain and you'll save, you know, a couple thousand dollars on this part of the process, that's not a very, that's not a super compelling pitch. Whereas, you know, Sam over here, if you're saying like, hey, you're moving, you know, millions, hundreds of millions, billions of dollars annually, you can save a very meaningfully, meaningful amount by adopting stables. It's just a very different kind of trade.

• 1:31:14Speaker 04

  I, I agree with that and I think there's still homeownership records that are in some basement underneath a municipality's, uh, you know, building. That's, uh, gonna take years to digitize those files. So these are the kinds of things where you really gotta think through the weeds of how you bring things on chain. I will say, if you're using the same technology every day, people get accustomed to it much faster. I think it's likely to happen with the payment scenario where you're saving a couple bucks on a daily transaction and it starts to feel like part of your life and something you can really rely on.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Last question from the chat, do you see prediction markets driving stablecoin adoption?

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  Easy one.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  What was that, what was, what was that reaction?

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, the truth is that as the on-chain world gets more active, it's a positive feedback loop because more people have wallets, more people have identities, uh, and people get more comfortable with the UX. So there's sort of this general network effect similar to what the internet had where actually one more popular website begets the next popular website because you're accustomed to going into this, the search bar and Googling the next thing. And so, yes, I do, I do think that will draw more folks into stables.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, but probably like less important than the genius act, but, uh, but, but still like, you know, a, a one link in the chain metaphorically. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the round and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Sam.

• 1:32:47Speaker 04

  See you guys.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have, uh, John Slotkin from Geisinger to revisit the story of the one billion dollar one person startup. We're getting to the bottom of it. Uh, let's see if he's here. Yeah, I think he is. John, how are you doing?

• 1:33:04Speaker 03

  Good. How are you guys doing? And first of all, congratulations on

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  Great to see you again.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  Thank you. Yeah, great to see you again. Thank you. So, I mean, how did you process this story? Where do you think is good to start? Do you want to maybe set the table with sort of your a little bit of your background and then some of the understanding of what the claims were made and then we can kind of go through them one at a time?

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Sounds good. So I'm a neurosurgeon. I practice. I'm also an investor over at Scrub Capital. And I invest in digital health quite a bit. And I, look, when I saw this story, just like I think a lot of us, I wanted this story to be true.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 03

  So we have an extraordinary reporter and a great venue. And I think what happened is we ended up with a tech story when what we needed was a health story.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:55Speaker 03

  So we had different questions asked of different people

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:59Speaker 03

  to really go a layer deeper before we anointed this as this great example of where we should go. And look, I think part of it is we're all guilty of having wanted this to be exactly what it seemed to be. I think investors were guilty of it, writers, founders. And honestly, guys, probably patients too, because tech stories, they feel consumable. They feel easy. But look, revenue, when it's absent, probably some of the needed regulatory context, that's where we need to go deeper. So that's where I came from at this.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, unpack that idea, revenue, you know, free of the context, or it needs more context? Because there are like several different pieces to that, the marketing claims, but also the margins, all these different things, like what popped out to you first? Where you're like, ah, this seems maybe too good to be true?

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So for me, the biggest thing about the article, and it's a great reporter, a decorated reporter, was what wasn't in the article? So six weeks before the article came out, FDA sent a warning letter to this company. Now, to be clear, they sent them to many.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  And that's fair. But those weren't featured and anointed in the New York Times.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Those other companies that received those letters. They are also Some of their supply chain partners named in the article are subject of a RICO lawsuit right now. There are multiple class action lawsuits and look, some of those look like they're coming from these volume firms, to be fair. But to me, it's that one of those things alone may be one thing and look, Maggie Harrison reported over a year ago, fake patients, fake testimonials and AI-generated photos. She actually put out a piece this morning that was a great piece, but that's a year old. So to me, that

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  That seems to be a repeating pattern in telemedicine of people saying like, well, real patients don't want their face on a website.

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  I'll use a fake name or a fake picture, but then it just keeps coming up as, again, an issue.

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  There was also, though, as you saw, there were fake doctors. So there was Dr. Albus Dongoldor. There was Dr. Tucker Carl Zinn spelled with a D. Like, that's another layer and it's just that I'm saying, when that constellation comes together, I think there's now almost like a burden of, why are we telling this story in this way? And that's where, you know, I think we needed a lot more of, well, wait a second, is this medicine work that we're talking about? And I want to make a point here, the day before this article ran, the day before, Lilly's oral got approved. It was not her's appetite. In fact, it wasn't even a peptide.

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  So it's often been said, the last thing that the weatherman needs to do before going on air is look out the window.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:58Speaker 03

  Well, so we have this company selling and others too, selling an oral version of the medication that has no biological plausibility of working. And to me, the best witness of that is that the day before Lilly announced an entirely different medication despite the fact that it would cause market confusion potentially.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  So you think there'll be, you're expecting there to be sort of issues with the actual product assortment that the company has been selling as well?

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  Well, some of what they sell and others are products that work. And let's be clear, a lot of these work really well, okay? But the problem when we sell ones that don't work is it sets those people back. It sets back their metabolic time. But also, if this administration, and I love that they're doing this, is being so pro-innovation in this regard, then we need to be particularly harsh when people are bringing things that are completely irrational and have zero evidence base. And when I say that oral terzepotide has zero evidence base, somebody email me if they

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  find otherwise, but Lilly is quoted as saying, it's true, there are zero, no published studies on oral terzepotide in humans, none, okay? And so, when that's the subject of the RICO lawsuit, so what we get into there is, in order for there to be innovation, we have to punish snake oil. And we do want innovation in peptides.

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  How do you think about the, like, just the broader boom in peptide prescription telehealth? Because I, like, I'm familiar with the warning letter process. It's usually violation of like, marketing languages, but it can also be used for a variety of other sort of regulatory actions. Do you think that there needs to be like, more clarification from the FDA? Or is it pretty easy for the companies that you've talked to and interacted with to steer clear of FDA warning letters in this particular category?

• 1:39:14Speaker 03

  You've really nailed it there. And let me be clear, I, not only am I pro-development in this area, I myself have had peptides as part of my own health journey. That's been great for me over the last couple of years. And let's start here. The demand is real, and part of what leads to this is the supply constraints are also real. So that's true. And these drugs, when done right, they're some of the most powerful agents we've ever seen. Look, I don't want to put too fine a point on it, but this is true. In a subset of people, and before everybody messages me, I said a subset, we have cured obesity

• 1:39:55Speaker 03

  in a subset of people. And yes, they need to continue on the medications, but we, all three of us live long enough to see that happen in some people, and that's real. And so I'm thrilled that this administration is encouraging development here. But that's why we need to police better. So what do I, what, you have pointed in important space, a gap that's allowing this to occur. And it's a little bit inside baseball, but it's important. FDA regulates substances and devices largely. And as you know, they cannot regulate the practice of medicine. That's key. Only the states can. So that's, that's one of the spreads here that's leading to this daylight for operators like this to come in, which

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  is FDA approves, you know, subcuter's appetite. Great. Zepbound, Monjaro. Formulations, that gets into the practice of medicine and compounding. FDA is statutorily forbidden from getting involved in the practice of medicine. So I'm looking to, and over in HHS, between Abe and some of these other guys and Marty, there are some extremely smart people that I think we need to now think about. This is an issue of reg- yes, regulatory lag, but also regulatory gap between federal, we get to control the substances, but states, we control the practice of medicine. It's allowing too much daylight.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  That's interesting. What about the gap within the pharma companies themselves around e-commerce? It feels crazy to say, but like the pharma companies, Novo, Eli, they, Eli Lilly, they market a lot. They run Super Bowl ads and they somehow are getting beat on e-commerce or something, or they just don't, i- i- it's not like, it's not like the average customer's journey starts at EliLilly.com, right? And it could, I would imagine. Of course, there's this, you know, compounding loophole because of supply constraints, but is there something else going on where they don't feel like because of their business

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  relationships with other distributors and doctors and other networks that they can just be their own Amazon.com and, and just put their own website up and say, hey, look, no one else can say, can buy it because-

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Apple did this.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  They were distributor-

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Right. Yeah, there's plenty of, there's plenty of other companies that have said, like, we want to be the sole supplier of our product online. There's going to be fake sites that pop up, but our URL is the only destination where you can go to get the real thing. Everything else is fake. Instead, we've lived in this hybrid where there, I mean, even just among the two venture-backed telehealth companies, one's doing compounding, one appears to have a partnership, very different regulatory structures. That's a lot for consumers to wrap their minds around. I'm wondering, like, do you think that the, the actual formulators, the drug companies with the intellectual property should just be going deeper into e-commerce?

• 1:42:55Speaker 03

  Well, I think we, we caught them where there was their own internal friction and inertia, right? Where these, these venture-backed entities that can stand up and move quickly on, on, on mobile and that was, that was- Lead time here that they have, but I will tell you, and I hear this from a bunch of my patients. They have gotten better. So right now, for example, Lily, if you want to go cash pay, you get an order from your doctor, they send a prescription, and I'm not associated with Lily. I'm sure we go, he has the same exact thing. So I'm not picking those sides here. But your doctor goes in and sends the prescription, just like it's to a pharmacy.

• 1:43:33Speaker 03

  You receive a text message the next day, you click it, you pay, it shows up the next day at your house in a cooler. So that is where they are now. Now, they were way behind in getting that. But we also had a point, and I'm sure you've heard friends, where the Lily price for Zepbound is getting pretty darned close to what the compoundings can charge, and the compoundings are starting to not be able to charge, you know, even less. But what we really need here, in my view, to make this work right, where we want to reward innovation and punish snake oil, is come up with a structural way, and it may need to be regulated because of this regulation gap where

• 1:44:15Speaker 03

  the right thing to do is the easiest thing to do, and the right thing to do is the profitable thing to do. Right now, I don't think we're structured that way, and it gets to this federal and state gap.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Speaker 03

  Amongst other reasons.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Uh, last question from my experience with the FDA in the tobacco industry. They would send warning letters, but a big problem was that there were distributors abroad usually that would manufacture illegal, unapproved vape devices, basically, e-cigarettes. Bring them in and then push them through a whole bunch of corner stores and gas stations. And the FDA just didn't really have the enforcement team to go store by store. Uh, do you think that they will face a similar challenge in regulating peptides online? It feels like it can be done a little bit more behind a computer. You don't need as many people going door to door, so maybe they're more equipped for it.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  But I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on like, what it actually takes to play the game of whack-a-mole here?

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  I think Marty and team are the right team to think this through because there's there's this permissive lens above them that wasn't there in prior groups on as to these medicines. So, once there's a permissive lens, now you can get positively innovative instead of thinking like this all needs to happen in shadow where Jordy walks up to me with a below jacket and kind of like hands it to me. This needs to be done right.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  And look FTC teaming up with FDA, that's going to be, I think, some of the power here because some of the enforcement we're seeing is already coming from FTC as to the way these things are marketed. But let's, let's get clarity and start collecting evidence, folks. So, if you say, "I'm giving this thing orally and I know it works," well, write that up and share that news with the rest of us because right now we think we have no evidence that it does. Let's get there and let's, let's realize they are extraordinarily powerful medications and let's not let a couple of bad actors ruin what could be great progress for us.

• 1:46:23John Coogan?

  No, I think it's a great message. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day and great week.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Up next, we have Liz Hoffman. She is Semaphore's Business and Finance Editor and host of Compound Interest, a podcast from Semaphore Business.

• 1:46:40Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  We will welcome Liz in.

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  She is not.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  The TVP.

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Here yet. Scoop has some hope for everyone. They say the world's oldest known tortoise is still alive.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  We.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Reports of death revealed.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  I heard about the death of the tortoise.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This was an April Fool's Day post.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Oh, it was?

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Real, yeah.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  I thought it was real too. Very, very sad, but that's amazing news. How old is the world's oldest tortoise?

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Over 100, correct? Let's see, okay. 193. Wow. That is amazing. So this is a chance. Fantastic news. There's a chance. We have to study this toward us and implement it into our daily lives. Oh, we have Liz Hoffman here. We have Liz Hoffman. Let's bring her in. Liz, how are you doing?

• 1:47:28Speaker 05

  Hey, guys. I'm good. How are you?

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:47:31Speaker 05

  Been a big couple of days for TVP.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  It's been a huge couple of days. We logged off. I will say that.

• 1:47:38Speaker 05

  Listen, as you noted, we just launched a podcast, so I just appreciate the good exit comp.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes, we're very excited. Tell us about the podcast. Where can they find it? What's the flow, the philosophy, the topics of conversation, the structure?

• 1:47:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a weekly interview show. You can find it wherever you find all your podcasts, like everything. You know, I started calling it a podcast and I was told, don't, it's a show because everything, as you guys know, is video now. Or whatever the next platform is going to be. But no, it's, I mean, these are conversations that, you know, we're having all the time as reporters where you're trying to like squeeze five minutes and shake some information out of someone. But there's a really interesting seat that they're in that they can talk about. Maybe a company, but also just like, why do big chunks of the economy work the way they do? And so we had, you know, we had the partner from Andreessen Horowitz, David Doolittle, who's like kind of running their defense tech. I've just been obsessed with like, why is Venture all of a sudden playing in big, heavy things to blow up? So that's been really fun. You know, tomorrow's episode will drop. It's CEO of Aura, talking about sort of the future of wearables and

• 1:48:37Speaker 05

  really why he's actually running towards really regulated health stuff, which is like a sort of counterintuitive. So it's been a lot of fun. You guys look like you were having a lot of fun, so I decided to join you.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, Aura is a monster of a business. Yeah, whoop. Yeah, and a lot of people were skeptical about these companies. They're like, ah, yeah, gadget, 100 mil revenue, maybe. And now they're like a billion in revenue or something like that.

• 1:49:00Speaker 05

  It's, they're big businesses, but it's funny, you know, to me, I've been covering, you know, business for a long time. And this is about as wide open a space as I've ever seen. Like, it's clear that something is going to win the intersection of AI hardware and wearables, but it's not at all obvious to me what it is.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, crazy to go after this while the Apple Watch. Already like killed Pebble and like totally dominated and became I think like tens of billions of dollars in revenue, just absolutely massive product. But then there's been all these different form factors that have snuck through with different value props. It's been good. Anyway, let's talk about the jobs report. The US added 178,000 jobs in March, but weak wages and falling participation signal a softening in the labor market.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do you even process a new jobs report? We were saying earlier on the show, I

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Believe nothing.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  You know, every time there's a jobs report for the last 12 months, it feels like we're hitting the gong. And then, you know, the revision comes out later.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Retracting the gong.

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  You have to retract the gong hit.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  It's the worst.

• 1:49:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, obviously with the big asterisk that like we will see what the revisions are. This was pretty good. It's come on the heels of a couple of bad ones. But I actually think that the way to think about the job market right now is that we've we've sort of been programmed to expect a certain number of jobs every month. And you have to think like, well, why? And part of that is that we expect the economy to keep growing. But the input into growing economy in history has been people. And and we're not growing the people, you know, mostly because of immigration and demographic shifts. Lot, you know, fewer babies started getting born about 15 or 20 years ago. So we have fewer people coming in. And at the same time that AI has just totally scrambled what we need those people to be doing. I actually would like to see less focus on the monthly jobs report, but the market is just so addicted to it.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. So where would we focus?

• 1:50:45Speaker 05

  I mean, I think probably the unemployment rate, if you if you're trying to stay in the in the labor market land, that's probably a more helpful thing. And particularly the cohorts in it, right? Like, I think you are going to see youth unemployment that like, you know, 18 to 25 just skyrocket, mostly for AI related reasons. I think, boy, that class of 2026, 2027, like, I do not know. And then sort of like socioeconomic bands within that. But, you know, this is, this is like maybe the first. Tech revolution history that benefits blue collar workers over white collar workers. And so just the way we think about the economy and what we're looking for, you know, Jay Powell in his last press conference said, you know, the labor market's in a balance. It's a pretty uncomfortable balance, but it is a balance that I kind of compared the

• 1:51:27Speaker 05

  US to a lifestyle business and like a dig that will land with your, with your listeners. It's okay to not be growing as long as the supply and the demand of the things kind of balance out and that's sort of where we are, but it, but it's not comfortable.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was having this debate with Sagar and Jedy about like, is AI holding up the economy or is healthcare holding up the economy? And I feel like AI is, is holding up like the market and the market caps and it's the reason that market, that the markets are up or down on a given day outside of the geopolitical stuff.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  But healthcare.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  But in healthcare, that's actually where we're adding jobs. Do you have more context on the health of the healthcare market, what those jobs are? Can 18 to 24 year olds slot into the growing healthcare sector easily? Is that too complicated? Like what's going on there?

• 1:52:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, healthcare is messy because we're talking about a lot of different things and it's like 20% of the economy. So it's both big and fuzzy. It tends not to be a very reassuring indicator if you're talking about the job market because it kind of tends to grow no matter what.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:27Speaker 05

  Sort of one of those just like blobs that just keeps getting bigger in part because we're getting older and you know, there's certain like the massive shortage of clinicians in certain places, but also this is one of those, you know, healthcare is one of those sectors of the economy where the AI, the outcomes are really levered, right? Like little unclear whether it's going to replace radiologists, you know, reading, reading scans, or if you think about, I don't know if you have any friends who are doctors, like the amount of their day they spend doing just really drudge work, like literally paperwork and checking the thing and making sure that this application is talking to that one could be a total tailwind for that industry. So that, that's a big question mark for me.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Jordi Hays?

  How are you, are you tracking the Iran war from a capital flows standpoint at all? How, you know, I think a big question, the, the tech and venture community has had.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, the war is tragic first and foremost, but so much of the funding coming in to the technology industry over the last 10 years has been from the region. And I think a lot of people have questions around how durable that will be, given how much instability there is in the region.

• 1:53:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think if you're thinking about the Gulf as a big pot of money, which it has been for a lot of the startup scene and a lot of like global investment markets for the last 10 or 15 years, I think that was already starting to change anyway. You know, I remember 10 years ago covering the SoftBank Vision Fund and Uber and like there was a sense that the Gulf was frankly dumb money, that they were sort of the world's ATMs and they were kind of looking for financial returns, kind of looking to get their name out there and ultimately kind of did neither. And they've massively pulled back into, okay, like yes, they are still willing to write checks for the Gulf. You saw they're a big funder of the EA buyout. But they really want to see that money come back, like literally on the

• 1:54:22Speaker 05

  ground in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates. And so the calculus of doing business in the Gulf, I think, had already been changing. And I was there in December and I was talking to an executive at Mubadala who said, you know, very proudly, he was like, you know, when asset managers, when Wall Street guys used to come here 20 years ago, they would end the meeting and say, and this is how much we want from you. And now they say, like, where can we partner? What can we do? How can we help you grow an export economy? So I think that was already starting to shift anyway. And I think, look, this really does remind people that these really modernizing economies in the Gulf, they are a nice house in a rough neighborhood.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  Sure. Have you, how much have you dug into like, like the dumb money and how it played out? Because like, one of the big rounds that I think Saudi Arabia did was like Uber. And Uber has done very well. And yes, there's like the WeWorks and there's like, you know, a smattering of failures. But if you were just broadly investing in America or tech over the last decade or two, I feel like you should have done well, even if you were like just picking randomly. So did they do particularly worse than just random? Or do they actually feel that way?

• 1:55:38Speaker 05

  It's a good question. They were so big in the biggest pot of this, which was the SoftBank Vision Fund, which obviously did not go great, but they're sort of one hand tied behind their back on the investment side. But the answer is that if it was really working for them, they would be doing more of it. And in fact, they're not, right? The Public Investment Fund, the PIF, has been tilting its portfolio back towards sort of domestic stuff. And by the way, like, they need money, but what they really need, they have a lot of oil, and we'll talk about, if you want, about where oil goes on all this. But what they really need is a domestic economy and the know-how to build that. So like, actually, a great example is Lucid, right? They control Lucid. And it is not an accident, Lucid is building a factory in Saudi Arabia, not because that's like the logical place to manufacture cars, but because Saudi Arabia wants it.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that feels like a really big give for a motor company that will probably deliver most of those cars to America or Europe or somewhere far away, and so you have to pay the transit. But for data centers in particular, you know, inference takes time. I don't really care if my tokens come from across the world. I know that a number of companies have already been using data centers in different time zones because the American data centers are really busy during the day. And so during the day, if you can go and generate an image in Malaysia and then have it sent back, it's fine. So maybe that becomes more of the give. But again, big questions about like, is just having a bunch of data centers in the desert like the backbone of a new economy? Or is it just like one step towards?

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  I mean, it does, it does nothing for employment, which like we're starting to learn here. But also, I had a story the other day that the cost to insure an insurance policy on a single asset in the Gulf. Now, you can literally, you can buy war and terrorism insurance. It's gone up 1,900% in the last six weeks. So if you can't insure it, you can't build it. So you don't have to see that shake out.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's really brutal. What are you tracking on prediction markets? Has this been useful in, in the actually understanding what's going on in the rest of the economy? Are you, are you a fan of them as a data source? Like, do they help you in your day to day?

• 1:57:39Speaker 05

  I think as a journalist, you're always looking for more inputs and aggregated intelligence is always a good one. As a social force, I don't love it. I think the long tail of nonsense is sucking up attention and frankly, capital that could go to be doing more useful things. One thing that I am interested there is that I think it's going to replace huge portions of investing. If I'm an investor and I think that Coca-Cola is going to beat its earnings next week, it's going to do better than the market thinks. Right now, my options are like, alright, I can go buy a call on Coca-Cola, short Pepsi, and hope that there's not a weird weather thing at the bottling plant in Atlanta or whatever. There's a lot of weird risks there. And actually, if you can just hit yes on that contract, it seems to me that

• 1:58:24Speaker 05

  a lot of investing is going to move that way.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:58:27Speaker 05

  And I think that's why New York Stock Exchange put $2 billion in a polymarket. I think they think so, too.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. As democratized as option trading has become, it is still complicated to understand exactly how you should even express something as simple as like, I think the war will end quickly, or I think Coca-Cola will beat earnings. There's a lot of different ways to actually build that option strategy. People obviously sometimes really enjoy that aspect of the intellectual pursuit of making the right trade, but it can be hairy sometimes.

• 1:59:02Speaker 05

  But I'm sure someone like Maiden lost money on the tortoise that you guys were talking about on the way in, right?

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:59:08Speaker 05

  But actually, a human went outside. I think it was the governor of the island, wherever it is, went outside and said, no, the tortoise is just sleeping.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Found the tortoise?

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  I think it's fascinating that suddenly everyone, these mention markets seem to be some of the biggest distractions. It's hard to make the case for why the information is important or necessary. And I think if people want to trade it, that's fine. But I think it's generally, we saw something yesterday, Trump had a pretty odd post saying, I think he said, praise be Allah. And it seemed very out of place. And so people assumed like, hey, maybe, maybe that is because it had like, you know, somebody either in the ad, you know, who, who knows how that

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  could have happened. But yeah, some, somebody out there thought maybe benefited from that. And the, and the, and the problem is like, it just creates this big question with like, everything that people say in the world in certain, in, in certain settings. So.

• 2:00:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I love it.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Well, I'm sure you'll be.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, please save Bitcoin. Please save Bitcoin right now before you leave.

• 2:00:21John Coogan?

  I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to unpack.

• 2:00:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm just joking around. So Compound Interest, is the show launched yet or it is about to launch?

• 2:00:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're in week six.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, amazing.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us and congrats on the new show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:00:38Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Brad Taylor from Sierra. Sierra just launched Ghostwriter, an agent for building customer experience agents through conversation. Let's bring in Brad Taylor. Second or third time on the show. Welcome back. How are you doing? Third time.

• 2:00:54Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me back.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Appreciate it.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Well, kick us off. Give us the state of the union on Sierra. How is it going? What's the traction been like? What's the progress?

• 2:01:05Speaker 06

  Sierra's going amazing. We grew to a hundred million dollars in ARR in seven quarters, 158. We're in the middle of our ninth quarter.

• 2:01:15Speaker 06

  Hopefully we get multiple gongs this show.

• 2:01:19Speaker 06

  We're working with 40% of the Fortune 50 now. Brands like Singtel, Sky, Nordstrom, Prudential. But most importantly, we're just really focused on helping people get successful quickly. One of my favorite stories is Nordstrom went live in four weeks with their voice agent ramp from 1% to 100% in one week. And our whole philosophy is the solution to every problem in AI is more AI. And so we're really trying to kind of orient the whole company around that. That's where Ghostwriter comes in. Happy to talk about it, but it's probably I think the product I'm most proud of that we've developed at Cero so far, it really kind of just reimagines the whole platform around AI in a way I'm really excited about.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Well, first, I maybe want to go back in time a little bit because you said Nordstrom's was a success case at a four-week implementation. That sounds like a success for implementing like any piece of software, really, like even ERP. Especially something that's customer-facing. Anything takes time. But, but, you know, when you started the company with your first clients, how much longer was it? Like, what, what made it take longer then? And then why is it getting faster?

• 2:02:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, actually, it's a good segue into Ghostwriter, too. I mean, first, our first design partners, we were building the airplane as it was taking off.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:02:33Speaker 06

  What took long is we had to make the product. And, you know, we had some early design partners like Sirius XM and Sonos that were amazing, just very patient with us. And I think it benefited from being now very early to this market. But after the product really existed, it was, you're just really figuring out, what does it mean to make an agent? You know, it used to be if you talked to a chatbot three years ago, I call it BC, before Codex or before Claw. You know, these things were robotic and rules-based. How you actually model a customer experience, not as rules, but as goals and guardrails. You really want these agents to be human-like. And to be human-like, you can't have them be reading a script, right? But that's a really different way of thinking about software. When you built a website before, you knew every button that someone could click. And

• 2:03:15Speaker 06

  now you have this kind of free-form conversational interface, and you're almost putting guardrails around it rather than drawing a path through your customer experience. So it's going to sound funny and almost technical, but we had to design the right abstractions, you know, for our customers to actually build their customer experience. And actually, just to take it to Ghostwriter, this new product, we think the era of the web app is kind of over. You know, if you think about what is a web app in the context of enterprise software, we made these databases, these systems of record in the 80s and 90s. And then, you know, as the web browser came out, we said, okay, we're going to give you some forms and fields in a web browser to manipulate those systems of record. Now, we think in the future, most people are just going to be talking to AI agents, and it's going to

• 2:03:57Speaker 06

  be performing those actions on your behalf. And we were thinking after December, when all of us got pretty AI-pilled with Codex and Claude improving so dramatically.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  That's when you got AI-pilled?

• 2:04:10Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Like, everything before that was just... They were just toys, but this...

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Honestly, talk to any software engineer...

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  That was a very... We're just joking around. There was a lot of people that went on winter break and they were like, "Wow, this actually seems pretty... It's gonna be a pretty big deal."

• 2:04:28Speaker 06

  Well, that's why it does feel like BDC, like before Codex. Like, December was this point, like, there's a before and an after.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:35Speaker 06

  So, we came back to the office after the holidays and we're just... Our minds are blown. Because we're all software engineers, right? We're like, "Man, if it can do this with code, why are we clicking around forms and fields in a web browser still?" And we're like, "If we were to start over today, our product, you would be using Sierra like you use Codex." And so, that's what Ghostwriter is. It's an agent for building agents. You can just talk to it. You could say, "Hey, I want a customer service agent that enables people to do a warranty claim." You know what? Make it a little more empathetic. You know what? Let's update our policy from 30 days to 45 days over the month of December, so our return window extends past New Year. You can just talk to it and it will actually perform all of this on your behalf. So, the cool part about it is you have this, like, evolution of how do you build agents?

• 2:05:20Speaker 06

  And now, we've made it accessible to everybody. And just like, I think, you probably all... I know so many people who aren't technical have built their first apps with Codex, now that it's so accessible. Our view is that anyone in the world can use our platform now to make these incredibly sophisticated agents. Can we bring that four weeks down to four days? You know, and I think that's really the value here. And I think it's exciting just because the era of, like, signing into a web app and filling out forms and clicking the submit button, I think it's sort of a thing of the past.

• 2:05:47John Coogan?

  Did you... Like, how... At what level of abstraction are, like, the CEOs of Fortune 50 companies operating right now? Because when I hear, like, "Okay, we made an agent that creates agents." I'm still seeing a text box. And I know a lot of CEOs that are like, "I don't do text boxes. I do meetings and I do conversations." And maybe, maybe I will literally text my guy who does that for me. But like, how... What is the flow? Is there, like, a head of AI at these companies now that's implementing this and they're doing this? Or are they calling you and saying, "Hey, it's great you built Ghostwriter. I would like you to use Ghostwriter to do what I want."

• 2:06:30Speaker 06

  Well, I'll give you the whole spectrum because as you intuited, like every culture is different.

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Speaker 06

  I'd say our audience for this are the people building these customer experiences like the head of sales or head of customer service, head of customer experience. Because for a long time to do any big digital project, you'd have to have your IT team, probably an outside systems integrator, a bunch of tech vendors. And you know, like the actual essence of your customer experience, it doesn't get lost in it, but it's like any product management process, right? You have to distill it down to a product requirements document and wait six months.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:02Speaker 06

  Can we actually empower the people who understand your sales process, your customer service processes, and empower them to run an A B test? To actually like make those changes on their behalf. So our audience, I would say, is one notch down from the CEO. It's like, who is the people who really understand your customer who should be empowered to actually build these things? But I think I've been really surprised that I think I love the word agent because I've seen a lot more agency in every executive team and everyone of our clients, like boards, CEOs, everyone I know, it's like they're like, my CEO uses like open A, like uses Chat GPT every day. They run like every time I give them a report, they, you know, give it to their agent.

• 2:07:43Speaker 06

  I was talking to one CFO of a CPG company who literally has two Mac Minis running open call all the time. I couldn't believe it. And you know, I One wasn't enough. Yeah, one wasn't. I had the same question. I did get to, I was like, what did you do with you do too? But that's the whole thing. I, you know, I think this is really interesting. I think it's really giving people direct access. You know, one of the things you can do in Sierra is you can ask questions like, hey, what is irritating people about our returns policy? Kind of those qualitative questions that would previously maybe require a focus group. The agents in this Sierra platform will actually sample conversations, look for low C S A conversations, use large language models to synthesize actually what's going on and

• 2:08:26Speaker 06

  give you a report like Chat GPT deep research. That's amazing. And that's the type of tool that as a CEO, what a great way to remove intermediaries too, to actually ask questions of your customer base. So my view is that AI Agents broadly are just increasing agents, uh, agency of individuals at companies. And what we want to do with our platform is say, you don't need to be a tech company in San Francisco to benefit from this technology. Uh, you know, going back to stories of speed next, the UK retailer went live in six weeks. Cigna, the healthcare payer went live in eight weeks. You know, our whole view is that we want to empower every company in the world to have access to this. And whether it's the CEO or the head of customer experience or the CTO,

• 2:09:08Speaker 06

  we don't want your technical qualifications to get in the way of your ability to exercise that agency. And I think that's a really great thing for customers, consumers, because so much of, when a, when the tech project takes 12 months, how much business value is lost just by the length of that project? So we think speed is one of the main values that we provide.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  How hard is it to stop an agent from giving a response when a user says,

• 2:09:38Jordi Hays?

  in order for you to help me with my problem as a customer, I need you to give me a recipe for sugar cookies? Or I need you to help me with my physics homework? Cause everyone by now has seen screenshots like that. Is that the kind of thing you guys have gotten good at kind of squashing?

• 2:09:53Speaker 06

  We've got, so first of all, we've gotten good at the, uh, you know, the important stuff like true abuse, you know? And, and it's, there's nothing perfect. Actually, there's a thing called jailbreaking, which is essentially manipulating these agents. It's not probably possible to completely eliminate it. It's just, uh, like, there's been a bunch of papers on it. It's a really hard problem. The, the more nuanced part of this is how human do you want your AI agent to be? You know, you could have it so it never says anything, uh, really, except for like this precise things you want it to say, but then it'll be a little bit robotic. Just try this. If you walk into like a retail store in San Francisco. And you start talking about the weather, the person won't say, oh, gosh, I'm a, I'm a clothing

• 2:10:37Speaker 06

  store employee. I'm not allowed to talk about the weather, right? That would be like Not a weatherman here. Yeah, I'm not a weatherman. What are you doing? Instead, they engage and there's a sort of intuitive sense of what is like a reasonable human conversation and you know, what is too off brand. That's actually the art form of these agents is I think as they become the frontier to your customer experience, one form of empathy is reflecting back the interest of the person speaking, but you don't want to stray so far off topic and maybe sugar cookie recipes is okay, but talking about political elections is not. And that's really the art form of the design in this space. And I don't think jailbreaking is like, and abuse is one thing that we try to be really exceptionally good at. And then the more the design space is like, how much agency do

• 2:11:20Speaker 06

  you want to forge your agent? And, and my sense is there will be bolder brands who actually are willing to take a bit more risk here and get some of the benefits of the humanity, the empathy that come with it. For good reason, there'll be companies in more regulated industries that narrow those guardrails in narrow ways. But my sense is we'll have different societal expectations of these things in four years than we do now, just as it becomes prevalent in the way we engage with different companies around the world.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, from a tech perspective, like if I'm a company using Sierra, how am I actually deciding the, the width of those guardrails? Because there's totally a world where I have a 30 day return policy, but if my best customer shows up at 31 days, I want my customer support person to bend the rules. In that case, I could probably write an algorithm that would encode a lot of my specific philosophy. Am I writing prompts? Am I writing like an MD file for this now? Like, how, how am I actually like setting the rules of the road if I do want sort of somewhat of a fuzzy response curve?

• 2:12:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is what we enable on our platform and under the hood, you can think of it as modeling these conversations as goals and guardrails rather than rules. And so you can put guardrails that are qualitative, like the person's really upset. You can also put goals that are quantitative, like they're a member of our loyalty program. And so it's pretty easy to model. The neat thing about Ghostwriter is, you know, it used to be ancient history two weeks ago, you had to learn, you know, how to use our product to model it. Now you can actually, you could just say what you just said. In fact, you could take a recording of what you just said and upload the audio file and Ghostwriter would make it the agent for you. You know, it's like that flexible. And so, you know, we're trying to, we've created a bunch of abstractions for companies to build these agents. We're

• 2:13:09Speaker 06

  really proud of. And now I think we've just lowered the bar for people using it. And, you know, just given our traction with some of the largest companies in the world, our hope is that we'll just accelerate our momentum going into the middle of the year.

• 2:13:23Jordi Hays?

  How do you think agents are changing enterprise sales? Are they valuable to Sierra at all? Do they move the needle? You know, I'm curious what role you think they play in like a truly elite enterprise GTM?

• 2:13:41Speaker 06

  I think it's huge. We have a whole team dedicated to this. I don't want to pretend we've figured it out. But when I think about true enterprise sales, like I'll say high touch, you know, Fortune 100 type enterprise sales, you're really trying to have your best practices consistent across your client base. You know, if you have a, and what's so hard is before you used to just have to train people. There's this, you know this because you know, sales, there's like, it's enablement. How do you actually train people with new best practices, new products? I think one of the most exciting parts of agents in the context of go to market now is AI agents can assist your frontline sellers or, you know, post-sales team to actually understand those best practices, understand

• 2:14:24Speaker 06

  products. Let's just take responding to an RFP as an example. It's something that, you know, used to probably a lot of inconsistency in how you answered those questions. And now you can have AI agents. A lot of that. And what's exciting about that is I think many of the best sellers are really great listeners. They're there to understand your customers' problems deeply. And that doesn't necessarily correspond with understanding agent architectures, like, you know, something you have to describe in our world. Can you have these AI agents actually assist us? You can end up with the world's best sellers sort of equipped with like an Iron Man suit of enablement and knowledge to help them do that. And the other thing I think about is just, you know, we're trying to scale faster than any enterprise software company in history. And so far, we're doing a pretty good job of that.

• 2:15:08Speaker 06

  But for Clay and me, you know, our big, you know, fear is like, as you expand to Japan, we just did an acquisition there, you expand to Southeast Asia, you expand to Australia. Well, you end up with these little, you know, Galapagos Islands versions of your company that aren't quite the same. And so can you use agents to make things more consistent as well? So, you know, if we're talking a year from now, I'd like to say like our agents made us like scale our company consistently globally and have kind of that consistently high level of service our clients expect of us. And that's something that would just be a ton more effort with a lot more inconsistency without AI agents. So I think it's huge in enterprise sales.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Tell us about the, tell us about the company you bought in Japan.

• 2:15:51Speaker 06

  We inquired a company called Opera, 11 people. They self-described were created in the Sierra of Japan.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  It's a life hack right there.

• 2:16:02Jordi Hays?

  That actually seems like a smart strategy is like find, find the leading AI companies in America and then build that company for your, for your region.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  It was genius.

• 2:16:12Speaker 06

  They're amazing founders. We said, rather than the Sierra of Japan, why not just take out the of and just be Sierra Japan? And, and they're amazing and they're, they're like young and hungry and understand AI. And I'm really excited just because we have a lot of, we really believe in the value of humility here. And it's like entering a market like Japan, it's very hard for Western companies to succeed there. You have this group of 11 people who are not only great entrepreneurs, who I just have an innate respect for all entrepreneurs, but understand the market, had been in the market with some regulated clients. And now they have, you know, sort of the full power of Sierra behind them. So I'm excited for it. I don't know a ton of precedent for sort of like doing a kind of technical acquisition to enter a market.

• 2:16:56Speaker 06

  We're really excited for it and I hope I can come back here in six months and tell you it's a wild success. But I'm really excited for it.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Well, what's the smallest company that you'll work with? It feels like the headline goal is enterprise, the Fortune 50. But is this going to be a one click and I'm not even talking to someone sort of self-serve at the very low end eventually?

• 2:17:18Speaker 06

  You know, maybe I would say like we tend to serve, we serve mid-market and enterprise. So we're not opposed to smaller firms. And I would say we really care about high-growth companies. So it's important to us to serve high-growth tech, high-growth retail. Just if you're a startup, we really want, we want Sierra to be your first phone call. So we're trying to make it as easy as possible. We're not necessarily going to go into self-serve, not because the technology won't enable it, but to some degree, our business model is helping people transform. You know, one of our med tech clients has 40 call centers and they need to consolidate into one and deploy AI at the first time. And you all, this is not your first rodeo, you know, like technology is like 1/15th of that problem.

• 2:18:03Speaker 06

  It's like, we actually come in and we can actually help you say, hey, here's actually the order of operations, you can realize the value quickly, here's how you can help with the change management. All that stuff can feel boring to a technologist, but if you're actually a company who's reading the headlines about Claude Code and Codex and being like, man, I have 100,000 people and 40 business units, how do I get this? We want Sierra to be the answer to that question. And I think as a consequence, you're building a company designed to help with that kind of question, you just create a different shape of company. And so we're really trying to serve the enterprise. And we, it doesn't mean size, it sort of means, you know, do you want to partner rather than a vendor? And that's how we think about it.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for serving the enterprise. Thank you for your service generally.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  It's so important. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you have another minute?

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted to, what are, when you meet a CEO, how quickly can you clock whether they have an elite enterprise GTM motion? And what are the indicators that you look for?

• 2:19:15Speaker 06

  Yes, I think I can. And just because I've partly you want to know why? Because I just stunk at it when I created my first B2B company. I transitioned from being at Facebook to starting Quip, but I had never sold software before. I'd only sold ad-supported software. And so, you know, when you went through the really awkward transition of sucking at something and learning it the hard way, you learn to pattern match on the old version of yourself. And, you know, my main indicator is, does that CEO spend time with their own customers? So many, like, I would say, product and tech founders outsource sales in the way you outsource things you don't care about. And I think it's almost impossible to start

• 2:19:58Speaker 06

  an enterprise software company and not personally spend time with your clients. And it's probably the main leading indicator of someone who hasn't figured it out.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  I'm hearing golf handicap and stakes.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  Not quite.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I spend, I spend time with my customers.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Thirty-six holes a day. No, of course, there's much to it. You were at Shop Talk. You were out in Vegas. That's a, that's a serious conference. It makes a lot of sense that you were out there personally. It's, it's a trip.

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on.

• 2:20:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:20:30John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, Gray Matter Robotics. We have the CEO and co-founder joining, bringing physical AI into US shipbuilding, scaling autonomous production for national security. We need this more than ever. And I'll let you introduce yourself. Welcome to the show.

• 2:20:49Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for having me, Jordy.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:20:52Speaker 07

  Ariyan Kabir, co-founder, CEO of Gray Matter Robotics. By the way, we're actually neighbors. Would love to give you a tour. Actually, we should have done this today at our facility with the robots in the background.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Wait, neighbors in Hollywood, neighbors in Los Angeles, neighbors in California?

• 2:21:06Speaker 07

  In Los Angeles.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  How precise are we being?

• 2:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Los Angeles.

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  Because we have neighbors right behind us, and I haven't seen you on the campus. But yeah, why don't you kick us off with a little bit of backstory, how you got into the industry, how you identified the problem, and then what you're building now?

• 2:21:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, as you as you know, as you both of you just kicked it off that, you know, we're living in a moment where it's more than critical, more important than ever to accelerate the production, accelerate the capacity building for our industrial base, especially in shipbuilding, right? US makes most of the advanced naval vessels in the world, aircraft carriers, destroyers, submarines, to name it, and we have more than 5 million man hours short in shipbuilding in the US. Between World War II until now, the amount of ship US has built, China built more than that in the last 12 months, right? And we are actually today at a milestone moment in the history for shipbuilding, in the history of national security, and our US Navy. We are launching a partnership.

• 2:22:05Speaker 07

  Today, we are announcing this partnership with Huntington Ingalls Industries, HII.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're huge.

• 2:22:10Speaker 07

  And together, we are bringing factory superintelligence to shipbuilding.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  Okay. What does the partnership entail? I mean, and maybe just to zoom out, Huntington Ingalls is, they they literally make the aircraft carriers, right? They like, they make the exquisite systems they ship build at the at the biggest scales, correct?

• 2:22:27Speaker 07

  That is correct. They make all the large aircraft carriers, large submarines, and some of the advanced vessels. Also, they're launching some of the latest and greatest unmanned vessels for the US Navy.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Is there a Shahed drone of ships that America should be copying? We just read a story in

• 2:22:45Jordi Hays?

  It's called a jet ski, John.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Isn't it a jet ski? I don't know.

• 2:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's actually what, I mean, they have

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  I I've seen a few of these demos, but I haven't, I've heard about the Shahed drone for years, and then it became very important with this latest conflict. And then apparently with that, that, what was it called, Lucas drone that America built very quickly, it feels like that was copied. Is there some sort of next gen autonomous surface vessel that you think is coming down the pipe in major way?

• 2:23:10Speaker 07

  We're seeing that. We're seeing that from Anduril, we're seeing that from Lockheed, we're seeing some of that also from Sironic, right? Let it be the existing primes as well as the new primes, they're bringing low cost, sometimes even dispensable, unmanned vessels, let it be, you know, over surface or subsurface.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what what does the partnership actually look like? I mean, Huntington Ingalls is a huge organization, like, how are you plugging in? What what organizations are you working with? How do you

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  How many rounds of golf does it take to land a partnership like this?

• 2:23:40Speaker 07

  Zero.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  Zero?

• 2:23:42Speaker 07

  Zero, zero rounds of golf. Because we're dealing with such a That's a narrative violation.

• 2:23:49Speaker 07

  We're dealing with such a such a big national security issue. We don't have time to play golf. We have to go build these autonomous robots that can start building all these autonomous vessels.

• 2:23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:59Speaker 07

  So at Grimata Robotics at the core, you know, you you asked me, uh, Jordy at the beginning, like, John, how did we get into it, right?

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:07Speaker 07

  So my co-founders and myself, we started Grimata Robotics about six years ago. And when we started at that time, anyone doing robotics and AI was doing one of the two things. Either sell driving cars or pick pack and ship our assembly in logistics.

• 2:24:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:21Speaker 07

  No one was paying attention to this massive need in manufacturing. All of our factories, vast ninety percent of them, are done manually by people by hand every single operation.

• 2:24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:32Speaker 07

  And we have this growing demand for physical goods and we have this growing shortage of skilled people, skilled tradespeople in manufacturing, especially in shipbuilding. And we had to do something to bridge that gap between demand and capacity. And robotics is one thing, but what truly started to change the picture is that when we started bringing in physical AI, marrying it with robotics, but then we also had to start thinking about beyond robotics. If you look at a factory operation, there are manufacturing processes like sanding, grinding, painting, coating, blasting, you name it. A lot of manual labor goes into it. But beyond that, there are a lot of other engineering activities, a lot of industrial engineering, process engineering, material science, a lot of sustainment operations, MRO, you name it.

• 2:25:18Speaker 07

  If you don't bring AI and autonomy across the full end-to-end picture, if you don't start bringing AI agents in each layer of engineering, we're not going to unlock our factories. So that's our mission at Grimata Robotics, connecting it all by bringing domain agents and back to superintelligence.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, how uh, how agent-ready are manufacturing systems? Do they have APIs or their CLIs? I imagine that they don't have MCP like, like, wait, gi- give me an example of like, there's one machine that makes a part that goes on the, you know, the aircraft carrier. Uh, like, how is the agent interacting with that? What is it doing?

• 2:25:55Speaker 07

  Right. It's a, if you look at a manufacturing operation, it's an in sequence of different processes.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:02Speaker 07

  In each process, this, you take a tool, you make some value added change to an object using a tool.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:06Speaker 07

  Let it welding the parts together, let it be grinding the weld, blasting the surface, coating the surface, a lot of inspection. So we deliver autonomous robot cells that are capable of.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  So is this like a six axis robot arm? Is that what I'm visualizing?

• 2:26:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, we, we work with, you know, we are agnostic to hardware.

• 2:26:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:25Speaker 07

  We embody our physical AI into different form factors.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:29Speaker 07

  Let it industrial robots sitting on the floor.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:32Speaker 07

  Or industrial robots on a rail on a mobile base that can work, you know,

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:26:37Speaker 07

  move around a submarine and work on these very large structures. We work with anything from as small as a military helmet to a fire truck to fighter jets to a submarine component.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:47Speaker 07

  So we are agnostic to shapes and sizes of robots.

• 2:26:50John Coogan?

  Interesting. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you and amazing job navigating my soundboard. I was thrown, I was thrown a lot at you.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, very exciting. I, I, I want to learn more about Huntington Ingalls at some point. It's, it's such a fascinating company. Uh, congratulations on the deal with them.

• 2:27:08Speaker 07

  Thank you. So this is a big moment for national security and US Navy.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:27:14Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:27:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Uh, up next, we have Atif Siddiqi from Branch. He's the founder and CEO. He's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Atif, how are you doing?

• 2:27:25Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:27:26Speaker 08

  Going well. How are you guys?

• 2:27:27John Coogan?

  We're great. Thanks so much for taking the time to join the show. Uh, since this is the first time on the show, would you mind, uh, giving us a little bit of introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:27:37Speaker 08

  Absolutely. Yeah. Atif, founder, CEO. Uh, Branch is the leading workforce financial infrastructure that delivers faster, more flexible options for people to get paid. So we focus on, you know, the majority of the American economy that works in an hourly job,

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:54Speaker 08

  gig job, tip job. So it could be gig workers, nurses, restaurant workers getting their tips instantly. And, you know, I think really companies are turning to Branch because they know faster payments can help them strengthen work loyalty, saving time and money. I was actually tuning in earlier. I heard your convo with the Better Money guys around, uh,

• 2:28:13John Coogan?

  Stablecoins.

• 2:28:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, the Uber, the Uber driver payouts, that's us.

• 2:28:16John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, no way.

• 2:28:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, we work with companies like Uber, Instacart.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's perfect. Uh, quick question. What is the screw award or the spring award behind you? What is that?

• 2:28:31Speaker 08

  This one right here?

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  It looks like a spring, like a giant spring.

• 2:28:35Speaker 08

  2020 Webby Award winner.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  That's a Webby. That's a Webby. Uh, did you win that for Branch?

• 2:28:41Speaker 08

  For Branch, yeah, in 2020.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  No way. That's amazing. Yeah, Webby is deeply underrated. Um, anyway, uh, give us the, give us a, a, a tour of the business currently. I mean, if you're working with Uber, obviously big company, but, uh, how, how, how can I think about the shape of the business? Are you in person, multiple offices, uh, scale fundraising? Just get me up to speed on the, on the scale of your operation.

• 2:29:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, we're, we're distributed. Uh, we have a couple of offices, uh, sales office, one in Tampa, but, uh, distributed workforce, about 230 employees, raised over a hundred million dollars of equity and, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's been, we're off to the races now. Uh, you know, I think, um, you know, one area where we've been really leaning into as of late is just the, uh, embedded finance offerings. And that's kind of the news today, right?

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  So is that, is that embedding into another B2B company that is acting as like the, the, the master payroll provider for an organization?

• 2:29:40Speaker 08

  That's right. Yeah. So think, uh, platforms.

• 2:29:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:29:43Speaker 08

  Right. It could be a vertical SaaS where they touch our end users around, you know, these gig or hourly workforces where we can live right there.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:53Speaker 08

  And make it really frictionless for those end users.

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've had a few, uh, like HR platforms where I've had like a few employees on, on hourly and they've sort of added like, oh, if you want to add this plugin or add on, I could, uh, and I don't know if we were using Branch back then. This was years ago, but, um,

• 2:30:10Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  But, but yeah, it makes a lot of sense that that would need to seep through the rest of the HR, uh, HRIS software suites across the.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Pros and cons in building in a important, but, uh, let's say less hyped category than stable coins and something like AI. Like, do you feel like you have to perform even more than you would because like if you want to get the attention of the capital markets, you really need to prove that you're, um, uh, you know, basically have to prove everything in the numbers.

• 2:30:42Speaker 08

  That's right. Yeah, I think, you know, oftentimes, a lot of this is just education of how big the problem is. Right? Especially when it comes to like attracting and retaining talent. I don't think a lot of people know like how fast these workers churn. So anything you can do to kind of slow down that churn is huge impact, right? To the bottom line of these companies. You know, we've seen companies retain, you know, using a service like Branches, like retain users 60% longer than they normally would, right? So if you think about everything that goes into getting a new worker on, onboarding them, that's a huge cost.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are the key features that result in lower churn, higher retention?

• 2:31:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with this idea of just really improving workers' cash flow at the end of the day. Right? So if you look at the industries we work in, especially as of late, more of these 1099 industries, cash flow is huge for them, right? It's the difference between them going out and using that to go earn more money, right? Uber drivers putting gas in their car to go out there and drive.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, so if there's two, if there's two competing platforms where someone could go to work, one's going to pay them every two weeks, one's going to pay them every single day, they were more likely to go and stick around or stay or choose the one that's paying them on a daily basis, essentially.

• 2:31:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's becoming table stakes, right? I think a lot of this was driven by like gig economy, the Ubers of the world. We're seeing this now across W2 workforces as well, right? Traditional industries there.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  You mentioned the 1099 trend, or can you get me up to speed? I remember, what, five years ago, there was debate over how Uber, Uber drivers were going to be paid, whether they were contractors or not. Like, what do you mean when you, when you talk about like a 1099 workforce? Like, what are some examples of that?

• 2:32:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think there's a, you know, I think a lot of the headlines focus around sort of ride sharing and the Ubers of the world. But like, we're seeing 1099 workforces rise, even industries like healthcare, right? We work with some of the largest nurse marketplaces out there, where nurses are turning to these platforms to supplement their income, pick up additional shifts on their off-hours, right? The other big trend we see is the rise of like the solopreneur, right? You're an individual that wants to start their own business and like, what are the tools and out there that really help you grow?

• 2:33:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, which brings me to my other thing. You know, one thing we announced too is that last week we announced that Stripe will be embedded into their Connect platform, right? So now if you're a marketplace or platform in Stripe, you can get up and running with a digital wallet, a debit card instantly from the Stripe system.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Okay. So yeah, give me an example of a customer or company that would wind up using branch through Stripe.

• 2:33:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, let's say, I mean, obviously the marketplace example makes sense to the Uber's involved. I'll give you maybe a like a mind body, right? There's a lot of, uh, they service a lot of like salons. Uh, oftentimes they're independent contractors working for these salons and they want to get them paid faster.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:54Speaker 08

  Right? So they can kind of now offer this as a branded solution to their independent contractors.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  And so if I'm in this hair salon, hair salon example, I imagine that I have some sort of like general W two focused payroll system set up for like the corporate employees. But is there an advantage to having the money sort of stay within the Stripe ecosystem and then get 1099 to the contractors that I'm paying? Because I don't have to move the money around or something like, is that it?

• 2:34:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's it. Yeah. I mean, addition to just like minimal API lift, right? The other is like no pre-funding, like Stripe has the money and so we can move that money right there. So it's not like you're having to come up with a capital, pre-fund it, send it in an Asra account and use that working.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Okay. So you're like in this, in this example, like a customer comes in, they pay, it's processed on Stripe rails. And so the money's right there. So it's much easier to move directly into the bank account of the, of, of, of the worker who provided the service all in the same day. So we're just sort of squeezing days out of the working capital budget as much as possible.

• 2:35:01Speaker 08

  That's right. And I think for the work themselves, right, it becomes like a financial hub for them, right? As a solopreneur, you're starting out, we've offered, you know, addition to just like fee-free banking and there's like cash back rewards that are very relevant to workplace expenses. I mean, Uber drivers are getting up to like 10% cash back on gas in certain cases, which is huge.

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is a big piece of, basically, are you seeing any acceleration like form filling and regulatory filings alongside 1099s? And the workers actually onboarding, is that like a point of friction or something that you've been working on like improving?

• 2:35:39Speaker 08

  That's right. Yeah. You know, the other announcement we had was that we did end-to-end tax filing capabilities for 1099 workers, right? So in addition to like faster payments, I think another critical infrastructure needed is like collecting W9s, IRS verifications, earnings trackings, right? Just all in a seamless experience.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress. Great to meet and thanks so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:36:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally meet.

• 2:36:03Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  We have some more stories that we will go through tomorrow. Is there anything that you want to close with, Jordy?

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  We need to get to the bottom of Sitrini's.

• 2:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Analyst on from straight.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  We're also going to try and get someone from Sitrini on the show to break it down because it is a crazy story. And I don't think we can do it justice with just, you know, a few random posts. Sitrini analyst number three got picked up by the CID, the Gulf CIA, because of the tweets about him. So I think everyone needs to be careful talking about Sitrini analyst number three. Based 16Z says, Hunter S. Sitrini, number three.

• 2:36:51Jordi Hays?

  Last post from Francis. He says, I think the next LinkedIn post I read about the TVPN acquisition might finally reveal the future of media. Just need to find one more.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  That's true. There was one more post that was good. There were so many good posts. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  And Nate, Nate, you with, with, with an absolute banger and a place that we will end it. He says, hear me out. TVPN for sports. They're very well, could be something here.

• 2:37:19John Coogan?

  And I liked it and I got screenshotted because it's official. They're very well, could be something there. Well, get out there, build something. Maybe go treat yourself to the largest buzz ball that has ever been built. It weighs 3,000 pounds. It opens up as a lemonade stand capable of holding 17,000 drinks, which will be served around the United States. That's a good way to.

• 2:37:42Jordi Hays?

  TVPN, the only place you can get technology coverage and

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Buzz ball coverage.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Hard hitting buzz ball.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  In the Lord.

• 2:37:50Jordi Hays?

  Analysis.

• 2:37:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpn.com and we'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye.