AI Is Coming for Your Memes, Axios NPM Package Compromised, Claude Code Source Code Leak | Alex Pruden, Qasar Younis, Sebastian Mallaby, Forrest Heath, Dino Mavrookas, Will Ahmed, Jannick Malling, Ryan Daniels, Chris Yu

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:47) - AI Is Coming for Your Memes (11:42) - Axios NPM Package Compromised (23:17) - Claude Code Source Code Leak (34:36) - Google: Quantum Threat to Crypto is Real (42:16) - Timeline Reactions (57:57) - Alex Pruden, a former Army Green Beret and Stanford graduate, is the CEO and co-founder of Project Eleven, a company dedicated to securing digital assets against emerging quantum computing threats. He discusses the urgency of addressing vulnerabilities in blockchain cryptography, emphasizing that recent advancements in quantum computing have significantly lowered the threshold for potential attacks on systems like Bitcoin. Pruden highlights the need for proactive measures to transition to quantum-resistant cryptographic standards to safeguard the future of decentralized networks. (01:16:37) - Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition, discusses the company's $15 billion valuation and its mission to integrate AI into physical machines across various industries. He highlights a recent partnership with LG Innotek to develop cost-effective self-driving technologies, emphasizing the shift from research to engineering in autonomous systems. Younis also notes the importance of shared learning across sectors like mining and trucking to enhance AI models, and underscores the company's capital efficiency and strategic approach to scaling AI solutions in the physical world. (01:31:51) - Sebastian Mallaby, an English journalist and author, is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. In his conversation, he discusses his latest book, "The Infinity Machine," which explores the life of Demis Hassabis and the development of artificial intelligence at DeepMind. Mallaby shares insights into his research process, including extensive interviews with Hassabis, and reflects on the rapid advancements in AI and their broader implications. (02:02:30) - Forrest Heath, founder of Somos, discusses his journey from dropping out of high school and moving to Medellín, Colombia, to building a company that provides high-speed, low-cost internet infrastructure in Latin America. He explains how Somos constructs its own infrastructure, including nationwide backbones and custom Wi-Fi routers, to deliver gigabit connections at affordable prices. Heath also highlights the potential for Latin America to leapfrog traditional telecom systems, positioning the region at the forefront of internet infrastructure development. (02:12:46) - Dino Mavrookas, co-founder and CEO of Saronic Technologies, discusses the company's recent $1.75 billion financing round, emphasizing plans to accelerate production and delivery of autonomous surface vessels to the U. S. and its allies. He highlights the development of the 180-foot unmanned ship, Marauder, and the Corsair platform, with production already in the thousands. Mavrookas also outlines intentions to invest billions in new shipyards, aiming to revitalize the U. S. shipbuilding industry and create thousands of jobs. (02:20:29) - Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WHOOP, discusses the company's recent $575 million Series G financing round, highlighting the addition of investors like LeBron James and Cristiano Ronaldo. He emphasizes WHOOP's expansion into 60 markets, its evolution into a comprehensive health platform with medical-grade technology, and plans to enhance brand awareness through increased marketing efforts. Ahmed also outlines the company's commitment to advancing product accuracy and functionality, aiming to make the device smaller and smarter while integrating more health monitoring capabilities. (02:31:49) - Jannick Malling, co-founder and co-CEO of Public.com, discusses the launch of AI Agents for investing, a feature that allows users to automate portfolio strategies directly within the Public app. These AI Agents can monitor markets, move funds, and execute trades based on user-defined instructions, enhancing the investing experience by shifting from manual order entries to intent-based automation. (02:43:21) - Ryan Daniels, founder of Crosby, a law firm integrating advanced AI technologies, discusses the firm's recent $60 million Series B funding and achieving over $1 billion in client contracts. He highlights the firm's strategy of employing AI agents to handle entire legal tasks end-to-end, emphasizing the importance of combining technological advancements with human expertise to enhance legal services. Daniels also addresses the evolving role of lawyers in the age of AI, underscoring the need for legal professionals to focus on client interactions and effectively collaborate with engineers to develop better legal technologies. (02:52:31) - Chris Yu, co-founder and president of Also, discusses the company's mission to electrify small form-factor vehicles, such as e-bikes and pedal quads, by applying the Rivian or Tesla playbook to these smaller modes of transportation. He highlights partnerships with Amazon and DoorDash to deploy these vehicles, emphasizing their suitability for dense urban environments and the potential for autonomy. Yu also elaborates on the collaborative relationship with Rivian, sharing technical architectures and commodities like battery cells, while adopting a contract manufacturing model for assembly to accommodate the unique needs of smaller-scale products. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://v...

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Tuesday, March 31st, end of Q1 2026.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Boy.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  We're live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  I got a new sound cue. I know you were pulling for me.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Dangerous.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  I got three now.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  Dangerous.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  I got three now. Watch out. I'm not going to go too crazy. I'm not going to overdo it. We've been there. We learned, we changed, we evolved, we became better as people, as did our linear lineup. We have a banger show. Let's pull it up. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Alex Pruden, coming in from Project Eleven, going to be talking about Google's quantum news.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  The crypto quantum crash. Say that three times fast.

• 0:53Jordi Hays?

  Crypto quantum crash. Then we have Cacer from Applied Intuition.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Very excited to catch up with him, an absolute dog. But then we have Sebastian Malabai.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Releasing his new book, The Infinity Machine, an insider account of deep mind.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Tyler's got it pulled up right there.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Super intelligence.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  I'm a huge fan of Sebastian Malabai. You might have read More Money Than God. You might have read The Power Law, The History of Silicon Valley. It's the definitive account of how venture capital became what it is today. Highly recommend that book. This is a very interesting departure from that because it focuses on a single person. It's biography, not a history of an entire industry, but very excited to talk to Sebastian Malabai.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  And then we have Forrest from Somos, raising a $40 million round.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Then Dino from Saronic, Will from Whoop, Jannick from Public, Ryan from Crosby, and Chris Yu, who's working on a spin out from Rivian.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Ooh, very exciting.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Already has a billion dollar valuation.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  There we go. Well. Friend of the show, our president here at TVPN, Dylan Eberscotto,

• 1:56John Coogan?

  headed to the TVPN newsletter, which you can sign up for at TVPN.com, and wrote a fantastic essay summarizing a trend that we've been discussing with him around how AI is changing meme making. And I found it very interesting. I'm glad that he wrote this piece. And so we'll read through this and then discuss it, debate it, and see where we can take it further. And then obviously-

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  Dylan's from Long Island, New York, so John is gonna be-

• 2:21John Coogan?

  I'm gonna do it in a Dylan Eberscotto impression of his voice. Memes are changing. That became abundantly clear during the Oscars a few weeks ago, when Conan tried to create a new Leonardo DiCaprio meme.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know what accent that was.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  That's just like UFC announcer, to go alongside the classic Leo memes. In doing so, especially by using TFW, That Feeling When, and the blocky white font that defined early internet memes, he inadvertently demonstrated that the meme templates millennials grew up with have become increasingly stale, even cringe. It's a good point. Instead, AI-generated videos are the new meme template that every network and studio should be focusing their launches on. Look at what happened, look at what's happening with the Harry Potter reboot. When the trailer first dropped, the reaction to the new Snape, played by Ghanaian, Ghanaian, Ghanaian, sorry, he's from Ghana, Ghanaian,

• 3:20John Coogan?

  English actor Papa Isidu was predictably and unfortunately negative. According to the LA Times, he received death threats since being cast in the new role. But after a few incredibly viral and well-produced AI videos, one, an original Snape versus Black Snape MMA match, and another AI-generated rap video, and another Drip Warts, The School of Drip, the narrative has started to shift. Have you seen any of these? I think I've seen Drip Warts, but can we pull up the original, the quote-unquote "original Snape" versus Black Snape MMA match? Because I have not seen this one, and I think it is illustrative of what- Dylan is talking about here Snape v Snape in the UFC ring. While we pull that up, let me tell

• 4:05John Coogan?

  you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps used to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So let's take a look at Snape v Snape in the UFC ring. Any luck?

• 4:22Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. I just dropped it in.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Cool. And we have, we have a few others here. The videos have amassed tens of millions of views and on Dylan's timeline at least, sentiment around both the character and the reboot has been a complete 180. Here we go. Really photorealistic.

• 4:41John Coogan?

  Is this, does this, are there any red flags here as a UFC enjoyer? Does this feel like a proper UFC?

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  Actual video quality is insane.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  So bulky? Yeah, the video quality is insane.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but old Snape won.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Uh, in the fight?

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Okay. But I think it just, I, okay, wait, how, how, how do you know that? Um, I think, uh, it just sort of like makes the characters more entertaining, more fun, shows you that this is just creativity at the end of the day. This is just like, you should not be so up in arms about something that's a movie. Like it's entertainment and here's some more entertainment. And so you're, you're adding entertainment to the discussion and people are enjoying that. Uh, there's another AI generated rap video about the new Snape, uh, which we can pull up a little bit of here.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, AI meme videos are inherently viral and driving real awareness in a way traditional memes no longer can, not just because they're novel and more entertaining, but because a single AI clip can travel further and compound harder than traditional meme formats and social feeds that now heavily favor video. This suggests, yeah, that's interesting. On, on X, it's still very easy for an image to go viral, but if you think about, you know, Instagram, YouTube, like a standalone image just can no longer actually get that escape velocity.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, uh, what about Dripped Out Pope? Remember that?

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a little bit, but but people are just spending so much time in the in the short form feeds. And it can go in there, but they're certainly.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess even some of the the dripped out Pope or what was it? Was it Balenciaga Pope? I don't remember what the name was.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Dylan says, this suggests a new playbook for marketers, especially in entertainment. If you're about to drop a trailer for a new movie or show, you need to be thinking about your rage bait character, the one people will latch on to remix with AI and build around. Conan tried to force a Leo meme down our throats at the Oscars. Didn't see that because I was sleeping, but this might have worked 12 years ago. That playbook is over today and rage fans and communities will, if you're successful, take your characters or moments and turn them into something much bigger, entire cinematic universes.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just very impressed by the the overall quality of of those outputs.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  The Oscar selfie, I remember this. This I think became the most liked image on Twitter at the time in 2014, briefly. That image, this is the canonical clout bomb. If you're a fan of Bradley Cooper, you like it. If you're a fan of Meryl Streep, you like it. You're a fan of Brad Pitt, you like it. And so you're you're amplifying all of it. The ultimate collab post. And this has become a format that's been used time and time again. It's it's effective. We we did a little bit of it at the Super Bowl. It's fun. It works. But now the future is is AI. Let's pull up the the drip warts school of drip video. I want to watch this one because I saw a clip of this. I didn't see the whole thing. Let's see if we can play this.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  That's Harry Potter. Are you really Harry Potter, my G? Shh.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  Type shit, type shit. Type shit, type shit. None of that, none of that, broski. We're all here on the Maybach Express for one reason and one reason only, and that's to go to drip warts, the school of drip.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  The Maybach pulling the train is pretty good.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  And there's the new Snape character. So yes, very effective. I was reflecting on this and thinking about how it's not just AI videos that are unlocked as the new meme format. Like 20 years ago, video editing was extremely difficult. Like you had to do it on a desktop. You had to have a piece of software that probably cost a lot of money. It was not widely accessible. And so these image makers, image memes, we were, I was talking to Brandon about this. Like Good Guy Greg was one of these, or like the Insanity Wolf. And it would just be like a picture, one image of a duck. And the duck would be on sort of like a solid colored background.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  And that would be the template. And then somebody would put white text with black, like block text, impact font on the top and the bottom. And that was like the image meme. And that was accessible in the sense that it could be like generated on MS Paint. It was free to generate it, basically. Then we got video editing, you know, cap cut Instagram reels as an editor called edits. And all of a sudden it became easy for someone to take a vibe reel and put different text over it. I send you a bunch of these where I'll find some crazy vibe reel and I'll just recontextualize it with a new, yeah, you're laughing. New caption, basically. And so the classic one is like those four, those four jets in the new Top Gun.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  And it's like when, when you and the boys all drive somewhere in separate cars or something like that, you know, is an example. But now you can generate, you know, full AI videos that can express the joke of the meme. And I think the next version of this is like software as a meme, S A A M, something like that. And we've been experimenting that with this, with the simulators. There's TB, TBPN simulator, Jeremy Gaffon simulator, there are more simulators coming. And all of a sudden, we, you know, the idea of building a video game, becoming a video game studio was like an impossible. Possible challenge, it would be months and months of time, maybe millions of dollars to get anything reasonable. So you had to be commercial about it. You could not do it as a comedy bit.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  But now you can, or it's getting closer. Certainly, our organization is set up to where we can turn Ben or Tyler loose for a few weeks and say, yeah, like, you know, work on this vibe coding project for a few days, a few weeks, like, it's okay. You don't have a lot of other responsibilities that are going to creep in. But but increasingly, it's going to be more and more, just like a few prompts on your phone to get the piece of software that is that meme. And you can think about the Gmail suite from Riley Walls as another software as a meme moment, where he's making a commentary on the Jeffrey Epstein saga and all of that.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  But he's instantiating the humor, the commentary in a piece of software that actually works. Although, of course, the feature set is a little bit boiled down from the full Google suite. But it get, but the UI is familiar and the UI is part of the joke. And so I think that's a little bit of where this goes. Well, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And let me tell you about Labelbox. Oops, sorry. Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So there is a whole bunch of hack news going on. We're in a very weird week in terms of the news cycle because it's spring break.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  And so a lot of executives of big tech companies are like, don't launch while my kids are out of school and we're going on vacation. I think that I actually think this is my real theory. So we're in a little bit of a slow news week and you can see that like the journal is covering announcements that happened last week. They're talking about Sora, they're talking about Disney, they're talking about, you know, things that that are more like reflective in stratechery. Ben Thompson has a sort of a 50 year retrospective on Apple. It's not driven by a news item, like, it's not like Apple launched a new product this week. So Ben Thompson is taking a step back and reflecting, it's a great piece, but. It's not exactly news driven because there isn't that much news coming from big tech companies,

• 12:31John Coogan?

  coming from the labs, et cetera. But there are a ton of crazy hacks, starting with Axios. There is an active supply chain attack on Axios, one of NPM's most depended on packages. So if you have been vibe coding, Axios is a, is a, a package that helps with HTTP requests. So it gets sucked into all sorts of different projects. And if you upgrade it to the latest version, you basically got a virus with that. And if that's running in the cloud, it's building, and that's probably maybe bad because it could steal API keys or SSH keys. It could do a lot of things. It could wreak havoc on your system. Also, if you built this piece of software and

• 13:12John Coogan?

  you included the contaminated Axios installer or package locally, it could potentially weasel its way out of your local environment and get onto your desktop. It's a, it's a virus. So be careful out there. And I'm sure people will be responding. The recommendation from Feroz, who sort of broke the news over at Socket Security, is that if you use Axios, pin your version immediately and audit your lock files. Do not upgrade. Socket Analysis confirmed that this was malware. Plain Crypto JS is an obfuscated dropper loader that de-obfuscates embedded payloads

• 13:52John Coogan?

  and operational strings at runtime, dynamically loads FS, OS, and Exec Sync to evade static analysis, executes decoded shell, shell commands, stages and copies payload files into OS temp, and Windows programmed data directories, deletes and renames artifacts post-execution to destroy forensic evidence. So, very risky.

• 14:14Speaker 04

  I would say like, if you have installed this, you should just like freak out, basically.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Should, and, and if you break your computer, that's like the first thing you should do. Just like try to slam it over your-

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, take the computer, throw it in the lake. Throw it in the ocean.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  That's how you should start. I concur.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  I mean, practical, yeah. I mean, there is going to be some sort of like power law response here where of the people that are victims of the attack, they will go after the most vulnerable with the highest like ransomware potential. And I think we're seeing that with one company, I believe Merckor was targeted, but I don't know if that's because of this.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  But I don't believe, was that, yeah, my understanding is that, yeah, the crazy thing is you have, you have this like Claude code leak that

• 15:00John Coogan?

  That was completely separate, had nothing to do with Axios.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Even though, even though I do believe they use Axios in Claude Code.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  I saw something on that.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  And you have the Merckor leak, which is

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Well, it's not a leak, it's ransom.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  It's a ransomware.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Someone stole some data.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they stole a bunch of data and now they're trying to, you know, get bids on it. We'll get to that in a little bit.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  And then there's, there's this Axios supply chain attack.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  A niche had a little bit more context. He said, "A tiny piece of code called Axios runs inside almost every app on your phone and every website you visit. Developers download it 100 million times a week. A few hours ago, someone poisoned it with malware that hands an attacker full control of your computer. If you've never heard of Axios, that's normal. It does one boring but important job. It lets apps talk to the internet. When a website pulls up your feed or an online checkout processes your card, Axios is probably doing the work underneath. Over 173,000 other code packages plug into it. It's everywhere." "The attacker stole a lead developer's login for NPM. Think of it as an app store, but for code that programmers use. Once inside, they swapped the developer's email to an autonomous Proton mail account and uploaded the poisoned version by hand. That jumped

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  past every security check the project normally runs before new code goes live. And this was not a rush job. The stackers staged the malware at least 18 hours before pulling the trigger. They built separate versions for Windows, Mac, and Linux. They poisoned both the current version and an older one within 39 minutes of each other, casting the widest net possible. Once the malware Ran on a machine, it deleted itself to cover its tracks. The trick was smart, they never touched a single line of code inside Axios itself. Instead, they tucked in a fake add-on called Plain Crypto JS, built to pass as a well-known trusted library. It copied the real library's description and author info, so nothing looked off at a glance. When a developer installed Axios, this fake package quietly ran the malware on its own.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  When a smaller package called UAPARSERJS got hijacked back in 2021, with about 8 million weekly downloads, the security world treated it like a four-alarm fire. Axios has 100 million, over 12x the exposure, with 173,000 packages depending on it. Socket, the security firm that flagged this, caught it in about 6 minutes. That's fast, but 6 minutes is still plenty of time for automated systems at companies everywhere to pull and install the bad version before anyone can react. If you or your team run Axios, freak TF out. Now, lock your version to 1.14.0. Change every password, API key, and access token on any machine that installed the compromised update,

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  and check your network logs for connections to sfrclak.com or the IP address 142.11.206.73. Karpathy had some context if you want to go through this, Sean.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  I will, but first I'll tell everyone a very important message from CrowdStrike, which is super relevant today. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And I'll also tell everyone about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, Andre Karpathy said, "New supply chain attack, this time for NPM Axios. The most popular HTTP client library with 300 million weekly downloads." That's a lot. Scanning my system. Andre Karpathy says he found a use imported from Google Workspace/CLI from a few days ago when I was experimenting with Gmail, Gcal CLI.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  The installed version luckily resolved to the previous version, the unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if he did this earlier today, the code would have resolved, everything would have updated, and he would have been pwned. It is possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings, e.g. release age constraints, or containers, or etc. But I think ultimately, the defaults of package management projects, PIP, NPM, etc. have to change so that a single injection, usually luckily fairly temporary in nature due to security scanning, does not spread through users at random and at scale via unpinned dependencies.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  So, very, very crazy, crazy story. Scott Wu said that Devon Review caught the Axios supply chain attack for multiple cognition customers before the attack was publicly known. These attacks will be 10x more frequent in the age of AI. It is critical that repo maintainers start using AI for defense as well. Showing one example below where Devon Review caught the attack within an hour of its release. Text minorly edited for anonymization. So, I was debating this with Tyler earlier. The question is like, how does this update diffusion of coding agents, diffusion of vibe coding?

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Is this, I was sort of saying, is this bullish for cursor, windsurf, you know, code readers? Because you would see an organization that said, hey, we were having a great time vibe coding, but going forward, we have a standard in this organization that we're going to have more humans in the loop? Does this make people be more inclined to put humans deeper into the situation? Tyler's counterpoint, I'll let you explain how you were saying that maybe this is actually bullish for just more token generation, more code gen.

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, clearly like there just needs to be more code review, right? The package was still seen within seven minutes by an automated system, right?

• 20:37John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  So like, yeah, I think people will just like, there's gonna be much more of an emphasis like, okay, use a coding agent to write the code, you also use a coding agent to review the code every time. Like, right now, that's kind of a thing you do, maybe later. If you're in a big team, you have code review, but if you're just doing it solo, maybe you don't do as much code review, right?

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  But it just becomes more embedded within the agents, right? You talk to Codex, you talk to Claude Code. There's already like every single.

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's bullish overall for cybersecurity. Like, I think every cybersecurity company will probably do well. People are on edge already. And even though this type of attack has happened for years, long before like the popularity of vibe coding, it just feels like there's a bunch of new solutions that are needed. The kind of incumbent cybersecurity players will do well. They're going to release a lot of new products. I think the question that I have is like, why seven minutes, right?

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  Like if.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Why not check it before it's merged in in the first place?

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Or just like, you know, these are machines. So theoretically, they can be constantly monitoring versus like.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. And, and the question is, I, I, we're going to be digging into this story more over the next few days, but I'm, I'm interested to know, like, it's founded seven minutes. When is it actually rolled back? If you look at 300 million weekly downloads, like clearly there are people that were downloading it at that moment in time at all seven of those minutes. There's probably like thousands of downloads, if not, you know, tens of thousands. Just doing like a rough ballpark on what seven minutes means over a week of 300 million per week. But the question is, like, how quickly was it rolled back? So is it only if you're in that seven minutes? Or was it, it was discovered in seven minutes and then it took them another 20 minutes to, to, to roll it back and stop serving the contaminated

• 22:29John Coogan?

  package? Understanding the scope of this, because it's very clear that as Andre Karpathy explained, like, he was actively using it every single day and yet was not caught in that seven minute window. And so he was clean. And, and understanding the scope and scale of the impact is very much determined by how many, just, just how, just, just how broad and how many installs happened during the contamination. Anyway, Will Brown has a good take. He says, I hope someone at Axios is reporting on this. And I completely agree. It's going to be, it's going to be confusing when they do. Anyway, let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent

• 23:13John Coogan?

  real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. So, moving on.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last night.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  More hacks, more leaks. What's going on?

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Last night, Claude Code, source code was leaked via MapFile and NPM Registry. There's just a link to.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Wait, someone's just actually, do not click a link. If somebody ever says, hey, I got some really great source code here, just click this link, probably don't click it, let other people screenshot it. There's plenty of meta-analysis over here. Seems messy, seems unfortunate. Heart goes out to the folks who are dealing with the situation. At the same time, Codex is open source, it's not the end of the world, but it did reveal a bunch of things about the roadmap and also some of the internal April Fools. That is the worst part. We love a secret surprise April Fools joke. I love a good joke and nothing spoils a joke like hearing about it a day early.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  But much more importantly, there are lots of, there are lots of other critiques of the way Claude code is implemented. What are the bad words?

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think this, I don't think this hurts their business at all.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  No.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  Because people are using Claude code to make other products.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  And then also having to take basically a fork of Claude code, maintain that, try to be shipping features against it, which is, again, I think it's, it's not, seems to not be legal at all to just fork the codebase just because it's out there.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, you can't just steal this of your business.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  People are converting it into other languages and maybe there's some argument there, but, but still, I don't think this hurts their business at all.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Understand some of the secrets, what's special, but at the end of the day, all of these tools, especially something like Claude code that's so new, like it's more of like the process.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  It's more bad for, for the overall brand of vibe coding.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, it's rough.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and the, you know, the, the irony here is that every time Anthropic has released any feature related to cybersecurity, all the big cyber companies have been selling off, you know, tens of billions of dollars.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The question of like, yeah, does this build trust in like using that code?

• 25:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so overall, overall, it, it hurts some trust, but, but again, you know, very obviously going to get through this.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, so. The how it started, how it's going is of course landing like a ton of bricks. In the last 30 days, 100% of the contributions to Claude Code were written by Claude Code. And the how it's going is that it leaked the source code, which is not what you want to have happen.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Angel says Mythos is so good at security that Claude Code's source code got leaked.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Okay, let's, I don't know, should I, this is like, you know, you didn't get to watch the Super Bowl, you have it DVR'd at home, do you want spoilers? Should we review the April Fools joke? Or should we leave it unspoiled? So that we can enjoy it tomorrow?

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's not, it's not, it's cool, it's very cool.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  You've already read it?

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  I read through it. But it's not, it's not to my, I don't think we're getting, I don't think we're getting a knee slopper out of it. But it's very, it's very cool. I think it'll be cute.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Okay, well, then we can move on. What else, what else did we learn? Tukey summed it up here. Do you understand what just happened at Anthropic? Someone on their team ran a production build of Claude Code, the compiler generated a dot map file, which is literally a blueprint that reverses the entire codebase back to its original source. And then they published it straight to NPM for the whole world to download. And it really does show you how fast the NPM downloads, like, there are people that are downloading it every single minute. And so, even if it's only up there for a minute, someone's gonna get it. And then all they need to do is send it to somebody, zip it, and post a link on X and it goes viral. It's like locking every door in your house, installing cameras, hiring armed guards, then accidentally uploading your floor plans to Google Maps.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Does that matter? No, that's a bad analogy. I don't like that analogy. Because floor plans are not why I lock every door in my house, I install cameras, I hire armed guards.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Aren't floor plans public on like Zillow?

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Oftentimes.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  I would say we can probably skip over this. John, if you scroll down, this account just kind of posts like the same format every single time. So we can skip the.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  If there's a red alert emoji, you got my attention.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's go over to Lisan Alga.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  A few takeaways from the Claude Code leak. Anthropic is actively using Mythos for development. They are already at Capybara V8. We learned last week that Capybaras are huge, but can be deadly.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  In the right context, Cappy Barra still has this.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  The foreshadowing is crazy. The foreshadowing is crazy. We were talking about how the Faustian bargain that is getting up a Cappy Barra as a pet seems so cute, but it can bite you. And it seems like that might be what happened.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Cappy Barra has 1 million token context window and fast mode.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  Cool. Numbat is another interesting code name tagged with at model launch. Remove this section when we launch Numbat. Fennec seems to be the Fennec Fox. Fennec Fox is very cute, but also not a domesticated animal. How about we get some golden retriever code names? How about Big Fluffy Poodle? That's a good code name for your, for your, for your animal themed AI model. Anyway, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference at scale from 1GB to hundreds of thousands.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Arvid says, hot take, Anthropic leaked Claude code intentionally to get a Nerdosphere code review. It would have never gotten if they had just open sourced it.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Oh, that's actually true. Way more attention.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  You don't leak your entire feature roadmap and you don't do, I mean, it's, it's, it's funny and I'm sure they'll make the most of this.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  This is 4D chess right here.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  But I'm not seeing the 4D chess.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  I'm seeing the 4D chess now. I'm convinced. This is, I mean, we're in completely uncharted territory for marketing stunts and pre-releases and sneaky footage that is, goes viral and maybe was planted. You don't know. And it's like some leaked account. Like, I don't know. I think everything's, I think the gloves are off. Everything's on the table. This could be an April Fool's joke. This could be a stunt to draw, to drive attention to an open source move. Although Tyler, you said that Dario is not a fan of open source at all, right? He's like against it unilaterally.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't want to do open source.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  I feel like, isn't there some steel man there where, where if you open source like? I don't know, like, like Opus 2 or something that's like really old. It's entirely commoditized in the research community. So all of those secrets that went into like making Opus 2 good, those have been commoditized. They've been discussed at the house parties in SF. The researchers have moved from one place to another. So everyone knows these, they're implemented. They're available as open source, but by, by open sourcing your model, you can share with more of like the up and coming academic community. Like if, if I'm a, if I'm a computer scientist.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, but if all the research is already commoditized.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess you could just use the other ones. It doesn't really have a benefit, maybe.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So has any, has anyone at Anthropic, has anyone at Anthropic commented on this at all?

• 30:50John Coogan?

  I haven't seen anything.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  Anyone.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  What is undercover mode?

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  That is a way to contribute to projects without letting people know that you're using Claude code.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  That's a hack.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Gurgly over at Pragmatic Engineer says this, Gurgie, sorry. This is either brilliant or scary. Anthropic accidentally leaked the source code of Claude code, which is closed source. Repo sharing the source are taken down with the MCA. But this repo rewrote the code using Python. And so it violates no copyright and cannot be taken down.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Okay. And there's a warning. Do not store the code, even though it has leaked. Do not store it because you might get DMCA'd. According to the primeogen, the last time Anthropic, in their infinite PhD level wisdom, leaked their own source code, February 25th. That happened. I, I missed that entirely. They DCA'd all repos that had their code. Careful storing the code because Anthropic will have no mercy. 40,000 users forked it, so maybe un-fork it. If you, if you did that, because it sounds like you might get a legal letter. Again, a DMCA is not, is not like an actual lawsuit.

• 32:04Jordi Hays?

  Un-fork, un-fork.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  And people, of course, making a joke that the Codex source code has been leaked in full here and they're linking to the GitHub because Codex is open source, which is cool. I don't know. It's interesting. And more and more people are building their own harnesses. There was some interesting data that Opus performs extremely well, better than in Clog Code in cursor on some benchmarks. And so there is this new paradigm of like, you know, how can you add different value when you're building a harness? So what else?

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes, certainly, there's plenty of other companies that are building harnesses and they're going to be able to dig through this and get some benefit, be able to improve their products. That's not great, but at the same time, Codex has already, the source code is already open source.

• 32:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  And so that's not, that hasn't been hurting Codex's progress and growth. So, end of the day, ultimately, I would say, I'm assuming very embarrassing for the individual that ultimately contributed to this, but they will get past it.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Well, we will put the blame squarely on the AI model so they can take it. DAX is getting line of code mogged, LOC mogged, because Clog Code open source is, Clog Code source is 512 lines of code, whereas Open Code, his project, is only 118 lines. And so he's got to get those numbers up.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  And GT mogs everyone with over 50 billion lines of code.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  He doesn't have 50 billion lines of code. GT, Gary Tan will be coming on the show hopefully this week and we will get the full scoop on how he's using Gstack and other models, which should be fun. Before we move on, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, Surferless Vector and Full Text Search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Vibe.co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies pick channels, advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  Zach says NDAs are a great way to keep your corporate secrets safe from one or two beers, but not three.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  Why is there a community note on this? There's, oh, this joke was posted before on Instagram. It's a little joke theft. Interesting.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Got him.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Interesting. But it's a good joke and I'm glad that he brought it over to X where we could enjoy it. Along with 36.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  The original, the original post was an NDA is a lock and three beers is a key.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  Okay, well, yeah, he toned it down for the, for the timeline. Anyway, there is news out of, out of Google. A Google paper warns that, warns crypto on quantum risk ahead of 2029 timeline. So we've heard about the risk of quantum computing affecting the cryptocurrency industry, crypto projects broadly. There is some new research out of Google that provides some more perspective. So, Google researchers have warned that future quantum computers may be able to break some of the cryptography protecting Bitcoin and other digital assets with fewer resources than previously thought, adding urgency to the debate over how the industry should prepare.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  The researchers did not indicate such a machine exists today, but said new work suggests the computing power needed to carry out that kind of attack may be lower than earlier estimates had suggested. In a Google research blog post, this is from Bloomberg, the researchers said that a future quantum computer could break elliptic curve cryptography, a form of public key encryption used across much of the market. Their latest estimate points to a 20-fold reduction in the quantum computing hardware needed to break what's known as ECDLP 256, a mathematical problem that helps secure crypto wallets and transactions. That does not mean Bitcoin and Ethereum are suddenly exposed, but the researchers in

• 35:56John Coogan?

  the white paper dated Monday said the clearest defense is a shift towards post-quantum cryptography or PQC. I'm sure this will be a hot topic over the next few months. A newer form of security designed to withstand attacks from powerful machines. They also urged the crypto industry to cut avoidable risks. In the meantime, we urge all vulnerable cryptocurrency communities to join the migration to PQC without delay. Google cast the paper as a warning meant to give the industry time to, time to act, not as a prediction of imminent collapse. Last week, the tech giant introduced a timeline to fully migrate its own security systems to post-quantum cryptography by 2029.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Fears around quantum computing as a realistic threat to crypto have swirled for years. In January, Coinbase established an independent advisory board to study what quantum computing could mean for the blockchain. That same month, Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, removed a 10% allocation to Bitcoin from his model portfolio, citing fears that the advent of quantum computing could undermine the token. On Tuesday, Bitcoin shrugged off the news of the Google paper, making the rounds, rising as much as 2.6% to $68,300. I'm not sure where it is today, but Jordi, I'm sure you can pull that up. Even so, the researchers said the time left before such machines arrive still appears longer than the time needed to move public blockchains to post quantum cryptography. However-

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  BTC is currently at 67.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  67, so slightly off of yesterday. A lot of this stuff has been discussed ad nauseam in the crypto community for years. I remember hearing about quantum potentially breaking Bitcoin as far back as 2016.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying you were already in that kind of like post-quantum-

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yes, 100%. I was locked in. No.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  I was aware of it.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  One concern that people in the community have had, that I've seen talked about, is this idea that if you did have a computer powerful enough to crack these encryptions, you would, unless you were like Google and you already had, you know, billions and billions and billions of dollars of cash flow, you wouldn't exactly stand up and say like, hey, I have cracked Bitcoin, because the incentive for a certain team would just be to go around and find these wallets that were maybe, maybe didn't have any activity for a long time and just start cracking those individually. Because if you just stood up and said, hey, I have a quantum computer that is, destroys Bitcoin, the price would go down and then

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  you, the hacker, you know, the hacker wouldn't get any benefit from it.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting. What are quantum stocks doing on this news?

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  Quantum, probably ripping.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  They rip on everything. Sci-quantum, is that one of them?

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Rigetti's up 8%.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Okay, there we go.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Oh, SciQuantum is privately held. There's another one, D-Wave, right? D-Wave, are they public? Yeah, they're up 10% today. But they're down 12% over the past five days. But, and 25% of the last month, and 42% over the last six months. But they're up 88% over the past year. Let's go. D-Wave is a $5 billion company.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's apparently a bull market in Nick on our team's email inbox.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Quantum companies.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Really?

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  That want to come on and talk about.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Well, we do have someone coming on, right? We have Alex Pruden from Project 11 coming on to break it down for us at noon. So Nick Carter was talking about this. He said, "Many are wondering what Google saw that caused them to revise their post-quantum cryptography transition deadline to 2029 this week." It was this, and it's from research.google, research.google, which we will go through. Max the VC says, "Google's basically saying, 'We've cut the quantum resources needed to break Bitcoin's encryption by 20x. We can now break it. We can prove it. We're just not going to tell you how. We've slowed down research to give crypto a chance. You have until 2029 to figure out a solution. Good luck.'"

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Elon chimed in and said, "On the plus side, if you forgot your password, the password to your wallet, it will be accessible in the future."

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Also to everyone else.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, how do property rights, if somebody, if somebody does have a quantum computer and they crack your Bitcoin wallet that you forgot the password to, but you can prove that you owned, and then they get busted for stealing your Bitcoin, you could potentially get it back.

• 40:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you ever really own code?

• 40:33John Coogan?

  I don't know. Nick also said, "And the craziest thing is that the quantum AI, the Google Quantum AI paper, is maybe not even the most concerning quantum paper released today from Project 11." Who's coming on? "Shore's algorithm is possible with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable atomic qubits." So this will be interesting to dig into further.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  The within minutes with the 500,000 physical qubits, Google is now more confident on a 2029 post-quantum transition. Well, speaking of Google, let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, it's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI, more important than ever. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. So, there's a lot of news about this quantum story.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Nick said, "Good morning. Now is not the time to panic. The time to panic is if Bitcoin devs read these two papers and double down on their chosen solution of hoping it goes away, then panic."

• 41:44John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. Dan Schipper says, "The first thing I've seen that could make Bitcoin go to zero or allow competitive coins to catch up." So, other, other, other coins clearly have at least like a very clear like marketing story to tell if they are like the quantum proof or the first to be quantum proof or the most seriously regarded in the quantum proofing race will be interesting. Arianna Simpson chimed in and said, "Except all or most other coins have this problem too." But that is the opportunity that someone can maybe change something. So, the chance that NASA lands on the moon, we were tracking this yesterday, the missions are starting to happen before 2028 on Kalshi is now at 14%.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Before 2027 is at 4.7%. So, they are racing. Of course, this Artemis 2 mission is not boots on the ground on the moon, it is rocketing around the moon. We'll have more about this tomorrow.

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  They're just going to check it out.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  They're going to be gone for 10 days. They're going to be in space for 10 days. And will be, will be very interesting. Brendan Gurrell was doing some deep dives on the technology, the streaming technology, what we really care about here that will be on board, something like 20 cameras, 4K live streams, laser beams to make sure it's low latency.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Super chats.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Should be a lot of fun. Super chats would be good. We got to get a chat going. I'm sure there might actually be, because they usually stream on YouTube, and so I wouldn't be surprised if there is.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  And is it going to be a 24/7? Like perpetual stream that's always on?

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  Even when the astronauts are taking a sleep?

• 43:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Taking a little nap?

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah, it's gonna be funny.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  The VFX artists are gonna be working overtime.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  All the conspiracy theorists are gonna be sitting there watching it very closely and then pausing.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  There was a glitch.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  There, did you see that glitch?

• 43:37John Coogan?

  That was, that was VFX, that was AI. No, this is my mark. I will believe that it's real if I see an astronaut put three fingers in front of their face.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  Because this is the one thing that the AI can't do right now. If you're ever on a Zoom call with someone, you suspect of being fake, a scammer, who said, hey, let's get on Zoom, let's talk about some financial investment opportunity. And you, and it looks like someone you think is the person, but you suspect that it might not be. And they will be able to show you, look, look at the fingers, the fingers are perfect, it's fine, it's fine. That's because this part is not AI, just the face is AI. This is the deep fake stuff that's happening. So what you have to do is you have to ask them to hold up three fingers. They'll be like, yeah, three fingers, this is fine, right? I satisfy the task. You gotta say, no, put the three fingers in front of your face. Because if you put the three fingers in front of your face, the AI gets confused

• 44:32John Coogan?

  and it breaks the deep fake that's happening underneath. So you gotta, you gotta go like this, show some depth of field. Good, you have three fingers in front of the face. This is the trick, this is the only way you'll survive in the, in the future. Be careful out there. Merckor had a breach, this is crazy. The design language for the hacker is very hacker coded. The, the, the hackers that are putting out a bounty created like an image that looks very aesthetic to me. They, the, the design of this, I didn't realize hackers did stuff like this. This is very interesting. But, you know, it's like, you think about the hackers, you don't think about them as like...

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  They're kinda like cosplaying as hackers.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  They are.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  But they have...

• 45:16John Coogan?

  They like adopted like the green, like the green text in the black terminal. It's like they're, they're, they're, they're living the, they, it's, uh, it's like life imitates art. That, that type of thing. Anyway, it seems like a very rough leak, very unclear what's actually happening. There's a whole bunch of different, uh, questions in here. There's a database of candidate profiles, source code, uh, video, all sorts of stuff. Tail scale VPN data, unclear how much of this is real. They could be faking it. I don't know where the comments are, but, um, the risk is that, uh, if there is some sort of Equifax style payout, that could be extremely costly because they have millions of people in their database and they gotta pay everyone 400 bucks.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Like Equifax did, uh, because they have sensitive information, that could be very, very expensive. Well, uh, we have had the Merkle folks on the show, uh, many times and are hoping that they get through this smoothly. And, uh, everyone's

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely brutal. I mean, it's, it sucks, it sucks first and foremost for all the individuals.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Who's PII is now potentially floating out there.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's probably quite bad for their customers.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Who paid for, uh, paid for the, you know, some amount of this data. And now it's just floating out there.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  And then, uh, obviously, you know, unfortunate for the company, but, uh, it's still unclear. I was, uh, looking at Lapsus, which is, uh,

• 46:45John Coogan?

  The hacker group.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Styled as L A P S U S with a money sign.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Classified as by Microsoft as Strawberry Tempest and more recently identified as or a part of Shiny Hunters is an international extortion focused hacker group known for its various cyber attacks against companies and government agencies. The group was active in several countries and has had its members arrested in Brazil and the UK in 2022.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  According to City of London Police, at least two of the members were teenagers. Lapsus uses a variety of attack vectors, including social engineering, MFA, fatigue, SIM swapping, and targeting suppliers. Once the group has gained the credentials to a privileged employee within the target organization, the group then attempts to obtain sensitive data through a variety of means, including using remote desktop tools. Attempts at extortion follow. Initially, the messaging app Telegram has been used for communications to the public, including recruitment and posting sensitive data from their victims. The first major cyber attack attributed to Lapsus was against the Brazilian Health Ministry's computer systems in 2021. Lapsus gained not a variety for a series of cyber attacks against large tech companies, including Microsoft, Nvidia, and Samsung. Following

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  these attacks, City of London Police announced that it had made seven arrests in connection to a police investigation into Lapsus. Although the group had been considered inactive by April 2022, it is believed to have reemerged in September 2022 with a series of data breaches against various large companies through a similar attack vector, including Uber and Rockstar Games, with subsequent arrests again by City of London Police and Brazilian Police. The group appears to have become inactive after September 2022, with members perhaps dispersing to other groups, and a conviction of two British members.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  It's also interesting, because they don't enforce like brand intellectual property around hacker collectives. And so, anyone can pick up the brand and use that, whether or not they're in the organization. It seems very fluid. But, good luck to everyone who's working on the response, and hopefully, a good resolution that is resulting quickly. Let's move on to some good news. We will be having Sebastian Malabai join the show at 12:30 today. But Colossus Magazine published an exclusive chapter from the book, which Tyler has there, the biography of Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind. And he secretly

• 49:12John Coogan?

  built a hedge fund inside of DeepMind, trying to beat Jim Simons. Google shut it down. So, there's this interesting screenshot that Colossus shared. Hassabis, for his part, assembled a secretive hedge fund operation within DeepMind. He recruited a team of 20 researchers to train high-frequency trading algorithms and explored a collaboration with the Wall Street behemoth BlackRock. It was not a project of which Google approved. But Hassabis, a five-time World Games champion at the International Mindsports Olympiad. Sick. Found hoped he'd found another game that he could win. One day I asked about the story of this trading project. I was told that Hassabis wanted to beat Jim Simons, the mathematician

• 49:54John Coogan?

  who founded the wildly successful algorithmic hedge fund Renaissance Technologies. Rentech operated in secret, which Demis loved, my acquaintance explained to me. Did the secret DeepMind trading team make money, I wondered? No, came the answer, because of Google's wariness, it was quietly disbanded. I heard about something, maybe it wasn't this DeepMind team, but

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, but did they rip SIGs?

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Could have been the missing ingredient.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Jim Simons, he also

• 50:19Jordi Hays?

  They had everything.

• 50:20John Coogan?

  Never wears socks and always speeds and just pays the tickets because his, his like risk adjusted value in terms of his opportunity cost is that he should never drive the speed limit, which is sort of a wild move. True, true wild man. I, I heard about the, the potential of a Google hedge fund years ago. I don't know if it was related to DeepMind, though, but just the amount of cash they have on the balance sheet, like they need a trading desk, basically, to move that money around, even if they're just buying treasuries, they need a strategy, Forex, there's so many different operations. And there was a pitch I heard about years ago that they were thinking about, like, should we be more active? We have a lot of information. We have a bunch of great engineers. We should, we could build

• 51:02John Coogan?

  a hedge fund here. But they decided that it was not compatible with like the don't be evil philosophy. It was not core to the mission and that they, you know, at, at some point, there is risk associated with active trading. And so you could potentially blow up. There are certainly plenty of examples of hedge funds that had fantastic teams, but could not stick the landing and wound up, wound up zeroed.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  Sophie says, Google shutting down a DeepMind hedge fund, quit right before they were about to

• 51:31John Coogan?

  Strike diamonds. It really is this meme. They, they probably would have printed, although it's not like the high frequency trading firms are, are not using AI or, or not using, I mean, Jane Street invested in a In a custom server company or custom silicon company, something along those lines, specifically for high-fruency trading. So they have a lot of AI researchers there. And you see this with a lot of labs saying, hey, does anyone from the high-fruency trading industry or quant finance want to come work over here? We can maybe start matching your salary, maybe give you a more interesting project that you can actually talk about, and people will be potentially excited about. I don't know. Anyway.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  BoneGPT, the rapper Eater, shared, "I don't want this part of my brain to grow," which is a quote from this. "So in the weeks after the presentation, the two sides finally converged on a fleshed-out version of the Pichai Plan. Soliman would lead DeepMind's applied side from within Google, while Hesebas would run research as an independent global interest company. For Soliman, this was a triumph. Google had finally signed a complex term sheet granting most of what he wanted. Hesebas was equally pleased. The plan guaranteed him an astronomical $15 billion in Google funding to sustain AGI research over the next decade, and it would put an end to the meetings on corporate structure, which he found screamingly

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  boring. After two years of negotiations, he had hit his limits. 'I don't want this part of my brain to grow,' he often said when asked to get his mind around another legal document."

• 53:06John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. That's a great saying. "I don't want this part of my brain to grow." It's so funny that you're going through two years of negotiation, and they're like, "Okay, you're gonna have so much funding to build AGI. $15 billion." You're like, "Oh, so like a seed round for like a NeoLab? Like, great. Oh, so like one data center from a NeoCloud?" It's like, the numbers have gotten so, so big that $15 billion does not feel like anywhere near enough at this point.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  Colossus, hit me, John.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Tell me about the...

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Elon, Colossus shares, "Elon has spent a decade trying to control an AI lab. He tried to absorb DeepMind into Tesla in 2014, then OpenAI in 2018. When that failed, an intern spoke up. It did not end well."

• 54:10John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay, let's read through this.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  He also tried to control... XAI to some degree.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  Well, doesn't he control?

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, he controls it, but at what cost? Right? All, all seven co-founders.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  Oh, true, true, true. That's what you're referring to. Got it.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, from, from the book, pushing back against Musk's obsession with the race against Google and DeepMind, Brockman added, "It doesn't matter who wins if everyone dies." Musk responded the next morning at 3:52 a.m. He confronted Brockman with a proposal that recalled Pichai's pitch. OpenAI should spin into Tesla. Initially, OpenAI's team could accelerate Tesla's development of autonomous vehicles. Next, it could use the profits from self-driving cars to fund its AGI moonshot. Tesla is the only path that could even hope to hold a candle to Google, Musk declared. Even then, the probability of being a counterweight to Google is small. It just isn't zero. Back in 2014, Musk had Skyped Hasebi's from a closet in LA.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  What a funny, what a funny.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Proposing that Tesla or SpaceX should absorb DeepMind. Almost exactly four years later, the new version of this proposal played into Altman's hands. It proved Musk's power hunger. With little difficulty, Altman now persuaded Brockman and Sutskever to take his side. Together, the three told Musk that OpenAI would not attach itself to Tesla. At an all-hands meeting on the top floor of a converted truck factory that housed OpenAI, Musk announced to the employees that he was quitting the lab scornfully adding that.

• 55:35John Coogan?

  I need Raptors. I need, I need a new Ford Raptor. Potentially every day. We gotta put this lab above.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Inside of a truck factory.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, scornfully adding that OpenAI would have to sprint faster to stay relevant.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  I guess they did.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  I guess.

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, hoping to lure away some researchers, he declared there was a much better chance of building AGI at a strong business like Tesla.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  Showing courage or perhaps just youthful innocence, an intern asked Musk if speed might be reckless from a safety perspective. Besides, wasn't developing AI at a for-profit company like Tesla the same as creating it at a for-profit company like Google? Isn't this going back to what you said you didn't want to do? The intern demanded. "You're a jackass," Musk retorted. Then he stormed out of the meeting.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  That intern?

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Cosgrove.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  No, that intern was Steve Jobs.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Just kidding. That intern was Taylor Swift. It is, it is, my interesting read on this is like, it's, it's crazy that Elon was interested in, in basically buying all of DeepMind, absorbing all of DeepMind, and then four years go by, and he's like, I'm, I still want a lab, I want to absorb all of OpenAI, instead of just incrementally adding to an internal lab at Tesla, just one researcher at a time, like, he was able to-

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he was, they were already working on self-driving.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and he was able to assemble eight co-founders at XAI, of course, like, they wound up leaving, but if you just think about it as like, okay, there's going to be some churn, maybe the churn will be higher even, but if you start the process in 2014, and you're, and you're hiring researchers continuously, and using cash flow from Tesla to fund that, and then, yes, researchers might leave, but then you get new ones, and you're just building that capability, it's like the Supercharger Network, or, you know, Starlink, like, you have to build a team, and, and you have to continually add, but instead, Elon's been in this world where it's always like all or nothing, which is a very odd strategy to me, instead of just like, home-growing it, I don't know, it is just like an interesting,

• 57:42John Coogan?

  it's an interesting strategy, I suppose. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context in beta starting today. And without further ado, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Alex from Project 11 to the TV panel showroom. Alex, how are you doing?

• 58:09Speaker 05

  I'm doing great. It's good to be here, guys.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Is it over, or are we back? What's going on? How bad is it? Tell it to me. Give it to me straight. How long do I have?

• 58:17Speaker 05

  Well, according to Google, you have until 2029.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Okay, that's like forever. That's forever in my mind.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, although maybe not forever. If you think about blockchains, they take a long time to change. Bitcoin's last upgrade took four years, and that's 2029's less than four years away.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that seems really risky. Take us through, like, what actually changed? Because I feel like...

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into that, a little context, we'd love some background on you and Project 11, and then we'll get into all the papers.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, all good. Yeah, so me, I'm a former Army Green Beret. Got out, or I got really interested in Bitcoin, working in the Middle East. Got out, went to tech. Thanks. Nice, nice sound effect. Got out, went to Stanford, and then I got a job working in venture first, then entered the blockchain space. Had a company called Alio, whereas after five years before getting really excited about solving this quantum problem that blockchains face. And so that's what led me to found Project 11. So Project 11, I kind of gave it away. It's all about securing digital assets on blockchains into the post-quantum future, right? So the way I like to frame it is that what quantum computers threaten is the underlying foundation of cryptography that all blockchains are built on, right? So it's that level that we have to fix, and then ultimately, everything on top of that,

• 59:31Speaker 05

  as you guys know from tech, like, there's all kinds of dependencies at each layer of the stack, and we have to rebuild the whole stack, and that's what Project 11's all about.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Just to put it into perspective, when did you found Project 11? You said it was five years. You spent five years at the last company. When did you actually get started on this?

• 59:47Speaker 05

  October 2024, so just over, I guess, almost a year and a half ago.

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  And what was the general dialogue around quantum and the risk to crypto at that time?

• 59:59Speaker 05

  That it wasn't real, that quantum computers were always going to be 20 years away, that, you know, that no one had to pay attention, there were bigger things to worry about. Honestly, I feel like that's slowly changed, and I think today's not just... So there's a paper from Google, there's another paper out of Caltech, both dropped on the same day. Both effectively lowered the bar massively that a quantum computer had to clear to be considered cryptographically relevant to threaten Bitcoin, right? So that was the breakthrough, and I think this is a watershed moment where, really at this point, when Google, the head of the Ethereum Foundation, and a Stanford cryptography professor all pound the table and say, "We cannot wait to migrate anymore," then people are going to start paying attention.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  What actually changed? Because it doesn't seem like the like the number of logical qubits or physical qubits, like that seems to be growing exponentially. But even when you trace out the curve, you're five, 10 years away from what we thought we needed. So is this a new algorithm, a new stack of code? Or is it new math? Like, what changed that we got this 20x increase in efficiency in terms of cryptography breaking via quantum computers?

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, a couple of things. So first off, these two papers are not necessarily about a quantum computer that's bigger or more capable, right? So this is they're about what is what it takes to break cryptography, right? And so what changed? So one of the things that changed was that, interestingly, physicists and, you know, kind of quantum cryptographers that looked at this problem for a long time, studied an algorithm called RSA. It's not worth defining, but it's kind of an older cryptographic algorithm. But that's not what really any blockchains use, right? Because, you know, RSA keys are very large, right? So it turns out, and this was kind of the key, one of the key upshots of the Google paper, it turns out that if you actually focus on the cryptography used by Bitcoin, Ethereum and other networks, it's actually way easier to break than they thought it was compared to RSA. And so that is, that is one of the major things.

• 1:01:58Speaker 05

  The other big breakthrough, and this is from the other paper from Caltech, is that, you know, quantum computers, as you guys may or may not be aware, as your audience may or may not be aware, are kind of, you know, they're very fragile generally. So to be useful, they need to have what's called error correction applied. And that error correction can kind of result in a lot of overhead. You need to have tons of physical qubits to get to, you mentioned logical qubit, to get one logical qubit. Well, this Caltech paper basically showed, hey, we have some new ideas to do error correction. And it turns out if we apply those, we don't need hundreds or thousands of physical qubits. Maybe we just need a handful to make one logical qubit. So that, the title of their paper, actually, the headline is, you may only need 10,000 physical qubits to break, to run Shor's algorithm.

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  And by the way, they demonstrated last year 6,000 qubits.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Okay, so we're close, yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 05

  That's, you know, no one can put a timeline on it, but how, how fast do you think you can close that gap?

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  Is the question.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Is it possible, Jordi was throwing out the idea of someone having a secret quantum computer, going around the blockchain, siphoning Bitcoin from, you know, cold wallets that haven't moved.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't implying that it exists yet, but implying the incentive of if somebody were to create one of these, but, but, but.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Jordi Hays?

  The way you're reacting, I'm imagining it's like if, if somebody does it, it'll be Google first, which is maybe a good thing. I don't know.

• 1:03:23Speaker 05

  It's like, it's really hard to know how it's gonna play out. I wrote, I wrote a whole blog post on our, on our blog on project11.com, people can check it out, called Quantum War Games. And it was really fun because it's exactly, it's like the what-if scenarios, right? Um, you know, because why do people want quantum computers generally? Uh, well, they're great for science. Two, like you can imagine, governments that wanna do espionage might want the ability to break cryptography too. They probably don't wanna reveal what they have, certainly not if it's China or Russia. Right? And, um, you know, and, but, and private companies, maybe not Google, but maybe some of these pure play quantum companies. Like, how are they gonna make money? Well, one way would be to recover Satoshi's Bitcoin as if it were buried treasure. Right? Like, oh, it's a buried treasure. If Satoshi's not here, it's mine now.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  Right? So, I mean, that could be another scenario.

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  So, look, I think that the, there is just a whole bunch of uncertainty about how this is gonna play out, about who's gonna execute the attack, about how long a quantum computer will take. And again, because blockchains like Bitcoin fundamentally rely on the cryptography, like it's existential for them. That's one of the reasons, like, I founded Project 11 and we, and we pursue this, you know, solving this problem very vigorously is because everything's on the line here. And we have to solve it for these chains like Bitcoin to have a future.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Is there generally low optimism right now that Bitcoin developers will be able to react quickly?

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  What's the statement about like I think Churchill said about democracies or the Americans maybe where it's like they'll do the right thing when every option is exhausted. I think this is like I think this is true of decentralized networks like Bitcoin. I mean their greatest strength is the fact that there's no single party that says how it works or how it should work, right? And this is this is encoded into how it was built by Satoshi as a as a reaction to the great financial crisis, right? So that's a great philosophical strength in the face of a crisis like this that demands a massive technical effort to overhaul. It's a daunting challenge because unlike say Google, which you know, Google has said they're going to upgrade all their systems by 2029. That's just, you know, someone at Google can make

• 1:05:22Speaker 05

  that decision snap, right? In Bitcoin, because it's a distributed community, everyone's kind of first has to agree there's even a problem. Then everyone has to agree on the solution. But I think there's examples of places where blockchains like, you know, I'll take Ethereum have done amazing things, right? So one is they they transitioned from an old system of consensus called proof of work to a new system called proof of state. It took four years to be sure, but it involved thousands of people all over the world and they did it. They did it. The blockchain's been running. Ethereum is the second largest blockchain by market cap. So I don't think it's impossible, right? But I do think especially in light of these two papers, these two breakthroughs, you just can't stop or you just can't wait anymore before starting that process.

• 1:06:00Jordi Hays?

  What about the rest of the digital world? Because if if if Bitcoin is having problems, then so many other kind of core institutions and companies, organizations, I imagine would have issues as well. Maybe maybe because they are centralized, there's, you know, easier to react, easier to kind of lock things down, but still need to upgrade overall encryption.

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's no doubt that other institutions need to upgrade, but in my mind, there's also no doubt that, you know, blockchains and digital assets are just the most vulnerable. I mean, one reason is obvious. I mean Satoshi, Satoshi's Bitcoin, so the founder of Bitcoin, who we think has gone away or died or something, you know, they have a bunch of their early Bitcoin that hasn't moved. There's a bunch of lost coins, you know, all in all, you know, it's about to maybe 15% of all Bitcoin supply is estimated to be lost. I mean, that's hundreds of billions of dollars, potentially, in, you know, in market terms. So that's just a huge incentive that like, let's take, let's take the counter example of, you know, if someone wanted to hack into a bank or something. And as you pointed out, banks are centralized, they can kind of react. Also, the cryptography,

• 1:07:12Speaker 05

  the way that banks implement this cryptography is just kind of one of many layers of security, right? So it's kind of this breaks, like theoretically, if someone tried to wire all the money out of my account, my bank would call me.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, they literally have tape drives where, you know, they have cold storage, they print things out and they have a ledger and they can potentially roll back, which is crazy to think about, but like, they could, if there was like a catastrophic hack, they could be like, look, everyone's just going back to yesterday's accounts and, you know, that's better than the chaos that we're in.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  That's it. And that's not true for Bitcoin, right? All I need is one signature and all of Satoshi's or Coinbase's or Binance's Bitcoin is mine. There's no fallback, there's no anything. That's how it was designed, right? That's the point. That was the point, permissionless finance. That was, so that's the challenge.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  So what is the state of the more faster moving coins, faster moving chains? Are you consulting or do you think you'll plan on launching something yourself that is

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  quantum secure, quantum proof? How do you think this plays out? Because it does feel like, you know, I'm optimistic that I'm rooting for Bitcoin. I hope the devs figure it out quickly. You know, hopefully that happens, but it does just feel in terms of like the marketing of a new project, there is a bit of a white space to say, we're the ones that are taking this particular feature most, most, most seriously.

• 1:08:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. Look, I mean, it's kind of hard to know how things are going to play out, but the white space that we're occupying is we want to be the bridge for digital assets to the post-quantum future, right? Now, that doesn't necessarily rule out potentially having a platform to issue on top of at some point, but I think for now, our priority is more or less, you know, people have already decided that things like Bitcoin and Ethereum and Solana and stable coins have value. And I think overwhelmingly, they would like to keep the things that they already value and just make them secure. So that's what we focus on, right? And there's no shortage of things for us to do because the protocols all have to get fixed, all the smart contracts have to get fixed, all the apps have to get fixed, and then all of the user wallets have to get fixed. And so, again, going back to the fact that this is a stack and you're breaking the bottom part of it. So, I mean,

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  we really focus all the way across. So we've done work with Solana, the Solana Foundation, we did the first post-quantum testnet for them. We've worked with a few other protocols as well. We designed actually a new novel post-quantum algorithm designed for blockchains with the founder of Zcash. We've done that too. We collaborated with EF and we're doing, we're getting ready to launch our own post-quantum wallet as well.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the information flow. How much of the work that you do, the work that will be done by the Bitcoin Foundation, Ethereum Foundation, all the different developers, how much of that is open source by default or licensable or just can be understood by other parties and implemented very quickly? Like, how should we expect diffusion, once this problem is solved, to actually roll out? Will it just be like, oh yeah, like, we're just following the Solana standard and so we're just going to mirror that over onto, you know, whatever chain we're working on?

• 1:10:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there will be diffusion. I think there will be, you know, consensus, if you will, around a certain subset of post-quantum algorithms. But I don't think it's just, you know, one and done because Solana is a very different system than Bitcoin, right? Bitcoin's digital gold, it's sort of meant to be slow, you know, and there's no apps on it. Solana's meant to be fast, right? And so, the cryptography that works for Bitcoin might not be this cryptography that works for Solana. And this is actually was kind of the result of some of the experiments we ran with Solana. And, and look, this is one of the challenges, right? And this is, again, by why we keep saying this is like time to start is now because we don't know how long it's going to take to migrate. Because, you know, these new algorithms, there's trade-offs that come with them. And by the way, even if you choose to implement one, you need to test it and you make sure it's secure, all this stuff. So-

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Have you tried to, have you tried to quantify or guess estimate what the quantum discount rate is on Bitcoin right now? Cause it's an interesting thing where like, if you own a lot of Bitcoin, there's a bunch of people on the timeline today talking about this. They don't have an incentive to like really freak out and spread the narrative, but they have some incentive to say like, hey, we need to have a conversation. We need to make progress on this. But do you think that's, that's factoring into price at all?

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  Totally. I mean, the way I would put it is, I think if this risk didn't exist, Bitcoin would be priced significantly higher. So I think exactly what you said is right. You like, oh, I'm not going to sell my Bitcoin. Cause you know, I mean, it's maybe not right around the corner and I'm hoping people fix it. But I also think there's people that would maybe enter. Uh, and they're like, you know, and Chamath has said this exact thing. He's like, hey, is this really digital gold? Uh, can we without with this quantum threat hanging over everyone's head? So I, I think if that threat was removed, then you know, you remove this cloud over that ecosystem and potentially, you know, you had a lot more people coming in and therefore price would be up.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the, the, it's easy to imagine as you approach that 2029 mark, more selling pressure, more concerns if meaningful progress isn't made in the next two years. Uh, what, what, what countries, uh, have the most kind of advanced quantum projects outside of the U S? I can guess, you know, China's, you know, investing heavily here. Uh, do they have their own retail quantum company that are trading like crazy?

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, first off, I, I think definitively the leaders, uh, both companies and research is American. So I think we should be proud to be an American here. Uh, but look, I think one interesting thing about the way China's chosen to attack this is, uh, they've made quantum computing a priority. And what that means in China is, you know, it's like, there used to be a lab at Tencent and at Baidu and a few other places. And at some point, a Chinese Communist Party official came in and said, guess what? You guys all work for us now. And guess what? You're all working together now. And guess what? You're not allowed to talk about it anymore. And that's the state of things. It's kind of a, I don't want to say Manhattan project, but it's like that level of secrecy in China. And there's a legitimate question around how far back they are. So the best estimates that we have from quantum fit, like we have a quantum

• 1:13:18Speaker 05

  physicist who's an advisor to project 11 that, you know, tracks generally resource estimates across the world and their view is that China may be six to 12 months behind at most. And so this is, yeah, exactly. That's not that far. You know, and so can we expect, you know, a quantum computer in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party that maybe is more willing to crush dissent in places like Hong Kong to care as much about the philosophical principles of Bitcoin and decentralization. If it serves their purposes to do otherwise, I don't think we can. And so I think, again, back to the fundamental problem, uncertainty, right? And it's better to be safe than sorry. So we need to basically prepare today to prevent the crisis tomorrow, to keep the trust in these systems.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for everything that you're doing. Thank you for your service, both here and before. Project11.com is the website, correct?

• 1:14:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Everyone should go check it out.

• 1:14:09Speaker 05

  All spelled out. Yep.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate the breakdown.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:14:15Speaker 05

  Great to be here, guys. Thanks.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automated Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, we have Qasar Younis in the restream waiting room from Applied Intuition. He's the founder and CEO of the company. And we'll bring him in in just a second. We are running-

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  We need a little bit of time.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  A little bit ahead of schedule, a little bit ahead of schedule.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  We need a little bit of time.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  And it's hard because there's not all that much short-term news. There is one news item that we can go through quickly. Allbirds just sold for $39 million. The company was once worth over $4 billion with D to C Darling, followed this company closely, because I was building a D to C company at the same time. I was like, wow, they are really getting big. But it seemed like it did not particularly scale. It was more of a niche product potentially. And of course, you know, margins and cost of sales creep in and then everything collapses to private equity multiples. Did you ever wear a pair of Allbirds? Were they ever, ever pull you away from Bottega? Get you in some Allbirds? You know, it's Australian wool.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  You know, it's kind of like Italian leather, Australian wool. Yeah, there's something like

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  No, I never, I never owned a pair of Allbirds.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Never throw a pair? Not even if you're visiting San Francisco. It's a great, it's a great

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Great sign of respect.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Sign of respect.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever, did you ever have a pair?

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  I had, I think I had one pair at some point. Um, they were okay. They didn't, I don't know. They, they, they sort of like look okay and are comfortable on day one, but then they sort of deteriorate a little quickly.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  This would be probably two to three trillion dollar company if the shoes had aura.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  But they, they had not.

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  They should have released a line.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  They actually had, it seems like they potentially had negative aura.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And they got, and I mean, the, the stock suffered. They, they had to pay the aura tax.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Aura discount.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Massive aura loss. Yeah. I mean, still a very interesting, uh, launch, very interesting, uh, go to market, telling the story of where the materials are from. That was certainly a playbook that was adopted by a lot of companies, uh, showing, putting the supply chain on display, basically, uh, was the right, right fit at the time, but people are not, not into it. The chat is not, is not happy about.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's ask, let's ask our dear friend.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  Kasey Unus from Applied Intuition, because he's here. He's in the TVP on Ultra Dome now. Kasey, how you doing?

• 1:16:49Qasar Younis?

  I'm doing great. How about you guys?

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  We're doing great. We have to ask, do you own a pair of Allbirds? What's your preferred shoe when you're walking around a factory like that?

• 1:17:00Qasar Younis?

  I, uh, don't own any Allbirds. When you're in a factory, uh, you're gonna have to wear. You're, yeah, exactly. You have to have a steel, there's no Allbirds, unfortunately.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Maybe that's the comeback story for them. So they just, they were worth four billion. Now they're worth 40. Maybe the steel toe Allbirds are what gets it done. A steel toe Allbird would look fantastic. Uh, we seem to be having a video delay. I think the team will work it out, but we can't hear you. Can you hear us okay?

• 1:17:25Qasar Younis?

  Okay, great. Yeah, I can hear you and I can see you okay. So I'm not sure exactly what's going on.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Well, uh, great to have you back on the show. I'd love for you to just, uh, reset with us for, uh, the shape of the business, where the company is today. How big are you? Give us, uh, you know, the broad strokes and then we'll go into the partnership today.

• 1:17:42Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, thank you. Thanks again for having me. The company Applied Intuition, we're a $15 billion company, still doing what we were doing before, which is taking intelligence and putting into physical machines. Today, we have our first ever physical AI day, where we're bringing lots of investors together, bringing industry analysts, you know, bringing everybody who's kind of relevant in the field to talk about all the things that are happening in physical AI. We're pretty strong believers that the future, you know, the next kind of big thing is AI going out of screens and going into the real world.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Talk about the most recent partnership, LG.

• 1:18:23Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, LG in a tech. We just, we just announced this a couple of days ago. The, I don't know how many of your viewers know, but LG provides-

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  You're putting AI in TVs. That's what you're doing. The AI is going in the TV, and I'm going to be able to ask questions.

• 1:18:39Qasar Younis?

  That is not what we're doing.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Much more serious.

• 1:18:46Qasar Younis?

  I mean, what's happening in the self-driving space is there is, now the models are basically working and they're figuring out. So really, there's an aggressive downward pricing pressure of how to make self-driving cheaper. The research kind of question is done, and now it's just an engineering question. And that's just another way of saying, it's a cost question. So companies like LG, who are doing, you know, sensors at really, really large scales and really, really cheaply, you know, they're entering the space as well. We're working together with them on self-driving.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, yeah, take me through, when people think self-driving, they always think Waymo, Tesla, but the, the, the, the, the market map of like products that need autonomy, and that would be defined as vehicles. Give me some examples. I mean, you're standing in front of something. I know that it's very broad. What's in this partnership? And then what else are you focused on? What's adjacent? And what's, you know, on the roadmap?

• 1:19:44Qasar Younis?

  Yeah. So I think what's different about us versus, let's say, vertical players like a Waymo or a Tesla- is we provide this uh you know AI across all types of machines so you see ag machines behind me if you were you guys were here for physical AI day we do we take the same models and we put them in defense we put them in commercial trucks we're running driverless trucks in Japan right now uh that are going into commercial operations in the next quarter we are running in mines uh so both all the way from you know Arizona to Australia so our hypothesis basically is these this these technologies whether it's self-driving or the underlying operating system they're so expensive and they're so complex to build

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:20:29Qasar Younis?

  and maintain the only way that you really make this a viable business is that you actually spread this across lots of manufacturers and lots of industries and lots of use cases I mean our kind of crazy claim to fame is you know our company is almost 10 years old and we've preserved basically all the capital we've ever raised

• 1:20:46John Coogan?

  it's amazing

• 1:20:48Qasar Younis?

  it almost sounds like BS right because uh the the whole mantra is you know raise a lot of capital and then and to plan or real AI company we have real AI bills and we've we've figured a commercial model which is a lot of scale we're we have over a thousand engineers and so we're one of the if not the biggest physical AI companies on the planet uh that's obviously also commercially viable so but it all goes back to that simple thing is like you want to distribute all this cost across lots and lots of companies lots lots of verticals

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  what about what about shared learnings like are you is a team that's working on mining are they able to find a breakthrough or discover something you can apply to trucking in Japan like is there a lot of

• 1:21:29Qasar Younis?

  absolutely that that is the heart of the company and so there's all the what you what you described as like shared learning kind of broadly but there's also technical advantages what we've seen is taking data which is just obviously also not obvious but taking really really diverse data From a mine actually makes our self-driving car system better. And taking, you know, data that we have from our self-driving car in Germany, you know, makes our defense work better. And so it really is, it really is a core to our strategy.

• 1:21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've heard so many stories about that where like there will be like exactly one instance of a chicken being chased by a woman on a tricycle in the training set. And so it's very hard for the machine learning system to actually understand that if you see that exact scenario, you gotta slow down, but that's the nature of big data and machine learning and these scaled systems. And, and, and it's not, it, it sounds crazy, but it's not that crazy to imagine some weird scenario that you see in a mine actually teaching you something that you could use just on a normal street.

• 1:22:34Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, maybe getting a little, little level lower, just, just so, uh, cause I was, me being an engineer always bothers me to talk in pure, a pure generality. I tend to mix and miss things. Uh, just getting to a level where what you're really talking about is anomaly detection.

• 1:22:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:45Qasar Younis?

  And it's not necessarily like, you know, you need to see the chicken running across the road in Thailand and that's gonna make the mine better. But what's really happening is models are getting a better understanding of the physical world around them.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Qasar Younis?

  And the kind of parameters around them. If you look at, uh, you know, kind of the, the last kind of generation, I'm crazy to say last generation, but really large language models, large language models really improve with diversity of data. That is really like, you know, a, a kind of a big breakthrough. And of course, scaling laws, all of that stuff is being brought in to the physical world.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Qasar Younis?

  And, uh, and we're, we're powering that.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, truly no one would have predicted, or I mean, of course, some people did predict, but I would have never predicted that like, uh, including poetry would help a model get to like solving math. Like I would just see those as different things. I'd say, put the poetry team over there, put the math team over there, but actually bringing all these things together worked really well. Uh, play out the counterfactual for me. Uh, you, you haven't, you haven't been a high burn company. You haven't been super capital intensive. If you'd done vertical integration and built the tractor behind you, uh, that would have been extremely capital intensive, correct? Is, is that like impossible?

• 1:23:54Qasar Younis?

  It's well, nothing is impossible. There we go. But you know, I my my undergrad was at this obscure school called the General Motors Institute. And as the name implies, it's really about automotive. It's like the West Point for automotive. And when you spend a lot of years in factories, as I have, there are some deep lessons that get imparted into you. And one of those lessons is, holy crap, these factories are extremely cost intent, the capital investment, they're extremely complex. And the strengths of Silicon Valley are actually don't quite overlap with the strengths of building a large factory. Now, in terms of the core question, we had Mark Andreessen here today. We, you know, we talked about this.

• 1:24:37Qasar Younis?

  Mark was one of our first investors and has kind of been been along with us with the entire ride. I mean, all the way to the presentation today. And we asked him this question about vertical, horizontal. What do you see happening in AI? What do you see happening, specifically in physical AI? And the punchline is, you know, we all of our values that apply to intuition can be reduced down to two words, radical pragmatism. And if there are verticals that we think that we should be a bit more vertical in, we'll do that. And I think it's it's kind of a false trade off to say, what we do in, you know, trucking is what we're going to do in construction, which what we do in agriculture is what we're going to do in mining. What we're really trying to do is bring intelligence out into the real world. And each of these verticals are facing really, really different problems.

• 1:25:19Qasar Younis?

  You take, you know, with a tractor behind me, the average American farmer is 58 years old. There's nobody coming to replace that person. And so what is going to happen? Because, you know, if you take that person, their kids have left and they're often not coming and taking over the farm, like maybe in previous generations. So that farmer needs, you know, we don't need to teach them how to use Claude code. That's not what's going to change the farmer's trajectory. What's going to change the farmer's trajectory is the machines are intelligent and they're working harder and smarter on their behalf. And so he can run an entire farm with a, you know, with a swarm of machines. And that's not. You know, that's not too far into sci-fi. One of the key components here that, you know, we're doing and we believe is,

• 1:26:04Qasar Younis?

  you need to abstract that hardware and software way. We, we as technologists, you look at like your laptop and your phone and you kind of take for granted the miracle that exists. Android runs on thousands of hardware devices flawlessly. So that's also something that applied does it. We're just abstracting the hardware and software. Once you do that, you can make every machine, you know, intelligent.

• 1:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Have you tried to estimate the economic impact, assuming you guys, you know, stay at the, you know, at the current kind of improvement rate or accelerate as the technology kind of starts to diffuse in, in some of these industries like trucking and mining and agriculture? Like what, what are the downstream impacts? I mean, there's such a debate right now around what, what, what impact will AI have on the economy? So much of the economy is like moving physical things around, producing things, shipping them.

• 1:26:54Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, yeah, so let's, let's, exactly. Let's separate a little, because the economy is such a generalization. So when you're talking about like, you know, code complete and white collar work is very different than, you know, trucking where there is a huge labor shortage. It's very different than in mining where, you know, people don't want to go live in kind of remote areas doing 12-hour shifts. I mean, literally labor shortages are preventing construction companies from, you know, collecting billions and billions in revenue. So these are industries where AI can't get there fast enough.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Qasar Younis?

  It's a very different calculus than a kind of, you know, I think what the normal narrative is. And, uh, and then we're super obviously excited about that. Let's take defense as a particular example. It's a very salient example. We don't need more warfighters in harm's way. We need less warfighters in harm's way. And no warfighter wants to go out in, into that ecosystem where autonomy is really becoming the dominant thing. And so, so I think the way to think about this impact in the physical world. Is it's a lot less resistance, there's a lot more pull. Now, the first question you asked is the size of impact. I don't wanna, you know, sound like I'm pitching my own book here with. I'm asking you, I'm asking you, I want, I want the biggest number, I want the biggest number.

• 1:28:07Qasar Younis?

  The numbers are absurd and ridiculous, but I can tell you this much, if you think about, you know, the way I think about, you know, I used to be a Y Combinator before, I was the COO and, and, you know, ran the firm and funded lots of interesting companies and one of the analogies I used to use to help founders understand market potential, market sizes, yeah, I grew up in Detroit, you're sitting in the Detroit Metro Airport, and you're sitting in a gate, and you look around, how many of those people are like really deeply using Claude Code? I mean, frankly speaking, not many, not a lot, will probably be using something like ChatGPT, some variants of that, maybe Gemini, uh, but how many of those people drive? How many of those people work at construction sites, how many of those people ride in buses? How many of those people serve in our armed forces?

• 1:28:52Qasar Younis?

  The point is, a much, much larger group and I, I, I like that, I, I feel a little, again, the engineer in me feels a little awkward saying these kind of, you know, pitching these things, but I think the market for physical AI is way, way bigger, purely because the surface area is much bigger and it's compounded by the way that, the way technology diffuses with phones and laptops creates this like rabid, you know, competition that you see in, you know, you're seeing in all these kind of subspaces, right? Yeah. In physical AI, you gotta kind of know what's going on in the car business and I'm not saying, you know, I'm not, you know, gatekeeping and saying, yeah, you gotta go to the General Motors Institute to build technology for the car business, but you bet your bottom dollar, it helps.

• 1:29:36Qasar Younis?

  And, uh, and we're doing that across a bunch of industries, I think it's, I think it's, you know, I'm, I'm as confident about the companies ever before. You know, the question, we always get asked this question, why the hell did you raise all this money, you know, almost a billion dollars? You're just gonna keep plowing it away in the bank account? We're doing it for a simple reason because we can, if we need to, we can invest very aggressively to take opportunities that we think we can accelerate, you know, beyond just traditional organic growth. And so far, that's worked. It's not to, you know, promise the future that we won't. Uh, but that's, those are the kind of debates we have every single day.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say I can see the path to a hundred and then a trillion dollars in, in run rate.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:30:14Qasar Younis?

  Well, I mean, uh, Waymo, uh, you know, a company that, uh, we, we, we love them. They're a local, you know, we're, we're also in, uh, Mountain View now, Sunnyvale. That company, uh, you know, is a great company, but is burning a lot of capital and, uh, is a mu- smaller revenue base than us and just raised at a hundred and twenty-six billion dollars.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Oh, shots fired.

• 1:30:35Qasar Younis?

  I mean, I love those guys. I mean, we have so many friends there. I'm not, I'm not trying to talk poorly about this, but.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  No, we love Waymo too. It's, it's very impressive what they're doing.

• 1:30:44Qasar Younis?

  Somewhere between, you know, fifteen that we're at and a hundred and thirty-two, I, I think that'd be massive, massive. Yeah, we have room to grow.

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Tell, tell Mark, tell Mark you're ready. You're ready for the big one.

• 1:30:54Qasar Younis?

  Believe, believe, believe me. They, they, everybody wants to, you know, it's somewhere, I feel like it's Fogoa where they want to, you know, keep putting money, you know, money into the company. We, we don't need any money.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  That is, that is the best analogy for Avenger capitalists. They are the farmers stuffing the goose.

• 1:31:09Qasar Younis?

  We, we, we have our own, we have our own, uh, farm, you know, and we're, we're making our own money. So that, that's really great. And frankly speaking, I mean, like I said, Waymo is great, but it's just robotaxis.

• 1:31:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:20Qasar Younis?

  And, and, and that's a small, but it's.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  So much broader.

• 1:31:24Qasar Younis?

  Go, go to, go to, go to Warren, Michigan.

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:27Qasar Younis?

  And you just go, go, go to the party shop in the corner and say, hey, are you excited about Waymo? I don't think, you know, it's not hit the masses yet, which just shows obviously Waymo's growth potential, but also shows, I think, how big physical AI is going to be.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:31:43Qasar Younis?

  Thanks for having me again.

• 1:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 1:31:45Qasar Younis?

  I'll talk to you guys. Thanks.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, see you.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Let me tell you all about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. We got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And we're talking to them later today. But first, we have Sebastian Mallaby. He is the author of The Infinity Machine. Sebastian, how are you doing?

• 1:32:04Speaker 07

  I'm doing great. Thank you.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:32:06Jordi Hays?

  So great to have you. This has been, you've been on John's

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  Radar for a long time.

• 1:32:12Jordi Hays?

  Dream guest list for a long time.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  We met maybe four years ago at a talk you gave around the power law. And it was very fascinating. I love that book. This book goes in a different direction. And after that conversation, I asked you, probably the worst question you could ask to an author. I asked you, what's your next book going to be about? Because you had selected venture capital, venture capital had done very well. And I presume that whatever you would pick would be a great investment category because you seem to be a good picker. You told me that you were thinking about biotechnology, biotech investing. You went a different direction with AI. Is there anything I should read into that?

• 1:33:00Speaker 07

  Well, I always kick the tires on a few ideas before I settle on one. And I think it took me from the power law coming out in February of 2022 to somewhere around the summer, maybe August, when I really settled on AI. And then it took me another, I don't know, three months to get the courage up to go and pitch Demis Sabis on the idea of giving me a ton of access so I could write this book. And then I got lucky because I pitched him and one week later, guess what? ChatGPT came out. So what I thought was maybe a fringe subject went mainstream super fast.

• 1:33:33John Coogan?

  Super fast. What was the response with the team? What was the process? Obviously, he's extremely busy. He also sleeps at very random times. We can get into that. But what was your actual interaction? How much time did you spend? What was the research process like?

• 1:33:50Speaker 07

  So once he agreed to be in, he was really in. It took about six meetings, two with him, four with his team to get them to agree. And you know, my pitch was, hey, if you say in every speech you give that artificial intelligence is the greatest invention in history. That means you're way too important not to have a book about you and it's going to happen. So you better get used to it. And also, if you're going to upend our lives, you know, change the way we think about ourselves as humans because there's a rival form of machine intelligence. You know, you better explain your motives to people, otherwise they're not going to accept it. So that was the pitch. He agreed.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:31Speaker 07

  And then, once he agreed, uh, we would meet like for two hours at a time. Uh, we would go to a pub near his home in North London. And there was a kind of secret staircase at the back, go upstairs, kind of dusty little room with nobody else there. And we would sit there for two hours usually. And, um, he would just riff, you know, uh, talk about philosophy, movies, computer science, neuroscience. I mean, he is such a range of a person, by far the most fascinating person I've ever written about.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Wow, that's, uh, that's high praise. Um, how do you think about balancing the biographical timeline, the history, the financial impacts, which you've covered in the past? When I think about the, the stories that you've told in The Power Law about venture capitalists, there's a little bit of their philosophy, but it's a lot of how the deals came together, uh, fly on the wall. I love that type of storytelling, but this goes a little bit of a different direction. So how did you, how did you think about balancing all the different, uh, perspectives that you could bring to his story?

• 1:35:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I always want to do the personality, the, the figure, but then the landscape behind as well. So it's always a mixture of, you know, you need a character who drives the story, but the story is boring if it doesn't mean anything.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 07

  So you have to link it to larger stuff that's going on in capitalism and how society is going to change and all that. And, I mean, in this case, because Demis is who he is, um, and he would just riff in these extraordinary paragraphs of like storytelling and, and theoretical stuff and, you know, it's just so fascinating. And I did give him the microphone more than I have in any other book. I mean, I basically quote, quote him at some length, you know, and it's broken up with me asking him questions. And so, um, I'm kind of the reader's. Lens through which to see Demis talking. And I'd never used the first person really before in my other books, but in this case,

• 1:36:37Speaker 07

  those thirty plus hours I had talking in a pub with this extraordinary man, that was the gold dust I had. So to really make the most of it, I did have these passages of us talking together, which kind of intersperse the more analytical or narrative bits of the book. How, after the transformer model dropped, what was Ilya Sarsky's reaction and why did OpenAI get ahead? You know, I cover all that stuff as well. But I do have these passages where you see events through Demis's eyes. Because I think it's worth doing because he's so unusual.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  What was your understanding of AI or view on AI in 2022 before you meet Demis for the first time? Were you aware of the doom arguments? Were you a believer in the technology? Did you think it was twenty years away, a hundred years away, two years away? Where were you before this book? Because I feel like it probably changed you.

• 1:37:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, I had met Demis before at tech conferences. Because of the power law and writing about venture capital, I would go to tech conferences in Europe and he would sometimes be there. And I actually cheekily, you know, raised the issue of hedge funds and especially, you know, the one Renaissance Technologies, the main CEO, Peter Brown, had done a PhD with Jeff Hinton about AI back in the day. And of course, I knew that Demis would know that. And so I said, you know, do you know these guys who use deep learning and applied it to markets? And that got his attention. So I talked to him a bit. So I knew that he was amazing. I knew that the technology was ripe in the sense

• 1:38:25Speaker 07

  that he'd produced this string of breakthroughs, you know, AlphaGo, defeating the human Go champion, then AlphaZero, which was even stronger, then there was AlphaFold, which won him the Nobel Prize for predicting all the shapes of protein in nature. So there was a series of good models. And what they all had in common was, they dealt with insane amounts of data, crazy combinatorial spaces. Like in Go, there's 361 first moves you can make. Okay, that's way more than chess. And so unscrambling Go and the strategies in Go was much harder than chess. And I knew that these breakthroughs were not just cool

• 1:39:06Speaker 07

  in themselves, but they represented the coming of a time when machines could make sense of an almost infinite amount of data and extract meaning. And hence the term the Infinity Machine, the title of the book, and hence my enthusiasm for writing about it. And I knew it was breaking out. I knew Demis was amazing. What I didn't know is it was going to break out literally the week after I met him and pitched him on the idea.

• 1:39:32Jordi Hays?

  What has surprised you about how the industry overall has evolved since you started meeting with Demis? Because in some ways, I have to imagine you kind of, maybe it hasn't been that surprising at all, even though a lot of the growth is impressive. But do you feel like you had a view into the future from those first conversations in the pub?

• 1:39:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I was lucky that the meetings were bookended by, you know, going to see Demis, sort of maybe the third meeting or something, ChatGPT by this point had gone viral, and him saying to me, okay, this is war. You know, you could see his competitive side come out, right? This is war. These guys, he said, have parked the tanks in my front yard. You know, I'm fighting back. So you could see that. And then after that comes the merger between Google Brain in Mountain View and the DeepMind team in London. So the two kind of halves of Google's AI talent base are united. And then I think you get what, you know, a business school professor is in the future going to

• 1:40:39Speaker 07

  write about. It's kind of like a textbook case in how you make a merger successful. Because Everyone knows that mergers are hard. And when you do it with eight time zones between the two teams, one in London, one in California, and you're doing in the middle of this knock down, drag out, you know, capitalist fight over building L L Ms, this is, this is gonna be, you know, most people said this is gonna fail. And I would come to Silicon Valley while I was doing the book, checking with my friends at, you know, different venture capital shops. And they'd all say, ah, game over, OpenAI has won. And, you know, the surprise is that within two and a half years, Demis Hassabis' Google Deep Mind model, Gemini, was doing better on the rankings than the OpenAI model.

• 1:41:24Speaker 07

  So that was an incredibly fast comeback.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the importance of being like a business person or a deal guy in AI? It feels like Demis has this quote, he doesn't want to grow that part of his brain, referring to some legal negotiations that took a number of years. Solomon. Oh, oh, was that Masafa?

• 1:41:49Speaker 07

  No, actually, that was, that was, that was Demis saying, I don't want part of this, this part of my brain to grow, and so take away these legal briefs.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  I completely get that. And it seems incredible for him to stay in the research mode, build the research organization. And yet, because of scaling laws, we're in this weird regime, in this paradigm, where sometimes doing a deal to marshal an extra 10 billion of compute actually does unlock a new capability and is almost in the research track. And I'm wondering how you perceive the relative importance or Demis's perception of the relative importance of these sort of like business dealings that might be more critical path to AGI than the Demis of 2021 might think.

• 1:42:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, I would say that the single most important business relationship in the world today is between Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Demis Hassabis, who's running the AI brain trust. Because Sundar has Demis's back, he deals with providing the resources, supporting the notion that you're going to spend all these tens and maybe hundreds of billions on compute. That's what he delivers. And he gives Demis the oxygen to then just go do the science. And sure, he has to build products. But I think, he said to me several times, Demis, we've got to a point where building a product like Gemini is in fact

• 1:43:25Speaker 07

  advancing the progress towards AGI. There's no tension between the two. If you had stopped your AGI research 10 years ago and taken a sidetrack to build some widget, yeah, that would have been a waste of time. But now that it's so mature, and you're actually to build the next LLM, you've got to kind of figure out a reasoning model, then it's going to be agentic, and then you're going to be scaling it even more, and all this sort of stuff that we've seen. This is genuine scientific progress as well as product advance.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do the products also help sort of shift the culture in Google? I'm interested in understanding this concept of like AGI pilling, becoming a believer in the Demis worldview of the impact of AGI, what artificial intelligence will do. That mindset has to diffuse through Google. The ChatGPT viral moment clearly had an impact. I'm sure agentic coding has had a similar impact. But what has Demis's role been in being the culture carrier of that belief in AI progress internally?

• 1:44:36Speaker 07

  Well, I think he's used all his sort of visionary communication skills to unite the Mountain View team and the London team. And I think the one organizational contribution he's made, which is sort of super powerful, is that from a long time ago, DeepMind had always two different cultures going on at once. There was a kind of blue-sky research for scientists. You get a lot of freedom, you could publish papers and all that, you know, go find what you want to find. And then there were moments when Demis decided that if you pushed really hard on a particular product or a particular project, you could get a breakthrough achievement that would

• 1:45:21Speaker 07

  really shock the world. And so he did this repeatedly with AlphaGo and AlphaFold. And this was sort of like his judgment, scientific taste, being applied to knowing when the moment was ripe to really go for it. And once he decided that, the blue-sky research bottoms-up stuff, that went out the window, and it became a top-down strike team, they called it. And in a strike team, there was a lot of top-down direction and everybody had to work on the same code base. You couldn't just go off and code your own experiment on the side, you had to be contributing to the main one. And that drives towards, a team is driving in a united way towards an outcome. And I don't think Google Brain had that.

• 1:46:06Speaker 07

  Google Brain had much more of the bottom-up stuff, and there was no strike team component. And so Demis brought this strike team idea, and it came from video game design. Earlier in his life, he'd been a builder of video games, and he, in fact, started a company doing that. And so this was like how you ship product, and that's been a key insight for Gemini.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Google and Gemini have every advantage just due to the massive cash flows that they have from their other businesses. How do you think that has impacted the culture of DeepMind, given that they have something very real to lose, right? It's not just about the... You know, maybe Demis's personal desire to be at the forefront of this research. But if you're not successful, then you lose one of the greatest business. You have the potential to lose or have your kind of core business threatened. Yeah, Google Search in such a big way.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think, you know, Google Search stands for a more general point that, you know, Google's whole reputation stands on providing reliable information. And so the penalty for screwing up is very high. You've got this very valuable company. You don't want to spoil its reputation. And so I think they were more worried about, you know, releasing a chatbot fast. And so they had prototypes of a chatbot in the fall of 2022, and they didn't want to release. And then OpenAI went ahead and did it. And so that kind of forced their hand. But their first instinct was, now this is going to hallucinate. This is going to do bad stuff. We can't afford that hit to our reputation.

• 1:47:50Speaker 07

  And, you know, Demis was quite honest with me in saying, well, you know, the surprise was actually the public's quite happy to play with a tool that hallucinates. You know, it still went viral, you know, so we should be less inhibited. But that was an example of how being at Google could be a kind of inhibition in moving ahead.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  How does Demis, he's always told a very optimistic story about AI. I love him as a science communicator, as an optimist. How has he interfaced with the effective altruist community, more of the AI doom crowd? Does he, because he doesn't talk about it that often, but does he think about it often?

• 1:48:33Speaker 07

  He does think about it. In fact, you know, he met his co-founder Shane Legg at an AI safety lecture, right? They bonded in a safety lecture.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:42Speaker 07

  And so right from the beginning, safety has been a big part of the agenda. And when Demis sold his company to Google in early 2014.

• 1:48:51Speaker 07

  Part of the deal was you're not going to use this technology for weapons ever. And you're going to have a special independent oversight kind of committee. You know, which will decide on AGI deployment because we don't want that to be just up to the corporate board of of Google. Now, you know, he's he's slipped on some of these things, particularly the military staff. Um, but he has been thinking about safety and, um, you know. The question is, what has he got to show for it? It's all very well to think about something. But what can you do ever? And I think, you know, this is why towards the end of my book. He's talking to me quite honestly about how it's a sort of paradoxical moment. He's doing great as an AI inventor.

• 1:49:31Speaker 07

  He's doing terribly badly as a sort of AI steward as as making it safe. It's just. It turns out that there's a race dynamic. The race dynamic includes China. You know, how do you control this technology when everybody is racing to jam it out the door?

• 1:49:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was interesting. Last week we were talking about how, uh, you know, Bernie Sanders has come out with a with a push. Uh, to to pause data center development and he quotes. Demis and some other lab leads talking about how they would agree to a pause if other countries were were kind of in agreement on it. Uh, and Bernie obviously left out the fact that I don't think any lab lead could see China pausing on development. So. Um, uh, how is your personal definition of AGI evolved over the last few years? Because everyone has their own definition. Half the people that come on the show says it was. It was six, six weeks ago, exactly. Uh, and then and then yet we're still in so many of these kind of more.

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  High level conversations, lab leads talk about race, you know, where AGI is six months away, you know?

• 1:50:40Speaker 07

  You're you're completely right. Everybody has their own definition. And so my solution is not to have that discussion. I mean, who cares what, you know, this? You could say right now it's Gemini is artificial, it's general, it's intelligent, game over. But just a definition thing. I think the other one, which is sort of usually fruitless is, is AI conscious? Could it become conscious? What is consciousness? Nobody has a good idea. So let's just sidestep those.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  I heard one good idea, which was something around training a model specifically that would hold back all data and all and all training data related to consciousness and the idea of consciousness. And so it cannot just pull from the archive and and and reference or simulate consciousness. And if it develops consciousness from that and can talk cogently about consciousness without having any training data ever seen the idea of consciousness, then maybe that's conscious. I don't know. It was just an interesting thought experiment. I don't know that anyone's actually run the run the test and I don't know that I would even accept it if they did, but it is something to think about.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Did you feel an acceleration in your personal writing process due to AI?

• 1:51:48Speaker 07

  I felt an acceleration in my learning process, which is sort of what I do before I go interview people. So because all of the computer science papers are basically on archive, and you know, recently there's been less publication, but certainly up to about 2022, you could go see a scientist either at DeepMind or one of the rival labs and and just have a conversation with the model about, okay, this person has done four papers, what's the connecting thread? Why is this person different to the one I interviewed last week? That was a super efficient way of getting up to speed and I didn't worry that it might be wrong because I was going to speak to the human and cross check it. But that was helpful.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Demis's having a having a home base in the UK is, in what ways do you think it would have helped or hurt the company so far? Like, has it been beneficial from the talent war standpoint? I'm sure, I'm sure US, some of the other lab leads have taken a trip out to the UK.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg is hosting nightly dinners for AI leads at his house, which is just a couple of blocks from all the other labs. Can't do that if you're in, if the researchers are in the UK.

• 1:53:03Speaker 07

  Right, yeah. I mean, there is movement across the Atlantic, but I think the deal is if you're in London, it's a little harder to recruit people, but once you've got them, they're probably stickier than they would be if you're in Mountain View or somewhere.

• 1:53:17Speaker 07

  You know, I think Demis has stayed in London because actually he is weirdly patriotic. You know, he comes from this mixed up sort of, you know, a Greek heritage father, a Singaporean, Chinese mother. In a way, that makes him a typical Londoner, because London is really a melting pot. But, you know, he stays there because he feels he wants, he believes in sort of British social democratic values. It's maybe ironic to an American audience, but, you know, actually, he thinks it's more egalitarian in Britain than it is in the US. You know, the US, if you go to the DeepMind office in London, you know, you go past the sort of public spaces, like this kind of fountain with toddlers playing it, and there's a kind of free movies in the summer by the canal, and then you get

• 1:54:01Speaker 07

  to this green space where the kids from the local housing project are playing soccer. And then you get to the DeepMind office, and it's hard to imagine you'd find that on the way to the, you know, the Apple headquarters or something. And, you know, it's just a different vibe.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Could you ever see Demis as CEO of Google, or would he have to do too much paperwork?

• 1:54:24Speaker 07

  You know, this gets to the heart of the dichotomy about Demis. It's so difficult because he's so many different things at once. I mean, you know, he is this Nobel Prize winning scientist who would love to just do pure research, and he often would sort of fantasize to me about, hey, I want to retire to the Princeton Advanced Institute of Advanced Studies and do what Einstein and Oppenheimer did before me and go there. And that, you know, I think he really means it when he says that. At the same time, he also wants to be in command of, you know, an AI lab, and he likes the capitalist competition. So if he had the opportunity to be chief executive of the whole of Google. I suspect he's too competitive to say no.

• 1:55:10Speaker 07

  Um, but who knows? I mean, there is that science side. It's genuinely unpredictable. He probably doesn't know himself.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Were you left personally optimistic after this process? About just our AI future broadly, net positive impact from AI?

• 1:55:27Speaker 07

  I mean, clearly there's a lot of upside, especially in medicine and pharmaceutical discovery. I think you have to be honest and say there's also downside, significant downside. And as I continued to do the research for this project, you know, I I became more worried about the downside because, you know, people like Geoffrey Hinton, I went up and spent two hours in his kitchen in Toronto and sat there debating, not necessarily whether machines would be more intelligent than humans, obviously that they will be. But whether they, whether machines have a motivation to harm humans, and he's very persuasive in arguing that they will. I mean, my point was, look, humans evolved over centuries

• 1:56:11Speaker 07

  to survive, to pass on their DNA. We're hardwired to survive. That's why we fight each other.

• 1:56:18Speaker 07

  Machines aren't like that. So why would they attack us? Why are you so worried, Jeff? And Jeff is like, well, you know, imagine you've got this super powerful AI and it's going to be attacked by the enemy AI and you have to defend it. So you tell the AI, if you see a cyber attack coming, you've got to fight back, you've got to defend yourself. And now all of a sudden, you've given your AI a survival instinct. And so don't tell me that evolution has to happen as it happened to humans. The evolution can happen in a machine way. But these systems are going to want to survive and they're going to be more intelligent than us. So we're in trouble. And I think you can't dismiss that. So I'm kind of both worried and excited at the same time. And I I think that's how humans.

• 1:57:00Speaker 07

  Generally respond to all technology and if we didn't take that trade and move forward with both the excitement and the scariness of technology, if we didn't take that, we'd be still living in caves.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:13Speaker 07

  So in some sense, the story of Demis is like, you know, the story of all of us, but magnified 10x.

• 1:57:18John Coogan?

  There's a documentary that was just released or might be releasing right now that features an interview with Demis, the AI doc, and it spends more time talking to all the different lab leads and voices in the industry, more focused on the doom question. Can we be apocalyptic? Should we be optimistic? But what I found most interesting was that the creator of the documentary summed up his full takeaway and said that AI is a Ponzi scheme. And I'm wondering if you got any vibes that everything will collapse, that this is just not financially viable?

• 1:57:58Speaker 07

  No, my view is that there's no AI bubble, but there's only just an open AI bubble. You know, in the sense that the technology clearly is getting better and better pretty fast, right? You know, we had the first chatbot in 2022 and it hallucinated, then they killed the hallucination, then they had longer context windows, then they had, you know, multimodal systems that could handle video and pictures, and then they went to reasoning models, and now we're getting agentic models, and now next there's going to be, you know, world models that will be built into these things. This is a lot of progress in just three and a half years. So I think it's accelerating in progress and therefore it's not a bubble.

• 1:58:42Speaker 07

  But what is true is that it's super expensive to develop. And if you're not attached to a really deep pocket, like, you know, Demis is attached to Sundar. You're in trouble because I don't think OpenAI can raise enough money to bridge from today, when they have a very popular chatbot, but almost none of those customers pay for it, to some future where the product is stickier somehow and they can charge money. And so I think, you know, OpenAI has been running two simultaneous experiments. One is with a new frontier technology, and the second is how deep are global capital markets? And they already raised, you know, forty one billion last year, which was a record for

• 1:59:26Speaker 07

  any private fundraising, bigger than any IPO, by the way, as well. And so, you know, kudos to Simon Altman for raising that much money. But can you pull that trick, like, on a bigger scale every year until 2030, when they hope to break even? No. And that's why they're cutting products like Zora.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  Except for right now. Because they just raised the hundred and twenty.

• 1:59:51Speaker 07

  But if you look at the hundred, it's kind of smoke and mirrors. That's, that's, you know, a lot of that is contingent on, you, you get this money if you go public, you get this money in the future, you get this money in kind, in terms of, you know, compute or something. The hundred wasn't really a hundred.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Isn't there a little bit of a dynamic where you could wind up with like an anti-Google alliance? Maybe there's, you know, there's like a tension between the, the industry and Google. This is like the foundational, like myth of, of the AI industry and the AI labs broadly, although they, of course, have fractured many, many times at this point.

• 2:00:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, there's always rivalries. Um, you know, one might say people gang up on Nvidia. Um, you know, that's the occupational hazard of being the leader, right? I think they'll deal with it. I mean, I don't think it's a winner takes all market, by the way. I think that, um, you know, there'll be space for others.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side, then we'll, we'll let you go. Did you have any takeaways or kind of ideas around the diffusion of physical AI and robotics? Did anything stand out? Do you have a strong opinion there? Right now, it feels like we've entered the sort of software singularity. But we, we just had Caseur from Applied Intuition on, and we're talking with him about how autonomy and AI is diffusing through the physical world, but I'm curious if you had any takeaways.

• 2:01:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think that, you know, one thing sometimes people don't quite understand is that large language models and the transformer architecture that underpins them is super consequential for lots of applications, not just chatbots. And so robotics is being improved by this technology. And, you know, I fully expect to see a huge breakthrough, you know, over the next two or three years with the capability of robotics. And so I think that's, that's going to be the, the big story. I kind of agree with the guy from KSL you had before, that, you know, the movement of atoms is going to be affected as much as anything else. So that's part of why I don't think this is a bubble. I think, you know,

• 2:02:04Speaker 07

  the potential in, you know, this super powerful AI is enormous.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming and joining the show. It was a pleasure talking to you. The book is The Infinity Machine. It's available everywhere books are sold. Thank you so much.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic cover, too.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, beautiful cover.

• 2:02:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

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

• 2:02:26Speaker 07

  All right.

• 2:02:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:02:28Speaker 07

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:02:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer's sport, go to fin.ai. And we will kick off the Lambda Lightning round. Let's see. Oh, look at this. We got everything. This is amazing.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in Forrest.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Forrest from Semos. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:02:49Speaker 08

  Hello, guys. How are you doing?

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 2:02:52Speaker 08

  From Medigene.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  First time on the show. Please introduce yourself.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  What a, what a setup here.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  This is a great setup.

• 2:02:57Jordi Hays?

  What a setup.

• 2:02:58John Coogan?

  This looks fantastic.

• 2:02:59Speaker 08

  I come with a bunch of nerdy stuff from the team, all the things we're building. No, I guess.

• 2:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Uh, yeah, kick it off.

• 2:03:11Speaker 08

  Let's see, where do I start? I'm Forrest, I'm a fancy plumber building infrastructure from scratch down here in Colombia to make internet way better and make compute and everything kind of work well in Latin America and beyond. So, very weird journey, but making the fastest internet in the world at the lowest cost is kind of a summary in a very short nutshell.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, you have a lot of fans. I got a bunch of texts from investors that were excited for you to come on. What were you doing, before we get into Somos, what were you doing before this?

• 2:03:42Speaker 08

  Dude, I came to Medellin when I was like 18 years old, basically just dropped out of high school and started building stuff and ostensibly came to visit a friend for a couple of weeks and that was eight years ago and here I am. So, I made websites, I kind of took a very non-traditional path and it's led me to doing a bunch of weird stuff here.

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  That's actually a non-traditional path. Normally when somebody comes on and says they had a non-traditional path, it's like, you know, Stanford to a Meta internship, a Google internship, a VC internship. But, very, very cool. What, yeah, breakdown, like, you know, Somos, you're raising a Series B today, like, how long have you been at it? What initially, I can kind of guess what the initial inspiration might have been, you're building digital products it sounds like and we're probably frustrated with internet speeds, but what's the backstory?

• 2:04:33Speaker 08

  No, I came to Colombia in 2018. I got roped into helping people build this like blockchain incentivized blah, blah, blah back when everything was going to be blockchain in like urban slums here in Medellin. And as those blockchain projects happened, everyone got bored really quickly, so they just left me with all the equipment and I just kind of became fascinated by how do you build connectivity in slums and didn't speak any Spanish, didn't know anything about telecom and just started tinkering and first couple of years were me like literally living in a slum here in Medellin, building internet, stringing stuff up in the middle of the street and kind of bit by bit, I just became fascinated by the concept of like internet is the most basic thing for the modern world and we just sort of assume that it's been solved and really

• 2:05:18Speaker 08

  we haven't done engineering in the last like 30 years. It's the same underlying architecture that like John Malone was building in Cable Cowboy days.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, every time I go travel to another country, I always look up like who the biggest industrialists are and who the richest people in the world are. It's always the people that built like the railroads, the mines, the telecom infrastructure, the wifi, the internet, the power lines. It's always like the stuff that, once you install it, it provides value.

• 2:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it sounds like you're doing a lot. What is in your strike zone of things that you want Somos to take on? Versus where do you work with external partners? Like what is the kind of core path?

• 2:05:55Speaker 08

  This is kind of the insanity of Somos. So we literally do everything from like, we interface with the submarine cables. We built like a nationwide backbone crisscrossing the country. We like make the wifi routers, like the things that go inside of the thing here is all PCBs.

• 2:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's a wifi router. I thought that was just a pretty lamp.

• 2:06:12Speaker 08

  So this is literally the router that goes in customers' homes. So instead of being some like ugly blinky box, it's like a beautiful lamp.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  That's super.

• 2:06:19Speaker 08

  And the lamp works independently.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  You're like, wait, does it have to be an ugly box?

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  No one thought of this? This is incredible.

• 2:06:25Speaker 08

  Like the internet is like literally the most incredible machine humanities ever built. And we're just relegated it to being this like ugly piece of infrastructure and kind of our idea is like, what if it was dope?

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing. So yeah, like how do you, like how does the coverage map like spread out? Everyone's familiar with those like AT&T and Verizon coverage charts of like the map of America. Do you have to go city by city, block by block? Are there ways that you can, like, how do you actually scale out to reach an entire coverage area?

• 2:06:57Speaker 08

  So I literally have like a thousand plus employees cabling the streets. We have like linemen and installers and they're all work directly for Somos. And this is kind of the insanity of what we're doing. And it's been a bit of a like slow flywheel to get ramping. But then at the end of the day, you're building this actual moat because it turns out it's really hard to build an infrastructure from scratch. So we literally are cabling the entire city from scratch with a new type of fiber to connect people to faster, cheaper internet.

• 2:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, in what ways do you think it's easier to do in a place like Colombia than the United States and vice versa?

• 2:07:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think this is one of the interesting things is like the US is kinda looks archaic in comparison to some of the stuff we're building here. So like my base plan for customers like 12 bucks a month and is a gig and we're giving people 10 gig connections and soon 100 gig connections in their homes. So the kind of weird thing that has happened in the US is we sort of believe Comcast is sacred. So we don't let people go build new infrastructure and we're almost, there's a world where it's like 10 years from now, we're like shit. The US has like third world internet infrastructure and what we thought of as the third world has infrastructure. Let's just do all these crazy things that AI is enabling that you couldn't do before. So I think there's this inversion happening kind of the same way as there were no landlines in Africa.

• 2:08:11Speaker 08

  We're kind of leapfrogging all the crappy old cable and just building internet as it was intended back in the arpy days.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:08:19Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you get people to move to Colombia to work on this? What's your pitch? Not, not saying anything wrong with Colombia. It's just, it's, it's a long way away. It's a, it's a long, it's a long flight. The time zone's not too bad, but.

• 2:08:33Speaker 08

  It's 75 degree year round. We have awesome engineering. It's like San Francisco without the fog and we get to just build whatever the hell you want. It's kind of like cowboy western technology, galt, galt in the middle of the jungle.

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, last question for me. Um, I'm sure you got asked this in all the VC pitches. How is Starlink rolling out? How is satellite internet fit into this? Is that a competitor? Is that a compliment? A lot of people in America sort of have both, but uh, how, how, how does that fit into the picture?

• 2:09:07Speaker 08

  I think the big takeaway here is I would sell your Comcast or Telefonica or Telemex stock. Cause I think what's happening is Starlink is attacking lower density areas, moving stuff, mobile. So most is basically building, think of Starlink for cities. So we're, we're building a pure play, just the best internet for dense urban environments. And I think there's like a density threshold where. Below that, Starlink will win. Above that, a thing like Solmos will win. But the traditional telecoms are kind of screwed.

• 2:09:33John Coogan?

  If I'm on level, if I'm on the third floor of a 15-story building in the heart of the city, like, you're gonna win on reliability, connectivity, speed, cost, all of that, right?

• 2:09:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, just base physics will be cheaper and way better and more reliable. Like, even Elon will say this. He's like, Starlink isn't really for cities. It's for everywhere outside of that, right?

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, so, like, basically unaffected by everything there because of physics. Always good news.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  A mutual friend, Zach, asked me to, told me I should ask about how kind of AI is impacting bandwidth needs and how that, that factors into the opportunity for you guys.

• 2:10:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think we're gonna look back and say, like, damn, the infrastructure we have currently is far underbuilt for the future of applications with AI. And one of the things that we are thinking a lot about in Solmos is, what if you extend the data center to everyone's end home, all the crazy application lists you can build on top of that, not only just speed, but reliability, redundancy, low latency? I think there's a world where compute lives in data centers and we're streaming your OS. Think of, like, super Chromebooks to everybody and that that's a world where you make compute way cheaper and way better in a way that historically wouldn't really be doable in traditional telecoms. And I think this is back to, like, there's a world where LatAm has orders of magnitude better compute than parts of the US just simply because we rebuilt the telecom infrastructure from scratch.

• 2:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Wow. What other, what other markets are, are, are on the roadmap?

• 2:10:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, we're heading to Mexico in the very near future. And, I don't know, there's some interesting neighbors of Colombia that are becoming open again that might be a, a new place to expand to from, from Colombia. So, I think Solmos-Carracas might be a thing in the future.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  Before we hit the gong, another mutual friend, Aaron, asked me to ask you about the High Frontier. What's up, what's up with that?

• 2:11:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I'm obsessed with this vision of the future as it used to be. And I think one of the things that's stoked for me right now is like, it feels like we're building awesome things like new ship factories and new infrastructure in the world that are like building a future as it used to be. Like, we used to think the future was gonna be awesome, and we kind of got okay with a very boring, muddling kind of version of it. And it feels like we're now turning this wave of like, let's go build orbital space stations and the l'grange points, let's build fleets of autonomous vehicles, let's build all these amazing things from scratch. So it's like, build infrastructure, rebuild the world, make awesome things happen again.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. How much did you raise?

• 2:11:59Speaker 08

  We just raised 40 million in this round.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Who came in?

• 2:12:09Speaker 08

  So Ribbit led this, we had Bracket Capital, and then USV, Kazakh, and YCOM, and they are all kind of doubled down from the past, so.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  I love it. What a great YC story, too. Yeah, fascinating company, fascinating industry, just, yeah, I love it.

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Did you pop up to the West Coast for the raise, or did you make everybody visit you?

• 2:12:31Speaker 08

  It's a little bit of both. Like, we get people to come down to Medellin, and they're definitely not regretting when they come visit, so we have some fun adventures driving to the countryside.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Forrest. I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 2:12:45John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 2:12:46Speaker 08

  Cheers, guys.

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen, and spend with the Phantom card. Our next guest is Dino from Sironic. He's in the restroom waiting room, let's bring him in to the TVB Ultra. Dino, how you doing?

• 2:13:01Speaker 09

  Good, guys, how you doing? Thanks for having me on.

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us the State of the Union. What's going on with Sironic?

• 2:13:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, likewise. You may have seen today, we announced a $1.75 billion financing round on a

• 2:13:16Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:13:21Speaker 09

  So do we need to build some ships? What's going on? We gotta build some ships.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  We gotta build some ships.

• 2:13:27Speaker 09

  We're super excited for this. I mean, it is a true byproduct of the execution that the team has delivered on over the last, not just 12 months, but the last really 36 months since we started the company. I mean, our team is truly A+. If you look at where we were just a year ago, we came off a $600 million financing round. What that let us go do is we opened our first shipyard. We launched Marauder, which is 180-foot autonomous and unmanned ship. We then announced a multi-hundred-million-dollar project into that shipyard to scale production of Marauder. And then Corsair, which you see behind me right here, our small USV platforms.

• 2:14:09Speaker 09

  We've already taken production of those well into the thousands. So now, as we look forward, what we're going to do over the next 12, 24, 36 months with this capital raise is we're going to accelerate that. We're going to accelerate the production, accelerate the deliveries of our vessels to the US and our allies around the world. We're going to launch new products. We're going to build new ships. And then we're going to go and build new shipyards.

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Speaker 09

  Right? We're going to invest in the shipbuilding industrial base in this country to the tune of billions of dollars. We're going to create thousands of jobs. And ultimately, we're going to unlock production rates that we haven't seen in this country since World War II. And we're going to do it in a very technology-first, software-first approach.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  You mentioned USV. Is that unmanned surface vehicle?

• 2:14:57Speaker 09

  Unmanned surface vessel.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  Vessel, got it. And then, so walking through the use of, you know, boats used to transport people. Now, we put equipment on them. How versatile are these vehicles? What are the different use cases? Are some weapons platforms or some just ISR capabilities? Like, what is the range of utilities that the armed forces will get out of these USVs?

• 2:15:23Speaker 09

  Extremely versatile. The whole point of the platforms we're building is actually for them to be modular by nature, right? And actually, we actually try to change the acronym around a little bit. USV is like unmanned surface vessel. You know, when you look in the past, it's really like a remote control platform, very similar to a predator drone. We use ASV, autonomous surface vessel, because what we're building at Sironic is not just one-to-one control, but it's true maritime autonomy to then go and deliver these platforms at scale and be able to control them at scale, meaning fleets of hundreds or thousands of vessels through the most advanced software on the planet for the maritime domain. And

• 2:16:07Speaker 09

  then when you're looking at the missions, the use cases that you mentioned, it really all just boils down to scale, persistence, and risk reduction, right? How do you operate large numbers of vessels? How do you do that continuously in what's becoming an increasingly dangerous maritime environment? And then how do you offer like real capability to commanders while keeping sailors out of harm's way? Keeping people safe is very, very critical and a key point to what we're building here.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  I don't want to diminish the work, but I'm curious about how much of a challenge is it actually to create an autonomous surface vessel? Because it feels like when you're driving on the road, there's so many random conditions and the car can flip over, but boats, it's a little bit safer, I would feel like. But am I missing something there?

• 2:16:58Speaker 09

  The other issue is you have people, other boats that are trying to kill you.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, maybe that's it. But I'm just thinking like a plane, you know, if it doesn't land perfectly, it'll crash. Like boats, you know, they just kind of rock through the water, but there's obviously more to it. So what went into making it a fully autonomous?

• 2:17:14Speaker 09

  There's a lot of, yeah. So the ocean is just a completely different environment altogether. So we deal with a lot of different challenges. One of the challenges that's really different from self-driving cars is, yes, there's a lot of complexities on the road, but that singular car really only cares about how How it gets to its end destination. It doesn't care about how the other hundred cars get to its end destination as well.

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:40Speaker 09

  And how they're all working together collaboratively on a mission.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:17:44Speaker 09

  Oh, and then you start throwing in six, eight, 10 foot seas.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:48Speaker 09

  High winds, enemy environment, some of the things that we're seeing now and like, whether it's the Black Sea, the Middle East, we're anticipating in the Indo-Pacific. Like, those are very, very complex challenges that we're solving at Sironic.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  What goes into setting up a new shipyard? Do you have to kind of co-locate around existing shipyards? Can you kind of stand something up, you know, totally independently? How does that, how does that work?

• 2:18:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, when you look at shipyards in the shipbuilding industrial base in this country, it's really how do you bring on net new capacity? You're not really co-locating next to anything because a lot of that capacity has really atrophied over the last 30, 40, 50 years. So what we're focused on is building new shipyards and then building the ecosystem and the infrastructure to support that as well through partnerships and vendor relationships. But one of our, one of our main projects and one of the things, a large part of this capital is going to go towards is Port Alpha, right? We have a shipyard in Franklin, Louisiana, I mentioned that. We're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in that yard. But we're looking at a brand new shipyard, building this from the ground up,

• 2:19:00Speaker 09

  completely greenfield, investing billions of dollars to 10x the size of our existing yard, right, to bring on new scale, new capacity and rebuild the shipbuilding industrial base from the ground up. That's what's needed because if you go around the country right now, you go to places which used to be shipyards and you'll see apartments and condominiums that are called naval yards. That's not just a name they came up with. It actually used to be a shipyard. So what we're doing now is we're investing in the shipyards of the future, again, to produce out of scale that we haven't seen since World War II.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  What's the best way to get a job at Sironic?

• 2:19:41Speaker 09

  You can apply on our website. I mean, we are hiring. We are growing. I mentioned how amazing our team is. What we're doing is absolutely critical for the country. The team comes in every single day. The work they're doing is changing the world. And so if you're a top engineer or looking to get into the defense tech space, please, please apply. Everything we're doing is absolutely critical. We grew the team from 200 to 1300 people over the last 12 months. And that's, that's only the beginning, guys.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming and breaking it down.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredible progress. The chat, the chat says, just put the S1 in the, in the SEC mailbox.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  We'll thank you soon.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:20:25Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys. Look forward to following up.

• 2:20:27John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. We got Will Ahmed from Whoop.

• 2:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Whoop.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  He's back. How you doing? Good to see you again. Welcome back.

• 2:20:46Will Ahmed?

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Give us the update. What happened? How you doing?

• 2:20:51Will Ahmed?

  Things are good, thank you. We, we announced a round of financing today, our Series G, $575 million round. So, uh, thank you.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Is this, is this the capital you finally need to make a bust down Whoop? Diamonds from the factory. That's what I'm looking for. Can you do anything?

• 2:21:13Will Ahmed?

  You know, we do, we do have some, we have some premium offerings in the mix that are going to be just right for you, actually. I think you're very happy with the product development.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Jordy wants a bust down. No, no, seriously, give me, give me updates. What, what's changed? Where do you want the product to go? And yeah, I am interested to know, are more collaborations in the works? Do you see that as an important point? Or are you just focused on more and more channel partners, more and more distribution, more growing? Because the product's pretty dialed at this point.

• 2:21:46Will Ahmed?

  Well, look, it's been an extraordinary 12 months for the business. You know, we had to 2025 with over 100% year-over-year growth, you know, 1.1 billion in bookings run rate to end the year. Our membership is growing around the world. We're operating in 60 markets. We've got Whoop members in over 200 countries. We've launched medical-grade technology now, coming out of blood tests around the world. And so Whoop's really become this broad-based health platform. And you can see that in the financing announcement today. You know, we've got the history of Whoop with the world-class athletes. We've added now LeBron James is

• 2:22:28Will Ahmed?

  a new Whoop investor. We've got Cristiano Ronaldo on the cap table, Virgil van Dijk, Matthew Vanderpoel, some of the world's very best athletes, really from every sport, are now on the Whoop cap table. And then in addition to that, we've got a bunch of great existing investors continuing to support the company, Collaborative Fund, IVP, Foundry Group, and more. And then we've brought in some sovereign wealth funds from the GCC, Proud Dev Mobadala, and QIA, and 2.0. So really, some of the biggest funds in the world that are, I think, phenomenal long-term partners. And then lastly, to the point about

• 2:23:11Will Ahmed?

  health, you know, we've added, the Mayo Clinic is an investor in Whoop, one of the premier health institutions.

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go. That's a niche, that's a rare Pokémon in the venture world. I haven't seen, I haven't heard of them on a cap table.

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  We're not ripping a lot of seed checks at YC Demo Day.

• 2:23:29Will Ahmed?

  Yeah, they haven't, they haven't done a lot of investing, but we see a ton of synergies from a research and medical capability standpoint. And we also have added Abbott as an investor in, you know, really one of the best medical device makers also in the world. So it's a phenomenal mix of investors. And I think we've been able to achieve this because of the remarkable growth that we're seeing as a company. And I think also just the tailwinds around health and longevity.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  How do you think your marketing mix will change over the next few years? Because I'm seeing $575 million LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo. That has like crazy Super Bowl ad written all over it. At the same time, you're tech native. I could imagine going way further into AI-generated personalized ads, pushing the performance marketing further. Like what appeals to you? How do you think you'll change? What will stay the same? What will change over the next few years from a marketing perspective?

• 2:24:26Will Ahmed?

  Well, we never want to lose sight of the fact that we started in sports and we've built this aspirational performance lifestyle brand. And so that'll really be at the core still of a lot of what we do for Whoop. But we also now have a product that can detect whether you have AFib and tell you your blood pressure every morning and help you do blood tests. So it's just a much broader health platform than it's ever been before. And our marketing needs to reflect that. One of the areas I would say of maybe not weakness, but opportunity for Whoop is brand awareness. We don't have massive brand awareness around the world. And so this capital is going to give us the gunpowder to really grow broadly internationally.

• 2:25:11Will Ahmed?

  And so you're going to be seeing a lot of Whoop wherever you consume content.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Super Bowl ad incoming.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you want to reach me specifically, maybe a partnership with an athlete like Johnny Knoxville might work.

• 2:25:24Will Ahmed?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  It just might make sense.

• 2:25:28Will Ahmed?

  We'll do a Whoop live heart rate on some of the stunts.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  I think that would do the trick.

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious, like, how Whoop, like, how do you guys think about improving accuracy at this point? Like, I'm assuming like a lot of, like, so much progress has been made over the last however many years, but there's still always incremental progress. Like, you can always be more accurate. How do you think about that? Is that still like a top priority? Or are there other, is it accurate enough at this point that there's better, there's better things you can focus, you know, the core energy of the team on?

• 2:26:13Will Ahmed?

  I mean, I think, big picture, we want the product to be getting constantly smaller and smarter. You know, we want it to be an aspirational product in the sense that it's something cool that you wear on your wrist, or we want it to be something that disappears throughout your body and can essentially be invisible. And so however you can gather this data super accurately, have the data sets grow in nature, more sensing, more capabilities, more medical approvals, the better. And I think that's going to continue to expand our TAM. I think it's going to continue to deliver deeper insights for our members. So we're going to be leaning in pretty heavily on research and development. You're going to see a lot of very powerful sensing coming from Whoop in the years to come.

• 2:26:56Will Ahmed?

  How is the peptide boom affecting Whoop?

• 2:27:01Will Ahmed?

  Well, I think the underlying reason for the peptide boom is that people want to take more control of their own health, and they're sort of generally frustrated with the tools that they've had to improve their health. And so that leads in different directions. Peptides being part of it, supplements being part of it, concierge doctors being part of it, AI health coaching being part of it. But broadly speaking, it's, I think, good for Whoop that people want to take more control of their health. And 10 years ago, I would talk about health monitoring, and people would say, well, that sounds like something niche for athletes. And now, you know, everywhere I go, people want to talk

• 2:27:43Will Ahmed?

  about how they can improve their sleep, or improve their VO2 max, or what is heart rate variability. So there's just clearly been a cultural shift to care a lot about your health. And, you know, longevity's become one of the most common reasons that people use the product. Our health span score, the Whoop age score, has become the most screenshotted page in the Whoop app. So clearly, you've got people who want to show off how old they are, or, you know, who want some counseling for how old they might be. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's an interesting dynamic with the various health platforms, where there's like, kind of an incentive, there's like a weird incentive to like, you know, measure, like, say, somebody's, you know, their chronological age versus their biological age, make it like, lower, people are more likely to share. It's like, I've seen, I've seen some people have, you know, come in and say like, well, my biological age is... Nineteen.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  I did one test that said I had the mind of a five-year-old. It said it was testing my brain health and it said that I had the.

• 2:28:48Will Ahmed?

  Is that good or bad?

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  It's extremely young. I'm way over five, so I assume it's good.

• 2:28:54Will Ahmed?

  I think we've built the most credible biological age metric because we did, first of all, we did it in partnership with the leading longevity institute out of California and then the Buck Institute and then we show you in great granularity each of your biometrics and what's improving it and what's not and by how much. So here's a trivia question for you. What percentage of people on Whoop do you think have a younger Whoop age?

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. I mean, if it was perfect, it would be fifty-fifty, I would think.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Seventy percent because people that use Whoop are much more likely to be.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Okay, so let's go with seventy. What is it?

• 2:29:34Will Ahmed?

  It's fifty-five percent.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Fifty-five percent.

• 2:29:37Will Ahmed?

  What that means is forty-five percent are older on Whoop. You know.

• 2:29:43John Coogan?

  They're early in their Whoop journey, okay.

• 2:29:45Will Ahmed?

  This whole show is really dialed in. No, so forty-five percent are.

• 2:29:57Will Ahmed?

  So, you know, but that shows that like it's not just telling you what you want to hear. It's, you know, it's going to push you.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And I only, I only brought that up originally because I've seen some of these come out and I'm like, okay, there's zero shot this person's biological age is lower than their chronological age.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Based on the life you live.

• 2:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Not every platform, you know, platforms are just kind of, every platform is going to run their own kind of algorithm to determine that and not necessarily working with the Buck Institute.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, very cool.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic progress.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update. Congrats to the whole, congratulations to the whole team. I feel like just in the last year, it was like the world has woken up to this kind of category and your guys' progress is a testament and I still think it's, I still think it's very early. It must be fun to walk down the street for you and. You know, someplace like LA.

• 2:30:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you probably see them everywhere.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I'm sure it's like every 10th person has a Whoop band on, but that means there's nine, nine or so.

• 2:30:55Will Ahmed?

  Yeah, it is. It is a trip seeing, seeing Whoop in the world. And, you know, for people who decide to take the hard path of building hardware, it's an amazingly rewarding feeling when you see a physical product that your team's built in the world. So I will say that's a, that's a very gratifying thing. But you guys, you guys owe me a question here. You haven't asked me.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  What is it? What's the question?

• 2:31:17Will Ahmed?

  Aren't you gonna ask me if the job's done?

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Is the job finished?

• 2:31:21Will Ahmed?

  Job's not done, guys. We gotta keep going.

• 2:31:28Will Ahmed?

  Thank you. Thank you for that.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:31:31Will Ahmed?

  Thanks.

• 2:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow, we'll see you.

• 2:31:33Will Ahmed?

  I appreciate you guys. Keep it up. Thank you.

• 2:31:35Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you at I C soon, I'm sure.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, get ready. The chat's gonna be your strongest supporters. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon, Will.

• 2:31:44Will Ahmed?

  All right, guys.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Continuing our lightning round. You know who we got? The CEO of public.com. Yannick, how you doing?

• 2:32:05Speaker 11

  Hey, guys. I'm doing well. How are you?

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic. Look at that stuff in the background there. Looking good.

• 2:32:10Speaker 11

  Do you recognize any of this stuff?

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, you got the whole head to toe, head to toe.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Head to toe.

• 2:32:15Speaker 11

  I don't recognize what Jordy is wearing. I don't think.

• 2:32:17John Coogan?

  This is new. Oh, you gotta get one. This is the new polo. You're right there.

• 2:32:21Speaker 11

  I know.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  You got lead left.

• 2:32:24Speaker 11

  There's plenty of room on the walls. Plenty of room on the walls.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, enough about our merch. Let's talk about your business. Walk us through the launch today.

• 2:32:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, so today we launched AI agents for investing.

• 2:32:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:32:36Speaker 11

  The easiest, safest way to put AI agents to work directly inside your portfolio.

• 2:32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Speaker 11

  And the way it works is pretty simple. There's now an agents tab directly within the public app. You chat with an AI to set up agents that monitor markets, move money around, and even execute trades for you all within the app, right? So there's nothing to install. From a security standpoint, obviously, everything stays in a safe, controlled environment because it's within the brokerage.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Can I install Axios?

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  No, do not do that. That is such a niche joke. Everyone's gonna think you're talking about the publication.

• 2:33:11Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. No, but I mean, it's been really fun. I have a bunch of agents running now on my account. It's been really awesome to see how it's changed my behavior as an investor, right?

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  John, relax.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  I like the sound of that.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  I knew you were gonna do that.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  We got a little John in the studio.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so, so, uh, makes total sense. What, like, if people are, like, uh, already signed up, which they should be, how, what should they, what's the first thing that, that they should try to, like, set up or experiment with? Like, what was your first few agents that you've set up and, and like, continue to keep running? Because I'm assuming you can effectively, like, run them, you can retire them at different points.

• 2:33:51Speaker 11

  Exactly, exactly. The first one I set up was, um, one that checks the oil prices before the market opened and buys protective put options every day as a hedge.

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:01Speaker 11

  If there's a spike in those, I call it the, "I'm tired of seeing red due to war agent."

• 2:34:08Speaker 11

  And so, uh, today that didn't fire, thank God. Um, you know, I have another one that just looks at my bank accounts and automatically sweeps any cash in excess of a certain amount into my bond portfolio. So I'm always yield maxing. You want to be yield maxing always, especially while the rate is still high.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:34:26Speaker 11

  And, uh, and then I got some more advanced stuff. Like, I got one that scans the market for opportunities to write cover calls.

• 2:34:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:32Speaker 11

  Across my top positions. So if there's a low-risk opportunity to make like 20 grand a month.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:38Speaker 11

  Um, selling options premiums, I instructed it to just go ahead and place those orders. And so that just rolls every time, all the time. And I don't have to think about it.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  That exact strategy was the first thing a, uh, a private wealth manager ever pitched me in my career, like a decade ago. They were like, I, and they had like a guy that did it. And you had to have a lot of money to like, access that. And there were minimums and stuff.

• 2:34:58Jordi Hays?

  You should probably check on that guy.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  But so so I there are obviously like incredibly advanced things that you can do with these agents in in the market. I'm also interested in just driving behavior change because a lot of folks that I know are earlier in their career. They don't want to necessarily take a lot of risk. The biggest lever on their financial future will just be seamlessly funneling money from their paychecks into something as simple as VTI and then they can do something more more advanced down the road. But what does it look like in terms of the best practices or best functionality for just creating a set it and forget it? I want to make sure that every time I get paid, money's flowing into the market. How easy is that these days?

• 2:35:46Speaker 11

  Well, I think with agents that becomes really, really simple, right? I think this is sort of the whole point. You know, the stock market has always been about manually entering orders, right? Like you do all this work and eventually you end up manually being like buy 200 shares of Apple at this price.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:01Speaker 11

  I think that user interface is now shifting to something like increase my position if valuations compress 15% from here.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:09Speaker 11

  You know, and it stays within my defined risk tolerances and so forth. And so I think it changes how people think about and manage their portfolios in a pretty profound way. And we do see it as a user interface shift like, you know, the interesting thing about this industry is every technology kind of had their model of brokerage, right? Like we started on the horn and then the dawn of the internet gave us the discount broker with mobile came the Neo broker. And I think now with AI, it's the era of the agentic brokerage. But what's uniquely interesting about this shift is every previous shift was about streamlining the process and reducing the responsibility set of the broker, you know, to basically just trade execution ultimately.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:51Speaker 11

  But it actually used to be much more full service to Jordi's point. There used to be a guy, I used to call you, I used to pitch all these kind of ideas, risk, you know, trade ideas, et cetera. I think with the agentic brokerage model, you're reversing back to that. And it's much more full service than obviously any human service could ever be because this thing can like write an algorithmic trading script for you in 10 seconds. It can do tax sales harvest. It can instantly analyze risk.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:15Speaker 11

  And so it's a shift back to a world where the brokerage plays a much, a much larger role than just trade execution. It sort of goes into the realm of maybe a quant and a financial advisor. And that's what we're excited about the brokerage playing a much bigger role through essentially agentic AI.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  Well, George.

• 2:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Can it, can, can it pull in external data sources yet? I'm thinking like fear and greed index, like should I, could I set something up?

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Or even like unemployment rate?

• 2:37:43Jordi Hays?

  If you have like max fear that you want to buy on days when, when the

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Fear index is high, but that might not be an, an actual like instrument in that you can buy and sell directly.

• 2:37:55Speaker 11

  Yep. A hundred percent unemployment data, CPI, Fed cuts, like one that people have been kicking around today is, you know, whenever there's a Fed cut, move money obviously out of my high yield cash account on public, put it to work. It's a high growth tech.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:08Speaker 11

  We like the sound of that. All right.

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:38:11Speaker 11

  And so and, and so there's a lot of those.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:16Speaker 11

  CPI, like, like the fear and greed one was requested today. I think that's coming in, in the next couple of days. And so really it's about getting all that into this natural language interface and just letting people kind of instruct AI to, to do this on their behalf.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  Last question for me about AI on the platform. What have you, what are the capabilities? What have you learned about users educating themselves about various financial instruments within the public ecosystem? You know, okay, I see a company, you're going to surface price to earnings ratio, market cap, the usual stuff. But there's so much more that you can ask in LLM these days about what does a company actually do? What is their strategy? How, what's the history of this company? Do I, what's the founder? Like, these things are, are perfect for LLMs and you can vend those in. But what are users actually using? What's the adoption been like? What have the learnings been?

• 2:39:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think one of the core tasks in application layer AI is to sort of figure out, obviously, what users want to achieve. Yeah. And then which model and kind of harness is best suited to achieve that purpose. Sure. But then also focus on like, what are we uniquely able to deliver, right? So we know what you own, we know what you used to own. Yeah. We know what your risk tolerance is. Yeah. By the way, we also know the difference between what that actually is and what you said it was when it signed, when you signed on. Yeah. And, and, and we have real time data feeds of everything, right? And so I think as a product builder, those are like some of the situations where you can really create a magic moment that general purpose L L M's can't.

• 2:39:52Speaker 11

  And I think a lot of that comes because we just have a lot of that kind of history about how people like to invest, what questions they've asked, to your point, in the past about the P E ratio or what the founder is like, et cetera. Because we've been basically running a research assistant since 2023. Yeah. And we're only a six year old company, so it's already for sort of like half the time that we've been live. And so we've been able to gather a lot of data for the last three years that we can now kind of repurpose into this.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  What's your theory right now? It's obviously day, day one, but do you think in the future we'll get, you know, more volatility because you have like financial institutions that are effectively using like agents or algorithms to do trading? And then you also have retail, so when you get like a new CPI print, you know, you have, you know, even, even, you know, additional trading activity off of these single events. Like, do you think this is something in the future that, that everyone will effectively have like a handful of agents running just naturally in the product? And then some people, you know, be like, you know, maybe prosumers, people that are more into it will have, you know, many?

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Or, or at some point is everyone, you know, at what point do, is it like, you know, old fashioned to be just like, you know, buying a stock yourself even with a button?

• 2:41:10Speaker 11

  Totally. I actually think we will look back at like tables at buy buttons and feel that's a little antique, maybe already 12 months from now. But I think the effect is things will get priced in faster, for sure. On the institutional side, they've, you know, they've used some version of AI for the longest time, right? But then, at the same time, retail have gone from being like 5 to 25% of the market. And on the retail side, folks haven't been as fast to react always, right? They haven't been as disciplined. They're not necessarily glued to the screen 24/7. And so, you know, they can't always react as quickly as they want to. And agents obviously change that, right? And so I do think that there might be, I mean, it's a little bit like, whether it's crypto, prediction markets,

• 2:41:53Speaker 11

  there's always a little bit more of a, of sort of an alpha opportunity or an R opportunity in the early, early days. And then over time, it becomes more mainstream and that kind of fades away. And I would suspect that this follows something like a similar pattern, at least.

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've just been thinking about it because, because the content on X is primarily user generated, at least the big accounts. It means that an event happens in the real world, it gets reported on, or it pops up on a website, or you get a news wire, and then a human takes that and puts it on X. And then this trade, even the majority of retail volume is like flowing off of like that human seeing the news, posting it, and then you get this sort of trading activity. But in a perfect world, you see news, and then you go to your broker, and the right trade has already been made on your behalf.

• 2:42:43Speaker 11

  Exactly.

• 2:42:44Jordi Hays?

  And anybody that's not adopting this will just be like, well, I missed kind of, I missed the opportunity unless you want to get out entirely.

• 2:42:51Speaker 11

  Totally. Speaking of X, a fun one is, that was from Dayways. If DJT says buy, just buy.

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  That's actually really smart.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  I think that's probably backtests very well.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Social.

• 2:43:08Speaker 11

  It backtests extremely well.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  What a crazy timeline we are in. Well, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. I miss you. Let's, let's be sure to hang out.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Let's hang soon.

• 2:43:19Speaker 11

  We will, yeah.

• 2:43:20Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:43:20Speaker 11

  Bye, guys.

• 2:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:43:22Speaker 11

  Ciao.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Ryan from Crosby. How you doing, Ryan?

• 2:43:37John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 2:43:37Ryan Daniels?

  Hey guys, good to see you again.

• 2:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you're on here like every week.

• 2:43:40John Coogan?

  It's getting ridiculous.

• 2:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's getting a bit much. Let me guess, another round.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  You should just bundle all the fundraisers together into like a series alphabet. Then you just do it all at once.

• 2:43:53Ryan Daniels?

  But then I never get to see you guys.

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  It is more strategic to break them up, but tell us what happened. How much did you raise? What's going on?

• 2:43:59Ryan Daniels?

  We have two announcements. The first announcement is we've raised $60 million, led by Lux. Our series B. And our second announcement, thank you. The second announcement is we did some math last month and we have now closed contracts worth over a billion dollars for our clients.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:44:16Ryan Daniels?

  It's a big milestone for us.

• 2:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, a billion dollars for the client.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  Is there a power law on there? Was there like one sneaky $950 million deal?

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Did you get 1% of this new OpenAI round in there? Somebody was like, I'm gonna review one clause. And you're like, I'm getting, no. It sounds like, it sounds like there's a lot of lawyers using it.

• 2:44:34Ryan Daniels?

  That's right. I mean, these are small deals, so it's a lot of velocity. I think definitely my corporate law friends are like, that's like one deal for me. That's not interesting. But for us, that's a big number.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:44:43Ryan Daniels?

  So it's a really good milestone.

• 2:44:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, yeah. Take us through, I mean, it sounds like, like the, the shape of the work that is being augmented by Crosby these days.

• 2:44:53Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, so you know, we're about a year and a half into it. We announced our seed around 230 days ago. We do commercial agreements. These are the sales agreements, MSAs, NDAs, DPAs for like fast growing AI companies. Now we're branching out, but since the beginning, we've been a law firm. So we have about 30 lawyers here who I'll give a shout out to are just, the last day of the quarter, they're working so hard for our clients, getting the deals closed. And we close deals fast, like in a couple of hours. And so this idea has just taken off with a lot of tech companies now and now even bigger clients who just wanna close faster.

• 2:45:28Jordi Hays?

  How, how have you been processing? You're kind of, I would say, very tapped into how well the models work in different roles. I'm curious your view on how application layer legal AI companies will do compared to just the labs themselves, right? I feel like every other day on X, somebody says, wait, this LLM. Seems to be doing just as much as, you know, this application layer company. You guys are using all the models internally.

• 2:46:04Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  For your own internal tools. But like, how are you processing kind of what feels like will ultimately, in the same way we saw with CodeGen, where you have application layer companies and foundation model companies, and then you have foundation models with their own applications. I'm assuming we'll see that in legal, but how have you been kind of processing it?

• 2:46:26Ryan Daniels?

  So, I mean, that is the question we have to ask ourselves every day. We think that code generation, more or less, is kind of like a year and a half ahead of the sort of non-self verifiable domains. So anything that's not like math or code. And law is one of those, but it's a huge service area. And our sort of like insight a couple of years ago was, let's, you know, not think about these sort of like AI co-pilots that are kind of like, you know, the equivalent of what Cursor was a year and a half ago, when you kind of hit Tab to autocomplete. But these long-form agents with bigger context that could do a full job end to end. And if you have agents that can do entire swathes of legal work, then the best thing you should do is start a law firm. Because you're selling work to clients, not, you know, fractions of work or kind of helping them along.

• 2:47:08Ryan Daniels?

  And in truth, we were ahead of the models, and so we were selling something that like, we weren't able to fully automate. And as the models are progressing, we're seeing more and more of a compounding advantage as, you know, we have more and more contracts that we're processing. We have more and more lawyers that were able to help us, you know, tune judges and, you know, like create better agents. And so we're able to just do end to end work in a way that like, if you're just selling a legal, you know, co-pilot, I think you're going to face a lot of competition just from the models with no customization.

• 2:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Sorry. Wild. John's back. Yeah, wild, wild moment. What? I'm assuming you'll also face competition from clients that are just like, hey, we can, should, should we, should we have an in, like, should we have an in-house lawyer that we can, you know, speed up? But, but everybody's competing with everyone, but. Yeah.

• 2:48:00John Coogan?

  How are you, how are you tracking the legal education market? Uh, I've seen it, it, it seems very hard to predict for me. Like there was this weird spike. I want to say like it was maybe post chat GPT where there were like more people signing up for law school.

• 2:48:13Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:14John Coogan?

  And that was like sort of contrarian based on the model capabilities like the A I S F discourse. But maybe it makes more sense. Like, are you tracking that data? And then are you tracking like how legal education is changing? Uh, I imagine that, uh, using A I tools already happening in middle school for a lot of people. High school, definitely college, definitely law school. Uh, how will that, how will that all trace through and how closely are you following it?

• 2:48:42Ryan Daniels?

  I mean, I think every industry is asking themselves like, how do people get the entry level jobs to learn those skills? And then become really good and senior and get leveraged by agents. Um, I, I went to law school at Stanford. I'm talking to a lot of professors there who are struggling with this question. I think our insight for now, like the stat we found recently is that the top hundred law firms last year made a little under seventy billion dollars in just profit, just in twenty twenty five. That's just paid out to their partners. That's just salary. And

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Good enough for lawyers.

• 2:49:10Ryan Daniels?

  Good year.

• 2:49:11John Coogan?

  It's so good to do.

• 2:49:13Ryan Daniels?

  And that was, that was more money than Google spent on all their R and D. And so like our insight was

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  Mung.

• 2:49:18Ryan Daniels?

  Which is great. So, so like if we could just put some fraction of the profits law firms are making into building better tools and experiences for lawyers and for their clients, I actually think the legal industry gets a lot bigger. And so it's like for a, a person in law school today.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:33Ryan Daniels?

  It's a good time to be thinking like, how can I just build better stuff? And that's just a new way of lawyers thinking.

• 2:49:37John Coogan?

  Okay, that's one way to put the profits to work. Uh, let me put you another way. If I'm a partner at a law firm and I see that, yes, agents can do the work of the, the associates that I would be hiring.

• 2:49:51Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:51John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe I, you know, uh, contrarian in me wants to still hire associates just for the mentorship and, uh, and building like the pipeline of partners that will do more human work, more deals work, more interpersonal relationship work. But I know that if I don't start Buying and paying for that service right now, even if I'm getting less margin on it loosely because I'm paying an associate a bunch of money and it's work that an AI agent like sort of could do and maybe they're a little bit more free. I'm actually incentivized to figure out how to accelerate them faster in their career, have them start working on larger, stickier deals that AI can't necessarily navigate just yet.

• 2:50:33Ryan Daniels?

  Yeah, I mean, I buy the argument. Like, I think that there's two jobs for lawyers really to focus on right now. One is just doing client-facing work and being really good at being like, you know, talking to people and understanding what their points of view are and not being buried in the sort of paperwork like a typical associate. And the other is being able to explain reasonably well to an engineer or a researcher what it is you're doing and what you're thinking about and all the subtleties of context. And those two things, I think, are both things that if you're not hiring enough lawyers, you can't do well and you can't build better legal technology and experiences. And so I think we're feeling this and every law firm is feeling like you just need people to be really thoughtful about doing both those jobs.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:09Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys fine-tuning any models, you know, based on, fine-tuning like open source models? Or is that not even, you know, I've seen like Finn and Notion have had some success with this. Is that even a good use of time right now? Because I'm assuming your guys' like actual like inference costs are not that high relative to what you can charge clients, even if you're using the Frontier models. But how are you thinking about that?

• 2:51:37Ryan Daniels?

  I think, again, if we just look at code generation as like the blueprint for the future, you'll see like a lot of the code gen companies got a lot of lift from just like, you know, the main, you know, three big models. And over time, you have to start fine-tuning your models as you get scale, as you get data, and as you need a more competitive edge. So we're not there yet. We have a lot of lift from just getting the right context to models, building the right agent flows, like, um, just doing some reinforcement learning on like, basically, you know, we work with really, you know, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google's models. But yeah, in a year and a half, as you get really specialized in use cases of law, I, I'm sure like we're going that direction. And part of the reason for this funding and doing it so quickly is to start investing in a research team that can, can kind of push the boundaries there.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  That's very exciting. Well, congratulations on the funding round. I'm sure we'll see you. We'll just book it now. You just tell us and

• 2:52:25Ryan Daniels?

  Same time next month.

• 2:52:26John Coogan?

  Cute.

• 2:52:26Ryan Daniels?

  Thanks, gentlemen.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

• 2:52:30Ryan Daniels?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:52:31John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado, we have Chris Yu from Also. How are you doing, Chris?

• 2:52:46Speaker 13

  I'm doing great.

• 2:52:47John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:52:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Since this is your first time, please introduce yourself.

• 2:52:54Speaker 13

  Yeah, my name is Chris Yu and I'm the co-founder and president of Also.

• 2:52:59John Coogan?

  Okay, break it down for us. What is Also? Give us some of the corporate lineage, the strategy,

• 2:53:03Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:53:03John Coogan?

  the product, just sort of everything.

• 2:53:06Speaker 13

  Yeah, so actually before 2022, RJ and I met and we immediately hit it off on this one topic. And so that turned into me joining Rivian at the time with the explicit mission to create a startup within a startup. The entire thesis that we had, and this has turned into Also with a spinout last year, is that, you know, if you look at the vast majority of trips that happen for the movement of people and goods around the world, they happen in smaller than car things. But nearly none of them have been electrified yet. And so it's really taken the Rivian or Tesla playbook and applying it to these smaller form factors.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  Okay, smaller form factors, that means everything from hoverboard to a horse and carriage. What are we thinking?

• 2:53:46Speaker 13

  We're focusing on wheels first, but yeah.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Okay. But yeah, yeah, narrow down the product for me, the go-to-market, the quad and the pedal-assisted electric bike. Are there timelines, shapes, sizes, ranges? Like, how do you think about narrowing down the product set? Because it is a really wide and diverse category.

• 2:54:11Speaker 13

  Totally. Yeah, so we think of it as in a way two phases of the business. Phase one of the business is how do we create a vertically integrated software-defined EV platform, but optimized for small form factors. And we've applied that to our first products. We call them EVs that you can pedal.

• 2:54:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:28Speaker 13

  And we announced those back in October. So one is a consumer e-bike. And the other is a pedal quad, which we partnered with Amazon to deploy soon. That's really exciting. But if you look globally again, today, things move around in things like two-wheelers, like scooters, Bota Botas, tuk-tuks, microcars, K-trucks. There's just these rich, diverse set of form factors. And again, none of them have been electrified and all of them are ripe for a really kind of tech-forward platform, which is what we're building. But importantly, today, we announced a partnership with DoorDash, and that kind of underpins phase two of the business, which is...

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:55:05Speaker 13

  Yeah, so if you look at the world becoming more and more autonomous, and even as that happens, some fundamental constraints don't change, meaning these trips are all happening in dense urban, suburban environments. Congestion is always going to be an issue. Cost per mile is always going to be a factor. And so we believe really strongly that even in a fully autonomous world, small form factors make sense for a lot of these trips. And that's really what this partnership is about.

• 2:55:32John Coogan?

  Talk to me about, I mean, I love RJ. Rivian's an incredible company. Obviously, a younger company in many ways than other EV makers that might be more vertically integrated. So I'm wondering, like, how much is it that you're taking the supply chain knowledge, the expertise, the best practices, the connections, and setting up sort of an entirely new supply chain that's distinct? Versus you're just going to be able to buy stuff from Rivian or license it? Or there's going to be more of a business relationship other than just funding?

• 2:56:05Speaker 13

  It's all of the above. We, RJ and I talk about us as kind of like sibling companies, if you will. So I think, I mean, there's a few aspects. One is we share the latest and greatest from a technical architecture standpoint. So if you look at how also vehicles are built, they're very, very similar in terms of how Rivian is built.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:23Speaker 13

  There are some commodities that are shared. So battery cells, we are first products actually use the same cell that are in Rivian R1s. And that helps a lot from a scale.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 2:56:31Speaker 13

  Standpoint. But there are other areas where we are taking a decidedly different path because our products are different from a car, truck, or SUV. So supply chain that you mentioned, that's actually one of them. We are fully engineered in-house, but we partner with contract manufacturers across the world to be able to do assembly. And that that's right for smaller scale products.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And with cars, you almost always want to manufacture them where they're going. Like, that's why even even like the Japanese carmakers have facilities in America or Mexico because you just would drive the car as opposed to put it.

• 2:57:03Speaker 13

  That's exactly right. If you look at a car, I mean, the size of tools necessary, the custom they are, tariffs, like, they all have to, like, you have to have your own factory in region.

• 2:57:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:13Speaker 13

  But if you look at any product south of a car, almost all of them are built with this contract manufacturing model.

• 2:57:18John Coogan?

  Okay, talk about the name and the brand. Rivian has those delightful headlights. Lot of different, interesting brand decisions around Rivian. What are you taking? What are you thinking? And where does the name come from?

• 2:57:32Speaker 13

  That's so great. I love it. We, naming something is so hard. And so RJ and I battled quite a bit with this, but when we landed on this one, we knew it was the one because if you look at transportation, it's always been so singular narrative. It's like, it's just cars, or it's just not cars.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:50Speaker 13

  And for us, the approach is like, whether it's a commercial enterprise or a consumer, it's all of the above, most likely, meaning that I want to use my R1 to go on a long weekend trip, but my school drop off with my kid, it's a pain in the butt to sit in the car line. And something smaller probably makes more sense. And so the transformation, electrification of transportation is also, it requires all of the above in a way.

• 2:58:18Speaker 13

  And on kind of like how we present ourselves from a brand, you know, one analogy that RJ and I really love and use often is it's kind of like we're two characters in the Marvel Universe, if you will. So it's like we have the same mission, but we can have very different personalities. And so also has an opportunity to be maybe in a way really expressive and take a little bit more liberties, what you're starting to see in some of our products than a more grown up vehicle brand may need to be.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:43Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about competition with Chinese manufacturers? You know, Rivian's had the benefit of not having to compete with all the Chinese manufacturers in the US.

• 2:58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:55Jordi Hays?

  I imagine micromobility, you know, is not going to be having the same kind of export restrictions. You know, how do you, how do you think about that threat? Assuming that, you know, there's Chinese companies out there that for one reason or another will be able to like sell at a loss for some amount of time.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, the DJI story, basically.

• 2:59:17Speaker 13

  Yep. That's a great question. I think there's a couple of ways to think about it. Increasingly, as you get to the larger form factors in our portfolio, when certainly as we get into autonomy, I think a lot of the similar factors that we're seeing in the automotive world in terms of the natural firewalls that are happening will exist in our space to some extent as well. But just to back up, I think one of the things that gets lost is there are a tremendous number of products in this kind of like small mobility or micromobility space that are coming out of China for sure. But I think it's without debate that the vast majority of these products are commodity, like relatively low quality, white labeled type products. That being said, there are a small handful that are really,

• 3:00:00Speaker 13

  really great products and using the latest and greatest tech. And if you look and take apart one of those products and you take apart one of our products architecturally and from a technology capability standpoint, they're actually more of the same than not. And I would say also it's probably one of the only brands outside of China that you could say that of within this space. And so just purely from a product feature, quality and technical capability standpoint, we feel like we're very, very competitive.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  Okay, product pitch. The Rivian R1T has a gear tunnel. It fits a snowboard, electric longboard with a handle that flips up like a giant razor scooter that fits perfectly in the gear tunnel. Am I on to something?

• 3:00:39Speaker 13

  I love it. That's not the first time we've heard that one.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Okay. The gear tunnel, it just, it just does feel like such a unique feature and it just, it just demands some bespoke thing that fits in there. You know, you want like a big speaker, Bluetooth speaker that fits in there, like barbecue or something. It just, I want an ecosystem around the gear tunnel, even if it's, who knows how viable that is. Anyway, very fun. Jordy, anything else?

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 3:01:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 3:01:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm on the website right now. I'm interested.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  You're shopping?

• 3:01:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm shopping.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  I'm shopping.

• 3:01:08Speaker 13

  We'll hook you up. Just let us know.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  We'll be very excited to ride these around. We've been doing, uh, we've been doing some, uh, office chair racing in the studio.

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  That's what I want. I want an electric office chair.

• 3:01:21Speaker 13

  Well, there you go. We have, uh, what we have in-house vertically integrated motors and rivers. We can power, we can soup those up.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I can just sit here and go, adjust me to the left one inch.

• 3:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just a little joystick.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thanks for hanging out, Chris.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Pilot me. You know, if, if, if you're not in the right shot, you're a little bit to the left. Production team can just move you.

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  That's actually.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  This is a product. You will have one or two customers for this if you build it.

• 3:01:45Speaker 13

  Autonomous chair. I love it.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Autonomous office chair. Hey, you're, you have to leave the meeting. Go back to your desk. Drive you around. I think we're on to something. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to get to chat with us.

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet Chris.

• 3:01:57Speaker 13

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:01:58Speaker 13

  On the show. Thank you.

• 3:01:59John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about app loving. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over one billion, billion daily active users and grow your business today. What's up?

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Brett Adcock.

• 3:02:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Was on the show yesterday.

• 3:02:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:14Jordi Hays?

  He had some interesting comments about the state of AI.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  I disagreed strongly with many of them.

• 3:02:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:21Jordi Hays?

  But. We have to cover this video from the Sean Ryan podcast.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a new gate.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a, they're calling it a telegate.

• 3:02:31John Coogan?

  Adgate.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Ad, well, maybe that too.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 3:02:35Jordi Hays?

  So, so he is hanging out with a figure robot.

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:38Jordi Hays?

  On the Sean Ryan podcast.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. He went outside for it. Yeah, I was wondering because like Sean Ryan normally shoots not like very cinematic.

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  Whiskey bar, but he's outside and.

• 3:02:49Jordi Hays?

  There's like a two-minute video where they're hanging out with the robot.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this up and I want to get your take.

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  All right, turn around.

• 3:02:58Jordi Hays?

  So this is the first time he tells it to turn around.

• 3:03:00John Coogan?

  Too is like we, uh, we basically, uh, the robots.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  End of the video. It starts turning around and then he says, turn around.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  And Nima here says the video is a smoking gun that figures robots are teleopt. Again, I love teleopt, not a problem, but Brett has. He always says he's not doing teleopt.

• 3:03:19Jordi Hays?

  You'd never do tele.

• 3:03:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. This is not autonomous. Notice how the robot starts turning around before Brett says, all right, turn around.

• 3:03:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can skip forward a little bit. And there's, pull up, pull up this other video that I'm actually on.

• 3:03:30John Coogan?

  There's another, yeah, there's another video quoting this that shows it on repeat.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 3:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Now.

• 3:03:38Speaker 13

  Thing too is like we, uh, we basically, uh, the robots almost all are fully software.

• 3:03:42John Coogan?

  It's by Vic. Vic quoted and said, yeah, okay, yeah, it's definitely not waiting for, for the command.

• 3:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Very.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  This one.

• 3:03:50Jordi Hays?

  All right. It's very subtle, but you can see it's turning around and then he says, all right, turn around.

• 3:03:54John Coogan?

  Yes, but the steel man here, premonition.

• 3:03:58Speaker 13

  All right, turn around.

• 3:03:59John Coogan?

  The robot knew what was going to happen because personalized superintelligence understands that a turnaround command is coming before Brett even says it. Starts turning around before. So that would be one possible solution. But yes, um, who knows? Also.

• 3:04:13Jordi Hays?

  The, the moment from yesterday that stands out to me is, uh, I said, why build a new, a separate AI lab focused on personal superintelligence outside of your company that is trying to sell some combination of intelligence in the physical world. And he said, I really value focus. Which I thought was fascinating, given that he is.

• 3:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Diverting his.

• 3:04:40John Coogan?

  His personal focus.

• 3:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Personal focus.

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like focus within an organization, like a specific, like the leaders that join that company can focus just on that problem. It was, it was an odd, an odd comment to sort of process. Um, yes, the, uh, I mean, I don't know. I, I haven't watched the full, uh, the full interview with Sean Ryan. I wonder if, uh, if, if he talks about whether or not this particular robot is teleopt, because it's totally reasonable that a company would have some teleopt robots, some autonomous robots and sort of mix and match them based on the particular demo. Obviously, if you're doing some sort of pre-scripted stunt, uh, dance or parkour scenario, you might pre-script that. And then ideally you would say, hey,

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  you know, this, this one's teleopt. Here, here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're using teleopt. Here's a demo of what we're capable of when we're fully autonomous, when we're, you know, partially, you know, remote controlled or something like that, somewhere in between. Um, I don't know. We'll see. Uh, you know, people will continue to dig in. I mean, all of this, uh, you know, the rubber meets the road when the, when the robots are out in the wild. When people get them and they start shipping and people can see, uh, unless you buy one and it's secretly teleopt, that would be wild. You're like, wow, this is remarkable. I can give it the most complex, I can give it the most complex vague instructions and it just does exactly what I do.

• 3:06:02Jordi Hays?

  If the figure robot can simply open a Diet Coke for John, we're a buyer.

• 3:06:07John Coogan?

  That's, that's the goalpost.

• 3:06:09Jordi Hays?

  I don't, we don't need it to do everything.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  That's the goalpost. Crack open a six pack of Diet Coke. Uh, Tyler, what do you think about, uh, the figure, figure gate?

• 3:06:18Speaker 04

  Uh, I mean, it's hard to say just from that video, but I think broadly like, um, people are probably like two against teleoperation generally.

• 3:06:25John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:06:26Speaker 04

  Uh, cause like, you know, the lesson from Waymo is that like actually.

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  It's goaded.

• 3:06:30Speaker 04

  You know, part, maybe if it's totally like a hundred percent teleopt, like, okay, that's not great. But if it's like partly like there's someone overseeing it.

• 3:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:37Speaker 04

  And maybe they're like pretty involved. Sometimes it can be like extremely valuable, like Waymo is a great product, whatever.

• 3:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:43Speaker 04

  Like even just like deploying robots in dangerous locations, if it's fully teleopt, that's still like a great thing.

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  Hugely valuable.

• 3:06:50Speaker 04

  And like clearly, uh, the way we get fully autonomous robots is by starting out with, with partially teleopt ones. So you get the data. There's like a very clear loop there. Um, so I think broadly people are two against.

• 3:07:00John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 3:07:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, anything else we need to talk about?

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  We talked about all.

• 3:07:08Jordi Hays?

  We'll be back.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  Oh, we, we, we do have, we do have one follow up to yesterday. So we did a little deep dive from the Wall Street Journal on Mark Lanier, the lawyer who successfully argued that Meta and YouTube are addictive in the LA court last week. And we posted the clip, a lot of people enjoyed learning about him and in particular, the fact that he has a menagerie that contains lemurs and llamas as well as a 120 person train. Uh, we, we love the way he's living his life. We're huge fans of Mark Lanier, although do have some disagreement around, uh, the, the legal findings, but, uh, a lot of people chimed in. Uh, XL wrote, uh, XL Raider said, uh, by the way, this is the Lanier Theological Library in Houston, which is open to the public for touring.

• 3:07:51John Coogan?

  Incredible guy shares two amazing images of, you know, what an amazing contribution to the community. And Eric Soufert, uh, quote tweeted our post and said, this is true. I grew up down the street from his property and he hosted a high school graduation party for one of my friends. He recently bought an adjoining horse ranch and built a seminary on it. So a lot of people, uh, coming out in support of Mark Lanier. And, uh, yeah, I mean, just seems like, seems like a fantastic lifestyle.

• 3:08:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll get him on the show.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic menagerie. And he really reset, you know, everyone's, everyone focuses on, oh, are you flying private? Are you, are you post economic? Like menagerie is clearly just a different tier, different ladder. That's where you want to go in life if you're successful and he's done it. So congrats to him. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:08:42Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have a wonderful last few hours of your quarter.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye. Rolling flashbang. Bye.