Apple Unleashes $100B Buyback, Palantir Crushes Earnings, OpenAI's New Open Source Model | Alex Albert, Scott Kupor, Kyle Harrison, Brielle Terry, Sean Henry, Andi Duro, Gabe Pereyra, Kareem Amin

(00:31) - Timeline (02:06) - What Apple Should Do with $100B Share Buyback (22:29) - Palantir Blows Past Earnings Expectations (34:57) - OpenAI Releases Open Source Model (50:25) - Google Deepmind Genie 3 Reactions (56:01) - Timeline (01:02:02) - Jet Blue First Class Review (01:07:58) - Timeline (01:30:23) - ElevenMusic Reactions (01:32:07) - Timeline (01:36:26) - WSJ: Flying Private is #1 Sign of Wealth (01:43:40) - Timeline (01:46:47) - Alex Albert, Head of Developer Relations at Anthropic, discusses the recent release of Claude Opus 4.1, highlighting its advancements in agentic reasoning and coding tasks. He emphasizes the model's improved capabilities in handling complex, long-horizon tasks, particularly in coding, and notes that the update is designed as a seamless drop-in replacement for Opus 4, maintaining the same pricing structure. Albert also touches on the importance of the model's natural, engaging personality, which enhances user experience across both consumer and enterprise applications. (01:59:11) - Scott Kupor, formerly a managing partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is now the Director of the U. S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM). In his conversation, he discusses OPM's role as the federal government's HR department, emphasizing the need to attract top talent, implement performance management standards, and leverage technology to enhance operations. Kupor outlines his priorities, including fostering a high-performance culture, improving operational efficiency, and preparing the government workforce for an AI-driven future. (02:24:54) - Kyle Harrison, a partner at Contrary Research, discusses the critical dependence of the U. S. on Taiwan for advanced semiconductors, highlighting that over 90% of these essential components are produced there, posing significant geopolitical risks. He explores potential solutions, including building domestic manufacturing capabilities, partnering with existing companies like TSMC and Samsung, or acquiring such technologies, emphasizing the urgency due to potential conflicts over Taiwan. Harrison underscores the necessity of a visionary leader to drive this transformation, noting that current U. S. chip manufacturing lacks such leadership, and suggests that Intel's foundry business could play a pivotal role if properly supported and restructured. (02:37:32) - Brielle Terry, Vice President and General Manager of Rocket Motor Systems at Anduril Industries, discusses the recent opening of a full-rate solid rocket motor production facility in McHenry, Mississippi, which aims to produce 6,000 tactical motors annually by the end of 2026. She highlights the facility's advanced automation and robotics, enabling flexible manufacturing of motors ranging from 2 to 32 inches in diameter, and emphasizes the potential to replicate this modular facility both domestically and internationally to meet growing defense demands. (02:44:13) - Sean Henry is the co-founder and CEO of Stord, a company that integrates warehousing, freight, and fulfillment into a unified cloud supply chain platform. In the conversation, he discusses the recent elimination of the de minimis exemption, which previously allowed imports under $800 to enter the U. S. without tariffs, and how this change is prompting brands to rapidly shift inventory into the U. S. to avoid increased costs. He also highlights the challenges brands face in adapting to these changes, emphasizing the need for efficient logistics solutions to maintain competitive delivery speeds and costs. (02:53:34) - Andi Duro discusses his creation of an anonymous social network where users' net worth serves as their username, aiming to facilitate open financial conversations that are often difficult to have in person. He notes that the platform has been well-received, tapping into a latent anxiety about financial discussions, and emphasizes its unique moderation strategy of banning users' bank accounts to maintain a respectful community. Duro also shares plans for monetization through referrals to financial products and highlights the platform's organic growth, with $3 million raised from investors like Dragonfly and Starting Line. (03:02:45) - Gabe Pereyra, co-founder and president of Harvey AI, discusses the company's rapid growth to 350 employees and 500 customers, achieving $100 million in revenue. He highlights the transformative impact of AI on legal workflows, noting that while some firms are cautiously testing the technology, others have co-developed software products with Harvey AI, leading to revenue-sharing models. Pereyra also addresses the evolving business models in the legal industry, suggesting that as AI enhances efficiency, firms may need to reconsider traditional billing structures and explore new approaches to pricing legal services. (03:15:33) - Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, announced the company's recent $100 million Series C funding led by Alphabet's CapitalG, valuing Clay at $3.1 billion. He discussed Clay's mission to empower non-technical go-to-market teams by providing them with tools to program revenue growth, emphasizing the importance of identifying and reaching out to the right customers at the right time. Amin highlighted how Clay leverages AI and data integration to automate tasks like analyzing Google Maps data to identify potential clients, aiming to reduce spam and enhance productivity in sales outreach. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TV.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, August 5th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Forces of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  I just lost my voice. I'm actually seeing stars.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  People said, people said the intro could be louder.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  They're like, that's the main feedback.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  I took it there. I took it there.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Good job. Anyway, let's kick it off with this post from Buko Capital Bloke. Apparently Variety has reported that Roku launches Howdy, a low-cost, no ads streamer, but it doesn't want to compete with Netflix.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Calling it a streamer is funny.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  What is a streamer?

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  I haven't heard that one.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  Is it just short for sleep streaming?

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, I work at a streamer, a small streamer, an American streamer called Netflix.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Is that, is that, does Netflix count as a streamer?

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  I think they call it a streaming service.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Oh, I guess it's a streaming service that streams the content to you. Yeah. Well, anyway, Buko Capital Bloke shares a hilarious post from the Banger Archive.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  From OrcBoxer.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  OrcBoxer says, have you seen the new show? It's on Tubu. It's on Tubu.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  It's literally on Hebe.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  It's on Pooty with ads. It's literally on Dippy. You can probably find it on WeNow. Dude, it's on Gumby. It's a fee-bow ratio.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  It's on Poob. You can watch it on Poob. You can go to Poob and watch it. You can log on to Poob right now. Go to Poob, dive into it. You can Poob it. It's on Poob. Poob has it for you. Poob has it for you.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Where do they get these names? Where do they get these names? It's like, it's like the pharmaceutical industry, how they have, like, every drug kind of sounds like vaguely like a familiar world with Goovy and Ozempic. Like, they sound like real words, but like, the domains are available.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  It is one of the most wild things, anyway.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should go check out Howdy, and you should check out Ramp, ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. And we have our first story. So we talked about this a little bit yesterday. Take him, author of The Nvidia Way and huge fan of Jensen Wong and Nvidia. Says, here's what I would do if I were CEO of Apple. Quadruple the RAM in iPhones to 32 gigs. Have the max model at 64 gigs. Memory is oxygen for local on-device AI. More equals smarter, more powerful. Take the margin hit. Memory isn't even that expensive. Then this is where we get controversial. This is what we were debating yesterday. Number two is buy Mistral or Anthropic and invest $100 billion to compute annually. Annually, that is, I didn't realize.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  So buying Mistral or Anthropic, that's $100 billion out the door, day one. Then you're spending $100 billion a year to build a multi-gigawatt data center.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Take him, great writer. And the more you spend time with this post, the more you can imagine a world where he takes Apple, you know, out of the MAG7.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. He says, build multi-gigawatt data centers and enter the frontier AI model race in a big way. This would be fantastic for Nvidia. I mean, Take Him seems like he's really full tilt on Nvidia to 10 trillion right now. Anyway, Apple has the capital. Apple knows the AI computing shift is existential. Where's the bold action and urgency? So there's a lot to agree with here. We debated it. The one thing we didn't debate is that Restream is the best streaming platform. One livestream, 30 destinations, multi-streaming to reach your audience wherever they are. Go to Restream to sign up. Anyway, what are we saying?

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  What is AI seemingly important? But what is the existential threat that we get? Just play this out. New computing, new computing platform. Eyewear that's integrated with AI. We haven't seen anybody launch a hardware device or even plan to launch a hardware device yet. That's not an additional device outside of your.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  We are both on MacBook Pros or MacBook.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Using iPhones.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  We have iPhones. They were additive. And then other people went further and they added an iPad to their life or they added a watch to their life.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  Not even Avi Schiffman, the most bold hardware founder in the world is saying, I'm going to replace your iPhone.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  He's just saying, I'm going to give you a friend.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  So I, I mean, I do think that there is some, like, if there was ever a crack in the foundation of Apple's monopoly on high-end smartphones, it's now because not, like, you're not going to get me to switch with slightly different design or slightly different shape or it's folding, like, tho- those phones have come to market, no one has meaningfully shifted, but a, but a phone that was designed from the ground up around AI and really, really optimized for ChatGPT and really, really like AI first at the core, just everything is infused, sure, like, maybe there's a chance there versus anything else that came out, like, Apple was always like, like, 5G was never a differentiator, Apple was never behind

• 4:53John Coogan?

  on that, they were never behind on, on, uh, display resolution, like, they had the, uh, the retina screen immediately.

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  But you could imagine a situation where if Apple was three years behind on retina screens, people would be like, well, yeah, like, I want the one that's sharper screen or something, and Apple's been behind on a lot of things by a year or two, and the, and that's what leads the Android fans to always say, like, Android's had this for two years, or that's why I have Android, because I like the cutting edge, because you're actually, you actually kind of are in many ways more on the cutting edge when you're in the Android ecosystem, but you just don't have all the integration that comes.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Android owners love to tell you.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  The, the specs of their device. They love to go spec for spec.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, exactly, but the question is, uh, should Apple actually go so hard to play catch-up, and so, um, Apple beat earnings last year.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  I even think, I mean, going hard could look like buying perplexity, people have, uh, made the case, my voice is still shot from that, people have, people have made that case, but it still feels insane when you look at the history, Apple's M and A history.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  And, and often, they're happy to, to acquire talent.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  But they don't do it at the, the VCs, historically, they're not doing it as sort of unicorn valuations, right?

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, the like going hard could look like spending a hundred billion dollars, or it could look like just figuring out what their next Google deal looks like. Because Apple has this insane deal with Google where Google is the default search engine on Safari. And they make, what, ten billion dollars?

• 6:38Jordi Hays?

  I think it's twenty billion.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Something, yeah, twenty billion in profit every year off of that deal. It's like a fantastic deal and people are worried that it might go away. So I, there's something in this, but there's something in here. But you know, you could imagine a situation where Apple is getting a massive payday from a foundation model lab to route iPhone customers to that model. And we haven't seen that dynamic play out. There's this question of will Apple?

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  One scenario is, is there's a world where a foundation model gets the Siri button and Google keeps the, the default search.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  And Apple suddenly is getting another, like a hundred percent.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Ben Thompson's written about this. We've talked to a lot of folks about this, like there's this weird world where ChatGPT is so dominant that they might, like they could swap out the foundation model for a different model. And most people wouldn't know, they'd be like, oh yeah, I use ChatGPT. And they'd be like, what model, four O or, or O three or Gemini or Lama? And they'd be like, I don't know, I don't care. Like it just gives me the answers. And so you could imagine a world where, where Apple is pumping users into, into monetized, you know, L L M queries and getting a huge check from that. And maybe that's the most elegant solution here to like get back in the AI race or capture the value.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  I would love to know how much OpenAI already pays Apple just through the App Store.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, because if you, if you subscribe to OpenAI in the App Store, they probably take thirty percent of that. And if they're making a billion a year and maybe a third of that is from iPhone subscriptions, in-app purchases, like you're looking at like a hundred million dollars a month? Is that like, are we in the right territory? That seems like extremely high.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  I know, I'm gonna look in the. I'm gonna look in the App Store right now and see how much they actually push in-app subscriptions.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I'm pretty sure I subscribed on web long before downloading the app and then I transferred the app in. And ChatGPT might, like, the team might push you out into a web view. Like, you can do that now. It's getting easier every year because of the antitrust stuff and it certainly makes, you know, economic. It's economically rational, especially if you're gonna get somebody to upgrade to $200 a month.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  You can't make changes to your subscription inside this app.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so the answer is zero. So right now, I think $0 are changing hands between Apple and OpenAI either way. But that could change and maybe that's the end. But, you know, on the question of should Apple make a huge acquisition? Tim Cook actually addressed it in the earnings call. He said something like, "We've acquired around seven companies this year, and that's companies from all walks of life, not all AI-oriented. We're very open to M&A that accelerates our roadmap. We're not stuck on a certain size of company, although the ones that we've acquired thus far this year are small in nature."

• 9:47John Coogan?

  And he said, "Like, we're acquiring one every few weeks," which is not quite seven per year. I mean, I guess that's like one a month, but a few weeks, sure. So he's doing deals, but he's not looking at anything massive, and I think that actually makes sense. My question was, if you were the CEO of Apple and you had $100 billion burning a hole in your pocket, what are the other things that you could do with that money?

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Formula One team.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  You could buy every team and the division and every track and all the sponsorships.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  I made a post about this jokingly.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  It's crazy. It's so much money. It's so much money.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  I made a post about this jokingly earlier this year. I still think it'd be cool for Apple to just be in F1 in the way that Red Bull is.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  I think that'd be great. No, no, I agree. Yeah, I think that'd be great.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  The one thing culturally is like, Apple's brand is, is very premium and very high end and.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they could handle a few losing seasons.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  This was the early bear case for Apple TV. I was talking to someone, a very successful Hollywood producer. And he was saying that the nature of the, of Hollywood is like venture capital. Like it is a hit's driven business. If you don't accept that you're going to have massive flops and egg on your face and embarrassing moments, you will not make it. And just like any venture capitalist who was like, I only want to make investments where they won't blow up. You're not going to make it, right? Like.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Marc Andreessen had a, had a, there was a clip from a episode he did recently talking about how you lose sleep over the companies you don't invest in, not the ones you invest in and don't work.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, so you have to be risk on, you have to be risk on in Hollywood as you do in venture. And so, the, the question was like, can Apple deal with spending 50 or a hundred million dollars on some show that completely flops and everyone's like, this is a disaster. And they've navigated really well. I think that they have had some flops, but they've kind of tucked those behind the scenes. Whereas Netflix has started to get more kind of, you know, people talk trash about, what was that, Red, Red Notice? Or they, they did some massive movie with The Rock that kind of flopped. They've done a few of these big movies that haven't done that well. And, and it's sort of like, oh, like, you know, they're, they're, they're not, you know, God's gift to, you know, producing. But it doesn't matter because overall Netflix is doing very well.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  And all it takes is like one Squid Game to like carry the whole quarter, basically, just like in venture. Or like one, you know, you sign the Friends deal and then, or the Office and people are watching that like 20 years later. So.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  And apparently so F1 has surpassed half a billion dollars in box office earnings as of last week.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a fantastic movie.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  Example of a, of a home run. But it's not like they're doing that once a quarter by any means.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Oh, and John Exley's in the chat. Shout out to John Exley. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to connect with him at our party in New York, but he did attend. You got to chat with him. A lot of the team got to chat with him. So thank you for all you do, John. We really appreciate you. The entire team is giving you a round of applause.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  General.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  Because.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  General of the chat room.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  You've done a ton of, a ton of work for us and we really appreciate it. Anyway, if you had $100 billion burning your, burning, burning a hole in your pocket at Apple, what would you do? I have a bunch of crazy ideas.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Go through your list.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  So, uh, most people would just say, hey, you're gonna benefit from AI because you are the window into all technology and it doesn't matter if it's, if it's gendered video or, or text. Like people will be consuming it on devices. You sell devices, you'll be fine. Just like search did not destroy Apple. It actually made Apple stronger because people search on their iPhones. So most people would just say, hey, return it to the shareholders. Apple's already done that. They've returned over a trillion dollars to shareholders in the past 10 years. Those are kind of rough numbers, but it's basically that, which is an insane amount of money to return to shareholders. But Samsung is worth 330 billion. They could buy the entire company, lever it up with two thirds debt, and they would just own both sides of the smartphone market then.

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Probably extremely anti-competitive. I think Lena Kahn would have a conniption fit, but funny concept. Funny concept. The other, uh, the other, the other idea is massively expand the retail footprint. So, Apple right now, I was surprised by this. How many retail stores do you think they, they have worldwide?

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, like 599 or 601?

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Did you look, did I tell you?

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this this morning.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  It's 535. Um, so it's not that many. It's mostly in the tier one cities. There's usually only like one in every city. They don't really, they don't take the Starbucks strategy where they put them across the street from each other.

• 14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  But for $100 billion, they absolutely could. $100 billion is enough to open 6,000 new Apple stores. So they would be 6,600. So they would be up around 7,000 stores, which for reference is as many subways as there are. And as many CVSs as they are and as many 7 elevens as there are in America. And so everywhere you see a Subway, you could see an Apple store. And I feel like this would be a big upgrade for America. I feel like if you just walked around every American city where tier one, tier two, tier three city, you just see a beautiful sheet of glass and it's an Apple store on every corner in America.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  They could also acquire every firearms store in the country and turn them into Apple stores.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  They could do a take private of Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 15:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm still buzzing from Thursday.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  It was a fantastic day.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely fantastic. Anybody that is tuning in, anybody that is tuning into the show for the first time today is going to be hearing our ideas for Apple and just thinking, these are some of the worst that we will ever heard. But they're definitely fun.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Okay, so speaking of glass from the Apple stores, they could buy Corning, which makes Gorilla Glass, it's a $55 billion company. Then with the money left over, they could buy InterDigital, which owns all the patents on 5G and 6G. So they could basically patent troll everyone else in the industry.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Just get extremely anti-competitive.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  They could also, with the money that is left over, we're still in the first like, let's vertically integrate this company mode. They could also buy 10 rare earth or cobalt mines. So they own the supply chain there. And then they could also build four battery giga factories and lock up the Sapphire Crystal supply chain that's used on the iPhone camera. So they could just completely own their entire supply chain for $100 billion. And that's just one year, one year. And then they, you know, the proposal was do this every year.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that was interesting about Take Kim's post is if you, if you listen to the earnings call, Tim Cook and the team were very clear that they don't even want to finance like data center development themselves. They're still working with these sort of like third-party lenders to like capitalize them. And so again, Tim Cook is the king of efficiency.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, he knows his business.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  He knows his business. Should we get into some of that?

• 17:03John Coogan?

  No, I have one more.

• 17:04Jordi Hays?

  One more.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  So.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  OpenAI, they act will hire Johnny Ive. They're coming out with something that's competitive. It's going to be some, some sleepless nights at Apple when that thing's drops, right? It's gonna be stressful because like, maybe, maybe, maybe it doesn't go super well, but like, you know, it's a serious threat. OpenAI is a serious company. They have a lot of customers and they got Johnny Ive, your former goat, designer, ready to drop, you know,

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  And a bunch of former Apple employees that are now at OpenAI.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Amazing, amazing team over in, in hardware at OpenAI. So the question is like, how do you fire back with your Apple and you have a hundred billion to spend? Here's what you do. The cogs on an iPhone are less because they have a margin. So you take that hundred billion dollars, you buy 200 million iPhones and you send a brand new iPhone to 200 million Americans. And you're just like, oh, how much are you charging Johnny Ive and OpenAI? Well, ours is free this year. We're doing a free iPhone for the entire year.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  They should just do something like that where it's like, your 11th iPhone in a row

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Is free.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Is free.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  They'd probably have 200 million people with free iPhones. And they're just like, yeah, we're actually, we want to keep you in this ecosystem. We like our services revenue.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  We're excited to be a platform.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  We're excited. We're just giving it back. We're just giving back. Can you imagine? I think that would also be extremely anti-competitive. I don't even know if there's a regulatory framework to stop that from happening. But, I mean, price competition is a real thing. And like, if you, if you discover that your competitor is under-capitalized and can't, can't win a capital war, you could potentially cut, cut, cut prices so dramatically that it's like, yeah, the, the other phone's like, cool, but, you know, this one's free. I guess I'm staying in, in the blue bubble world.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook next earnings call. All right, we're gonna buy all of the mines we depend on and we're gonna make the iPhone free. Stock just yeets. Eighty percent.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  He's like, I'm petty, I'm petty. And you know what, Johnny, I, you know, I'm not gonna let you win.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  I would rather die than let you win.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would destroy myself. Uh, yeah, I've been reading a lot about cutting your nose to spite your face.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  And I'm pretty into it. I'm pretty into the strategy.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, uh, let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Go talk to the purple llamas, vanta.com.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, so, uh, Ben Thompson's been noodling on, uh, on Apple and AI strategy. He had a rough go because he, I think he took some time off or shifted, he shifted his posting schedule right when all the earnings dropped and there was all this crazy stuff going on. So, um, he, he's just writing about Apple earnings now. But he has, uh, he still has some, some good takeaway saying, you know, even if they do, even if Apple does swoop in and buy Mistral, for example, the overall point holds. Apple isn't going to compete with OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, X and Google on pursuing AI superintelligence. Like five extremely well-funded, extremely serious teams, uh, they're gonna, Apple's gonna go their own way,

• 20:21John Coogan?

  centered on their devices and their direct relationship with their customers, at least as long as Cook is in charge. And anyone that's saying that Cook, uh, needs to step aside, I think is, uh, is in for a world of hurt because he's been on a generational run and he's solving the most important problem for that company, which is not the application layer in artificial intelligence. It's the supply chain and keeping the, keeping the flows, flow of iPhones coming.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Making and selling phones.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Making, put the phones in the boxes. Tim, he's doing it. He's doing it. He's really underrated. He's been CEO longer than Steve Jobs was. He's the longest-tenured CEO of Apple in history.

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  He better be bringing some of these AI researcher comp packages in as comps when he gets in front of the comp committee at Apple. Say, hey.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  That is true. He should definitely be getting a bump. If he does have researchers, I mean, he has AI researchers. They are improving different functionality. I feel like, maybe I'm hallucinating this, but it feels like the text-to-speech engine has gotten better on my phone. I listened to a semi-analysis article with the default Apple Safari text-to-speech, and it was very listenable. So I think we're getting better there. Regardless, like, he's gotta get his AI researchers graphite so they can embrace code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. So, anyway. Hunter SPX is shocked at Alex Karp's comments on the Palantir earnings call.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  Karp said, "The growth rate of our business has accelerated radically after years of investment on our part and derision by some. The skeptics are admittedly fewer now, having been defanged and bent into a kind of submission. Yet we see no reason to pause, to relent here." So good. Citrini says, "You can't accuse the guy of not having flair." These are so good.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Palantir ticked up over $400 billion, up almost 10% in the last five days.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Let's go. Congratulations to everyone over at Palantir. Congratulations to Eliano, who's been on the show, friend of the show. He says he's actually in tears after Karp went on CNBC and said, "Just tell the haters, read them and weep." I love it. We covered this yesterday a little bit, but I wanted to go one step deeper.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show, Marcus Millione, was posting earlier a bunch of sell orders that he had for Palantir earlier this year, and he was feeling weeping, very disappointed with himself.

• 22:55John Coogan?

  He was weeping. So, Palantir Technologies boosted its full-year outlook after posting higher profit and revenue for the second quarter, driven by continuing demand for its artificial intelligence projects. The Denver company which sells AI software to manage and analyze large amounts of data, everyone says, "What does Palantir do?" It sells software. It now expects revenue to be between 4.14 billion and 4.15 billion. What a narrow band for the year. They know what's coming. Up from the prior outlook of 3.89 billion, 3.9 billion. So, the interesting thing here is that they... Where is it here? I missed it.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  So, revenue from US commercial customers rose 93% to 306 million. So, Karp's been talking about this for a while. Just look at us. Like, you say that we're just a government contractor. Look at our, look at our commercial side of the business. Like, we're doing very well there.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who were we talking to when they casually mentioned that they got like a nine-figure contract in Japan randomly?

• 24:05John Coogan?

  On the, on the corporate side?

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on the corporate side.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  I don't know. We've talked to a lot of Palantir people, but it's all over the place. I mean, everyone from like Airbus, like, if you want to know like what Palantir does, just, just... The Airbus example is like the best because it's just like, you're making planes. There's a ton of different parts that go in that plane. You need to see the lead time, the durability, the testing of all those. You need not just a database of what you have in stock, okay? We need more seat belts to get this plane out the door. We need more engines. We need more, you know, doors or whatever. Like, you gotta buy all these different things, probably from TransDive or something. Some, some PE backed, small manufacturer makes the subcomponents. You gotta buy all those components, put them all together, and then ship the, ship the, the final plane out?

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Well, you don't just need a database of what everything's in. You need to know how these things interact, and that's why Palantir always says like ontology. It's a layer on top of the database. And so, there's been a bunch of database companies that have grown a ton. Snowflake and, and Snowflake and, and Palantir were kind of duking it out. And now they're kind of partners and friendly. You put all your data together into a data lake and put Palantir on top of it. And so, it's driving, it, it's all good news for, for Karp. Two CEOs top one. One billion dollars in raises. Palantir CEO Alex Karp's 2020 Equity Award has soared in value to 14.7 billion as the company's

• 25:36John Coogan?

  stock grows. That was when the company first went public and he got a bunch of stock and it's grown and grown and grown as the share price has appreciated. So

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Or Snowflake. Stock chart looks very different.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Well, what's the market cap right now?

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  68 billion.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Still up 30% year to date.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Little side project incubation for the folks over at Sutter Hill. It is the latest ultra-exclusive achievement for executives of big US companies. The billion-dollar year, two bosses made it last year, holding stock-based pay that swelled in value by at least 10 figures in a single year. That'll buy a lot of cross-country skis and a lot of Aquanauts. Alex Karp clocked more than 6 billion dollars.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  He could effectively corner the entire

• 26:26John Coogan?

  You could buy all the Aquanauts.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Aquanauts.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  You could buy them all.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  All of them.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  100%. I've actually done this before. I've asked ChatGPT, like, find me the market cap of all the supercars. So you take the average selling price of the F40. It doesn't work this way because once you start buying them up, they get more valuable. But if you take like, an F40 is like a couple million bucks, but there's only a few thousand of them. You add that up, that's like 5 billion dollar market cap. One of the biggest market caps, if you use this kind of rough terminology, is fire trucks. Because they're a million dollars each, and there's like a million of them in the United States. Now, they're all like slightly different brands, so it's not quite the same comp. F150s also, huge market cap, tons of F150s.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Ben, can you look into getting a fire truck for our road shows?

• 27:09John Coogan?

  I don't think there's enough space inside.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's actually true.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  I think you want something else. But you could load up cables in all the different sizes. Like, you know, we pull out the hoses and just a massive HDMI cable. I think that's the move. So Hawk Tan grew, his pay grew by 1.15 billion at chipmaker Broadcom. So Broadcom did very well. Only two other S&P 500 CEOs have hit that mark in recent years, according to data from a public company data provider. Cryptocurrencies exchange Coinbase Global, Brian Armstrong in 2021 at 2.1 billion, and naturally Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, can boast billion-dollar gains in three years, including a record 43 billion in 2020.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  Though all are part of a pay package that the Delaware court declared invalid on Sunday, Tesla granted Musk a new interim stock award that tentatively valued, that was tentatively valued at 23.7 billion with the promise of more this fall. Barely scraping by.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Scraping by. The other note on Palantir, I think this was reported on Friday, they have a new US Army contract worth up to $10 billion. So this is consolidating a handful of contracts that they have into a single deal. And yeah, so pretty, pretty significant. That's over, I believe, the next decade.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  So Palantir, classic 20-year overnight success. Overnight success. Some interesting history and kind of strategy of how they got here. So we talked about this before, but you remember the famous story about Alex Karp talking to his employees early in the, in the, in the journey of the, of the company. He said, when you're traveling for business, I want you to book a five-star hotel when you're in town visiting a potential client. And Gary Tan was commenting on this. Other employees were saying like this, we're a startup, we're burning money. This is kind of a crazy thing. What's the rationale here? And Karp had a very contrarian take. He said that when you're doing business, you're going to meet

• 29:17John Coogan?

  a Fortune 500 company that you're going to be consulting with, or rolling out, or selling them Palantir, selling them software. You're going to be a forward deployed engineer. They will ask you, oh, you're in town, where are you staying? Just, it's a natural thing that comes up during introductions. Oh, you're in town, you're in, you're in Dallas, visiting us at our HQ. We're evaluating Palantir as a potential solution provider. Where are you staying? And if you say the Holiday Inn, they will assume that you're selling Holiday Inn level software, Holiday Inn quality software. But if you say I'm staying at the Four Seasons, they will assume that you are selling Four Seasons level software. And so Palantir had this culture of, Karp has joked about like steak dinners being

• 30:00John Coogan?

  like not the correct way to sell the product and the product actually has to be very good, but clearly from an early, from, from early on, Palantir focused on-

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Cared about brand positioning.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Brand positioning and just taking travel and entertainment very seriously because there's going to be a lot of forward deployed engineers that are on the road a lot. You want their life to be, you know, manageable so they can go and show up and perform and they're not, and they're not like gassed and exhausted from an economy flight and then a, and then a tough bet.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Holiday inn.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  So, this was wrecking their financials though. Like, when they went out and they went public-

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  The narrative was that they were a consulting company masquerading as a software company.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  And looking at the earnings yesterday and their margin profile, this is very clearly not a consulting business.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So when they went public, you can look up the, the, the market cap when, when they kind of went out early, but I believe that they were languishing in the low tens of billions. Might have even dipped down to five billion at some point, seven billion market cap.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  The stock was not doing very well.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  If you bought a single share at the open, you could have paid nine dollars and 20 cents.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  And years and years later, you would have been flat-

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  On that entire period.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  It was, so they went out October 2nd, 2020, and if you look on May 12th, they, they, they ticked over that initial price. So, not, a lot of people were writing it off for a long time. And it, and it's still, it didn't, it didn't, it wasn't like a fa- fast IPO by any means, right? This was like, it took them, what, 15 ish years to get out?

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So 2020, 2021, they were in like the 40 billion, 35 billion. I think they probably dipped lower at a very, at varying points in time. But it wasn't, it, it, the, the stock was not ripping and it was kind of in this, it was languishing, the consulting meme was, was going strong. And that was because they were spending a ton on travel and entertainment. But what's interesting is what happened during COVID. So during COVID, they couldn't travel as much and companies didn't want forward deployed engineers coming into their offices. They didn't like airlines were shut down for a long time. Everyone was working

• 32:22John Coogan?

  remotely. So they switched to a remote first, you know, forward deployed engineer strategy. And so by default, during an implementation of Palantir, you would just hop on a Zoom call or hop on a Teams call or whatever. And so their travel and entertainment budget like cratered and that was really, really good for their bottom line. And then they were able to just kind of like hold the line and they didn't. And sure, they added it back slowly, but it kind of revealed that this actually does have software margins. This actually is more of an enterprise SaaS company than a consulting business and it allowed them to grow very, very significantly. And so they've been on an absolute tear and congratulations to everyone over at Palantir.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, while we're talking about earnings.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Let's talk about linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Start building.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Ben and the production team are going to pull up a post from highlighting something from Reddit's Q2 earnings call. If we can pull this up and play this video.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Ooh, this video. That's fun. Okay, let's see.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's play a video here. Let's see. This is the hardest thing.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  That's why Reddit is the number one most cited domain for AI across all models per data collected by Profound. That's why Reddit is the number one most cited domain for AI across all models.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  We just partnered with Profound. This is a company that I invested in earlier this year. James, CEO, has been on the show. Profound allows companies to understand and improve the way they show up in LLMs. So today, companies are using LLMs. Everyone's using LLMs to research products, make business decisions. And so if you're running a, any type of business, whether it's consumer or enterprise focused, you've got to actually figure out where you stand in these rankings, how people are perceiving your products through the models, and Profound lets you. Do all of that observability. I think the best way, the best comp for it is kind of like

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  SEO optimization. There's a bunch of different dynamics here, but Profound is the clear leader, and we're super excited to partner with them.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for Profound.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Profound and a new TBPN sponsor. Welcome to the lineup.

• 34:42John Coogan?

  To the livery. Welcome to the next drop of merch. Welcome, Profound. We're happy to have you on the team.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  In other AI-related news, OpenAI has announced an open source model. They said they'd never do it. Everyone's saying.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  It was in the name. It was in the name. How could you have doubted?

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Closed AI. Closed AI. They're not OpenAI. They're closed AI. Everyone thought they were so clever. They said they couldn't possibly open source a model, and they did.

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  They did.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  They did it. The unthinkable.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  First, first open model in years, right? They used to have them.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Was, was GPT-1 open source? Like, when, when was the last time that, so we're going to talk to Tyler about this.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  I want to say it's GPT-2?

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Was still open source? And then they decided to close source something. It's tough that I, I treat you like things that I could Google, and I know that you just have to search it or ChatGPT it. But good luck. Get me the information on the, the history of OpenAI's open source models. In the meantime, I will read this post from Sam Altman. GPT-OS, all lowercase. He's still in lowercase mode, although he, he uppercases the other sentences, but he, he, he threw in, he likes lowercase.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Is he sending you messages, John?

• 35:59John Coogan?

  I'm seeing it. I'm seeing coded messages in here. GPT-OS is a big deal. It's a state-of-the-art OpenWeighs reasoning model with strong real-world performance, comparable to O4 Mini, that you can run locally on your own computer or phone with the smaller size. We believe this is the best and most usable open model in the world. We're excited to make this model the resilient, the result of billions of dollars of research available to the world to get AI into the hands of the most people possible. Hit that soundboard again. I want to keep it going. We believe far more good than bad will come from it. For example, GPT-OS 120B performs about as well

• 36:40John Coogan?

  as O3 on challenging health issues. We've worked hard to mitigate the most serious safety issues, especially around biosecurity. GPT OSS models perform comparably to our frontier models on internal safety benchmarks. We believe in individual empowerment. Let's hear it for individual empowerment, people.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  I feel empowered the way that you're reading this, John.

• 37:00John Coogan?

  Although we believe most people will want to use a conventional service, a convenience service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the privacy benefits are obvious. As part of this, we are quite hopeful that this release will enable new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products. We expect a meaningful uptick in the rate of innovation in our field and for many more people to do important work than were able to before. OpenAI's mission is to ensure AGI that it benefits all of humanity. To that end, we're excited. I think I cut this screenshot off. We're excited for the world to be building on an OpenAI

• 37:41John Coogan?

  stack created in the United States, based on democratic values, available for, I didn't screenshot the rest of that, but, oh, here it is, available for free to all and for wide benefit. So I imagine that that was the voice.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  As the author intended.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  As the author intended. Exactly, exactly.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Will Depew has some more notes here, some context. So less than one year between 01 announced, which was September of 2024, and we have an 03 level model, open sourced, that's runnable on consumer hardware. Wild progress. You were highlighting earlier, Sam initially had a poll.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Saying like, you know, should we, should we, what do you want? Do you want an 03 level model, or do you want something that you can run?

• 38:23John Coogan?

  He did both.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  And he did both.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  He did both. Wow. Yeah, so we were reading that. So it was what, like six months ago or something, that post that you, that you shared? Yeah, I think so. So I asked Tyler to dig this poll up. Sam Altman shared a post that, it was a poll on X saying, what do you want? Do you want an 01 level model, reasoning model, frontier model, open source, or do you want something you can run on your phone? And it was, and it was neck and neck, and people were clicking on the phone model. They were like, we want the phone model. And then Dylan Patel quoted it and said, Oh, you idiots. Don't vote for the phone model. You can just still.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's get a truly frontier model.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Let's get a frontier model. And so Dylan Patel was very much like, like, you guys don't know what you want. Like, like, the phone models are available. That that will be easy. The hard thing, we got to twist OpenAI's arm to open source the reasoning model, the O3 level model. And Sam Altman just said, you wanted this or this? It was a false dichotomy. You get both.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  You get both.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  You get both.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yacine says, all caps, I'm so sorry for doubting you, Sam Altman. I'm so sorry for saying that you were the Antichrist. I didn't realize, I didn't realize your plans were measured in centuries. I hope you forgive me for everything. I'm so glad you kept control of OpenAI. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Never talked down on the future first ballot Hall of Famer. Apparently, the future leader of open source AI will be very interesting to see how Meta responds. Will they stay in the open source game? Also, just how important is open source? Is this a Linux scale opportunity? Is this an Android scale opportunity? Like, is this, you know, is this GitLab to GitHub? Like, what's actually the long term play? Certainly cool. Great for the community. We're going to see fun experiments. We're going to see interesting things done with this. I think, do we want to talk about some of the ideas that we had for building on top of this?

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Open source model, fine tuning. I can just run through some. I know there was one you didn't want to, you didn't want to share because you thought it was too, too, too good, too much alpha. But what was it? What was I talking to you about, Tyler? What were our ideas? We had one that was.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, initially, we weren't sure there was going to be reasoning.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  So we were going to add fake reasoning.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it was going to be a model that gaslights you into thinking it's reasoning, when in fact, it's not reasoning.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  So if you pull up, if you look at the actual, like, you know, reasoning UI, it's just UI. It's not, there's no actual reasoning. It's like, it's a time delay. It's a time delay.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  It's delay. And then while.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Thinking really hard.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Let me think about that.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  What would a super smart person think right now?

• 41:02Speaker 03

  So we could actually still kind of do that because it's not a multimodal model.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  Like, you know, we just add some kind of like totally blank encoder or something for the image.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  And then it's like, hmm, this is an interesting image. Let me think about what's in it.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of the best images I've ever seen. A lot of people are saying this, this is one of the greatest images. Thank you for sharing this PNG and/or JPG with me. There's nothing about the, about the image. It's great. I, I, I, I'm seeing that this image is, uh, is, is large in file size. It's purely metadata based analysis. It doesn't know anything about what's going on. Like, wow, this is a tough question. I'm gonna have to generate a lot of internal reasoning tokens to, to answer this. Test time inference is really is magical, isn't it? Anyway, back to thinking. Okay, I'm reasoning about this now. Yeah, so.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other, the other obvious opportunity, you know, people have been frustrated with sycophancy with the models and, and models being.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Well, not me. I've been frustrated with the lack of sycophancy.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you want more. You want more.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  I want more.

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  You want the model to gas you up, but you know, fine tuning it to go, you know, over the top. Somebody could release the glazinator 3000, which, which just tells the user, uh, you don't, you don't just think you're goaded. You are goaded. I know this, you know this.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  It's like, I'm asking you to solve IMO question six. Why are you talking about whether or not I'm goaded? It's like, it, it just tells you like, you got this one. Trust me.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  The timing, the timing here, the timing here is interesting. I mean, everybody's, everybody's been banging the table saying, where is the, uh, American open source AI or LLM leader? It was reported yesterday by the misinformation that, uh, Reflection, Reflection, uh, the misinformation reported that Reflection, uh, one year old startup, uh, we've had, uh, the CEO on, before he's in talks to raise 1 billion to develop open source models to compete with Deep Sea, uh, Meta and Mistral. Uh, and yeah, all of the, you know, the, the, the Chinese open source models have been on a tear. Uh, Quen released Quen Coder recently.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are into Quen.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, or a new version of it that, uh, is getting good results. So. It's important work.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  So one interesting thing that's kind of related to the like US-China like race is like so when Deep Seek first came out, everyone was like up in arms because they said like it's it was less than $5 million to train, right?

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  So in the in the model card for for these models, they actually reveal like the GPU hours it took.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Which then you can like figure out how much it probably cost uh costed to um, you know, train.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Give me the number and tell me if I need to ring the gong for them.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  So so for the big model, it was probably around like four million. So just yes, but but the the small model was like 500K, probably a little less. But that's like 10x better. The model is way better than Deep Seek R1.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So shall I ring the gong?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it's it's pretty sweet.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  I wanted I wanted I wanted to hear 400 million at least. I was expecting nine digits. Nine digits. They got a billion of revenue coming in every month.

• 44:10Speaker 03

  But isn't it cool that it it costs so much?

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Ten days of revenue on the open source model. I you know, no, it is very cool. So so we're ringing the gong for for the elegance of the training run.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  Efficiency, efficiency.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on delivering a great model, saving time and money.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Putting money back in the hands of shareholders and not in the hands of open source developers, I suppose. Um, but yeah, I mean, do you do you think that uh is this is this like a pre-training scaling wall narrative? Like like would you as someone who is a potential consumer of an open source um model like? Do you want a 400 million dollar open source model? Would that necessarily be better? Because it seems like they were able to distill it pretty well, get it to the frontier, not, you know, burn a ton of money on on training. Also, the question is like if they're this is probably distilled from their other models that are much bigger. So like you, there is no world where you could just spend $4 million and get this level model without also

• 45:12John Coogan?

  have done having done the GPT four run, the GPT 4.5 run, etc., right?

• 45:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. It's also just like, even if they didn't distill it, they just have the knowledge of like how they did it.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  Which is like arguably more valuable, right?

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  And I think in terms of like open source, it's either you want to go like super, super cheap and super small, which they kind of did here.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  Or you go super big, like almost like the llama, like the behemoth, right?

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, I think it would have been really cool to see that, like literally like state of the art. You know, level model?

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  You could also try and ask Claude, hey, build me a frontier open source model. Don't make mistakes.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna have someone from Claude on soon. This is funny because you said 500K for the small model?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably less.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  So that's the same amount of money that they're putting up for this challenge, the red teaming challenge. Have you seen this? So to encourage researchers, developers and enthusiasts, that's me, from around the world to help identify novel safety issues. This challenge has a $500,000 prize fund that will be awarded based on review from a panel of expert judges from OpenAI and other leading labs. At the end of this challenge, we will publish a report and open source an evaluation data set based on the validated findings so that the wider community can immediately benefit. So if you can hack this thing, if you can get it to teach you how to develop a nuclear bomb or take over the world, you might have 500K in your pocket.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Not bad. Go get some of that. That's a seed round in 2012.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Massive day for the labs. Anthropic announced a state of the art coding model, Claude Opus 4.1, which won UPS 4-0. We are having somebody on the show from Anthropic later today, Alex Albert,

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  to break all of that down. So I'll wait there. And then Google also announced Genie 3, a new frontier model, a new frontier for world models.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, Tyler, take us through Genie 3. What is it? Where are we in the deployment of this particular technology?

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Let me give a little bit more context on Genie. So given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720P. So.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  I gotta be up at 60 frames a second if I'm pulling in no scope.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  24. True.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  This isn't, this is an 824 movie. This isn't, this isn't cinema. This is video gaming. Get it up at 120 frames. I gotta be on 144 Hz monitor.

• 47:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Google, DeepMind, as soon as John can 360 no scope at 60.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  You got a customer, but for now.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  You got a customer, but you gotta keep pushing it.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down. What is this and where did it come from? Why is this important?

• 48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I thought this was really cool. I mean, we've seen kind of like. Worse versions of this, it's not like a completely new paradigm of like basically, um, you know, real time video that you can control.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Yep. Oliver Cameron came on the show.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Uh, he was at, uh, Cruise self-driving. I interviewed him years ago. He came on the show and he demoed this and the production team was kind of freaking out because it was like, this is very trippy, like wandering around this like kind of, uh, Elder Scrolls landscape.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've seen the same thing with, um, I remember playing like a Minecraft.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, Minecraft. People have figured out how to do, Ash has a Minecraft demo too that runs very quickly on some of their hardware.

• 48:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, but it's just like, I mean, if you watch the videos, it's like incredible. Like it looks, I think it looks by far better than.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Way better.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Okay, so we, we, we, we're now in like, where like, video generation was really, really crazy and then VO3 came out and it was like, oh, it's good. And same thing with like Midjourney.

• 48:58Speaker 03

  It's definitely getting to the point where like you could use this for training as like a RL thing, right? Cause this is like, kind of, I mean, this is how you like, uh, justify spending a huge amount on this stuff. Because then you can use that as like training data.

• 49:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Right? For agents or whatever.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, synthetic data generation.

• 49:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  For robots. Okay. That makes sense. What, what, what else? I mean, there is like the long term of like, you know, people do just enjoy watching AI-generated videos. People get joy out of looking through Studio Ghibli's for a few days. So like, there is value just in the inherent product aside from training. So you could imagine that this becomes like.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up some of the examples and have them in the timeline.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's pull these up and, and try and like, uh, flip through those. But how far are we from like the actual game mechanics? When we played Oliver Cameron's one, I, I remember, uh, being able to move around with the arrow keys. That was cool. Next thing I wanted to do is I wanted to jump everywhere because that's like the default mechanic. I mean, anyone who's played any game like with a jump button, you're jumping the entire time. You're bunny hopping. Like this is not something you just wander around in. Um, and so does it have a jump button? Do you know?

• 50:11Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't think it does right now.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Wow. We're so far. We're so early.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  But, but you can, I mean, it's cool because you, I, I actually don't remember this exact one you're talking about. But you can prompt like all sorts of stuff, right? So in, in the examples that we can probably pull up.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  You can see them prompting like, okay, a dragon flies in and they're in some like random.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's take a look at this here. Okay, so it's a bunch of, this looks like an after effects.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  Each one of these is an interactive environment generated by Genie 3. A new frontier for world models. With Genie 3, you can use natural language to generate a variety of worlds.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Did they make this demo for us?

• 50:46Speaker 02

  And explore them interactively. All with a single text prompt.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Oh, I wanted to take the horse off the, off the, off the ski jump. So we're looking through a helicopter. Yeah, it's for sure photoreal. Like, this is, this is good enough.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Genie 3 has real-time interactivity, meaning that the environment reacts to your movements and actions. You're not walking through a pre-built simulation. Everything you see here is being generated live as you explore it. And Genie 3 has world memory.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Jump, jump, press spacebar.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  That's why environments like this one stay consistent.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Hey, 360, we just got a 360.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  World memory even carries over into your actions.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  This is, that's AI? That's wild.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  For example, when I'm painting on this wall, my actions persist.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay, that's pretty good.

• 51:31Speaker 02

  I can look away.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  That's way less hallucinatory.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  But when I look back, the actions I took are still there.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  So it remembers that, oh, that's big. Yeah, so that's a big thing. We haven't seen that, really. Yeah, because when we were, when we were walking around in the other world, we would like turn around and there would just be like a cave. And then you do a 360 and then all of a sudden it's like. It's so different. Yeah, it's like a church or something. Jet skis, horses. There's a dragon. Dragon, yeah, that dragon looks pretty good.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  You can use Genie to explore real-world physics and movement.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  I wonder how expensive this is. This will probably be extremely gated. I'll have to beg Logan to get me access.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  And even other characters.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go, that's a job. That's real, oh, okay, that's really cool. Yeah.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  And that's just the beginning.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Worlds can help with embodied research, training robotic agents before working in the real world.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Okay, give me a top-down simulation of World War I. I want to play Hearts of Iron.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  And emergency training.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  No. Give me a spreadsheet. I want to play Stellaris or Eve Online.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  Think about some of the use cases here.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Spreadsheets in space.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  Some of the use cases here are insane.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Alright, we can pause it now. You can imagine a world in the future where you give Genie some images of you, like with family, growing up when you were five, and you could just like be, like have a third, like you could just like

• 52:53John Coogan?

  Very trippy.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  Generate like a synthetic memory.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Like this is where we're headed, where people are gonna be having to kind of simultaneously hold their real memories and these sort of like simulated fake memories.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Wow, it's just like, I put on my VR headset, it's just like Christmas, and I'm super VR sick, I'm throwing up everywhere, just like when I was a four-year-old and I ate too much candy on Christmas. It's very realistic.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  I think this would be really cool for Lama to, or for Meta to do, like some kind of similar thing that you can run on the VR.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think the training data set for this is? Do you think this is YouTube gated?

• 53:27Speaker 03

  It's gotta be YouTube and it's also probably just like video games. I mean, you can see, so if you look at the old, this is Genie 3, if you look at the first papers, it's very clearly like, okay, that looks exactly like, you know, GTA V.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 53:41Speaker 03

  Or in the first one, it's like some kind of very simple like 2D game that you can tell like, okay, that's a video game that they either built or found somewhere that they trained on.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the pulling from the different video games would be cool. I wonder if you run into IP, because you're basically like distilling GTA into a model.

• 54:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Probably not okay, but you blend them all together, you create something new that's probably transformative and fair use. But I keep wondering, I was running the numbers and I think YouTube has like 20 exabytes of data, which is

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Twenty million gigabytes or something, or twenty million terabytes or something like that. It's like, it's so much that you can't exfiltrate it, you can't put it in a suitcase of hard drives. Like, it is, it is, just the storage is like a data center of its own, like, as opposed to, like, the common crawl, like, the, all the web text is like, it's like, you can put it in a server rack. Like, it's not that much data. And same thing with, like, some of those image data sets. And I always wonder, like, does Google have, like, a permanent advantage here? Or will we see the other labs catch up on this pretty quickly? Like, OpenAI seemed to have catch, caught up pretty quickly in, in image generation,

• 54:59John Coogan?

  Midjourney's doing great there. But a lot of the images are out on the open web, whereas a lot of videos are locked in YouTube. And like, if you can't get access to, if scale really matters there, Google has like a serious, serious.

• 55:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they have Sora, which is like, it's kind of very slow. Like, the architecture is definitely different than what you've seen from.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  I don't even care about the speed of Sora, I care about the fidelity. So, so Sora, the latest Sora feels like VO2. And VO3 feels like a full step. I've said, I put the same prompt in both, and Sora is like way more hallucinatory. Like, it's way crazier. VO3 still hallucinates and does like crazy things where like, you'll be watching a car drive forward, and then all of a sudden it flips around and it looks like the car's driving backwards. Like, it gets confused, but just the visual fidelity is really, really high.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  You've done that in real life.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flip, flip the car around. Anyway, get on Numeral HQ, Sales Tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance, numeralhq.com. Anyway.

• 56:01Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Close.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Clouseau.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Clouseau Investments.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  How do you not know how to pronounce Clouseau? Do you know Inspector Clouseau?

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Oh, lore.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  Is he French?

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Uh, it's, uh, actually, I'm gonna blank and I'm gonna look really embarrassing now because I was trying to

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  Fictional character.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Fictional character, yeah.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  In the Pink Panther series.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Pink Panther, that's right, yeah.

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  Movie? Is that a movie?

• 56:23John Coogan?

  It has been adapted into a movie. It was originally, I think, an animated show.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, so not, not.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  You don't know the Pink Panther theme song? Dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun, dun dun. Uh, Clouseau Investment says, "I haven't done it yet, but I really want a short Uber. In New York City, there's a taxi app called Empower,

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  which charges drivers a flat fee. In exchange, takes zero percent of the ride cost, all of it goes to the driver. If you're in NYC, I encourage you to try it. I've been using it for two weeks now, and every ride is thirty percent cheaper than Lyft and forty percent cheaper than Uber. LGA to Manhattan is around twenty-five dollars, sometimes fifty to seventy-five, depending on Uber or Lyft. I think Uber should be in the cash generation phase, but they somehow flush the twenty-five to thirty dollars they make. They ride doing literally nothing, down the drain. Bold statement. Uh, there will always be a market for Uber because some people value their time at a thousand an hour, but for most people like me, waiting two minutes instead of one to save thirty dollars is worth it. I still do not understand what the engineers at Uber, PayPal, etc. do, because it seems like the marginal improvements they make are not worth their cost.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, maybe I can sell a call on Uber or something, because despite Uber and Lyft using lobbyists and dirty tricks to try to stifle competition, eventually, instead of pocketing thirty dollars from a sixty-five dollar ride and giving the cab driver thirty-five, somebody, someone like Empower will catch on and charge forty and give it all to the drive, give it all to the drive.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  All to, oh.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Driver and Uber, uh, anyways.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  But, um, I think the interesting thing here is like, I can easily see something like Empower working in, uh, New York City.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  Can't imagine it. Yeah, high-density environments where there's a lot of taxi cabs.

• 58:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  I just think in, in the, I've never seen a taxi cab ten square miles around my house, once.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  And the question is like, Even if the model works, if they're not taking a cut, then they don't have money to invest in onboarding both sides of the two-sided marketplace. And so the question of like, why did Uber and Lyft burn so much money? Well, it's because they were running insane amounts of ads convincing everyone to be an Uber and Lyft driver. And so they created, they brought all this liquidity to the market. And New York City has had a few of these competitors. There was another one for a while.

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  There was one that was owned by the taxi.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  There's been a few.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  Some of the major.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  And yeah, I mean, it's very clear that like certain markets are going to have, you know, different ways to slice it. You go to some markets and I mean, when we were, I think we were in New York City, right? And Uber had clearly lost some fight with JFK because it was like, oh, if you want to take an Uber, just like get in a taxi cab, drive 10 miles and that's the Uber pickup zone. And it's like, what? Like the Uber used to just come directly to the exit and act like a normal person.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  Same thing with LAX.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, LAX has LAX.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  You have to call it black.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Which I guess makes sense because it was really congested and it was kind of crazy. And it was, and it was like actually probably net worse for everyone.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  I think the bigger point here is just what, what is, why is the company not generating obscene amounts of cash when their, when their margins feel like they should be able to produce? We're going to be having David Richer from Lyft, CEO of Lyft on, I think, later this week, post earnings. A bunch of questions for him around autonomous vehicles and we can maybe bring up this post as well.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  We'll see. Yeah. See the rebuttal. Well, let's tell you about Finn AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 59:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Go to fin.ai to get started.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Tay Kim has a great post here from Jefferies. Apparently this looks like it was in some

• 1:00:06John Coogan?

  Isn't this hilarious?

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  From Jefferies.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  This is hilarious. Like memes are, I've seen memes in VC decks, like, oh, we're doing a quarterly update on the market and somebody throws a meme in there. Jefferies is a very serious investment bank and they're throwing an AI-generated image.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  It says a lot.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  You see the source? Source Copilot? You know what that means?

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  They made it?

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  The AI image generation they used is from Microsoft Copilot. Everyone thinks, oh, everyone uses ChatGPT. Not Jeffries. They use Copilot because this is an Excel shop.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Hands off the, hands off the mouse when you're prompting in Copilot to be a Jeffries associate generating this. But it's a funny meme because Azure and GCP are dancing. Meanwhile, AWS is a sad puppy in the corner. You know, we talked about this with AWS, like, sort of lagging, not having a strong, you know, horse in the AI race. Google obviously has a fantastic foundation model lab. Azure obviously is the OpenAI bet and is growing like crazy through the.

• 1:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Amazon has, has Anthropic.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  They do. Yeah.

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  The work they're doing with TPU there.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Somebody was saying that like Tranium is, is underperforming or people don't like Tranium as much. They prefer just give me a ton of, a, a ton of Nvidia GPUs. But, you know, who knows? Never count out the GOAT, the man who invented the cloud, the cloud cowboy, Andy Jassy.

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  I mean, truly in the age of like AWS being the most important driver for Amazon as a whole, like the perfect person to run the business is Andy Jassy, right? Because he created it. So. They're in a pretty good spot.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Joe Weisenthal, flying first class on my flight out of New York City. I was a little bit surprised here. I expected him, I expected Joe to be flying private.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Jordi Hays?

  He says, everyone in the front is solo, quiet and isolated. I look back to the rest of the plane. People are joyously traveling with friends and family, sharing humor and adventure.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Was just an interesting observation.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, I understand why, I understand why people in, in the front are solo, quiet and isolated because first class flights have become extremely draconian.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they really have.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Terrible. We, we should share our experience. So we, we, we flew a mixture of first class and, and economy to New York City with, with our lovely team and crew and Jordy were, Jordy and I were up in first class and were served. We were flying, uh, should we name?

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna name him. We're gonna name him.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  We're gonna name names.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  We were flying.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  We were flying JetBlue Mint.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Which historically I've had great experiences with Mint over the years.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  David Seigler was singing their praises, said it was the best first class experience he's ever enjoyed and said it was fantastic, but we had quite.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  At times it's been fantastic, but this was.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  We had quite a different experience.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  This was devastating.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  Let's, let's run through our problems. So the seat was comfortable, lay flat. It was great. You didn't think it was comfortable? I thought it was great.

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  The falloff is real. Everything about the experience is degraded over the last couple of years.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  You know, the worst thing about the lay flat seats? This is such a me problem, but they're clearly designed. They're like, they're like 99.9% of people will be able to lay down completely flat here. And the seat is six foot six. So I'm two inches short. And so I have to like curl up.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Curl up in a little ball.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Exactly, like a child, yes.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, it gets worse.

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  It gets worse. Yeah, that was just the beginning of our nightmare.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  I ordered steak.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  And I wasn't hungry.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:31Jordi Hays?

  So of course, as soon as the flight attendant left, I got up and I walked the steak dinner back. And I gave it to Michael and Scott.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Jordi Hays?

  And then I went back to my seat.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  And I was just relaxing and the flight attendant came up to me a little bit later and said, would you like dessert? We're serving gelato, I think it was. And I said, sure, I'd actually, I would love gelato, thank you. And the flight attendant went back to the front. I ran to the back and I started handing the gelato to Michael. And a hand jumped into frame and grabbed the gelato. Grabbed the gelato out of my hands and said, you cannot do that.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  And of course, there's a rule that says you can't pass food between cabins. But I was just shocked because I was shocked.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Makes no sense. Once I take possession, possession's nine tenths of the law. Once I take possession of the steak, it's mine to do what I want with. I think I should be able to distribute the steak evenly amongst the entire first class cabin. I should be able to auction it off. It's mine. I should be able to resell it on a secondary market. Whatever I want to do with that.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  There should be a stock ex.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  Either you gave it to me, yes, yes, this is what we're going to do. We're going to start, we're going to vibe code an app that allows you to sell first class meals to economy customers. And it runs on the JetBlue wifi.

• 1:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so credit to the flight attendant.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  It could be annoying if I'm distributing the plates and the forks and the things like that around the plane. It's annoying. Maybe it's frustrating to the other clientele. But I was more on your side. So anyways, I brought the gelato back to the front. I gave it to you. You ate it. You enjoyed it.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  But then after that, we looked, we did a quick deep dive on JetBlue and I got very concerned because JetBlue.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  Nothing more shocking than riding in a metal tube at 30,000 feet and realizing you're flying a penny stock.

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Basically. So JetBlue is now trading at.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  What's the ratio between just like?

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  I was just gonna say their market.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Is it bigger than Perplexity? Because I feel like Perplexity is a pretty solid business.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  They're over 10 times smaller than Perplexity.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  They're less than one tenth of Perplexity. Oh, okay.

• 1:05:45Jordi Hays?

  Yes. And their entire market cap is less than Mira Marotti's seed round.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  And so usually if I was gonna get in a tube, a metal tube and fly thousands of miles.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  I would trust Mira for sure.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  I would, you know, I'm starting to think, you know, optimize for market cap a little bit more on the provider. But anyways, Joanna, CEO, welcome to come on anytime.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Get down to the TBP and defend your first-class policies. I was talking to the flight attendant and I said, I'd like to speak to the manager. I'd like to debate the manager because I don't think, I'd like to debate the manager. You don't want to speak to the manager. You want to debate the manager because they have rules. They're gonna pull out some rulebook. I want to go a level deeper. I want to go from first principles. Why do those rules exist?

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking, I was thinking, you know that company Pipe Dream?

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  They make tubes that run underground that you can transport goods. I was thinking if you could create some type of advanced straw that you could run from first class, put it, run it on the side and then run it back like telescopically, like back to your boys in the back and then just feed it and use like high-pressure air to feed them little bites of steak through the back. And so you could do this. You could do this without anyone, potentially anyone knowing about it.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, passing back scraps to your boys is like the, it's so American. I was, I was deeply offended. Uh, and then it got worse because the flight attendant kept bringing different trays of snacks. And I remember when they brought them one tray of snacks, they're like, do you want any of these? This was after the, after the steak debacle and, uh, and we start taking them and we're clearly taking more and more than we need. We're like, yeah, just give us the entire tray.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  And I asked, I asked specifically, I was like, can I bring these back to my friends? And she said, technically, yes, because they were for the whole cabin.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  These snacks are cabin wide.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Less than 10 minutes later, she brought some nuts that were, that looked very nice.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Yes, and those you couldn't, you cannot pass the nuts back.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  But you can pass the chips back.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, very, very frustrating.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, it was brutal. It was brutal. Anyway, we had some fun.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Ben, Ben definitely said at one point, you know, we're flying with like 10 people. Shouldn't we just, shouldn't we just charter a jet? And he made a good point. He made a good point.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Well, you will have to get on Adio. Customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free at Adio.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Kevin Kwak has a screenshot from LinkedIn.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  He braved LinkedIn to bring us this. Uh, he says, this is the funniest LinkedIn title from now on. People should only use LinkedIn like this.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  And Peter Sellus over at Discord, in the title of his LinkedIn, it says, "I have full purchasing authority over Discord's extremely large and lucrative cloud contracts, and I am presently leading their renegotiation." Basically putting up a billboard.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Just getting exactly what you want. I want to talk to the most senior person possible at every hyperscaler. Take me seriously. Great.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  His username on LinkedIn is disgruntled.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Disgruntled, wait, Peter Sellus?

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  And his title, if you go to the experience section, is personality hire.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  This guy's a good sense of humor.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Prior to this, he was Vice President of Product at Snap, so.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Good stuff.

• 1:09:18John Coogan?

  University of Chicago.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  Come on the show, Peter.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  He's connected to Orin Hoffman's connected to him. Orin's been on the show a couple of times.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Should do a live auction.

• 1:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:26Jordi Hays?

  With the hyperscalers.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  And you should get on public.com, investing for those that take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading, trusted by millions. Is Discord out yet? No, they're about to go public, right?

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  That seems to be the case.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  I haven't been following too close, but big fan of Jason Citrin. Yeah, I know, Dalian was saying like it was the wrong move, but regardless, love Jason and what he's built. Fantastic. One of the coolest founder stories. Went to a college for like video game design, I believe. Started an app, sold that, and then was building a video game, built a League of Legends for your phone, like a Moba, and took that to Tech Ratchet Disrupt and was demoing it. Was just like super into the gaming world. Eventually got lucky with Discord and found the correct product market that scaled.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  The building games to building.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Put the KPIs in the orbit.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  The building games to building dominant messaging platforms, pipeline, undefeated, Slack, Discord. Pericles in the chat says, what kind of country is this? We can't even pass back little steaks to our boys.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  I know, I agree.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  He also says, I love Adio.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the screen. Feel the same way.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Good to have you here. Good to have you. Let's talk about Scott Wu. There was a report about cognition. He is replying or kind of subtweeting the coverage. Basically 30 out of the 200 people that were acquired from Windsurf got laid off, and then the rest got a buyout offer. If you're not interested in staying on the boat, you were on a go ship, now you're on the Titanic. No, not the Titanic. You're on the.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Carnival, Carnival Cruise for Cracked IMO.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  It's a destroyer.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, battleship.

• 1:11:07John Coogan?

  You're on a battleship, and everyone's got to be pulling in the same direction. Everyone's got to be hoisting sails on this galleon. And so Scott Wu says, people have asked about our culture and recent employee communications. Cognition has an extremely performance culture. And we're upfront about this. This is Scott Wu's, this is my Scott Wu impression. We are routinely at the office through the weekend and do some of our best work late into the night. Many of us literally live where we work. That's true. They have a house in Silicon Valley somewhere, and a bunch of them live there. We know that people who joined Windsurf didn't expect to join Cognition and we're proud of how we work. We understand it's not for everyone. We gave our team the opportunity

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

  to decide. We offered for all employees who joined via acquisition to opt into our culture with full clarity on what that entails. We know that we will lose some strong talent in doing this, but we truly believe the level of intensity this moment demands from us is unprecedented. While not everyone is looking for a culture like ours, everyone deserves respect and appreciation for their work regardless of their decision. We accelerated and cashed out all four years of equity for everyone at Windsurf, even for the 85% of employees who didn't hit their one-year cliff. And for those who opt out, we're providing an additional nine months of pay on top of this. This is just good guy Scott. He's just doing everything right. He's, he's setting the bar high. He's letting people know, hey, we

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  take this really seriously. We just don't want there to be a culture clash. Look,

• 1:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you got one of these buyout, if you got, if you, if you just went from almost acquisition from OpenAI, ended up on the ghost ship through the Google deal, ended up at Cognition, got all your, got, got the full upside from the deal, even if you had invested. And then now you're at Cognition and realize, I don't want to work as hard as everyone else here. And you get the opportunity, you get nine months of pay to just walk away. That person is, there's, there's going to be some people in that group that are

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Totally. I mean, it, it's not, it's not like the norm, but there are definitely people who are like, I was actually excited to rest and rest. I was, I was actually excited to hit the ping pong table, you know? I wanted to just be on the beanbag chair for a while and I wanted to kind of cruise and, and have like a normal nine to five. Like there are people who, who like, that's what they, maybe they, maybe they, maybe this was their third startup. They're already got some liquidity. They're doing great and they have a family and they're, you know, they, they want to be a little bit more flexible, take more time off. And like, that's the beauty of, you know, the American labor market is you can kind of choose and pick your own adventure. But the, you know, Scott wants to create a cohesive team, a cohesive culture. He doesn't want this idea. It's very tough when, when

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  half the team is staying up really late grinding and they love it. And then the other half is like, I'm dipping out early. It's, I'm just

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  It's awkward for everyone.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  It's just awkward for everyone. So he's just saying, hey, like you're welcome to stay on the team. But you gotta buy in or you gotta bounce and go, you know, take your, take your liquidity from the accelerated vesting you got, take the nine months of extra pay and go find something that actually brings you joy. Go do your life's work. So I think this is well managed. It seems like the comms leaked prior to this. I don't know. I don't know. Would it have been better if he posted this beforehand and just kind of owned the narrative? Maybe that would be the move because you kind of know that people will frame this poorly. And so you get out and say, hey, I'm going founder mode. I'm, I'm, I'm offering this buyout offer because there are plenty of companies that have done these buyout offers before. I'm, I believe that there's one major company, I forget which one, that has a standing offer

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  at 24 seven, every single day. Like, doesn't matter if you just joined. I mean, of course, you can't just like join and leave immediately and get the buyout offer. But basically, like, you, if you hit a cliff and they're like, we'll re-up you, we'll keep you incentivized, we're gonna keep paying you. But like, the buyout offer is always there for you to take some cash, go figure out what's next, find a better fit, because we just don't want people who are just like hanging on to this job because they are like just hesitant about going somewhere else when they should just figure, figure out the next thing.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, you don't want to be losing sleep. Get a Pod5 Ultra. Go to 8sleep.com, buy your warranty, 39 free trial, free returns, free shipping. I got a great night's sleep. I slept for eight hours last night and I think it's showing.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Didn't you say eight and a half?

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  You put up some crazy numbers. I got a 95 last month. I've been down in the dumps. I had a 45 Sunday night.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  No, you're, you're, you're back in the game. The energy's coming through. And you can feel it in the intro. Your sleep is great. Sleep for you is inversely correlated with your voice. The more sleep you get, the more hoarse you will get from screaming into the microphone.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  You can tell my sleep score by the, by the intro.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Skooks says, after they put GLP1s in the water, being obese will be back in vogue. A sign of indomitable vitality and enormous wealth.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  This is not obese. This man is not obese. He is prosperous. Prosperous and prosperity should be celebrated.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Love the cane too.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  It's a, it's, it's a wild build to run.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Our next move, bring back canes.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Cane, smart canes. It's gonna happen. A lot of battery life in a cane. Plenty of room for a ton of batteries. A lot that you can do with a cane. On-device inference, GPT OSS, run it on the cane. Run it on the cane.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  That's really the ultimate status symbol.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Does Nvidia make a narrow 4090? Like a GPU that could be, could be put in? Maybe we just need to string together a bunch of iPhone chips. I really, I really think building a smart cane might be a challenge. I don't know if you can, I mean, I guess the chip in the iPhone is probably small enough to fit in the cane, but you'd have to figure, it might be, it might have a thick part to the cane.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you could make a very wide cane, right? Almost like an elephant's, you know, leg.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  That seems like not the vision I'm going for with the cane. I want, I want an aesthetic cane. I want a cane that, that doesn't jump out at anyone.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  You doubt, well.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Doesn't, doesn't jump out at anyone.

• 1:17:06Jordi Hays?

  We'll put Tyler on it. Tyler, just, just try to make one by the end of the show.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Build us a smart cane using open source LLMs, please. Thank you. And then when you launch the cane, buy a, buy a billboard for it on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go to Saagar and Chetty.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  One of our billboards was taken, one of our billboards was taken down this morning. Was that by a? After, after a good run.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  By, by a state actor? Do we think?

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Probably. Some type of, yeah, nation state.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Hacker group.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Or was it a false flag? You'll never know.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  Zach, Zach Pogroff noticed that, that it had been taken down. It was very disappointed. So working on getting more up. Zach, we're on it.

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe SF next time. Maybe, I don't know where else we should go. Probably Saint Tropez. That'd make sense for a billboard.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Abilene.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Abilene would be good. Abilene would actually be great. Abilene would be the way. Audience of one. I just want, I just want Chase and Sam to see it, basically.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  Audience of two. There's also a lot of people at Abilene that are just getting into data center.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  The billboard in Abilene should just say, it shouldn't even say, listen to TV. It should say, come on TV. Call into TV. Sam, call into TV. We'd love to chat with you. If we put that up, I think we get him. Okay, he'll of course come on the show.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to Data Center USA.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, congratulations.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Saagar and Jetty says, "I can't help but love every iteration of the Moon Swatch."

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  What do you think of this? Collaboration between Omega and Swatch.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Is that the same company? Does Swatch Group own Omega Omega? I always listen to the James Bond pronunciation, the Daniel Craig. He says Omega Omega.

• 1:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Does Swatch Group own?

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, looks nice. History of the Moon Swatch. The Moon Watch was, it was Omega. It was worn by the astronauts.

• 1:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Same company. Swatch Group.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Same company, yep. Very big, very big company. So if you're not familiar with the Moon Watch, there was a knockout, drag-out fight. It was like the AI talent wars all over again in the 1960s to decide which company would send the watch to the moon on the wrist of the astronauts. Everyone expected it to be Rolex. Omega won the contract. The Omega Moon Watch went to went to space, went to the moon and came back and now is a celebrated timepiece. The ones that went to the moon are obviously in museums and the models from that year traded at a very high premium, but they but they issue new moon watches regularly. And the Moon Swatch is something that's a little bit more, I think, affordable, certainly more rugged and has a nice

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  has a nice fabric strap, so.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  Will release Saturday, August 9th and is priced at $400.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. And if you're looking for your own watch, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. You can get an Omega. You can get something worn by Marc Andreessen. He's an Omega guy. Little bit of a.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we clock that.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  We clock that early.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Came out with an interview.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  We were expecting.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  What's on the wrist?

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were expecting a graph diamond hallucination, maybe four of them ideally, but you know, he went with the budget option.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  But we'll get him. He's coming on the show, I believe, tomorrow, and we will pitch him on picking up a couple graph diamonds hallucinations with the pennies in his couch cushions.

• 1:20:37Jordi Hays?

  He's got a lot of real estate. Everybody's got a lot of real estate. A lot of people, I don't know what's up with people just wearing one watch, especially allocators.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:44Jordi Hays?

  His caliber, right? Why stop at one?

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  You've seen a couple of people that wear a watch and then the whoop band or a watch and then an Apple Watch or something, but why not? Why not four Daytonas?

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Anyway, congratulations to Joe Weisenthal again on the absolute run. Odd Lots is the number one business podcast in the world and the number six podcast in the world after Cold Blooded from ABC News and Crime Junkie and the Joe Rogan Experience is sitting at number three. Mick Unplugged, Leadership Because Growth, which I'm not familiar with, is number four. And The Daily from the New York Times is at five.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this is not because we, our, our episodes of Odd Lots released yesterday. It is because they got a profile, a glowing profile in the New York Times on Sunday.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:37Jordi Hays?

  They're on a generational run. We love to see it.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Joe said the business category of the Apple charts is very funny. It is funny because Money Rehab, Andy Frisella, Real AF, like a lot of, like, I think Jaco Willink is in the business category and it's very different than the Odd Lots stuff. Like Odd Lots is like, let's talk to an expert on the grain market. I'm like, let's see what's going on with the yield curve.

• 1:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  And it's very much listened to by, by hedge fund folks and capital allocators and a lot of these other podcasts are listened to more by lifestyle entrepreneurs and, and small business folks and they, and obviously that's a much larger audience, much larger addressable audience, but it's good to see Odd Lots on an absolute tear. And Joe says, okay, gonna stop with the kiss self congratulations, but fun to be number one for what will be a brief moment, surreal week. Also, one last thing, if anyone knows how I can parlay my 15 minutes into throwing out the first pitch at a Cyclone game. I have no idea what the Cyclones is. Is that some sort of, is that sports of some sort? It's some, I've never heard of this.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  High A affiliate, the Brooklyn Cyclones.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  High A affiliate of the New York Mets.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  This is, so this is baseball?

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54John Coogan?

  And that's the one with, where you throw the ball and then you hit it with the-

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Is this like a feeder team?

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Is the one where you throw the ball and you hit it with the bat? And there's like gloves too, right? Well, good luck to Joe throwing out the first pitch. That would be great to see. Good content.

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Nikita says, "Things that will cause a user to churn: one, friends leave; two, product stops growing and becomes culturally irrelevant; 998 feed has a bug where it flashes; 999 bookmarks are not searchable." You have to imagine Nikita's DMs are potentially gnarlier than Elon's at the moment of thousands of his mutuals and friends messaging him every possible bug in the app. I know we would do the same to Jacoby before he left.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I was just talking about this. Like, we don't use the bookmarks feature. We use the shared groups feature to kind of track posts that we want to share on the show. And I was like, "Oh, I wish I could search across all of these." But I was like, "I'm literally the only person that wants that." Like, I'm the only, I'm the only person whose entire job and career depends on this one niche feature. And so, it's not even worth requesting. I'll just figure out a workaround, hopefully scrape it out of there, and then make that searchable or something. Because I can, I can work on a workaround. But yeah, fortunately, friends have not left, and X continues to be culturally relevant. It's where news breaks. And we saw that on Full Display with the Soham Farik saga. The

• 1:24:19John Coogan?

  entire thing played out on X. Started with a post, wound up with everyone else chiming in on various posts, kind of ended with like us interviewing him live on a stream on X. It was very cool, all within the X ecosystem. You know, stuff, stuff still happens elsewhere. But in terms of like, where the tech conversation is happening, it's entirely, it's entirely X. And there's, there's no, there's no even close second. Now, I do think it's interesting to see. I want to get better at understanding like, what, what is the current thing on Instagram today? And where, what is the real community that is formed on various other platforms

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  that are adjacent? Because I know some people that have grown accounts and, and when I was big on YouTube and really focused on YouTube, I would notice things, like we were talking to Samir yesterday, about like, different metas that develop and different themes. And you, you, sometimes these break containment, but a lot of times, it's just... Just a story that that happens within the YouTube ecosystem. Somebody posts a video and then there's a reaction to that video. There's a whole cycle of news that happens within the YouTube ecosystem.

• 1:25:30Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, X still feels, you know, if you're generally interested in tech.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  It feels like a shared experience.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Whereas if you're interested in tech and you're on Instagram.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't feel like you're you have any feed that feels at all similar to even another friend. That's like loosely interested in tech.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm trying to think on YouTube, the big, the big discourse is always, it's always about YouTube. Like Colin Samir really are at the center of the of the discourse on YouTube.

• 1:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Creator industrial complex.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that on YouTube, you have to have a YouTube account and you have to publish a YouTube video to have a voice whatsoever.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Like, anyone can show up on X and type out 280 characters, go viral and be the main character, be the current thing, start a conversation, engage with that conversation. But the bar on YouTube for having a voice, like the comment section just doesn't rise to the same level as like a reaction video. And so when, when, like, when Mr. Beast is embroiled in controversy, there will be other YouTubers. Like, there was this, the Mr. Beastification of YouTube. This idea that Mr. Beast had created this meta and then other YouTubers were copying it. And it was all this like yelling at the camera and fast paced editing and lots of like in your face, high saturation graphics popping up, all this different stuff going on.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  And, and that entire, that entire news cycle played out on YouTube. And it was because there were commentary channels and cultural and analysis channels that, that replied essentially. But instead of it being like a quote tweet dunk, like the, the equivalent is like responding.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Viral video.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Another viral video responding to the analysis. So someone put out, so Mr. Beast was on a tear and then other people were copying it. And then somebody put out the Mr. Beastification of YouTube, which went viral. And then other people would respond to the Mr. Beastification is overstated. Or it's not that big of a deal, or it's, it's even worse than you thought. And so people will take the conversation in different ways, but it moves much slower. Because if you're like, yeah, I want to do a reaction video, okay, see you in a week. Right?

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Anyway. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Is that gong new? This gong is relatively new, a couple months since our new studio. Uh, we do have another new gong over there that we haven't, uh, that we haven't actually, uh, showed anyone.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  We haven't hit on an area.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  And we, when we got a completely new gong for the Figma IPO and we had Dylan Field hit it on the day of his IPO. It's game hit, I, it's a game hit IPO gong. It will be retired, it will hang in the rafters of the TVPN Ultra Dome. And eventually this, eventually this dome will be filled with gongs from historic technology moments. And, uh, we're gonna give the Computer History Museum a run for their money. They might have Commodore 64 or whatever. They have the, they have the original, like, touring machine. It's like this, it's this computer that you crank. It's like the craziest thing and it can do calculations. And it's like, it's, it's literally no electronics and it's a computer. It's like, it's all just like, basically like marbles flowing around, not really.

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Dream rig.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, dream rig. Imagine posting on that. Um, but, uh, we're gonna give them a run for our money with our gong collection. Anyway, uh, what's up with?

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Eleven Labs has a new launch today.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Big news.

• 1:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull this video up somehow?

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want, I want to listen to the Eleven Labs music.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  They're saying Eleven Music is here created with leading labels, publishers, and artists. It lets you craft studio-quality tracks with control over genre, style, and language using just text. Built on licensed catalogs, every song you create is cleared for commercial use. That is pretty insane. I had an eye-opening moment, probably two years ago at this point. Uh, one of, uh, I enjoy the music of the rapper Gunna.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  And somebody made an entire alb, a Gunna album that was entirely AI-generated.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Was it good?

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  And it was solid.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  It was solid.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't necessarily, I, I, I listened through it a couple times. You could, if you paid it, if you were not paying attention to it, it sounded just like a regular Gunna song, album, whatever.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Did any of those, was it on Spotify?

• 1:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I think they published on Spotify, but I believe it got taken down.

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  Did any of those songs migrate over into a playlist?

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  For me, you're saying?

• 1:29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:55Jordi Hays?

  No, but I don't think-

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  That's what I would consider like crossing the chasm would be like. It's in your liked feed, or it's in your rap playlist.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Spotify's in an interesting place here because your one way to piss off artists is allow people to generate AI versions of the same artists, and the artists are losing revenue. And I knew a team, a friend that was working on basically Spotify for just AI-generated content. They ultimately pivoted because they didn't feel like they wanted to withstand decades of lawsuits. But it sounds like Eleven Labs has found a solution here. Let's play this video.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play the video. Let's see what they have to say. Hopefully we don't get copyright striked. I think we should not, because this is the first time this music has existed. Okay, so we got some orchestral music. It's pretty epic. I told the founder to make us a WWE theme song, a really aggressive, over-the-top track for us. This is not quite our vibe, but it's nice. It's nice. Okay, this is definitely past the uncanny valley. Like, this could just be a real song.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  This is hitting.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  I'm digging it. I'm digging it. Okay, let's see, did they do any Gunna? Okay. Okay, you got some fast-paced-

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  A little elevator-coated, but I'm getting it.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  What else we got? Their customers must just love, like, falling asleep. Reggae? Yeah, this is pretty cool. Give me some heavy metal. Okay, some hip-hop. It's pretty sick. I like this one.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  This is epic. I want this on. I'm sold. Oh, this is good. It's hit.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  That's great. Get me that track. I want, I, I want.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Get me that track. This is a good time to talk about. So last week, the Panama playlist came out. John and I were featured in them.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Doxed.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we were, uh, targeted by the Panama playlist. If you go to panamap playlist.com, uh, they basically scraped a bunch of people's Spotify's without them knowing and then published their playlists. Uh, I was wondering, I was looking at this playlist and I, I didn't immediately have a memory of it. It was, the playlist was called No Cap. And I was like, why would I name a, a, uh, a playlist that? And it took me a second to come back to me. It's because, uh, I was collecting songs, rap songs with obscure references to venture capital and investing.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  As one does.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  As one does. And so, uh, if you look at the first song, God did.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  Clearly for a party round drop that never happened.

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Never hap- never happened. But first song, God did, uh, DJ Khaled or one of the other rappers on the track says, "I'm at the cap table. What the splits is? Not that cap table, boy. We live this." And, uh, then you have, okay, okay. Kanye West, price went up. Angel investor.

• 1:33:20Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, anyways, a bunch of other random, random references, but, uh, it's all making sense now. What else we got, John?

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  We got GPT-5 news, uh, on Polymarket. GPT-5 released by August 10th is now sitting at 92%. It was sitting at 75% yesterday, earlier this week, 80%. Uh, and so that's the, by the end of the week, uh, there is a 92% chance that GPT-5 is released. Um, and it, it has mooned recently. Just back on August 3rd, it was sitting at 31% chance. So it has just in two days gone from 31% to over 92%. So people are definitely expecting GPT-5 to be released, uh, in the next five days, which should be exciting.

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  I'm sure there'll be lots of coverage, lots to talk about, and we will want to hop on with as many, as many legends, as many, uh, as many Metis list AI researchers as possible to get the, to get the deep dive.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  In other news, uh, flying private is the new wealth yardstick. I know our audience is gonna wanna know about this. We talked about Joe Weisenthal.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  Is this news?

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  This is news.

• 1:34:35Jordi Hays?

  Is this new news?

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  This is.

• 1:34:37Jordi Hays?

  Is there people hearing about this for the first time?

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  But I love this because, do you know Max Chuning? He started a gummy candy business, sour candy business. He sold it to Hershey for seventy-five million dollars. I just love the name. Max Chuning with two X's. It's like a great name. Uh, so he was a YouTuber. He started a sour candy business, Sour Strips, and just grew it and grew it and grew it and wound up selling it for seventy-five million and did very well. Uh, but the first thing he did, before buying a Rolex or a dream home, was a private jet for his wife and six friends to veil on a Desal Falcon nine hundred. They skipped security lines, zipped straight to the runway and seated themselves in leather recliners with gold accents. In the wood-paneled cabin, the price tag for this adventure, one hundred thousand dollars. Worth every penny. Chuning's golden doodle, dude.

• 1:35:24John Coogan?

  This guy is phenomenal with the names.

• 1:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Naming artist.

• 1:35:27John Coogan?

  Love it. Uh, sprawled at their feet. "The joke is, I had to get a private plane so I could bring my dog," the thirty-five-year-old said. "I didn't really care what the price was. The ultra-wealthy have always enjoyed flying private. That exclusive club is growing as soaring stocks and crypto prices meant more millionaires and billionaires, who now have a range of choices to book a seat on a jet. And you know the best part? He can give the steak to his dog if he wants, cuz he's flying private, baby. Doesn't have to deal with the draconian rules of JetBlue Mint."

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Flying private has become the ultimate luxury splurge for many wealthy individuals, surpassing Ferraris, Hermes, Birkin bags, topping fourteen thousand dollars, or even waterfront Hampton homes.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  All the above.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Which we recently learned are very interestingly priced, where property in the Hamptons is somewhat reasonable. You know, five, ten million dollars might get you in the game, but renting a house in the Hamptons for a single month during the high season, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, right? Something like that?

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Very, very expensive. And, and, and the, the rental rates are, are so extreme because you really only wanna be there.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  You only wanna be there during the summer, the hot season. When Emily Sundberg will be out there. Uh, for many. Of those aspiring to join the ranks of the truly rich, having private jet money is the new goal, dividing the 1% from the .1%. The pandemic unleashed a burst of demand and providers say popular culture has turbocharged enthusiasm and envy for the fly private lifestyle. Social media has given, I mean swift to 810.

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Zar in the chat says, uh, his friend flies their dog private solo.

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  Well, we talked about on the show earlier, a dog that flies private alone because the owner, uh, signed a contract to do the interior design for the private jet. And as part of the deal, their dog gets to fly private. And we were laughing about-

• 1:37:25Jordi Hays?

  This is one of the worst deals.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  About like, what if you want to get to, you know, New York to Miami and the dog wants to get to LA and you have to do a layover at, at Van Nuys to get to Miami because the dog has to fly private. Um, but the younger people are getting a glimpse into the lives of jet setters, whether it is a model flying with friends to a bachelorette party in Los Cabos, Mexico, or a hedge fund manager hopping a plane for a birthday in St. Bart's. Realistic expectations are in or in order. It's my dream to fly private, said a user on a Reddit forum for so-called Henrys, which refers to high earners, not rich yet. I think that's

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  everyone on our team, uh, adding that he earns about $300,000, is married and has a kid in daycare. Definitely closer to broke than flying private, another user responded. Mogged. Yet the number of people who are rich-

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  The Henry term emerged during the D to C boom.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  I've never heard of that before.

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  That, that whole era where a lot of D to C brands were kind of looking at their customers as people that weren't necessarily going, uh, head to toe Loro Piana, but they would- You know, maybe buy, flex up and, and get, you know, an item or two, or, or buy some away luggage. That, that whole thing.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Buy a Clydesdale, not a thoroughbred, that type of money.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, the rain, the, I, I did a deep dive on like the horse market recently and the, uh, as one does, and the, uh, the, the spread between the cheapest horse and the most expensive horse is staggering.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  There's range.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  You can spend millions, or you can spend just a couple thousand dollars. So no excuse not to have a horse. One horsepower, what's my, how much power do you need?

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  The U S added more than a thousand millionaires every day last year on average, according to U B S. The billionaire club grew more than 50% between 2015 and 2024. Private jet hours flown touched a high in 2022 and then have stayed elevated since, according to data. Uh, travelers can now use apps to snag individual seats on private jets or pay for flights by the hour. Others charter flights paying for just the occasional trip from New York to Miami. While there are rare business moguls whom, who might spring for the entire jet. Some jet providers accept payment in crypto, shrimp, cocktails and facials. Ken Richey, a pilot and chairman of Flexjet, a private company, said the frugal wealthy, high earners who don't typically splurge,

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  started spending big on travel during the pandemic because of health concerns. Many of them have found it tough to go back to flying commercially. Yeah, because of the JetBlue rules, we know this. Uh, and years of economic growth have helped ease the stigma around conspicuous consumption that's set in after the financial crisis. It's in vogue to be wealthy, he said. Sometimes we love the rich, sometimes we hate the rich. It isn't just avoiding the security line or the hoi polloi. Flying private means trading Biscoff cookies, which were also given to us on the JetBlue flight.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  And denied.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  For freshly baked ones and packing lunch with such items as shrimp cocktail and filet mignon from menus spanning a dozen pages. Chef Nobu Matsuhisha, Hisa, crafted a menu for Vista Jet that includes miso salmon. Some cabin hosts are trained to give travelers facials 40,000 feet above the ground with Dr. Barbara Sturm's line of luxury skincare.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Very nice.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, fly private, stop making excuses.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  We had a

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  I I made us a song on 11 Labs.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Okay, break it down. Yeah, yeah. Can we play it on the stream?

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  I think so. I think we have it set up.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Let's hear the song.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Is this like a rap? This is not how WWE works.

• 1:41:24Speaker 03

  I don't really know what you mean.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  I'm not into this. No. Uh, go do some research. Go do some research.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  Shut down.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  Shut down.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  Shut down by John.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. The whole point of the WWE intro is that is that it it has no words. It's it's purely instrumental. So so look up, look up some WWE intros. Because it's meant for the announcers to speak over it. And so I'm sure you can just prompt it and say no words. But also, like, the words are going to be the hardest thing to get right because it's it's like telling jokes. It's it's it's creative writing. It's very, very difficult for the models to get that right. Um, obviously, amazing work by 11 Labs, very convincing, but we got to do some work on prompting this one's.

• 1:42:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go back to it. I don't I don't want I don't want any of that cringe, like, rap.

• 1:42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and and, yeah, and and and the and the abstract, like, chat GPT compression of, uh, of the concepts that we talk about.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Good effort, good effort, though, Tyler.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  And and impressive that it was able to be turned around so quickly. This isn't something that cooks overnight.

• 1:42:22Jordi Hays?

  Before we before we go into the next story, uh, funny story from earlier this year. We were flying back, uh, from, uh, a trip and our and, uh, we're joining a buddy, a friend of the show on their jet.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  And the morning of, it was a super, uh, early flight. We didn't text him to remind him that we were coming. And so we got to the we got to the the terminal, got on, uh, the golf cart. We're driving out to to the plane and just watched it take off.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  No, we didn't watch it take off. It was taxiing.

• 1:42:58Jordi Hays?

  It was ta- well, we watched we watched it taxiing.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, no, no, no. It didn't. It didn't leave the ground.

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we got out of view from it, so I thought it left the ground.

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  No, no, it didn't leave the ground.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  But you're saying it was, but it was running down the runway.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  It was on the runway, taxiing still.

• 1:43:11Jordi Hays?

  It was.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  It was not, it was not actively taking off.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  I thought it had turned around.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  I don't know, but either way, they turned the plane around for us. It was the nicest thing anyone's ever done for me.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  We felt really bad.

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  If I, if I ever go on, that's like the best, what's the nicest thing everyone's done for you? Turn around the PJ for sure. That's up there. Uh, it was, it was mortifying. It was, uh, it was a low point, but then the rest of the flight was fantastic.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  It was fantastic.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  Great time. Learned a lot. It was fantastic.

• 1:43:34Jordi Hays?

  And we are forever indebted.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Anyway, in other news, the New York Post is launching the California Post.

• 1:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Uh, the New York Post goes to Hollywood, plans to launch, plans launch of the California Post daily newspaper. Uh, New York Post, you probably know them from their hilarious and wild, uh, front page, uh, uh, what do you call them? Just like headlines. They write really great, great headlines with like these hilarious puns. And so they are going to come to California and launch a, uh, daily newspaper, which of course will probably be instantiated on the web very seriously, but, um, they call it the new venture. Uh, they're bringing the signature high brow, low mix, uh, high, high, low brow mix of content that the New York Post is famous for,

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  alongside fearless, common sense journalism, celebrity entertainment news, world-class sports reporting and legendary covers.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we gotta get, we gotta start getting the California Post delivered.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm very excited for this.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you know who founded the New York Post?

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  I don't. Who?

• 1:44:37Jordi Hays?

  He, uh, happens to be a founding father of this country, Alexander Hamilton.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  You're kidding me?

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  Yes. The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, a founding father.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:44:51Jordi Hays?

  Who George Washington appointed as the nation's first secretary of the treasury.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Wow, what a story. Uh, we, we, we have our next guest, but, uh, in other media news, uh, Barry Weiss is apparently looking to sell the free press for $250 million. I'm going to hold off on ringing the gong until it's confirmed. We're all rumors. The rumors actually come from the New York Post. Um, but this would be a fantastic outcome. For a new media company that's only something like four years old, Barry Weiss left the New York Times opinion page. There was a huge dust up. That's that happened in 2022. And she's reportedly met with Skydance Media CEO David Ellison at the High Powered Allen and Company Summer Camp for Billionaires. And David Ellison is the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison. And he's apparently

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  reportedly interested in buying the Free Press as Skydance continues to

• 1:45:42Jordi Hays?

  We, I think, originally covered this briefly when they were meeting at Allen and Company's event earlier this month, or I guess earlier in July. This screams like talent acquisition as much as it does.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, Barry Barry is on a tear and she yeah, is a she she does. She leads the podcast interviews and brings great guests on and she writes. But then they also they also have gotten a bunch of great people on the team. Tyler Callen has a column at the Free Press. Like, that was the that was the thing that got me to subscribe because I love Tyler. And I was like, I want to see what he has to say. And I don't want to like, it's paywall. So I have to pay. And so she's been very good at like hoovering up talent, building this thing. And and they publish a ton. When you go to the Free Press, you just see tons of articles, all sorts of stuff. Just today, I was looking at the Free Press homepage, they have a basically an op ed written by Palmer Lucky. Like, they got

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Palmer to write about his thoughts in the Free Press. And I thought there was just like, that's the example of like, great, great written written work. So congratulations.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  Barry would be able to help make CBS relevant again, even if she was continuing to run the Free Press.

• 1:46:52John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, without further ado, we have Alex Albert.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Alex, welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for joining on short notice. Great to meet you. Great to have you. How are you doing?

• 1:47:01Speaker 04

  Great to meet you guys. Very, very excited to be on here. And John, I'm hoping you hold on to that that mallet so we can get a gong ring in here.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  Give us some news. What you got?

• 1:47:09Jordi Hays?

  We went from

• 1:47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's oh, go ahead.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  No, you go for it.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  I was gonna say it's an exciting day. We dropped Clot Opus 4.1.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Hit that.

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  Three hours ago.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  You gotta give us a number. How many parameters? How much money do you spend on the thing?

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  I can give you a Sweetbunch score.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Okay, here we go. Give me a Sweetbunch score. How much? What is it?

• 1:47:29Speaker 04

  74.5.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you. It's been a very, very exciting week. We're shipping like crazy. A lot of stuff happening.

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:40Speaker 04

  Don't know how you guys are even keeping up over here.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, it's amazing. It's, uh, yeah. I mean, we've been talking about streaming for seven hours a day. We'll, we'll get there eventually. Fortunately, three hours is like just enough to barely cover, scratch the surface of what's going on in tech. Uh, talk to me about where this fits into the rest of the landscape. There's a ton of stuff going on in opening, uh, in, uh, in Anthropic's world, uh, from Claude Code, different consumer models, open, uh, there's so many different projects. How does this fit in?

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is our best model yet for just general capabilities and intelligence. Really, really is pushing the frontier on all sorts of agentic reasoning coding tasks. Um, back in May, we kind of hinted at the launch of Claude four that we want to get on a more continual release schedule with our upcoming models. And this is kind of our first step towards that vision of now being able to ship models faster and faster to our customers and end users.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, one of the narratives that's kind of stuck around with Claude for a long time is this idea of like the vibes just being really good. And yeah, it does great on the benchmarks, but it's just like fun to talk to. People like the way it talks. But, uh, at the same time, Anthropic's been fantastically successful in the business context. Is there an important overlap there? Like, are you hearing from business customers that the vibes being good is driving bottom line results?

• 1:49:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, more so how much do developers care about vibes versus just raw?

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  It seems like developers are the only ones that can tell that the vibes are good, but, uh, but I'm always interested in like, how does that actually translate to like my bottom line if I'm an enterprise SaaS company and I need to use a, an Anthropic API for something? Am I, am I happy with the vibes or is that just kind of like a nice to have on top?

• 1:49:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, it, the vibes are kind of. You can measure vibes in a lot of different areas, right? So if you're a developer, you're measuring vibes in the coding domain and how long of a task can these models complete? Can you just let it go off agentially and work on your files? If you're creating an application, you're enterprise that has end users and you're having those end users actually interact with the model. You want those personality vibes to be pretty stellar. Otherwise, you're just going to give a bad experience to your customer. I think Claude has like a really wide range of things there. And of course, we're known for kind of that natural feeling, personality. And we've done a lot of character work there. We've some really great researchers on the team that focus on that. But then on the other side of the spectrum for the developers, for those folks that are building agents,

• 1:50:05Speaker 04

  that's where we really get into that that other type of vibe, which is, you know, how long of a task horizon can these models operate on?

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Is there a good benchmark for for task horizon yet? We've heard baby AGI, 15 minute AGI, 20 minute AGI. We've seen a lot of people like string these things together. But like in terms of like most consumer interactions, I think where most people hit the interface of an LLM, they feel like like 20 minutes is the kind of the upper bound of what the average AI user is experiencing.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Can you tell, talk to me about that?

• 1:50:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I do think LLMs right now have somewhat of like a jagged intelligence frontier. Where in some tasks, of course, they spike more than others. For me personally, when I'm trying to assess that capability in a model, there's a couple of places I look. One is especially coding benchmarks. These are really, really important because often it's the model trying to complete a PR end to end. So it needs to take a lot of actions. It needs to call a lot of tools and modify a lot of files. So things like Sweet Bench are actually like good proxies in some degree to measuring that. There's also third-party institutions that are doing this research right now. So one is called Meter, their model evaluation threat research.

• 1:51:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 04

  And they have that really nice, that really nice line goes up graph of like plotting out the models and how long of a task they can do compared to a human developer.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:36Speaker 04

  And Claude has always been pushing the frontier on that. And I'm assuming once they get 4.1 up there, it'll be up and to the right as well.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen like the, in terms of the spiky intelligence, like ArcAGI is like the main thing that people point to is like a weird valley of capability because it seems like it should be obvious and easy to do. And yet it reveals something about the models. Are there any, are there any places in the coding world that are more specific where we're underperforming? Either just because we haven't focused on it. I'm thinking about like, like, I imagine that most models are better at Python than Fortran.

• 1:52:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  But, but is that, i- i- is that an outdated take? I- i- is Fortran now just kind of like solved because somebody just got all the training data together and RL done Fortran and now we're good?

• 1:52:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, I definitely think there's still probably, if you were to like, take Sweetbench, for example, and you translate it into every coding language. I'm sure Python and JavaScript, TypeScript would be ahead of the other languages. But we are seeing, especially with the Claude four models, that they're able to handle a lot more of those like older languages or the languages that don't really appear as much in, in the training data to a much better degree. And that's through a combination of, of things from RL to just general architecture improvements. So we're, we're kind of covering the bases with the models, but yeah, it definitely started in one way and now it's expanding out.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  What, what have reactions been to 4.1? I'm assuming a variety of people got access to it, you know, pre-release. What, what are the areas that people are kind of most excited about?

• 1:53:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, again, it's kind of those coding and agentic tasks have been really the star of the show here.

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  What I think is interesting about that is that coding is kind of the proxy for allowing everything else. So if you think about how a model actually interacts with things on a computer, everything can be done through coding operations. So when we say coding, it's almost like a little disingenuous to just like narrow it to that domain. But some of our early customers that were playing around with 4.1, Wind Surf being a great example in one of their benchmarks. They showed that from OPUS 4 to 4.1 showed roughly the same performance jump from Sonnet 3.7 to Sonnet 4. And this was like a real world junior developer task eval. So something that I definitely would pay attention to.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  How are things going on the rate limit side? I've heard that like capacity is generally constrained for everyone, everywhere, all the time because we don't have enough data. Obviously, people are working on that, but like, I guess like broad update on like how things are going, but then more specifically, like when you're talking to companies that are building on top of Anthropic APIs, are there specific strategies that you recommend to just embrace the realities of the modern AI era and capacity constraints?

• 1:54:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the rate limit situation is something we're just continuing to iterate on. And of course, we have like very, very smart people. They're much smarter than I think about this problem in terms of building out compute and also working on making our inference just overall more efficient.

• 1:54:51Speaker 04

  Generally, we want to provide the best experience we can to our customers. So whether this is on the Claude code or through the API, there's various things that we do, whether it's like through our applied AI team, helping our enterprise customers with like their specific deployments or on Claude code, making sure that our rate limit system is fair and actually allows for people to utilize it as much as they can without rewarding people that might be like abusing the system and kind of detrimenting the other users. So it's really about like kind of monitoring and keeping it consistent. So we ensure like great experiences for everyone that's trying to use Claude.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  What about pricing? Is there a step up in like costs associated with 4.1 versus 4.0? What does that look like?

• 1:55:34Speaker 04

  Pricing is the exact same. We really do intend for this model to just be like a drop in replacement for Opus 4. So if you're using Opus 4, you should just be able to cleanly kind of switch over the model string and you're good to go.

• 1:55:48Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 1:55:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  What are some of the weird use cases that you've seen for Claude code? I've talked to some people that are like,

• 1:55:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Because coding is kind of like an abstraction over like everything that a computer can do, they're coming to Claude code with tasks that don't, that feel more like just general, like personal assistant agent stuff, but then it just writes a bunch of code. Is that real? Is that, is that something that it's more just like when, you know, when people do those like beautiful artworks in Excel where they like this color every single cell as like pixels? And it's like, you're not, you're kind of abusing the tool here, but it's still impressive? Or is that actually like, you know, a glimpse into the future?

• 1:56:34Speaker 04

  I think that is a glimpse into the future. There, there was a tweet I posted a few days ago, kind of asking the community for, hey, what's all the best non-coding use cases you're using Claude code for? And it got hundreds of replies and really the answers kind of were super wide ranging, everything from like managing your own personal knowledge base, second brain on your computer, you know, maybe you have a ton of notes and text files to some folks are actually using it now for like video production. So we have, we have a guy on our team that uses Claude code and uses like an open source library to create animations and things for like all our product launches.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Oh, that's very cool.

• 1:57:12Speaker 04

  Which is just absolutely amazing. I didn't even know that was possible. But it is kind of hinting at this thing that it's like, well, if you can control code, you can really control anything that happens on a computer.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Speaker 04

  Now we're moving it to this like operating system abstraction almost. And I think that's really the direction you're going to start to see Claude code heading in.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Anything else, Jordi?

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  Any, any, I'm curious to get an update on, it seems like a lot of the companies that we talked to, you know, we were talking with Dylan Field the day of the IPO and he was talking about updates they're making with, with MCP. What's going on in that realm? Any updates while you're here on that front or interesting use cases?

• 1:57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, MCP has been absolutely just ripping lately. The community is awesome and it's like really got to this point now where it's almost its own like self sustaining thing. Where there's like meetups and gatherings that are being hosted completely outside of of like our facilitating and thankfully we get to participate in them and that's just like been super cool to see.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  I think MCP is going to be a large part of like making sure this kind of a Gentic future goes well. So if you can spin up easy integrations and connections to any service or any product or any internal application, all of a sudden you kind of

• 1:58:30Speaker 04

  unhobble Claude to some degree and you give it access to that knowledge that it needs to actually go out and do those correct operations. So very excited about the team there and yeah, hopefully a lot more good stuff coming on the way there soon as well.

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations to the whole team on the launch. It's a massive day.

• 1:58:47Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  Week and love to have you back on soon. I'm sure they'll, I'm sure four dot two will be right around the corner.

• 1:58:54Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Lot more coming soon. Yeah.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:58:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:58:59Speaker 04

  Bye.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Scott Kupor from formerly Andreessen Horowitz. He was in the OPM business, the other people's money business. Now he's the director of OPM for the US government, the Office of Personnel Management. Welcome to the stream, Scott. We are excited to talk to you. How are you doing?

• 1:59:20Scott Kupor?

  I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on the show.

• 1:59:25Scott Kupor?

  Thank you.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  We're in a very funny era where more folks from Silicon Valley have moved over to the government and every time they do, I have to have them explain to me like I'm in the VC world, what they do. I think I learned about the OPM, that like the entire office was a new term to me just a few years ago.

• 1:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Explain the

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Explain the government.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  Office of Personnel Management to me like.

• 1:59:47Scott Kupor?

  You mean to tell me that you guys don't know what OPM is? That is really disappointing. I'm shocked to hear that.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  I probably learned about it about a year ago.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Explain it like I'm a venture capitalist that's about to write a thread.

• 1:59:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Explaining it like I've always known about it and I'm an expert in it.

• 2:00:01Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, my, my wife asked me the same thing when I got appointed to the job, so I'm not surprised to hear that. Hey, so really quickly, what it is, is we are the talent. Management organization for the government. So in simple, in our corporate VC terms, we would be the HR department basically for the company.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:16Scott Kupor?

  So our job is like, make sure we have the best talent. Make sure we have actual things like performance management standards, which by the way, we don't have, which we're working on. Uh, make sure we have the ability to, you know, kind of understand the employee base through technology, which we don't have currently. So, but basically think of us in very simple terms as we would be the HR department inside, you know, any other, you know, traditional VC back company.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  And, and does this cut across all the other departments? Or are you like, where, where, where, uh, where the, where the boundaries of your?

• 2:00:45Scott Kupor?

  Yeah. So, um, it's, it's a hybrid is actually what it is. So basically, so like there's some stuff that we have exclusive province on. So like, I'll just give you a simple example, like the president puts out a hiring and executive order saying, we want merit hiring to be the standard in government, which you and I can, we can talk about that forever if you want, but basically, so he says, look, I direct OPM to figure out like, what are the standards that we need to do cross government to make merit hiring a reality. So we will go put out a bunch of, you know, regulations and research it and say, great. Okay. Now this is the law of the land for all the other agencies. This is what we expect you to do. And, you know, OPM will not formally approve and issue offer letters and stuff like that unless you guys do that. So that's what we do. And then, but there are HR departments, obviously in the different agencies.

• 2:01:27Scott Kupor?

  And, you know, so think of it as like, you know, in a company, you might have like centralized HR, but then you have like business partner HR that might sit in the sales organization or other stuff like that. And they may be kind of, you know, do things that are domain specific. But all the big things about like, how do we recruit people? How do we train them? How do we actually manage them? You know, performance wise, we will provide guidance for.

• 2:01:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, uh, sorry, Jordy.

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I was just going to say like getting into it, what, what are your priorities first 90 days, 180 of the year? Uh, I'm sure there's you, you've, uh, like, uh, even any, any, you know, I'm, I'm assuming you're trying to bring in best practices that you've learned.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  Fix the government, don't make mistakes.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Just ask a model to do it.

• 2:02:09Scott Kupor?

  We're going to make, we're going to make some mistakes, which is okay. That's part of the problem, by the way, which is like, we've been living in this environment where like you literally cannot make a mistake. And so nobody actually tries anything. So yeah, really simply, there's three big things we're trying to do. One is create a high performance culture in the talent. Uh, so in other words, like we, my simple goal is look, we want like the best and brightest people to take government jobs. But as you guys know, look, A players want to be around A players. They want to be in an environment where they're held accountable, where when people do well, they actually get rewarded. We have a very like tenure-based and conservative risk management-based system here in the government, which is like you get power and you get promotion by having more people in your organization and a bigger budget, and the longer you spend time in government. So we've got to just flip that on its head and say, look, we're going to

• 2:02:53Scott Kupor?

  award things like innovation, we're going to reward. I've been using the term measured risk-taking, because, look, we can't go just like literally throw stuff against the wall and see what works like we do in Silicon Valley. But anyways, that's thing number one. So like, goal is how do like all the smartest people in the country feel like coming to work for the government actually is great for them. They learn stuff, and they'll go get, they'll get paid for that in the private sector. Number two is, we've got to make operational efficiency like a core tenet of government. So again, I know this sounds crazy, coming from, you know, the world that I know you and I came from, but today, basically, there's no incentive for efficiency. So again, you need to like make it into people's performance plans and say, like, your job every day is, are you doing a great service on the behalf of the American people? And are you constantly like turning the crank to figure out, how

• 2:03:36Scott Kupor?

  do we use technology? How do we, you know, use AI to do stuff? How do we like reorder to do things? Again, because Spend less money? Spend less money, right. Today, again, right, I mean, it's the exact opposite incentive, which is more money means more people means more power, right? And so like, everything we have to do is, yes, spend less money to deliver a better service. And so we've got a ton of like technology initiatives that we can talk about there. And then the final thing we want to focus on is, we've got to make like, we've got to anticipate what living in an AI-first world looks like for government. And we got to not be flat-footed and realize that we have none of the talent we need, and we don't even know what the jobs are. So this is, I think, a huge opportunity, quite frankly, where I think we should work with the private sector and say, great, you guys understand what AI is going to do. Let's

• 2:04:19Scott Kupor?

  figure out ways where we can have information sharing, even like, quite frankly, swap employees back and forth, but find ways so that we don't wake up five years from now and realize there's all these new jobs that are being changed and/or augmented by AI, and the government is not like, you know, figuring out how to actually get that talent into the government.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, you mentioned spending less money.

• 2:04:39Scott Kupor?

  Yes.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  I want to know about the potential of spending more money. Is there, is there a world where we remove salary caps on government employees? Like you've seen this in Silicon Valley. There's not like, you know, obviously founders are very driven, but they have uncapped economic upside. Like the venture capitalists have uncapped economic upside in so many ways. The AI researchers that are getting poached, like it is just money ball at the end of the day for a lot of sectors of the economy. Is there a reason why the government is fundamentally structurally different? Or do you think that we just need to make a better pitch for civil service?

• 2:05:18Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both. So, okay, so look, we're never going to solve, we're never going to solve like the ultimate like uncapped upside pay gap between the public and private sector. And look, that's just, you know, politically, that'd never work. You know, we're not gonna, you know, like, you know, we're not gonna have a Zuckerberg equivalent of like paying engineers a billion dollars a year, right?

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Scott Kupor?

  But we can do two things. One is we can change the compensation structure so that, yes, like A players actually get rewarded. So I'll give you a very simple example here. Everybody gets ranked one through five at the end of the year in their performance evaluations in government. Five's the highest, one's the lowest. Seventy percent of the people get ranked a four or five. Okay, which means like they're awesome, they're doing outstanding work. 0.2% of the people get ranked a one or a two. Now, again, mind you, this is across a population of 2.4 million people where at a minimum, you might expect a normal distribution, but like there's just no way that 70% of the people are above average. Right? Unless you're in, you know, like Wobegon, basically. So we got to solve that problem. And then if you solve that, then the incentive structure can follow it, right?

• 2:06:14Scott Kupor?

  Because again, a typical government employee gets 0.5% of cash bonus at the end of the year. That's because again, there are too many people highly ranked and the delta between low and high is like, you know, 50% or something, right? So what I'd like to do is say, you ought to have many fewer people ranked a four or five. And let's give those people like most of the bonus pool, for example. So we can't solve all the problems, but like we can solve that. And then your, your other point's a really good one, which is we got to change the pitch. So again, I'll give you a story here. When I first came in, one of my, one of the employees here said, the pitch that we use for government is job stability. Basically like that's the pitch. And I was like, I'm sorry to say, but like, unfortunately, I think somebody's been lying to you because like, there's no job in the world where we can guarantee job stability for people, even in the government.

• 2:06:59Scott Kupor?

  To me, the pitch has got to be, you can see things at a scale and solve really hard, complex problems. And yes, like you can, you know, do a public service as well. But we've got to get people excited about like, you know, you know, putting people on the moon or all the things that, you know, guys like Elon do, you know, it's the whole like, founder story of like, what's the mission of the organization? The mission of the organization cannot be, we provide job stability. So we've got to like, tell that story. We got to go tell it on college campuses and we got to go like, show it. And look, people don't have to commit their life to being in government, but if you could come here for two years and work on really hard, really cool problems. And you could actually advance in the organization because you're not tenure limited, but you actually are skills. You know, you know, you're awesome at skills. We should be able to promote you faster.

• 2:07:41Scott Kupor?

  Like, there's no reason why we can't compete for really smart people in that environment. And then again, go take that skill set. And go work for, you know, Elon or go work for Zuckerberg and get paid a billion dollars a year after that. Like, you can do both things. So we got to sell the story.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was talking to a friend who had some experience in China and he said that the, the main difference that he noticed was that the really, really top performers over there just kind of got sucked into government work. And he was kind of framing it as like, it wasn't exactly optional for them. And I know that that's not on the table here. We love freedom and choice and, you know, independence.

• 2:08:16Scott Kupor?

  We kind of decided along the way that we actually, like, democracy is actually a good thing, right?

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. But I guess my question is like, is like, should, I know that like, when the, when the administration changes over, I mean, this happens every four years now, eight years most, there's, there's a push to bring in new folks. And there is some recruiting that goes on and, and there's like whisper networks of who's really talented and let's make the pitch to them. That maybe now's the time to go and, and serve your country. And a lot of people do swing at that pitch and they, and they take it and some of them do very well with that. But should it be more aggressive? Should have, should recruiting be, be 10 times bigger in terms of just?

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Every talented founder, engineer, venture capitalist, anyone who's high agency, high intelligence, high EQ is at least hearing the pitch for where they would fit in in the US government. Because I think a lot of people, I know a lot of people that got calls, I know a lot of people who are talented and didn't get calls, and I'm wondering if we should have reached them with something.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it felt like at the beginning of this year, and maybe the end of last year, was just Doj was just dominating all recruiting.

• 2:09:23Scott Kupor?

  It was Doj. Doj is a fantastic recruiting engine.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but I didn't, I didn't see that, I didn't hear like, oh, I have a fintech founder who, you know, they were great, but they got kind of clobbered, and now like the IRS is calling them. Like, I didn't hear that story that often, for example.

• 2:09:37Scott Kupor?

  Yeah. So, yeah, so let me try to just unpack that a little bit, because so first of all, you're absolutely right, we should 100% do that. So, there's, there's a problem we have today, which we, which we are working on fixing, which is today, believe it or not, you can actually, there are weird hiring procedures in the federal government, which makes it very hard, in some cases, literally to hire people based on their skill, skill assessment. So, I'll give you a great example. So, people have gotten really good at, we put a job description up on this thing called USA Jobs, which is basically the website, and people essentially tailor their resume to exactly the words that are in that job description, and the filtering process puts them at the top of the list, but it's all self-assessed stuff. We actually, we literally, like, you could hire an IT network administrator

• 2:10:20Scott Kupor?

  in the government today, and not have a technical person interview that person to see, do they know like, what like, you know, HTTPS means, basically. And, the good news is, we just, part of it is because like, people are worried about, okay, are those tests discriminatory? We actually just had a good legal ruling the other day that clears the path for this. But believe it or not, literally, like, we do not have skills-based assessment for many jobs in the government. So, the way to, so like, it's just really hard, it's really hard for those people to come in. We, but you're absolutely right, which is, look, the real solution to this problem is, we gotta do both. We gotta fix that piece, and then we have to literally go tell the story, like... I don't think this is the solution. We're not going to do TV commercials like, you know, the Army and Navy and, you know, we need a few good men, basically. But we need something

• 2:11:02Scott Kupor?

  like that. We got to go tell the story. And you're absolutely right, which is, I would bet there are, I don't know, I bet there's thousands of data scientist jobs open across the government today. You, as an employee, if you're interested in that, you should just be able to apply once and we should then send your resume to all thousand of those jobs. Like, we don't even do that today, basically. So like, you literally have to go find out where those thousand jobs are. So there's all this stuff that, again, it's not, they're not bad people. It's just that the system has not been set up for that goal. The system has been really set up to say, let's really be conservative. Let's really be kind of, you know, careful on these things. And we just, we have to change that paradigm.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like we're fishing with a really large net. You know, you put up a big ad, we need a few good men, and whoever gets caught in the net comes into the organization, and we need to get some harpoons out and go find the really, like, laser-focused people for the perfect job that will thrive.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  Military, you know, it's been interesting. I think things have changed, but there was a period where military recruiting, to my knowledge, was, was really, really tough. And that's still with a lot of, a lot of people that do end up joining, having been marketed to and, and, and kind of exposed to Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, since they were kids, right? But nobody's getting, nobody, most, most Americans wouldn't know, they think OPM, if anything, is other people's money, like you were saying. And they wouldn't know it. And so how do, how do you get somebody, like, even open to the idea? You know, a lot of kids today in high school, college, they know they want to work in tech. Nobody's going through those periods of life knowing they want to work in a specific organization or, or very little. On the tech.

• 2:12:35Scott Kupor?

  You're absolutely right. So look, yeah, and we got, look, we got to just, like, have a presence on college campuses and be there just like Goldman Sachs is and just like Facebook is. And we got to go tell our story. Like, you know, you guys know this, but I used to work for a head of sales at one of my companies, and his famous thing was, you know, show it, sell it, hide it, keep it, basically, right? And right now, we are hiding it, basically. And people find us because they're looking for stability, as opposed to us finding people who are looking for, like, an actual, real, interesting challenge.

• 2:12:59Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting time. You know, apparently, CS grads are struggling to find roles.

• 2:13:06Scott Kupor?

  Exactly.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can see the variety of reasons for that. You know, we just had someone on from Claude. Claude Code performs really well now. Maybe it's performing at the level of a junior engineer. But the opportunities in government where you don't need to be, you're not out there competing, with other foundation model labs.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  We saw Luke Ferrator, like, he is a programmer. From that massive Bloomberg article, it didn't seem like 90% of what he was doing was programming. It seemed like, yeah, he was able to scrape some data together and do some analysis to know how to make a decision. But a lot of it was just sending emails, having phone calls, having meetings.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  But Luke's also an example of somebody who's truly elite in his category. And I'm talking about like the next like 10,000 people.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  But I feel like if you're a new grad and you can program, that gives you a superpower that then you can also just be effective, to be rigorous and first principle thinker in a meeting where you're just trying to decide how much money should we spend on this thing?

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Scott Kupor?

  Did you see, by the way, did you see the quote from the unnamed government source in that article about why they didn't like, why they didn't want Luke? They're like, he's not qualified because he didn't go to college and he didn't have five years' experience, right? That is exactly the problem, right? All of our criteria for evaluating people are based upon credentialing and based upon tenure. And this is where merit-based hiring matters so much. Like, to me, if you're Luke, I don't care, if you're 18 years old and you can actually function at the level of somebody who like, you know, knows programming at a high level, let's pay you at that level, let's hire you at that level. And, and okay, like, if you need some help around the edges to like, you know, make sure you can sit in meetings, you know, with your shoes on, that's great. We can teach you that, basically.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Scott Kupor?

  But we can't, we can't exclude people from the process because they don't have like, you know, a sheet skin that says, you know, they went to Stanford for four years. I mean, that's crazy.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  How is your AI strategy forming when people hear AI in government as citizens? They get scared. That sounds scary. If they hear, if you're working in the government and you hear AI, you're probably thinking, I don't want to lose my, my job. But, but clearly it should be able to be, you know, beneficial.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  The big thing just feels like, get every government employee access to an LLM. Because before any of the job displacement, any of the cyberpunk Terminators, like let them search the knowledge quickly. Like, please. Anyway, what was your take?

• 2:15:21Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, you're exactly right. So today on my government computer, if I want to do something on an L M, I have to like go to my personal computer to do it, right?

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  It's not good.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  And how many government jobs are email jobs?

• 2:15:32Scott Kupor?

  Look, the privacy issues are real and we got to be conscious of that. But like there's, but there's, but so much of what the government does is already in the public domain. So let me give you a very simple example. So one of the things my team does, I mentioned, is we develop like rules and regulations for, you know, let's say how you should do merit hiring in the government. Okay. And the way the process works, which I won't bore you with, but basically like we put out a rule and then we have to invite public comment on it and literally people submit comments. So we're doing a rule right now where we got 40,000 public comments on this rule. Okay. Some, a group of people in my team literally read all 40,000 of those comments and they write a written response to them and do it, you know, the old fashioned way. Now, I'm not going to say like, let's just have, let's just get rid of all the people and have A I do that. But there's no

• 2:16:13Scott Kupor?

  question in my mind that we can get a 10 to 15% easy efficiency advantage if we actually had a very simple L L M that we could train on totally public data. I'm not talking about private data. All that regulation stuff is public. You know, help people manage that process. But like, we have, so we have to start with that. So like what I, what I'm doing here in, in O P M is I'm actually going to have somebody come in from the outside and like do the full landscape of like what's happening in customer support and what's happening in, you know, H R organizations and like what are all the use cases out there? And then what I'm doing is just telling my team, look, now your job is to go back and find like, what are the small wins we can make on little use cases? And again, I'm not asking you to like, you know, get rid of 100% of your people, but like, you

• 2:16:54Scott Kupor?

  need 10 more heads and you need to find some place to get 10% more productivity. We ought to be able to do that within our current budget without actually having to, you know, add headcount. So we just got to start with little baby stuff that doesn't scare people, get them educated. You're exactly right. Everybody should have, you know, an L L M on their desktop. And then we can tackle the hard problems, which is okay. Are we going to put confidential government data in them? And do we need them air gapped and all that crazy stuff? But like, we don't even need to do that right now. We just need to like educate people and then come up with use cases that are based on like literally public data. With human augmentation.

• 2:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Is the, does the federal workforce have a, like, an aging problem? You know, we'll talk with CEOs on this show or investors that say, you know, the majority of factory owner operators in the country are going to retire within the next five to 10 years, right? That becomes concerning because there's a lot of just like general know-how and process that could just kind of get lost or evaporated. Is that a challenge that you're facing in terms of, you know, people that have been in the government for 30-plus years and are getting to the point where they're ready to retire?

• 2:18:00Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, if you look at the demographics of the government, I don't know the exact number, but there's no question like the government is, is very skewed towards people who are kind of later in their career. And again, I think this is a problem that we've had, which is we haven't figured out a way to actually get people in at earlier stages in their career because we've got all these impediments that I talked about that make it hard for you if you're a recent Stanford grad or whatever, to be able to get a job here. So yes, we have to solve that problem. Look, I mean, sure, there's going to be knowledge that walks out the door. Look, I'm more worried about the long-term thing, which is, do we have a steady pipeline of really smart people who will come here? And then, then we can solve that aging problem by just, you know, over time, kind of changing the demographics. But yeah, like, I don't think, I'm not worried like there's a cliff here where, you know, 10 years from now, all the experienced people will walk out the door.

• 2:18:43Scott Kupor?

  But I do think we have to have like a demographic and a, and a set of hiring practices that allows us to actually kind of, you know, build a funnel from the very bottom of folks.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be cool. I remember maybe in 2012, like Teach for America was really popular. And obviously that was like non-governmental, but like aligned with this idea of like a tour of rough service and there was Code for America. And, you know, it's like, cut out the middleman and just go straight for America. Like work for the government.

• 2:19:10Scott Kupor?

  I love that. Yeah.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  It'd be great culturally. It was like, yeah, somebody, so, because now, like, I feel like if you did four years just in civil service and then you jump into Silicon Valley, it's kind of like a weird track, but like it shouldn't be. It should be completely normalized.

• 2:19:22Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, a long time ago, right there, and this is not the perfect analogy, but there used to be something called like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was exactly that, right? It was like, people came right out of school. They did some heavy labor for a while and then they went to the private sector. So, yeah, like, we ought to do this. So like, what I would love to do is I would love a program where we say, you know what, take all the smartest people. Have them come here for two years. By the way, if we can do this, let's forgive your, let's forgive some student debt as part of that, right? So like, let's actually have a real trade off, which is you do public service and we'll give you some financial compensation. And oh, by the way, I want to work with the private sector and say, you know what? We're going to get a private sector employer to guarantee you a job when you finish your two years here. And they might even give you full credit for those two years. You come in as a third year and that. And like, just work on that stuff, right? So, uh, you know, that's what we need to do.

• 2:20:07Scott Kupor?

  And, and look, I've been using this term that's terrible that my kids joke at, uh, which is make government cool again, which is magaca, if you pronounce it out loud.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Magaca.

• 2:20:16Scott Kupor?

  My, uh, my, uh, uh, marketing team who's sitting here next to me off camera.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't, doesn't run off the tongue.

• 2:20:22Scott Kupor?

  Doesn't really, yeah, it's not, it's not really not the greatest outcome, but like, that's what we have to do. Like, we have to make civil service like, super exciting. And the good news is like, we've got no shortage of like moonshots now, right? So like, AI, right? Like, how do we transform the government with AI? That's a great moonshot. Let's go do that. But we need like a, you know, Apollo mission like moonshot, which I think the president has given people with AI. And we got to go tell that story. And, you know, if we can do that, then I think like, we're in a totally different situation.

• 2:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Are you going to be visiting college campuses for career fairs at all? Are you going to be pounding the pavement?

• 2:20:55Scott Kupor?

  I would love to. Look, you all know this, having been in the valley. Look, if you're in the valley, 99% of your job is recruiting, basically. Like that is like probably the most important thing that any manager does. And yeah, like, I don't think any of us is beneath that. We got to go sell. So yeah, I'd love to go to campuses. I'd also, look, I, I want to, we've been talking about campuses. Also want to be clear though. One of the priorities the president has, which I totally agree with is, we shouldn't use credentialing as a shortcut for this stuff. So look, I don't care if you went to college or not, if you have the skills to do this job, like, we got to go find you too. Uh, look, college, college campuses are nice aggregation points and make it more efficient, but like, we need to go find anybody who has a, you know, technical degree or not a technical degree or a trade degree, or anybody who's just really smart and capable and go find those people. And we should hire them not because they, you know, have a, you know, a diploma, but because they actually can contribute to the workforce.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Or even like experience at a startup, like they've been there for a couple of years, they've vested, they're running the next thing, go do a tour in the government.

• 2:21:46Scott Kupor?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Last question, have you had any pleasant surprises since starting your job? Anything that you're like, oh, that's actually run pretty well?

• 2:21:55Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, you know, look, I'll be out. So to be totally honest, look, um, there are my pleasant surprise, which is I don't think is surprises. Look, there are very good people here who are who are really care about what they're doing. So, look, you know, everybody in the government here, there is a serious element of public service and they all take it very seriously and believe it and believe it. And it's incredibly like noteworthy. What I what I really think is look, I think the system has failed them, which is look, as as leaders and managers, we have created a system where, you know, we've told them do not ever make a mistake, do not ever risk innovating, because we don't, you know, look, you guys know the valley, right? In the valley, we always talk about, look, we're looking for uncapped upside on stuff.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you get fired for not taking the risk.

• 2:22:33Scott Kupor?

  That's exactly right. There is no value today in in maximizing for uncapped upside if that means you also take an extra 5% of downside risk. And again, like, I want to be totally clear, we can't be cavalier, you know, we're dealing with people's, you know, social security, or we're dealing with national security. So we can't just, you know, literally throw caution to the wind. But we can accept that there are some things where we may not get them 100% right, and then we'll fix them when we do. And we have to have a culture to do that. So that, to me, has been, again, the very positive upside surprise, which is, and which I hope will prove true, which is if we can change the incentive system, I think you have really good people who will do what the incentive system incents them to do, basically. But right now, we just, we have an incentive system that, in my mind at least, kind of encourages behavior that just is not, you know, efficiency maximizing, is not innovation maximizing,

• 2:23:18Scott Kupor?

  and, you know, is just outdated, I think, in a world where, you know, we know technology and the needs of the government are going to change very rapidly.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  We need to be innovation maxing. Let's do it. I love it. Thank you so much for joining.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for serving our country and rallying so many smart people to join you.

• 2:23:34John Coogan?

  And thanks for breaking it down for us. This is very helpful. Thank you so much.

• 2:23:37Scott Kupor?

  Don, you take care. Bye.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Bye. We need a Luke Ferrator for the CIA. We need to send Luke Ferrator to North Korea, infiltrate Pyongyang, get behind enemy lines, and turn it into a capitalist utopia. Make South Korea look like a complete blackout by comparison. You've seen that map of the North Korea is dark and South Korea is super bright. More lights in Pyongyang than all of South Korea combined. Luke Ferrer tour on the front lines. We'll get it done.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  This is breaking in real time. So John actually hit up Peter Salas over at Discord. HR apparently just threw a note on. Peter Salas just posted, guys, at TBPN WTF, John actually, I think I'm in trouble. HR just threw this on my calendar. And it's Peter and HR discuss TBPN issue.

• 2:24:26John Coogan?

  Wait, is this real?

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  No, I think he's joking, but very good stuff.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  I love it. That's amazing. Thank you for sharing that.

• 2:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Peter, come on the show. We're gonna do a, we're gonna figure out your cloud. Your cloud needs live. We're gonna have people live bidding.

• 2:24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should have three, we should be Shark Tank. He's the shark. We have three hyperscaler cloud SDRs. Come on and pitch. Okay, this is what we can bring to you. This is what we're asking. We're asking for, we got 100,000 H100s for you.

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  It's an auction for who can deliver the lowest price.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Anyway, we have our next guest in the temple of technology. We have Kyle from Contrary. How are you doing, Kyle? Good to see you.

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:25:06Speaker 06

  How's it going, guys?

• 2:25:07John Coogan?

  What's new in your world? Break it down for us.

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  Well, we're just, we're just launching our latest deep dive from Contrary Research. So for folks who don't know, Contrary Research is our private markets research database. We launched a couple of years ago. Contrary is a venture fund, but our focus is on talent and on research. So finding the best ideas, best people, bringing them together. And so Contrary Research has published research on 500 different companies. I think we've got most of your sponsors on the list. So we're getting, we're working our way down. And but we just published our latest deep dive on building an American TSMC. So TLDR, the piece is the idea that we're completely dependent on Taiwan for 90% plus of advanced semiconductors. And it's probably the dumbest bottleneck that we could possibly be in.

• 2:25:54Speaker 06

  And it feels like we're basically just hoping that it doesn't become a problem when it could become the most significant geopolitical flashpoint and effectively lead to World War III. And so it feels like there is something we should do about it. And, and so we kind of go through the options of, do we build it from scratch? Do we borrow it from TSMC? Do we try and buy it from, from some willing sellers?

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  It seems consensus that Intel is not the American TSMC. Is TSMC the American TSMC? Is Samsung the American TSMC? We've seen a lot of progress from both of those companies. Elon doing a big deal with Samsung. TSMC obviously seeing great results out in Arizona. What's your take on just porting or expanding the current set of fab companies that are doing quite well?

• 2:26:36Speaker 06

  Our biggest takeaway from doing the research is that a little bit that the ASMC is more of a mindset than a specific company. It's an ecosystem that we have to build a lot of different aspects of this. There's a ton of startups that are building a lot of advanced stuff in chip design and using AI in that. And TSMC is pouring 165 billion into the US more so. So there's a ton of things that we can take advantage of. The biggest limitation is that when you try and build a lot of this stuff from scratch, you just don't get there quickly enough for it to make a difference, right? There's a bunch of stuff like the folks at Anduril. And they have this idea sort of internally of China 2027, where it's this idea of, you know, if China's going to invade Taiwan,

• 2:27:19Speaker 06

  it's probably going to happen over the next, you know, call it four or five years. Xi has talked about 2027 specifically. So this is an urgency thing. This is not a long-term bet. And so the question is, how do we get to scale where if China was to take Taiwan tomorrow, is there something that we could do to have some capacity here? The unfortunate reality is that the startup ecosystem, as great as it is and as much as it can benefit us in the long run, it's not going to get there quick enough. As much benefit as we get from TSMC partnering, a lot of the results they're having in Arizona. And there's a huge cultural blowback in Taiwan because they have this silicon shield where they think of our dependence on them as their protection from China. And so, yes, TSMC wants to pour a bunch of resources here. But whether we get those sort of leading-edge nodes

• 2:28:02Speaker 06

  that allow us to compete for things like AGI and to really compete with China, that is a much longer battle. And so despite the fact that Intel is struggling, it's basically sending up emergency flares. You guys talked about it on the show. Basically, in their last quarterly earnings, they talked about, you know, we're going to do our best. And if we don't get material customers, it may not be economical for us to continue to compete in leading-edge nodes, which is going to be a huge hit for the US to stay competitive. And so our thesis in the piece is that we basically have to take Intel as our only hope of getting to scale quickly enough. Intel's not going to do it on their own. There's a bunch of stuff that we have to do to make that possible.

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what's the biggest request from TSMC or Taiwan? Like, should we be pulling the, hey, we'll invest alongside you, we'll subsidize, we'll give you tax cuts to build the second, the third, the fourth fab in America? Or should we be more focused on, let's commit more defense resources, more government spending to Taiwan to create, you know, an American shield that's independent of the silicon shield? Or maybe both?

• 2:29:08Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, there's definitely, when you talk to all of the major defense companies, Palmer Lecky has a great line where he talks about turning Taiwan into a prickly porcupine that people don't want to step on. That is absolutely priority number one, to make them, to give them all the capabilities that they need and the folks at Andor are on the ground in Taiwan all the time. So that's a huge component of sharpening the partnership. I also think that you need to emphasize that American companies need to be, the government needs to incentivize American companies to be purchasing American-made semiconductors as much as possible. So as you reshore more of this stuff to, whether it's TSMC efforts, whether we literally, you know, nationalize Intel and take it and take the Foundry business private, right?

• 2:29:50Speaker 06

  Like Dylan Patel, who you guys have had on the show and is an absolute rock star, he has made it abundantly clear that the survival of Intel-Foundry is critical to America's economic and technological dominance. And so we have to take that seriously as well. And there's a bunch of incentives that we can build in terms of making, you know, getting people access to semiconductors that are made by Intel in the US, by TSMC in the US. We have to incentivize people to be using our own ecosystem so that we get the reps we need to get as far away from dependence on Taiwan as possible.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that Le Buthan is the right leader for this transition for Intel? It seems like they need to, with... Broader support reinvent themselves and yet hearing Lit Bhutan on earnings calls and just talking through it just feels like cut after cut.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  He's good at firing people, but is he really good at firing?

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  I haven't been, I haven't been inspired by, uh, he's definitely not Karp on the mic. Uh, he's not, not exactly inspiring people. Um, so I'm curious.

• 2:30:53John Coogan?

  Karp also has like 1,000 employees and I'm pretty sure Lit Bhutan has like 100,000 employees or something.

• 2:30:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, they, so Intel has more employees than TSMC and Nvidia combined.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:04Speaker 06

  And so he's got, he's got plenty of people that he can fire. Uh, the, the biggest thing that is compelling about Intel is that they are already in this process of cultural change. Right? You look at that and it's back to 2005 was the first time they had a CEO who wasn't an engineer by trade. And basically they went through 15 years of financialization, like it was literally the Jack Welch playbook of just dumping money into stock buybacks and, and robbing R and D for, for decades. And he, you know, those CEOs were the ones that put them on the, on the path, sort of stumbling, uh, losing their lead. So like even, even with Gelsinger, like that transition is already in its way, like putting engineer, they talk about bringing the nerds back. And that transition is already in his way, which is important.

• 2:31:45Speaker 06

  I think the cultural leadership that you should be paying more attention to is the leadership level at Intel, Foundry specifically. When you think about Intel's two core businesses, you have Intel products, Intel Foundry. Intel Foundry has had four different leaders over the last three years, like some of them lasting no more than two months, right? And what was compelling, this idea that like you, you can't, you can have this sort of within a division leader who can be really inspirational. I think the folks at Waymo, they have a co-CEO setup, but it's their former head of policy and then their former CTO. You have the technology of the, the policy, like that's a great duo for sort of Waymo setup. Something at Intel Foundry that could be similar could be really compelling.

• 2:32:26Speaker 06

  The thing that's the biggest concern for me is that the first person they had, once they started breaking out Intel Foundry into a separate P and L, the first CEO that they, the first leader of the, of Intel Foundry that they had, they called him the president of Intel Foundry. He, he reported directly to Gelsinger. Four years later, it's now, this person is the general manager of Intel Foundry. They're also the chief global supply chain officer and the chief technology officer of Intel's core business. Meanwhile, like Intel products has its own dedicated CEO with the title of CEO. I think the biggest problem is not necessarily even Le Ploton, but it's more about are we actually acknowledging that that Intel Foundry needs to be a growth engine that you can invest in to be able to build back dominance? And that's absolutely not how they treat it.

• 2:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Was, I feel like earlier this year, there was a rumor that Elon was kicking the tires on Intel. Is, was how, how real was that? Did he kick the tire and?

• 2:33:19Speaker 06

  It was, it was the PJ tracking. That was how they all knew.

• 2:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it, but it, but the PJ, but the PJ tracking felt like a bit silly because everybody was in Mar-a-Lago.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone was there.

• 2:33:28Speaker 06

  That's right. You can, you could spin probably a lot of compelling narratives based on all of the people who were there at the same time, right?

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:34Speaker 06

  And in terms of like, what is actually sort of official? The two things that you know for sure are there was talks that, that TSMC was going to acquire Intel's Foundry business. Their board flatly denied that, that that wasn't true at all. Then there was talks that they might invest heavily and run a joint venture where they take over operations of Intel's Foundry business, even if they're not buying it outright. And what's funny is that they did not deny that outright. They refused to comment. And so the general census of folks is that that was a conversation that was active.

• 2:34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How much of the, uh, the race for American semiconductors is driven by the question of like founder mode? Just that abstract question of, uh, you know, do we need Elon in the seat leading? He said he was going to be walking the floor at Samsung. Uh, uh, obviously like the founder mode pattern has seemed to work in so many stuck, kind of stagnating worlds like rocketry, electric cars, or Elon's gotten in and kind of jarred things loose.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  But, uh, but is that, is that something that we, that we should be looking out for or optimizing for?

• 2:34:43Speaker 06

  100%. I mean, when you contrast Lipu versus Jensen, it's like night and day difference, right? You do not have visionary leaders in chip manufacturing in the US because we don't do it anymore. Like, it's not a fundamental part of who we do, of what we do. There's not a core DNA there. And so, do you need somebody who is that visionary leader? Absolutely. And does Intel have any of that DNA? No. And so, when you think about what needs to change, I think our thesis and takeaway after doing six months of research and drilling into all of this stuff, is that you cannot ignore the entire ecosystem. And that leader, that visionary leader role is absolutely critical. And that is an unanswered question. Like, we don't have that. Like, we

• 2:35:23Speaker 06

  don't have an, you know, somebody retweeted our post today and said, "We just need an Elon Musk, like, you know, Herculean act of God to be able to make this possible." And like,

• 2:35:34Jordi Hays?

  Don't we all?

• 2:35:35Speaker 06

  The takeaway is accurate. The how to do that is much more difficult.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can't be manufactured. But, I mean, green shoots all over the place. Lots of cause for optimism. But...

• 2:35:46Jordi Hays?

  So hopefully, the piece starts a conversation, can be a catalyst for change. What are you hoping to see out of, like, the immediately next quarter for Intel to get on the right track?

• 2:35:57Speaker 06

  The biggest opportunity is for Intel to stop treating Intel Foundry like it is an ugly stepchild. Like, it is this, like, embarrassing accident that they happen to have, and they're trying to distract people over this other thing, or dress it up like it's this fancy thing. And the biggest problem is, and this goes back to, this is a great conversation I've heard a couple of folks have. They talk about, I think it was Buco Capital talking about, like, the greatest thing that Elon Musk has built, independent, even thinking about Tesla, SpaceX, everything, it is the investor base at Tesla is gotta be the most incredible investor base any public company has ever had to let him do what he's doing and to have the vision and everything. Intel is just smattered with what Palmer would call "Wall Street weenies." Everybody's just

• 2:36:40Speaker 06

  thinking about it is, "How can we optimize this thing as effectively as possible?" And it's like, that is not how you build the future, nor is it how you build American dominance. And so, really, you need that investor base turnover. And it feels like that comes from narrative. Telling the story of Intel Foundry, we can get a visionary leader, we can have this opportunity. They're already at scale. They have a lot of the technology. They've they have sort of caught back up. And in many ways, they're still failing operationally, pretty miserably. And so the opportunity is like, tell that story and get an investor base that is stoked to be investing in the ASMC.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for joining. It's a pleasure catching up. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:37:18Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:37:19John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on, Kyle. Great work. And speaking of Anduril, our next guest works for Anduril. There we go. And she's the general manager of Anduril RMS. And we're excited to talk to her about the new rocket motor facility, but we'll let her break it down for us. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing? We have one minute while we get.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Just gonna keep clapping, John. Just keep clapping, just keep clapping.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Never stop. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  There she is. What's happening?

• 2:37:47Speaker 07

  Oh, it's a really good day. Just just commenced or finished a ribbon cutting

• 2:37:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:53Speaker 07

  with our new facility in Coastal Mississippi with Chairman Wicker about 10 minutes ago. So good day so far.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Tell us more about this facility. What are you making? How big is the facility? How big were the scissors you used to cut the ribbon?

• 2:38:09Speaker 07

  The scissors were not as big as I was expecting. I mean, they were big, but they weren't like the economically big. No, we just finished the a full rate production facility for kind of what the 2020s can do for automated robotic full rate production of solid rocket motors. We have a 450 acre facility in Coastal Mississippi, about nine buildings. And when we moved in here, it was a multi-ball facility in 2020. And we saw the good bones it had and the ability of what it could do. So we took one of the buildings, the far south end of the campus, nearly quadrupled the footprint. Got world-class engineers, specifically from the automotive industry, to really look at

• 2:38:53Speaker 07

  what solid rocket motor production could look like in the 2020s with robotics, automation, and really putting, you know, robotics everywhere where there's a safety critical or a quality critical component.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Speaking of robotics, what's behind you?

• 2:39:10Speaker 07

  That is one of two robots that are involved in the casting assembly. So we go through a mixing of solid rocket propellant. And then you have to cast it where you you're essentially filling a mold like you were. Solid Rocket Motors is a lot like making a cake. You you mix together dry ingredients, wet ingredients, and then you pour them in a mold and you cure it in an oven. And so this is the robots that's used for the casting process.

• 2:39:36John Coogan?

  Can you give us a view into the shape of the company? I know Adranos was the rocket motor company that was acquired, but it sounds like you've hired a lot of people. How big is the organization now?

• 2:39:48Speaker 07

  So you are right. We started as Adranos. I was one of the two co-founders of Adranos back in 2015 with my co-founder, Chris Stoker. And we grew that into about a 40 person company. The time of acquisition by Androl, who was previous to that, had been one of our customers. So a little bit of a vertical acquisition, vertical integration play. We have since grown that organization to just about 200 people today. For Androl Rocket Motor Systems, I sit as the Vice President and General Manager of that business line.

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:40:24Jordi Hays?

  What did you see back in 2015 when you started the original company? That that kind of caused you to take on the mission? It felt like broadly Silicon Valley started kind of being aware of rocket motor like supply chain challenges. I want to say like in 2022, but you clearly saw it way, way ahead.

• 2:40:46Speaker 07

  Yes, this is all very much before all of the, I guess, need that has arisen for solid rocket motor production enhancements. Really, back in 2015, I had developed a brand new formulation called Alatech that can bring more performance to the industry. I saw a need to commercialize it and naively thought that I would be able to to progress it to a spot where the two kind of incumbent providers of solid rocket motors would fight over themselves to get access to the IP. But what I quickly realized is the.

• 2:41:23Speaker 07

  The desirement for them to innovate and get these new propellants was not there. And the only way I would ever be able to see full adoption and utilization of that product was if I was my own customer, if I was the solid rocket motor provider. And a big piece of my PhD at Purdue was looking at innovative ways to process energetic materials, new ways of mixing, new ways of doing things. So I was able to leverage those learns, those lessons, along with taking what is state of the art for kind of automation and different manufacturing processes, put them all together to create what my vision was for what solid rocket motor production could look like in the 2020s.

• 2:42:04John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:42:04Speaker 07

  And we really were kind of ahead of, you know, all of the other suppliers that have joined into that market.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for calling in on such a busy day. Congratulations on the massive launch and good luck with the next phase. I'm sure you're going to be making a lot of products very soon.

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and hopefully copy, I don't know, a last question I had, is this, is the idea for this new facility to be a model that you would copy and paste to scale production? Or is this going to be able to kind of take, take you guys all the way?

• 2:42:37Speaker 07

  No, that's exactly the, the purpose of what we are wanting this facility to do. It's, it's really looking at a manufacturing line that is agnostic to what goes through it, so we can do anything from a small two inch diameter motor to something that's really big, up to 32 inches in diameter. And we are agnostic in the manufacturing process, but really focusing on kind of the one piece flow out of manufacturing practices. We can take this, this facility and copy paste it elsewhere. On our 450 acres, I could fit another two full rate production facilities. Each one, if you look at a mid-scale tactical motor, like say nine inches diameter, we can do about 6,000 of those a year out of one facility.

• 2:43:19Speaker 07

  So if I place another two of those here, you know, that's just a linear increase in production without having to have a brand new giant explosives campus. And then alternatively, I can take this small footprint agile manufacturing process and place it strategically for integration purposes with our different customers, both domestically and abroad. And we are on the record looking at, you know, multiple places for that, including Australia through the, the new guided weapons enhanced ordinance program.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the update.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

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

• 2:43:54Sean Henry?

  All right, thank you.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Sean Henry from STORED. We ran into him in New York City. Got a chance to sit down and have-

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Staying at the same hotel.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, staying at the same hotel. We just had, well, we had breakfast. He just sat there and listened to us.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  He was walking by. He was busy. We said, "Hey, sit down."

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Sit down.

• 2:44:11Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about supply chain and logistics.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  The de minimis, uh, de minimis exemption. We will welcome him to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:44:23Sean Henry?

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you last week.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  Where'd you land? Where are you now?

• 2:44:31Sean Henry?

  Back home in Atlanta. No longer having fun in New York, having some breakfast with you guys.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, very nice. And business is good overall?

• 2:44:38Sean Henry?

  Crushing breakfast, I should add, I guess.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  It was great. It was a great breakfast company.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  We were crushing breakfast. It didn't feel like you were crashing because you were probably, it was a busy day for us.

• 2:44:49John Coogan?

  It was a busy day for everyone.

• 2:44:50Jordi Hays?

  You were probably even busier and we requested that you hang with us. It was fun.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:55Jordi Hays?

  And shared some insights on all the different things happening in your world.

• 2:44:59John Coogan?

  So yeah, give me the update on tariffs, the de minimis exemption, where things, how we kind of got here and then where we are now and then we'll get into where we're going next.

• 2:45:10Sean Henry?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess background, there's two types of core tariffs. One is the general commercial, something's coming into a US port and you're charging a tariff based on the commercial value of the goods at that time. And that's largely what was rolled out at Liberation Day a few months back was all of these tariffs, particularly around large imports. But there's a separate category that had a big action last week, which is de minimis exemption, which is really started in the early 1900s, mostly for international travelers. Think, "Hey, I want to send a package back to my family." Well, there's these rules created that as long as that package is under $800 and in these categories, you don't pay any tariffs.

• 2:45:49Sean Henry?

  Well, what's happened the last few decades is if I want to store my inventory locally in the US, meaning bring it through a port, hold it in the US, now ship it locally. If I'm, say, let's paying $2 for warehousing, $7 for delivery.

• 2:46:05Sean Henry?

  And five dollars for the tariff to get it in, I'm paying fourteen dollars to ship that locally. But if I never bring it into the US, if I just keep it in China, keep it in Europe, put it in Mexico, Canada, and instead I'm maybe paying one dollar for local warehousing and labor, a more expensive package like nine, ten dollars internationally, but I never pay the tariff, I'm not comparing fourteen dollars to ship my unit through the US versus maybe ten dollars to ship it from international. That's a big difference on your average product. And so Trump and the administration had formally said that, well, they've been waging war on this since even before election day, but they formally said it was going to go away in 2027. So since the start of the year, brands thought they had maybe two years to get ready for this.

• 2:46:49Sean Henry?

  And all of a sudden, last week, you saw announced on Wednesday that it's going away on August 29th. And so now brands are rapidly trying to move inventory into the US.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and is it apocryphal to say that this all like Timu and Shein like kind of started this trend? Or did they just merely capitalize on it? Were there other, other companies that kind of found this? It's not necessarily a loophole. It's more just like an opportunity that if you exploit it to the max, you can scale a multi-billion dollar business.

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were using it. Nobody exploited it to the same degree.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wouldn't call Shein and Timu just like, you know, the tourist example. It's like they're, they're shipping billions of dollars through this platform. But are they the, are they the, the, the, the real progenitors of the idea?

• 2:47:39Sean Henry?

  They've definitely exploited it at a greater scale than anyone else.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:47:42Sean Henry?

  But what's crazy is that if you look at the top 100, let's say Shopify businesses, over 50 of those roughly was the estimate are shipping out of Mexico into the US. So this is very prevalent across brands of all sizes, particularly very large in the apparel category. And just some quick numbers, last year alone, there was an estimated 64 billion dollars of commerce that entered the US through the de minimis exemption, which is roughly 10 billion of missed tariffs and roughly four to five billion of missed US logistics infrastructure revenue. And so broadly speaking, logistics, US oriented companies like ourselves are very excited by this

• 2:48:21Sean Henry?

  because it's very hard to compete with Chinese and Mexican and other labor, real estate, and no tariff versus local fast shipping.

• 2:48:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, what I mean, this sounds like a huge tailwind for your business, but what are your customers actually coming to you with question wise? It sounds like there's a very quick shift on the horizon around the de minimis exemption. So they're coming to you and saying, hey, I need to move all my inventory from Mexico or China or Taiwan or Vietnam into Atlanta or somewhere else as soon as possible. Is that basically what's happening?

• 2:48:57Sean Henry?

  Exactly. Because what I think it's important to note that when you look at tariffs, a lot of people apply it linearly. Okay, a 10, 20, 30% tariff product cost is going to go up 10, 20, 30%. That's on the commercial value of the individual unit. And so much of the cost is both margin for the brand, advertising, local US logistics. And so these tariffs don't translate one to one for how it's going to impact the consumer. But at the same time, we're not necessarily talking to the brands as much about changing manufacturing origin to get away from those tariffs because the impact can often be absorbed for these mid-market brands who have real profits, real growth. What we're talking about is back to that math I gave

• 2:49:38Sean Henry?

  of if you were spending $10 to ship it internationally, avoiding a tariff, but you're doing a one to two week shipment. So a slow delivery, cheaper. And it was, you could do two, three day delivery in the US, but maybe $14 all in with the tariffs. Well, all of a sudden, if you're now spending, or I said 11 at first with the tariffs or in the US, all of a sudden now you're going to jump all the way to 14. It doesn't make sense to pay more and deliver in two to three weeks cheaper. But now, all of a sudden, there's this massive influx of volume where all these brands are saying, how fast can you get me live in the US? I'm in Mexico, I'm in Canada, I'm in Europe. And the problem is with outdated technology, most logistics businesses are going

• 2:50:19Sean Henry?

  to tell them four to six months. And or with the influx of volume, a lot of capacity is becoming challenged again, like we saw all the way back in 2020 and 2021 with such shortages of warehouse capacity. It's not that there's not leases on the market. It's that ready to go warehousing capacity with all the infrastructure, technology and labor, that capacity is rapidly And gobbled up. And so we actually had a case study on our website from exactly what's going on where True Classic T is a great example. Massive, an eight hundred million dollar T-shirt retailer wearing one right now. Earlier this year, they were stuck in Mexico and the Mexican president first signed away their exemption, which was,

• 2:50:58Sean Henry?

  if you first bring it into Mexico and it's here for less than a hundred eighty days, because we know you're going to ship it into the US, you also never pay our tariffs, but please pay our labor, our real estate, etc. Well, they first signed that away. There's since been a pause put on it, but we already migrated customers. Take someone like True Classic. They were often told, we can get you live in the US in six months. That's insane cost that they're going to face for those six months relatively. We had them live in eighteen days from meeting us to go live, and that's all because we're really the cloud in comparison.

• 2:51:30John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Last question from me.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  How solid are we? I mean, when we went into, when we went into Liberation Day, a lot of it was just uncertainty from the business community. How confident, whether or not it's good or bad for your business, how confident are we that we will be at least on the same course? For whether it's good or bad for the next few years, for the next twelve months, like, how much confidence do people have that these set, this set of rules that are in place right now will stick?

• 2:52:02Sean Henry?

  Personally, I think the confidence is going up. I think this is one of the last exemptions people were curious about. And while there are still a few negotiations going on with specific countries, the kind of broad general tariff, the reciprocal tariff, and even key countries have already been set. And frankly, I tend to believe the administration is liking the results. So far, we've taken in over a hundred fifty billion of incremental revenue since Liberation Day, just via tariffs alone. There was a GDP positive, or sorry, a kind of balanced budget, a positive month, so it's all these tariffs and more. And so I don't think we're going to change course and go backwards. And I think some of the logic is while it may drive a slight increase in cost on the the front end,

• 2:52:43Sean Henry?

  you have to wonder what it's going to do on the back end when there is more production in the US, more middle and lower class jobs that have been competing with Mexico, China, these other countries, labor on logistics. And ultimately, if they're able to use tariffs to impact other taxation on citizens, leaves me thinking the administration is going to stay a course on this.

• 2:53:04John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Awesome. Well, congratulations on the growth and it seems like a lot of these decisions are going your way. So happy to have you on the on Team America, building infrastructure and everything that we need to bring products to market in the United States. So thank you so much for joining.

• 2:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Sean.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:53:23John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:53:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Andy from 2Cents. We've highlighted his posts many, many times on the show. Excited to meet him and chat about the the business and his, his day job outside of posting, because he's built a very, very fun social network.

• 2:53:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to talk to Andy.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  Where your username is your net worth. Andy, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:53:47Speaker 09

  Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Are you in a secure location? You've probably upset a lot of people with what you've built, but.

• 2:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Why? It's opt in.

• 2:53:54John Coogan?

  I guess it's opt in, but it just feels like something people would push back on, right? You've gotten pushed back for that, right?

• 2:54:00Speaker 09

  To a degree. People have been a lot more positive about it than I thought they would be, actually.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:05Speaker 09

  I think what happened is I tapped into a latent anxiety that everyone actually had, and it seems sort of like people are like, thank God someone's doing this so that I don't have to worry about it anymore.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  So is it, is it anonymous? It's just your net worth?

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Quickly, quickly explain, explain the product for people that haven't seen it. I think a lot of people have probably seen it without realizing it. They've maybe seen screenshots of like polls or comments or things like that, which I think are fascinating. But, but yeah, explain it for the audience.

• 2:54:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we're building an anonymous social network where your username is your net worth. The main idea is to provide a verified place to have financial conversations that are difficult to have in person or with other people around you because of the inherent private nature of finance. And so we're collecting net worth information from bank accounts, brokerages, crypto wallets, and then later we're also going to do real estate and all kinds of other financial assets. And we're trying to calculate this one big number that we can assign to everyone and allow you to speak from your position, basically.

• 2:55:08Jordi Hays?

  What are some of the key learnings, insights? I mean, I think the polling function where people can, users can ask a question and then see, like, you know, let's say it's a yes or no answer. You can see how much net worth is like backing up the results. And so I feel like it exposes like, okay, what does, like, what side is wealth on, on this specific issue? But I'm sure you've had a bunch of other interesting learnings.

• 2:55:36Speaker 09

  I think probably the most interesting thing is when I set out to build this, I thought it would be inherently a place for financial discussion where people would talk about tax strategies and ARBs and alpha and stuff like that. And it's really become more of a general place to hang out. And what I figured out is actually every conversation is a financial conversation. Your net worth and the experiences that have led you to that number sort of dictate the way that you are going to look at other things as well. And even if you're talking about something that's kind of boring or weird, that number is still relevant in that conversation, even if you don't bring it up every time you talk to someone.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:56:13John Coogan?

  I feel like there's a lot of anonymous social networks that have gotten like problems with like bullying and stuff and just like toxic communities because of the anonymity. Have you run into any problems? Are you fighting it in any particular ways? Or do you think it like?

• 2:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do people ever come on there and try to eat the rich?

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  It's just net worth negative $2,000.

• 2:56:33Speaker 09

  We are actually in an incredible position as a social network because our moderation strategy is to just ban your bank account. And so if you break the rules on the platform, we can just block out the accounts that you've connected with.

• 2:56:47Jordi Hays?

  That's so interesting because normally on like Reddit, you could have somebody that's angry and then they could just create, they could be getting banned and just recreate accounts.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  How would you create new account with a huge bank? You have to set up a new bank account, transfer all your money over there. Like that takes a long time.

• 2:57:01Speaker 09

  And if you do that enough times, eventually you will make other people angry who will ask you why you're making so many bank accounts.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:08Speaker 09

  And we don't even have to worry about it.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  That's very funny.

• 2:57:11Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 2:57:11John Coogan?

  How's growth been? What's the news? How's, are you monetizing yet? I can imagine a bunch of different ways to monetize.

• 2:57:17Jordi Hays?

  I can see, you know, you have interesting data that other social media companies need to kind of piece together through behavior and things like that. Like, I imagine the big social networks try to build a profile to understand, like, what is this person's purchasing power? You guys get it. You're the users, you know, providing it. But how are you thinking about monetization?

• 2:57:41Speaker 09

  I think there's a couple of big strategies that we can try to go after. Referrals is something that I've looked at for a while. If you look at a public company like NerdWallet, a lot of their revenue is coming from referrals to loans and mortgages and credit cards. And from our position, if we have a bird's eye view into your finances, we're actually pretty well-equipped to show you products that would benefit you financially. So we're not just selling you something, but we're also trying to sell you something that makes sense with the type of portfolio that you currently hold.

• 2:58:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, hey, we noticed you're not using leverage. Did you know?

• 2:58:15Speaker 09

  Right.

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  You know that you could lever up massively?

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  We'd love to refer you to Harry Winston, Rare Jewels of the World. Discover the Sunflower Collection.

• 2:58:23Jordi Hays?

  John, what are you reading?

• 2:58:24John Coogan?

  I'm reading How to Spend It. It's the, it's the wealthy section of the Financial Times that comes on the weekend. Refer you to Vacheron Constantin, The Quest. Vacheron Constantin celebrates seeking excellence for 270 years. 270 years of doing better if possible.

• 2:58:41Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  These are going to be great referrals. You gotta call, you gotta contact the ad salesperson at HTSI. They got the graph diamonds ad in there. This is going to sell like hotcakes when you go, when you start monetizing.

• 2:58:55Speaker 09

  That's the broad plan. That is the broad plan.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 2:58:58Speaker 09

  Before this, I was doing basically a bunch of different side project apps. 2 Cent started as a side project.

• 2:59:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:04Speaker 09

  And I was just trying to figure out something that could ship out the door three or four times a month or a year and see if anything would get traction. And so the early growth on 2 Cent has been really amazing. It's probably the most popular thing I've ever built. And almost entirely organic. So it has come from Twitter on the timeline, from other posters wanting to sign up and be on it. I've actually gotten a lot of comparisons to this earlier app Poster.

• 2:59:29John Coogan?

  Hmm. Oh, yeah.

• 2:59:30Speaker 09

  Which was popular a couple of years ago.

• 2:59:32Jordi Hays?

  I invested in Poster.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It was a wild, it was a wild place.

• 2:59:37John Coogan?

  Last contrarian.

• 2:59:38Jordi Hays?

  But it's so, you know, people are, it's interesting. A lot of people will use 2 Cent that have never had an alt or an anonymous like account. And I think it becomes extremely freeing for them to feel like they can have conversations online without being tied back to their LinkedIn, you know,

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  It's anonymous authority.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Being tied back to their family. And I do think, yeah, I just think you've tapped into something super interesting because money is so, is just at the core of everyone's life, whether they want it to be or not. And giving people a place where they can talk about it freely. Of course, there's still going to be judgment. Like, of course, there's going to be people on the app that are going to think a certain way about someone's financial situation or, or, you know, what they're saying or how they're spending their money. But it does. I feel like the next, I feel like it'd be funny to build out, I'm curious, would you ever build out like a feed of like the users kind of like, if they obviously opted into it, but just like purchasing, I feel like, I feel like a lot of people would, would be

• 3:00:42Jordi Hays?

  very fascinated in that. In a different way than like Venmo used to do it, which I was like, why is Venmo a social network? You know, it's like, I don't want, like, I don't want people to know what, what I, you know, whatever, but.

• 3:00:57Speaker 09

  Yeah, this is on the roadmap. We would love to have a feature where you can opt in your transactions, your recent transactions, and then almost quote tweet them. And say like, I bought this $18 shawarma at this bodega. It sucked. Here's a picture of it. And it kind of proves that you did that, right? Like, you're not just saying it. And same thing for brokerage movements. If you sell a bunch of Apple stock or whatever, you can write your due diligence and then also prove that you actually made that sale. So you're not just saying you did it. We're proving it through financial history that it happened. And obviously, that's going to be entirely opt-in. You can choose to show things or not show things. But it'll be the only social network where you can have these types of conversations, where you can prove that you're actually moving your money or making these transactions that you're claiming that you are.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Very cool. Speaking of money, have you raised any money?

• 3:01:44Speaker 09

  We have. We have raised $3 million from Dragonfly and Starting Line.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:01:51Jordi Hays?

  And was that just announced today? I didn't see it anywhere.

• 3:01:55Speaker 09

  It was yesterday.

• 3:01:56John Coogan?

  The official 2Cents account on 2Cents increased by 3 million.

• 3:02:01Speaker 09

  Right.

• 3:02:01John Coogan?

  And so you saw it.

• 3:02:02Speaker 09

  Where our spot on the leaderboard has jumped up a couple of places, which I'm very happy about.

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  That's great. What's the number one spot on the leaderboard right now?

• 3:02:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Who's the richest?

• 3:02:12Speaker 09

  Right now, we have, well, so I don't know because it's anonymous, but they are at 26 million.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  26 million.

• 3:02:18Speaker 09

  Verified liquid.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Verified and liquid.

• 3:02:21John Coogan?

  That's pretty crazy.

• 3:02:21Jordi Hays?

  My DNA I researcher.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 3:02:24Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get MSL on there.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  8 million, 333 every month. You're like, oh, okay, I know who this is. Got a $100 million contract. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Great to meet you and have a great rest of your day.

• 3:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the round.

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  Congrats on the round.

• 3:02:38Speaker 09

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Andy.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Gabe from Harvey AI. Very excited to talk to him about legal AI and the impact of open source. I want to know if anything changed this week for his business. We will bring in Gabe from Harvey AI, the legal. Hello, welcome. How are you doing?

• 3:02:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:02:59John Coogan?

  Good. How are you guys? We're great. Great background.

• 3:03:02Jordi Hays?

  Great background.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  About to say.

• 3:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Is that mahogany?

• 3:03:05John Coogan?

  Yes. The official wood of business and law.

• 3:03:08Speaker 10

  Yes, mahogany, some bucks, gotta look professional.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What's the latest? Give us the update. I have a bunch of questions that'll go all over the place, but give us the update in your world.

• 3:03:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, so last week hit three year anniversary. Have kind of scaled up to 350 people, 500 customers, just hit 100 million revenue.

• 3:03:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Love hitting the gong for revenue, you know? We hit the gong a lot for 100 million dollar rounds, but it feels better when it's real customer demand.

• 3:03:40John Coogan?

  We have this silly soundboard where we play the overnight success sound, but.

• 3:03:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that one. And usually it's because some founder's been grinding for like 10, 20 years and then they finally hit breakout success. But like Harvey is kind of an overnight success. What actually set you up for this? Obviously you were in a unique position to actually go after this opportunity. This wasn't just something that you just lucked into, obviously. So give me a little bit of the prehistory.

• 3:04:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, I actually, I started doing AI research in like 2012 and tried to do some other startups. And so I think there was a lot of this experience of trying to build these companies.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:21Speaker 10

  Without this technology. And I think I was at Meta on the large language model team right before Harvey. And my roommate, who is now my co-founder Winston, was an associate at a law firm. And I was showing him kind of the GP three models and he was showing me his kind of the legal work he was doing. And I think it was pretty obvious these models were going to get much better. And that seemed like a great application. And then I do think there was like some factor of luck of, you know, raising from OpenAI, how good GPT four was, and then kind of really focusing on big law.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you add all that in, then we can do the overnight success. Because it's like easy. If you want to just grow really quickly, just spend a decade researching a fundamental technology that will change the world. Anyway. What? Yeah. So much to go into here.

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, one thing I want to. You, at this point, I'm sure are talking to or have closed all, you know, pretty much all the top law firms in the United States. I'm sure the reaction internally at all the different firms, I'm sure there's some excitement. I'm sure there's. There's clearly excitement, otherwise they wouldn't be signing up and becoming customers. But I posted something last week, I was in New York and I spoke with, I was speaking with a lawyer randomly. And he was telling me about their AI adoption internally. And he said, and this was his point of view, he said, adopting too much AI will hurt our bottom line.

• 3:05:50Jordi Hays?

  And I posted that note yesterday and it sparked a big conversation. You know, the obvious response is that you don't pay great law firms and lawyers for the execution. You pay them for the overall product and the sort of like guidance and advice and strategy and all these other things. It's not just like the raw, like generation of documents or reviewing contracts and things like that. So how, you know, how are, give us kind of the overview of how different firms are reacting and sort of leveraging AI? And then I want to hear how you think law firms might need to like reinvent themselves and like kind of

• 3:06:32Jordi Hays?

  even adopt new business models and approaches and things like that over time.

• 3:06:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, so it's definitely like a wide range, both law firms, but also kind of individual partners within law firms. And so we have, you know, firms that are still in the, let's test this out, let's see what to do with this. And then firms that are, we have already co-built software products or models with them. And they are, we're revenue sharing and selling that to their customers. So there is kind of the full range. And yeah, I think it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I think my guess is long-term where this is going is, I think your point is exactly right. Like, I actually think if you look at partners billables, they're actually undervalued.

• 3:07:15Speaker 10

  Where it's like, if you want to do a massive public merger, that partner is worth much more than 3,000 an hour, but it kind of gets subsidized by all these associate hours. And so there'll be some changing of, you know, how you charge for these. But so far, I think we're still kind of early days in that conversation. And it's much more, how do you, you know, get adoption? How do you start upskilling lawyers to use this technology? But do have a lot of

• 3:07:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the interesting thing, I think, you know, we obviously have a bunch of founders that watch the show. And I think it's interesting to look at invoices you get from your law firm. And and just like, look line by line, where was I getting like, real value and legal advice and strategy and all these things that are extremely high leverage? And where was I paying to like, recreate a variation of this document? Or fix a punctuation error and things like that? And obviously, you can't see exactly, but I it is easy to imagine in the future where in the same way that you have a hundred, a hundred X engineer today that's using, you

• 3:08:20Jordi Hays?

  know, cognition Devon or and windsurf or Claude code or whatever variety of cursor, etc., where they can be ultra high leverage because they effectively have an army of people, you know, working under them agentically. I think you'll see that in it's hard not to imagine that happening in law where you have this like incredible individual player who's able to like, produce potentially in order of magnitude more work in the very near future.

• 3:08:49Speaker 10

  Yeah, and one thing we're also starting to think about is like, it's always interesting to ask, why do you have this billable model structure in the first place? And I think one big problem is pricing legal work. And so like, the reason you have this model is like, these projects are so complex that it's actually impossible to do fix fee without, you know, this technology where it's just, how much does it cost to do this merger? It's like, you're gonna have all these things that come up. But I think as these models get better, the same way it's hard to predict, like, how long will it take to fix this bug? But now with these models, you can kind of look at a code base and say, oh, actually, I can tell you, you know, some good airbans. I think there's things like that you can start exploring that make more of these new business models.

• 3:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen, have you seen lawyers in big law spinning out and building firms from the ground up to try to disrupt themselves and create new models? I mean, we've seen, we've had the founder of Crosby on, which is like, they're building a firm themselves and like, focusing on like, a few specific types of contracts initially. And I could imagine it's kind of hard, if you have a law firm with thousands and thousands of lawyers, it's hard to like, totally change the business model where if three people spin off and they come to you at Harvey and say like, we want to leverage this ground up, build a firm around this. Are you seeing that at all?

• 3:10:05Speaker 10

  Yeah, one of the fastest growing, I think they might be ML200 firms now is actually partner only. And so I think this model is, I think that the challenge is it just depends on the type of legal work you're doing. But this is also traditionally like, not traditionally, in the past couple of years, what firms like PWC have also been doing of how do you bundle this legal work and provide alternative ways? So I think some of this work is getting unbundled and with different models, you can kind of tackle different parts of the legal work.

• 3:10:33Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much do you guys care about models getting more intelligent versus just delivering on the current capabilities?

• 3:10:42Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think for us, the big challenge we definitely still have is like the models aren't good enough to do the very complex legal work. And so I think for us, you know, Sam has the quote of like, try to build some company that like, as the models get better, your company gets better. And I think we are very much in that position where it's like, I think as amazing as these models are, and I think lawyers get a lot of value. We still have so many use cases where it's just like, the models can't draft these very complex like merger agreements and things like that. They can't look at these massive case law research corpuses or discovery corpuses or data rooms and like really understand them. And so I think there's a bunch of room, both for the foundation models to get better, but also we're starting to think about like, can you, you know, custom build these reasoning models?

• 3:11:26Speaker 10

  Given this kind of specific data you have. So I think there's huge room for improvement for the models.

• 3:11:30Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about the back office? There's a lot of costs that go into law firms that are, that are non-legal work, operations, billing, you know, all that. Is that something, is that a focus at all for you? Is that something you think about or is there just enough work to be done on the client side?

• 3:11:48John Coogan?

  Would you do like a legal billing product too?

• 3:11:51Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's something we've thought about of, you know, partnering with the folks doing that in the future. We've had law firms ask, can you, you know, help us automate parts of how we do billing? We have a bunch of firms that just buy Harvey seats to do some of this back office work again. And then there's clients that have asked about, you know, can you help us build spend management, things like that? But I think right now the focus is still kind of building the product for, for lawyers, for law firms.

• 3:12:15John Coogan?

  We have a question from the chat. Is the company named after Harvey Specter, the fictional lawyer from Suits? Or Harvey Dent, the Batman villain who I think also had a law degree?

• 3:12:26Speaker 10

  Harvey Specter.

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  Harvey Specter, there we go.

• 3:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 3:12:30John Coogan?

  It's a great, it's a great character. I want to talk about costs, obviously, tons of revenue coming in the door. Also, we're seeing this weird phenomenon, maybe it's not that weird, but like with test time inference reasoning, you want to put, you know, GPT, what was the R K G I, they were putting $2,000 of inference behind every task just to crack that puzzle. If I'm, you know, coming to you and I want, you know, to really make sure that the AI is checking its work fully, I probably want to put a ton of tokens behind that. What does the cost structure look like? How does that evolve over time? What is, what are the relevant changes that could happen and changes in the landscape?

• 3:13:11John Coogan?

  We saw the open source model come out from OpenAI at the same time, even if you're running, even if you switch to open source today, you still have to pay for energy and GPUs and stuff. So, yeah, how does the cost side of the business evolve over the next couple of years?

• 3:13:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think our bet kind of from early on has been focused much more on like capabilities. These models are going to get cheaper as you scale, get economies of scale, you can kind of solve these problems. I would say right now our cost structure is similar to, you know, if you're using like a chat GPT where, you know, that gets amortized over the task, you have some tasks that are low compute, some that are a lot. I think Google is actually one of the very unique domains where you have these tasks where I want to draft a motion and typically this is going to cost $250,000. I want to do document review and this can cost a million dollars. And so you have these specific problems where you can actually just run models over every single document or just a ton of compute at this.

• 3:14:06Speaker 10

  And so we're starting to kind of explore like, what do those different models look like if you're doing tasks like that? But yeah.

• 3:14:13John Coogan?

  Lessons from Atrium, lessons from Clearspire, lessons from binding a actual law firm to a technology company. Seems like it hasn't, not doing that certainly hasn't hurt you, but did you know?

• 3:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm sure, I'm sure you had a lot of investors that, why don't you sell the work instead of the software?

• 3:14:36Speaker 10

  We actually, we actually had the opposite. Like when Winston and I started the company, we talked to the founders of Atrium and like 30 of the folks that worked at Atrium. And actually, Jason Kwan, who at the time was the GC of OpenAI, was at. Y Combinator, we went, they did Atrium and Sam was as well. And so we kind of like mentioned that and they were like, you guys should focus on building tech business. And for us, it seems like the scalable play here is like, we don't want to build a professional service firm ourselves. We want to enable every law firm, every professional service firm to kind of become the next generation of firm.

• 3:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes so much sense. Microsoft Excel, their team didn't build an investment bank and yet it's used by every investment bank and it's, and that will continue for a long time. Anyway, I think we have to jump to the next guest. Jordan, thank you so much for coming on. This is really fun. Congratulations on all the growth. Huge. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. And up next, we have another massive moment. Let's bring in Kareem from Clay. We'll get the update from him. Welcome to the stream, Kareem Clay AI. How you doing?

• 3:15:47Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:15:49John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 3:15:51John Coogan?

  Give us the latest, give us the update, what's new in your world? What do you do? Break it down for us.

• 3:15:57Speaker 11

  Can give you all those things. Excited to be here. Um, yeah. Well, today we announced that we raised a hundred million from alphabets capital G.

• 3:16:08John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:16:10Speaker 11

  Thank you. At a $3.1 billion valuation.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Three Jet Blues. That's crazy. Amazing. We've been dogging on Jet Blue a little bit today, but that is fantastic. Congrats.

• 3:16:21Jordi Hays?

  So classic overnight success. You started the company like a few months ago?

• 3:16:25Speaker 11

  Yeah, like eight years ago.

• 3:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I was gonna say, so the story, so, so give us, give us like the journey, how you got here, because I think like you guys have been a massive beneficiary of, of L L Ms from what I know over the last few years, but it was not a, was not an overnight success.

• 3:16:45Speaker 11

  I'll call it a spiral.

• 3:16:47John Coogan?

  Spiral.

• 3:16:48Speaker 11

  Um, yeah, I mean, we started the company with the idea of how do we give the power of programming to an order of magnitude more people. And I was saying, it took me some time to reformulate that to how do we give that to what we call go to market engineers. So it's like, half of the company can't code, but has all of these ideas of how to grow the company. Um, and Clay basically gives them the power to program revenue instead of just program software.

• 3:17:16John Coogan?

  Let's make that a lot more concrete. Uh, there's been this cool wave of designers going from zero X engineers to one X engineers. And that's had a lot of, uh, a lot of benefits in organizations. But what does that actually look like concretely on a go to market team? Is that just generating emails faster, managing a, um, a CRM? Like, what, what are we actually talking about in terms of?

• 3:17:40Speaker 11

  Yeah, the, the actually like most important part is who should you reach out to? That's actually like, I would say 60% of kind of like, there, there's two ways to grow your company. Either you find new customers or you expand existing ones. If we just talk about finding new customers, 60% of that is finding the right person. Right? And then kind of like reaching them at the right time is another 20%. So what we do is, um, let's, let me give you an example. One of our customers, they have a ton of people just going on Google Maps, looking at all the different locations that they sell to, finding warehouses. And then manually counting the number of parking spots that, uh, that warehouse has, cause that's a good indicator of they're a good customer.

• 3:18:23Speaker 11

  And so we can use Google Maps API and L L Ms to do that counting for them.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Oh, that makes tons of sense.

• 3:18:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, so really most of it is about like account selection and finding the right people. And then the second part is, you know, that they just raise a round of funding like us. Was there some kind of new news story that, uh, that they just hire a few people in a department that you're selling to? And it's very specific to what your company does and their product.

• 3:18:49John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Is this, I've asked this question on the show before, but it feels pretty common that some random private equity firm will just be spamming people on the internet trying to buy their companies. Oftentimes, there's probably good targeting. Oftentimes, there's bad targeting. How close are we to just eliminating those emails that are just kind of, that outreach, the spray and pray outreach? When is spray and pray gonna end?

• 3:19:18Speaker 11

  I hope not. I mean, I think that that's kind of like one of our top goals is if you actually, I think you could think of it as what if you actually put in the effort and the thoughtfulness into figuring out who actually wants your product. One, you reduce spam, and two, you actually increase your own productivity. It's just that that's hard to do at scale. And the best companies like Ramp, like there's a lot of companies who've figured out how to do that internally, what Clay is doing is giving that to every company. And really, what that means is that businesses can find each other faster and more accurately. So I think it should end up benefiting everyone.

• 3:20:03Speaker 11

  That makes sense. Anything else?

• 3:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Hundred million dollars, where, how are you gonna spend it?

• 3:20:10Speaker 11

  Hopefully, we don't spend it.

• 3:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, always a good play.

• 3:20:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think that one of the key, like, really exciting things about Clay is that we have this huge community that has emerged around us. So there's Clay agencies, so people who implement Clay. Oh, that makes sense, yeah. There's like 60 clubs in 29 countries where people meet up to talk about different techniques. Because if you think about it, in sales, like, you're always figuring out how to be creative, how to be unique. And Clay is a tool that lets you do that. I almost think of it like Ableton is for music, or like you said, Figma is for designers, Clay is for go-to-market teams.

• 3:20:49Jordi Hays?

  For doing deals.

• 3:20:49Speaker 11

  Interesting. Exactly. So we want to use that money to support that community. So we're having a conference actually, Sculpt, in September in San Francisco. So we need to, we're gonna do more events like that. And then there's a lot of investment into the product. We're just touching the surface of what we can build.

• 3:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there any functionality to share workflows or create some sort of marketplace for workflows like, you know, yes, there are agencies on top of Shopify that do design, but then there are also templates. And so you gave some examples of, you know, new funding announcement in my category. That seems like something that I could be able to just pull off the shelf and not even, not even build from scratch within Kly.

• 3:21:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, totally. I feel like you should really join our team. This is exactly

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  Where are you going?

• 3:21:41Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 3:21:42John Coogan?

  Sorry, we'll leave it there.

• 3:21:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, we'll leave it there.

• 3:21:46John Coogan?

  Well, good luck. Very exciting time and congratulations on the massive round.

• 3:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, Miles.

• 3:21:51Speaker 11

  Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

• 3:21:52John Coogan?

  Good talking to you. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:21:53Jordi Hays?

  Good stuff. Well, John, I got to get on with London and I'm sure you got to get on with Taipei.

• 3:22:00John Coogan?

  I do have to get on with Taipei.

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we end it there? Thank you for tuning into the show today.

• 3:22:04John Coogan?

  And thanks to everyone in the chat. I agree. The deeper the V-neck, the more funding you get.

• 3:22:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Good strategy.

• 3:22:11John Coogan?

  It's a good, I didn't say it, but I think it's true. Hundred million dollar deal, really deep V, looking good. I, you know.

• 3:22:19Jordi Hays?

  The next round is down to the belly button.

• 3:22:22John Coogan?

  It was funny because we, I, clearly you could see the bottom of the V-neck if we had shown the full screen, but we have a ticker. And so the ticker made it look like, you don't know where that thing ends. It could just keep going forever. But Palmer Lucky has made.

• 3:22:34Jordi Hays?

  It's actually a vest.

• 3:22:35John Coogan?

  Palmer Lucky has made the Hawaiian t-shirt iconic. Maybe Kareem makes the, the deep V iconic at Kly. Good energy.

• 3:22:43Jordi Hays?

  You can do it.

• 3:22:44John Coogan?

  I was into it. Anyway.

• 3:22:45Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, folks.

• 3:22:46John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave us some reviews. Leave us some reviews. Send us some notes. Send us some, reply to some threads, whatever you want to do.

• 3:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you want to do.

• 3:22:57John Coogan?

  Get in touch. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 3:22:59John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:23:00Jordi Hays?

  See you soon.