Calley Means, Delian Asparouhov, Leif Abraham & Jannick Malling, Alfred Wahlforss & Florian Juengermann, Saman Farid, Erik Palitsch, Netflix's Growth Plans Post Earnings, AMD's Plan to Beat NVIDIA

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com 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 Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (03:34) - Netflix's Growth Plans Post Earnings (13:34) - AMD's Plan to Beat NVIDIA (28:04) - Delian Asparouhov (54:53) - Leif Abraham & Jannick Malling (01:13:45) - Alfred Wahlforss & Florian Juengermann (01:28:08) - Erik Palitsch (02:03:15) - Saman Farid (02:28:26) - Calley Means

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVVN. Today is Thursday, April 24th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  We got some new sound effects today.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  We do. I'm very excited.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Expect the unexpected.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  Expect the unexpected. We got a lot of great breaking news. Netflix had earnings and they recorded record profits. It's fantastic. From Bloomberg, Netflix Inc. reported record profit to start the year, allaying concerns of a slowdown or fears the streaming leader might be hurt by growing economic uncertainty. First quarter earnings rose 25% to $6.61 a share. The company said Thursday, easily beating analysts' estimates. It's a bad day to be a Netflix analyst. You're just getting beaten up by the corporate results. Sales grew to 10.5 billion, in line with projections. The results were boosted by a recent price

• 0:59John Coogan?

  increase and strong slate of programming across the globe, like the UK hit series Adolescence. Investors have come to see Netflix as a safe bet during a great time of economic uncertainty and challenges for conventional movie and TV business. With global audiences of more than 700 million viewers, the company said it has seen no impact on its business from President Donald Trump's tariffs or the market volatility that has followed. And so, this is interesting. Congratulations to all the Netflix shareholders. Congratulations to everyone at Netflix. But I thought it was interesting because, you know, we've been, we were talking earlier about like, we saw the stats on all the different tech companies, how much they're off-peak from the start of the year. And even Meta's down 25%. And we were kind of working through-

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  It was 28% over their, over the last 12 months.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we were kind of working through it. We were like, okay, how did we get to this point? How, how is Meta affected by tariffs? Like, they don't make stuff in China. I mean, I guess they do make the Oculus, but they're not selling that many of them. But in general, you know, the question was, why is Meta hurt by tariff uncertainty or the chaos of the last few months? And you know, you can kind of talk to Sean Frank over at Ridge Wallet and say, okay, well, you know, if D to C advertising that's happening on Meta is impaired by tariffs, they could pull back on advertising. And so you could get there. But with Netflix, like there truly is nothing that affects them on the tariff side. Like they truly are just a digital content farm, basically.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the economy would have to be pretty bad for people to start thinking, I want to be less entertained.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. And historically, things like Netflix have done very well during economic downturns.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Because things are rough, but you want to kill some time. And on a dollar per hour basis, Netflix is probably the best bank.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Their usage metrics are still insane. People say, TBPN, you guys put out three hours of content a day. Well,

• 2:57John Coogan?

  Netflix puts out three hours of content every minute.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, well, and if you look at, I think, some of their usage numbers, I think it's like the average users using it for like two hours a day.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  I actually think we should.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Distribute on Netflix. Absolutely. Yeah. Give us a call. Netflix. Reed. Reed Hastings, if you're listening. Come on.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll fly up to Los Gatos.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, yeah, I'd love to partner with them. Anyway, interesting development. Couple of years ago, there was this customer segmentation push. They went for higher tiers. They will charge you an arm and a leg for 4K streaming across a bunch of devices. If you're, if you're sharing the passwords, they, they, they cracked down on the password sharing.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  And they also introduced the ad-supported tier, which isn't free. You still have to pay for it, but it's, it's working, basically. And that's driving platform growth, higher engagement beyond raw subscriber accounts. And really, they're price discriminating, right? It used to just be, oh, Netflix is like 10 bucks a month for everyone. Well, there are some people that are willing to pay more for 4K and more screens and whatnot, and no ads. And then there's other people that, you know, are more price sensitive. And so they've done a great job at this. And they've basically, so their, their, their target for 2029 is to double revenue and expand margins. We love doubling revenue and expanding margins, folks. It's fantastic. Double.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, 2029, I mean, it's been 30-year-old business at this point, at that point. Pretty wild.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  30-year-old overnight success. It's possible. It's possible.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  And so they're pivoting the strategy, the company is moving beyond simply adding subscribers to maximizing revenue per user via segmentation by introducing ad-supported tier and multiple price points. Netflix can capture price-sensitive users and retain them with a cheaper ad-backed option while raising prices on standard and premium plans. For those who value an ad-free experience, that would be a lot of folks. Dissemination?

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  I would expect our-

• 4:49John Coogan?

  I want to pay more and get more ads too.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  I would expect our community to, yeah, want to pay more and get more ads. So hopefully they recognize that and start rolling out.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  They have that tier as well, that tier as well. So let's break it down. Ben Thompson's analysis of Netflix's Q1 2025 results underlines the robust financial performance and ambitious growth plans, record quarterly profits, $10.5 billion revenue, beat expectations aided by recent price hikes and popular content releases. Notably, Netflix ceased reporting subscriber additions this quarter. That'll frustrate a lot of analysts because everyone always likes to have as much data as possible to project these things.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  And a company that was adding a ton of users would probably want to include that data.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Yes, but there was also a very, like, when you would dig into the subscriber additions, you would see weird things like, oh, they're growing a ton of subscriber additions, so maybe the stock should go way up. But then you'd find out that they were in lower-priced markets. And so there was, there were all these anomalies where they were doing okay in the US, but they were growing a lot in Middle East, North Africa, and Asia, and all of those have very different economic impacts on the business. And so Netflix is saying like, hey, we're a mature company. We're like 20 years old at this point. Why don't you guys just focus on revenue, profit, and cash flow, which we love? And so internal forecasts, oh, and this was interesting, there was actually a leak to the Wall Street Journal show that Netflix is aiming to double revenue to $78 billion by 2029 and even target

• 6:17John Coogan?

  a $1 trillion market cap. And now there was a recording of, I believe, the CEO on the earnings call saying like, you know, we have a very high-trust environment here at Netflix. You know, we, we, we share a lot of information with our entire team. Sometimes that gets leaked to the press. We don't like when it gets leaked to the press. But you have to wonder if it's an intentional leak, right? Because it's like, you know, like, we have that internal forecast of our streaming hours going to forty hours, twenty-four hours a day, trillion dollar market cap, you know, a hundred billion dollars in ad deals. And it would be terrible if that leaked. But, but at the same time, you could imagine a situation where we would, you know, accidentally, intentionally leak that just to make us look better. And so maybe that's what's going on here. I don't know. We'll have to ask them.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  But, you know, it could be, it could be bad to have that leak.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that Jamie, Jamie Dimon audio leak. Remember, we talked about this, where he just sounds like a great leader.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  I love a good leak.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, ambitious and wants to, you know, push his team to be their best and work hard.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  What a terrible leak.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  And so they're gonna, they're gonna roll out more new monetization streams, grow their advertising business. It's projected to be nine billion a year by 2029 and continued price increases alongside a moderate rise in subscribers. So they basically hit saturation. Like, everyone has Netflix that is interested. They're not really interested in, in bringing new people on. And that's probably what's going on with the, with the App One deal that we discussed earlier. And so they're basically saying that, like, we are confident in economics of scale. And we're going to just, you know, focus on monetizing our audience more significantly.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Has kind of dropped out of the big tech narrative. You know, it used to be FAANG. The N stood for Netflix. Now, we're on, we moved on from FAANG, we're on MAG7, Tesla's in.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's hard to call a five hundred billion dollar company big technology, right?

• 8:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  It's quaint.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  It's quaint.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Quaint tech.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  A quaint lifestyle business, for sure.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, much more of a lifestyle business.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  And it's amazing that a business like this can, you know, have reached sort of full market saturation and still trade at almost a fifty X P E ratio.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, gotta give them credit for that.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  They got destroyed during, didn't they get destroyed during COVID or something? At some point, like, they had some major, major drawdown in the stock. But I actually remember back in high school.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  I got in a kind of a drunken fight with a high school friend, uh, late night once about whether or not Netflix was a good stock.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Not, not super on brand for you, I'm sure.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Well, this is high school, you know.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay, it was in high school. I thought you were saying it was recently.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This was back, this was back.

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  So you were 21 when you were in high school?

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  You got held back a little bit?

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, but this was, this is probably, uh, you know, around 2007, something like that.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  And.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  So you were feeling the heat from, from the financial crisis?

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, for sure, for sure. But my, basically, my friend was like, was like Netflix is like overvalued, like it's not a good stock. And I, and I was just like, and, and I laid out like, no, like, I think in the future, like, you will have Netflix, like, maybe even on your phone. Maybe you'd have it on multiple screens.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  And he was like, no, like, this is like a terrible stock, like, it's not going anywhere. And then it became like the, the best stock of all time. And I should have bought it instead of just like, you know, arguing with him. But, uh, this is fun.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, you also should have angel invested in Coinbase, a bunch of other companies in your YC batch.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, if they, if they accepted, uh, credit card debt as collateral for angel investments, I would be doing very, very well.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  A bean air.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  I had negative net income or negative net worth. Anyway, um, so they're trying to aim for 36% subscriber growth. They're trying to hit 410 million users by 2029, um, and ARPU should rise significantly through segmentation, ads, higher pricing. Uh, they're, they're going for that one trillion market cap. You love to hear it. Um, they're.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  Just an easy 2X, right?

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yep, they're only, yeah, I mean, that actually isn't that crazy on a five-year plan to double, like, that doesn't seem that crazy. But they gotta get more people. Um, and so, uh, yeah, the, the, the takeaway from Ben Thompson is that, you know, he was advocating for an ads tier for a long time. He's called it a success, even if the ads aren't material yet. Um, it, it is putting them on the path. And there was a lot of.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Of work that they needed to do at one point, they were, I don't know if they actually landed with Microsoft, but they were thinking about partnering with Microsoft to do kind of the backend ad exchange. And there was a lot of

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  No, and the bull case for Netflix's ad product, as far as I know, is just the targeting potential and Netflix's ability to like basically

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  verticalize from the content to the user, to the, to the user's interests.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  It certainly should be more targetable than just

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Linear TV ads.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Or not over the top, but like over the air TV ads. But I don't know that they have that much data. I mean, if it's like this person, it's nowhere near as much as an Instagram where, you know, you're following all these things, they know where you are on the web, they know what you're, oh, you're clearly shopping for a suitcase this week because you've been hovering over the suitcase content that we've been sending you randomly. Much harder to do that, so I think that's why there might be a benefit to partnering with an ad exchange that has a little bit more tracking information. But still, I mean, you can probably tell just, you can probably do more segmentation than in a normal, in a normal

• 12:03John Coogan?

  linear TV context, but it doesn't seem anywhere as efficient as Meta, but.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but that's not the point, right? These are going to be brand marketing dollars.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  And that's okay.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  And there was a big, there was a big debate over like when Netflix first opened the floodgates of ads, they were going to get a lot of experimental budget because it's very interesting. Oh, I could put my brand next to some prestige TV potentially on Netflix or something that seems interesting. But ultimately, the ad buyers were going to just want to see results. And it's hard, probably harder to track if you're just showing someone an ad and then they're not necessarily clicking through. It's more brand advertising, so all that attribution could be difficult. But it seems like even though, even in the face of all of that, like ads are just such a great business that it's working.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting to think about mobile watch time, too.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's not, it doesn't feel as common for people to be watching television.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, for that, you could actually put the link right there.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  And so you can have a pop up ad and get that to a correct attribution.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Instead of like the QR code on the screen, which I don't think many people are doing if they're watching Netflix like on their TV late night. But a lot of people are just like going around with their phone, doing their, you know, chores and then watching Netflix in the background. Interesting. Anyway, Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis has a great breakdown on AMD's transformation and how they are trying to beat Nvidia. This is AMD 2.0, a new sense of urgency, and it's a very interesting deep dive into how the, these big companies are interacting with the next generation of analysts like Ben Thompson and Dylan Patel. And so Ben Thompson's been, you know, advocating for different strategies at Intel and many other companies. But there's always been a question of like, oh, is he like an armchair quarterback?

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Like, does he really, could he possibly know better than like the entire Intel executive team? And it seems like maybe now it's yes. But with AMD, like, and Semi Analysis, the answer is like, absolutely. Because Semi Analysis, back in December of 2024, about four months ago, they published an article detailing mediocre AMD software and lack of usability. This was something that had been flagged by George Hots before, basically saying that like the chips themselves on a flop per dollar basis are quite competitive with Nvidia. But the software infrastructure on top, like the middleware that goes in between like the model that you're trying to train and the actual silicon is bad. Basically, I don't know how to put it nicely.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  So, but Dylan is saying that AMD has turned it around.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  You're listening.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  They kicked it into high gear and they've made rapid progress in the last four months on many items Semi Analysis laid out. They view AMD's new sense of urgency as a massive positive in its journey to catch up to Nvidia. AMD is now in wartime mode, but there are still many battles ahead. And so. Founder mode.

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Switch your business to ram.com. Are those connected somehow? They are. This is a ram that just plays every time we play founder mode now.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  We have two versions.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  So basically, I mean, everyone knows that Nvidia has like completely run away with the data center game for AI training, especially on the on the pre-training side. There's some stuff that you can do on the inference side. Once you've trained the model and distilled it, but when you need a huge cluster of 100,000 GPUs, the game is Nvidia.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  To Jensen.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  And yeah, you've seen, you've heard these stories about like Elon and Larry Ellison getting dinner with Jensen and being like, give us the, give us all the chips. And then obviously every other big tech company wants the Nvidia chips. Nvidia stock has been mooning and all of that is because of the CUDA ecosystem that sits on top of Nvidia and how reliable those chips have been because when you're running a really big, really big and expensive training run, one little flaw could cost you a lot or could throw the, throw the training runoff. And so AMD has an equivalent of CUDA, I believe, ROCM, RockM, software and developer tools. But there's still a bunch of software gaps, scaling challenges and a need for community driven breakthroughs. That's what has made Nvidia so strong.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  They have an ecosystem of developers who build software and test suites and all sorts of open source stuff. And there's a bunch of interesting anecdotes here about what made Nvidia really so dominant that we should go through. So basically the takeaway is that AMD is in wartime mode. And it's very cool. Like Lisa Su actually met with semi-analysis after they published the December AMD article and acknowledged many of the gaps in the software stack. And they've done a bunch of other things. They hired a developer relations czar. This is the DevRel function to actually interact with external developers. And they do this on tech Twitter and at real life events. Like this is actually where it's happening.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  And in January, AMD recognized that external developer community are what made CUDA great. And so it's a very big pivot from the previous com strategy, which was never admit that there are any flaws in the software publicly.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Always claim victory.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Always claim victory. Now they are coming from it, coming to the, to the market with a much more humble approach. And I think it's been very well received. And so AMD has shifted into high gear to compete in AI. They know that there's a lot of money at stake. They're overhauling the culture and software stack with a focus on developers. They've, I've already rolled out, you know, massive improvements to their software stack. And they have this new developer for strategy. They're addressing longstanding issues from poor Python tooling to slow multi GPU communication. So there were actual points in the software stack where there was no Python library. Like you could not, you could not write Python

• 17:48John Coogan?

  to do something. You had to go to a different language. And that's obviously a point of a friction for developers.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  If you have a developer who loves writing Python, then you're like, actually, to do this thing, you have to write something else, maybe C++ or something. That's frustrating.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  And the key here is that all the big potential customers and existing customers value speed above, you know, pretty much anything else, right?

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. If these people are getting paid a million dollars, like you want them just to move as fast as possible.

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally. And Elon doing the new data center and whatever it was, was it a year that they pulled it off?

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:21Jordi Hays?

  It's like, they're not going to wait around for an inferior solution.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yes. Dylan actually highlights the X AI team catching up to the frontier so quickly as an example for what, how AMD, how AMD should be thinking. Like, like, they should think, hey, we are behind. But if we are realistic about that, and we sprint and we change the culture, we could potentially catch up to the frontier very quickly, which is very cool. And so the, there's plans for a community GPU cloud, which anyone could use to train. Google had a great example of this, where there was this open source GPTJ moment, which I wasn't, I like, heard about a long time ago, but I didn't know the full story. Basically, there was like a high school kid who

• 19:07John Coogan?

  Got access for free to a a cluster of TPUs on Google's cloud. So they're free, but it was a very powerful cloud. And he trained a a language model, an LLM, that was roughly equivalent to GPT-2. And everyone was like, this is incredible. If like some random kid can just build something that's like at at the same level as OpenAI. This is like a testament to like how awesome Google is with their TPUs. And and and same with with Nvidia does the same thing. Nvidia actually gives out servers to universities. And some of them, I I don't know if this is actually important at all, but they're gold plated. It's just like, it's just like, I think it's just to make a statement. I think it's just to make a statement, just to be like, we're delivering this thing.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  It's awesome. Like, we want you to be excited to build on Nvidia, so we're delivering you a gold plated rack.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Spend your annual tuition as a college student just on energy for that free, on that free Nvidia GPU rack.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Aggressive enough, so put it to use.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so basically, it's all, it all comes down to like this cultural transformation. But Lisa Su has acknowledged the company's software shortcomings. And AMD is now in wartime mode, fixing bugs and engaging developers. The company has launched Developer Relations Initiative. And they're increasing the R and D budget, boosting AI engineering compensation and scaling internal GPU clusters. And so there there's a couple other interesting things in here. They're focusing on continuous integration and whatnot, catching up on tools and libraries, more Python support. And and really focusing on cluster scaling, which has been a big problem.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Where is the, I need to find the the story about George Hots, because that was interesting. Gio.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Let me see, Gio Hots. Let's see.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  Okay. So.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Let me see.

• 21:10Jordi Hays?

  Found a post on Hacker News from four months ago from somebody saying, is there no hope for AMD anymore after George Hots gave up on AMD? I feel like there's no realistic chance of using their chips to break CUDA dominance.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, so here's some from the actual semi-analysis article. Although George Hots could have settled for AMD's earlier offer of cloud-hosted MI300X systems with full BMC access, he insisted on physical hardware so he could hack the metal directly. And so George Hots was saying, like, we need an alternative to Nvidia. We need to break the Nvidia monopoly. This was something that he was pushing for, and he wanted to develop a new, like, PyTorch competitor, basically, for training machine learning models on AMD hardware. But he was running into tons and tons of problems with the software stack. And he was posting about

• 22:07John Coogan?

  these, and he said, like, hey, if you guys just send me the latest and greatest, I want to be able to hack them, but I don't want to pay because I'm doing your job for you, basically. And AMD initially balked, even though Hots's goal was to help open source tooling on their GPUs, which is exactly something like Jensen would jump at. Jensen knows the value of the open source community on top of CUDA and Nvidia. And so he's given stuff out all over the place. But AMD, that wasn't in their culture. And so the stalemate turned into a public spectacle when the widely respected PyTorch co-creator tweeted in support of George Hots receiving the physical boxes, which is interesting because, like, PyTorch, obviously, it's an open source library, but like, he's kind of creating this competitor

• 22:50John Coogan?

  with TinyGrad. But obviously, the PyTorch creator just wants cool and efficient AI training software to go out there. And so he says, "Sumith..." Chintala says, "For what it's worth, if George Hots was offering to work on my stuff for free and wanted two boxes, I'd drive them out to him myself." TinyGrad is a beautiful, phenomenal piece of software, in my opinion. TinyGrad has some sort of limitation. I think George Hots is trying to keep it under 1,000 lines of code or something. And so it's this remarkably optimized and interpretable program for training AI

• 23:31John Coogan?

  models on GPU hardware. But he ran into a bunch of problems with AMD and started pushing them. And so SemiAnalysis says, "We believe that this nudge worked, and a George Hots March 8th blog revealed that AMD had relented, sending him two MI300X boxes. With this, AMD finally passed the GeoHots cultural test for AMD. This is arguably a bigger reputational coup than a technical one. Shipping real silicon to a high-profile hacker signals a newfound developer-first ethos that marketing dollars alone can't buy.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  And it finally turns a bruising Twitter saga into a story demonstrating AMD's new developer-first ethos. In addition to sending GeoHots boxes, we believe that AMD can also score another easy reputation and marketing win by donating physical AMD GPU boxes to academic labs. Jensen and Ian Buck has had a long history of donating GPUs to academic labs, going back as far as 2014. This year Jensen continues to support academic labs, such as Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley, UCSD, and others, for some time by donating physical, gold-plated B200 boxes to them in addition to providing free cloud access to Nvidia GPUs."

• 24:54John Coogan?

  So he's just like, "You can use the cloud for free, you can have the boxes for free, we just want you anything." Yes, 100%. It's amazing.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, so interesting to follow what's like the, the, the, the change in management. Like this is something like, you know, a going direct type of change. Like this is a big change for the, for the company culture. But I think that they finally realized that like it had to be done because they'd done, they'd done so much right on the actual. They'd done their job on the chip side and they'd built a great product, but it was not getting adopted. And it was because of the lack of, of focus on nurturing the open source community, building developer relations and actually making it easy to work with their product that they made.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  But it's different, you know, I don't think, I don't think this is the same dynamic with, I don't think it was the same dynamic in gaming. I think gaming was much more simple and much lower stakes. And so if you have a shader that doesn't run perfectly, the gaming company will just kind of figure it out. It's not that big. Whereas if, if a training run goes wrong, that's, you know, potentially like a billion dollars down the drain.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  It's just fascinating that Lisa and Jensen could be cousins and she wouldn't pick up at least a little bit of what her, of her cousin's move.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  So I invited Dylan Patel on the show. He's traveling. He should be joining us in a week or two, hopefully. And I definitely want to know, you know, this is great. I love this. Let's go for AMD. I'm super happy for them. And, and congratulations to semi-analysis for like making this happen. At the same time, like, why did it take so long? Like this feels like this was foreseeable.

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Potentially missed out on a, a part of the bubble, right?

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  We're in a bubble.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  We love bubbles on the show, but they, they were pretty much asleep at the wheel for at least the initial run, which cost them. A massive amount of, you know, they could have raised

• 26:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Tens of billions of dollars of cheap equity

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  Through that process and, and, you know, I'm sure they, they conducted, you know, a bunch of different, you know, fundraises over that period, but they didn't really get much of a, you know, the, the stock's up like 60% over the last like five years. So it's not like they haven't really been a winner in the, in the boom.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's put up the guest lineup for today and we have Delian coming into the studio first and we have a bunch more folks.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  We got co-founders of Public coming in. They announced a partnership with Aston Martin today.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Very excited about. Got Listen Labs Reform, Formic, and of course, Cali coming in from TruMed to talk about the food dye bans and a bunch of other stuff. So very excited for that.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  But next up we have, Delian, welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Welcome. It's Delta V with Delian.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  What is up?

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Let's go. I think I lost a button?

• 28:10John Coogan?

  I think I.

• 28:11Delian Asparouhov?

  I think you just got excited when you saw me. It's okay.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  I did. It happens. I did.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  It happens.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Uh, it's not every day. You get to hang out with one of the most cutthroat venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  One of the top spacemen in the world.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  The Bulgarian bruiser in the building. How you doing?

• 28:26Delian Asparouhov?

  John, what is it like being down to one job? I fantasize about, you know, only having one job all the time.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Delian Asparouhov?

  Somehow stuck with like five jobs.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Has anyone told you about like the value of focus? Maybe you should just focus on one thing.

• 28:38Delian Asparouhov?

  I know. I wish I was a little less ADD.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, what is on your mind? I'm sure you're thinking about Hill and Valley. I want to pull up the.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Wait, first I have a question. You said, you said your, your Zoom, uh, you're doing a lot less Zoom since moving to LA. Is that just a lot, you're just meeting with the Varda team in, in person or is it founder meetings as well? Are you taking more meetings in person now that you're Gundo adjacent?

• 29:03Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh God, you know, let's not use that word. It's a dirty word. I am El Segundo, not adjacent within. I'm currently, you know, located within those city boundaries. I think it's honestly, it's basically everything, like everything from the portfolio companies to, you know, FF meetings, you know, to, you know, to Varda meetings. And it's one of these things that it kind of feels like recursive where it's like, when you have less Zooms than when somebody like, I had this like VC asking me for a Zoom this week and I was like, cool, you're in SF, just let me know next time you're LA. Like if it's so important, just like take a limited flight. And they're like, I don't have any plans to be in LA anytime soon. And I was like, cool, then I don't have any plans to talk to you.

• 29:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Bogged.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. Well, we appreciate you joining this Zoom and this show.

• 29:49Delian Asparouhov?

  You guys are worth it.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Let you thank you. We appreciate it. Let's run through Hillen Valley. Over a few short years, we've made it into the preeminent forum for the top technology leaders and elected officials to gather. You barely scrapped together a single notable name, but somehow, Jensen Wong, Alex Carv, you got a ton of people here. Maybe walk me through, you know, who you're excited about. Give me the, give me a little bit of history and then I want to talk through some of what, what message tech is trying to send to DC these days.

• 30:23Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. I mean, the history of Hillen Valley is it started off with like an intention of being like a 30, 40 person dinner that like ballooned up into 100. And like the first one, I think had like 12, 13 elected officials. And then it just like kept gaining steam from there. We're just like the, you know, sort of dinner got bigger. And then I mentioned the dinner was so big, they were like, man, we've got a lot of really great people here and we're doing a private dinner. I think like the public would be very interested in like, you know, some of these people and conversations happening, you know, in the public sphere too. So we expanded to like, including like a, you know, more public daytime forum. And then that just, you know, sort of gained momentum. And this year it's like, I just in some ways, I can't imagine how much of a better, you know, lineup one could have. I think like the, you know, sort of main message, just like, look, you know, if we like,

• 31:04Delian Asparouhov?

  Go back in time to like 2018, you had everything from like Google bailing on the Maven Project, like VC saying that like, you know, investing in weapons was just as bad as investing in like porn and gambling. And so there was just so much hesitation and there was like a real rift, I feel like, between Silicon Valley and, you know, you know, you know, Washington DC. That is kind of counterproductive. Like if you look at the Obama era, like part of why Obama 108 to 2012 was like a deep integration with Silicon Valley intact. And it was like the first social media, you know, sort of driven campaign. But I felt like, you know, partially in Trump era, there was just like this huge rift because like Silicon Valley was so left. Trump was seen as so radical that like people didn't want to work together. And so honestly, a part of the message is like, look, we're all on the same team. And we're working together to make the United States better. And so one of my like favorite examples of this is I'm moderating a panel.

• 31:48Delian Asparouhov?

  That's with Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Kevin Weal, who's the Chief Product Officer of OpenAI. And then Reeve Parat, who's the Chief Investment Officer and President of Alphabet. And look, like in theory, Alphabet and OpenAI are like hugely competitive. On the flip side, like OpenAI has the best, you know, sort of consumer application in AI that's ever existed. And Alphabet was just awarded a Nobel Prize last year for AlphaFold, you know, predicting protein, you know, sort of folding and like the, you know, protein structures. Based off amino acid sequences. And so the like goal of that panel would be like, look, like, yes, these companies are competing. But also we're all way better off if these companies can build as many fucking data centers and have as cheap of energy as possible.

• 32:29Delian Asparouhov?

  So that like, you know, we don't have, you know, DeepSeek becoming the like default open source model that the rest of the world uses. They can't afford the like, you know, you know, ChatGPT and can't afford, you know, sort of AlphaFold. And there's a lot of soft power that comes from that. Like, do you want the thing that like the random person in Bulgaria is using as their AI? To be willing to talk about Tiananmen Square or not? I prefer the version where it can talk about, you know, sort of Tiananmen Square. And the best way that we do that is make sure that we are the best at AI, have the best energy. And the best way of doing that is like tech needs to collaborate with DC. And Secretary Interior Burgum needs to unleash a wave of, you know, you know, you know, streamlined permitting and, you know, you know, nuclear energy, you know, in the United States. And what better place to talk about that than literally in the Capitol, you know, sort of Hill Visitor Center?

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you, do you know how the, the pre, the, the Obama era? Collaboration between Silicon Valley and DC happened? Like, was there an instantiation of Hill and Valley that was just like the old big tech companies? Talking to the Democratic administration in the same way because Hillen Valley is bipartisan, right? Like when I was there last year, I was hanging out with Chuck Schumer and stuff. So like, it's not like you guys are like explicitly conservative, although obviously there is like a pushback against the the previous tone in Silicon Valley. But walk me through some of the the history there.

• 33:51Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I don't know like what the history was of the Obama campaign and how it got so social media centric. I remember they had this like, was it like the CTO guy? There was like an ex early Google guy or something like that?

• 34:04John Coogan?

  I heard some crazy stat that that you so the president, like whenever the president goes to visit a an organization that's non governmental, it gets logged. And the number one organization that Obama met with was Google during his eight years. And it was and it was just a very, very close tie, I think. And and I think that there was maybe maybe I'm thinking like the precursor to this is more like Ted, like you know, the Ted Talk era is kind of where like all the elites would come together and there would be some crossover. Maybe that's not a perfect match. But but anyway, we can move on. I want to hear.

• 34:40Delian Asparouhov?

  The goal here was to like, hopefully make it like sort of more immune from administration changes, basically, where it's like, you know, yeah, Obama visited Google all the time. Google basically like, you know, would ban Trump from ever going on campus. And so we started Hillen Valley under the Biden administration. And we've tried to keep it as close as we can to bipartisan as possible throughout all of the years, right? Now, look, obviously, right now, Republicans are in control of, you know, sort of both Congress and Senate and presidency, etc. As they're obviously a little bit more represented this year. But the goal is like, how do we make sure that that like channel of communication between the top technology leaders and elected officials stays there irrespective of who happens to be, you know, sort of in the White House at that current time? Because I don't think what you want is this thing where like, the only time that Silicon Valley and, you know, DC talked to each other is when like DC happens to be crazy left leaning, because that happens to align with like,

• 35:25Delian Asparouhov?

  A significant portion of Silicon Valley, not everybody. I mean, thankfully, the tech right is willing to be a little more, you know, sort of vocal. But look, you know, even in this last election, when, you know, you had David Sacks screaming from the rooftops about, you know, you know, being willing to vote for Trump. If you look at like, you know, donations, Silicon Valley, Quas Silicon Valley was still like 85% you know, Democrat, you know, by on a dollars basis. And so.

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Interesting dynamic where the dollars were telling a very different story than the timeline.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  I actually wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about that. It was right before Andreessen went full MAGA. So it was a little bit like, like I had the data all crunched and I was like, oh, it's actually like very purple, very split. It was almost like 50 50. But it was also like almost entirely driven by power law donors, like between Peter and

• 36:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Bossless.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Graylock.

• 36:13Delian Asparouhov?

  Reid Hoffman.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, Reid Hoffman, like, like those two were like at the biggest in terms of, in terms of, it wasn't for this cycle. It was like over the last four years or something like that. But then, and then Mark and Andreessen was actually like perfectly 50 50 split. Like they were perfectly bipartisan because a lot of what they were donating to was like crypto stuff. And then when they came to partisan stuff, they typically donated to both sides. Anyway, so walk me through some of what do you think Silicon Valley is asking for or pitching in DC these days? It feels like there's a bit of a narrative, at least on X, that, oh, all these like tech people supported Trump. They're the dog who caught the car.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  And it's not going their way, or they don't even know what to ask for, or what they're asking for isn't getting done. What do you, what do you think the message will be to DC from tech next week?

• 37:07Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I'll go through honestly, just like some of the panels that like, you know, I'm, you know, moderating and like the message on each. I kind of gave you the like, you know, AI panel where it's like, look, there are a bunch of like, you know, sort of EPA and permitting restrictions that like are preventing us from setting up as energy and data centers that we need. And like, Secretary Burgum is the person that like oversees some chunk of that, not all of it. He doesn't oversee the EPA. But like, that's the request there is like, let's make some policy changes so that OpenAI and, you know, sort of Google are not restricted by regulations as like the primary. You know, bottleneck to their growth of data centers and energy. Yeah, I love my Delta V portion on TVPN. So I'll talk about the sort of space side of things. I'm going to be moderating between Tim Hughes, who's the SVP of all business basically at SpaceX,

• 37:53Delian Asparouhov?

  Representative George Whitesides, who's the former Virgin CEO, now turned congressional representative, junior congressman, and then Major General Bucky, who's head of all things space at the Defense Innovation Unit. It's a little bit of both civil plus DOD. I think there the request is like, look, there's some pretty ambitious goals that Trump has set forth. Basically, he wants boots on Mars and Moon, wants to simulate low Earth orbit economy, wants more of the academic community to engage in aerospace. And I think the message there is like, look, NASA needs to lean on commercial space for the things that it provides and stick to what it does best for truly out there things.

• 38:35Delian Asparouhov?

  And so Jared Isaacman made some comments in his congressional hearing around like, SLS is a big rocket and maybe gets us to the moon soon, but it's probably not the long term solution. And so that's a perfect example of like, I think everybody in commercial space largely agrees with the fact that the commercial industry has better, cheaper, more effective rockets than anything that NASA is building in. And has at this point, we should probably reallocate that budget to just those commercial companies or to other NASA priorities rather than spending a bunch on SLS. So that's a tactical thing. I'm doing this fireside chat with Vinod Khosla. One of his big things is just like the integration of more and more AI, basically into healthcare. We have this mutual portfolio company, Sort Health, that has gotten really deep.

• 39:17Delian Asparouhov?

  They're now like a $4 billion company. They're basically the largest physical therapy provider, largely done via AI. And it's not just like AI where it's like a chat screen. It's like they've got sensors that they put on you, gamifies it, etc. How do you get more and more of Medicaid and Medicare to, yes, use humans when you've got some super delicate operations? But there's so much of that care that's provided that at this point could be exported to a bunch of basically like commercial health companies that are largely integrated into AI and get more aggressive. On that, which satisfies honestly a bunch of the current administration's priorities as much of a node. Yeah, he's not a huge fan of Trump. He is a fan of, you know, basically using, you know, sort of AI to, you know, improve healthcare. And then that, you know, matches Trump's, you know, goals of improved government efficiency, where you can cut out a bunch of the Medicare and Medicaid cost.

• 40:02Delian Asparouhov?

  Where it's like, look, we can all talk about like defense budgets and this and this. Entitlements are the vast majority of the federal government's budget. And so, you know, if you want to go look at efficiencies, you're going to have way more juice to squeeze. Like, you know, you know, improving Medicare than like, you know, you can cut out all the DEI programs in the world, and that's barely a blip relative to Medicare.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how much, uh, do you expect, uh, the conversation, uh, to veer towards Doge? And then specifically, uh, Trump had promised earlier this month, a trillion dollar defense budget, uh, which would be a 12% increase over this year. And, uh, yeah, do you expect that to be a major top talking point? Uh, as part of some of these conversations? Or is that, um, you know, just, just business as usual?

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and also, I mean, we were talking about the defense budget earlier. It seemed like you were like lightly blackpilled on it for a little bit. Have you updated your view?

• 40:58Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, well, I mean, a part of why, um, yeah, it's always fun with Hill and Valley, where we can't decide on the date until Congress publishes its schedule, because we are dependent on the elected officials, you know, sort of being there. Otherwise, it's not a very interesting event. Uh, anyways, a part of why it's next week is because Congress is in session, you know, basically next week. And everybody's, you know, sort of flying into town on, you know, sort of Monday, both whether you're Yonson Huang or you're, you know, Senator Banks, both are flying in town on Monday. Um, and next week is when they're both, you know, sort of discussing the reconciliation bill, where they're basically going to be, um, you know, uh, increasing defense budget beyond the continuing resolution, uh, to match some of the, you know, February bills that we talked about, you know, sort of last time around, when we chatted about this, um, as well as starting to talk about next year's basically, you know, sort of defense budget. Um, you know, I think, yeah, there's, you know, sort of clear signaling, you know, sort of from the top,

• 41:41Delian Asparouhov?

  that, um, there's going to be an increase and in particular around the president's top priorities, which were nuclear weapons, modernization, um,

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Golden Dome.

• 41:49Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, hypersonic boost glide vehicles, uh, you know, sort of ship, uh, building, um, and then general reindustrialization. And so, um, there's been talk of that reconciliation bill being 150 to 200, you know, sort of billion, which obviously gets, you know, sort of the total last year bill, you know, pretty close to that, you know, sort of trillion dollar mark. And then obviously, um, you know, sort of next year's budget, you know, sort of being at that trillion dollar mark. And so, um, yeah, there's a bunch of people that are literally on the House Appropriations and Senate, you know, House Armed Services Committee, um, and, you know, Senate, you know, uh, Armed Services Committee, um, that will be there. Um, and I'm sure that they'll be, you know, sort of the, the talk of the town. But it'll, it's always interesting with this stuff where like, um, Hill and Valley, we've heard from some of the elected officials is actually some of the, one of the few times where, um, even the elected officials gather at that level of density. Cause most of the time they're

• 42:33Delian Asparouhov?

  like, you know, even in these like, you know, uh, um, weeks where they're in session, man, it's like staff running around, doing papers, et cetera. They might briefly all go to the floor together, but they barely have a chance to talk on the floor. Like, we've actually heard that like some of the like bills end up getting negotiated, like during the cocktail hour and like reception of Hill and Valley. Because it's just like one of the few times where it's like, oh, we like have the entire House Armed Services Committee here and we're not like in a like session where we're like grilling somebody. We're actually like here like casually chat for a while about like.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  We, we joke, it's like if you, you know, if you can't put a deal on a napkin, like it's probably too complicated an venture. It's like if you can't put a bill or a budget on a napkin, like it's just too complicated. So we're just running the federal government on napkins and it's actually good, right?

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 43:15Delian Asparouhov?

  It's funny, like I, I, the last couple of cocktail receptions, it's so funny where you'd like, oh, it's like everybody's mingling, et cetera. It's like literally all the tech dudes are sitting over there and then like all the elected officials are like scrambling, like trying to figure out like, okay, you know, you know, what is our, you know, sort of stance, et cetera. And then it's so funny cause it's like, it's bipartisan, but also like some of these people fucking hate each other. And so it's just like, you know, last year, like, you know, you got Chuck Schumer giving like the, you know, the opening remarks, but then you've got his like Republican counterparts, like all like rolling their eyes and scoffing and everything. And I'm like, ah, DC, what a wonderful place.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  The swamp, the swamp.

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  This one, baby.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  That's funny. Uh, we're, we're gonna see you in a suit, right?

• 43:53Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, I have finally been given approval by my government relations team that when I go do one-on-one briefings with congressmen, I can now wear a T-shirt with a blazer. But at Hillen Valley, that is a time where if I'm on stage with a senator, I'm definitely wearing a fucking suit and wearing matching shoes.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  What does it take to get a ticket to Hillen Valley these days?

• 44:15Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, I, I'm not, I don't think it's a, you know, sort of perfect process, but you know, between Jacob, Christian and I, we do our best to, you know, to curate the phenomenal, you know, sort of dinner list in daytime. Um, I think with daytime last year, we weren't sure how many people to bring. And then like the, you know, audience wasn't always fully filled. And so this year we maybe swung a little, you know, too hard, too soon. And I think now it's going to be a fucking mob. Um, so anyways, we're, we're learning each year on how to, you know, sort of balance and what the proper process should be. But at this point, we are very at capacity on both. But in future years, you know, just hit up, yeah, daliandefoundersfund.com, [email protected], [email protected]. And, you know, beg for forgiveness or beg for hope and we'll figure out whether or not we can get you in there.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what do you expect the dialogue to be around? Uh, big tech is, is, you know, such a charged word, but at the same time in the sort of AI race, uh, you know, if you ignore Upstart Labs, even though they have billions of dollars, they're still young companies, which means big tech is like critical to national security. Uh, do you expect there to be a conversation around, um, you know, right now you're seeing Facebook, uh, sorry, Meta just being sort of like dragged by the FTC.

• 45:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Kevin Systrom is collaborating.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, collaborating, which is, which is crazy. Uh, and a lot of that feels like rehashing an acquisition that was approved, you know, uh, that went through over a decade ago, uh, feels like such a massive distraction, uh, at a time when we don't want our big, we want our big technology companies, you know, focused on, uh, winning this very important race, right?

• 45:59Delian Asparouhov?

  Yes, but they made such big enemies where it's just like both sides like look, Zuck has done his best to cozy up to Mr. Trump, White House, etc. You know, he's wearing his chains, he's tan, he's, you know, look at the pro again, hanging with Phil Rogan. But also like, you know, the Dems hate him because they feel like, you know, they lost the 2016 election because of him. And, you know, Trump hates him because he feels like he lost the 2020 election because of him. And so, you know, I don't think he made a lot of friends. And, you know, I don't see any politician balking at like the FTC going and dredging that stuff up. And like, you know, even Kevin Systrom has a, you know, sort of bone to pick with him. And so, I definitely, you know, sort of buy into the like, you know, the sort of distraction, you know, sort of narrative. I also kind

• 46:43Delian Asparouhov?

  of buy into the like, yeah, I mean, like, look, like, you know, um, you know, we maybe are in a like, parallel to the Gilded Era, you know, are we in the roaring twenties? Are we in the like, you know, sort of Depression thirties? You know, you know, you know, do these, you know, sort of, uh, what were they? Not oligarchs, what was the name that they used for like the Gilded Era?

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Robber barons?

• 47:01Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. Yeah, the barons, the barons of industry.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Robber barons.

• 47:04Delian Asparouhov?

  The robber barons, exactly. So like, you know, maybe there is a little bit of, you know, sort of robber baron mentality, um, you know, right now with some of these big tech companies. Um, man.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, who's been advocating for monopolies? I mean, it's a crazy idea.

• 47:17Delian Asparouhov?

  I don't know, crazy concept.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  It's almost like someone wrote a book on it and then everyone was like, that's exactly what we should do.

• 47:23Delian Asparouhov?

  We don't believe in the M word over here at Founder's Fund. We want to invest where there's lots of competition and it's really hard to gain market share.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Exactly. Just power law outcomes for whatever reason. It could be any. Um, what do you think about the, uh, the idea that Ramp, uh, should get a government contract? The government should run on Ramp? We were joking about it months ago. It seems to be getting more and more serious. Do you like the idea?

• 47:48Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, you know, look, I think, uh, the current smart card system within the GSA, um, is a pretty antiquated and old school system. Um, you know, Trump and Doge want to root out a bunch of fraud. Um, you know, Ramp has seen, you know, even with some of the, you know, neo-primes, traditional defense contractors, people that work with the government, that even on like the commercial contractor side of things, they're able to root out things that are inefficiencies, etc. Man, can you imagine what happens when they sort of get implemented within the government? So, you know, not a done deal or anything, a lot of work to be done there, but I think it's pretty damn good for the country if we manage to get them in there. And apologies on that note, boys, I gotta run, but great having a little mini Delta V, mini Hill and Valley.

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm looking forward to next week. It's gonna be very great.

• 48:29Delian Asparouhov?

  You guys in DC.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, see you soon. We'll talk soon. Bye. Let's go to an ad. We got AdQuick, out of home advertising made

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Don't know how that ties to AdQuick, but I'm sure they'll love it.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever mode is running in a billboard for your Series A.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Yes, and it's also, it's also not overthinking it.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, it's so easy to get into the, the math of like, oh, I need to be able to

• 48:59John Coogan?

  measure every single performance metric. I mean, AdQuick makes out of home more measurable, but there still is a brand element to running ads. And this is something that you see in every company as they mature. They eventually realize that it is, it is worthwhile to do marketing that is not necessarily perfectly trackable. Case in point, Jensen Wong, who will be at Hill and Valley, dropping off gold plated GB 200 servers to the future AI builders, you know? And, and endearing that community to him. And that's, and a great billboard, it's not can do that. So head over to adquick.com.

• 49:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested to see next week at Hill and Valley, what issues are truly bipartisan, right? Energy, production, right? As societies produce more energy, prosperity tends to go up. You could imagine that being somewhat bipartisan.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was working on a, I was, people have been saying, oh, John, are you gonna run for president? I was thinking about like, if I did, what my political platform would be, because I want to be bipartisan. And I was thinking my platform would be pretty simple. It'd just be GDP up, unemployment down.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  GDP per capita up.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Productivity up and government waste down.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  Hard to argue with any of this.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Exactly. I feel like, I feel like every American could be behind a platform or a presidential candidate who just said, my goal is GDP maximization.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  That seems pretty simple.

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  That seems like something everyone can rally around.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Give Citadel Security right access to the government.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Jane Street. Speaking of Jane Street, the trading revenue has nearly doubled in 2024 to more than $20 billion. Let's hear it for Jane Street, folks. I know a lot of you were worried that they weren't making enough money, but they're back. Paki McCormick says, man, SBF would be so rich if he stayed at Jane Street. Funny take. Very interesting. I'm always interested to see how these details look. The bull all twisted up. Very, very funny.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is going on there? But very fun. On the flip side, the information is reporting that lots of tech companies have had their hiring plans impacted. 19% in the survey said, we cut staff. 33% said, we plan to hire less. 30% said, no impact, but we are evaluating the situation. 13% said, our hiring plans stay the same, and 5% said, we plan to hire more. Now, I wonder how much of that is driven just by the fact that only 5% of venture-backed companies are on the upswing, because it's kind of a long-shot game, and so they're not all scaling up.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  But it is interesting that people could be cutting staff for a variety of reasons. It could be tariff-related, but it also could be AI-related, could be a bunch of different things.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  Or we plan to hire less, could be...

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Or it could just be, if you have the time to fill out an information survey, your business is struggling, you'd be focusing on your business, maybe. I don't know.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  That's possible.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Are the best companies really answering the survey? I don't know.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  I do think these, I do think these types of anonymous surveys are very interesting. I would, it would be great to see them more broken out, right?

• 52:13John Coogan?

  There's a bit of game theory to it, because like, if I get this and I am hiring, I'm going to want to psy-op my competition into firing everyone, so I'm going to respond.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  Say, we cut staff.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Then it becomes a meme. Everyone's like, oh, everyone's got to cut staff. Everyone fires everyone. You're the last person. You have the pick of the litter. You can hire all the best people.

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  You're ramping.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  That's the way you win the game. Tyler asked for a dedicated supplement rundown from Jordy Hayes. I'm looking to outsource my thinking. So what are you taking?

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gave a comment.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Oh, you did respond.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  Let me pull it up.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  There's a nice picture of Tony Soprano in a stained glass window for some reason, I think.

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  Gibbleed, gibbleed.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  It's not quite gibbleed.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  Not gibbleed, but.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  It's more stained glass window, but I like it. It's beautiful.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  My current stack electrolytes.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Electrolytes?

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  Heavily weighted towards magnesium.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Magnesium is an electrolyte.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  So it usually comes in, in various electrolyte products, but taking a lot more magnesium over.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Isn't magnesium a metal? I feel like it's a metal. I don't know. Anyway.

• 53:13Jordi Hays?

  That would be pretty metal. We need a metal sound effect.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, iron's important, right?

• 53:17Jordi Hays?

  It's a mineral.

• 53:18John Coogan?

  Do you take iron at all?

• 53:20Jordi Hays?

  No, most people.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Don't need iron?

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  To my knowledge, have, have too much iron.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  And donating blood is a way to.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Oh, pull the iron out. Interesting. Okay.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Then I'm on creatine, of course. I take zinc and vitamin C in a combination.

• 53:37Jordi Hays?

  Thiamine, which is a B vitamin.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Your body can become thiamine deficient if you use nicotine. I do use nicotine.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  So thiamine to boost it back up.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, exactly. And then taurine.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  That's in Red Bull.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is in Red Bull.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  They were smart to do that. And then I'll cycle peptides from time to time. We, we gotta get on a peptide cycle.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Really? You're on peptides?

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  Not, not the second, but historically I've, I've indulged.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  But those are performance enhancing drugs.

• 54:05Jordi Hays?

  They're not legal for most professional athletes to take.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  You're not natty.

• 54:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't, I wouldn't, I think trying, claiming natty is like claiming you're not doing what it.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  I, I, I agree. I'm very pro abusing steroids.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  No, but we should get on a peptide cycle together.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  I want to be on the Wolverine thing. I want to be on the.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, BPC 157.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to take whatever the LD50 is. Give me just a hair under that.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Give me just a hair under that. Anyway, dudes will buy a billboard in SF on the 101 to announce getting a bed frame. That would actually go viral. You should do that if you're trying to raise money.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  I have acquired a bed frame, folks.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  Somebody should do it. Reach out to AdQuick. They will set you up. But let's bring in public.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  Guys, welcome to the show.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  Guys, I can't, we can't hear you.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  We can't hear you.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  What's that sound?

• 55:03John Coogan?

  What's that sound?

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  What's that sound? It's so loud.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  It's happening. Oh, is that the sound of the Aston Martin F1?

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think so.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  It's happening. Oh, I'm at the box of Miami GP, Las Vegas GP. Oh, is that Public advertising on the Aston Martin F1?

• 55:19Speaker 03

  How did you get my voicemail to run on the show?

• 55:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  It just sounded like the sound effects of like Pacific Rim or something.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got it from that influencer Ashton Hall, the guy who has the viral morning routine. He drops that sound effect, so we had to pull that over to our show. But how are you guys doing?

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you guys.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Can you introduce yourselves a little, a little bit and explain what the news is today?

• 55:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So I'm Yannick, Co-CEO, that's life, other Co-CEO, co-founders of Public. We announced today, as you could tell from your live. We are the new sponsors of the Aston Martin Formula One team.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  Let's hear it.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, we love it.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  So amazing.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Storyed, storied team, storied brand.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're going to write books about this partnership.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Do we get a God for that or no?

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  Get a God for that, right?

• 56:18John Coogan?

  We're also going to pull up some, some video of Aston Martin's driving around, entertain the viewers.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Can you break down, can you break down the process? I imagine, we know this has been in the works for a while, but what was the process? When, you know, and when did you even start thinking about doing something like this?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  Well, so, I mean, let's talk about first why it makes sense for us first at the beginning of the process. So we started six years ago, mainly as a fractional shares platform. We were like the first to do the whole, first trading platform to do fractional shares. Then it obviously became a big thing. But since then, I'd argue that the platform has matured a lot. I think now we have one of the most powerful investing sort of suite of tools in America. Multi-asset investing, multiple account types, embedded, deep AI research. And customers have evolved kind of with us. So now folks are coming in with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in their accounts. Uh, but to be honest, not everyone knows that we're there.

• 57:21Speaker 03

  And so this partnership was a great opportunity for us to sort of raise some awareness around that. And kind of get that message across, obviously to the the right demographic as well.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Can you talk about anatomy of the deal? Uh, how'd you meet the folks over there? Did this all start with, is there an agency involved? I know you guys do a lot of stuff internally. Is it just an email? Did you meet someone at an F1 race? Like, how do you even meet these folks?

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Full founder mode. No way I can tease.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 57:49Leif Abraham?

  No, we have a, we have a, we have a best of the cap table. Uh, that happens to be involved with the team as well. And so through that, we got introduced to them. And this is also a deal where um, the Aston Martin actually took part equity in public as well. Um, and it's, you know, kind of like, I think it's the first time they've really done this. And uh, and so a little bit of like experiment from them as well. Uh, like cool thing for them as well. And what was interesting is that the way they also think about it is that, you know, they have a platform, they have, you know, also sponsors that pay them, you know,

• 58:29Leif Abraham?

  ridiculous amounts of money and whatnot. And so like, they don't necessarily like need another billion bucks from a, from a, from another startup or something. But they like the idea of finding opportunities that they feel they understand themselves as well. In our case, like Robb's Transfer, their audience being the type of audience that has money to invest. Um, US markets being one of the fastest growing markets for Formula One, generally speaking, it's the only country with three races. And so on. And uh, and so for them, the viewers focus and the focus of the audience that we have was like a good match. And so that's why, you know, for them, we'll say, uh, also just say, going to have, um, to, to, you know, be a little bit closer involved and actually like join the cap table as well.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  How do you guys think about international, long-term? Do you see a world in the future where you have millions of users outside of the country? I know US has obviously been the focus to date.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely, but the way that starts is we actually launched an app called Alpha, which is a little bit of a spin out of our AI product. Launched that in international markets late last year as a separate kind of product. So that's all live and growing well in a bunch of European markets and a few other places around the world. And so that's basically like Apple stocks with AI powers. That's how you think of it. You literally come in, you take a photo of your watch list, wherever you have it, and the AI, the auto follows everything and tells you why things are moving in real time, not just they're moving and by how much. And then you can directly ask questions and do research and all that stuff. So that's like, I would say, the first step in our international strategy in building that audience sort of abroad. And then obviously, as you can imagine, investing services could come later

• 1:00:15Speaker 03

  because that's the aspect that has a regulatory component to it, which takes a while.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Can you talk about how you actually envision the partnership manifesting in advertisements? Obviously, like logo on the car, but there are 21 races. There are so many different places to put logos, integrate, throw, have a box, have a party, have an after show, pre-show, digital. There's so many different things that can package up into these actual partnerships. What did that process look like and where did you land?

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to call out, I want to see Alonso, you know, executing trades, you know, during a pit lane.

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  It's that fast, by the way, that you can actually totally.

• 1:01:04Leif Abraham?

  But yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's always, whenever you do these deals, there's this massive laundry list of stuff that you have access to and can do and whatnot, right? That falls into paddock club passes at the events. And that falls into like, you know, we will have the logo and the halo and the logo tiny on the side of the car as well. But also doing the US races, for example, and things like that. But one specific thing that we thought about is, um, in our space of like, kind of like new broker investing apps, um, things like referral have been this like mainstream thing of get a free fractional stock and so on. And as we move more out market, the less that stuff worked. Because if you have a little bit of money, let's be honest, you don't really give a shit about five bucks on free stock.

• 1:01:48Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Leif Abraham?

  And, um, and so for us, it's a sense of like, okay, what do people that, you know, have a little money care about? And it's most case experiences you might not say have access to otherwise. Um, and, and so the sense of like, this partnership is like one of the first ways for us to have the ability to give exclusive experiences to our customers through, you know, certain giveaways in the app, through referral in the app and so on, to for example, you know, win things like access to the paddock, meeting rates with drivers and all that kind of stuff, right? And in the future, obviously, like we will figure out what are other ways to execute on that strategy as well. But the sense of that, like, what does referral for a more affluent audience actually look like? And for us, much more things like experiences.

• 1:02:33Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Leif Abraham?

  But then specifically also, just to finish the rant quick, is, um, um, like, we're like basically like starting today, you can actually, um, in the app, win access to the paddock in the Vegas race later this year. And it's actually find, like, if you find the three little F1 cars in the app, that's just like hidden in different places in the app, and you find all three of them, then you essentially enter, you know.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  And they're not easy to find, by the way, either. So it's not like a. It's not like a thing that everybody will double. Yeah.

• 1:03:05Leif Abraham?

  I'm still someone to tweet out where they are.

• 1:03:07Speaker 03

  But it's also, of course.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna give the app to my three year old and say, you got, you got 14 hours.

• 1:03:15Speaker 03

  Go, go. Make sure to load it with a couple hundred keys before you do it.

• 1:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can do a little day trading.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how, how do you think about the, the evolution of the way brands integrate with F1? Obviously, Red Bull doesn't make cars, or I guess they made that one car once, but in general, they don't make cars, but they're a huge F1 sponsor with the whole team. Haas Automation's kind of in a similar, similar boat, but then Aston Martin's more of a car brand. How do you think that that's evolved and, and is there a world where we see a public.com F1 team at some point?

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Uh, well, not in the next couple of years.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Because now we have this deal. No, look, I, I think what's interesting about the Formula One is it is the only sport that I can really think of that has scale and has this sort of thing where whenever Formula One comes into town, it's the whole show, right?

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:14Speaker 03

  It's a Super Bowl event 20 times in a year, basically, right? Because like, yeah, you go to a Premier League match, two hours, you knock down a couple of pints, it's over and you go about, about your day. This is like the whole weekend.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:04:26Speaker 03

  The circus comes into town, they talk about, there's a lot of drivers, why, obviously. And so therefore it just lends itself very well to like a very intense focus type of exposure.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 03

  Which I think is really great. And I think you've seen that in around the Super Bowl and a few other places, but in the Formula One, it just kind of happens many, many times throughout the, the course of a year. And I think that's what makes it interesting for B2B companies as well as for consumer companies, actually.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did, uh, did drive to survive factor into your calculations? I imagine there will be public.com branding that makes it into drive to survive just by nature of being on the car.

• 1:05:03Leif Abraham?

  Yeah, but that's the funny thing. It's like, so with, uh, with Formula One, you either sponsor a team or you sponsor, you know, a race slash the league itself. And these are two separate things, right?

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Leif Abraham?

  And, um, and drive to survive is more with the, uh, with the league itself and so the trick really for folks like us is.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  What can you do that has the chance to make it into the storyline of the show? Alright, so like, you know, what kind of beef can we create with, I don't know, a training app that, you know, sponsors of a team or something or like, you know, like, but like, what can it drop maybe part of essentially? So you can have the idea of something sharp.

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'd love, we'd love to, we'd love to help. No, but I, I mean, I can imagine, you know, just naturally the, the, you'll get placement in the show just as Alonso and Lance have their moments in the show, right? So it's very natural.

• 1:06:02Speaker 03

  But, but generally you always have a multiplier thing. There's a great Formula One game, right? Lego right now has a Formula One kind of thing going on. And so there's always kind of these, these multipliers kind of happening in and around the sport.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about other multipliers, uh, more on like a geo-location basis? I mean, I'm sure you could run geo-fenced ads in Vegas that weekend by billboards. Like, what are you thinking to get the most squeeze out of, uh, the event when it kind of comes together?

• 1:06:32Speaker 03

  I mean, there's a long, like, like there's a long list of stuff you can do. Uh, it's a multi-year deal, so we also have a little bit. It's starting in the Miami race, um, in a couple of weeks. So that will be the first one. We've kicked off now this essentially Scamager hunt in the app, uh, where you can get access to Vegas, um, paddock, et cetera, by finding these kind of cars around the app. And so I think there's a lot of stuff we can experiment with. I think relative to, you know, we're not quite as big as Ramco yet. Uh, they still have us a little bit on the market cap kind of side. And so, uh, but you know, but, but we might be one of the more nimble, uh, folks that can get a little bit more creative.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  And so I would say, e- e- expect to see a, a bunch more, uh, kind of stunt.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how did, uh, Lawrence Stroll's kind of leadership factor into, into the decision? Like he's obviously has a, you know, like running the team, but then simultaneously like, you know, has the manufacturer side too with Aston Martin. He's like, Seems like extremely convicted to winning and making a statement and you know, as a car enthusiast like I've watched what Aston is doing, again, really, really committed to winning. They've like massively improved their, did that give you guys extra confidence in going and making a partnership, knowing that, hey, the team by itself is not, when you look at other teams like Haas and things like that, who's had a sort of history of

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  economic challenges, that's not exactly, you know, the team that you want to attach yourself to, even though they have.

• 1:08:10Leif Abraham?

  But also, like generally speaking, there's a lot of like change happening in F1 right now, right? You have a bunch of mixed up, some drivers that switch teams, you have, you know, behind the scenes, you know, the, you know, one of the guys who, you know, built the engines, the engineers from the Red Bull team was hired now as Aston Martin and so on. And so there's like, right now, there's a lot of change happening and it's not just, you know, seeing Verstappen win every time and, you know, having like the joke of just like putting a piece of tape on your TV so the race becomes more fun to

• 1:08:50Leif Abraham?

  watch. Like over his name, so. And, you know, it's like, there's so much change happening right now. And I think that is why I think this season and the next season and the win after, I think it'll be super exciting, right? There's a new US team coming in with Cadillac next year, there's a movie coming out in June or July this year. And so there's just like a lot happening around it, you know, which is quite awesome.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  But I think you're totally right. Like the, where Aston Martin sits right now is kind of perfect for us, right? Because it's not like, it's, it's, it's, it's a team that is still a little bit on the up and up, but I think will be very competitive over the next couple of years. Yeah.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  You're already, if you're already wearing dark green, are we going to see you guys driving around in some Aston Martin street cars? Do you have any favorite picks or historical Aston Martins that you've been thinking about? Are you a James Bond fan?

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  James Bond's car, right? They literally say something in one of the Aston Martin movies, "From royalty to double agents," you know, in between. And so obviously now in New York City, doesn't make a ton of sense to be driving on the DB.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  No, no, in New York, you need to get the Valkyrie, clearly.

• 1:10:05Leif Abraham?

  Exactly.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  The roads are a little bumpy. I'm sure the, you know, the clearance on that thing isn't great, but it is street legal, so why not be whipping around Fifth Avenue?

• 1:10:15Jordi Hays?

  You need to basically change your, yeah, you probably need to change your tires like every 200 miles or something like that. But I'm curious, did you guys get any messages this morning from friends back in Europe? Like, hey, I saw the news. Like, that's, that's awesome. You know, then you're like, hey, guys, we've been a billion dollar, you know, company for a while. Like, you know, this is like, you know, the first time. Like, we were, we were in like Business Insider, like, two weeks ago, and, and some people were messaging John and I like, oh, congratulations. And we're like, I think we get more views than Business Insider. But thank you. I can imagine.

• 1:10:53Leif Abraham?

  A lot of, a lot of people asked us for tickets, that's for sure.

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys are gonna be extra.

• 1:10:58Speaker 03

  All the people that had like a 25K angel investment, they're now coming like, so.

• 1:11:02Jordi Hays?

  They're like, so I'll be in the paddock, right?

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can get me tickets to the whole season, right? Like, what does that cost? A quarter million?

• 1:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm extremely excited. I'm gonna be even more excited to watch, have another reason to, you know, turn it on at like 4am or whatever, Pacific, whenever, you know, the international races happen. And we, we should be signing a lease for our new studio. And we're gonna have a lot more space, so we should figure out how to get a car in the background, one way or another.

• 1:11:33Leif Abraham?

  You'd be surprised how cheap it actually is.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. I remember, I remember our conversation.

• 1:11:39Leif Abraham?

  I'm not sure if I'm allowed to like say these numbers on here, but it is actually not that bad.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cheaper than a real, you know, a regular Aston Martin.

• 1:11:49Leif Abraham?

  I mean, you won't drive. It doesn't have an engine or anything. But like, showpieces, and you're like, find an auto lobby or something sometimes, you know?

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  No, I want the, I want it like on, like on the back, on the back wall of the studio.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  I mean, I went and toured Red Bull's headquarters in Santa Monica a couple of years ago, and they had the full F1 car there on the halfpipe, and it just made the vibe in the office like fantastic. And so, yeah, I'd highly recommend. Getting an F1 car. Everyone should really. It's part of the ideal three car garage. You know, you need the family hauler. You need the weekender and you need the F1 car, of course. Why doesn't everyone just do this?

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I don't know why we're the first to think of this.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations and congrats to the whole team. It's gonna be, you know, very excited for Miami and everything to come.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  Awesome.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  We will see you soon.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Great to see you. Later.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  We're getting an F1 car, folks.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  We need to. Oh, I think we should daily it, you know, just, you know, it's gonna be a little rough, gonna be a little bumpy. But you pull up in an F1 car, you pull up with a fantastic Patek Philippe on your wrist, like the guy in that picture that you picked up on.

• 1:13:05Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  Bezel, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source any watch on the planet. You don't want to be, get caught on race weekend with a bare wrist.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  That's, that's unacceptable.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  It's, it's laughable. You can't.

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  RM would be a good option for race weekend.

• 1:13:23John Coogan?

  It is a racing machine on the wrist. Yeah, we've been looking at some RM's.

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  And I can see Bezel going over and, and, and, you know, maybe, you know, getting their own team at some point.

• 1:13:32John Coogan?

  I would love that.

• 1:13:33Jordi Hays?

  With the trajectory that they're on.

• 1:13:34John Coogan?

  I would love that. Anyway, our next guest is in the studio. Let's bring him in. We got Alfred from Listen Labs announcing, and we got his co-founder.

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  Boom. And they got the jackets. They're not, they're not quite.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Color coordinated. I love it. Dress it up for the show. We always appreciate when people dress up when they coordinate their outfits. How you guys doing?

• 1:13:56Speaker 06

  Doing well, yeah. Exciting.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Uh, can you give us a little overview of the, the history of the company? Introduce yourselves. Tell us about the round. Give us the basics.

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  For sure. So Listen is an AI customer researcher that can find and interview thousands of users and tell you what they want. And today we're, or yesterday we announced our Series A and 27 million in total risk led by Sequoia, Conviction and Pair. And yeah, we work with some amazing customers like Microsoft, Canva and Chubbies. And the core concept of what we do is like.

• 1:14:30Speaker 06

  Every company wants to be customer obsessed. So imagine you wanted to take that to the most like fullest extent. And that's basically you would talk to every customer you could. And you talk to them, try to understand exactly who they are and what they think about. And you'd find a way to synthesize all of those conversations into a clear understanding of their behavior. And you wouldn't do this just once, you do it all the time. Every time you make a change to your product or service or marketing. And that's what we do.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Cool, I can imagine a ton of different ways to get customer insights out of all the data. Just using Microsoft as an example, like there's probably one million tickets in some database. That's just a bunch of text that hasn't been processed. You, you know, run an L L M over that, that makes sense. It sounds like you're doing something more advanced where you're actually calling people up. Maybe there's a screen recording and interaction and some questions back and forth. Is that all A I driven? Walk me through the case study, I guess, with Microsoft or anyone else you want to chat about.

• 1:15:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. So it's an A I that can have a one on one conversation. And then you can have hundreds of those conversations in parallel. And what we found is that kind of you have to reach enough people to really understand what people want. So if you speak to ten, ten of them, most of them won't have much interesting things to say. And the second thing is that the synthesis, if you have like hundreds of conversations, finding the signal over the noise is, you know, A I is amazing, is amazing at that.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:55Speaker 06

  And, and you know, A I is also the ultimate listener. It's more empathetic than than myself. And as a case study, like one of my favorite ones is Chubbies. So they recently launched a new product based on learnings that they made from Listen that is growing really, really fast. And it's a little bit weird, but it was an A I or it was interviewing kids using Listen.

• 1:16:23John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:16:24Speaker 06

  And they were much more honest to our A I versus like speaking to a stranger.

• 1:16:31Speaker 07

  And it enabled them to learn a lot about like how to make their shorts more comfortable. And basically created a new product with a new liner in the shorts that just felt much better for the kids. And now that product is growing really fast.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  Do you believe there's sort of a customer love flywheel in a sense where the more someone likes a product, the more inclined they are to want to talk about how to make it better. And as part of what you guys are doing, helping to like accelerate that where a product could have some customers, but it's hard to really get scaled feedback because nobody really loves the product enough. Like I get emails all the time. I'll try a SaaS product and I'll churn. And then they'll reach out to me being like, hey, you know, I, you know, can we get feedback? And usually I'm not super inclined to provide feedback. Sometimes I do if I feel like it's just off. But how do you think about sort of like building that sort of customer feedback flywheel?

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  And converting it into customer love?

• 1:17:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think what is interesting is the, you know, we have this. At bigger companies, right, what you actually, you know, you have a lot of feedback, as you said before, but actually talking to real customers is actually pretty complex, right? It's at the bigger companies, they typically outsource it to to external agencies because there's a lot of hoops they have to go through. And, you know, they touch like a hundred K and then they schedule like 20 interviews and do that. And, you know, what we enable them to do is instead of using using these external agencies, they can just use us, right? It's cheaper, it's faster, it's better because you can reach way more people.

• 1:18:21Speaker 07

  And yeah, I think that's an exciting opportunity also for like in general for, you know, AI founders to, you know, if you can replace one of those like external, you know.

• 1:18:34Speaker 06

  External partners.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:36Speaker 06

  Basically, you just flip a switch and you sell an outcome instead of just the software.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  When you talk to, when you talk to maybe bigger, older companies, are you surprised at how they sometimes don't have a process in place to talk to customers? Like, I feel like it's part of Silicon Valley, like ethos, lore, you know, PG is just sort of like banging, you know, founders over the head, saying like, talk to your customers, talk to your customers. And so it's a part of the culture here, but I imagine there's some companies that you may be in a sales process with that don't have any infrastructure or very little infrastructure in place relative to how sort of like scaled they are.

• 1:19:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of the products and services out there are kind of, they suck, you know, and it's, it's, it's so often that you use a product and you're thinking like, okay, what were they even thinking? Like, clearly they're not keeping us in mind here. And for some of these large companies, you know, they do want to invest in talking to users, but it's just so complex because there's a lot of bureaucracy even to reach out to a user. You kind of have to go through legal and it becomes too complicated. And that's why they have to use these consulting firms to kind of go through it. And but we've been able to kind of streamline that process.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Can you talk about how these interviews happen today and how they'll evolve? I can imagine chatbot interaction to begin with, but at the, like, the, the voice interfaces are pretty close, virtual avatars are getting pretty close. What's the product like today? Where do you see it going?

• 1:20:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we, for any, we actually like started a company by virtue of.

• 1:20:27Speaker 06

  You know, trying to solve the problem for ourselves and and we had this AI consumer app that had twenty thousand downloads in one day and it really blew up out of nowhere. We're running with expensive GPUs, spending like a thousand dollars per hour. And it was our personal credit cards attached and like the users were turning really fast. And so we're like, okay, how do we actually solve this problem? And then we we built a very simple prototype. It was a chatbot and that could just talk to all the users and summarize what they wanted. And we found things that were really useful, like which template should we add? How should we fix our onboarding?

• 1:21:06Speaker 06

  And now we have built out this kind of entire stack where it's essentially three steps. It's first interviewing and we do that over video. And have like the video understanding, both of the emotional experience and what they do on the screen. And then it's finding the people. So we actually allow you to kind of find all the customers through a database of millions of users. And then, of course, analysis and the ceiling for analysis is really high. You can hire McKinsey and they'll charge you a million bucks to give a PowerPoint deck. And yeah, we're we're working on that.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  That makes a ton of sense. How how many, what are some kind of edge cases or companies that you you would expect to start using Listen? That that maybe are non-traditional like I my immediate thought is that we should throw up like, you know, basically a number that you can just call and give feedback on the show. Uh, which, you know, we were live fifteen hours a week, so it's hard to find time for phone calls. But it would be awesome if people could call in and be like, hey, like, talk more about this. Or, you know, uh, things like that. But um, how uh, yeah, do you do you see this type of um, user research expanding into industries that maybe just aren't customers of these different consulting firms today? Just because of the the costs?

• 1:22:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. I think there's a huge new market you can open up for, you know, smaller companies or companies that couldn't traditionally afford or couldn't even honestly wait for 12 weeks until you get like this report back.

• 1:22:39Speaker 07

  I think that's very exciting. But if you take a step back and think about, you know, what makes a great company? And you can even go back to Y C of, you know, what they think is like, you mentioned it before, right? Write code and talk to, talk to users and, you know, that's really the core. But those two parts, you know, we have the writing the code, which now AI agents are doing more and more, you know, it's getting easier to, to build things. So what becomes more important is actually building the right thing and kind of having the feedback, talking to the customers. So that's what we're building. And, you know, i- it's almost scary, but maybe in the future, that's, that's what we're gonna do. Like, that's maybe the last thing that humans will do, like kind of telling the AI what to do, what to build, being the tastemakers. Which podcast to listen to?

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, just wired directly into Cursor Devon and then it just takes that feedback and immediately implements the change and.

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  No, it is, it is an interesting scenario to think about where, where Listen is directly integrated into the

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Agent.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Into the basically developer tools where somebody can say like, hey, I want a feature to do this. And then it just immediately, you know, gets built. So I'm sure you guys are thinking about something like that.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  On the, on the post-interview analysis side, I can imagine that AI is very good at aggregating sentiment and tagging things. Essentially creating like the top 10 requests, the word clouds. But have you found L L Ms or any of the modern AI tooling being useful and finding like the diamonds in the, in the rough? Like, everyone's telling you to build a faster horse. There's one person who's clocked it and says, no, you gotta go into the automobile for your product. And, and you're able to dig that out with modern technology.

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we have like a module that finds surprising statements and outliers sentiment. And I think there's also interesting things around kind of building a profile of understanding who this user is and if they give good advice or not. And we actually have like a quality score of each participant. So you should listen to all feedback. And as we've done more interviews, we've done now more than 300,000. We can kind of build a elite set of tastemakers essentially that you can reach out to that tend to give like great advice.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How did the round, how did the round come together? Obviously got basically the who's who of Venture in. Was anything surprising? Was it, you know, did you guys go out to run a process or did people come to you?

• 1:25:19Speaker 06

  Well, it's a very competitive fundraising market for the VCs today. But you know, we're very lucky to work with exceptional partners. And Brian Schreier at Sequoia, he also led the first investment in Qualtrics, which is the biggest outcome in the customer feedback world. And then it's amazing working with Mike Vernal at Conviction,

• 1:25:47Speaker 06

  who's done, yeah, the best deals.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  When Listen has as big an outcome as Qualtrics, what pro sports team are you guys gonna buy?

• 1:25:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I actually spoke to, I'm from Sweden. I spoke to Ryan Smith at Qualtrics and the first thing he said like, oh yeah, you, I just bought a hockey team. You guys, you guys love hockey, right?

• 1:26:11Speaker 06

  I think table tennis.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Table tennis, table tennis.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  What is the most popular sport in Sweden right now?

• 1:26:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, maybe chess boxing, no, table tennis, I don't know.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Table tennis?

• 1:26:23Speaker 06

  It is very popular. We went, we almost won Olympics. China.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, that's rough.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  It happens.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  It happens.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, guys. Well, congratulations. Very exciting and let us know when we, when it's ready for podcasting.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll roll it out for sure.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  We'll roll it out. Take care.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:26:44Speaker 06

  Bye.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  And we got an ad for 8Sleep. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn. Get a Pod4Ultra. They got a 30-night free trial, a five-year warranty, free returns, free shipping. Go check it out. Oh, 100. I know that's not even close.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  100. I don't know how this is possible. I think Autopilot was doing the work. My little one was throwing up last night. But so, credit to my wife. Real MVP for getting her taken care of. But who we got next?

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  We got Eric from Freeform coming into the studio.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Talking about manufacturing, going back into hard tech. Thursday tends to be a little bit leaning heavy on the hard tech. Every once in a while, we got Dalian kicking it off and then we try and bring in some robotics, some manufacturing founders. Always an interesting discussion to have with those folks.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  We are talking to Formic as well. They're doing robotics. And I'm sure we'll talk to many more, although we've hit a ton of the companies at this point. When you do 20 interviews a week, you can you can create a market map pretty quickly. You can churn through.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  We are the market map.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  We are the market map.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  America is our market map.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Well, let's bring him in. Eric, how you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 1:28:13Speaker 08

  I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for thanks for hopping on. Would you mind kicking us off with a little introduction on yourself and the company?

• 1:28:21Speaker 08

  Absolutely. So Eric Pylech, CEO, founder of Freeform. We do, you know, really, we're bringing AI to metal 3D printing. My background was early employee at SpaceX, worked there for over 10 years. I ran the Merlin engine program for Falcon 9 and the Raptor program for Starship and kind of saw the potential of 3D printing, metal 3D printing firsthand and then left to go and actually drive it into, you know, industrial, commercial use.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  So I'm assuming you're a key player in transitioning the sort of engine from this like, you know, crazy blob into this like, we'll try to pull the image up on the screen. Was 3D, I imagine, was 3D printing, you know, a part of how you guys were iterating? Or were you not able to leverage the tech that you guys have now?

• 1:29:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, it was. I think the thing that I saw was the enabling, you know, potential of 3D printing, but how slow and crappy it was, to be honest. Like, we were doing things with Raptor that, you know, we were inventing, we were, you know, innovating in the rocket space for the first time in decades, truly. People think rockets are super complicated, but really, the technology hasn't changed much in a long time. Then this manufacturing technology comes along that allows you to control physics in a different way. I mean, true, if you look at the way you make metal things, there really, there haven't been these new disruptive technologies in a very, really, long time. So, you know, printing enabled Raptor, which I would argue is the

• 1:30:01Speaker 08

  most, one of the most amazing and high-performance rocket engines ever in the history of humanity.

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about how metal 3D printing actually works? I think I'm familiar with like, kind of consumer level 3D printing, and that makes sense to me. You melt some filament, and it's basically melted plastic through a metal nozzle. If you're melting metal, doesn't that melt the nozzle? How does this all work?

• 1:30:26Speaker 08

  So, we use lasers to melt metal powder layer by layer.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:32Speaker 08

  And so you think of it, you're just slowly building, you know, layer upon layer upon layer of, you put a layer of metal powder out and use a laser to kind of selectively melt where you want, and then do that again and again and again.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  And then, uh, how do you think about the decision to, uh, manufacture a part using subtractive manufacturing versus additive manufacturing? I'm sure, you know, you're obviously very bullish on 3D printing, but there must be limits and things that you say, "Hey, we're not just gonna go 3D print a whole bunch of like rebar because we can just mold that or something." I don't know.

• 1:31:05Speaker 08

  No, that's exactly right. I mean, I think one of the things that sets Freeform apart from, I think really every other 3D printing, metal printing company out there is we aren't developing the technology because we think it's cool. You know, we're not pushing for 3D printing because, you know, it's cool. We don't print pencil holder, you know, bottle openers, pens and pencils. We just don't do that stuff because frankly, like people don't care. The, to get to your question specifically, it's like, what is it actually good at? What is the value proposition of the technology? And it's truthfully today, amazing for very complex geometries, very complicated things. And we're very candid with customers about should you machine it, you know, subtractively make it or should you print it?

• 1:31:48Speaker 08

  You know, what we're doing is enabling, um, the, the next, you know, the, we've built the fastest, highest volume metal printing platform on the planet. We have it here in Hawthorne. We're about a quarter mile from SpaceX. You know, I would then say we, we, you know, our primary customers are some of the, you know, most exciting and innovative aerospace and defense companies out there.

• 1:32:11Speaker 08

  Without naming any specific ones.

• 1:32:14Speaker 08

  And, you know, we're right down the street and, you know, our, our take on it was to commercialize the technology. We need to be able to do high volume, you know, and then by doing high volume, then we can bring the price down, you know? And, and that was the thesis actually was gotta do a lot of volume and bring the price down.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about, uh, your business model? Are you selling the finished product or are you selling the machine? Are you thinking about that in kind of different stages? Cause I imagine in the future. Like, and customer would just have one of your devices and they could operate it themselves? Is that where you're going?

• 1:32:48Speaker 08

  Yeah. No, so that's a great question. The business model is we just provide turnkey parts. So we actually handle everything. We print them if it needs post machining, it needs holes reamed, it needs surfaces turned. We do all of that in-house. All the metrology, you know, we'll do CMM inspections, high-res 3D scanning, anything the customer needs. We, you know, the whole thing, the industry is really complicated and fractured. And so when we went out, you know, six, seven years ago and started figuring out, hey, what is the right business model in the space? I kept my head, my brain kept going back to, and by the way, I worked directly with Elon for my entire career at SpaceX. So this first principles kind of thinking that everybody says they do.

• 1:33:32Speaker 08

  I feel like I was indoctrinated in the actual school of it, you know, by him. You know, but I kept thinking like, man, you know, we're melting stuff with a laser and it, you know, we care about single-digit microns of, of precision. This isn't, you know, traditional metal manufacturing. Like this isn't a CNC machine. So customers, you know, why are they so unhappy with the space? And when they buy a machine, why are they disappointed? Because they don't know how to use it. It's, so it's more akin to like semiconductor fabrication than like subtractive, you know, metal manufacturing. So we said, we need to own all of it, then to answer the question.

• 1:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What it is, you don't have to go into super explicit detail, but I'm curious how you think about, you know, margins. A lot of these, you know, traditional software VCs have, have sort of been chirping on X over the last couple of years. Hey, you're putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these manufacturing businesses, assuming they're going to have, you know, software margins. And that, that hasn't been the case historically. Are you guys getting so efficient that, that you can achieve kind of greater margin profiles? Or is it just about sort of scale?

• 1:34:43Speaker 08

  Absolutely. I mean, that's exactly where we're at today. Our margins are fantastic. And the technology is fundamentally new and enabling, which means, you know, I get that question a lot. It's like, well, even if you can charge higher margins now, isn't this a race to the bottom? The answer is, you know, that is true over a long time scale for any industry, right? Anything that gets commoditized over fifty or a hundred years and highly optimized, it ultimately becomes a race to the bottom. The question is how long, and the technology that we've developed and are the capabilities that we have are enabling new products, new, they're enabling innovation in industries that are, you know, we're providing the tools that people are truly like innovating on the design and

• 1:35:27Speaker 08

  in integration fronts, so, and performance. And so, you know, I think as long as we continue to stay at the front of that and the technology is getting better every day, when I say, you know, I don't love to use AI buzzwords, but we, that is what we're doing. We're bringing like AI to 3D printing such that the next part coming off the platform is even better than the last one. And, and so, you know, because of that, and the process is constantly getting better and we're coming up with new materials and new features and new functionality, then, you know, I think I can make the argument that the margins will stay high for a very long time. And especially when you start looking at the places where, you know,

• 1:36:10Speaker 08

  we've developed technology that fundamentally unlocks the ability to develop new materials. You know, so now we own the material, we have the technology to actually leverage it, and then it enables something important. You know, maybe in the semiconductor space or in the, you know, the rocket space or even the automotive space.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, in that, in that new materials, I mean, I've talked to some people who do the subtractive manufacturing with CNC and there's like different types of aluminum, different alloys, like, is that something you're already? Uh, doing and do you just handle that for your customer? Are you testing different uh like alloys? Is that how you think about that or or what do you mean when you mean new materials?

• 1:36:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, our business model today is not yet the truly development of new materials.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:55Speaker 08

  Um, that it's we've done some of that. We work with a another very large, well-known customer that I would say is in the general broad family of customers that, you know, we won't mention specifically.

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:08Speaker 08

  That um we've been working with them on development of some new alloys that enable, you know, I think um some pretty cool things for them. And uh but that's like not that's more of a one-off today. It's it's the the reason why they're interested in working with us on this is because we've developed the sensing and compute platform and have the the data sets and the the sensors to actually uh engineer and develop the materials at the metallurgical level.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:37:35Speaker 08

  That no other printing company has. I mean, you know, Freeform is uh really it's it's in the 3D printing space, you know, we're we're like SpaceX, you know, the the the the mindset of um of those organizations and talent of those organizations, you know, the metal manufacturing market has generally been viewed as this kind of like stagnant, dimly lit, rusty, you know, oily machine shop. Um, so we had to go out and find, you know, like rocket scientists to develop the technology, you know, to be able to do this, you know, and that's one of the reasons why like Nvidia made a a substantial investment in us recently is they saw what we were doing on the compute and data side and they want to be a part of it.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  What are the different vectors of optimization in metallurgy? I imagine cost and weight and strength are important in space, but what like is electrical conductivity important? Like what else is important uh to think about when you're thinking about the material, either that you're selecting or eventually uh kind of building from first principles?

• 1:38:34Speaker 08

  Absolutely. It depends on the application, you know, uh, it, uh, uh, for, for example, like, uh, heat exchangers, you know, metal printing is very good today, even at high cost, i- if for conventional, like other shops, or, or if you're buying a conventional machine, um, it's very good at very, very complicated geometries that you either can't make any other way, or they're, you know, prohibitively expensive or difficult to make any other way. And those do generally fall in a couple of categories. They're like fluid components, or heat exchangers, things that, you know, thermal, uh, devices. Um, and so in, in an application like that, you care a lot about, you know, the thermal performance of the material. In other cases, you might be putting parts inside a gas turbine engine. This is another typical application for 3D

• 1:39:19Speaker 08

  printed parts. And in that case, you want something that's like strong when it gets hot, you know? Um, so there are, i- it really does depend on, you know, the application. And I think the, the thing for us is we actually have the platform and the feedback and the analytics to be able to close the loop on whatever the p- p- particular, you know, uh, uh, feature of the material or, or application that you need.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, I mean, you mentioned, uh, putting a 3D printed part in a gas turbine engine. We've been hearing that, uh, China's been having a lot of trouble manufacturing planes to compete with Boeing.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Specifically jet engines.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Why is a jet engine so hard? Can you just 3D print it at some point? I mean, I imagine that like China is capable of getting...

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why is it so hard, Eric? Why did it take you 10 years to figure out how to do it?

• 1:40:05Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  Can't you just like put this, like scan the 747 and then print the 747? It's a, it's a copy machine. That's what you're making, right?

• 1:40:13Speaker 08

  Exactly. Exactly. Someday, yes. That, I mean, you know, the, the vision for us at Freeform has always been, um, to take the, you know, the complexity out of it and to provide a, you know, a, a lights out, a truly, everybody says automated factories, you know, to provide a lights out factory that is truly automated. The unique thing about metal printing is this is actually possible. CNC machining and other subtractive methods that were, there's no way to do, to truly do that. That um there's just there there there just today, there is not.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 08

  Um, printing, we're already entirely digital. It's like, take a digital file, the machine doesn't care what you're printing, it just prints it. You know, and then automating the rest of that. And then you mentioned China. So obviously, the joke about why are gas turbines hard, you know? I I don't think gas turbines are hard. I think rocket engines are harder. Um, gas turbines, you know, are easier in a lot of ways. Um, but the the, you know, China is a good example where, you know, I get quite frustrated that, you know, we we are, we are a manufacturing technology company that is developing capability that is not only gonna affect and improve the lives of of people uh in general, but also is critically important to our national security as a country. Um, and you know, China is investing in the 3D printing space.

• 1:41:32Speaker 08

  Um, they are building, you know, huge factories full of these conventional machines. They don't have our technology. They don't have the ability to, you know, they can go make 100 laser, whatever number laser machines. Those parts are still junk. Um, and you know, we are developing this in the US for the US. Uh, we obviously do quite a bit of defense work and it does get frustrating. You mentioned China and it's like, I had to put my plug in of, you know, it's frustrating that I do feel companies like ours, there was a question earlier about software margins and businesses and VC stuff. You know, yeah, we're not a software business, but the interesting thing about Freeform is it's where the bits and the atoms um are combined, which I think makes us even more interesting.

• 1:42:15Speaker 08

  You know, you want your 5,000x, 10,000x, 20,000x company. You get it at a company like this at at Freeform, you know, you're not gonna get that.

• 1:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about some of the stress of of working with space companies? I imagine like, you know, you guys aren't doing launches yourselves anymore. You're probably more relaxed than you were when you were at SpaceX. But at the same time, I'm sure you get, you know, a a call or an email now and then being like, hey, we need this by, you know, uh, Sunday night at this, you know, specific time because we're going to space. Uh, you know, what what's it like, kind of like working, you know, with with end customers around that?

• 1:42:52Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Jordi Hays?

  Type of thing.

• 1:42:53Speaker 08

  No, that's also a great question. Uh, the, you know, truthfully, I'm probably more stressed now than I was when I was sitting face to face with Elon three times a week. Um, because because I feel like the the scope of what I focus on today is um.

• 1:43:14Speaker 08

  I don't know. Actually, I can't, I don't, the scope of what I focused on there was like, I kinda knew, you know, where I was. Here, it's like all over the, you know, top to bottom, you know, everything kind of ultimately falls on me, uh, in some capacity. The, but it is stressful. We get this with exactly what you just said all the time. You know, we get a call from customer X that says, uh, hey, guess what? We tried to get these somewhere else. This supplier let us down, you know? Can you guys hook us up and get these done by Sunday? Um, that can definitely be stressful. I think also, you know, the nature of a startup, especially one with as many moving parts as we have. You know, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a company that's more vertically integrated than us, truly,

• 1:43:58Speaker 08

  and does as much as we do in-house. You know, with such a small number of people actually today still. Yeah. Uh, you know, we're building the plane while we're flying it. So, you know, at the end of the day, um, we deliver on time and we've started to build a reputation and, and, you know, if you will, like a brand with these important customers that they come to us when they want their problem solved. You know, they come to us with the hard stuff, um, and, and when they, they can rely on us and we do everything we can to make sure we deliver on, you know, before promise and better be, you know, exceed expectations. Yeah.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you, uh, do you feel like you have an edge? Uh, I, I imagine a lot of your competitors are, you know, family, kind of multi-generational companies and/or private equity owned and like, I just feel like you're clearly in a very different, you know, mindset, right of like, you know, uh, to, to, to say the, the meme, but like founder mode, like we need to over-deliver, we need to constantly be faster, like it's not enough to respond to a customer in two hours. We need to respond in 30 minutes, max, like that kind of thing is that, um, you know, I think, uh, we've heard about, uh, uh, from various. Founders on the show that you know when they email somebody in China, even if it's 2am for them,

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  they respond instantly and in America they might get a response two weeks later and it's like, hey, fill out this form. So, talk about kind of like bringing that sort of like mentality that you have to, to this industry.

• 1:45:27Speaker 08

  100%. So I feel that we have an unfair advantage for a bunch of reasons. I think I was raised in the school of SpaceX, you know, 2005. You know, early on, there were, there were 50 people, 60 people. I was there until there were 10,000 people. And, you know, I think that that, the things that I learned that, that are just second nature to me of, immediate, you know, you do it now. Call people on the phone. This is something that's been lost. You know, over the last several years and I, and I, and I do see it, you know, we hire, you know, we're hiring, we interview all the time. This has gotten lost, but that is something that we have that I don't think the rest of the 3D printing space, you know, the industry has.

• 1:46:10Speaker 08

  You know, we don't advertise a lot. In fact, we very intentionally do not align ourselves with the traditional metal printing. You know, I'm not trying to alienate anyone, but you know, we're just, I don't even want to be compared because it's not even fair. We have done so much more and moved so much faster with so much less money than the rest of the whole industry. And there's just so much noise and I just don't, I don't, I don't play that game. I'm like, come see it for yourself. If you want to see us printing parts super fast, you're welcome to come over and, and actually see it. I'm not going to put, put together some pretty marketing stuff and, you know, like, just do it. So I do think you're entirely right. Like, the mentality is everything.

• 1:46:53Speaker 08

  Culture of the company and, and the way that you enforce that culture and reinforce that culture is, is, is very important.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Can we zoom out a little bit and talk about the 3D printing industry broadly and where and where you think it's going even at a consumer level? I feel like 10 years ago, there was this sense, or at least like, you know, 3D printing companies were promising, hey, like, you're not even going to have to order that toy because you're just going to have a 3D printer in your home that just sort of like prints it on the fly. And that clearly hasn't happened.

• 1:47:25Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  And it was a good fundraising narrative, but I'm curious, as somebody who's doing this all day long, again, in a specific niche, but I'm curious how you think about the industry evolving over time and consumer use cases.

• 1:47:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think like, I had plastic printers too, you know? Before I even, I was never a guy, you know? I saw the potential of printing when I was designing and architecting like Raptor and Starship and, you know, there were three of us sitting, talking to Elon about how we're going to colonize Mars. And I'm like, we're going to have to make, you know, we're not going to carry like bar stock and machine it on Mars, you know? We're going to have to use what's there and turn it into, you know, the minimum material we need and then make it. So the conceptually, the idea of additive manufacturing, which I don't even like that name, but is, is, it seems legit, you know?

• 1:48:23Speaker 08

  Like, use what you need and just make the shapes you need and you can grow it organically like nature. Nature is usually a good model for things. That all makes sense to me. The, I do agree, like, the overhype by others in the space, in hindsight, you look back and you're like, yeah, of course, that wasn't going to be, what happened? You know, plastic printer prices dropped, people started buying them with this promise that they were going to be able to print all these things. You bought the thing, you built it, you printed a pencil holder that you downloaded off the internet, you realize, I don't know how to do CAD or have access to CAD tools, so I'm downloading models from others. It's just a novelty space, you know? And I think has been for a while.

• 1:49:04Speaker 08

  Metal printing at least had its roots in something more real that I think there Was potential there, but we were clearly so far away from, you know, where we needed to be because the, the, the, the behind the scenes. Customers are buying these million dollar machines and then having to hire PhDs to operate them to get maybe one out of every five parts. Over the course of a month, that might be good, you know, it's just so far away. Um, and one of, one of the reasons for that, by the way, I do believe is because they tried to monetize. On the machine itself, they were like, we need to make this million dollar box and then sell this to customers. And I think that was one of the mistakes was that's why we rewound and said, hey, if I can unwrap the box.

• 1:49:49Speaker 08

  If I don't have to sell a box to a customer, as dumb as this sounds, if I don't have to sell them this self-contained box. Now what can I do? I can rethink how the process is done. I don't have to have, put my powder on in a little spot in the corner anymore. I could use half the room if I need to. You know, what is the right first principles way to do what I'm trying to do is efficient and fast as possible? And then let's engineer a solution for that. So, you know, yeah.

• 1:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Such a better uh B to B experience is just paying for the end state uh versus, you know, trying to, but I'm curious. To push you a little bit further, do you think that end state of, you know, like, just like people today might have a printer in their home? You know, every home in America has a 3D printer. You, you think that's a reality 10, 15 years from now? Uh, I can imagine AI, you can now generate a CAD uh file that, that, or, or is it just kind of like? Still gonna be unnecessary and inefficient?

• 1:50:47Speaker 08

  You know, that's a great question. Uh, part of me wants to feel, you know, the future is. These are always interesting things to think about, you know, um. I, my gut tells me that.

• 1:51:02Speaker 08

  We should, we should uh centralize and, and it's a service. I feel like the world is going to, you know, the direction is you own less and less. Look at like your cars. It's like you got people now that literally don't own cars anymore and they just like rent the service. Why? Cause it's easier. It's, it's not because they don't have to drive. They, it's just easier, you know? So ultimately, if you make it easier and you make it cheaper and, and you can take advantage of economies of scale. I think that that probably makes more, more sense. And then, you know, to, to be clear, like we, the, the vision for Freeform was always to be more than just a metal printing company. You know, I think the, the, the concept, uh, at least at the beginning in, in my head was let's dominate the enabling manufacturing technology.

• 1:51:46Speaker 08

  Then let's, let's solve the, how do I go from the printed part to the end, to the end use part? That can just be plugged in via make the printing process better, post machine it, you know, heat treat, whatever. Let's solve that problem end to end and then let's vertically integrate on some products. Um, because at the end of the day, why would I, you know, there are, there are some, some, some specific areas that we're starting to um, do some things in that are quite interesting that our technology, our approach uniquely enables. That I think, you know, ultimately that's where the money is to be made. Um, up and down the stack, but the progression kind of makes sense.

• 1:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, last question on my side, have you seen any interesting upticks in demand or interest from the tariff? Uh, the, the, the trade war or just given the nature of your existing customer base focusing on aerospace? And defense, I can imagine a lot of your customers just aren't too impacted, given they were already focused on sort of having US supply chains.

• 1:52:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, we actually have seen quite a bit of uptick, um, since the tariff stuff is happening. Uh, there, it seemed like there were a lot more. Companies out there, you know, relatively big name ones that were doing a lot of business with China specifically, more than I was aware. Um, you know, given some of the recent.

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  They don't try to advertise that. You know, they're not yelling that from a rooftop.

• 1:53:13Speaker 08

  They don't. Yeah, they don't. Yes. Which is interesting. Uh, but yeah, to answer your question directly, we have definitely seen an uptick. Um, and, and I think it's, it's also as word has started to get out about us in the space. I think, you know, cause we have kind of flown under the radar for quite a while. Um, you know, I think people are now starting to hear about us and, you know, and I feel like they should be worried. You know, about what we're doing and, and our pace and like ability to disrupt. They should be.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  So good. Uh, I, I have a couple more questions. Um.

• 1:53:45Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  But first, uh, 3D printing for a long time had this stigma around it as, uh, it's great for prototypes. Uh, but at a certain point, you're going to want to switch to a different manufacturing.

• 1:53:58Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  A strategy. Um, are you seeing customers come in and say, hey, we just want to work with you for a little bit on the menu, on the prototyping side? And then maybe we'll do something different. And then do you have to kind of walk them through the vision? Or is it very clear upfront that, hey, this is about scale? The, the, the, the part that we're making for your rocket or your plane, uh, in 20 years, it's still going to be coming off of a free form machine because that's the business model.

• 1:54:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, so we do also, um, we, our business is not exclusively aerospace and defense. Um, it's a large portion of it, but we do do automotive work. We work with semi, several semiconductor companies. There's some other kind of energy, um, you know, up in the energy sector kind of companies we work with that are interesting. Um, and, and yeah, so.

• 1:54:50Speaker 08

  I guess the I just completely blanked on the question.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  So the question is is is prototyping versus scaled manufacturing? I imagine at a certain point like automotive, if I would, you know, if I'm a car manufacturer, I'd love to come to you and say, hey, let's prototype a bunch of parts. But then, once I get it dialed in, I'm probably I like the the historical example would be, oh, then I'm gonna go get it, you know, subtractive machine or cast, right? But at a certain point, it sounds like, hey, I want to make a 100,000 cars this year. And you're gonna say, yeah, I'm along for the ride and I'm gonna be cost competitive. But have you had to, is that the right thesis? And have you had to walk customers through that?

• 1:55:32Speaker 08

  Yep, exactly. Yes. So we generally turn down today, depending on the company and the potential, we turn down a lot of the prototyping stuff.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:55:41Speaker 08

  Because it just doesn't make sense for us to to focus on that. Unless it's coming from a huge company that there's something interesting that could come after.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  Project. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:55:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. We generally turn that stuff down. We have the upfront talk with customers about the scale and that's the target. You know, that's what we're interested in. That's that's how we're gonna get, you know, economies of scale and the costs and down to where everybody needs it to be. And ultimately, you know, I think one of the interesting things about the space. So I will say like, from my time at SpaceX, I always liked solving these extremely complex, interdisciplinary, system level problems.

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Massives.

• 1:56:21Speaker 08

  You know, and these very, very, you know, how do we colonize Mars? And it's like, a lot of people's brains will short circuit. I don't even know where to start. And weirdly enough, like, I was always like, well, I'm just not smart enough to figure this out. So I'm just gonna like, assume that doesn't matter and assume that doesn't matter until I get to something that I'm I'm like, well, I can calculate this. So I'm gonna start here, you know, and then just go from there. The the interesting thing about printing is is we've started, we have started to demonstrate the the feasibility of truly scaling it up is that it starts to, you start to think about the disruption of even the product life cycles. Like, a lot of the product Life cycle stuff today is centered around these very long manufacturing timelines.

• 1:57:06Speaker 08

  So meaning like, you know, it's just, and I don't have a conclusion here other than, you know, how much more often would products get updated or customized? If you didn't have to wind up a 12 months of tooling in a casting facility, right? Yeah.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of that product update, I imagine that you're, you're building the machine and then you're also scaling up the machine. And once you have a really solid contract, I imagine that then it's like, okay, well, we're going to want to, like this machine is capable of doing this part and we want to do that at volume. So what is your product release cycle on the actual machine side? Because are you, are you freezing and then doing a V2, V3? Or are you upgrading the machines iteratively? What does that look like?

• 1:57:53Speaker 08

  We do a little bit of both, actually. We do, we do some level of upgrading on the, so there's a roadmap. That was like, the first thing we ever built was just, can we put a bunch of lasers on a thing? And melt stuff pretty fast. You know, it was, it was not designed to be a throughput maximizer, or it was small, the platform wasn't big. It was just like, can I put a bunch of lasers in a small area and melt stuff quickly? The second thing was then can I take that and scale it up to something that's actually useful in size? And start to demonstrate this, some of the architectural elements of the system that enable the lights out factory. Like, how do I, you know, unpack and get the parts out and get them off the plate?

• 1:58:38Speaker 08

  And get them ready for, you know, the next steps or whatever it needs to do. The third step of that is, has been to go even bigger. And that's what we're building actually right now. So we went from, you know, I, I don't remember the exact number of throughput capability from gen one to two. It was something like 20X from one to two, and then two to three. Or I, I came from SpaceX, so everything starts at zero. So zero to one, you know, one to two, what we're building now is basically the third generation of the technology.

• 1:59:10Speaker 08

  This is the one that is, um, the platform is quite large. Um, like the size of this, of this platform is, is, is, is for what it can do, it's tiny. Um, compared to the industry, but it's, it's pretty large.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:22Speaker 08

  They make these huge parts and it's like 10 to 20x higher throughput than even the system we're using for production today. Um, so, you know, we've basically taken these huge steps. Um, every, every generation. And then there's the, the, the incremental improvements, which are predominantly around software. Generally, um, because we're implementing better models, faster compute, faster sensors. And we're rolling those out in real time. Luckily I came from the aerospace industry. You know, I led certification of Falcon nine and Merlin, um, uh, for, for the Air Force and NASA. It's like, I, you know, so I can talk to the aerospace folks, I can talk to the defense folks. I know what they're looking for in terms of product release, you know, that, that, uh, uh, uh, you know,

• 2:00:07Speaker 08

  hardware in the loop testing and then releasing software versions, locking certain things down for production and having control of that. Um, so that, that's been helpful too, to kind of, you know, grease the wheels of that with customers that are like, oh wait, you're changing stuff all the time. Like, no, well, not, not exactly. Um, but yeah.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Uh, last question, I'll let you go. I don't know if Jordy, you have anything or you're good?

• 2:00:27Speaker 08

  I'm good.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Um, I, I'd love to know, um, a few pieces of advice or lessons that you took away from working with Elon. That folks might be able to apply, even if they don't have, you know, a decade of experience at an actual Elon company. What do you think's actually actionable?

• 2:00:44Speaker 08

  Oh man, um, boy, there's a, there's quite a bit. Um, surround yourself with the smartest, most, most accomplished people you can in general. And then listen to them. Um, secondly, there's no problem that we can't solve together. Um, you, you, you, you know, people are their biggest, um, you know, this is easy to say too, right? And hard to put into practice, but you know, you're your biggest enemy. If you think you can't do it, you definitely can't do it. Um, and then question everything. Question everything. You know, Elon is an extremely smart man. I feel obviously like very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work at SpaceX for so long and sit in the room and see how he makes decisions and, you know, and, and the good and the bad, you know?

• 2:01:28Speaker 08

  I mean, all of it. I, I just, I had a good experience at SpaceX and, and learned a lot. And, and a lot of, you know, even Freeform today, there are a bunch of current and former execs at SpaceX that are investors in Freeform and obviously Founders Fund and, you know, 8VC and Valor and a bunch of, you know, top tier investment firms, Threshold and Two Sigma. They'll all get mad at me if I don't list them all out.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. Just keep listening.

• 2:01:55Speaker 08

  You know, I gotta get the, we need to roll the credits.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gotta say, Eric, you make me believe in onshoring manufacturing.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  When I talk to you, I believe that it's possible. It's easy to, to, to be blackpilled and say, no, we're never going to make it in America. But I feel like if we just give you like another 20 years, we'll be able to make anything here.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds chaotic day to day when you read the headlines, but when you actually talk to someone who's working on this and who's clearly going to be working on it for decades, it feels tractable.

• 2:02:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:27Speaker 08

  Yes, it's totally tractable. Yep.

• 2:02:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, thank you so much for stopping by. This was fantastic. We have to have you back. Uh, this is, this is really, really enjoyable. Thank you.

• 2:02:36Speaker 08

  Would be a pleasure, guys. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:02:42Speaker 08

  Sounds good.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Uh, and if you're trying to sell some 3D printed metal parts all across the United States, you gotta get on Numeral. Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. And I have some breaking news.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news?

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  My company, Lucy, is now on Numeral. Let's go. Double kill. One hand washes the other. They pay me, I pay them. The money goes into my pocket and back into Numeral's pocket.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  It's great. But we have been, uh, keeping our next guest waiting. We will bring him in. We're talking about robots with Formic. Formic.co is the website. Let's pull it up. Full service robotic automation for $0 capex. That's what we like to hear. We love when capex is free. Welcome to the stream. How you doing today?

• 2:03:32Speaker 09

  Welcome to the Antech Capex Club. Good to meet you guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  It's a great club.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. Can you introduce yourself? Give us a breakdown of the company, where you're at and what you're building?

• 2:03:43Speaker 09

  Sounds good. Yeah, my name is Salman. I'm the CEO of Formic. We're building the robot army that is helping American manufacturers automate. You can see some of them on the screen behind me. These are our robot babies, as we affectionately call them. We have hundreds of them across more than 100 factories now in the US that are using our robots to produce all kinds of products. We're making everything from metal parts for aircraft and automotive, plastic parts for lawn mowers and golf carts, as well as things like food and beverage. We make all the nachos for Chipotle and dog food and cat food and laundry detergent. You name it, you know, our robots are helping to make it.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  You make Chipotle nachos robotically?

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:04:23Speaker 09

  We are indeed. Yeah, the last guy I heard Eric was on, you guys were talking about bringing manufacturing back. Like, it's real, it's happening. We're really excited to be part of it.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what do you have to say to the naysayers that say we'll never make it in America? The haters.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  The haters.

• 2:04:39Speaker 09

  Look, I lived in China for 25 years and I saw the industrialization of that country. And it's like, it's not a two-year process, right? Like, industrializing is a 20-year journey at the minimum, and probably much more. And, you know, we do have 250,000 factories in America that are making all kinds of products. So they exist. The problem is, we don't have labor force to support them, right? It's not just about cost of labor. There are millions of unfilled jobs in factories. Today, the typical utilization rate of a factory in America is less than 2,000 hours a year. The comparable number in China is 7,500 hours a year, right? Like, there's 8,700 possible production hours in a given year.

• 2:05:22Speaker 09

  The vast majority of American factories are sitting around collecting dust 75% of the time. And it's not because like there isn't demand for their products. It isn't because there isn't raw materials available, right? Like it basically just boils down to the fact that there aren't people who want to work in these factories and do these backbreaking jobs day in, day out. And so until we automate a bunch of them, we're going to have a really hard time re-industrializing. So, you know, I'm optimistic, Jordy. I think there is a lot of opportunity to re-industrialize and bring more manufacturing back, but it's not going to be in a year or two, right? Like we're helping make that happen faster, but it's going to take some time.

• 2:05:58John Coogan?

  Like a really dumb criticism that I don't agree with of this company, and it might be completely wrong, would be like, hey, this is just, this is just financial innovation. You're just, you're swapping CapEx to OpEx. That allows you to grow really fast. I think that could be good for re-industrialization, but how much of that is key to the business? And then what else are you doing? I imagine that you're not, you know, mining the metal to make the robots. You might even be purchasing the robots from other people and then designing software suites and integrating. But, you know, Palantir goes, oh, it's just a consulting shop or whatever. What is the criticism of your company of like, of like where you're starting? And then why is that the right path to start and then grow out from?

• 2:06:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it starts from like the basic premise that people, most roboticists are working on the wrong problem, right? I was a VC for 10 years. I was investing in robotics companies. I funded like 50 different robotics companies and saw all the different ways in which they had challenges. And what I realized is like, look, any roboticist will tell you, getting a robot to do a job is 10% of the work. 90% of the work is like, how do you do error handling? And how do you solve all of the shit that happens after you deploy that robot? And I think that's the part that's generally underappreciated, which is like, we'll see a robot doing a backflip in a cool YouTube video. But once, once you try to get that robot to do that reliably for, you know, Ninety nine point eight percent uptime, you start to encounter all kinds of issues, right?

• 2:07:26Speaker 09

  Joint failures, maintenance challenges, programming issues, your in-feed, like your product is just has a lot more variation than you expected. Yep. And I think it's generally underappreciated. And so the reason that factories in America don't automate today is not because you can't get a robot to do this job. The the problem is like all the surrounding infrastructure doesn't exist. Got it. And so if you're the factory that focuses on making chocolate chip cookies, and you're really good at the best chocolate chip cookie recipe and baking, like you're not also super good at deploying robots and managing them. And so what happens is like they're just kind of overwhelmed. They don't know what to get. They don't know how to get it. They don't know how to manage it. They don't know how to maintain it. And so what we realized is like you have to build all the surrounding infrastructure, like robotics has this last mile problem,

• 2:08:11Speaker 09

  where if you can make it easy to scope, deploy, manage and maintain the robot, then you can drive mass adoption. And so we built a bunch of software that does that. We do, we use, we use computer vision and LiDAR scans to kind of full site evaluation in an automated way. This used to take months Yeah. to walk through the facility and measure every single thing to figure out what you can automate and what kind of robot you need. We do that in minutes. Then you need to figure out what robot to to to build and deploy. So you need to basically simulate different robot arms, doing that job with different grippers, different conveyors, different safety scanners, different fencing, like you need all of this stuff to make a robot useful. Then you need to actually program the robot to do the job. And so we basically built AI that automates the process of programming the robot.

• 2:08:54Speaker 09

  And then lastly, once that robot's deployed, you have kind of all the ongoing management of that robot, right? So how do you do teleoperation? How do you do error handling? How do you preventative maintenance? How do you gracefully recover from all the different types of errors that you're going to encounter? There's a ton of infrastructure that needs to be built. And so like ninety percent of roboticists that I meet are working on, how do I make the robot a little bit smarter? And nobody is working on this giant problem, which is the reason that robots don't aren't deployed, right? I can tell you from the hundreds of robots that we've deployed today. Less than 5% of my deployment cost is programming the robot to do the thing. That's like, it's like, it's, it's, it's completely, you know, delusional how many people are spending their time trying to make the robot a little bit easier to program.

• 2:09:35Speaker 09

  Like, that's inconsequential to me. Like, I need to focus on solving the other 95% of the, of the cost of deploying robots. So, I don't know if that answers your question.

• 2:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about landing on CPG, food and beverage broadly? You, you said you invested in 50 plus different robotics companies. I'm assuming you saw a bunch of, you know, success and failure and I'm, I'm, I'm assuming that was super intentional to land here. And then I want to ask, you know, potentially, you know, other categories that you're excited about.

• 2:10:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'll be honest, it wasn't that intentional. We started out going really broad. We were doing things in, in metal fabrication. We were doing things in plastic injection molding. We're doing things in CPG and a bunch of other industries.

• 2:10:17Speaker 09

  Ultimately, we narrowed back into CPG for the, for a couple of reasons. Number one, it's the actual, it's the industry where there's the most amount of utilization, right? So, the typical CPG factory actually runs 20 to 24 hours a day. In things like metal fabrication, like, like parts, factories that make metal parts for aerospace and automotive, they typically run, you know, eight hours a day of, of production, but actually only like six hours a day of actual parts being made. There's like two hours a day where people are setting up and tearing down. So, so high utilization means automation has a much, much bigger short-term impact. Number two, it's the industry where there's actually a lot more of it happening domestically.

• 2:10:57Speaker 09

  In metal and plastic manufacturing and other stuff, like, a lot of it is still being imported today from, from, from China, from Mexico, from Canada, from other places. But because CPG products are generally low value and low margin, it's not worth it to ship them across the ocean. So, a lot of that is actually happening domestically. So, there are a lot of factories that can use automation. And third, Those are the jobs that are the most backbreaking, painful jobs, right? Like you can afford to pay a machine as fifty bucks an hour or sixty bucks an hour, because that's like a high-value, high-margin product. You can't afford to pay somebody who's packing boxes more than fifteen bucks an hour.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  And they're still picking up super-heavy, you know, cases of drinks and things like that.

• 2:11:39Speaker 09

  Exactly. Yeah, it's backbreaking.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  Can you take me through kind of a market map or like the the the the topography of robotics? Because I've watched How It's Made, I've seen, you know, a little scooper. I don't even know if I'd call it a robot, it's more just like a machine. Then there's, you know, two-axis gantries, I'm seeing a lot of robotic arms, a lot of six-axis stuff. And then you get into the humanoid world. Where's the biggest opportunity in terms of or where's where's the most need to deploy? And like, what type of robot is the most important to just roll out in America right now?

• 2:12:17Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, I think like articulated six-axis robot arms are still the vast majority of use cases, right? I think if you look at what humans are doing in these factories, like they're typically using their arms, not other parts of their body. So I think it's just an indicator of like, that that's the most common task. Whether you're talking about assembly, whether you're talking about quality control, you need to kind of vision, obviously. Whether you're talking about packaging, whether you're talking about even kind of primary food handling and sorting. In the metal fabrication world, you you need a lot of machine tending, which is, you know, picking up a blank part and putting it into a CNC machine. We have a bunch of robots that are doing that. All of those are just kind of articulated arms that can do it.

• 2:12:58Speaker 09

  So I think there, you know, there are use cases for the humanoid form factor to kind of do new new types of tasks. We also have some gantry robots that we've deployed that do certain types of applications where it's like very high payload work. But, you know, the, to be honest, like the form factor is kind of irrelevant. Because in all of these types of robots that you're talking about, you have a couple of motors and some motion control, right? Like, it's actually, if you can abstract away the software enough, like all of those things are essentially different variations on the same on the same problem.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  I want to talk about the CapEx thing. What's the damage for a company if they're not working with you to buy a bunch of six-axis robot arms these days? Can you give me like an order of magnitude for how much these robots even cost? I've seen a couple of them.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or maybe even some of the history. Some of the history, I mean, we've seen so many companies try to automate, you know, bring in robotics, right? Like Nike has a history of trying to do this in Latin America and just failing miserably despite having seemingly competent partners. So, yeah, I'd love some additional context there.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I'll start with the second question first and then I'll move to the first question. So the vast majority of robots in America today are deployed in very, very big companies. So General Motors, Procter and Gamble are two examples of like the biggest buyers of robots in America. They buy like a couple hundred robots a year.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:14:31Speaker 09

  And they have very large in-house engineering teams who can use those robots to do different kinds of tasks. The problem is 99% of factories in America are small, medium-sized businesses. And the logic follows like, you know, if you take a single General Motors plant that makes cars, there's 4,000 small factories that make the components that go to General Motors that get assembled into a car, right? So there's one guy who makes the windshield and one guy who makes the screws and another guy who makes, you know, the tires. Like every single one of those smaller factories is not automated at all today. 95% of them don't have any robots. So the cost is a part of the question, right?

• 2:15:14Speaker 09

  Which is, yeah, it costs between a couple hundred thousand dollars to a couple million dollars to build a fully automated robot worksite. The the interesting thing, though, is if you break down that cost, about thirty percent of that cost is the hardware itself, right, like the robot arm and and and the conveyors and that kind of stuff. Seventy percent of the cost is all the custom engineering that you typically have to pay for, for integrators and consultants and this and that to come in and try to customize it to your process. And if you're a small factory, like you don't have the capacity to kind of get rid of that seventy percent custom engineering cost, because you don't really know anything about robotics. And so the reason that we built all this kind of infrastructure tooling around it is that we're cutting out that seventy

• 2:15:59Speaker 09

  percent. It costs us significantly less to go and buy and build and deploy those robots than it would be for them to try to do it on their own.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through who the best robot builders are in the world right now? What is the what is the supply chain look like in terms of constructing, building, R and D ing new robots? Who are the major players globally? Who are the up and comers? I I don't even know if I could name a single robot maker, but I'm interested to hear kind of like what the landscape looks like, who the who the major players are.

• 2:16:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the the biggest robot companies in the world are all not American, right? So Fanuc is Japanese, they're they're one of the biggest ones. Kuka used to be a German company, it got acquired by a Chinese company. ABB, Yaskawa, you know, Mitsubishi, you know, there's a bunch of these kind of very, very large industrial companies that make robot arms. The the thing to note, though, is that you like buying a robot arms is effectively kind of useless on its own. You need a full robot work cell to make that work. So you need PLCs that often come from like Siemens or Rockwell. You need sensors that come from companies like

• 2:17:14Speaker 09

  A programmable logic controller. So it's like the it's the thing that controls all the peripherals and safety equipment.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:17:21Speaker 09

  Um, yeah. And then, uh, you need like conveyors, you need safety scanners that are often made by like key and some cognex and much other company. You need grippers, which is the end of arm tool. Uh, so, uh, today, like the vast majority of people who deploy robots. Basically hire a consultant that goes and buys all the different components for them and then assembles it and then deploys it for them.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw this at Hadron. They have a they have a six axis robot arm and they have this like invisible wall that if you put your hand.

• 2:17:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, a light curtain.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, light curtain. That's what it's called.

• 2:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how, uh, why has automating three PLs proven to be such a challenge? You know, there's been a bunch of, you know, Amazon had their, uh, internal efforts. I think there's like six river systems, which was maybe Shopify. Uh, acquired them, but it just seemingly is, uh, such a difficult task. And you would think that, you know, grabbing items and putting labels on them and, you know, shipping them should be, uh, it seems straightforward, but, uh, clearly not.

• 2:18:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll note that like we don't know a ton about three PLs because almost all of our work is in manufacturing. Logistics is a much, much smaller industry and like we're not in it today. Uh, I will say, right, like logistics has to deal with a lot more variability than manufacturing. Um, because if you're, if you're running a three PL, like any kind of product could come into your warehouse anytime. Uh, and so you need systems that can deal with all of them. And there's just, there's just like physics based constraints on that, right? Like if you're picking up, uh, you know, a, a, a one ounce bag of something versus a fifty fifty pound. Uh, box, like you just need fundamentally different physical hardware. Um, and that's why I think a lot of this kind of humanoid stuff is, is.

• 2:19:10Speaker 09

  Very strange because like if you're picking up a 50 pound box with with one of those robots, like it's it's very likely to tip over pretty easily like you need a a and if you want to move at any kind of speed, right? Because if you take a 50 pound box and you move it uh at at you know, five miles an hour, uh that your effective load during that acceleration is like double or triple uh that, right? So it's like 100 pounds of of load that you have to be able to handle, which is just kind of impossible. Um, if you move to manufacturing, like you have a lot more consistency because every production line is kind of making the same part uh or the same product at relatively higher rate. Um, and so the the technical complexity is lower, but the operational complexity is higher.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Um, on on the note of humanoids, uh, are you worried about depreciation with humanoids? I think this is a concern if if humanoids end up, you know, working well, but then following the same path as like EVs? Because uh, there's like high, you know, there's high wear and tear on cars, right? They're just like going down a road all the time and that's challenging. And you can imagine humanoids are walking around with these heavy uh loads. And then uh simultaneously, like all of that interaction just feels like um, I worry about the economics of humanoids. If you buy a robe, a a robot for 50K and the next year it's worth 10K. It's like, well, you almost could have hired a human for that kind of uh cost.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  But I'm curious what your point of view is.

• 2:20:36Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think it depends on what um, what the task is, right? Like if you're using that humanoid to do that an occasional task, right? Like pick up your laundry and then put it into the basket, for example. Like you don't worry so much about wear and tear because it's low frequency. If you're talking about manufacturing use case, right? Like these robots behind me, all of them operate 24 hours a day. Uh, and so at that cycle rate, like you're doing maybe 50,000 cycles a day. Uh, at that rate, like the wear and tear you get on all the components is very, very high. Um, and uh, like a six axis robot has six motors. Uh, a humanoid, most of these humanoids that we've seen have something like 30 to 50 motors, right? And so just you're just talking about like the wear on the motor.

• 2:21:18Speaker 09

  Like we have to go out and lubricate these joints and and and and replace motors on a pretty regular basis. Um, I can't imagine if I had to do that for 50 motors instead of instead of three, right?

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Speaking motors, I saw that in the latest Boston Dynamics demo, they said that they switched to electric motors. Is that a meaningful shift in robotics? Or is that something that's unique to their approach to building humanoids?

• 2:21:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, so most of the robots that we use use servo motors. So they're all they're all kind of electric motors. It's pretty, it's pretty standard.

• 2:21:56Speaker 09

  Some of some of the new humanoids are using linear actuators, which is a newer technology, and I think the Tesla humanoid is doing that. It's like the exact kind of wear and tear profile on that is not clear. And a lot of them are actually building their own their own motors from scratch. So like the Chinese, like I think this is a place where China has a huge advantage compared to like a lot of the American startups.

• 2:22:20Speaker 09

  Like Unitree, for example, which I'm sure you guys have seen those videos. Like they have built an entire team to build actuators and a whole team that's building their own custom lidar and a whole team that's building their own kind of custom sensing across. You know, for most of these American companies, it's kind of inconceivable to go and try to invent your own motor and try to figure out how to build a humanoid. But in China, it's possible to be much more vertically integrated.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  It's so odd because you have to imagine back in the dawn of the automotive revolution, like Ford was certainly building motors and wheels and tires and seats and the frames and stuff like we did have the ability to have a vertically integrated supply chain at one point in America. And then we just decomposed it so much that it's been it's been a struggle to get back to vertical integration. Very, very tricky.

• 2:23:10Speaker 09

  The management consultants got hold of us.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  They did, they did.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, on on on humanoids, I don't know if you've been following what physical intelligence has been doing with some of the end to end models, this idea of generalization. Are there any, are you looking at any software approaches that are more, I don't know, big data or, or, you know, deep learning driven to handle more of those edge cases to automate the the last 90% of the work that you're doing? And what are you, what are you following on the AI side of things these days?

• 2:23:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I think these vision language action models like what physical intelligence is doing is are are very promising. We're running trials on some of those vision language action models for some of our use cases.

• 2:24:01Speaker 09

  The problem today is that they're just generally too slow for us to be able to use them in a kind of commercial setting. But I think that'll get better in the next few years. So there are like, you know, in the common trajectory for us is like, we'll, we'll start out in a factory with one or two robots. And then the factory will come to us and say, hey, can you help me like automate all these other tasks on my production line? And today, some of those are solved and some of them are not. And so as we go, you know, as, as these vision language action models get better and other kinds of techniques around, you know, deep learning get better. We'll start to go and address more and more of those tasks. Yeah, I mean. That's great.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, continue.

• 2:24:40Speaker 09

  I was just gonna say, you know, like, I, I think that the, the thing to note here is like, we're just at a very different place compared to like more established automation economies. Like in China right now, last year, there were about 400,000 robots deployed. In the entire US, we had about 30,000 robots deployed, so less than a tenth of, of the amount of robots deployed. In a place where the labor cost is so much higher that you could theoretically justify a much higher use case of robots. And I think a big part of the reason is like China just has so many more engineers that they can put towards the problem of design and deployment. Plus they subsidize a lot of the kind of robotics industry to be able to go and make it easy for people to deploy.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:21Speaker 09

  I think in the US, we have this, this challenge where there's a lot more small, medium sized businesses. And we don't have the historical infrastructure or the engineering capability for all of these plants to figure out how to automate on their own. And so like building this set of tooling and helping them figure out what are the latest things that are happening in kind of AI and machine learning and, and computer vision? That we can apply to the different use cases in your facility is, I think, the only way that we can, we can move faster than China in the long run.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  Is there anything that you want to see from the US government to speed up the deployment of robotics in America?

• 2:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Trillion dollar, trillion dollar contract.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, you could imagine subsidy, uh, subsidiary, uh, subsidies or incentives or, uh, you know, a strategic reserve of robots, uh, but you could also just look at like deregulation. Uh, but I don't know what your, what your take is.

• 2:26:08Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, so I'm excited to go to the Hill and Valley Forum next week and talk about that a little bit, but I like, frankly, I, I don't think there's much that's necessary. Right. Like I think the, the incentive is there, right? There's plenty of financial incentive for these small means as factories to do it. To be honest, like the biggest barrier to adoption of robotics in America is like, it's a cultural change, right? Like these factory owners, a lot of these are third generation businesses, right? They've been passed down or they're kind of private equity owned. And like in both cases, you end up with these businesses that are very risk averse. Uh, they're afraid to adopt new technology. They don't have the internal capabilities to do it. Uh, I think from the government side, like things that are being done around educating that, that group of, of manufacturers and

• 2:26:51Speaker 09

  helping them to deploy automation is, will have a very big impact. Like similar to what China does, actually in the U S, we've had subsidies for small, medium sized factories for the last 10 years to buy automation equipment, right? There, there's accelerated depreciation. A lot of states have matching grants where if you buy a $500,000 piece of machinery, the state will grant, grant up to, up to 50% of that cost. Um, and so like we've had plenty of these incentives in place, but adoption is super low. Like when we talk to the states, most of them say like, we can't give out these grants, like nobody's using it, uh, because people don't know what to buy. They don't know how to buy it. Uh, and once they buy it, they're like, they can't handle the responsibility of this new

• 2:27:33Speaker 09

  piece of equipment. Uh, and so there's tons of grant dollars just sitting around, uh, not getting deployed, uh, because there's this kind of, there's this, there's this barrier at the last mile.

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Very informative. Thank you. We'll see you at Hillen Valley.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you next week.

• 2:27:51Speaker 09

  Awesome. Look forward to it. Appreciate you guys having me on.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:27:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Thank you. And we want to tell you about Polymarket. Go to polymarket.com.

• 2:28:00Jordi Hays?

  To get the real news.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Get the information.

• 2:28:05Jordi Hays?

  We got a new market up there. One billion chat GPT users in 2025.

• 2:28:11John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:28:12Jordi Hays?

  It is currently at a 64% chance. And feels likely to me. I, the way that they're pacing.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Is.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Huge growth. We have some posts in there. Cali's here. I'll let you take the intro. I'll be right back.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Welcome in, Cali. I'm gonna play a sound effect here. Boom. What's going on? Looking good in the suit. You've been wearing those a lot these days.

• 2:28:40Speaker 05

  A lot of, a lot of the tech folks have been brushing off the suits these days and coming to DC. So.

• 2:28:49Speaker 05

  Nice to, nice to, nice to go down to the closet.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  How do you stay healthy when you're in DC? Do you have a good, do you have a workout routine? A couple favorite restaurants? Are you just, you know, five coffees a day? No breakfast or lunch?

• 2:29:03Speaker 05

  I would love to say I'm on the True Bed Good Energy program, but the sleep has been lacking, I will say. Try, try, try and, trying to find good food, but not eating much. Just a lot of caffeine.

• 2:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I bet. Let's jump right into this food dye ban. I'd love to get your high level take on it. It, it seems, you know, the big question, we're a technology and business. There you go.

• 2:29:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Good. We, we focus on business and my big question is how manufacturers will respond to the ban, given that, you know, it's hard enough to even just deliver on the existing demand that they have much less. You know, make, you know, fundamental changes. And to be clear, I'm very much in favor of the ban. But I'm curious what you think this kind of looks like in practice.

• 2:30:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I'll back up a little bit. I think there's a lot of lessons for business in this environment we're in right now. But, you know, I never expected to be here. I'm at the White House now. I'm a special government employee, as well as running True Med with Justin Mayers. And Justin and I, you know, started this company on the mission of, I think a lot of founders do this, we just wanted to impact the world and change health incentives. And just through the advocacy, you know, Justin and I going on podcasts and talking about this, something started resonating on this idea that our healthcare and food systems are broken in the past year. Got to know Bobby Kennedy, got to know President Trump, helped connect them for the endorsement. Now, coming on and helping to advise the next couple of months.

• 2:30:44Speaker 05

  But I think the big lesson of this food die ban, I don't even know, I really like the word ban, I like phase out. Because ban implies overregulation. And I think, I think what people are waking up to is, there's mass distrust of legacy industry right now. I mean, you know, I talk a lot about the food industry was run by the cigarette industry in the 1990s. Few people remember this, but 50% of the US food supply was controlled by Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds. In the early 1990s, they consolidated the food industry when smoking rates were going down. They were actually some of the largest companies in the world in the 80s, like highest market caps. And some of the biggest balance sheets in history of capitalism, tobacco companies, it's a good business, nicotine.

• 2:31:26Speaker 05

  And they consolidated Kraft, US Food, Nabisco, and very deliberately bought off the USDA to recommend the food pyramid, which is basically a recommendation for ultra-processed food. And they shifted very strategically thousands of scientists from the tobacco department to the food department, and really added all these chemicals in our food to make them hyper addictive. So through that corporate capture and what I would call the weaponization of food, today in America, a child's diet is 70% ultra-processed food. In Japan or Italy, it's 15%. So my big argument is that we don't really have a free market with these outcomes, where of course the disease rates are just skyrocketing. I mean, the stats are crazy.

• 2:32:09Speaker 05

  We're digging into this for a report for the administration. We spend five times more per capita on healthcare than Spain, but live six years less. I mean, Spain doesn't even have a good healthcare program. So, so these are common sense actions. And I think, I think there's a really a moment, I'm meeting with a lot of food companies, a lot of pharma companies. You know, and they they're running scared because Americans have lost trust. I mean, we all know this. I think it's why they're such a robust, you know, tech ecosystem building and startup ecosystem. You know, it's because these large companies have really lost trust with the American consumer and the American public. I I think often for good reason. So, so I would call this not as much a ban, it's a correcting of corrupt incentives where these food dyes,

• 2:32:52Speaker 05

  I mean, just total no brainer. They're they're petroleum based. They're literally crude oil. They they add a molecule to crude oil, make that bright neon color, uh, and they're phased out of essentially every other country. So it's an example of common sense actions that I think are are quite needed.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  So that that phase out in other countries, does that mean that a lot of these manufacturers fully have the ability to sell these products and and make, you know, these products to sell into the US market and they're just choosing not to for the most part?

• 2:33:21Speaker 05

  Oh, it's it's even more shocking than that. They actually often make the product in the United States. So Kellogg's makes Fruit Loops uh, with carrot juice and watermelon juice and ships them across the border to Canada and ships them over to Europe. They make the same product with petroleum based dyes here in the US. So a lot of our food can actually be exported to Europe based on just just the chemicals in them right now. So so actually the US companies are, yeah.

• 2:33:46Jordi Hays?

  What is the, is it a margin thing? You know, is it, is it, is it?

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  Just economic incentives.

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is it purely economics or or is there something else?

• 2:33:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, the food dyes, again, I think this is one of the most no brainer, unimpeachable things they could start with. Because it's actually not a cost thing. Uh, we've done a lot of engagement with the food industry on this. Um, actually, they've done a lot of research and they actually cite this as a reason for why they should keep it. They say, well, the kids in focus groups lunge for the neon bright colors. And it's like, well, I'm sure they do, but you're feeding them crude oil. So so it's really actually, they they say it's consumer preference. And actually, when pushed before the food industry said, well, we believe in consumer choice and kids prefer uh, these bright colors. So that's one reason, I think, uh, the administration and Secretary Kennedy started with the food dyes.

• 2:34:40Jordi Hays?

  My, my, my, yeah, my three, my three year old would love to eat cake for dinner every single night, but that doesn't mean that that he should have, you know, the, the, uh, you know, uh, autonomy to just make that decision himself as a, uh, three year old.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the history here with like corn subsidies? Is there, is there a risk of like playing whack a mole as the government decides what, what to push or what to incentivize? What do you take away from not just what the food companies have done historically, but what the government has done historically to kind of like steer the food supply in one direction or another?

• 2:35:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, so, so I've been an entrepreneur for more than 10 years, but I grew up in DC, started my career, you know, early on as a lobbyist in the food industry. And we used to weaponize this nanny state argument and say, you know, you don't want to be nanny state. But what, what, what I really have been trying to communicate, you know, and particularly frankly, a right word audience, you know, going on Tucker and Joe Rogan, things like that. What I've really been trying to do is articulate that this is not a nanny state regulation issue. It's a correction of corruption. When you look at agriculture subsidies, more than 90% go to corn, soy and wheat, which are essentially the components of ultra-processed food. And the grocery lobbyists and the food lobbyists push for that because at a supermarket, when you can put something in a box and it lasts forever

• 2:36:03Speaker 05

  and it's, you know, bright neon colors, the profit margins are much higher. Whereas natural food is low. So there's a huge incentive to shove ultra-processed food down our throats, which has led to agriculture incentives that make a Coke at a supermarket cheaper than water because the Coke has so much subsidized ingredients in it. So that's not a free market. That's totally rigged. 90% to corn, soy, wheat, 0.4% of subsidies go to fruits and vegetables. Then you get to something like SNAP, the food stamp program. Now Elon's looking at this. This is the fourth largest entitlement program. It's $140 billion a year. The number one item on food stamps is soda and more than 60% go to ultra-processed food. We're the only country in the world where a low-income nutrition assistance

• 2:36:45Speaker 05

  program goes to soda and Twinkies. So you have, you know, you go down the list, school lunches, the largest source of calories for kids, federally funded, no nutrition guidelines whatsoever, no sugar, no sugar limits. So, so you've actually just very deliberately, you know, from the history of the tobacco companies, really weaponizing these regulations. But by my calculations, it's been a trillion dollars over the last 10 years of subsidies to ultra-processed food. So we're trying to take step-by-step common sense actions to kind of unwind that. Where I also quite frankly, think there's a cultural awakening happening where people realize the system is pretty screwed. And you know, hopefully, you know, we were talking about it, what we're talking about on a tech podcast.

• 2:37:27Speaker 05

  So the fact that people are trying to be healthier, reading labels more, Justin's talking a lot about this, obviously. I think that's a good thing, too. And, and very unexpectedly, you know, I do think President Trump, Bobby Kennedy, you wouldn't expect that this coalition, they're leading to an awakening where 24 states right now are passing legislation on food ingredients, school lunches. So I think it's very positive what's happening.

• 2:37:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I always thought it was fascinating that, uh, the food issue is, it, it, it, it's secretly very bipartisan because, because you get like the right wing, like trad folks who want to, you know, clean up the food supply. But then you also get like the left wing hippie who's hanging out at the farmer's market and is just like, yeah, I grew these vegetables myself. They're way better than the processed foods.

• 2:38:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm curious.

• 2:38:12John Coogan?

  There should be a coalition there.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Is food and health as political as it seems in the news? I feel like if you talk to people individually, you know, it's, it's like John said, it's bipartisan, like every, we want everybody to be healthier. And then you get into Washington and it feels like, you know, you, you, you mentioned you started your career, uh, in, in the lobbying space. Um, so I'm curious, like where, where you think it's, you know, if it's actually a political issue for the average, uh, citizen, or it's just sort of manufactured by special interest groups?

• 2:38:45Speaker 05

  Oh, there's zero reason, uh, food and poisoning our kids should be political. And frankly, these things about reforming food stamps, you know, and taking the dyes out of our food were leftward issues, you know, five to 10 years ago. You know, digging into the health issue, I think one of the most pernicious and chronic conditions in America is, is Trump derangement syndrome. And I think, uh, TDS has led many people on the left. To reflexively be opposed to these common sense policies. You know, probably a lot of the tech folks listening, I know cut politics is complicated. There's a lot going on, a lot of change happening. My hope is that we can all come together on these Maha policies. I mean, these are absolute no brainer. It's taking on incentives of the pharmaceutical industry, which is something the left used to talk a lot about.

• 2:39:29Speaker 05

  It's taking on the interest of, you know, processed food makers that are really doing some harmful things for kids. But you've had a wild situation where you've had Democrats now passionately arguing to keep food dyes in the food. You've had Democrats passionately arguing that we need to continue to have a $10 billion subsidy from the federal government to soda companies on SNAP, just reflexively because, you know, the Trump administration happens to be talking about this. You've had almost no support from Democrats. I called out Cory Booker, Senator from New Jersey, who I've worked with before. I've met, I know he cares about these issues. Where the hell is Cory Booker? Why wasn't he at the Health and Human Services Department on Tuesday when Secretary Kennedy was announcing this policy on food dyes?

• 2:40:13Speaker 05

  Where is he helping on these issues? I mean, this is as bipartisan as it gets.

• 2:40:18Jordi Hays?

  How much, you know, yeah. How much does Pharma's, you know, position end up influencing media narratives? They obviously spend, you know, an exceptional amount advertising with different media companies. This has been, you know, maybe a big issue in mainstream television where, you know,

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  a television network is not going to, you know, bring somebody on to talk poorly about a company that, you know, is a big sponsor. If you wanted to come here and talk negatively about Ramp, we'd probably change the conversation.

• 2:40:52Speaker 05

  I have nothing negative, I have nothing negative to say about Ramp. We love Ramp.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Of course, of course. But how, you know, is that a focal point at all? Do you think we need some reform there? Is it just the sort of free market, doing the free market?

• 2:41:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is how this framework I have and you know, so privileged to be fighting this fight with Justin and with TruMed and trying to help the administration. But I think what we're doing with the strategy is we're putting a stake in the ground that everyone can agree with where that in 10 years, our incentives of our system are changed. And the way I define those incentives is that nobody wants this, but the fact is the healthcare system, you know, a lot of health startups, quite frankly, still, their business model is predicated on more people being sick. The pharmaceutical industry makes more money when people are sicker for longer periods of time. Hospitals make more money when the beds are full, not when they're empty. You know, insurance companies actually make more money when people are sicker because

• 2:41:51Speaker 05

  of this horrible medical loss ratio issue where they actually have an incentive to raise premiums. So you actually have every single lever of the healthcare system predicated on sickness. Now, that same system, the pharma industry particularly, is the lifeblood of news advertising, over 50% for most news channels. So that creates not a direct, you know, there's not a direct edict going down, but you have a zero lack of curiosity from the media about why people are getting sick. It's really just referees about, you know, hey, you need to take this drug. Ozempic is the standard of care for kids, you know, with COVID. I mean, COVID was a metabolic health crisis. We were 16% of COVID deaths and 4% of the world's population. And the CDC said at the time, it's because our immune systems are so weak, we're dying

• 2:42:36Speaker 05

  very quickly when we get this disease. Yet the media was just about the COVID vaccine for six month olds. So you do have a very, very damaging situation where there's self censorship. And you know, what I, the strategy is to get to that long-term world where new startups are thinking about how to make people healthy, not how to take advantage of a system and, you know, deliver direct to consumer Ozempic or, you know, a better UX on medical records. A better UX on medical records is putting lipstick on a pig. The problem is the underlying incentives of the system. You know, shipping pills in a millennial pink packaging is an innovation. You know, a lot of healthcare startups are just wrappers on the existing broken health incentives that are destroying the country and going to bankrupt us.

• 2:43:21Speaker 05

  So that's the stake we have. The way we get there is let's do unimpeachable things. So this food dye thing is one. Obviously, there's been a lot of talk about pharmaceutical ads. Secretary Kennedy and Marty McCary, the amazing new FDA commissioner, have talked about that. No announcements right now, but that's, you know, something they've said they're clearly looking at. So it's just getting these things that are 90% support issues, bipartisan issues, and I think you'll be seeing them in rapid succession, these announcements.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, does the media, you know, incredible growth of drugs like Ozempic scare you? Obviously, being overweight is unhealthy. That's, you know, not a political point, but when I hear people, you know, saying that they're sort of like losing more muscle than, you know, fat, that can be, that personally is, you know, can be concerning. And then I'm curious if you have a general, you know, just personal opinion only on this sort of balance between like compounding and getting drugs that are benefiting people

• 2:44:31Jordi Hays?

  out quickly and affordably versus like, you know, protecting the intellectual property of the companies that, you know, develop these drugs.

• 2:44:41Speaker 05

  Great question. So on the first one, I'd say the Maha stance of Ozempic, as best I can define it, my personal opinion, is there's nothing wrong with GLP-1s or Ozempic per se. Actually, I think something the administration is talking a lot about, it's not an anti-drug stance. I think with the dawn of AI and very exciting things, quite frankly, in therapeutics, there should be robust innovation and frankly deregulation at the FDA. The problem is that with the existence of Ozempic, it's two problems. One is that the drug costs 10 times more than it does in Germany or Sweden. So, and that's going to come from US taxpayers. So there's a real corruption in the pricing. And then number two, corruption in the standard of care, what I call it.

• 2:45:24Speaker 05

  So there was a Medicare ruling from Biden that said that Ozempic should be the frontline defense for anyone who's obese or overweight on Medicare. So, you know, a 15-minute appointment, you get your Ozempic.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Instead of diet or exercise, right?

• 2:45:38Speaker 05

  Right, didn't even mention, there's no funding for diets. We spent five trillion on healthcare, right? And then they were gonna push this through where Ozempic's over a thousand dollars a month, which would come from taxpayers, not with no other option or no other route for an American to get, you know, the blood testing to understand their nutrient deficiencies, or talk to a dietary coach, you know, this is what true men did, why we put that flag in the ground. It's like, there should be flexibility with, um, with where healthcare dollars can go. So the problem, you know, is not that Ozempic exists, it's that that Medicare ruling would have gone to Medicaid, it would have gone to kids, because now it's being essentially pushed on six-year-olds in the American Academy of Pediatric. So you're getting to a world where, you know, stab rates,

• 2:46:20Speaker 05

  metformin rates, antidepressant rates have exploded among teens. Thirty-five percent of teens are on some kind of chronic disease drug. And Ozempic would just be added to that repertoire. And of course, that's just not from our medical system incentivizing the root cause. I mean, maybe somebody that's seventy-five-year-old on Medicaid, Medicare, um, who is, you know, four hundred pounds and extremely diabetic and set in their ways, sure, I mean, probably Ozempic, I'd be fine with Medicare funding for that. But, but for the vast majority of the American people, um, that shouldn't be the first line defense. That, that's the problem with our healthcare system right now. There's not flexibility for patients to maybe work with a functional medicine doctor, or figure out a more root cause intervention, because obviously obesity is not an Ozempic deficiency.

• 2:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, yeah, yeah. What, uh, what countries do you look at as models? The, the tech industry loves to poke fun at Europe, you know, they don't tend to make trillion-dollar companies very often, uh, or, or ever in the last-

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  They also don't win a lot of bodybuilding competitions. We are the most obese country, but we also, America also wins a lot of bodybuilding competitions.

• 2:47:28Jordi Hays?

  John's point of view, but, but what can we, you know, what are you looking at in terms of, like, this is a, you know, functioning, uh, government in the context of, uh, personal health?

• 2:47:38Speaker 05

  Though I don't like giving Europe any credit whatsoever, and they don't deserve much. And I will just say, this is a key point, Europe's healthcare systems are total basket case systems. They're terrible socialist systems. So I think one of the things we can learn from other countries.

• 2:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Just to be clear, the stuff.

• 2:47:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:47:55Jordi Hays?

  The stuff they get right is like saying like, hey, we don't want this die. We don't want glyphosate, you know, they get a little.

• 2:48:00Speaker 05

  Exactly. Actually, what they get right is that the healthcare system is less important, is that people are healthier to begin with. The problem with the US healthcare system is not that we have the wrong Medicare Medicaid reimbursement rates. It's the fact that we're the sickest country in the world, and that's actually because we rely too much on the healthcare system. So what I like about some other countries in Japan, and I think we need more of this, and Bobby Kennedy is pushing this more. I mean, if your kid is obese, you are shamed as a parent. Like, it is totally society unacceptable. Like, you are stunned, like, you're like yelled at by the school. Like, I think we need that same type of energy in America, like, children should not be fat and diabetic, like, period. Like, like, we have totally lost our way.

• 2:48:40Speaker 05

  Right now, there's a whole TikTok craze where they're shaming doctors for weighing patients or even talking about weight. O- obesity is a blaring warning sign that our cells aren't working. And it is not, I do not blame the individuals. When eighty percent of American adults are overweight or obese, we have a systemic problem. But from the culture, we shouldn't accept that. We should absolutely be declaring that we do not want to have childhood obesity or diabetes and have that culture. Additionally, in Japan and Italy and some of the European countries, there is like total bipartisan just consensus. This sounds so obvious, but, but it's not the case in the US, that we shouldn't be poisoning kids. I mean, the school lunches in America are an absolute dumpster fire.

• 2:49:22Speaker 05

  And, you know, in, in Japan and Italy and France, France has mandated at daycare a four-course meal, including a cheese course. I think a cigarette and wine afterwards. I mean.

• 2:49:35Speaker 05

  But that'd be healthier than what they serve in America. I mean, it's absolute disaster. So there is just this cultural thing around food. One thing I look at Europe, they spend three times less on average per capita on healthcare, but two times more per capita on food in Europe. They, they do have a lot more respect for their agriculture system and their farmers. And the consumption of whole food there is much lower, that, that, you know, thoughts about pesticides and what's going on in the food. So you always hear you go to Italy, you eat the posse, the gelato, you lose weight. I mean, that's really true. So I think what needs to happen and what I hope culturally happens with these step-by-step wins is we move culturally to a system

• 2:50:17Speaker 05

  that puts less emphasis on getting sick and then getting drugged and more emphasis on what I really think it's a spiritual issue of having more curiosity and awe about what we're putting in our body, our environment, how that impacts the soil, how that impacts the food, and then just getting back to basics on, you know, not poisoning kids.

• 2:50:34John Coogan?

  Is there anything that the government can do or even America could do about on the fitness side of things?

• 2:50:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what happened to the presidential fitness test?

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  It got phased out. There was a new program in 2013.

• 2:50:44John Coogan?

  That's half of the battle here. We're addressing a lot of the diet and the food supply stuff, but fitness is extremely important, but it's harder to incentivize or subsidize. Maybe, I don't know. What is your take on fitness?

• 2:50:56Speaker 05

  Well, I was just with Secretary Kennedy in Miami at a UFC fight and, you know, Shaq was there and a bunch of A-list celebrities talking about how they can help, you know, encourage youth fitness and rejuvenate. So I don't want to get in front of any announcements here.

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:09Speaker 05

  But I think that type of education and inspiration among kids for more fitness to not be, I mean, a boy in America, you know, a teenager boy in America has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man. Like, there's been a depletion of testosterone among kids, obviously because of our food or sedentary lifestyle. We're soft. I mean, you know, 77% of military-aged youth cannot join the military in America right now. It's a national security crisis. So my one-two kind of framework in my head is let's get the wins like the food dies. But you can't undercount the cultural

• 2:51:52Speaker 05

  education elements to this, you know, bringing what Justin Mayers and Mark Hyman and a lot of people have been talking about this for a long time, bringing that to the forefront, these comments and solutions. So you're going to see a lot of initiatives. And one thing I'm excited about is when Secretary Kennedy was sworn in by President Trump, he signed an executive order. And on May 22nd, in about a month, they're releasing a 100-day report on the chronic disease crisis, why kids are getting so sick. It's gonna say things that the US government's never said before about environmental toxins, about our water quality, about our food quality, about our sedentary lifestyle. So getting the facts down and having the conversation on a factual basis and not letting industry,

• 2:52:36Speaker 05

  and I'll say this, a lot of people in industry lobby not on policies, but actually to prevent transparency about what's happening. But you know, there's pressure, you know, to not talk about pesticides. There's pressure to, you know, not talk about certain topics because it's gonna scare consumers or it's gonna confuse consumers. There is a good trend right now where the government is gonna talk about anything they want to and they're gonna give Americans information, not infantilize the American people as we often do. And I think that's the necessary precondition for a long-term conversation about policy change, two systems that are gonna bankrupt the country and cause us to cease to exist, which is, I think is true, given the trajectory of our healthcare budget,

• 2:53:18Speaker 05

  which will bankrupt us, and the decimation to American competitiveness when you have 50% of teens overweight or obese and 38% of teens prediabetic.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Those kind of numbers are so shocking, living in California or any, you know, if you live in California and New York, it's just you would never believe those numbers. You have to go to places that don't, where wellness is not, you know, the number one trend. I'm curious, do you think this movement around making America healthy would have been possible before decentralized media? It feels like we kind of needed podcasts, we needed social media, we needed people, we needed like a mom, some random place to discover that when she removed red dye from her kid's food, that this thing happened and then she shared it and people start collaborating. So I feel like, you know, a lot of this movement just would have been impossible

• 2:54:11Jordi Hays?

  when you only could get your news from magazines or newspapers or radios that are all captured in some way by, you know, large corporates.

• 2:54:20Speaker 05

  No, the independent media ecosystem is an absolutely necessary condition to the opportunity we have right now. It can't be overstated how destructive this that our core information source has been co-opted by an industry that profits from Americans being sick and that's had devastating consequences. I think what's happened with independent media is one of the major historical events in American history. Like when you read about the American Revolution, it was really propagated by the ability to easily print pamphlets and then Franklin and others, you know, getting ideas out that have never been able to get out before in a in a mass way. I think this is a huge shift. I mean, for, you know, since World War II, we've had a corporate owned essentially media. And now we're able, you know, you guys and people at a microphone are able to get more distribution than CNN.

• 2:55:06Speaker 05

  The, you know, Secretary Kennedy, you know, was called a whack job by everyone. Actually, him and President Trump are the two most popular political figures in America still. He was able to get through on independent media podcasts like Joe Rogan. And actually, Americans, you know, determined a lot of them that he actually makes a lot of sense with what he's talking about. Really about these overarching incentives of healthcare. I can't stress that enough. There's a, there's a in, in this building, in the White House, there's, there's a shift happening where we are, of course, talking about healthcare policy, like what to do on Medicare and Medicaid, but, but it's more about the foundational incentives. Where, what is the logic of where the $2 trillion we spent on Medicare or Medicaid going?

• 2:55:48Speaker 05

  Is that straight to drugs or is it more root cause interventions? How are we incentivizing our food system? Are we really incentivizing ultra-processed food for kids? Is there enough transparency for Americans to make the best decisions? There's more foundational topics being asked, and those are very disruptive topics to the, you know, legacy industry. And, and that's all because of independent media. I'll say the independent media also rightfully has led to record distrust of our major institutions from, you know, frankly, the education system, you know, lots happening with Harvard right now, to the pharmaceutical industry, you know, to, to, to others. That's warranted. And, and, and one of the leverages, I think, there is for change is that these industries, when I meet with them,

• 2:56:33Speaker 05

  you know, really acknowledge that they have to make some major changes, really partner frankly with Secretary Kennedy. You know, not to do any Secretary Kennedy, President Trump any favors because they actually have to make changes to maintain their legitimacy with the American people. I mean, it's not working right now. I mean, some of the tech bros on Twitter are saying how incredible, you know, um, recent American healthcare innovation, uh, how it's, how it's been. I, I'd love to see what they're talking about. I mean, we're literally have life expectancy declining. You know, we spend four to five times more than other countries. Prone disease rates, every single one is at a record high this year in America. We have the highest rate of chronic disease than any country in human civilization. I, I, I don't know what they're looking at, but we're not in a good situation right now.

• 2:57:17Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, think about timelines? You're, you know, special government employee for a limited period of time. This is obviously a monumental task. It's not something that can be solved even in a single admin. How, how do you think about, you know, making sure that obviously, you know, we were headed in a, to, to, to a really bad place, uh, from a, from a, you know, nationwide health standpoint, from an economic standpoint, due to the, due to the consequences of those health issues. But, um, what, what's the, what's the strategy to make sure that this sort of movement becomes bipartisan and kind of can live, uh, live on after you guys are, are no longer in the White House?

• 2:57:58Speaker 05

  I personally think we need to think about is a 12 year strategy. We're not going to reorient the incentives of the largest industry in America, the, the fastest growing industry in America, because we're getting sick. The most employed industry in America, we're not going to change those incentives, uh, overnight or even in the next four years. I think what we need to do, what I'm focused on is, is maintain the political coalition of what you call this Maha coalition. The reason we're able to drive change is because millions of women, quite frankly, moms voted for Trump for the first time, people who would have never considered voting for Trump years ago. This, this issue has galvanized voters into a coalition. Uh, President Trump, uh, was 50 50 among young people, 50 50 among independents. We couldn't have imagined that four years ago.

• 2:58:43Speaker 05

  So multiple factors for that, but clearly this Maha kind of energy led to that. So the reason we have an opportunity for change is because voters have really galvanized around this issue. So to me, if we can solidify that coalition, that coalition is going to continue to drive change. We need to deliver wins for the next two years. I mean, I'd love for Democrats to compete for those voters. They've had their head in the sand. If those voters can help Republicans, which is my hope in the midterms. I think you have 2028 where both sides are basically arguing who's more Maha, which I think is a positive thing. I think we've shifted the paradigm of health. You know, before last year, healthcare was about how to add more people to the existing broken system. That's insane. You had Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren just a couple of months ago during

• 2:59:28Speaker 05

  the confirmation hearings with Bobby Kennedy, obfuscating him for taking on pharma companies. Elizabeth Warren actually said, you know, you're going to hurt their profit margins, these poor companies. Like, like, people have lost their minds when it comes to healthcare, somehow arguing that more resources, more spending to this broken system is how we solve it, instead of actual core reform of the system. I want to get political victories and change the overall bipartisan way we talk about health. And I will say, everyone talks about the special interest, the money. The one thing that counteracts that is voters really voting on this issue. And now you have Maha Moms and people waking up, caring about this issue as a voting topic. So as long as that's solidified, you'll have momentum that changes the incentives of healthcare, where we can look back in 12 years, and we

• 3:00:13Speaker 05

  have a thriving pharmaceutical industry, but they are incentivized to promote longevity. They're incentivized to cure diseases, not just manage them. All pharmaceutical profits right now are managing. And, you know, we have an overall healthcare ecosystem that's more value-based, that's more geared towards keeping people healthy, which can't happen.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there does feel like a way to flip the incentive where the pharmaceutical companies are like, if we can just keep this person alive for another 100 years, imagine how much, you know, how many drugs we can sell them.

• 3:00:44Speaker 05

  They should make a lot of money for that. Like, like, imagine the impact the economy, if they could do that. Like, they should make a ton of money for that. And they tell you off the record, right? They'd love to do that, but the incentives are all about disease management. So, so, so, this isn't a free market right now, and there's a real opportunity to nudge these incentives to a different direction.

• 3:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes no sense. Well, thank you for the work that you're doing.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  And making the time.

• 3:01:07Speaker 05

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  I think you're doing very important work.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:01:11Speaker 05

  Talk to you soon, guys.

• 3:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Bye. Let's tell you about Public. You heard the founders on the show earlier, but Public is investing. For those who take it seriously, they got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We got some personnel news today. Jason Citron is out as CEO of Discord. He's bringing on Humam Saman, Sakanini. We need a- Building Discord has been one of the most meaningful and rewarding experiences of his life. What started as a simple idea to help friends talk while playing games has grown into something far bigger than I ever imagined. I'll be transitioning to a new member as board member and advisor and continuing to support Discord through this next chapter. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together and even more excited for what's

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  ahead. Very interesting. Very cool. It will be interesting to see- Crazy run. Discord gets out at some point. There's been rumors about IPO. And so, yeah, maybe that's the, maybe this is a move to prepare for the public markets. Being a public market CEO is a different job, and maybe Jason wants to step back. But we'd love to have him on the show, do a little gaming day, talk about everything in Discord's world. Fascinating founder, total outlier, not from the typical Silicon Valley elite pipelines, not Stanford or Harvard. Built, you know, one mobile game at some point, sold one company,

• 3:02:39John Coogan?

  ran it back, built up Discord into a really, really powerful company. So congrats to him on the transition and good luck to the new CEO of Discord. We got some listener feedback. We got some posts about the show. Midwest Tech Bro says, "After switching to TBPN, I got my entire life back. No more deciding what podcast to listen to. Trying to write down important points or worrying that I missed some key news today. TBPN changed the way I consume media and in turn changed my family's life." Thank you, TBPN. Thank you.

• 3:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Thank you Midwest Tech Bro. Says from my wife, the Palace of Pump has rocked our world.

• 3:03:17John Coogan?

  Yes, we're good. We're happy to have you as a listener. There's more TVPN news. Austin Peter Smith says, people will say it isn't scalable to bring on each new podcast listener via direct sales reps, but here's a counterfactual. I got cold emailed by a TVPN rep, ended up doing six calls with them over eight weeks before deciding to become a listener. And then I went on to spend $11 million on eight sleep mattresses with my Tri-Ramp card, providing enough measurable ROI to cover that sales rep for the quarter. Thank you, Austin.

• 3:03:50Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 3:03:50John Coogan?

  Padavangun based Alexandor says, you should get a notification if your tweet was featured on TVPN. Well, this is your notification. You have been featured on TVPN.

• 3:04:04John Coogan?

  You're featured on TVPN.

• 3:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 3:04:08John Coogan?

  Tweet this. We do want to build an automation, something around this, maybe reply to this post with this clip. We'll figure it out. We're hiring folks every day. Just if you apply, make sure you have at least one of the following.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have an opportunity to get into TVPN.

• 3:04:24John Coogan?

  We want Navy SEALs, GP at a tier one VC, these types of things, 10 years Cuda experience, 20 years high frequency trading experience. If you have something like that, you might be a fit for the team.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  And still an opportunity to get in under 100 people.

• 3:04:37John Coogan?

  Exactly. Being in the first 100 is huge.

• 3:04:40Jordi Hays?

  At least if you join in the next couple of weeks.

• 3:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  Janon account says, would be insane if there were one company with John Schrom and Daria, Alec Redford, Ilya, Saman, Greg, Andre Karpathy, Mira, and Paul Cristiano. Very, very funny.

• 3:04:56Jordi Hays?

  And the only person left at this company after six months is Saman.

• 3:05:01John Coogan?

  No, I think Greg's still there. Yeah, Greg came back. But it is, it is crazy how there's been this, you know, there was insane concentration of talent there. And then as they, as they transitioned out of a, becoming a research institute into becoming a product company, there was a turnover in, in the team and people scattered to the wind to do all sorts of different projects. But, you know, I'm excited. More competition, better products for consumers, specifically in AI.

• 3:05:28John Coogan?

  Ryan Peterson shares the Wall Street Journal talking about Flexport. It's a staggeringly tedious job that would be of little interest to anyone in normal times. Absolutely. They called us tariff pencil pushers. So rude.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  He's getting, he's getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Whenever something happens in logistics, shipping, he's the person that everyone wants to call.

• 3:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Many people, many people love to say that Ryan actually created global trade.

• 3:05:59John Coogan?

  He did.

• 3:06:00Jordi Hays?

  And so he gets quoted.

• 3:06:01John Coogan?

  Created shipping, yeah.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he invented, you know, the ship, basically.

• 3:06:05John Coogan?

  The ship, yes, the ship.

• 3:06:07Jordi Hays?

  This post from Tyler Cosgrove.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  Just fantastic design.

• 3:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Close friend of the show.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  Show.

• 3:06:14Jordi Hays?

  He adds the soft bank. Soft bank treatment to OpenAI's charge. I agree. It looks much better with the unicorns galloping upwards and.

• 3:06:22John Coogan?

  The winter projection for, uh, winter 2025 projection for, um, chat, uh, for OpenAI revenue is going from 1 billion in 2023 to 4 billion in 2024 to 13 billion in 2025 to 29 billion, then 54 billion, then 86 billion, then 125 billion.

• 3:06:44Jordi Hays?

  We're going higher.

• 3:06:45John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Uh, I mean, they're, they're on their way and, you know, yeah, you throw the, you throw the unicorns on there. You throw the big PowerPoint arrow and it looks a lot better. But I mean, the business is ripping. I use the product every day. I think most people do. Uh, and so good luck to them on their path to 125 billion dollars in revenue in 2029. Hopefully, I think that they might blow that out. Who knows? We'll be tracking it here. We'll be breaking it down. We'll be tracking polymarkets to see where their DAUs end up.

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  Or their MAUs. Uh, Sean Frank coming on the show tomorrow, but had a, um. Had a good post we wanted to highlight, he said, or a bigger third thing, trend lines don't continue forever. Hard work built this business. Covid scaled it for 24 months. Every single person in America suddenly loved the outdoors. They went out and bought gear to enjoy them. This is the story of solo brands. NAS, NYSE has suspended solo brands. Are they a casualty of tariffs or mismanagement? Sean Frank's breaking it down. He says that gear had negative network effect. Every solo stole, every solo stove sold increases the CAC of the next one because the next buyer is less incremental, less interested, more, taking more promos or ad impressions to buy. And instead of launching a second

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  bigger SKU, they bought non-adjacent brands. Chubbies is great, but solo stove buyers aren't guaranteed to be Chubbies customers and vice versa. There's no flywheel, no cross-sell, no advantage, just a hard goods company and apparel brand trying to be managed by the same team.

• 3:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that the idea of consumer holding companies is very appealing, but consumer products are a full contact sport.

• 3:08:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:25Jordi Hays?

  And the best companies that I'm aware of have, you know, management teams that are 110% in and trying to then, if you're not and you're trying to manage multiple brands while you're competing in the same categories with, you know, founder-led or just exceptional management teams, so.

• 3:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, happy birthday to YouTube. YouTube turned 20 yesterday and Colin Samir remade the very first YouTube video ever there at the zoo. And I hadn't really watched the original YouTube video. I mean, I probably watched it at some point. This is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Us at the zoo, Colin Samir recreated it and it's 21 seconds and it's kind of a funny watch if we can pull it up. Let's see. In other news, Arowan raised a $2 billion valuation. Let's go. I, is this a down round?

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we spend.

• 3:09:26John Coogan?

  What happened? I feel like if they have just like a few customers like you, they should be up at like 20, 40, 100, 200 billion.

• 3:09:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the fact that I get to track my LTV in the app is.

• 3:09:37John Coogan?

  Wild.

• 3:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Wild. But yeah, somebody was breaking down the math here. I don't know how accurate this is. They have 10 stores.

• 3:09:48Jordi Hays?

  You know, I don't know. I've heard a bunch of rumors, just being around LA over the years, of just how much money they make. But you have to think of it as a grocery store, a high-margin grocery store, which is non-traditional. Grocery is typically low-margin. They've turned grocery into a high-margin business, plus adding on a high-margin restaurant, plus they sell, you know, home products and beauty products and skincare and things like that. So you can't look at it as a purely monolithic, you know, it's not a typical grocery store. And then they also have this, like, cafe business. And I think when you combine all of those, they're just cash machines.

• 3:10:32John Coogan?

  Andrea here says, she's been told by multiple sources that they claim to make $50 million per store. So 10 stores, that's $500 million in revenue. And they also make more money from the smoothie collabs, which is very fun. One of our goals for this year is to get a TBPN smoothie at Arrow One. So if you're listening to Arrow One, give us a ring. Let's watch the Colin Smear YouTube video.

• 3:10:54Speaker 09

  All right. So here we are in front of the elephants.

• 3:11:01Speaker 09

  Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's, that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. All right. So here we are.

• 3:11:18John Coogan?

  Can you believe that?

• 3:11:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 3:11:21John Coogan?

  That was the first YouTube video ever. Masterpiece.

• 3:11:24Jordi Hays?

  A masterpiece.

• 3:11:25John Coogan?

  A masterpiece. Chad Hurley, the YouTube team, they threw that up. And YouTube was originally a dating site.

• 3:11:34Jordi Hays?

  We gotta pull up one of those videos sometime, not today, but of the early YouTube team, when they're just like, you know, talking, like, they look like they're in like a dungeon, basically. Like, they're just talking about how hard it is, how things are working, how they're not working. But they cooked.

• 3:11:50John Coogan?

  They did. Let's close out with a post from Sean Frank, who's coming on the show tomorrow. He says he's opening a speakeasy just for Red Dy 40 and Microplastics. Don't let Kelly Means find out about that, Sean. But I like the way you're thinking. Government can't hold you back. Poison resist. You're just gonna get stronger. It can only make you stronger, Sean. I think you're in good shape. I think you can handle all of the microplastics and the red dyes. Good luck to you, though. So good. And we'll ask you more about it tomorrow when we see you on the show. But anyway, thank you for watching, everyone. Thank you, folks. We will see you tomorrow. We'll see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Cheers.