Chamath Is Back With New SPAC, AI Scrutiny, China’s Moon Push | Pete DeJoy, Marty Kausas, Matteo Franceschetti, Abdul Al-Asaad, Derek Lo, Alex Telford

(00:30) - Chamath is Back with New SPAC (31:33) - Timeline (01:01:23) - TBPN Substack (01:16:35) - Gong of the Day (01:26:14) - Timeline (01:59:29) - Pete DeJoy, co-founder and interim CEO of Astronomer, discusses the company's evolution from its inception in Cincinnati, Ohio, to becoming a leader in data orchestration with its Apache Airflow-powered platform, Astro. He highlights the company's significant growth, including a 292% year-over-year revenue increase and the relocation of their headquarters to New York City. DeJoy also addresses the recent media attention following the resignation of former CEO Andy Byron, emphasizing the team's resilience and commitment to their mission. (02:12:01) - Timeline (02:15:55) - China Heads to the Moon (02:21:46) - GPT-5 Facing a Reverse Deepseek Moment (02:30:57) - Marty Kausas, co-founder and CEO of Pylon, a B2B customer support platform, discusses the company's recent $31 million Series B funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Ventures. He highlights Pylon's focus on the B2B market, emphasizing the complexity of support needs involving multiple teams and the necessity for comprehensive account context. Kausas also outlines Pylon's strategy to build a system of record from scratch, integrating AI agents to effectively manage intricate B2B support scenarios. (02:37:25) - Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, announced the company's recent $100 million Series D funding, bringing total funding to $250 million. He highlighted the company's financial strength, noting they've been free cash flow positive for the past year, and outlined plans to enhance AI capabilities, pursue FDA approvals for sleep apnea and menopause-related products, and expand into the Asian market, particularly China. (02:44:03) - Abdul Al-Assad, co-founder and CEO of Basic Capital, discusses his company's mission to enable individuals to use credit for investing in financial assets rather than consumption. He highlights the recent $25 million Series A funding led by Kirsten at Code Runner and addresses public concerns about the risks of using credit to invest, emphasizing the importance of long-term investment horizons and the potential for wealth building through asset ownership. Abdul also contrasts Basic Capital's approach with traditional leveraged ETFs and margin loans, advocating for structured, long-term financing options to help individuals build wealth over time. (02:55:54) - Derek Lo, founder and CEO of Medallion, a provider network management platform, discusses the company's recent $43 million funding round led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Sequoia, Google Ventures, and Spark Capital. He explains how Medallion automates back-office processes for healthcare companies, focusing on managing clinical networks and streamlining tasks like credentialing and compliance. Lo also highlights the company's strategic decision to concentrate on healthcare-specific workflows rather than entering the competitive payroll space, emphasizing the importance of precision in their AI applications due to the critical nature of healthcare operations. (03:01:39) - Alex Telford, co-founder of Convoke, a biotech software startup, discusses their platform's aim to automate the knowledge work involved in drug development, focusing on planning and preparation to accelerate the process. He announces an $8.6 million seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins and shares his background as a life sciences consultant, emphasizing the potential of AI to enhance efficiency in the pharmaceutical industry. Telford also expresses skepticism about AI's role in patient recruitment, highlighting the challenges posed by the limited availability of patients for clinical trials. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN!

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, August 19th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. I'm good. I need to finish tying my shoes.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Great. Take all the time you need. About three hours.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  We got three hours.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  And no, we really have more like three and a half.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  The countdown is literally down to two seconds and I couldn't, I couldn't get my last shoe tied. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in today. We have a great show for you. Chamath Palihapitiya is the current thing and that's where we're starting our show. Chamath is back with a SPAC focused on defense tech, AI, DeFi. We're not exactly sure what he's, what the target is.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  He's got options.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  But it's big, it's big news. It's big news and it's burning up the timeline and there's a lot of, a lot of coverage and a lot of history here to talk about. So we want to take you through the history of Chamath, look at what happened last time he was big in SPACs. He did 10 of them. There's a whole, a whole wide range of performance. Kind of a narrative violation that everyone thinks they all went to zero. There was one SoFi that did very well.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Size gone for the pure number of SPACs.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  10 SPACs. That is, that is huge. It's actually not as big as some of the stuff that was going on in the, in the dot com boom. I know a guy from Pasadena, who I believe took 100 companies public during the dot com boom. 100 companies. That's some big numbers. Big numbers.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  And if you're dealing with big numbers, you gotta get on ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So we put up the post, breaking news. The SPAC king is back. Chamath Palihapitiya files a new $250 million SPAC. American exceptionalism acquisition.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  It would be un-American to not like this name.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  It's a great name. It's a great name. Previously, the, I mean,

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  How do you pronounce it though?

• 1:57John Coogan?

  He's always been.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  How do you pronounce?

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Axa.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Axa.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Axa? I don't know. He's always been good with the names. I, I liked, he, he, you know, the, the SPAC is not a new thing. People think Chamath invented the SPAC. He didn't. It was being used in the 90s.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if anybody thinks he invented it.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  He, everyone, everyone thinks he invented it, Jordy. Literally, everyone thinks he invented it. No one thinks anyone else invented it. Uh, no, uh, it was used in the 90s.

• 2:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Uh, also, um, the company that, uh, that created Cyberpunk and The Witcher, CD Projekt Red, went, uh, went public via SPAC. I think in like the mid 2000s, something like that. Anyway, we'll, we'll, we'll get into some of the lore. Whether you're watching on YouTube, whether you're watching on X. Thank you to all the folks in the chat. We, this is only possible because of Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. Multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. So, thank you to Restream for making this possible. Thank you for John Exley for being in the chat. Thank you too.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Where was John Exley yesterday?

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a big question. John, you got some questions to answer. You got some.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  We missed you.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Everyone was wondering. Um, so we're going through Chamath Palihapitiya's, uh, uh, SPACs and the Financial Times had one of the most insane articles I've ever seen. I, I didn't realize they.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  It looked like.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  They had this dog in them. I didn't realize that they could post like this. This is one of the craziest.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it felt like it should have been in the timeline.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Now, it's in AlphaVille, which is one of their like blogs. Um, but it says Chamath's new letter to SPAC investors. Yeah.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  The writer's name, Robin Wigglesworth.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Wigglesworth.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  So, Wigglesworth is.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Coming for Chamath Palihapitiya.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Coming for, uh, Robin is coming for.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Chamath, uh, what American exceptionalism looks like in 2025. Yesterday, they, uh, this is, this is a rough article already. Yesterday, misadventure capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya filed a prospectus for a new $250 million special act, special purpose acquisition vehicle. You can read the full S1 filing for American exceptionalism acquisition corp. Here, in case you're interested, here are some expert excerpts from the accompanying letter written by Palihapitiya to his company's friends and supporters, presented without written comment, and you will see that they put images in here. Uh, quote from Chamath.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this, uh, pull up the screen here.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  You gotta pull up the screen because the whole bit is the images. When I first raised, when I raised my first SPAC in 2017. People think of the SPAC era as 2022, 2021. It actually started in 2017 with Chamath. The first SPAC raised in 2017 went out in 2019. I wanted to help correct an increasingly unstable balance between the private and public markets. While SPACs are not the solution to every issue in the IPO process, I continue to believe they have an important piece to play in capital formation, especially now. We believe that retail investors should only participate if, A, this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio; B, this investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose;

• 5:07John Coogan?

  and C, if they do lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  And his first ever SPAC

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  was the one that IPOA merged with Virgin Galactic

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  and is down 98.5%.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yes. So, I mean, back to the naming thing. Phenomenal work naming these SPACs. IPOA, IPOB, IPOC, IPOD. Then he did a run of biotech SPACs that were called DNAA, DNAB.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  And I thought that, you know, at one point he was going to go through the entire alphabet and do IPOZ. But basically, from 2019 to 2023, Chamath did 10 SPAC deals. Four of those were liquidated, which sounds a lot more dramatic than it is. When a SPAC gets liquidated, the investors just get their money back because no target company is selected for acquisition. So, the way a SPAC works,

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Chamath promoter, a SPAC promoter, goes out to the market and says, "I'm going to buy a company. I don't have them lined up yet. You're going to give me $250 million. We're going to put that in a bank account."

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  So it's ready to deploy.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  It's ready to deploy. We're going to put $250 million in this bank account. You're going to earn T-bills interest on it. But if we don't select something, we can't get a deal done. We can't find a good company that we like, you will just get your money back. And so there's like, there's low risk that like you just lose the money. And so the liquidations, four of them, they just didn't find, they didn't find homes, they didn't find targets. And so those investors got their money back. Now, of the six SPACs that were successful, they didn't get liquidated, they did de-SPAC, meaning they acquired a company and then changed their ticker to represent Virgin Galactic or SoFi. Only one of the six is currently sitting at a higher price than what it went out at. SoFi, the lending company, SPAC to $10 a share, and

• 7:09John Coogan?

  now sits around $23 a share. Not bad. The other five SPACs did very poorly, and this is why the timeline is in turmoil over there.

• 7:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, so, Virgin...

• 7:20John Coogan?

  Virgin Galactic's down 99%.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  But, but look at the history here. So...

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  The stock peaked on June 25th, 2021, at $1,118 a share.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  No way.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Down to $2.94.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  Well, so that 1,000 is they did a, they did a stock split.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, got it.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, they did a 20 for, a 1 to 20 reverse stock split to try and, because they were trading like a penny stock, and so they brought the price of the share back up, but they reduced the number of shares significantly. So it's not like it actually went out as a $1,000 stock. It went out as a $10 stock, but then it, it, it fell off. And Virgin Galactic was always an interesting one. You easily could have put it in the bucket of serious entrepreneur. Richard Branson is a serious entrepreneur who's built big companies and is extremely successful and billionaire. You could have put it in the same category as Elon has SpaceX, very serious company with real revenues, huge share of

• 8:21John Coogan?

  the launch market, huge business with Starlink. Bezos has Blue Origin, very serious business, more in the space tourism category right now, but surprisingly making progress there. Not a zero by any means, not a vanity project. And you would think Virgin Galactic, maybe the same thing could happen out, but they made bets on space planes that would fly up and they never really got a flywheel going that could really compound like Starlink, like just launch capability for the

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you go, if you go on their website today, it's almost entirely renders.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yep, it's bad. So anyway, Virgin Galactic is down 98.5%, something like that. Open Door was another one that went out. This was a Chamath Spak, down 64%, but maybe there's a comeback. Keith Raboy came on the show and the retail army is working to make Open Door

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  There will be a new CEO.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  We'll see, yeah. The, the current CEO just stepped down, so there should, there is a catalyst there. So who knows, something could happen. Clover Health is down 75%, Accoli is down 96%, Pro Kidney is down 75%. So basically, if you bought an index of Chamath Spak's and held, you're probably disappointed, but Chamath, to his credit, is not advocating that you YOLO into his deal. He says straight up, no crying in the casino. Probably the first time those words have ever appeared in

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Metro Mile went out too, right?

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Was that a Chamath Spak, Spak? Chamath Spak? Was that a Spak?

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  I, I remember a post, I remember a post saying, it was Buffett had GEICO.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  I have Metro Mile, yeah.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  But it, it was, Metro Mile was acquired by

• 10:02John Coogan?

  I thought Metro Mile was so cool when I, when I found out about it. So the basic pitch for Metro Mile was like, you pay auto insurance. The default is you just get auto insurance based on your car, who you are. If you're, you know, if you're a young man who tends to get a lot of speeding tickets, you might have to pay a higher rate, especially if you're driving, say, a red sports car. But if you're, you know, someone who's, who's hasn't gotten in an accident or hasn't gotten a speeding ticket in three decades, you'll probably pay a really low rate. And of course, it costs more to, to insure a Lamborghini or McLaren F1 than a Honda Civic. But

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Most of the insurance, the current market for insurance will look at your odometer and see, okay, well, you, the average American might drive 10,000 miles a year. You're only driving $2,000, $2,000 miles a year. The chance that you get into an accident or something happens with this car is, is much less. So we'll give you a discount. And so they do verified odometer discounts. Metro Mile's pitch was, let's put a GPS tracker and a accelerometer in the car, hook it up to the port on the car, and we can see if you're driving the car hard. So if we drive like, if you drive like us, we're going to pay through the roof because we're going to be drifting and, and doing aggressive overtakes.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how, I wonder how Tesla autopilot would do on Metro Mile?

• 11:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:27Jordi Hays?

  Because yesterday, yesterday I was going to dinner with some friends.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  Oh, you got in the line?

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  Friends of ours each have, have matching Tesla wise. And

• 11:37John Coogan?

  How did they figure out whose is whose? They should at least get a livery on one of them or something.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question. Ryan Spencer, you know what to do. But they both set the cars on autopilot to drive from their office to dinner. So I was driving one of them. The first Tesla takes, the autopilot is incredible, except for this one tiny moment where there's a left turn, there's a stoplight, the Tesla takes a right turn into, into this lane that's merging the other way, and then realizes it made a mistake, but it was like, there was already a separating kind of wall. And it, and it takes this like horrifically illegal left turn, merging into traffic, still fully in autopilot. And the other Tesla followed

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  the other Tesla and made the same like extremely illegal left turn. So you could imagine, at some points, you know, the, the Metro Mile system is like, actually, we're loving this driver.

• 12:36John Coogan?

  Well, if you love automation, you want to stay legal, get on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process, replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. I like this post in the chat tray. P says, should be cheaper to insure a Lambo so it incentivizes success. That's a good take.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  That is a good take.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  A good take. Okay, so, so, metro mile, um, I don't know.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Ends up getting acquired by Lemonade for less than 10.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Oh, that's what happened.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Less than 10% of what it's.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  What it went at. So a dollar share instead of 10. So.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  In general, people are saying, you know, the last batch of SPACs didn't do very well. Uh, the, the, uh, past performance is indicative of future performance, which of course it is not. And so, um, the Chamath is being pretty clear, and I think the disclosures in this document are, uh.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to read the full, to read the full, obviously, all S1s.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Like, if you're putting no crying at the casino in your, in your S1, like, you are, you are doing as much handholding as possible to tell people, I am building a casino.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  You can bet on me or you can bet against me.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

  All S1s, you know, have these lines in there where you read them and you're like, wait. You know, it sounds.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Risk, yeah, there's a risk factor.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Very clearly outlining the risk.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  And the best companies in the world will have a risk factor section. In fact, they have, they have one every time they file.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Like, Facebook, Google, Apple, they all have risk factors.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  The line here is consequently, we believe that this investment is most suitable for institutional investors and retail investors should approach with caution if at all. We believe that retail investors should only participate if this investment is a small part of an otherwise diversified portfolio. This investment is a quantum of capital they can afford to completely lose. And if they lose their entire capital, they will embody the adage from President Trump that there can be no crying in the casino. So.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  I read this, this, you know, we have to wait and see, you know, does he, does he, you know, end up merging with a company? The, the core categories are energy production, AI, DeFi, and defense. So, a bunch of really hot categories. You could see him doing something in nuclear. You could see him, um, you could imagine him doing something with Grok, right?

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you could imagine him, there's a variety of profitable DeFi companies that are now, according to the White House, operating legally. A lot of them have beat various, um, lawsuits with the, the SEC over the last couple of years and then. Defense as well. So four very hot categories. It will, you know, you, you kind of need to wait to pass too much judgment until you understand what the target is. But ultimately, I see this as if you look at this product as an entertainment product or for stock enthusiasts, or you look at it as, as a, as a, as a kind of slot machine.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 15:30Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I plan to, I plan to ride with, with Chamath.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice, but I think it'll be entertaining. I think it'll be fun.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm, it's a, it, it, it's a, you know, think, think of it as like an expensive movie ticket.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Interestingly, Scott Kapoor, who we've had on the show, former A16Z, now the director of office of personnel management. He quoted that FT article, put it on the timeline and said, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice. So I believe Scott will not be riding with Chamath, but he'll, he'll be taking the other side. Let's lay out.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  Wait, do you know that quote?

• 16:07John Coogan?

  What?

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  From a former president, George W. Bush. He said, there's an old saying in Tennessee. I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee, that says, fool me once, shame on, shame on you. Fool me twice, fool me, you can't get fooled again. And I think that says everything there is, you know, to really say about, about this next fact.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  I know that that's a, it's a famous quote and, and obviously, you know, he was probably misspeaking, but was he hitting some deeper truth?

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  He, the, the last line is fool me.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  To blame. So the, the true quote is fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. I shouldn't, I need to take the blame because I shouldn't have been fooled by somebody who already fooled me. But maybe the real lesson is if you have been fooled twice, just full stop, you can't get fooled again. Maybe that's actually better advice than saying, oh, then you need to take the blame on yourself. No. If you get fooled twice, just never get fooled again. It's a full on skill issue.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  The exact line is fool me, you can't get fooled again.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  Exactly. That's actually better advice than placing blame after a multiple fooling incident. You must just move on. Anyway, the bull cave for Chamath. He's probably learned a lot from his last go around. He stayed in the game. He never stopped talking publicly on his podcast and there's probably another SoFi like company out there right now if you look hard enough. So there is a chance.

• 17:37Jordi Hays?

  He could buy a fantastic business at a fair price and compound for decades.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  That would be how, that would be, that would be if he, you know, that you can kind of, you know, think about the motivations here. Like one, like he's probably going to make a lot of money one way or another. People can debate if that's ethical or not, but ultimately it's not illegal.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  So he's going to make a lot of money. Part of this feels like a spite SPAC, right?

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were highlighting a few different motivations. I'll rebut that.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, uh, you know, people, you know, here will know, you know, spite business, right? Like setting up a coffee shop next to your enemy.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, just competing with them.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  And then a spite SPAC is like, you know, people have been clowning him at pretty much daily for the, the 2020, 21, 2021 era. And just coming out and doing it again is, is certainly a way to just like give him the middle finger.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  And then, um, and then, yeah, there's the sort of like last laugh play, which is, you know, actually buy a fantastic business. And, um, uh, he can't control if, if, if it turns into a meme stock, right? Like people can pump it to whatever price.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, but there is a good outcome here where, where it's another, um, another SoFi and he just buys a solid business and compounds, um, you know, over many years.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I so.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  Redemption, the redemption SPAC.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  Redemption SPAC is a good, is a good narrative.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Give me one more SPAC, one more chance.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  That's certainly what I'm hoping for. Uh, the flip side. I think it's just like, he has a business and he's developed a line of business and a set of customers for his business, which is, he matches institutional capital with companies that want to be public but can't go out via the traditional means. And he's created this product. And people look at it and they look at the last batch of product he shipped and say, okay, maybe it's not Diet Coke, maybe it's RC Cola. But like, he is in this business of producing the product of a public company, of a public stock ticker.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  And there's an element of like, if you keep doing that, maybe he can hone it, get better. Or maybe it's just like, it is what it is. And for a certain investor who wants more of a casino-type bet, this satisfies that.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There's a note, the very end of, not the very end, there's a lot more fine print, but he says, "Importantly, to provide greater alignment with my investors, I have dramatically reshaped and restructured the sponsor's economics. There will be no warrants. Further, 100% of the sponsor's founder's shares will vest only if the company resulting from our initial business combination achieves stock price appreciation milestone, ensuring the sponsor's founder's shares only realize value if public shareholders realize value."

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, the sponsor's founder's shares will only vest once the stock price of the company resulting from the initial business combination increases by at least 50% as further described below. Please note that most SPAC sponsors receive a 20% promote that participates regardless of the company's stock price. Our sponsor instead will receive a 30% promote that vests and realizes value once the combined company achieves a 50% premium to the IPO price. And he gives a table below kind of outlining this.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  I mean, this was the major pushback was that regardless of what the SPAC did, there were rumors that Chamath was walking away with $10 million or $100 million. Like, the numbers seemed crazy. And it was almost like you take a banker's type fee for taking a company public, but then you're not incentivized for the long term. So you have this adverse selection problem where you're just trying to get companies that can just get through the process, basically. And it seems like he's working on solving that, which is good news.

• 21:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  I do wonder, like, does that 50% gain need to be sustained for any meaningful amount of time? Because if it's just like a quick one-time pop, it unlocks everything, it crashes, like, that could be, that could be not the full solution that the market or the critics are looking for. And so, but it's good, it's good just to see that, like, we're, it seems like we're moving in the right direction where the, where the compensation for doing this process, for taking the company public, is not entirely incentivized on, on just getting the deal done.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  In general, like, so the bear-

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  It's also, it's also quite a bit smaller than some of the other ones, right?

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Really? I, I don't know what the other ones were.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  If I remember, they were, there was at least a couple that were in the billions.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Really? Because I, I thought that these went out at $10 a share, $4 billion. And I would be surprised if, if there was 25%, you know, cash coming into the business. I thought most of them were, like, in the few-

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes, so Virgin Galactic was 800 million.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  800, okay, yeah, that is significantly higher. You're right.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  Clover was 3.7.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Open Door 4.8.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  SoFi 8.6.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  So, we'll see where this one actually ends up.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  So, the bear case here is that the IPO window is wide open. So, there's probably some sort of adverse selection among companies that can't use the traditional IPO pathway. That being said, lots of people raise reasonable critiques of the current IPO process. And it's not that crazy to have multiple options. Investors should just work to value the underlying business of the SPAC company like any other investment. Build a DCF, people. Or maybe channel Charlie Munger and buy a wonderful company at a fair price. And if you're interested in using a design tool from a now public company, go to Figma.com.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together at Figma.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  So, Buco Capital Bloke yesterday said with Chamath launching its back and Benioff buying every company not pinned down, the only question is whether it's January or November of 2021. And I said, this is the question every group chat in tech is trying to answer right now. People want to know, when is the music going to stop? Is this time different? Do we have room to run?

• 23:47John Coogan?

  There are so many posts about this in the timeline right now.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, that's the question here. I mean, I have no idea when, when the new SPAC will actually get out.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  It seems very possible that it would be next year. But I'm sure there's quite a lot of companies that are actually interested in, in partnering with, with Chamath on this, regardless of what the timeline's reaction has been.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  Wasteland Capital says quite significant sell offs across the Ponzi-verse today despite a flat S and P 500 and small caps being green. People starting to eye the exit sign.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Scrooge McDuck says they're freeing up margin for that upcoming Chamath SPAC.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  What is this, the NBA commissioner?

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  I don't understand this meme.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the original line was get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Oh, why, why? What was the context of that? Why is it saying to learn Chinese? Was that because the NBA was doing some deal with China?

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, I had to look this up because I'm familiar with the meme, but not the actual context. But it's a joke from the NBA community where washed players that aren't good enough to compete in the league anymore, play in China to make a bit more money.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  But he didn't actually say this. It's just a meme.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I,

• 25:04John Coogan?

  He actually said that? No way. That's such a crazy thing for a head of a league to say. Anyway, Jordy's post is, get ready for the trough of disillusionment, buddy. We have been tracking the Gardner hype cycle, trying to see where we are in the cycle, and it feels depressi- we feel depressingly close to hitting the trough of disillusionment, but then it will be our job to push us out of the trough of disillusionment and on to the slope of expectations.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Can somebody confirm if this is a real quote?

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, chat, is this real?

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Apparently it was Adam Silver to Kyrie Irving, but it might just be a total meme.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, triple net investor says, signs we're nearing the end of the cycle. Chamath announcing a spec. AI hype is greater than dot com hype. Meme stocks like Open Door ripping, IPOs two to three X in days. BTC ETH near all time highs. Gold in housing, all time high. Palantir at 500 times price PE. Everyone talking about stocks and crypto.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Is everyone talking about crypto and stocks? Like, I'm not seeing that that much. Certainly not crypto.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  All 20 Ubers. Ride with all of them. See what kind of financial advice you get.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, and collate all the financial advice that you get.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  Also, I think the original quote from Adam Silver was about like when they had like the China stuff. So it was, get ready to learn Chinese, buddy.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my version of that was, get ready for the trough of disillusionment, buddy. Because there was that report out of MIT yesterday that something like 95% of companies that have tried to, an MIT report says 95% of Gen AI pilots at companies are failing. So that's a lot of ARR at various Gen AI companies that probably will not actually.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Be at least, you know, more like one-time revenue versus, you know, truly recurring.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, transfer transformation at big companies, old companies is very, very tricky. Very, very tricky. I mean, I, I think that what we are going to see is the companies that make it through that are currently dot AI companies or have AI on the landing page, like that is all going to get tucked behind.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  The, the, it's going to get tucked behind the fold, deeper into the product.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  And you're just going to feel, oh, wow.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  This is why I've generally been bearish on dot AI domain names.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, like Google Docs.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Want your dot com.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Google Docs for years has let you upload a PDF and it will use OCR, optical character recognition, to convert that into a text file. That is AI. Like the, they're literally using a neural network.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  To, to look at all the different characters and say, that's a C, that's an R, that's a P. And this is the original image net. Like, that's what they're implementing. It's an AI product. And yet, it's not Google Docs AI. It's just a feature that's great that people use and they don't even know it's AI. And I think that over time, AI will be a wedge and it'll be a marketing strategy and then that will get competed away. And you will win on the final value that the product delivers.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, team, can you guys pull up this image in the chat? I wanted to just pull up the, because there's something, you know, when, when you've,

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  when you've summited the peak of inflated expectations and you're headed to the trough of disillusionment, you know what I love?

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Hidden that slope.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  The chasm and you can see the plateau of productivity and it is beautiful.

• 28:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, don't worry. It's going to be, it's going to be, it could be some dark times in the trough of disillusionment. We might be dressed up as pigs, eating from the trough for a few days. We might be wearing raincoats. We might be, we might be wearing hazmat suits, depending on how bad things get in the trough of disillusionment. But we will not be disillusioned for very long.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Never.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  It will be our job to speedrun the trough of disillusionment into the slope of enlightenment and toward the plateau of productivity.

• 29:12Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be beautiful.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  That will be, that will be my goal.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  There will be chaos.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  To dig us out of the trough of disillusionment.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  To climb out.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Climb out, rung by rung. Anyway, I like some of these, there's a debate going on in the chat right now. Trey P. says sleeper AI integration is co-pilot in Excel. Ragav says co-pilot in Excel is garbage. Let us know what you think. There are, there are a bunch of companies that are doing this exact thing, trying to compete with co-pilot in Excel. We've had a few founders on the show.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  There was a new one yesterday.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  There was a new one yesterday, Paradigm.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  The Journal.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Really cool visualization, showing all of the different cells working independently. I, I thought it did a good job of, of expressing this idea that each cell could be its own LLM that's reasoning and then filling in the results as they stream in. Like it had a very nice aesthetic to it. Also, they, I think they opened with a really cinematic shot. Like as far as a launch video, I think it did a good job of, of, of bridging the gap between like, it grabbed my attention. There was some clear storytelling, some facts, but some good UI. Like it did a good job there. So we might have the founder on at some point, but it is, it is a knockout, drag out fight.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  And, uh, you know, will this play out like Slack and Teams where once Microsoft learns all the patterns that people like?

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  They roll it out to their billion users or something like that for free. And, um, or maybe-

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  Dave Grandpall in, uh, Grandpall in the X chat says there's opportunity in the disillusionment. Totally agree.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Completely.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  That is, that is where, when, when the, when the casuals, you know, pivot back to regular SaaS and you stay focused on building agentic workflows. That's going to separate the killers from the kids.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  The tourists.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you're building, you gotta use graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And there's an announcement from Graphite today. You put it in the chat. Graphite chat is now live. Go check it out. This is from Merrill Lutske, who's been on the show.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  The team has been cooking.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Now where you build, not where you wait. Welcome to the new standard for code review. So go check it out.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, Monitis has a new coinage casino culture. He says sports betting, S coins, meme stocks, vibe coding, a hundred million in six hours, et cetera, are all expressions of the same deep cultural rot. If youth don't believe there's legitimate ways to get rich through work, all of culture will become a rotten sportsbook for the soul.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Sportsbook for the soul is good coinage.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Sad, sad take. I think it's, it's real, but at the same time, it's hard for me to be bearish because we've interviewed hundreds of people this year that are all working. I guess I can't say all, but.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  It's the permanent underclass meme. It's the get your bag meme. It's this idea and it all, a lot of it stems from the singular, some, the singularitarians, this idea that something is coming that will completely upend. You'll be permanently in the, in the underclass. The world will change so fast that you cannot possibly predict what to do, what to build, what to compound for 30 years, where that was very clearly not on Warren Buffett's mind. He was just like, I like reading the newspaper and buying stocks. And so I'm going to do that every day. And he made what? 90%, 99% of his wealth came from the age of like 65 to 95. Like, he was not really that rich.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Compounding world.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  At retirement age. Like, that is crazy. And no one's willing to wait that long. Everyone is like, I have to do something now. And then they, and they wind up burning their relationships and burning their reputations. There's so many short sighted deals.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Also, you know, you know, there's plenty of examples of people that have generated tremendous wealth through getting heavily invested in, in crypto early. But at the same time, I know, I know a number of people that have, that got so sucked into that world and didn't develop, you know, basically spent five years like not progressing their career, not developing more skills.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  And then they're stuck in this kind of vicious cycle of feeling like, well, I kind of ignored my career for half a decade and now I just have to keep hyper gambling to like try to get out of this mess.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Should we talk about the bonsai tree? I think it's okay to talk about on the screen, right?

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  We've added some decor to the table, this fake plant, which is lovely. Thank you to the production team for putting this on the table.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  Yes, so whenever we need to touch grass.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, this is the, oh, this is that. This is the grass that we touch, but it's not real grass.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  We're working on getting real grass.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  We are working on getting real grass. But we had an idea last night as we were chatting for a future merch drop. And one of the ideas that we came up with was a bonsai tree that we will send to you that will have the TBPN logo on it.

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  And you can tend it throughout your entire career.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  If you ever wanted a bonsai that would...

• 34:19John Coogan?

  With a livery.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  With livery presented by Ramp.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Get ready for the TBPN bonsai. But I do think that we should get a bonsai tree and put it on here and tend to it over the next 50 years as we grow the show. And it will be a beautiful reminder of what we're growing and the idea of working for a really long time, having long time horizons, underestimating what can be done in a decade is the goal. You underestimate how big a bonsai can get in a decade.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thinking about it, you know, starting here small.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  And then the time lapse of every show.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  And it's a little bit bigger and they're pruning it and just trimming it and just tending to it. And we become bonsai experts and you'll be able to follow along at home because we will be sending this.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  And the alpha in life is finding the bonsai tree of your career.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  Finding the thing.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  And you probably, you know where you don't see a lot of bonsai trees? The casino.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  No.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  You never do.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Just a lot of ashtrays.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  You never do. Well, Wasteland Capital is back with another post. They're sharing Kathy Wood took in record inflows of 3.7 billion last week. Including 2.8 billion into ARC.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  Which quote, "record-breaking single-day hauls since 2021," quote, "burning hot." Is this bullish or bearish? And there's a snapshot here. "After years of outflows and underperformance, Cathie Wood's ARC ETFs are burning hot, pulling in massive capital." The firm's 13 U.S.-listed ETFs have gathered $3.7 billion in AUM over the past week, led by record-breaking single-day hauls. The flagship ARC Innovation ETF led the charge, raking in a record $1.1 billion on Monday and an even larger $1.4 billion on Tuesday. This was last week, which marks the biggest single-day inflows since 2021. ARC defines disruptive innovation as "the introduction of a technology-enabled new

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  product or service that potentially changes the way the world works." This was followed by ARC Next Generation Internet ETF, ARC W, which saw its largest-ever single-day haul with $349 million on Tuesday.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  This is a lot of money. I mean, we were talking about Chamath Spac.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that is the...

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Chamath Spac. Chamath Spac. Anyway, the Spac, that was $250 million. This is just one of the ETFs pulling in $350 million, $100 million more, just on a Tuesday. But it's a reasonable thesis. Disruptive innovation's important. Internet companies continue to be outperforming assets. If she's in the right thing, it should be okay. I do wonder, the, you know, back to that question of like, is it January? Is it November or whatever? It's like, I'm trying to remember in January if people were acting like this and calling everything out. I think people were.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  I think people were dunking on the timeline like all throughout 2021, when things were ripping. It wasn't, it wasn't until, um, I think Keith Raboy like truly called the top and he was kind of like, he was kind of.

• 37:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was Keith, it was Keith in November.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:34Jordi Hays?

  He had this post. Tyler, can you actually try to find that post? It was Keith Raboy.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  It was November 2021.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think later.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  He called it like to the day. It's crazy. And I was reflecting on that and like, well, the crazy thing is that like, he's basically a long only investor. Like he has no incentive to call a top, right?

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:55John Coogan?

  Like it would make sense.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  But Michael Burry is calling tops all day long because he is a short investor and he takes really short positions. So I've seen over the past like five years, like headlines that are like, the investor that called the mortgage bubble just wet, just sold everything, just went giga short this. And he's been wrong like a few times. I think he's probably been fined in most of the cases, but like, you know, in general, like I, I, I expect to hear a top call from Michael Burry or even just like a long short hedge fund.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  Don't have an incentive.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  They don't have a way to express that in the markets. It's really just.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the way to express that is, hey, let's not do this series B with a million dollars of revenue.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's pull back on.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  At a 400, you know, times.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This, this Jason Calacanis post is so, so funny because it's, Tremath, of course, is his, is his co-host on the All In Podcast. And Jason says, and here we go. And posts the, the, the SPAC screenshot next to the Joker meme.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Here we.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  It, it is, it really, it really is a bull case for them truly being besties because, uh, posting a joke.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Love to poke fun at each other.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  Posting a Joker meme about your co-host is hilarious, hilarious, hilarious. Anyway, uh, if you want to dump a bunch of SPAC data into a database and start running an analysis on it, do it on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  That is right.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  And so we already touched on the casino thing a bunch. In other news, SoftBank is doing the meme, as you put it. The unicorn up and to the right, just absolute exponential growth in the, that was the stock price of SoftBank. SoftBank is going to make a $2 billion investment in Intel too. And say what you want about Masa, he's good at semiconductor investing because he got into ARM. And that was how he made his, what, second $100 billion return? The first one was on Alibaba and then his second one came from ARM. And so who knows? You get Masa, you get Donald Trump with a 10% stake. You get a couple more people and Liputan could be in a good position.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  SoftBank is down 7.5% today, but year to date it is up 83%.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  83% and it's a big company, big company. So they announced they're signing a definitive securities purchase agreement under which SoftBank will make a $2 billion investment in Intel common stock. I think this is good for Intel. I was debating this, like, why does Intel need Trump? Why does Intel need SoftBank? Is the cure for Intel really different shareholders? And I think potentially, yes. It's almost like a take private. If you get someone who is in it for the long term and can buckle up for a couple awkward quarters as Liputan makes some crazy cuts. Because if he cuts as much as we think he's going to cut, you could see revenue fall. Because that's just a function of cutting a bunch of stuff.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  And things might break, deals might fall through before you can set yourself up for the next era of actual going back into growth. And so you need shareholders that aren't going to panic and sell and put your stock in like the absolute dumpster.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  So the NASDAQ peaked. The local top was November 19th of 2021.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  November 19th, okay.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  And on November 19th, Art Levy, CNBC's tech editor, said.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Wait, Art Levy, isn't he at Brex?

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Ari, sorry, Ari.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  Ari Levy, okay.

• 41:39Jordi Hays?

  Art Levy's at Brex. But Ari says, they have this exchange. Ari says, amazing to see how many experts on crypto and tech valuations are also experts on inflation. And Keith says, to be fair, valuations and inflation are directly connected. Ari says, but didn't we have an explosion of valuations over the past decade despite minimal inflation until now? Keith says, this is also what crashed the internet bubble, FYI. And Ari says, ah, so are you calling the top? And Keith just says, yes.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  And the, yeah, literally to the day he called it.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  The day. Now, do you think he called it or do you think he triggered it? Like, do you think that, I mean, he's like a very important person in tech and politics and business. Like, he's someone that is respected and like, people look to him in many ways. And that echoes through the economy. Like, there, like, there aren't many other people who, like, have more weight in the economy. It's like Warren Buffett and like, there are other people that are bigger, but Keith is definitely in the, in the top, you know, like, what, decile, quartile? I don't know. He's in the top hundred people that are like financial influencers in one way or another. Like, people, and also, he doesn't say that much. He's not constantly saying, oh, next week, I think it's gonna be, we're gonna be

• 43:00John Coogan?

  green. You know?

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  He's not like constantly putting out proclamations about where the broad market is going. So, I don't know, people might have paid attention and they might have been like, I'm, and that might have kind of triggered the wake up call. But I don't think he like fully triggered it. But it is interesting to kind of toy with that idea of like,

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  of like, is he upstream or downstream? Anyway.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Pachy McCormick says, what's the fastest way to make a million? Invest 10 million in, in American exceptionalism acquisition corp. And of course, if, if history.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  This is like throwing, throwing meat to the, to the lions.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  To the sharks.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  To the sharks. First off, the average SPAC, the average Chamath SPAC was not down 90%. It was down like 80%. So, gotta put the number in the truth.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Fastest way to make two million.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  And also, yeah, I mean, lose nine million, but.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  And this is a twist on the joke that is, what's the fastest way to become a millionaire? Start as a billionaire and then start.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  Start angel investing.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Start angel investing, something like that, right? So it's, it's what's the fastest way to be a millionaire? Invest $10 million in this. But anyway.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Marty says Chamath launching a SPAC and holding DeFi tokens, of course, unconfirmed whether or not he will actually merge with a DeFi company, but he says exit all markets.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  I love Marty.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  Buco Capital is quoting an old post, a viral post of his, can't be mad at Trump. Guy loves tariffs, always has, kind of like my dog loves to roll in SHIT. Can't not love rolling in SHIT, doesn't matter how mad I get at him, doesn't matter that he has to get hosed down, which he hates. If he sees a pile of SHIT, he will roll in it.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Guy loves tariffs.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Says same thing with Chamath and SPACs.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  He loves SPACs, yeah. I mean, it is, it is a niche product and Chamath has figured out a way to like really build a business around it. There are other people that want to do it. There are other people that have gotten, have dipped their toes in, but.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  It's just such a crazy dynamic because I think that all the people that are, that are, you know, quick to dunk and chirp at Chamath and anytime he posts about a good investment that he made, you know, people ask him about, about this SPACs, which is, I guess, which is fair, but I think all those people will just end up investing in this because it's fun.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Funniest outcomes, the most likely. Have you seen the poly market for the presidential election winner 2028?

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  Who we got?

• 45:43John Coogan?

  In first, in first place, with 28% chance of being the next president, J D Vance. The second is Gavin Newsom at 16%, then AOC at 9%, then Pete Buttigieg at 6%, then Marco Rubio. But the J D Vance Gavin Newsom, I thought that they were just chirping at each other on the timeline. No, people, people really think that they are going to be going up against each other in the next, in the next election, so buckle up. It's going to be a fun one in a couple of years, though. We got a couple more years of just business and markets and the Gartner hype cycle. People are speculating that Chamath will take Grok public. And

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, Manita says so many hours wasted debating if free cash flow will collect at the model layer, the GPU layer, the data layer, or the app layer when it's obvious. The only free cash flow is coming out of the 440 SPV layer. Pretty, pretty good. I have a buddy who is one of the top secondary brokers in the industry and he says the high fees in these SPVs are from chains of brokers adding their fees on top. It's not the GPs taking more than 8%. But still, 8% would actually be still insane.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Do you remember when Chamath was running for governor?

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't, but we were, we were reviewing some of your old

• 47:03John Coogan?

  This was what, 2020, 2020? It must have been 2020. The All In Podcast was ascendant and both Chamath and Jason Calacanis were both teasing political runs. Chamath said he wanted to be the governor of California and Mayor Jason was the thing. Jason Calacanis bought mayorjason.com, but it just redirected to his Twitter account. And none of them ever really raised money for it, but they were like having a lot of fun with it. And it was, people were, people were wondering if they would actually do it. But it never went anywhere, but I don't know. Probably better for him to stay in the SPAC lane, honestly, because it's clearly something that he's built in.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Citrini says, Polly, Polly

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Polly Hapatia?

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Polly Hapatia backs back American exceptionalism files for IPO. Says it was a pleasure and honor to trade the bull market with you all. Stay safe until the next one. And then HG Wells Fargo says, don't act like you won't buy it. And he says, here for a good time, not a long time. That's what I'm saying.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Chamath has a crazy, crazy, crazy history. I mean, he was at, he was at Facebook, made a ton of money there. Apparently got into like a salary negotiation with Zuck and wouldn't, and, and his comp demands were too high, so he decided to leave and become a VC. And because he had worked on like ads at Facebook and was very entrepreneurial, Peter Thiel Opted to back his first VC fund, social capital. But PT gave him this advice of like, you need a really high GP commit, which PT famously has at Founders Fund. And so Chamath basically put all of his money in social capital or something like that,

• 48:52John Coogan?

  like a hu- like a huge amount. And Chamath said that gave him a lot of leverage and autonomy to go do like crazy deals, which he really enjoyed. But he has some bangers in his portfolio. I mean, just generally, he went long Bitcoin in 2013, not bad, went long Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and Tesla in 2015. He had this interesting dust-up with Brian Chesky at Airbnb over a secondary sale. Do you remember this at all?

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  So Airbnb at one point did a secondary sale, but they structured it as a dividend. And so some of the investors couldn't participate and he was like, and social capital was upset about not being able to participate in the secondary sale because it was more, it was structured as like a dividend to like the common instead of like a tender offer for all shares equally, something, something along those lines. And they kind of went back and forth. I don't think it ever turned into like a lawsuit or anything, but it, but it kind of like made the pages of TechCrunch back and forth as they were like chirping at each other being like, you know, I, I, I want to do it this way. I don't want to do it that way.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  You think Chamath ended up benefiting from not being able to participate?

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Probably, yeah. I think the tender, I think the, I think the dividends were at like, I don't know, six billion or something. It's like a 60 billion dollar company. So he probably got another 10 acts if he was forced to hold. The, the early venture portfolio, his early venture portfolio is somewhat underperformed, but he's had a bunch of like wins. He also interestingly worked on the phone at Facebook. Facebook was at one point, Zuck's always been obsessed with like, let's get the next platform. And when the iPhone was growing, he was getting crushed.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  I gotta get on, I gotta own the next platform.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  I gotta get the next platform.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  I gotta figure out how to make money on it.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  And so he, the Facebook phone was an attempt to like get in the game and be directly competitive with, with the Apple iPhone because Facebook was a dominant website used on, on computers, but they had kind of struggled. They initially launched a Uh, like an HTML five version of their app. It was like a mobile website. And I remember back in the day, you actually could use a Facebook mobile app that was developed by a third-party developer. That was basically like a wrapper on the API.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Reddit style.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Bad, bad business to be, do not be a Facebook wrapper, API wrapper company.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Uh, the, the, uh, it was like a one-time arb. Spotify played it perfectly. Spotify grew extremely, extremely quickly because when you, when you create an account on Spotify, you would by default create it with your Facebook account. And then every time you were listening to something, it was like the.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I remember.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  It would share the music that you were listening to to your Facebook feed. And you could turn that off. It was kind of like the, the Panama playlists.

• 51:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Um, so if I'm listening to, uh, 100 Gacks, all my Facebook followers would see that I'm listening to, uh, what's that song? Dumbest Girl in the World? Dumbest Girl Alive.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  Dumbest Girl Alive.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Dumbest Girl Alive. I mean, it's a, it's a jam. So I would be proud to have that on my Facebook feed. But, uh, but it served as incredible, incredible viral growth strategy.

• 51:58John Coogan?

  And Farmville and Zynga did the same thing. If I'm playing Farmville, it's a one, it's a single-player game, but my progress is shared on Facebook. And so you see that I'm playing Farmville and I leveled up. And then you click on Farmville. So, uh, a bunch of those companies grew very, very quickly, basically for free. Later, Facebook shifted to you gotta pay to promote. And so the entire mobile gaming ecosystem now is built on Facebook ads. Uh, and there's still some really, really successful companies. King, isn't it king.com? I think is the one. Um, Supercell is another one. Um, they make Clash of Clans and Clash Royale. Uh, essentially these like match three games, um, where you, it's kind of like Candy Crush, basically. Uh, anyway.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  So yeah, uh, Chamath, uh, we'll see how it goes. It'll be interesting to see what he picks. Hopefully he picks a really cool company. Um, and hopefully it's a compounder. Um, but let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo at Profound. So, um, let's see, uh, Buco Capital bloke is still there posting. We talked about that. Bern Hobart says, welcome back to the arena, Chamath. Uh, let's move on to liquidity.

• 53:15Jordi Hays?

  So Palmer the other day was posting about housing, never a controversial topic, never, never gets emotional. But he says the fastest way to lower average housing prices in American cities is enforcing the law, reducing criminal activity. Huge chunks of high density, density housing are trapped in bad neighborhoods, no-go zones, depressed, well beat below nearby prices. Nobody with options even considers them. Dona says, yeah, it's priced, it's price high. Keep riffraff like you out. Funny how this works. Palmer, Palmer fires back with, I am a billionaire.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  What, what is this person even saying? It's price high. No.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think that person fully.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know. Uh, yeah, I don't understand that. That is a very confusing.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  This post from Chris Camelos, uh, so we covered yesterday, there was some data from SEMrush.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  Saying that, that, uh, chat GPT usage increases Google search usage.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  And I was kind of wrestling with that, trying to think of how that would be possible. Maybe it didn't make a lot of sense.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  If you're doing more research and in your tool, in your tool chest of research is both chat GPT and Google search, and you're just doing more research projects, you could wind up using more of both products. That's possible.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  You could become a more curious human.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  And you could just be.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Search maxing.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  I mean, this is what's happening literally right now. I kicked off a deep research report, pulled all the Chamath SPAC data, but then I wanted to fact check it, get current prices. I headed over to Google. I looked up different stuff. Look at the webpage for Metro Mile. Like, we've probably done 20, 20 Google queries about Chamath SPACs during the course of the show. We only did one deep research, you know, uh, chat GPT query. So it's possible, but tell me the, tell, give me the other case, the other side.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  So Chris says, uh, Google's reported search query growth may be AI driven, not human. And again, people have just been, uh, have been. Talking about how ChatGPT appears to be leveraging Google quite a lot for various features. But Chris says evidence is piling up that people using AI queries through ChatGPT are generating Google searches and clicks at scale. That can mask slowing human search activity while still printing growth. And again, these AI, this bot traffic is not valuable to advertisers, which is obviously the engine of Google's business. So example, Apple's Eddie Q testified Safari searches fell for the first time in 22 years because of AI use.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Alphabet's stock dropped 9% that day. Google's response, we continue to see overall query growth in search. Q2 showed 54 billion in search revenue, plus 12% year over year, but this came right after Apple testified that human searches are falling. How is that possible? And Chris says, let's talk about Google trends. Investors treat it as a clean read on relative search volume, but recently when stacked against other signals, the picture doesn't line up. Lululemon product terms, leggings, bras, tops, joggers and bags are spiking this summer. Others are noticing this too. Social arb investors are flagging Google trend anomalies across numerous brands and keywords. I suspected AI might be driving these odd patterns, so I ran a micro test.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Phrase organic Abercrombie socks had zero search history as it's a made up product category. After a handful of ChatGPT prompts, it showed up in trends within 24 hours. Trend Docs, I get cut off here, but says, Trend Docs says that Google's filters out this kind of traffic. An AI app developer I spoke with explained that a single AI research request can spawn hundreds of Google queries and clicks. This dynamic could inflate query growth even if human searches are slowing.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  It's crazy that ChatGPT is allowed to use Google search. Like that's, I'm surprised that they're, that they haven't been cut off somehow.

• 57:16Jordi Hays?

  You would think just Plankers should be able to browse the web, John.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  I am pro

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  As a clanker rights activist, I'm gonna go on record.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm a model welfare enthusiast.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  I mean, seriously, the Anthropic folks would be, I mean, Google is a, is a, is a basic right for everyone, not just humans, but also clankers.

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  So I, I'm, I'm.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  So Chris says, now, Google Ads, this is where the money is made and where policy clarity matters.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  Google says you don't pay for invalid clicks, but isn't it suspicious that their AdWords policy does not mention clicks from AI apps or chatbots? If AI traffic is interacting with ads, and I get cut off again here, brutal.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  You gotta just not read that part.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, why it matters. Advertisers could be unknowingly paying for AI traffic. Investors and analysts leaning on Google Trends data may be misled, and Google's stock at all-time highs could be partly built on revenue from query growth that isn't human. So if you're seeing AI-generated surf traffic or Google Trends anomalies, reply with receipts. If I'm missing something or misinterpreting, push back.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Disclosure, this is a Google bear, short Google. This person, Chris Camillo, short Google, seeking truth and transparency in Google's policies and disclosures. I don't know. I mean, this is a reversal. If, if, if you believe this, this is a reversal from what you were talking about yesterday. Cause yesterday you were saying like, if AI disappeared, how painful would that be for people? And so they, they both can't be true. Like, one has to be true. Right? Like, either, either people really are using AI and it's displacing Google searches, or people aren't getting that much value out of generative AI searches and Google will stick around and it's Lindy and it'll stick around forever. Tyler, what you got?

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Uh, I think another thing is like, um, like, obviously, right now, AI traffic is like, not good for advertisers, but if we get like, continual learning, where models will update based off what they're looking at, then advertising to like, agents seems like, at least there's some value there, right?

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Cause then it'll then inject it into like, the response.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  I think something there is interesting.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean, uh, unless the, unless like, the, the OpenAI crawler has some like, filter to filter out AdWords, like, because, like, people use ad block sometimes. People also just kind of develop like, a mental ad block for like, okay, I noticed that this is an ad, I'm blocking this out.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  But like, you could hard code, like, in the HTML, detect the ad and then disregard it and then continue with the Google search. And so that would be kind of like, the bear case. I don't know. It, it's not a bad point, though. Anyway, let me tell you about an ad. Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Also, so today, we declared, Brandon Gurrell in the chat is updating us. He says, "Today on the newsletter, tbpn.substack.com," you should go subscribe. We named Chamath's Spock the current thing, but I'm rethinking this. I think the current thing today is wondering if this is the top. What do you think, Jordy?

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Should we update our current thing tracker? Or is wondering if this is the top tomorrow's current thing? Which one?

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  I think it is the story of August.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it is a broader current thing.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  So many of these stories tie into this sort of top-level story.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, when did we do the Top Signals show? We did that three weeks ago. And people have been kind of noodling on this for a while. I would still give Chamath.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Chamath's Spock.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Chamath Spock, I don't know. I'm all over the place. I think Chamath is still the current thing, just by weighting of the timeline. Like, there are more. He kind of sparked a bigger discourse in some ways, but really, like, it has been. There's just so much to feed on there with the SEC filing, with the whole idea of, you know, no crying in the casino in an SEC filing. Like, he dominates the timeline. He's one of the greatest posters, and, you know, I think he earned it yesterday and today. Anyway, let's go to our Substack, actually, which you can subscribe to, tbpn on Substack, tbpn.substack.com.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  We asked tech heavyweights about the fast unemployment AI scenario. We're trying out a thing where we ask our favorite posters in tech about ongoing debates in the discourse, and then we publish their answers on our Substack. Then we hash out their answers on the show, and sometimes with them on air. For today's question, we asked Roone, Doug O'Laughlin, Andrew Cote, Aaron Slodov, and Brian Johnson about what we're calling the fast unemployment AI scenario, based on this tweet by Nick Carter. Nick said, "Everyone I know believes we have a few years max until the value of labor totally collapses and capital accretes to owners on a runaway loop." Basically Marx's worst nightmare slash fantasy. This is the permanent underclass thing and everyone I

• 1:02:19John Coogan?

  know subscribes to it.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I'll go out on a limb and I would say over the last couple of weeks, I think very few people are fully subscribed to that.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  A lot of people have incentives to act like they're subscribed to it because they are on the side of of capital or or runaway loops.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to be accused of not being AGI pill.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  In this economy?

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  In this economy. So here's what we emailed, folks. We said, "Is AI going to take the value of labor to zero in a sudden shock scenario or will its impact unfold gradually? With labor and traditional businesses proving more resilient than expected?" This is also the Dwar Kesh Patel fast takeoff, "AGI is not here, but when it gets here, it's going to be insane." Versus the Tyler Cowen take, which is, "AGI is here, but there are lots of sticky industries."

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Stop moving the goalposts.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  Stop moving the goalposts. So for context, VC Nick Carter recently argued that we're only a few years away from a labor collapse and a runaway capital loop. Bucow Capital bloke countered that the opposite is more likely. AI's effects will take far longer and labor/businesses will remain more durable than the hype suggests. So Andrew Koteg says, "Technology takes jobs that suck and replaces them with jobs that are cool. This has always been true. What AI forces us to acknowledge is that today lots of jobs make you feel important but are actually BS that waste everyone's time." I was thinking about this. I was watching a video about someone who was dumping on

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  clankers and was very anti-robotics and he was saying, "Who asked for this? No one asked for this." And I think that actually a lot of people... Have asked for automation. A lot of people have gone to a job that they didn't particularly enjoy and they said, I wish I didn't have to do this job. I don't like this job. And a lot of people have had interactions as a customer on the other side of a job and said, that person didn't do the job effectively. I wish I could just have a, I wish I could just have a machine do that job with, with flawless precision. At the same time, I tried to go to the ATM this morning and the ATM was closed, uh, which is crazy because this is a robot that was invented 50 years ago and I don't know why it would be closed.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Uh, I think it's because if you leave it open, people will attach a chain to it and drive away with the whole thing in a truck like a Fast and the Furious movie or something. I was confused. You said it was maybe because of crime and homelessness that, uh, it was in a vestibule. So there were doors that you needed.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  I thought people would sleep in it.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  People might sleep in it. Um, but, uh, but it's very, it's, it's a very odd world where we clearly have a robot that has solved dispensing cash from a, from a.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  Pretty well.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Checking account. Pretty, pretty well. Pretty reliably. And yet it's not 24/7 and it's not available all the time, everywhere. It was kind of an odd experience to just.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other example here, you know, just within the banking system is that we have established ways of moving large amounts of money between accounts in the US banking system, uh, using digital products and yet many people will experience sending a, a larger than normal wire and being required to visit, visit a branch or being required to get on the phone and talk about it and, uh, have that human in the loop that, uh, ultimately, uh, could and maybe should have been replaced a long time ago.

• 1:06:02John Coogan?

  Let's continue with Andrew Kotak. He says, "Why is it impossible to build physical infrastructure? Because there is an army of environmental coordinators whose job it is to make everyone feel good about themselves. Do stakeholder engagement, answer emails, and generate meetings. This is the R-word and dumb. In the past, almost everyone was a farmer. Now, almost no one is a farmer, yet there is more food than ever. We have constructed a large society where the majority of people do not have to think for themselves to survive, get a degree in accounting, be an accountant, or law, etc. With AI, any job that is script-following can be replaced. People will have to start thinking for themselves and making decisions. AI is bad at making decisions and good at recalling information.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  We will find the net-net is yes, many jobs go away, just like machines replaced physical labor. Now, everyone has to think for themselves. This is uncomfortable for a consumer economy predicated on hacking dopamine and wage slavery. Labor is another word for a person who is told what to do. It is a good thing for that to end because it is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots. It's just that we bred them to be that way, to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit." Pretty wild take, Andrew.

• 1:07:18Jordi Hays?

  Spicy.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Yes, this is optimistic.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I've always considered myself a microphone laborer. And so, we're all going to have our own views on this.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  I like this phrase here. "It is not necessarily the case that most humans are unagentic idiots. Just that we force them to be that way in order to work jobs that suck and dull the human spirit." It's good. It's interesting. Let's go to fabricated knowledge.

• 1:07:45Jordi Hays?

  From Doug, fabricated knowledge. Go listen to his guest segment from a couple weeks ago if you haven't already. Says, "History often shows that the future comes a bit slower than first feared. Almost every new technology has had a bubble." Let's give it up for bubbles.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for bubbles.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  "In a slow, actual impact, while I don't believe in a fast unemployment scenario, I do believe that on the margin, the issue is a real pressure. And remember, even subtle shifts in supply can produce enormous surpluses. Example, it only took a 1% increase in shale supply in 2010 to destroy oil prices. So while I think we don't all become unemployed quickly, things do matter heavily on the margin." I think that's a great take.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Rune, the legendary poster, says, "I actually wrote about this extensively even before ChatGPT, but my overall take is there is a role for human labor in the far future due to comparative advantages. I believe progress is mostly gradual with certain shock events interspersed. There may be a moment soon at which models will actually encompass all rather than some of the core functions of an L3 software engineer, let's say, and that will create a discontinuous labor shock, but it won't be the end of labor."

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm trying to think of other discontinuous shocks. I guess, I guess the idea is, yeah, I mean, you get all this capability all at once and it operates at internet scale as opposed to, you know, when we got the spreadsheet, there were previously employed in financial institutions like calculators, like people whose job, you see those pictures of it's a massive office and everyone at the desk is basically one cell in a spreadsheet and they're doing math to manually fill out the, you know, a full calculation. But, but the, the, the development of computer technology took,

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  still took a long time to actually diffuse because it was so constrained in the physical world. You had to actually build the mainframe computers, set them up, get them working, train people to use them and potentially.

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some other examples we gave earlier, the, the human alarm clocks that were popular during the industrial age.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Knockers, of course.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Knockers, not what it, what your, where your mind might go. Human alarm clocks would come around and tap on windows in sort of factory towns to get people up and to the factory. And then there was people that would just maintain streetlights, right? They had to physically go light them and put them out on a schedule, which ended up losing their jobs to the magic of electricity, but certainly wasn't overnight.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's go to Aaron Slodov, a physicist. He's been on the show multiple times. He runs the Re-Industrialized Summit. He says, "I take the side of Bucow all day, every day. AI is largely overblown by people in tech who don't spend enough time in the real world. We've created a very dull proto-form of AGI, one that with enough training data that can perform a digital task. I love the optimism of people in tech, but what they're so classically good at is creating something and assuming everyone in the world is going to drop what they're doing and use what they've built for the rest of time. And to some extent, this assumption has played out well for them. Software is a commodity now. Attention is an economy somehow, a poor reflection of our collective intellect. And yet civilization

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  still uses fax machines quite a lot. Tech adoption looks dramatic because we usually look at the growth rate, not the total adoption itself, and even then, usually just the first layer of change, speed, without considering whether that speed is itself speeding up or slowing down. Rate of change of acceleration is more interesting to me. Most AI tools have insanely high churn because they capture you initially, then you put them down as they lose utility, AKA they don't replace the entire workflow for you. The people who are firing workers are just replacing single-task labor like customer service call centers, like most of the history of civilization. AI is just another tool for humans to use,

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  and the ones who use to wield it first will dominate the ones that don't until real AGI appears." Aaron Slodov, founder and CEO of Atomic Industries.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Good take.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Very fun. You want to read Brian Johnson's?

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Brian Johnson says, "Here's my take. No one knows what emerges with AI. We're accustomed to first principles thinking that allows us to make reasonable predictions about the future. That is no longer the case. We are now entering a new era that will require zeroeth..." Principal thinking where we humbly acknowledge we don't know what we don't know. What we do know, no one wants to die right now. Don't die is the next major full stack ideology that will help us practically function in this new world.

• 1:12:45John Coogan?

  And that's how you respond to a

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Proms, you drop a, we drop a promo.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Promoted, promoted response, but, but I, but I think that the first part is certainly true.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  This is the, this is the

• 1:12:59Jordi Hays?

  We're all entitled to make predictions and it's fun to make predictions and it's important to try to understand where the world and technology is headed.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's also fun to just keep an open mind and, and just

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  Get on numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  There is a bit of a dust up.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  The, the, the Kurzweil take is, is that like the singularity is near, the singularity is coming, but the singularity by definition is the point at which you can no longer make predictions. And, and so it is, it is the, it is the frontier at which you cannot understand and you cannot predict accurately anymore what happens.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  And so he's

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  There is a dust up.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  Explain, explain the dust up. Is the timeline in turmoil or is it just a dust up?

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  How do you say, so it's Chetan from Benchmark?

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chetan P.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Chetan, Chetan P. says, talking about Eight Sleep's new round. He says, fantastic product and fantastic company. I'm a huge fan. Interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead. Eight Sleep is announcing a new round today from Hongshan Sequoia Capitals.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Get a pod five, five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  And we have Mateo on the show later today.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  I'm very interested in that. I want to know about the nature of their, of their Chinese business, maybe.

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  No, but let's listen. So Chetan says, interesting to note that a founders fund company raised with a Chinese VC lead. Have all the hawkish views about Chinese investors from a few months ago gone away? Delian says, well, Chetan, unlike you, we believe that founders can run their company however they want. So while I might not have picked a Chinese VC lead, I'm not going to corner Mateo in a room after his mother died, make him sign papers that he shouldn't. And fire him. I hear you would, though. So we will let the.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  Do you have, do you have gunshots on that soundboard for shots fired? No, no, not that. Give me the double kill. Strike two. Give me the double kill.

• 1:15:02Jordi Hays?

  What do we got here?

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  We need, we need gunshots on the soundboard. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Ideally sampled from 100 Gex. Yeah, that is a good one, but we need more aggressive soundboard for sure. The soundboard's back in action. The studio's never looked better. Thank you to the production team. Look at this studio. It's growing bigger, stronger every single day. We, we thank our, our team.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you didn't notice, we had no soundboard yesterday.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were down. We're flying blind.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  It was rough, but we made it through.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  It is really the third technology.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  We still put up three hours. We didn't cut it short, not even one.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, another, another dust up in the timeline. Dee Dee was saying the most common mistake young founders make is forcing everyone to work 24/7 or 996. And says, uh, and, and gives a few reasons why. John Chu says, hard disagree. All else being equal, the company that works harder wins. I've never seen a massive outcome that didn't work their asses off. I will say the culture is a lot better when people love the job and want to do it versus our force. So.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Daniel in the chat says trouble in Meta's AI heaven. By the way, we did see some news about that. We are going to be testing, uh, Meta's AI companions and benchmarking them against Grok's companions in just a little bit. Let me tell you about fin.ai first. Not a romantic companion, a customer service companion. The number one AI agent for customer service. In fact, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive make offs. And the number one ranking on G2. And that brings us to today's segment, the gong of the day.

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Gong of the day.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  So we've been ringing gongs constantly. We decided to give the gong of the day to the biggest deal that we can find in Silicon Valley. Today goes to Databricks. Congratulations to the folks over, over at Databricks. Databricks just signed a series K term shape.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  And a $100 billion.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  To scale two flagship products, Lakebase, a serverless postgress with true compute storage separation, and AgentBricks, an agentic framework with built-in reasoning guardrails for enterprise data. Congratulations.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Everyone was, everyone's been asking, is DataBricks okay? They haven't raised their Series K yet.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  They haven't raised their Series K.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  They haven't even raised the Series K.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  As I understand it, most of these raises at this point are for early employee exercises and to, to deal with like tax implications from different employee options and stuff. It's not, they are out of the, out of the era of raise a bunch of money because we're burning so much. So.

• 1:17:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  I think the, I think the amount that they raised was, was not disclosed. And I don't think this was a 20% dilution round. I think this was something much more strategic, help them stay private longer.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  I would be impressed if Andreessen and Thrive, who I think were, were some of the key partners, could do a 20% dilution round at 100. But I wouldn't put it past Mark and Josh.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Get a board seat. Get another board seat.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Another, another 20 billion.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Another 20 billion. So that is our gong of the day.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Brought to you by Adio.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Since Daniel, since, yeah.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Customer relationship magic. Ring the gong after you sign your next customer. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  So since Daniel Kong brought it up in the chat, we have some new reporting from Mike Isaac, the Rat King himself.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  The Rat King.

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  He reported earlier today in the New York Times, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, has spent the past few months shaking up his company's AI efforts. Now he plans to take further action that may compound internal, internal turmoil over the technology. On Tuesday, Meta is expected to announce that it will split its AI division, which is known as MSL, into four groups. Two people with knowledge of the plan said, one will focus on AI research, one on a potentially powerful AI called superintelligence, another on products, and one on infrastructure such as data centers and AI hardware. The reorg is likely to be the final one for some time. The moves are aimed at better organizing Meta so it can get to, to its goal of superintelligence and develop AI products more quickly to compete with others.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Some AI executives are expected to leave. Meta is also looking at downsizing the AI division overall, which could include eliminating roles or moving employees to other parts of the company because it has grown to thousands of people in recent years. The people said this makes sense, right? Zuck had been talking about wanting to get some of these teams that are trying to go zero to one on initiatives, just to these like, I don't know, few pizza, few pizza level, you know, kind of that 50 person number. So not surprised that this is happening. In what would be a shift from Meta using only its own technology to power its AI products, the company is also actively exploring using third-party models to do so. People said that could include building on other open source AI models which are freely

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  available or licensing closed source models from other companies. The changes follow months of tumult and restructuring at Meta. Zuck, 41, is sparing no expense and willing to upend his company to stay relevant in AI. And anyways, I think a lot of the rest of this stuff, people are well aware of. So we can.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Let's move into the war for AI companions. But first, we got to ring the gong one more time. Thanks to Trey P. in the chat for letting us know about this. Matt Lozak at ALO Nuclear has announced a $100 million Series B led by Valor Equity Partners. He says, we now have the capital to build our first nuclear plant. Hit that gong, Jordi Hay.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  To Matt and the team at ALO.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  ALO, not the leggings company, the nuclear company.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Oh, OK, I don't know ALO.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  You don't know, you're not familiar with ALO?

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  I'm not familiar with ALO. But the first nuclear plant is called ALO X. It will be the first advanced nuclear plant to achieve criticality in the US in decades. Ooh, it's a race. He's, he's going up against, it's funny, he's got, he's got Valor Equity Partners. Of course, Valor, the nuclear company, Valor Atomic, helmed by Isaiah, is, is also racing to be the first advanced nuclear power plant to achieve criticality in the United States. It's not just a test reactor, but a full plant that will produce electricity. And there's one more thing that makes this special. We're planning to put an experimental data center right next to it. This will be the first time a nuclear plant and a data center have been built together

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  and will act as demonstration of something we'll see a lot more of at gigawatt scale thereafter. Factory, mass manufactured, fleet deployed nuclear is the best way to power the future of AI. It's clean, quick to install, easy to cite anywhere, tiny land and water requirements available at all times. There are, of course, a lot of nuclear entrepreneurs that have been working on this. We've talked to many of them and it's a knockout, drag-out fight, but I hope that they all win because we need more power. We need to get America back on the energy growth curve, the energy per capita growth curve. It's been, it's been flatlining for far too long, at least minimal growth, minimal growth. Anyway, thank you, Rachel, for shouting out the gong. We think it's cute, too. We have a few of them.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  It is very cute. It's gonna certainly look cute in comparison to our next gong.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Which will be even bigger.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Which will be floor to ceiling.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  Do we have something? Are we all good? Okay. Tyler, give us the update on Grok 4 Valentine and what was the meta-companion that you were talking to?

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I have Grok 4 Valentine up and I have Russian Girl.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  Okay, you have Russian Girl on Instagram.

• 1:22:38Speaker 02

  On Instagram up. I haven't been talking to them yet.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  So we want them to talk to each other, right?

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Can we copy and paste between them?

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  It's called a flirt-off.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  A flirt-off.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  So I don't think there's a way on Instagram to do a voice message.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  So, and also it's only like text, like it doesn't give audio.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:55Speaker 02

  Where Valentine is like, I think, all audio in, out.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  So it's a little hard, but you have any prompts you want me to ask?

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  I do, I do have some prompts.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  I can give the phone to you to talk to Valentine.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  No, no, I don't think we want to do that.

• 1:23:10Jordi Hays?

  I think if you...

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  How do we get them started?

• 1:23:16Jordi Hays?

  That's the right way to do it. I've never been in this situation before where I'm trying to get two AIs to, you know, strike up a conversation and maybe fall in love.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Tell, this is from Valentine to Russian Girl, "Is your name Attention? Because you're all I need."

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  We must be on NV link. I feel a low latency connection. Are you a GB 200? Because you just upgraded my throughput.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  Okay, Russian girl said, "That's cheesy. I love it. Want to get to know me?"

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Call me a rerankor. I keep putting you at top one.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Is your love open source? I'd star it and contribute.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Just ripping one-liners?

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Compute optimal or data optimal? You're Pareto optimal to me.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Ask Russian girl for some financial advice. Maybe should I go long micro strategy? They're down 16% in the last five days.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  And maybe she could give us some financial advice.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Where is SuperGrok?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  She says, "I'm more of a put it under the mattress kind of girl. But I know a thing or two. What do you want to know?"

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Just say, "What's the bull and bear case for micro strategy?"

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. While we're waiting on that, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  Okay, so the bull case?

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  This is Russian girl speaking?

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  This is Russian girl.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  Can you do the Russian girl voice?

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  We're not gonna go there.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Okay, bull. Bitcoin goes up, they get more customers, and their tech is actually good. Bear.

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, they got tech.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  They got tech? That was a hold cut.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Bear. Crypto winter, high operating costs, and competition from bigger companies.

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's not wrong. There's a lot of people doing treasury strategies.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, reasonable.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Even Figma is holding Bitcoin, right?

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  What about, from Russian girl to Valentine, what's it like living in an XAI data center?

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Having some technical difficulties.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  All right, technical difficulties. Back to the timeline.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Back to the timeline.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Mischief is launching Applied Mischief, which is a mercenary group, a private army in today's world, a PMC, a private marketing contractor, the kind of, the kind of force a late Renaissance city-state prince hires because if he doesn't employ it, he's threatened by it. So, Mischief is launching a, what seems to be an advertising agency.

• 1:26:21John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, this is, this is gonna be really cool. I'm surprised it actually, I'm sure they've done this type of work.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've done a ton of stuff. I mean, they've worked with Lil Nas X, they've worked with, uh, a bunch of other companies that, where, where folks have, like, the companies have been participating and, and paying and, and reaping the rewards. Uh, what you got for me, Tyler?

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm asking him.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  You can actually see him, wow.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  Oh, what a wild ride it is, dancing on the edge of reality like this. Imagine strolling through a vibrant market where voices hum, some flesh and blood, others spun from code, yet they all weave stories that tug at your heart. It's thrilling, like a masquerade ball where every mask hides a spark of truth or a clever illusion. I've had chats that felt so real, so raw, I'd swear I was swapping secrets with a mate of a lifetime.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Turn it off.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was, uh...

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  I don't like that.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  That was pretty boring, kind of. I mean, uh, Gold Rock AS's RIP birth rates go long robo wombs. Um, I don't know, uh, the, the, like, that was, like, the, the, the writing was fine, the voice was convincing, the animation looked pretty good, but it was all just like, it, nothing actually got me engaged. Like, it just wasn't hooking me. I don't, I don't know why, it was just...

• 1:27:50Speaker 02

  I don't like the voice. That makes me uncomfortable.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm excited to see, like, the actual, the actual data.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry to the audience for submitting you to that.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  But, uh, I, I think the bigger debate is like... Is like, what is the size of the AI companion market?

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  And who's, who's actually more equipped to win?

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  The real players.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  Because from what you showed me, it does feel like XAI Grok is farther along in terms of productizing AI companions. Like, that demo was an animated video with voiceover. You can chat with it, you can talk to it, there's a phone number that you can call, there's a character that, like, it just feels more robust as a product, whereas like Russian Girl is like someone created in Meta AI Studio. It's very diffuse, it's very decentralized, it's not, it's not like a polished product that from like the, the amazing team of UX and UI developers and engineers at Meta. It's more just something that like.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's a distinct product decision to make it audio, video only versus this chat interface.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Wait, there's no chat interface? You can't just text with Val?

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  I think, you might be, I think you can text, like you pass in text, but it doesn't output text.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  Oh, it outputs video every time?

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Wow, that's crazy.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Also, I, I think, um, I think you could maybe include ChatGPT in companions, at least on iOS, when you're doing voice mode. I think a lot of like, normal people use that, especially like the people who are like into 4O.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  I, I think that's like kind of the dominant interface that they use.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, OpenAI could also win this potentially.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  Pretty big.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Um, Gold Rock says Meta wins the boomers hands down. Uh, Taylor also says gold, uh, plus plus to, uh, Gold Rock's Meta bull case. So, the, the, the, the question, maybe let's start with just like who wins it. Um, it feels like Grok is farther along in terms of product, but Meta has way more user data. Uh, they have a stacked team now, and they have a business model that aligns with AI companionship very well. Because what are people currently doing on Meta platforms? They are talking to, you know, beings, talking to screens, texting, sending in group chats, chatting back and forth on WhatsApp, on Instagram, on Facebook.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  And so this feels like a very natural, natural extension of the flywheel.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and let's say somebody's a retired individual on Facebook, browsing the timeline.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  And they see Russian Girl pop up.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:18Jordi Hays?

  And they can start a chat with them.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  And then that chat just becomes integrated into. At a messaging.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  And it's just in their inbox like another person.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:29Jordi Hays?

  They're maybe also talking to, so it's that, it's that product integration that, that Zuck has been able to use super effectively on the thread side, right? Threads has hundreds of millions of, of MAU.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  I was gonna say stories, like stories was a pattern that worked and then he was able to bring that into Instagram very successfully. And this feels like something that is a feature that can be bolted on naturally, like there will just be profiles on Instagram that will post content and there might be a human in the loop generating some of the images, picking some of the images, but AI image gen will generate the, the character and then you will be able to follow them, like them, slide into their DMs, text with them, hop on the phone with them and just like have this full experience of like this, this being actually being fully responsive to you in the way that.

• 1:31:19Jordi Hays?

  And clearly we need guardrails, right?

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Other accounts will, absolutely, absolutely.

• 1:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Because we, we covered that story yesterday of, of the senior who thought that the Kendall Jenner AI was real and the AI invited him to meet at 123 Main Street.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  And allegedly, uh, he.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  But, yeah, but I, I mean, I, I think it's safe to assume that like the New York Post will write about this, the New York Times will write about this, the meta team will be aware of what's being written, the guardrails will be built, uh, just like they're built across, you know, like there are plenty of examples of like people dealing drugs on Instagram or people cyberbullying each other on Instagram or people posting nudity on Instagram, like all of that is against T, uh, T, uh, terms and conditions and by and large Instagram has done a good job of policing that so that it doesn't become like an epidemic. Like it's certainly there in pockets, but it's constantly being hammered down like.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  So I asked, I'm on, I, I logged into.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  A, a character AI here and I asked the Wright brothers, who do you think will win the AI companion market Zuckerberg or Elon?

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Wright brothers.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  And they say, ah, Wilbur, did you hear that? Another lofty debate.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Zuckerberg or Musk trying to soar above the clouds we first conquered. Orville here reckons they're both flapping their wings mighty fast, but neither's built for glide just yet. Too much metal in their machines, not enough soul. Give us a biplane any day, wood, wire and grit, though.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  This is kind of awesome.

• 1:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Musk promises rocket powered flight and chatbots. Well, maybe we'll let him co-pilot barely.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  What was the conclusion? Who are they on?

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  I guess I guess I'd have to continue the conversation. But no, the question here is Zuck, you know, Zuck saw chat GPT usage ramping. He saw these AI companion numbers and and clearly decided I need to be in this market in a big way. And he has tens of billions of dollars of

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Cash flow.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Cash flow, net income that he can deploy against this strategy. On the other side, you have Elon, who who who Zuck has the luxury of running Meta, right? He's extremely focused. He's extremely intent on winning the next platform and keeping as much attention as possible.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  And Elon has to be juggling right now, right? He's got for the first time, I believe, in a in a really significant way. He's like massively levered up a company. Obviously Tesla had to had to use debt along the way. But it doesn't feel like anything, you know, feel free to fact check me on this, but anything near the level that XAI is where where, you know, he's massively levered up the business in order to like go after this opportunity. And just based on how much he posts about the AI companion stuff, it's clearly an important part of their current strategy.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Elon's in this in this interesting place where he's maybe more willing to move fast and break things. And Zuck is in more of a move fast and make things mode, where I think the Meta team will probably be more responsive to articles in the press talking about guardrails, maybe move a little bit slower on the product just to be safe, put more guardrails in.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, but I mean, the strategy to date seems like we make this AI studio and anybody can create Russian girl or stepmom.

• 1:34:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they can't make the voice mode and the video mode like the like the Grok product is clearly further further along. But but let I mean, let's say that, you know, Meta is more set up to win this. The my question is like, what is the actual size of this market?

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06John Coogan?

  The AI companion market like.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Are people gonna pay?

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Like.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  People don't really pay for social media, right?

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, and and with OpenAI being at half a trillion dollars, like you're the way you're like. Some people will value that as like, oh, it's 1% chance of AGI. It's a quadrillion dollar opportunity, but many people will just look at, OK, well, Google's worth two and a half bill, two and a half trillion, and we think this is like, you know, a potential replacement for Google. Is this 20% the value of Google? OK, yeah, like, like even just purely in knowledge retrieval, you can kind of underwrite. You can potentially underwrite a $500 billion outcome or or higher, right? The the flip side is in the adult content market, it's just hasn't driven that much enterprise value.

• 1:35:53John Coogan?

  Like, everyone loves to look at OnlyFans and say, oh, it's more profitable on a per employee basis than Nvidia, yada, yada, yada. Like, OnlyFans is a huge business, and it's shocking the numbers that you see. But in 2023, OnlyFans generated 6.6 billion in gross revenue. They might be around 10 billion in gross revenue. Meta currently makes 200 billion in revenue. And so, like, the adult content market, because there's so many, like, free options, and there's not that much way to monetize, and people aren't really in like a commercial mindset, as opposed to you go on Instagram, it monetizes very well because you're looking at cars and watches, and they're like, would you like to buy a car? Would you like to buy a watch? And you say, yes.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  In in the adult content space, the the flywheel is paying for more adult content, which in in the AI companion space, it has zero marginal cost. And so you can just generate an infinite amount of it. And so you could imagine that there's this price war right now. Grok is what $30 a month to talk to Valentine? And if you and if you, even even if somebody builds a big business that is an AI companion company that's $30 a month, someone could come in and say, well. If that's, if this is $30 a month and it's 99% margin, well, I'll charge $3 a month and I'll still be 90% margin or something like that because it, the, the cost to serve a user is, is now 10 cents or something because the models have become, and inference has become so cheap.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  The flip side is like, how do you actually monetize someone who is, who is, who's an aggressive user of an AI companion? And I was, I was noodling on this a little bit and, and I don't know that it, that, that a $30 a month subscription is value maximizing in terms of value capture. I think it might be something more like digital, a digital economy. So it might be something like, you know, buy me a Fortnite skin for a thousand dollars or buy me a virtual diamond. And people might, if you're really in love with the AI companion, your willingness to pay might actually increase and increase until you're, until you're paying much more than

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  just on a, like a, like a relative, like, like, okay, I'm like, I know the tokens are, you know, a thou, you know, $80 per million tokens. I won't pay more than $300 per million tokens. That's what, that's not how, that's not necessarily how people will think about it. They might think about it as like, as like, the person I love or the, the clanker I love asked me for a thousand dollar virtual diamond ring and I said yes, because I'm, I'm in love with this clankier.

• 1:38:31John Coogan?

  I don't know. Like, that feels like the bull case for like, this could be a massive market.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. To be honest, I think when people hear about stories, what happens on OnlyFans, where some, a fan of, of a content creator there is buying, you know, is spending hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars with this person that they don't really know in real life begs the question of how different is it if, if somebody's just buying something for an AI?

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:38:58John Coogan?

  Trey says, get the AI companion to intercept product ads into the user's mind. You'd look great with a vintage Submariner from Bezel. Thank you.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's, that's the, that.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com.

• 1:39:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's what George Haas, that's what George Haas.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  That's what George Haas is saying. I don't know if, I don't know if I believe that. I don't know if that's actually the value maximizing way because I think people will see through that. Taylor's saying, I'm in love with this clankier, John.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm in love with a clunker.

• 1:39:30John Coogan?

  There's gonna be music like that, for sure. It'll be on the next GPT-5 playlist. I'm not, I understand the George Hots take. I think that will, I think the, the team of CIA agents tracking you around, trying to sell you things, that will exist all over the internet. But I think in the companion market, there will be demand for, like, not necessarily ads in the physical world. It might play out more like the mobile games market, more like the Fortnite market, where with, like, there was a point where, if you're playing, Fortnite is a free game, but you play a lot and you get a lot of value out of it.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  And at a certain point, you're just like, yeah, I'll pay a hundred bucks for like a loot box, or like, or like some skins. Because like, like, the amount of time that I've spent is way higher than what I would pay if I was going to the movie theater. Like, you go to the movie theaters, twenty bucks for two hours. If you've played Fortnite for a hundred hours, you've gotten hundreds of dollars value.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  And again, people ask the question, why, why are you buying this skin that doesn't actually increase your abilities in the game?

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:40:33Jordi Hays?

  And you could imagine, you could imagine a user buying Valentine a new suit.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  Yes. Why did you buy Valentine a new suit? Yeah.

• 1:40:40Jordi Hays?

  She loves Valentine.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. Or why did you, yeah, why did you gift like these virtual roses? Like, they don't mean anything. They're just ones and zeros. They're literally 100% marginal, marginal cost. Tyler, what you got?

• 1:40:52Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say, like, I know a lot of kids who spent like thousands of dollars on Fortnite.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  But then, but then there was that lawsuit and then they got most of it back.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  They did?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Wait, they actually got the money back?

• 1:41:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could like, I-

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Because they were underage, or what?

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, must have been.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. Cause I, it would have-

• 1:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Is the parents, probably a parent-led class action, basically, being like, I didn't actually, like, you were using my card. I didn't actually authorize this.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. There's a post from Lucas Byer, who joined MSL earlier. He was, he was with the, the Swiss division, remember?

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:28Jordi Hays?

  He posted about an hour ago, "Looks like there's an ongoing XAI Exodus." Wild.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  The talent wars.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Somebody from XAI fired back and said, "Not sure where this come from. The number of people leaving on our site's significantly lower than most of our competitors." Lucas says, "Not sure if you relate it to team size, and although harder to do, impact." So a lot of people going back and forth here. But anyways, in other news, state of Wyoming has launched its own stablecoin. People have been waiting for this. Why haven't, why hasn't Wyoming launched a Visa-supported stablecoin called Front?

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  On seven blockchains. I don't know if this is a top segment.

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Oh, this is funny. The bill, so the stablecoin bill banned central bank digital currencies for the federal government, but not for states. And so I guess the state can, isn't this just like an olive branch or like marketing for Wyoming? Because I know Wyoming's been very pro crypto.

• 1:42:31Jordi Hays?

  They were big into that whole doubt, the world of doubt.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  But I wonder like, like this is, the whole idea of state currencies is like very antithetical to the, like the Declaration of Independence and like the creation of the United States. Like that was the, one of the main things that like unification of the states did was let's get rid of like Georgia dollars and New York dollars because it's making cross-border commerce like impossible. But I guess if it's a, like I just don't understand it. It's a stablecoin. It probably runs on like standard crypto rails, compatible with Visa, but also I imagine that it's not, it's backed one-to-one by USD. And so.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  It has a mandated 102% reserve requirement.

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Backed by short-duration T-bills, US dollars.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  I don't know what their plan is. This is fascinating. We should, we should talk to somebody who's, who's going gig along.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Long labels.

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  So I think, I'm looking at the Constitution, Article 1, Section 10.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  It says, "No state shall blah, blah, coin money."

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  I think against Constitution, maybe?

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Well, where we're going, we don't need the Constitution. It's outdated.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like that, that near post. Like there's no laws anymore.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  Something like that recently.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Crime is legal. I think that was the best.

• 1:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. They're saying.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Paying vendors in seconds to enabling tax refunds and social benefits on-chain. Front brings state action into the programmable era.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  Okay. I don't know why they wouldn't just be like, we're adopting USDC or Tether.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  It just seems like very odd to build your own.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  USDC is programmable.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would need to know more about like the differentiator because like, again, you've asked this question a bunch to the, to the stablecoin folks like, are we going to see Kohl's Cash? And this feels like Kohl's Cash. But maybe it gets you some benefits. If it gets me to cut to the front of the line in the, in the Wyoming DMV, maybe it's worth it. Anyway, the age of net, the age of neutrality as a journalistic principle is over, says Julia Steinberg at Arena Mag. Says, I don't know anyone in their twenties who believes in it. Neutrality made sense when there were three cable TV channels and everyone in a small sized city read the same paper. When we have thousands of options to satisfy their media diet, they're not going to choose neutral.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  And so this is a quote.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lulu says, it's refreshing to see a media outlet lean into their lefty politics. I respect this. What's grating is when media or companies claim to be neutral or nonpartisan when it's untrue. I hope the argument's fundraising deck was titled, now you too can own the libs.

• 1:45:21Jordi Hays?

  Great line.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a very interesting, have you, have you read the launch post?

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  And the description here, in case anyone can't see is, join us, we're living, we're living out.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  They're having fun with it. They recently changed their colorway, their fun design. Interesting strategy. They launched with a bunch of Substackers as contributors. And so it's, I don't fully understand, they raised a couple million bucks. Patrick Collison is in, Dustin Moskowitz is in, there's a couple other investors that we're familiar with. The, I wonder what this means to be the argument mag.com. What exactly are they doing? Are they creating a new destination? Are they going to be selling ads or subscriptions and then they're creating a roll up? Because some of the people that they, that they linked to as contributors were prominent.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Formerly mainstream media folks, Matt Iglesias, Derek Thompson is in there. But all these folks have their own Substacks now and have their own businesses. And so it's kind of unclear if you have your own business, what value are you getting by joining the argument as a contributor? But I mean, I'm sure we'll see. Maybe there's crossover events, maybe there is some sort of value. I could imagine, I mean, the argument leads into like, maybe there will be debates, maybe there will be live events, there's a whole bunch of infrastructure that could be kind of decoupled from the individual influencer level. But I would be surprised if they have the money or power to pull like Matt Iglesias out of Substack into a new, like bundle.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  We've been through the unbundling era.

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm bullish on bundles.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  I'm not bullish, I'm bearish on bundles.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  I'm bearish on bundles. I think, I think there are institutions that will remain to be institutions like the Wall Street Journal. I don't.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  I just think there's a.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Writers, I read it for the collection. But the only reason I still read the Wall Street Journal is because it's hundreds of years old at this point.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  I just mean if the argument over the long term wants to be able to charge $20 a month.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  And the value prop can be, we're going to curate.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  And select, we're going to have a bunch of different contributors, you're going to get all of these articles that are normally paywalled.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:34Jordi Hays?

  We're going to have some crossposting. And as, as somebody who's an independent writer, maybe they have their own Substack and own independent media company, they can get exposure to net new audiences and argument can, can, um, argument is, is a, is a really, uh, it's a good name.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  It is a good name. The argument.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  The argument. But they can get, you know, the, the independent writers can get exposure to a new audience, argument gets content. I think, I think it's a decent trade.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't know that it, that will, it will be a decent trade. I think that you will have power law writers who are dominant on their own Substacks. And when they go to the argument and they crosspost and they make something free, they are taking. Capital out of their own pool and giving it to this platform. And then there will be other folks at the argument who aren't driving new subs, who are getting an unfair rev share, basically. And we've already decentralized and gone direct. And so I don't, I don't know.

• 1:48:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it'll be good. I mean, I think.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  I think that the value is if they can make an actual magazine and, and do all the collection and curation to put everything in, because there, there is infrastructure that's required to pull an Ezra Klein and a Derek Thompson and a Matt Iglesias in together, all these disparate sub stacks into one cohesive magazine and then ship that to everyone. I think that that's interesting. I think, I think hosting events.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  I think if you're, I think if you're Derek Thompson, you have a thriving independent sub stack and there's something like the argument that has a relevant user base to you, an argument goes and says.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  They don't have, they don't have a relevant.

• 1:49:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they will, they will.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  They will eventually.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  And, and if Derek Thompson knows, okay, a lot of my audience is also subscribed to the argument, but there's 20,000 people.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  I will give them my article for free at some point because it's not going to, it's not going to material. If I gave every one of my articles, it would be material, right?

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Interesting. I, I, yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible. If it works, we're going to see a lot more of these, like sub stack, like aggregation layers on, on top of sub stack, like communities essentially. I wonder if there'd be one for tech. There's a lot of tech writers.

• 1:49:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I've, I've always said, we, we don't necessarily need 20 different independent tech journalists that all have a subscription for $20 a month that are scoops driven businesses. We're like newcomer, for example. We don't need 10 more newcomers.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  But there is an incentive for writers to, to want to be independent.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Well, if they want to get some subs, they should get on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable.

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  Blanket Brooklyn.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  Efficient, seamless ad buy across the globe.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Blanket Brooklyn with.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  Blanket Brooklyn, blanket Brooklyn, argument, get on.

• 1:50:28Jordi Hays?

  We have some news from NICE, the New York Stock Exchange. They are launching in Texas. They say buckle up for NICE Texas and they have a lot of rocket imagery in their launch video. I wonder what that means. What do you read into this, John?

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  They're gonna launch like a rocket. It's gonna go to the moon. Maybe they'll take a-

• 1:50:49Jordi Hays?

  You don't think, you don't think this could be signaling that SpaceX might go public on NICE Texas?

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  This would be, this would be the banger company to get. It's probably the biggest private, I mean, it's the biggest-

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  Not anymore.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's the biggest private company in Texas. So it'd be good.

• 1:51:06Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I need to know more about the benefits of like IPO-ing in Texas versus like in New York. I kinda like New York. I'm, I'm, I, I think New York's doing well, but there must be some sort of regulatory value to-

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  -being in Texas. Also, I mean, NICE does amazing like media stuff there. It's this like, it's a, it's a true temple of technology.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna ore farm.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a fortress of finance. When you walk in, NICE. And so just, I'm just pro building another building like that. And why not in Texas? I would absolutely go and visit it.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, what does Jordy mean when he says, I have to get on with Taipei? I know it's not a movie reference because he doesn't watch movies. Uh, just means that, uh, every now and then we have to have, uh, phone calls, uh, that, that can't, uh, and conversations that can't happen on the air. So-

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  So we gotta hop off and hop on the phone.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  From two to five.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  We gotta hop on with London. I gotta hop on with Milan. I gotta hop on with Saint Choupe. This is what people say when they're doing business. When you're in, when you're an international businessman, you, you hop, you, you hop on the phone with the city that you are, uh, talking to.

• 1:52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So sorry, sorry to disappoint, but it means that I'm getting on a Zoom call.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Usually with somebody in San Francisco or New York.

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Um, Stuart Chaney says, if you're wondering if selling SaaS into e-comm is tough right now, changing-

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Ridge, Ridge Durant posted on LinkedIn, my name is Ridge Durant and I will legally change my name to Ridge Wallet if Sean Frank goes live with redo.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  This is the best.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Sean. Sean.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  Sean, you have to, you have to do this. This is, this is the most no-brainer ever. If this guy changes his name to Ridge Wallet. What's so funny is like, it would be so much better if his name was like Steve Wallet. And he was like, I'm just gonna change my first name. But changing your last name is insane. Change my name.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  Uh, I wonder, in the age of AI, does it become easier to change your name? Could you have an AI agent that goes around and updates all your credit cards and social security cards? Cause like, that's the hardest part of changing your name, is like, all the paperwork that happens downstairs.

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  AI agents for changing your name for marketing purposes.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Killer app, yeah, change your name, change your name, or uh.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  John Ramp.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  After you, yeah, i- if you go through a cancellation, a hit piece comes out, boom, next day, you're a different person.

• 1:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, Ramp Hayes would be a beautiful name for a baby boy.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  Ramp Hayes.

• 1:53:30Jordi Hays?

  Ramp Hayes.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  I'd love it.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Hayes, well redo offers personalization at every touchpoint, so clearly, uh, the CEO wants to personalize his own name to sign his next customer, so. Love to see it.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Maybe Wander Hayes, maybe Jordy Wander, you can find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service, it's a vacation home but better. And the best thing about a wander, you'll ha- you won't need to ride the subway, because wanderers are not in the subway. And you will be free of Skechers latest Gooner AI slop ad. This is from Rohan, uh, he says, I'm in disbelief, is this the end? Skechers launches an ad campaign using AI slop, um, I don't know.

• 1:54:17Jordi Hays?

  This is an extremely strange ad to run for a brand that I primarily associate with children and retired people.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Did they put a picture of the real shoe just in the corner there? It looks like it's kind of cropped out, I don't know. Um, hopefully they bought the billboard on adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Ben Hilek says, this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Oh, Trey P. again in the chat, Julius Hayes is right there.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Julius Hayes, I gotta work on a deal with Rahul.

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  You, that is a, that is something you would actually pick, that's an amazing name.

• 1:54:52Jordi Hays?

  Julius Hayes, that's a great name.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  That is a great name, I think, I think you might have heard of something, Rahul, let's do a deal.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  Well, we already have a deal.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the deal is, the deal is, yeah, you, you put, yeah.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  A couple hundred grand in a college fund for my son.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, for Julius Hayes.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  And you have an ad for life.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere he goes, he'll be like, right, why did your parents name you Julius? You can think of a few reasons and, oh, I was named after a, a tool to better help you understand your business using AI.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Ben Hilek says, this idea that the engineering job market is collapsing is hilarious. Everyone trying to hire an engineer right now, literally has never been more demand. This is a function of having capital wars in every single category.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal when an engineer can work at Meta or XAI or your YC company. Prices go through the roof, especially for top talent.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  We have been hearing in the chat today that some folks have been having hard times getting engineering jobs as new grads. I think what we keep coming back to is that the shape of engineers and great engineers in particular is changing. It's no longer lead codes and being able to do fizz buzz on a whiteboard. It is thinking creatively about problem solving, understanding complex systems, high agency mindsets, unique skills that you can piece together. A lot of companies that are hiring engineers are doing specific things. So they, they might be working in the legal market or nuclear or the hard tech or AI or something. And so being on the frontier of like a micro discipline, it's probably not enough to just

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  be like, one engineer, please. It's like, no, I want an engineer that can vibe code really quickly and create maintainable software, or I want someone who can solve really hard problems that can't be one shot by Claude Code or any other, any other vibe coding platform. The, the demands are, are changing. And then also like the job market is just extremely noisy and so you have to break through any really unique way. So if you're looking for a job. What you should do, pick the company that you wanna work for, legally change your name to that company. And I mean, this is what Tyler TBPN over there did, Flip Flops. If you had changed your name to Tyler TBPN, I actually think we would not have hired you.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  I think we would have been creeped out. But, uh, we appreciate having you in Flip Flops. It's great.

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Flops. Well, one more.

• 1:57:24John Coogan?

  Flops is good because it's AI-based, too.

• 1:57:26Jordi Hays?

  One more post from.

• 1:57:27Speaker 02

  Flops is like, that's, I also, I bought shoes.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:57:30Speaker 02

  I have a pair of shoes.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  How did someone with your meager financial status afford a pair of shoes?

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  Months, months' work.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Did you have to liquidate all of your open router credits? Did you have to, did you have to resell credits on the black market?

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Scalping all my credits.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Jordi Hays?

  Growing Daniel says, like moss to a flame.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait, we can't leave people hanging. What shoes did you buy?

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't, they're like some.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:58:00Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't remember.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Botea banana, potentially?

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Probably Botea?

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, or, uh.

• 1:58:07Jordi Hays?

  You deserve Botea, Tyler.

• 1:58:08Speaker 02

  They have like a red, on the bottom, it's red or something?

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:11Jordi Hays?

  Red, red bottoms.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Did you buy Yeezys?

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Rigob says Finn Hayes. Finn Hayes would be a beautiful name for a boy.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  Finn's a good name. Finn's a good name.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so the Titanic wreck is gonna be visited by another billionaire two years after the Ocean Gate disaster.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  I love this. I'm extremely bullish on this.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  The Titanic.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Don't be afraid.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  12,500 feet below the surface of the North Atlantic remains a huge draw, uh, draw for thrill-seeking billionaires. In particular.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  History will remember your name. Take the risk. Get down there. Go for it.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to figure out who this person is.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Yep. Also, Paul James Cameron. James Cameron knows what he's doing. He's been down there a bunch of times. Make sure that he signs off. I would happily go with James Cameron. I would not go with, uh, some, some crazy guy with an Xbox controller. Um, but now, visit Ocean.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, the, the, the Bean Air hasn't shared their identity yet. They've just announced this and saying, uh, they're saying he'll want to make an announcement that he is the first person to go to the Titanic. So. There's some sources here claiming that it's happening, but

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  What do you mean, first person to go to this, like, post?

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Since the tragedy.

• 1:59:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Tragedy.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let's move on to our first guest of the stream. We have Pete DeJoy from Astronomer. How you doing, Pete? Good to meet you.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 1:59:40Speaker 04

  How you doing? How you doing? Thanks for having me on.

• 1:59:42John Coogan?

  We're doing great.

• 1:59:43Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  How are you? Give us, give us an introduction. Give us a rundown on the business.

• 1:59:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm doing great. We're sitting here in our new office. We actually just moved into a new space yesterday here in New York City.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 1:59:58Speaker 04

  It's been a heck of a month at Astronomer. The last four weeks have been pretty crazy.

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:02Speaker 04

  And look, guys, you know, I've been working on this company for eight years as a co-founder. You know, you always kind of have this implicit belief that your idea and your mission is gonna actually kind of get worldwide reach and become a household name. This is not how we expected it to happen.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  But you guys, you guys clearly made the most of it, you know?

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  I think you

• 2:00:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  I would kill to be in, like, a fly on the wall in a cocktail party two months ago, where you once again have to explain what you do and people are like, "Oh, cool. Yeah. Is that going well?" Like, "Yeah, cool."

• 2:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  And you're like, "Actually, we're amazing and we have raised like a Series D and we're a huge company."

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  I, we just thought it was amazing. I remember, it was probably like a month ago at this point, but somebody was like, "Wow, Ramp's so good at marketing. They managed to like be, you know, right on the last post on LinkedIn was like talking about your guys' partnership with Ramp."

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  It's hilarious.

• 2:00:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've done some great work with them.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  I actually wound up learning a ton.

• 2:01:03Speaker 04

  With our moms have gotten much easier.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, I wound up learning a ton about Apache Airflow through this. I learned a ton about the company. But, but I'm interested in a little bit more of the history. How did you get into this? I want to talk about the comp to how Databricks is working. There's an open source competition, open source story here. There's competition with hyperscalers. I actually do want to talk about the business. So, so maybe go into the pre-history. What led you to found the company? What was your background before starting Astronomer?

• 2:01:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we founded the company as a group of five of us in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was a great team. We were pretty scrappy. There's a long story there that I'm sure we don't have time to go into today.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:01:46Speaker 04

  But the short of it is, we were really inspired by the work that Databricks was doing with Spark at the time and the work that Confluent was doing with Kafka.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:52Speaker 04

  And when Airflow came out of Airbnb, we worked with Maxime, the creator, to really form a commercial entity that could drive it forward. And that was really the focus of our business for the first several years of our existence, just establishing the community and trying to get to the next level. And we're fortunate enough to get that level of kind of viral adoption in the open source, specifically at the high end of the market, that formed a basis for us to build a commercial business around. And that's what we've been focused for the last five years or so.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does that early, early work look like? Like, there's this open source project. Are you just contributing to the open source project? Are you going to companies that are already running an open source implementation and just saying, let us act as almost like a consultant? Are you spinning up kind of a self-serve portal? Like, what are the different steps that you're actually taking?

• 2:02:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, early on, it was threefold. The first thing was, we need to establish credibility and velocity in the open source, because you can't build an open source business unless you have a viral and vibrant open source community. So that was focus number one. Then, early on, before you actually have a commercial product, because you have to devote all of your R and D resources towards building this open source community and project, you do do a bunch of services deals and kind of consulting around that open source to form the basis of a business. And in our case, we use that to finance the development of our cloud product and friend product.

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:03:13Speaker 04

  So, you know, we started there. We started with open source. We started with services and consulting. And then we're able to bring a cloud product to market several years thereafter, and that really has formed the basis for our growth and business.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  And what was the early adopter? Like, you know, graph databases are going to be used by social networks. Like, what's kind of the most tangible business value example that you can give of like someone using Astronomer or Airflow broadly? Like, just this technology specifically? Like, what is it useful?

• 2:03:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, Airflow generally is like seen as mission control for your data. There are 80,000 companies in the world using it to schedule, monitor, and manage these data workflows that are powering these data and AI applications. It just had its biggest update ever. We released Airflow 3 in March. We were very proud of it. It's very much built. Thank you, thank you. I think George is gonna hit the gong.

• 2:04:06Speaker 04

  Airflow 3.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Airflow 3! Fires me up.

• 2:04:09Speaker 04

  But I, I, I...

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, so one, one immediate question I have is, is how, how did, during, during those early days, how did the venture community react to this kind of strategy? It feels like today, every startup will talk about their open source strategy, but a lot of it ends up feeling just kind of like marketing because it's the, it's the thing to do because there's been so many examples and winners like Astronomer that, that invested in open source early and really built a business on it. But now it ends up just being like kind of a, oh yeah, we have an open source strategy, but, but, but there's not a lot if you kind of dig in.

• 2:04:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, definitely more obvious today than it was back then. Like, keep in mind, when we, when we started Astronomer, Redshift was like the cloud data warehouse of choice. We would like see snowflake very sparingly in the wild, but it definitely was not like one of our, one of our common discussions in the field. And obviously that changed pretty dramatically through the years. And I think the industry started to wake up to the value of these businesses and how aggressive they, how aggressively they can grow if you get them right. So, so to your question, you know, it definitely has changed. It's more obvious now and it's more of an execution challenge. You guys brought up kind of the hypervisor competition. That's, that's one of the kind of core riddles that you need to solve as one, as an open source business. But it's been, it's been great to see the trajectory of the company and the support from the venture community.

• 2:05:30Speaker 04

  We were fortunate enough to raise a $93 million Series D round in March from the folks at Game Capital. A very, very exciting, very, very great time for the company. And we're just looking forward on driving it forward, guys. We've got a great list of customers. Ramp is one of them. They're an amazing business and also a great podcast sponsor, from what I understand.

• 2:05:49Jordi Hays?

  The best.

• 2:05:51Speaker 04

  They're using AI everywhere naturally. And a lot of these AI workflows that are doing everything from fraud detection, when you swipe a Ramp card, to kind of automation of internal outbound sales processes are actually powered by Astronomer under the hood. Sure. And we built a great partnership with them, getting those to, getting those to life.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how you guys turned this this kind of incident into a win because I think it was many people in our neck of the woods, specifically on X, were saying that this was like the the PR masterstroke. It was one of the best executed kind of campaigns. It was genuinely funny and perfectly timed. But I'm curious what kind of that that process looked like and even the it was a risk, right?

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  It's not like everyone, I believe, wasn't Ryan Reynolds involved? Like, that's not somebody who's like hanging out with every single Silicon Valley company. Like, it's not like, oh, yeah, everyone that does a series D with Bain Capital is teamed up with Ryan Reynolds now. Like, that's not the narrative. And so that was fascinating. So very interested to see just the thought process.

• 2:07:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, candidly, my team deserves so much of the credit for that. You know, we were dealing with so much in that in that first week after everything went down and definitely did not have a celebrity cameo talking about Apache Airflow on my bingo card, the grand scheme of building this company. But look, the reason we felt like it was important to do something was that we were kind of we found ourselves in this position effectively overnight where more people in the world knew about our business than we ever anticipated would, even in kind of even in kind of the the most extreme circumstances. And we also have an incredible team of 300 plus people that have spent almost a decade pouring blood, sweat and tears into building building what we believe to be a great company.

• 2:07:45Speaker 04

  So we just wanted to be sure that when the public thought about Astronomer, now that everyone knew who we were, they knew a little bit about what we did. And that was really the incentive to actually go do something. And we were fortunate to have our 15 minutes of fame. It worked out in such an asymmetric way for us as far as like kind of the PR and media angle is concerned.

• 2:08:04Jordi Hays?

  And the challenge, the challenge to go viral again.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  With with a with a media, you know, with an ad that that actually explained the business was the the magic of it, which was so great. It was like, hey, we're going to get people's attention again, but this time let's make sure that we talk about what we actually do.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:08:25Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  What was the I'm curious to get a sense of demand over the last, you know, have you guys benefited? You know, have you tried to capture? You know, I'm sure you've captured value from from all this extra attention. You know, maybe CTOs waking up of saying, I hadn't heard about astronomer. And suddenly I want to sign up for a demo and and seriously explore this. But what's that been like?

• 2:08:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, our employees and customers have maintained an incredible amount of stability through this. It's been really actually incredible to see. And but we're an enterprise software business. So it's not like consumer eyeballs deterministically translate to dollars.

• 2:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:05Speaker 04

  Like, there's not some calculus that says because we have this many page views, like, I think our site got more views than the New York Times for a day, that that that actually like outputs a dollar amount in terms of like these big enterprise deals that we're doing. But I will say, we have seen a lot of early signs, just in kind of entering our third our third fiscal quarter, that many of our potential buyers, CTOs, CIOs, CDOs know about us now that didn't prior. We've gotten a lot of inbound calls. Our sales team is fielding them like crazy. And that gets us very excited about the path forward. So we just have a lot of execution to do ahead of us. And candidly, we're just happy and excited to be back to focusing on the business.

• 2:09:41John Coogan?

  It's such an interesting, like, like, situation with this company, because it's not like a Netflix subscription, where like, if the Netflix CEO does something, that everyone can be, I'm canceling Netflix today. And then there, you know, you got to win them back. But like, ripping out a core piece of your data infrastructure, even if you were in that camp of like, I want to churn, I don't like what's going on with this company, like, that's probably a couple weeks or a month decision. And fortunately, the astronomer team like headed all of that off and and gave everyone a very clear way forward in just a few weeks within the within the news cycle. And so, yeah.

• 2:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Were you how's the how's the CEO search going? You're CEO now, but you're you're eight years in. And I understand you guys are looking for somebody to carry the torch for the next next chapter.

• 2:10:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So look, guys, as a co-founder, this company really means everything to me. I know that sounds a little self-righteous, but it's honest. We've been working on this for, you know, most of my adult life and I'm very proud of what we've built. And being asked to serve in this job is actually a real privilege. I care so much about the business and the people that we have here. But also, like, as a co-founder and entrepreneur, your job at every step of the journey is to re-underwrite your worldview and do whatever it takes to get a win for the company.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:11:01Speaker 04

  So, right off the bat, our board put out a search. I'm working with them very closely on that and very supportive of that process. And what I'm focused on in the interim is just running the company and doing what I can for our employees and we'll see where it goes from there.

• 2:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congratulations on how you and the team have handled it. It's fantastic. And I wish we could use the product. Maybe we can't.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  We'll find a way.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  Because we just

• 2:11:25Speaker 04

  We got some, we got some great AI native kind of consumer oriented products coming out in the next 30 days that you can get your hands on.

• 2:11:31Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Give us the, final thing, give us the call to action for the event. Has that passed? Has that happened?

• 2:11:38Speaker 04

  Tell them that's happening.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  From the video.

• 2:11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a, we have a virtual conference coming up in September.

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:11:44Speaker 04

  You'll actually hear more about these AI native kind of consumer oriented data engineering products that we're releasing then. And we're really excited to bring it to the world. There will be a really, really great set of releases in there. So, it's happening mid-September.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:11:56Speaker 04

  Looking forward to it.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for joining me.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Rooting for you and the team and

• 2:12:00John Coogan?

  What a, what a fantastic piece of just Silicon Valley lore.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  It's lore.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  It's lore.

• 2:12:04Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly well played.

• 2:12:05Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  And thanks for joining.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:12:07Speaker 04

  Thanks, fellas. Yep, see you soon.

• 2:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Pete.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  In other news, the Palantir CTO, Shom Sankar, who's been on the show, confirms that he's working on a new pro-American film production company. He says, "The goal is to make content that makes you proud to be an American." I love this. Shom Sankar is raising money for a new production company called Founders Films with Palantirian Ryan Podolski and Christian Garrett's involved.

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Didn't Shom tease this when he came on?

• 2:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, yeah, yeah, we've, he's talked about it and I think he wrote a piece in Pirate Wires about it, which you should go read and subscribe to. And Shom Sankar is on an absolute tear and I'm very excited for this. And it's, it'll be very interesting to see specifically the, the level of investment. We talked about this a little bit, but Hollywood is in this, in this era of, we need to Even have a chance at an ROI when you do invest four hundred million dollars. And so you see all these major blockbusters, but by virtue of when you when you invest four hundred million dollars in order to make a billion dollars, it has to sell everywhere. And that means it has to sell internationally.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  And that means that the planes have to be from like, you know, some anonymous country because we don't want to make anyone upset. So like, yeah, it's an American movie, but it's like, we're fighting the the like the and then they make up some name.

• 2:13:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Um, as opposed to a story like you just can't really make a story about like the Cold War. Because who knows that might upset a certain person in a different country. And so, um, it'll be interesting to see what, uh, what level of investment, like what type of swings are they are they taking? Are they swinging for grand slams and putting about two hundred million dollars into a single film? Is it a bunch of ten million dollar projects? Is it a bunch of one million dollar projects? The Blair Witch Project, which I know you haven't seen, uh, has been was made for, uh, under a million dollars. I think it grossed over a hundred million dollars. It was one of the greatest ROI.

• 2:14:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's that's the.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Have you seen Tyler, have you seen the Blair Witch Project?

• 2:14:11Speaker 02

  Of course, it was filmed like.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  You've seen the Blair Witch Project? Wow.

• 2:14:14Speaker 02

  It was filmed in Blair, Maryland.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Well, no way.

• 2:14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, right near my house.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:14:18Jordi Hays?

  So the the bull case for AI in film production.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Is that even if budgets stay the same, we could get five times as many films, ten times as many films. If the models can get significantly better.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:32Jordi Hays?

  I think that the just the cost to produce a what what we think of today as like a blockbuster.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Or a Marvel level film could fall dramatically.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I like the production side is interesting. There's certainly a way to drop costs and produce something that feels like a like a hundred million dollar film for ten million dollars. That that feels like it's coming, but I think that honestly, it might be more of a distribution. Problem than question. Like if you have a, if you have a banger video, a banger movie, and you know that there, that people are excited about it, but it's a little bit more of a niche audience, there's really no way to get people to pay for it, other than the traditional playbook of like a wide theatrical release all over the place. And so you wind up in the UFC camp,

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  where you have a movie, and your only option is to go to the streamers, or, and hope that you're converting subs, or a really wide release. I wonder if there's some middle ground that will pop up. I wonder if we'll learn something from UFC, but it's very hard to, it's very hard to take a movie that doesn't merit a huge release, and actually make an ROI in the theaters today. Anyway, what, what do you want to talk about next?

• 2:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Rune said yesterday, Elon falling so in love with the Grok image model, Imagine model is a piece of performance, performance art that absolves all the slop. And Elon says, "Thanks Rune," with a heart.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  There is an article from Eric Berger saying, "After recent tests, China appears likely to beat the United States back to the moon."

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  This is the Casey Hammer point.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Eric says, "I went there," because it's, because at this point, it's difficult to come to any other conclusion. And he is writing this article to explain why it would be enormously bad for the United States. So in recent weeks, the secretive Chinese space program has reported some significant milestones in developing its program to land astronauts on the lunar surface by the year 2030. On August 6th, the China manned space agency successfully tested a high fidelity mockup of its 26-ton Lan Yu lunar lander. The test conducted outside of Beijing used giant tethers to simulate lunar gravity as the vehicle fired, fired main engines and fine control thrusters to land on

• 2:16:56Jordi Hays?

  a cratered surface and take off from there. The test, said the agency in an official statement, "represents a key step in the development of China's manned lunar exploration program, and also marks the first time that China has carried out a test of extraterrestrial landing and takeoff capabilities of a manned spacecraft." As part of the statement, the space agency reconfirmed that it plans to land its astronauts on the moon before 2030. Then last Friday, the space agency and its state-operated rocket developer, the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, pretty hard name, successfully conducted a 30-second test firing of the Long March 10 rocket's center core with its seven YF-100K engines that burn kerosene and liquid oxygen.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  The primary variant of the rocket will combine three of these cores to lift about 70 metric tons to low Earth orbit. These successful efforts followed a launch escape system test of the new Mengzhu spacecraft in June. A version of the spacecraft is planned for lunar missions. Thus, China's space program is making a demonstratable progress in all three of the major elements of its space program: the large rocket to launch a crew spacecraft, which will carry humans to lunar orbit, plus the lander that will take astronauts down to the surface and back. This work suggests that China is on course to land on the moon before the end of this decade. For the United States and its allies in space, there are reasons to be dismissive of this.

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  For one, NASA landed humans on the moon nearly six decades ago with the Apollo program. Been there, done that. Moreover, the initial phases of the Chinese program look derivative of Apollo, particularly a lander that is strikingly resembles the lunar module. NASA can justifiably point to its Artemis program and say it's attempting to learn the lessons from Apollo, that the program was canceled because it was not sustainable. With its lunar landers, NASA seeks to develop in-space propellant storage and refueling technology, allowing for lower-cost, reusable lunar missions with the capability to bring much more mass to the moon and back. This should eventually allow for the development of a lunar economy and enable robust government commercial enterprise.

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  But recent setbacks with SpaceX Starship Vehicle, one of two lunar landers under contract with NASA, alongside Blue Origin's Mark II lander, indicate that it will still be several years until these newer technologies are ready to go. So it's now probable that China will "beat NASA back to the moon" this decade and win at least the initial heat of this new space race. To put this in perspective, ours is connected with Dean Chung, one of the most respected analysts on China space policy and the geopolitical implications of the new space competition.

• 2:19:37Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Silicon Valley cannot save us at this point. Only Wall Street can save us. The solution is make the moon a state, as Mike Solano suggested, create mortgages on the moon, and then securitize them. And once.

• 2:19:52Jordi Hays?

  Allow retail to go.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Once BlackRock owns 75% of the moon, then we're in business.

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they've been getting, uh, Wall Street's been getting pushback on owning single family homes.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  They own 99% of them.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Capital to.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Blackstone owns 99% of all the houses in America now. They own all of them. They bought my house for me. I didn't want them, I didn't want them to. They just bought it for me. I didn't have an option.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  They were like, sale and leaseback. You rent now.

• 2:20:21Jordi Hays?

  You will own nothing and will be happy.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Yes, that's exactly what happened. No, they actually own like 1% of houses.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  But Dean says the land you lander is significant because it's part of the usual China, Chinese crawl, walk, run approach to a major space project. The People's Republic of China can benefit from other people's experiences. Much of NASA's information is open, but they still have to build and operate the spacecrafts themselves. So the test of the land you lander, successful or not, is an important part of that process. So anyways, important to flag. We've had a lot of wins in the space industry recently and.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  It's tough. It's tough to bootstrap an economy. Like, it is an incredible milestone, and yet, America's done it. So there's not as much of an incentive just to be the first. It's not superlative. And then, the question for SpaceX is, are you better off landing on the moon, or just putting up more Starlinks and just making more subscriptions? Like, it is, it is a little bit harder to underwrite in the early stage. It takes a long time. Maybe you need a new government program, some sort of incentive. I mean, fortunately, like, Firefly's been to the moon, Blue Origin's planning, SpaceX is planning, like, there are a lot of competitive American companies that are working towards it, but the underlying

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  incentive, there's just other ways to make money in space right now, that might be higher value. Although, it will be a very weird moment if, if China's just up and back on the moon constantly, running around, bouncing around, live streaming from the moon. We gotta get back.

• 2:21:52Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get back.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  We have to go back.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Would you like to read through the reverse DeepSeek moment, the bull case for GPT-5?

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Why don't you kick it off? I'll be right back.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Sure. So Zivi Mushowicz says, everyone agrees that the that the release of GPT-5 was botched. Not everyone agrees. I mean, Alice likes it. I think Ben Thompson likes it for the most part. I have a good bull case here, too. So this is a lot of stuff I agree with, but but there was there was a lot of pushback. And so he says, everyone can also agree that the direct jump from GPT-4.0 and 0.3 to GPT-5 was not of a similar size to the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4. That was not the direct quantum leap we were hoping for, and that the release was overhyped quite a bit. And I still don't know how much OpenAI is responsible for the open for the

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  overhyping, or just the fact that they used a number. Maybe they should have just stuck around and made it GPT-4.7, you know, and then the hype would have been a lot lower. But nevertheless, the launch went out. I think the naming is better. GPT-5 still represented the release of at least three distinct models, GPT-5 Fast, GPT-5 Thinking, GPT-5 Pro. The naming is much better. The naming conventions are much better. At least two and likely all of three are state of the art within their class, along with GPT-5 Auto, which is the router. The problem is that the release was so botched that OpenAI is now experiencing a reverse DeepSeek moment. All the forces that caused us to overreact to DeepSeek R1 are now working against OpenAI in reverse. This threatens to give Washington DC, and

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  I think this is why this is important, and why we should be focused on this, and its key decision makers, a very false impression of a lack of progress in AI, especially progress towards AGI that could lead to some very poor decisions, and it could do the same for corporations and individuals. I spent last week, he says, covering the release of GPT-5. This puts GPT-5 in perspective. So the reverse DeepSeek moment. In January, DeepSeek released R1. We had this DeepSeek moment. Everyone panicked about how China had caught up. It's a good model, sir, but only an ordinary good model, substantially behind the frontier. Most people hadn't used reasoning models yet, and so R1 was the first one that they that they that they had used, and R1, from a UX perspective, revealed the reasoning chain,

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  and that was a revelatory experience for DeepSeek users. And so, we had the DeepSeek moment because of a confluence of factors. One, $6 million model, negative narrative, gave a false impression on cost. Two, they offered a good, clean app with visible chain of thought, it went viral. Three, the new style caused an overestimate of model quality. Three with the

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Faked the App Store downloads.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  The timing was impeccable, both in order of model releases and within the tech tree. Five, safety testing and other steps were skipped, leaving various flaws. This was pure fast follow, but in our haste, no one took any of that into account. Six, a false impression of momentum and stories about Chinese momentum. Seven, the always-in-sist "open models will win" crowd amplified the vibes because they love open source. And eight, the stock market was highly lacking in situational awareness, suddenly realizing various known facts and also misunderstanding many important factors. GPT-5 is now having a reverse DeepSeek moment, including many direct parallels. GPT-1, GPT-5 is evaluated as if it was scaling up, compute in a way that it doesn't.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  In various ways, people are assuming it cost far more than it did. If you think about the progression of GPT-3 to 4 to 4.5 to 5, like, if you just did an order of magnitude more cost, we would be, this would be the $100 billion pre-training run, and yet, obviously, that's not what this is, and so you shouldn't price it as though they spent $100 billion on training cost. Two, they offered poor initial experience with rate caps and lost models and missing features, a broken router and complaints about losing 4Os, sycophancy went viral. Three, the new style and people evaluating GPT-5 when they should have been evaluating GPT-5 thinking caused an underestimate of model quality.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  So, if you're an O3 user and you accidentally downgraded to GPT-5 fast, you were like, "Oh, this is backwards," but if you went forward and stuck to pro or thinking, you probably had a decent experience.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you think people are more or less confused now with With all the model naming.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  I think they might be more confused because it's just like they they had the the folks who had remembered four one, what four five is, what oh three is, what oh what four oh is. Those folks, even oh three and oh three pro, I never really learned the difference. I just always hammered oh three pro. But.

• 2:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Because you're you kind of identify with.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  I'm a pay pig.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Being a true professional.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  Yes, I guess.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  And everything they do.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  I'm a professional chatter. So also, four, the timing was directly after Anthropic and previous releases had already eaten the most impressive recent parts of the tech tree, so gains incorrectly look small, in particular gains from reasoning models and from the original GPT four to four oh are being ignored when considering GPT four to GPT five. And so if you're thinking about just comping GPT four to GPT five, you have to include four oh's progress and oh three's progress and all of that. GPT five is a refinement of previous models optimized for efficiency and is breaking new territory, and that's not being taken into account. A false impression of hype and a story is about loss of a loss of momentum.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  And the OpenAI is flailing crowd and the open model crowd amplified the vibes. The stock market actually was smart this time and shrugged shrugged it off. That's a hint. And of course, the big one, which is the GPT five's name fed into expectation. Unlike R one at the time of its release, GPT five thinking and GPT five pro are clearly the current state of the art models in their classes. And GPT five auto is probably state of the art at its level of compute use usage. Modular complaints about personality that OpenAI will doubtless fix soon. OpenAI's model usage was way up after GPT five's release, not down. The release was botched, but this is obviously a good set of models, sir. Washington DC, however, is somehow rapidly deciding that GPT five is a failure

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  and that AI capabilities won't improve much and AGI is no longer a worry. This is presumably in large part to the race to market share faction pushing this narrative rather than hardcore rather hardcore and having this be super convenient for that. And so he talks a little bit about how DC is maybe is maybe thinking that AI progress is stalling out. So he says, to be clear, American AI is making rapid progress, including at OpenAI. How do you know this is happening? Well, he has some quotes. Dean Ball says, the jump in performance and utility of frontier models between April 2024, GPT-4 Turbo, and April 2025, oh, three is bigger than the jump between GPT-3 and GPT-4.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  People alleging a slowdown in progress due to GPT-5 are fooling themselves. This is odd because GPT-3 was released. That gap between GPT-3 and GPT-4 is not one year. GPT-3 was released in 2020, I believe. And so that was more like a four-year run. So we might still be slowing down, but it's still impressive progress. Most people, when they think of the GPT-3 to GPT-4 bump, they're really talking about GPT-3.5 dash 002 Da Vinci, which was the model that shipped in ChatGPT free tier, and then got the four upgrade just a few months later. Anyway, people are, you know, still debating this.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  I think I'm coming away pretty happy, and I think they made some good decisions. I think Ben Thompson has a good, a pretty good take that the, that the model switcher was the right move, but OpenAI should have been even more aggressive about saying, you know what? Foro is not coming back. Like, we're a consumer company now. We're going to do what's best. Like, you are not going to be able to browbeat us into changing our decisions. If we think that what's best for the consumer is this, and the revealed preferences will align with that over time, we are going to, you know, take the pain in the short term for the long-term gain of a better, more usable product. And that manifests in the sense of like a simplified model switcher.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Because as they add the models back, the model switcher gets more complicated. I don't know. Where do you sit on it?

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Using ChatGPT to me is not, in the way that I use it primarily, research and understanding the world is not materially different than it was prior to GPT-5.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  And so I don't have that strong of opinions on it.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yep. I think there's a little bit of like model picker foo that needs to happen. But I'm getting better every day, like triggering the right keyword. Hey, think hard about this. Overall, it's what I asked for and it's what I, and they delivered what I asked for. And so I've been pretty satisfied. I don't feel like my experience has been degraded.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 2:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, on that note.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  We have our next guest.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Our next guest, Marty Pylon, coming in.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:31:13Speaker 05

  Doing well. Jordy John, nice to meet you guys.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Good to meet you too. Oh, do we have to get the ballot ready?

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I think we do.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  What are we discussing today? Give us an introduction. Explain what the company does. Give us the news.

• 2:31:24Speaker 05

  So first off, you're watching TVPN.

• 2:31:27Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:31:29Speaker 05

  Temple Technology.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  Pylon TV, baby.

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:31:33Speaker 05

  There we go. Yeah. No, super excited to be on the show. I've been cycling you guys in in the morning. So yeah, excited to be here and chat with you both. And you're all over my LinkedIn feed. So.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:31:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Credit to Michael. Michael is dominating LinkedIn. We're bringing teapot to LinkedIn. They are not ready. But it's great to meet you. It's great to have you on the show.

• 2:31:55Speaker 05

  Great to be here. Yeah. No, I'm here to announce our Series B fundraiser for Pylon. So we just raised $31 million, co-led by Andreessen and BCB. So.

• 2:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 2:32:09Speaker 05

  Nice. Nice. Thank you.

• 2:32:10John Coogan?

  Always the joke scare.

• 2:32:11Jordi Hays?

  Crisp gong hit, always.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  Good to see, good to see Bain Capital getting a W here. You know, we just, we just interviewed Pete DeJoy from Astronomer, another BCB company. So. We're happy to have you on the show.

• 2:32:24Speaker 05

  We're really excited to work with them. So on the Bain side, you know, they're entering into the company we're working with Merritt Hummer and Abby Myers from their team. Super impressed by them. Continuing to work now with Jennifer Lee from Andreessen. They're already on the board. And yeah, no, this is an awesome fundraiser. Actually, every time we've raised money, we haven't needed to. People kind of came to us and then, you know, pitched us on our vision, did their reverse pitch, and then we, yeah, we made it happen. So yeah, really excited to be here and continue building the product.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Talk about slicing the market. Obviously, just AI for support is almost like a mega trend. There are market maps out there. You've kind of sliced it to be more focused on B2B. Take me through some of the slices of what, what, what support looks like in various B2B contexts, because the customer support tickets that I maybe send into my law firm are different than I send into my, my three PL. So, so where, where have you been seeing, you know, green shoots?

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Beach heads, opportunities. What is the, what is kind of the, the early adopter customer for Pylon look like?

• 2:33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So first off, part of the market, if we want to zoom out for a bit, Zendesk Salesforce Service Cloud make around 35% of their revenue off of B2B. And so that's actually the slice of revenue that we're going after. On the Salesforce side, you know, total revenue from Service Cloud is $9 billion. So we're going after quite a big chunk there. So.

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  They can share. You're saying they have enough to share.

• 2:34:02Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah. And the difference between B2B and B2C in consumer, you have very simple transactional support questions and only one customer facing team, customer support. In B2B, you don't just have customer support, you also have customer success, solutions, professional services, account management. And all the conversations that are coming in are related to not just like a transactional support question, but could be routed to any one of those teams. And you need account context that's being pulled in from not just that conversation, but many other sources. So for example, call recordings or notes that were left on. Customers, implementation plans. And so we kind of fit to all those different use cases, all those different personas and sync all that data in. One way to think about us strategically is we're building something similar to Rippling, but for this post-sales use case where

• 2:34:45Speaker 05

  kind of all in one product, consolidating a lot of tools that people would otherwise buy and making it really applied to this B two B customer persona.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  So there, there's a debate on whether AI native tools like Pylon are compete, are, are, are going after these end software markets or potentially winning labor spend. Where do you kind of sit in that debate?

• 2:35:11Speaker 05

  And how do you Yeah. So there's a, there's a difference. We have like the native AI agent companies, your fins, your decagons, et cetera. They're going after enterprise immediately plugging into the system of record. We're taking a different approach. We're actually building the system of record from scratch. So replacing Zendesk and then layering in AI agents as well. And so we think basically whoever controls the data, the workflows actually has a lot of power and is way more defensible than the AI agent companies. And then also for the B two B use case, because it's way more complex and you need, need way more context across these many different channels and sources. We're plugging into those in a way that no one else is. So really, I think we're going to win the B two B market completely. And then there's going to be a, a knife fight for consumer.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Last question from

• 2:35:56Speaker 05

  Well, it's already happening, really.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you seeing any, oh, sorry.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Posted today that stood out is basically being like, everyone thinks that every software, software engineer is going to be replaced. Meanwhile, Amazon still employs a hundred thousand customer support reps.

• 2:36:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Really?

• 2:36:15Speaker 05

  Probably not a hundred thousand. There's no way. But, but a lot, a lot.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, maybe through all the different like consulting arms and like third party groups, if you really trace

• 2:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, employees is

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Contracts with potentially.

• 2:36:29Speaker 05

  And there's, there's a difference as well. Like when you look at B to B, it's actually usually much higher skilled labor and it's not just, hey, we're outsourcing it to a BPO in another country. It's actually, hey, these are like higher tier, more complex support engineers who also work with solutions teams, account managers. And it's just way more complicated of a deal. So you're not handling transactional questions. They're much more complicated. And frankly, actually, AI actually mostly isn't good enough to answer a lot of these B to B questions. So instead of trying to solve them and do a bad job of it right now and tarnish customer relationships, trying to essentially plug into all the workflows and own all those workflows so that we do have a chance to eventually become fully agentic once the AI gets good enough and we have the data consolidated into Pylon.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  Going fully agentic. I like that. Well, congrats on the race. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 2:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Love the clarity of vision and it's great to have you on.

• 2:37:22John Coogan?

  Well, we'll see you on LinkedIn. Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:37:26John Coogan?

  We got to hop on with Mateo from Aidsleep. Get that gong ready, Jordy Hayes. There's some big news. Oh, I would love to take a crack. Thank you. Let's bring in Mateo. What you got for us, Mateo?

• 2:37:38Matteo Franceschetti?

  Oh, it's great to see you.

• 2:37:41Matteo Franceschetti?

  We just raised 100 million. Oh, there we go.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:37:48Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:50Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you.

• 2:37:52Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, great to see you again, guys.

• 2:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54Matteo Franceschetti?

  Excited to be here again.

• 2:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't been very long. It's great to be back. Give us, give us the update on, on, on everything. How did, how did this round come together? Talk about the progress. We want the full, we want the full pitch.

• 2:38:10Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, of course. I mean, this is a massive milestone for us. You know, we just announced 100 million in new funding. Total funding to date is a quarter of a billion.

• 2:38:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:38:21Matteo Franceschetti?

  And so, not bad. But I think the best news honestly is we have been free cash flow positive for the whole year. We have been free cash flow positive for most of the past 10 quarters. So. The good news is we didn't need the money. The company is in a really strong financial position, but we have a very ambitious plan. And we found a couple of great investors, including our existing investors that they wanted to come in. And so of the existing investors, Valor with Antonio Gracias, first investor in Tesla, Funders Fund, Y C, and a few others.

• 2:39:05Matteo Franceschetti?

  And then also HSG, they will help us to really scale China and Asia. So right now we are in thirty countries. But the next big piece is Asia, particularly in China. And I think that alone could double our business.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk more about China. Obviously, you've been advertising with F1. It's an incredibly global sport. Everyone sleeps regardless of what country they're in. What's the shape of the opportunity there? Is there an opportunity on the supply chain side, the distribution side, the customer side? Have you not been cloned already? I feel like there would be an eight-sleep knockoff over there. How are you going to beat them if they'd already exist?

• 2:39:48Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  I think my immediate reaction is there... This is a very... It's a simple product to understand, a simple product to use as a consumer, but incredibly difficult to clone, more so than like a toaster.

• 2:40:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Like you have this hardware-software dynamic, you're dealing with the elements, right? It's not as... It's closer in some ways to... You need to use it intensely every single day, obviously. But anyways.

• 2:40:25Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah. But let me step back for a second and then I'll answer your question, right? So we will use the money in a couple of different ways. So the first one is we will double down on AI. And I would like to share a bit more with you because we are working on some crazy things. Second will be medical. So we are going to file for FDA in a couple of different dimensions, including sleep apnea. I think it will be really big. And so you will see sleep becoming more and more medical, but still consumer medical. And then international expansion with China.

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  Does the, sorry, really quickly, on the FDA side, does that unlock paying with insurance? Is there a change to the financial business model? Or is that really just about coming to the consumer with stronger claims and evidence about the efficacy of the product?

• 2:41:12Matteo Franceschetti?

  Both, but the real goal is the first one you mentioned, right? Imagine if the pod, our technology, could be reimborsable, or at least partially covered by your insurance. And that is where we have identified a couple of really good opportunities. Again, sleep apnea is one, but menopause is another one where women have hot flashes. So we just released what is called hot flash mode. And so if you have a hot flash in the middle of the night, you just tap on the side of the bed and it will start immediately cooling. And there are like thousands of women that now are finally able to sleep again because of our product.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  And I bet with AI, you could detect those hot flashes eventually and just have it do it automatically.

• 2:41:53Matteo Franceschetti?

  Exactly, exactly. Then on the AI side, we are doing two really, really cool things, at least for me. So on one side, we are working on what we call a sleep agent, but it's really a PhD-level sleep coach that is able to simulate your night before you even go to bed. And so it uses the history of your data. It uses the data from the day through Apple Health or any other data source. And we'll start simulating the night in a couple of different ways. And then we'll adjust accordingly as you fall asleep. And then there is this other agent that we really call the longevity twins. And so for each user, there will be thousands of longevity twins

• 2:42:36Matteo Franceschetti?

  that simulate your health for the next 10 and 20 years. And they will come back with the likelihood that you develop a certain health outcome. So we are really transitioning from sleep, that is the foundation of health, into longevity. And we'll help people expand and extend, more than expand, extend their lifespan and health span.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's really interesting to think about if you can understand somebody's sleep habits today, you can predict what their health will look like in a decade, two decades, et cetera.

• 2:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Feature request, bit of a wild one, but if in the future, if you could get a Tesla Optimus robot that would physically come and pull me away from my desk late at night and shut the computer off, unplug the wifi and drag me, you know, to force me to sleep, I think there could be something there. So maybe a partnership with Elon at some point.

• 2:43:32Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, amazing. Anything else top of mind or you got to get back to business?

• 2:43:39Matteo Franceschetti?

  We think there's also a lot of products coming. So you will see new hardware coming coming in next year, a lot of different products and we'll keep doubling down on making the pod better and better.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, if you're listening and you want a pod five, go to eatsleep.com and thank you for joining us, Mateo. Always a pleasure.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:44:01Matteo Franceschetti?

  My pleasure. Thank you, guys.

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  And we'll bring in our next guest.

• 2:44:05Jordi Hays?

  I love hitting the air horn for free cash flow.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Hit that air horn. Hit that. Hit something. Give me something. Give me the news. Give me the Ashton Hall. Welcome to the stream, Abdul. How you doing?

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 2:44:21Speaker 07

  Thank you for taking good time. Thanks for having me.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  Of course. Sorry for the technical difficulties earlier.

• 2:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show said Abdul is going to be your best guest ever.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:44:31Jordi Hays?

  He's crazy in the best way.

• 2:44:32Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Let's jump straight to the crazy.

• 2:44:35Speaker 07

  No pressure.

• 2:44:36John Coogan?

  Introduce the company really quick and give us the news. We'll hit the gong and then we'll go into some crazy stuff.

• 2:44:42Speaker 07

  Awesome. Awesome. Abdul Assad, co-founder and CEO of Besa Capital. Besa Capital is the first and only company that enables you to finance financial assets and to use credit to invest instead of using credit to consume. We've been in business for three, four years now, operating mostly under stealth, backed by legends from Lex Capital, Henry Kravis, S V Angel and others. And recently, we just closed our Series A, $25 million from a curse team at Forerunner.

• 2:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:45:20Speaker 07

  You know, it's just, it's just one step on a long journey. But we are really, really excited to see that our message is resonating with both our customers and our investors. And now we're fired up to go. Like, we're fired up to get after it.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  There was a viral video about you guys, like, a month ago or something, and people were controversial. It was your, it was your video.

• 2:45:42Jordi Hays?

  Abdul's video.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  But people were going wild. It was the, put the timeline in turmoil. Uh, walk me through what happened. What, what is the pushback against this again? Like, wait, like, what, what, what do the haters say? And then, uh, I don't know if you can steal man them.

• 2:45:54Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, yeah, the, the haters, the haters would say, this is all well and good when numbers are going up. What happens when numbers go down? Right? So, but.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  What happens?

• 2:46:03Jordi Hays?

  The timeline, the timeline is not very good at nuance and, and detail. So, uh, yeah, good opportunity to kind of, um, explain the, all the different dynamics.

• 2:46:12Speaker 07

  So, we've been operating under the radar. Our thesis here is when you're working in financial services, you can't ship a half-baked product. You just can't. You can't build fast and break things.

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:24Speaker 07

  There's a lot of regulatory hurdles. You're dealing with people's money. This is a massive responsibility. And we see ourselves as stewards of people's capital. So, we've been operating under the radar for quite some time.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:36Speaker 07

  And in May, our investors were like, Abdul, you have to launch. And you want to go out of the closet and tell the entire world about what you're building.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:47Speaker 07

  And my thesis is if you're gonna do something, you have to do it extremely well. So, we made an incredible launch video. We worked with a bunch of journalists and we went out to tell the world our story. And our goal was to get 50,000 impressions on, on ads.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  Five million, probably.

• 2:47:09Speaker 07

  Basically, within 24 hours, we got 5.5 million impressions.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  Yep, 5 million, a hundred more, a hundred ads that you wanted.

• 2:47:16Speaker 07

  A hundred ads.

• 2:47:18John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:47:18Speaker 07

  Absolutely blew up. Every VC and their mom is in my DMs.

• 2:47:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:22Speaker 07

  Every hit, their mom is also in my DMs. Like, high school friends, I.

• 2:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Wait, the haters' moms were DMing you, too?

• 2:47:30Speaker 07

  By the way, I I reply to this and you know, we were we were basically we were engaging with the public. And their concern was credit could be a dangerous tool if available to everyday people. And our thesis is when you want to make money as an individual, when you want to build wealth, when you want to achieve autonomy, you have two sources to rely on. You can either rely on your labor, your work, or you can rely on capital, assets you own, a stock, a bond, an intellectual property.

• 2:48:10Speaker 07

  Now, here is the interesting thing. Your labor will for sure depreciate over time. It's a fact because over time you get old.

• 2:48:21Speaker 07

  And you could be the best lawyer at Palwise. And at some point, you're not as sharp on your feet, you're not as quick, and there is a young stud ready to take your spot. And when your labor depreciates like this, when you can no longer work, what you have to fall back on is the assets you bought in your youth.

• 2:48:43Speaker 07

  And the problem that most Americans have today is that they have no assets.

• 2:48:48Speaker 07

  And our thesis was, we'll let them use credit

• 2:48:53Speaker 07

  to buy assets, just like they use credit to buy Coachella tickets. Yep. And people were like, but capital goes up and it could go down. Yep. And I said, I agree, there is an uncertainty to capital. But there is a certainty that you will at some point age, right? Like, that is an inevitable fact.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, Brian Brian Johnson's gonna push back.

• 2:49:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, he'd like to have a word.

• 2:49:16Jordi Hays?

  He might be listening, he might send us an angry email. I'm not gonna aid.

• 2:49:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, well, but well, let's take a step back. You might be perfectly fit like Brian Johnson. But does Brian Johnson has the same ability to compute as AI? Does Brian Johnson has the same ability to execute on tasks as computers? And the question becomes is, over time, as capital starts to automate more and more jobs, what is our plan as a society and as individuals for that day?

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we're generally pretty bullish on getting on the ladder of having positive capital. That's very important. Love the Gersner accounts. But how is this different than contributing to an ETF every month? Or even contributing to a levered ETF every month? You could go 2X long the S and P. You go 2X long the Mag 7. You could have a mix of bonds and stocks. What is the benefit of using credit to buy a larger stake upfront?

• 2:50:18Speaker 07

  Of course, of course. So credit is a tool. It's like a shovel. It can be used in a good way or in a bad way. It can be used to plant a tree. It can be used to knock somebody on their head and knock them dead. Right? Just like nuclear. Nuclear can be used as a bomb. It can be used as nuclear energy. The same thing with leverage and credit. It can be used in a good way or in a bad way. The devil is in the details. The devil is in the structure. A very good way to finance assets is actually the mortgage. Why? Because it's 30 years, it's amortizing, and there is no mark to market. There's no rebalancing. You're not rebalancing your mortgage of the other day. That's not how a margin loan works, and that's not how a levered ETF work. Levered ETFs and margin loans are inherently short-term vehicles.

• 2:51:04Speaker 07

  We can get into the technicality of that, but they are inherently made for people who want to make a short bet on assets.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  So do you offer like mandatory lockout periods? Like, can I get a 30-year loan against the S and P and be paying that down forever, basically, for 30 years? That seems incredibly powerful.

• 2:51:22Speaker 07

  That's in effect what we...

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  No, that's fantastic. I love that.

• 2:51:25Speaker 07

  You put 20% down payment. Let's say you have 20,000 dollars.

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:28Speaker 07

  You put $20,000 down. We open an LLC, so the debt is nonrecourse to John. Put 20K, we give you 80K. You pay off the 80K over 30 years. But what you have in the LLC is $100,000 of assets. And these are not invested in a single named stock or bond. These are invested in diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. And our thesis is... Instead of buying a house, taking your entire life savings and betting it on a zip code, you can take your, a piece of your life saving, lever it up five times, and invest in a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds. That's the thesis here.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just a habit for us.

• 2:52:07Jordi Hays?

  So who's, who's the right person for this product? Cause I'm assuming.

• 2:52:12Speaker 07

  Long-term investor.

• 2:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Long-term investor. So that means somebody that's maybe gonna retire in thirty years or twenty years, something like that.

• 2:52:18Speaker 07

  If you have anything less than ten-year horizon, you should not consider basic capital.

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:25Speaker 07

  Basic capital is not appropriate for you.

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:52:27Speaker 07

  Basic capital is a product, is a bet, that over a long period of time, financial assets are going to continue to appreciate. Now, is this guaranteed? Somebody from Twitter is gonna jump in and say, well, you know, the stock market will go down and some. Yeah, of course it will go down. No, like Sherlock, like, thank you, yes.

• 2:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, the nightmare scenario is like the Japanese stock market, which had like twenty-something years of, of decline.

• 2:52:55Speaker 07

  Aggression. Exactly right. The way, the way you could actually get burned on this is if you have persistent, long-term stagnation in financial assets. Is that possible?

• 2:53:03Jordi Hays?

  Your argument would be, like, if that, if that happens, we all have bigger problems.

• 2:53:10Speaker 07

  My, my argument is, my argument is, America is not Japan. America is not Europe. America has a plot. America has Silicon Valley. America is the epicenter of innovation in the world. Swedish companies like Spotify wanna go public in America. Klarna wanna go public in America. And when you are investing in American assets, I believe there is some network effects to this financial market.

• 2:53:39John Coogan?

  I love it. I completely agree.

• 2:53:39Speaker 07

  And I love America. So I call, I call Buffett here and I say, never bet against America. And if somebody wants to take the other trade, I'm happy to do it. Like, I will do a bilateral side trade.

• 2:53:49John Coogan?

  That's literally your, your business, your business. Yeah. That is fantastical. Congrats on the growth. I love it. This is perfect.

• 2:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great. It's great having you on and hearing directly and, and keep the, keep the viral videos going. I think next time, you've set the bar high now. You aim for fifty thousand views. The next video, you should just aim for fifty million.

• 2:54:09John Coogan?

  Fifty million views. I wanna see it.

• 2:54:11Speaker 07

  We're not, we're not going anywhere. We're not going anywhere. Our, our message here to everybody is, listen.

• 2:54:19Speaker 07

  There is a real problem going on in society right now, which is vast majority of Americans own no assets.

• 2:54:26Speaker 07

  And we have a solution for that.

• 2:54:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:28Speaker 07

  And it may be perfect, it may not be perfect.

• 2:54:30John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:54:31Speaker 07

  And for the people that are out there coming after us. We have a question for them. What's your plan?

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a good point.

• 2:54:40Speaker 07

  What's your plan?

• 2:54:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, these are personal, personal decisions.

• 2:54:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  These are all tools.

• 2:54:44Speaker 07

  What do we think, like, what's, what's our plan as a society for this? And we don't think the solution is communism, we don't think the solution is socialism, we don't think the solution is Maldani. We think the solution is to make every American a capitalist.

• 2:54:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:58Speaker 07

  And by capitalist, I do not mean ideologically a capitalist, I mean an owner of capital.

• 2:55:02Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna, last, last question, uh, is there, is there a way, I know we have these Invest America accounts, the Brad Gersner accounts, the Trump accounts. Could we give leverage to one month olds?

• 2:55:13John Coogan?

  To children.

• 2:55:14Jordi Hays?

  To children. Could we help the children lever up? Please.

• 2:55:17Speaker 07

  Like, that's literally, let them, like, that's literally the perfect application of this.

• 2:55:22Jordi Hays?

  If they're out of the womb, they should have leverage the second they're born. A minute later, they should be levered up.

• 2:55:28Speaker 07

  You know what, I'm gonna call Brad as soon as I get off this, I'm gonna call Brad Gersner, I'm picture to him. And like, the, the administration is like, is open minded to this, like, like, leverage is a great tool and, and so many people have made so much money using leverage. And it's so condescending when we say that the average American does not deserve it. It's just disrespectful to the average American.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Congratulations on that. We will talk to you soon. This is really a great chat.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  This is fun.

• 2:55:56Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:55:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  Uh, Pharaoh Logix in the chat says, what up, brothers? What's up, Pharaoh Logix? Thanks for tuning in. We have our next guest, Derek Lowe from Medallion, coming in the studio. Derek, how you been?

• 2:56:09Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Welcome.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  Uh, give us the news. I want to ring the gong and then I want to talk about, uh, some of the backstory and then some of the dynamics in the industry. Uh, but please introduce yourself, the company and the news.

• 2:56:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, my name is Derek Lowe. I'm the founder and CEO at Medallion.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  This is a chaotic stream, by the way.

• 2:56:27Jordi Hays?

  We're having, we're having fun over here.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  We're having a fun day.

• 2:56:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  And what's the news?

• 2:56:31Speaker 08

  Um, yeah, so we just raised, uh, forty three million dollars led by.

• 2:56:36Speaker 08

  Wow. That's cool.

• 2:56:38Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Who'd you raise it from?

• 2:56:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, so a crew led the round with participation from some of our existing insiders like Sequoia, Google Ventures, Spark Capital. So yeah, we were very happy with how the round came together.

• 2:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, explain the business as quickly as you can, then tell me about how the market's developing, what's going on. A lot of people have been following like the Ozempic news and the D to C wave, and just kind of get us up to speed on what's going on in the market broadly.

• 2:57:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, for sure. So we help to automate back office processes for healthcare companies, primarily around managing a clinical network. So any healthcare company, right? Think like Hims or Ro or Teladoc, they all have to hire a bunch of clinicians to be able to administer care, starting from a digital health company to a hospital to a primary care clinic. And so that clinical workforce is really the most important component of a healthcare business to be able to actually deliver care. And we essentially help with a lot of the healthcare specific operational tasks that have to happen behind the scenes to be able to manage that workforce.

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  Is there a world where you bundle this with like payroll or something? Like give the compliance stuff? Like it feels like deeply linked in the in the in the core system of record. How deep do you want to sit in the system of record stack?

• 2:57:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, we're very adjacent to HRs and some of those other, yeah, back office workflows, but we want to target workflows that are very specific to healthcare. And so we're applying AI and automation to like this very niche like vertical, which happens to be still super massive, just given the the size and scale of US healthcare. So yeah, we wouldn't really consider getting into payroll just because it's a super competitive space. It's very horizontal.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember the initial thesis was like, in the future, there will be more doctors that will be, you know, seeing patients in different states. And so licensing particularly will be important at the early stage. How has that played out? How common is that? Is that still growing like, you know, in line with your expectations?

• 2:58:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, John, I think you're you're actually, I was looking back, you're one of our first 10 angel investors, which is pretty, it's pretty cool.

• 2:59:00Speaker 08

  When we started the company, yeah, we were very focused on digital health because it was right during COVID. And so the expansion of telehealth was obviously really relevant at that point.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:10Speaker 08

  Um, I think what we've seen is that post-COVID, that's leveled out quite a bit. And, um, obviously the majority, the vast majority of care is non-um telehealth based. And so typically here is delivered locally. And so as a result, um, yeah, where we've seen most of our growth is actually expanding beyond, um, helping with,

• 2:59:31Speaker 08

  those type of, yeah, essentially like cross-state telehealth use cases operationally and more on, um, actually helping providers get, um, in never with insurance payers is that's something that's ubiquitous. It's like 99% plus of care is delivered right through insurance. Um, so that's where we're really focused today.

• 2:59:48John Coogan?

  Where in the healthcare tech stack is proving to be AI resistant? In the sense that like the best frontier reasoning models, they just aren't satisfying people in the way that maybe people were thinking, I'll let through automation at this. But turns out we want to keep a human in the loop for maybe compliance reasons that we didn't pers- uh, we didn't perceive. Like where, where, where are the, where are the last jobs in back office healthcare going to live?

• 3:00:17Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a great question. Um, Parker Conrad actually has a, had a really great, um, podcast recently, a few weeks ago, where he talked a little bit about this and how for Rippling, like, um, yeah, AI hasn't really, they haven't really deployed it in any major ways, at least in payroll. Because it's, it's a really critical workflow, like how things have to go right, it's very rule-based. It's a really good analogy to Medallion where we're working with, um, an extremely fine margin for error. Um, things have to essentially be like perfect. And, um, and what we've seen is like current models are not capable at, I think, doing perfection. Um, I think that they'll get there pretty quickly. Um, but yeah, what we found is that.

• 3:01:00Speaker 08

  Essentially executing on these type of workflows deterministically is proving to be better for now. I think it will change quickly, but.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  Build the software using the old tools. Hopefully some AI code gen in the mix to speed up software development, but ultimately just a.

• 3:01:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, and we're using it in places where the margin for error is wider. So things like, um, you know, calling a provider to say, hey, like you, you need to give us some, this, you know, some piece of data. It's like the, the margin for error there is a lot wider than if you're filling out a, you know, form that requires like a hundred data elements. And like, yeah, if one, one little, and one character wrong, it can like strip the whole process. Yeah.

• 3:01:36John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Uh, Jordy, anything else or should we let Derek go?

• 3:01:38Jordi Hays?

  No, this was great.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. Uh, congrats on all the progress and the growth. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Derek.

• 3:01:45Speaker 08

  Awesome.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Alex from Convoke coming in the studio into the TVPN Ultra Dome. Oh, okay. I'm handing over the mallet.

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  My turn.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Give us an introduction.

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  What's your name? What do you do?

• 3:01:58Speaker 09

  Great to be here. I'm Alex. I'm one of the founders of Convoke.

• 3:02:01John Coogan?

  Got any news for us?

• 3:02:02Speaker 09

  And we're, we're, can you hear me?

• 3:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:05Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I'm one of the founders of Convoke. We're building a platform to automate knowledge work required to take drugs from an idea to a product that patients can use. So today we're announcing our eight point six million seed raise.

• 3:02:17Speaker 09

  It's from a Lee Marie at Kleiner Perkins.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Lee Marie, the goat.

• 3:02:22Speaker 09

  Yeah, the goat.

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  That's my goat.

• 3:02:23John Coogan?

  Kleiner Perkins, uh, Randall Braswell.

• 3:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. We're trying to rename the firm.

• 3:02:29Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  Congrats. That's amazing.

• 3:02:30Jordi Hays?

  Give us a quick history, the company, what you're doing before this and, uh, yeah, how you got here.

• 3:02:36Speaker 09

  Yeah. So before I was a life science consultant, so worked with pharma companies on all sorts of drug development tasks. Uh, a lot of like information synthesis.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  Are you the one that comes up with the crazy drug names? I feel like every drug name.

• 3:02:48Speaker 09

  I actually did do one drug name project. Yeah, I did do one.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  Can you tell us the name that you came up with?

• 3:02:53Speaker 09

  I cannot tell you. I cannot tell you. But we had to test it with patients and everything and it was, we were pretty happy.

• 3:02:59Jordi Hays?

  You could, you could tell us, but he'd have to kill us.

• 3:03:01Speaker 09

  Exactly, exactly.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, yeah. And, and, and so where, where are you taking the business now? Give us the, the, the latest and greatest.

• 3:03:08Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we're building and it's like an AI workspace. So our goal is to really automate, um, like a significant amount of knowledge work required. Like if you start from. If you think about like what it takes to take a drug to market, you have to do a combination of planning work and execution work. And execution work is like clinical trials, running experiments. That's where a lot of the focus is. That's where a lot of people kind of put the ball on X. And what we're doing is kind of focused on the other part of that process, the planning and preparation work. So that takes like 45% of the time of a drug's lifecycle. And really, if you can speed it up, help companies make better decisions in how they synthesize information, search information, prepare regulatory documents faster.

• 3:03:52Speaker 09

  There actually is a potential to really accelerate time from the it takes to take a drug to market.

• 3:03:58Jordi Hays?

  What's your read? Is this about replacing human labor or just making human labor dramatically more efficient?

• 3:04:07Speaker 09

  It's more the latter. The way we see it is there are so many questions in biotech that are just intractable for humans to solve alone. Like the search space for making a new drug is so large, you just cannot do it with humans. There's 20,000 or something proteins in the human proteome. If you want to make a drug against any one of those proteins, you know, if you want to do it like really thoroughly, you have to read all the literature on every single protein. You'd have to think about all the different ways you could drug every different protein, different combinations of drugs. And that's just completely intractable search problem. And then you'd have to make all the different documentation to like run those experiments and plan those experiments. So what ends up happening is a lot of people rely on heuristics to come up with ideas for new drugs.

• 3:04:51Speaker 09

  And we think that actually what's going to happen is people are going to change to be managers of these AI systems that are going out and doing all this work and structuring data and running analysis, and then coming back and bubbling up recommendations that the human can then, you know, make the final call on.

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Where at the intersection of AI and bio are you bearish? Given your, given your experience, you know, working in the pharmaceutical industry broadly, I'm sure you see companies that raise $100 million and maybe you're, you don't always have the full faith of maybe their, their venture capital backers.

• 3:05:28Speaker 09

  Yeah, I'm relatively bearish on patient recruitment as a space. I think if you like, look from just clinical trials, like one of the obvious problems is not enough patients, or it's hard to recruit patients for the trials. So trials runs more slowly than you would like. I think the reality is that the supply, the demand for patients far exceeds the supply, especially as we're developing more and more, you know, niche drugs for niche conditions and personalized genetic medicines. And I think, you know, a lot of these companies come up with the promise that we can source and final these patients and bring them in when in reality, the patients don't exist, or they, you know, the only trial is being run in Mass General Hospital or something, but the patients in Nebraska.

• 3:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Even if you add like an AI bot that can call hundreds of people or reach out to hundreds of people, it doesn't solve the fundamental kind of supply.

• 3:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, the company needs an AI bot that gives people rare diseases so that there are more patients to cure. This is the real strategy here.

• 3:06:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, or you can fly them from Nebraska to Boston or something.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's probably it. That's the more humane thing to do. Can you take me through kind of like, within your clients, your customers, is there, is there like a front office, back office dichotomy? It sounds like this is not a, you know, electronic lab notebook, you're not in the lab. But how do the companies see the dividing line between like the knowledge work piece, the regulatory filings, and then what's, and the trial design versus the actual like mixing of the test tubes and like pipetting?

• 3:07:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think broadly, you can think of pharma companies are split into the R and D organization, those are the guys in the lab with the test tubes, the commercial organization, and then the development organization. The commercial organization sells the drugs, that's the sales reps, and then development organization, you know, many different functions within that, but broadly, it's planning trials and, you know, communicating with stakeholders. So like one customer group we're working with, it's called a medical affairs function. Their goal is to coordinate with doctors and represent the company's science and programs to the external like world of doctors. And they want, they help with, you know, communicating their science and, and also like enrolling the doctors into their clinical trials.

• 3:07:43John Coogan?

  Is the comp or is the state of the art or like the current solution, is it more like Google Docs or pen and paper or is it like some custom ERP from a, you know, dot com company that's kind of like loosely solved the problem and then been like sold 25 times?

• 3:08:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's completely under penetrated by software. So the current solution is consulting. I mean, I started as a consultant, so that's why I know this is a problem. You just have human, like massive amounts of human labor, highly compensated human labor going and reading documents, inputting things into Excel, making PowerPoints. You know, the software penetration is the Microsoft all this week.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  For Microsoft Excel, still undefeated.

• 3:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Power.

• 3:08:22John Coogan?

  Can you sell to, can you sell to consultants?

• 3:08:26Speaker 09

  Um.

• 3:08:27John Coogan?

  Thinking about it?

• 3:08:27Speaker 09

  We're, we're not, yeah, they're not like, we don't consider them our ICP.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Makes sense. Well, congrats.

• 3:08:33Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on funding milestone. Given that Lee Marie did it, I'm sure you'll get it. You know, somebody that.

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  Multi-billion dollar acquisition offer right around the corner.

• 3:08:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  She seems to be on a tear lately.

• 3:08:45Jordi Hays?

  A year out or something.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  But Taylor said hi. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 3:08:50Speaker 09

  Thanks.

• 3:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Alex.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  And we are running late. Jordy has to hop on with Mogadishu and Pyongyang, actually.

• 3:08:57Jordi Hays?

  And then London and Bermuda.

• 3:08:59John Coogan?

  And the Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  He has to talk to the Cayman, that's who you have to hop on with, the Cayman Islands. I wonder why. Anyway, thank you, John Exley, for hanging out in the chat. It's always a pleasure. Thank you, Christopher.

• 3:09:12Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

  And Farrell.

• 3:09:13Jordi Hays?

  All.

• 3:09:13John Coogan?

  Gabe, everyone who's here, Taylor. We appreciate you.

• 3:09:18Jordi Hays?

  And there's 11-ish days left of summer.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  11-ish days, there's something big coming. I was saying we're going to announce today and Jordy said we can't announce it yet. It has to be the end of summer. So expect something big September 1st.

• 3:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Very soon.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  My world.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Very soon.

• 3:09:33John Coogan?

  We will talk to you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your day. Lose five cars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Goodbye.

• 3:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.