Crémieux & Kian on Nucleus Genomics, Michael Kratsios on Genesis, Nvidia Responds to TPU Progress | Kian Sadeghi, Joe Weisenthal, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, David Faugno, Keller Rinaudo, Royce Branning

(01:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (13:14) - Nvidia Responds to TPU Sales (22:15) - Trump Launches Genesis (25:40) - Trait-Based Embryo Selection Ethics Breakdown (45:17) - Cremieux, a critic of Nucleus Genomics' embryo selection product, discusses the company's misleading claims about their technology's capabilities, particularly in predicting complex traits like intelligence and appearance. He highlights the scientific implausibility of their assertions, noting that their methods cannot reliably predict such traits, and expresses concern over the ethical implications of offering parents a false sense of control over their future children's genetics. Cremieux also points out the potential harm in promoting a product that lacks scientific validation, emphasizing the need for transparency and accuracy in genetic testing services. (01:05:01) - Kian Sadeghi, founder and CEO of Nucleus, a company specializing in consumer genetic testing and analysis, discusses the transparency and accessibility of Nucleus's scientific models, emphasizing that their science is public and available for independent evaluation. He addresses concerns about the authenticity of customer reviews, explaining that due to HIPAA regulations, real patient names and images cannot be disclosed, and acknowledges the need to update their website to clarify the use of anonymized information. Sadeghi also highlights the evolving nature of genetic models, noting that updates are part of their commitment to providing accurate and up-to-date information to patients. (01:28:58) - Joe Weisenthal, born September 2, 1980, in Detroit, Michigan, is an American journalist and television presenter, currently serving as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg's digital brands and co-host of the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, he discusses the prolonged timeline before AI and robotics significantly impact sectors like elder care, referencing Honda's Asimo robot's initial promise to assist the elderly. He also addresses the shift in tech financing from venture capital to substantial debt, highlighting concerns over managing this debt and the implications of credit default swaps on major companies like Oracle. Additionally, Weisenthal critiques Nvidia's public responses to competitors, suggesting that confident companies typically avoid commenting on rivals, and reflects on Nvidia's rapid ascent from a successful chipmaker to one of the world's largest companies. (01:59:49) - Michael Kratsios, the 13th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, discusses the Genesis Mission, a national initiative launched by President Trump to accelerate scientific discovery through artificial intelligence. He emphasizes the collaboration between national laboratories, universities, and tech companies to create a centralized digital platform that leverages federal scientific datasets, aiming to automate experiment design and significantly shorten discovery timelines. (02:26:28) - Sebastian Siemiatkowski, co-founder and CEO of Klarna, discusses the company's launch of KlarnaUSD, a U. S. dollar-backed stablecoin, marking a significant shift from his previous skepticism toward cryptocurrencies. He highlights that KlarnaUSD aims to reduce costs and increase efficiency in cross-border payments by leveraging the Tempo blockchain developed by Stripe and Paradigm. Siemiatkowski emphasizes that this initiative reflects Klarna's commitment to innovation and its ambition to challenge traditional payment networks by offering faster and more affordable services to consumers and merchants. (02:38:09) - David Faugno, CEO of 1Password, discusses the company's growth to over $400 million in annual recurring revenue, with nearly 80% of business coming from enterprise customers. He highlights 1Password's initiatives in AI integration, including partnerships with Perplexity's Comet browser and OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas, to enhance secure usage of AI tools. Faugno also emphasizes the importance of credential hygiene in the face of increasing security threats and shares personal insights into his preference for fly fishing in Utah and Montana. (02:50:59) - Keller Rinaudo, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, announced a $150 million contract with the U. S. State Department to expand Zipline's autonomous drone delivery network across Africa, aiming to serve over 15,000 health facilities and reach an additional 130 million people. He highlighted the shift towards "Commercial Diplomacy," emphasizing partnerships that foster trade and technological collaboration rather than traditional aid. Rinaudo also discussed Zipline's rapid growth in the U. S., noting record-breaking delivery volumes and the transformative impact of their services on customer behavior and local economies. (03:08:11) - Royce Branning, co-founder and CEO of Clearspace, discusses the company's mission to help individuals reduce screen time by providing tools that enhance intentionality in technology use. He highlights the asymmetry in the battle for attention online and emphasizes equipping consumers with the ability to steer their focus and protect their family's attention. Branning also introduces Clearspace's new screen time agents that operate at the network layer, offering comprehensive visibility and control over device usage across all platforms. (03:19:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBN. Today is Tuesday, November 25th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  We had a, we had a fan, yesterday was Anthropic Claude 4.5 day. We had a lot of fun talking to Sholto about that. You should go check it out. We wrote a little write up. I collaborated with Brandon and Tyler to kind of give our thoughts on the state of the AI race with regard to OpenAI and Anthropic and what makes Anthropic special. The things that stuck out to me, I mean, the thing that went viral was just the fact that apparently Dario goes around Slack and writes essays every single day. And everyone is like, give me the essays, turn it into a book. Paging Stripe Press, we got to get Stripe Press to turn it into a book.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, well, that, but I was also thinking of, of a potentially a risk vector for them being like the, the Dario files, you know, disgruntled employee that saves

• 1:01John Coogan?

  leaks everything.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  And then leaks them all.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  I imagine.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Because he, even when he's on mic, he's known to say some things that he, at times, sort of.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  People, people, I feel like people take you out of, out of.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Out of context.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Out of context a lot, like, like he will say.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  He's kind of the final boss.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  If this doesn't, yeah, if this doesn't go well, we could lose 50% of white collar work or entry level white collar work. And, and people will be like, Anthropic's stated mission is to destroy jobs.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Take your father's job.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's rough, but, uh, ramp. Time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Timeline was in turmoil over the weekend and yesterday. We covered a little bit about the Nucleus dust up on the timeline. Cremieux will be coming on the show at 11:45 and then.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  Followed.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Keon, the CEO of Nucleus will be coming on the show at noon. So we will kind of have both sides. Then we have Joe Weisenthal joining from Bloomberg.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  And and then we have, who else do we have today?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Kratsios.

• 2:14John Coogan?

  Kratsios is coming on to break down Project Genesis, which we're very excited about. Uh, anyway, let's, uh, run through, uh, what other, uh, news stories were at the top of the timeline. While we pulled those up, let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Oh, yes, the biggest news in tech in AI is that, uh, the, uh, Ilya Sutskever, Dwarshish Patel podcast has dropped. Do we have?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Hit the timeline.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Do we have the opening clip? Because the opening clip is, is iconic. Uh, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's very funny. It's a, it's a bit of a hot mic moment for Ilya. And I think we should, we should pull it up and, uh, and play it because it has a fascinating, uh, just insight into, it feels very like, oh, this, where this is the real Ilya. He's not, he's not even thinking that he's on camera and he gives his real, um, his real feelings. So let's, let's play this from the very start.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Crazy that all of this is real.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 03

  Don't you think so?

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Meaning what?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Like all this AI stuff and all this Bay Area, yeah, that it's happened, like, isn't it straight out of science fiction?

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Another thing that's crazy is like how normal the slow takeoff feels. The idea that we'd be investing 1% of GDP in AI.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Hasn't even set up the cameras yet.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  It felt like a bigger deal, you know, where right now it just feels like.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  We get used to things pretty fast, turns out, yeah. But also it's kind of like, it's abstract, like, what does it mean? But it means that you see it in the news.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  That such and such company announced such and such dollar amount.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:52Speaker 03

  That's, that's all you see.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  It's not really felt in any other way so far.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Now, should we actually begin here? I think this is an interesting discussion.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Sure. It's like one of the greatest podcast intros of all time. So good, so good. Uh, anyway, we're not going to watch the whole show.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  That's, that's going to be a new meta.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Uh, I mean, you, you can't, you can't fake that. It's amazing. Also, it's just funny because, uh, uh, you know, he, it's effectively getting caught on a hot mic. But I was joking, I was like, of all the things that you could say on the hot mic before you sit down, oh, okay, we're actually recording. Uh, his is just completely reaffirming everything we know about Ilya Sutskever. Like, it's just completely the same, like, okay, he's a, he is a true believer. It's not like he was sitting down and being like. Like Dorkesh, like we gotta go on my private plane. I just sold so much secondary. It's crazy what's going on with this stuff. Like if people really think this AI thing is gonna pan out, I'm making billions of dollars. I'm cashing out.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  I'm, I don't believe any of this stuff is real. No, he wasn't caught on a hot mic like that. His hot mic moment is like, wow, it's exactly like science fiction. Everything is.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  It's all real.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  It's all real. Yeah, which is just iconic. Well, you can go and listen to that in the Dorkesh Patel or Sess feed and on the YouTube channel and on X. He put the full thing up. It's 95 minutes long. Tyler, did you have any other takeaways from your speed run? You're listening to it at 5X, right?

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Well, on X, you can only do up to 2X. I was on that. So I still have like 10 minutes left. But yeah, a bunch of good stuff in here.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  Does he pop the scaling bubble? Does he give a bearish take about?

• 5:28Speaker 04

  Is it over?

• 5:29John Coogan?

  At any point? While you're thinking about that, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Continue.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  So I wouldn't say he's like anti scaling, but he does kind of give this interesting take, which he basically says that like now AI companies, like there's too few ideas for the amount of companies and for the scale that we're at, where he basically like, you can think of AI progress as being in these kind of distinct ages, right? So he says 2012 to 2020 was like the age of research where you're trying all these like different ideas and the scale of things is very small, right? Like to train the original AlexNet was like two GPUs to do the original transformer was like eight, maybe 64, but like, you know, very small amount of GPUs.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  And then once we kind of figured out that transformers work, we entered this age of scaling. And that's basically from 2020 to 2025. And now we're basically at this point where like, yes, you can keep scaling and models will get better, but even if you scale 100X, like are we really gonna get super intelligence? Like it'll get better on the benchmarks? And they'll become more useful, but it's not like this. He doesn't think that just raw scaling alone is basically what's gonna bring us there. I mean, this has been echoed by a lot of people, right? This was, I think, Carpathia said this where we still need a couple of different kind of paradigms for this to work.

• 7:01Speaker 04

  And even he's like, this is even kind of what Shulto said yesterday, which is like, Pre-training, it's not dead, but it's like, the reason that Opus 4.5 was better is not just because they scaled pre-training.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  It's scaling generally.

• 7:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Speaker 04

  But even then, like, the scaling has gone from pre-training and now it's RL.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 04

  And so we basically, we need to find another paradigm.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  And the way you do that is just doing like, research. And so he talks about SSI as basically being this, like, all they do is research.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Return to research.

• 7:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's small, kind of, training runs, even though, you know, they only raised $3 billion, which is like, small compared to other.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:40Speaker 04

  To other research institutions.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  The fact that they're basically putting it all on these kind of, I mean, I don't know if they're moonshots, but they're these small training runs where they're doing experiments.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  And then they're gonna scale it up eventually.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  But they're not just, basically, trying to win the AI race by just scaling up and doing the same thing as someone else.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're trying to find a new, a way to actually bend the scaling curve, find a new scaling law, or find a new technology that like, that they can scale against. I was thinking about Ilya's talk at NERIPs last year. He pulls up this chart of the relationship between the mammal's mass and the brain volume, and it's a pretty linear graph. And so like, the elephant is a lot bigger than the mouse, and so it has a proportionally larger brain to its body volume. And, and it's this perfect, it's this perfect linear curve. I should, I should just try and figure it out if I, I can maybe text it in, I took a picture of it.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Because it's a very, it's a very cool chart. Here it is. Where do I send this? The timeline? Let me see.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Ship it.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Share.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Let me see. Timeline. Sorry.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Boom. So basically, the mammals have this like very clear linear trend. But then the non-human primates are a little bit higher up on the chart and they're just doing a little bit better. But then hominids, the actual humans have a different, there's a very distinctly different curve. And so there's this interesting, like, it was making me think like, like, maybe that's what we're supposed to see when we think about, yeah, this, this. It's like, it's like, when we say like, straight lines on log graphs, when we say we are seeing scaling happen with the current architectures,

• 9:42John Coogan?

  which line are we scaling against? Are we, are we actually scaling on the, on the human curve? Or are we waiting for divergence from that current scaling law?

• 9:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, he has this good quote where scaling has taken all the air out of the room, right? Where like, basically, like, we have more than enough compute to try these like different ideas.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  But they're just all going straight into, to training the next big model.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 04

  Using the next paradigm. And maybe it's slightly different, right? You have a different way of doing RL or whatever. But it's still fundamentally the same thing, right? And he talks about maybe continual learning is really the, the better approach, right? We've, we've been in this era of like, having a pre-training thing for so long that we think of like, AI is like, you train this thing, and then you release it and it's like done.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  And RL is like, a little bit different now because there's this idea of post-training and you can kind of integrate.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  I also thought the interesting thing was with, with pre-training, you use the whole internet, so you don't have to decide anything. You're just applying this algorithm to just all the data, all the compute, and there's no decisions. But then with RL, you have to decide, okay, we're putting in these math equations and we're maybe not putting in something else because we're actually creating the data and we're, and it's not just this.

• 10:54Speaker 04

  He says like, this is maybe why we see these kind of like, models that are super well.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  They do super well in evals, but not so much.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of the overfitting and.

• 11:03Speaker 04

  And the reason is because the data that we choose is not the correct data.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  Because researchers are basically being reward hacked, maybe into like, just solving for benchmarks.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's interesting. It's interesting to hear this, like, the conclusion is, we need another breakthrough, and then simultaneously consensus be like, but like, we're definitely gonna get that breakthrough in like, the next decade. It's like, it's hard, it's hard to predict.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it echoes a lot of even what Mike Newp has been saying, like, we need new ideas.

• 11:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Saying this for months.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  But it's way, it's way harder to predict the rate at which breakthroughs will arrive, as opposed to like, you can actually chart out, okay, the formation of capital, the time it takes to build a data center, how long it takes to, you know, manufacture a bunch of GPUs, rack them, run the training run, like, that's much more predictable than like, human came up with new algorithm, like, that's sort of random.

• 12:01Speaker 04

  And he brings this up as the reason why you see companies doing this, because it's just, if you're raising money, it's so much easier to justify the raise by saying, we're gonna buy this data center,

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  do this training run.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  It's gonna cost exactly those much.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  It's very underwritten.

• 12:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then the model will be this good, and then we can use it to monetize this way.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:17Speaker 04

  Where if you're just saying like, oh, yeah, we're just gonna pay a bunch of like, really smart researchers to do a bunch of research, and then they'll, they'll figure something out.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  That, it's like, you can't really.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in some ways, it feels like SSI is set up for like, somewhat of a mini AI winter, or like, at least riding the hype cycle down.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  Because it doesn't sound like he's sitting there being like, we raised three billion and we're spending it in the next 12 months, it's like.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  2.9 was that.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  No, not, not, not.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  No, no, no, that's the point, it's not, it's like equity, it's just sitting there, it's like, he can clearly pull back.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's like, hey, I'm gonna give each researcher, all these different teams, like, shots on goal.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  No, I love it, I completely agree.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna keep taking those shots until, obviously, he'd be able to raise like, another 10 billion dollars whenever he wants, especially if he has like, a key breakthrough insight, and they can be first to scale that.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about cognition, they make Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Nvidia has posted-

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  They hit the timeline.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  They hit the timeline. Break this down for me, Jordi.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  They said, "We're delighted by Google's success. They've made great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google. Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. Nvidia offers greater performance."

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Versatility and fungibility than Asics.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  Which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  That is a crazy thing to post.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, crazy, crazy thing to post.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Sometimes we get stuff from Nvidia.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  "I don't know, boys, but having the largest company in the world sending tweets to defend their main product is not very reassuring."

• 13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just an odd... I feel like this would be so much better delivered. I actually don't have that much of a problem with the actual text here. I just think this should be delivered by Jensen with some nuance in a conversational setting. It just hits a lot different when this is in at exactly 9:00 AM, like clearly scheduled, clearly typed out in a document, you know? It's like, it feels like a press release, which is just an odd, odd thing when it should be, you know, this should be an answer to a question which someone, Bobby Cosmic in the chat was saying like, "Oh, the mainstream media is just now picking up on the Gemini

• 14:41John Coogan?

  3 story and there's articles in the Wall Street Journal and other places saying like, 'Oh, maybe Google's back, like, you know, buy Google, like, it's very exciting.'" And so Nvidia feels the need to respond to that, but it's a lot different when it's actually a response instead of just like, "We're putting out a press release, like, who knows why."

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  As opposed to like Jensen saying like, "Well, since you asked," you know, talk show host or news anchor or whoever he's top podcast host, whoever he's talking to, to our cash, you know, whoever he's talking to, maybe us, we'd love to have him. I can ask him that question. He can defend this here.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, the timing is, seems important because they are coming under a huge amount of pressure right now. There was an article in Barron's this morning by Tay Kim. The headline is not what Nvidia's comms teams would have liked it to be. The headline is Nvidia says it's not Enron in private memo refuting accounting questions.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  That's a crazy thing to say. Of course, it's not Enron, but...

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Let me get into the to the coverage. So Tay says, "A series of prominent stock sales and allegations of accounting irregularities have put Nvidia in the middle of a debate about the value of artificial intelligence and its related stocks. Now Nvidia is pushing back. In a private seven-page memo sent by Nvidia's investor relations team to Wall Street analysts over the weekend, the chipmaker directly addressed a dozen claims made by skeptical investors. Nvidia's memo, which includes fonts in the company's trademark green color, begins by addressing a social media post from Michael Burry last week, which criticized the company for stock-based comp dilution and stock buybacks. Burry's bet against subprime mortgages before the 2008 financial crisis was depicted in the movie The Big Short, of course.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia repurchased 91 billion shares since 2018, not 112 billion. Mr. Burry appears to have incorrectly included RSU taxes. Employee equity grants should not be conflated with the performance of the repurchase program," Nvidia said in the memo. Employees benefiting from a rising share price does not indicate the original equity grants were excessive at the time of issuance. That makes sense. Barron's reviewed the memo, which initially appeared in social media posts over the weekend, and confirmed its authenticity. Burry told Barron's he disagrees with Nvidia's response and stands by his analysis. He said he would discuss the topic of the company's stock-based comp in more details. Burry is, of course, now over on Substack. He's charging $380 a year.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  And if you are a perma bear, I can't... This is like Christmas coming early. Nvidia didn't respond to Barron's for requests for comment, but they also responded to claims that the current situation is analogous to historical accounting frauds Enron, WorldCom, and Lucent that featured vendor financing and SPVs. Nvidia does not resemble historical accounting frauds because Nvidia's underlying business is economically sound, our reporting is complete and transparent, and we care about our reputation for integrity. Unlike Enron, Nvidia does not use special-purpose entities to hide debt or inflate revenue."

• 17:49John Coogan?

  There's no market... It's like there's 25 examples of how this is not the same.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia also addressed allegation that its customers, large technology companies, aren't properly accounting for the economic value of Nvidia hardware. Some of the companies use, we've talked about this, use a six-year depreciation schedule for GPUs. Burry said he believes the useful lives of the chips are shorter than six years, meaning Nvidia's customers are inflating profits by spreading out deep depreciation costs over a long period. Nvidia's customers depreciate GPUs over four to six years based on real-world longevity and utilization patterns. Older GPUs such as A100s continue to run at high utilization and generate strong contribution margins, retaining meaningful economic value well beyond the two to three years claimed by some commentators.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  So, again, under fire on the TPU front and from the Michael Burry camp, but again, I think their answers are totally valid. Matt over on X had a post here, he said, "The TPUs equal bad for Nvidia take is up there with the dumbest, maybe worse than DeepSeek as it completely misses what actually happened in the last six weeks. And I will remember who is who in the zoo, my view. One, demand for AI is bananas, no one can meet demand, everyone is spending more. Google said just yesterday they have to double capacity every six months to keep up.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  Two, scaling laws are intact," he's referencing Gemini 3, "the flywheel is about to speed up. Somehow the mid-curve crew thinks this is zero-sum competition. None of this suggests that. If you think the race is hot now, wait until you see what comes out of large coherent blackwell clusters. All the magic from the quote 'god machines' is pretty much still hopper-based. Lastly, a quick GPU-TPU lesson, the cost and performance specs on the box aren't what you get in real life." And Google is going to get a... That margin to doubled. What matters is system level effective tokens to watt to dollars and TCO. Nvidia GPUs have higher FMU because they are they're already embedded

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  in workflows slash the ecosystem is massive. By the way, this is a good test. If you have an opinion on this topic, but you have to look up FMU, then perhaps curate better source.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  MFU.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 20:11John Coogan?

  MFU. MFU.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  What? I said MF.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  FMU. Sorry.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry. The above effective token watt gap also likely widens with Ruben. Add in that Jensen can actually deliver volume in a tight market, plus future flexibility, multi-cloud capable, programmable for paradigm shifts, and he'll sell every GPU he makes for years. Google will too, since everyone wants a second supplier and TPU is a fantastic chip. But this is as far from either or as it gets. The one benefit of this confusion is that it is likely to give Google a brief stint as the world heavyweight champion, the most valuable company. I would guess the midwits put the strap on them in less than two weeks. So he is-

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Put the strap on them? What does that mean? Just like, like pile in? Saying just like, so he, so he, is he, it seems like he's predicting that, that people will overplay the Nvidia bear take and overplay the Google-

• 21:12Jordi Hays?

  Overplay Google's opportunity with two years.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Opportunity, and that will result in Google becoming the most valuable company in the world. And he uses the phrase, put the strap on them in multiple-

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  In less than two weeks. Interesting post.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  In other news, David Sacks has hit the timeline. He says, according to today's Wall Street Journal, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth. A reversal would risk recession. We can't afford to go backwards. We will-

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  The article is how the US economy became hooked on AI spending. And we will be chatting with Kratsios in about an hour on this, on this very topic. So we can get into a little bit.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Adio. AI native CRM. Adio builds skills and grows your company to the next level. If you want to read through.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Fact sheet from the White House. President Donald J. Trump unveils the Genesis mission to accelerate AI for scientific discovery. Today, and this is yesterday. Today, Trump signed an executive order launching the Genesis mission, a new national effort to use artificial intelligence to transform how scientific research is conducted and accelerate the speed of scientific discovery. The Genesis mission charges the Secretary of Energy with leveraging our national laboratories to unite America's brightest minds, most powerful computers and vast scientific data into one cooperative system for research. The order directs the Department of Energy to create a closed-loop AI experimentation platform that integrates our nation's world-class supercomputers and unique data sets to generate

• 22:52Jordi Hays?

  scientific foundation models and power robotic laboratories. The order instructs the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology to coordinate the national initiative and integrate and integration of data and infrastructure from across the federal government. The Secretary of Energy, APST, and the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto will collaborate with academia and private sector innovators to support and enhance the Genesis mission. Priority areas of focus include the greatest scientific challenges of our time that can dramatically improve our nation's national, economic, and health security, including biotechnology, critical minerals, nuclear fission, and fusion energy, space exploration, quantum information science, and semiconductors and microelectronics.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Next, harnessing AI for our national security and economic development. With the Genesis mission, the Trump administration intends to dramatically expand the productivity and impact of federal research and development within a decade. So there's one more note here on strengthening America's AI dominance. Trump continues to prioritize America's global dominance in AI to usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security. And so we will get into more of this with Kratsios.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm very interested to hear how like how the public-private partnership actually works here. There was a time when every, basically every cool technology was coming out of DARPA, coming out of the US government. The US government landed on the moon and since then, you know, I think a lot of people in technology have lost faith in the US government overseeing the development of technology, even academia. I mean, people, people think like, you know, AGI will emerge from a private C corp. Like, that's where people believe that the best work will be done with, you know, give Ilya Sutskever, give the best scientist $3 billion, let him go cook.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Like, that's the thesis currently in tech. This feels like somewhat of a rejection of that in some ways. There's obviously lots of different places where having AI resources, having science and technology resources within the government make a ton of sense. But it'll be interesting to see, like, where are the interfacing points between the two, between the two categories, the public and private sector? Because by default, I think most people in our audience in technology would, would say, hey, like, let's leave the, let's leave the space travel and the, and the AI research to the, to the private sector.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  And, and this is, you know, potentially a different direction, potentially just very synergistic. So it'll be interesting to see where it breaks. Well, should we run through the Astral Codex 10 piece on trait-based embryo selection to tee up our discussion with Kremiu and Keon from Nucleus?

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  And go through that. So. This is from Scott Alexander in Astrocodex 10. He said, "Suddenly trait-based embryo selection. When a couple uses IV... So in 2021, Genomic Prediction announced the first polygenically selected baby. When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as 10 embryos. If they want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked the healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest to detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis. The final step was polygenic selection, genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall. Best in what sense? Genomic Prediction

• 26:37John Coogan?

  claimed the ability to forecast health outcomes from diabetes to schizophrenia, for example. Although the average person has a 30% chance of getting type 2 diabetes, if you genetically test five embryos and select the one with the lowest predicted risk, they'll only have a 20% chance." So you get a 10% bump there. That's nice. "Since you're taking the healthiest of many embryos, you should expect a child conceived via this method to be significantly healthier than one born naturally. Polygenic selection straddles the line between disease prevention and human enhancement. In 2023, Orchid Health, founded by Noor, who we've had on the show, entered the field. Unlike Genomic Prediction, which tested only the most important genetic variants, Orchid offers whole genome sequencing, which can

• 27:22John Coogan?

  detect the de novo mutations involved in autism, developmental disorders, and certain other genetic diseases. Critics accuse GP and Orchid of offering designer babies, but this is only true in the weakest sense. Customers couldn't design a baby for anything other than slightly lower risk of genetic disease. You're basically just selecting out of what you already got. They're not editing the genes. They're merely sequencing them and then allowing you to select. These companies refused to offer selection on traits, the industry term for the really controversial stuff like height, IQ, or eye color. Still, these were trivial extensions of their technology, and everyone knew it was just a matter of time before someone took the plunge. Last month, a star...

• 28:04John Coogan?

  startup called Nucleus took the plunge. They had previously offered 23andMe style genetic tests for adults. Now they announced a partnership with genomic prediction focusing on embryos, although GP would continue to only test for health outcomes. You could forward the raw data from GP to Nucleus and Nucleus would predict extra traits, including height, BMI, eye color, hair color, ADHD, IQ, and even handedness.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's worth noting that Nucleus is now being sued by genomic prediction.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Even though they have this partnership.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming the partnership is no longer.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, we can ask.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I'm assuming it's no longer because one of uh GP's co-founders left uh left the company to join Nucleus.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  And allegedly uh turned off all the security cameras that the.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Is that that's metaphor or is that actually?

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the lawsuit alleges that the that he turned off all the security cameras on his.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  That's not a metaphor for like, you know, sharing a Google Drive of PDFs. You literally mean.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  It's his last day at work.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  And he was allegedly like rounding up.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so he turns off the cameras allegedly and and the implication is that maybe he was rummaging around like literally taking documents or something like that. That's at least what the timeline is.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  What the lawsuit alleged.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Okay, wow, that that that's wild. I I did not know that that was a literal accusation.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  And then another part of it, uh, apparently Nucleus, uh, it's new people at Nucleus were emailing uh uh, the former uh co-founder uh at his old email address uh evidence of them violating the the uh the agreement that they had. So.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it's very, very, very, very messy. We can ask.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's like four or five companies involved in this.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  And all of them are controversial because this is the most, I think, the most controversial probably like category that you can be in.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's it's certainly up there.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  Health is already like one of the most controversial topics.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone has an opinion on it.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  As an health influencer that has gotten into

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  Various debacles.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, there's just like the, there's just, it's so easy to throw, I mean, in the same way that people are throwing Enron at Nvidia, like, it's so easy to throw Theranos at any biotech company that's not, you know, that's accused of anything. And also biotech, it's like, it's pretty hard to understand the underlying science. It's not, it's not, it's not as popular as, okay, like, does the website work? Does the business make money? You know, what's the cash flow like? It's way more complicated. And so it does attract even more attention. So one of the other companies in the space is Harasite. And Astral Codex 10 continues here. They entered the space with the most impressive disease risk scores, yet an IQ predictor worth

• 31:05John Coogan?

  six to nine extra points. And a series of challenges to competitors whom they call out for insufficient scientific rigor. Their most scathing attack is on Nucleus itself, accusing its predictions of being misleading and unreliable. Let's start with the science and then move on to the companies to see if we can litigate their dispute. In all theory, in theory, all of this should work. Polygenic embryos, polygenic embryo screening is a natural extension of two well-validated technologies, genetic testing of embryos and polygenic prediction of traits in adults. So genetic screening of embryos has been done for decades, usually to detect chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome or simple gene editing disorders like cystic fibrosis. It's challenging. You need to, we've talked about this before.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  You need to take a very small number of cells, often only five to 10, from a tiny protoplacenta that may not have many cells to spare, and extract a readable amount of genetic material from this limited sample. But there are known solutions that mostly work. And so the companies that we're talking about today aren't Necessarily doing like the fundamental lab equipment development, building the machine, figuring out how to sequence data from the first. It's more about the analysis that happens on top of the results.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  And the recommendations.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  And the recommendations.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  Which is probably, which I would say is the most controversial part of this.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't, I don't know that any of them are recommending, hey, we think you should take, we think you should pick this baby. They're more just saying like, we think that according to the data, this baby might be taller than this one.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  But if you're giving somebody a risk fact, if you're giving, if you're.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's not a recommendation. Like if I tell you this car is 700 horsepower and does zero to 60 in two seconds and this one does 800 horsepower and does zero to 60 in 2.4 seconds, this one's faster in a straight line, this one's faster on the curves, and then like you pick, like I didn't make a recommendation, I just told you the stats, right?

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but from when you look at the, these companies from a, from what they're marketing.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  To consumers of what, of why you should care about the service.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  And then the way that they deliver the information.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  If they're advertising, we can effectively advertising, we can help you have a smarter, healthier baby. And then they're saying like, hey, we think this direction is going to get you a higher IQ. How is that?

• 33:26John Coogan?

  I don't think it's a recommendation.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  It's not an explicit recommendation.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  But I think people are trusting the service to try to get them what was marketed to them.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, people want the data and they want the data to be accurate because they're going to make a decision based on that. But I mean, here Scott Alexander actually gets into some of the, uh, some of the complexity of, uh, of the actual trade offs because there are, so, uh, most traits are polygenic, requiring information about thousands or tens of thousands of genes to predict. These are too complicated to understand fully at current levels of technology, but some studies have chipped away at the problem and gotten to a partial understanding. Often this looks like being able to predict a few percent of the variance in the trait to determine whether someone's genetic risk is slightly higher or lower than, uh, average. And, uh, so some people might genuinely want to select on a single condition.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  For example, people with a strong family history of schizophrenia might want to minimize their chance of their children getting the disease. For these people, reducing schizophrenia risk by 58% while keeping everything else constant, sounds pretty good. Everyone else probably wants a genetically healthy, um, generically healthy embryo with low risk of all conditions. Exactly how this works depends on the customer's own value. Would they prefer an embryo with lower cancer risk to one that will have fewer heart attacks? Like, that's a trade-off that you have to pick. And the exact benefits will depend on how parents make that decision. Genomic Prediction and Haracite try to help by providing semi-objective measures

• 35:01John Coogan?

  of which embryo is overall healthiest according to different conditions of facts on longevity and patient-rated quality of life for genomic prediction. That's the embryo health score. This is, you know, that's close to a recommendation. I think you're getting close.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and Nucleus's subway campaign is "Have a Healthier Baby."

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, the, the, the, the marketing claims are a big, big piece of this. I think, I think the scientific claims are potentially just as important, but it's both, they're both, understanding where the science actually is, both broadly, and then also within the companies, and then how it's marketed. Like, all of that is important to get like a complete picture of what's going on here. So, for Haracite, it's a polygenic longevity index. They don't give exact risk reduction numbers for each disease, saving that, saying that it depends too much on a couple's specific family history, but say that most people gain one to four years of healthy life.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  When I test it on a set of 20 embryos, the healthiest gets an extra 1.66 years. And so, how much would you pay to give your children an extra one to four years of healthy life? This is no longer a healthy, a hypothetical question. Here are the costs. Genomic Prediction is around $3,250. Orchid is around $12,500. Nucleus is around $9,249. And Haracite, $53,250. That is expensive compared to the rest, five times the price. Is it worth it? Well, if you're already doing IVF... The claimed risk reductions are accurate. You value your kid's health as much as your own. You have low time discount rate.

• 36:48John Coogan?

  You're well off enough that these aren't extraordinary sums of money to you. You're OK using expected utility calculations where 50% chance of preventing X is half as good as fully preventing X. Then I'll go out on a limb and say, yeah, it's obviously it's worth it. Consider genomic prediction, which costs $3,500 for five embryos and claims to lower absolute risk of type 2 diabetes by 12%. That implies that not getting type 2 diabetes is worth $27,000. Ask anyone dealing with regular insulin injections, let alone limb amputations, whether it would be worth $27,000 to wave a magic wand and not have type 2 diabetes. It's not a hard question. And that's just one of a dozen conditions you can lower the risk for. Other ones, like not getting breast cancer, might be so valuable that it's hard to even

• 37:33John Coogan?

  attach numbers. So what about IQ? Six extra IQ points, which is Harasite's estimate with five embryos, is about a quarter of the gap between the average person and the average Ivy League student. The benefits of intelligence are hard to quantify, but it's been shown to have probably causal positive effects on income, mortality, and achievement. Probably the income effects alone make up for the cost of the intervention. Again, assuming total parent-child altruism and a low discount rate. So if we accept all of these claims and assumptions, the choice seems obvious. It probably even accounts, it's probably even obvious for governments to pay for all citizens to get these, given how much they'd save on healthcare costs, says Scott Alexander. But in practice, it's complicated.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Critics have raised both scientific and ethical objections to polygenic embryo screening. Most significantly, it's been condemned by various bodies, including the Society for Psychiatric Genetics, the European Society of Human Genetics, and the Behavioral Genetics Society. Their statements are not good. They tend towards vague language about how people are more than just their genes, or how no genetic test can be perfect, or how embryo screening is not exactly the same thing as some other form of screening, which has a longer history and more proponents. Although, quote, "Although in general, higher scores mean you are more likely to have a condition, many healthy people will have higher scores."

• 38:58John Coogan?

  Others might, others might develop the condition even with a low score, says the Society for Psychiatric Genetics, as if they have just blown the lid off of some dastardly conspiracy. Screening embryos for psychiatric conditions may increase stigma surrounding those diseases they continue. An objection which, taken seriously, could be used to ban every form of medical treatment. Because if you take care of something, you remove them from the population, that might increase the stigma, but we should still treat these. So, he says, "We will mostly ignore these people and try to imagine the implications of the objections that mildly competent critics might raise, some of which will coincidentally overlap with the content of the non-hypothetical statement." So, the big question he wants to answer is scientific objection, the scientific objection around efficacy,

• 39:43John Coogan?

  does this, are we sure this works at all? Are we sure this works? So, a typical polygenic score is created by collecting thousands or millions of adult genomes, then matching genetic information with surveys about who has the trait/condition of interest. Reputable studies then test these scores on holdout samples, adults who are not used to make the score, to see if they still accurately predict who has the trait/condition. Polygenic embryo selection depends on an assumption that the scores which work in these kinds of retrospective tests will also work prospectively on embryos. This assumption hasn't been formally proven in studies, which would require years or decades to conduct, but seems commonsensical.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  The strongest challenge to the application of polygenic scores for embryo selection comes from a recent body of research showing that most scores combine causal genetic effects with population stratification, and therefore can be expected to lose much of their predictive power when comparing two members of the same family. There is an increasing agreement in the field that unless scores are validated within families, headline results like "decreases risk of X by Y percent" will be large overestimates. When I talked to company representatives, they all said that they took accuracy extremely seriously and had various white papers and journal articles where anyone could double-click, could double-check on their methodology. But I attended an industry conference a few months ago, and the gossip level

• 41:12John Coogan?

  was comparable to a high school cafeteria.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Says minus the sex rumors, most of the attendees were having their kids via IVF.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Everyone had some story about someone being careless or fudging their numbers. Some of the conflicts broke out into the open on Wednesday when Harasite left Stealth and published a white paper and associated blog post. They criticized genomic prediction for reporting between family rather than within-family results and Orchid for smuggling a term for age into their Alzheimer's predictor. Unsurprisingly, this makes it work better. We'll get to their accusations against Nucleus below. Note that this was recent enough that competitors haven't had time to air their own criticisms of Harasite if this happens. I'll try and keep you updated.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this article is from around five months ago.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  And since that time, Nucleus has been accused of plagiarizing the paper.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  From Harasite.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Just discussed from Harasite.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  From Harasite.

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  And then also accused of stealing IP from genomic prediction.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  So there's, again, a bunch of different accusations. We'll let Keon.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the goal here is to just give an opportunity for, you know, Kremu and Keon to answer some questions, try and contextualize it, try and make their case to a broader audience. There, you know, I've read through as much as I can, but without actually getting in the lab and rolling up my sleeves, I don't think I could come to a firm conclusion here. But I can certainly talk to them on this show and hopefully get some more information that the community can do with what they will. So Scott Alexander concludes this section, talking about his strongest opinion of the

• 43:13John Coogan?

  scientific criticism. He says, "Authorities on all sides have cited Alex Young as an authority on how polygenic scores can be confounding or misleading. Last week, Alex Young revealed that he had been working with Harasite while it was in Stealth mode and endorses their research." Three. LOL. Probably that means Harasite's products are okay. That serves as proof of concept that this technology can work and means other companies' claims are at least plausible. So lots of back and forth and we will be joined by Kremiu in just a few minutes. I actually need to message him and make sure that he has the information.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Is there anything else that you think would be worthwhile to discuss before we hop on?

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can just go through. I mean, the original accusations came from an account called Sichuan Mala.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Sichuan Mala, yes.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  Who wrote an extremely lengthy blog post on a bunch of the issues that they felt they had found with Nucleus. Nucleus ended up firing back and saying that Sichuan Mala was, or sort of implying that Sichuan Mala was funded by a competitor or competitive service, as well as making those allegations with Kremiu.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  They go into issues around potentially fictitious customer reviews, which we'll ask you on about. AI-generated blog posts, accusations of intellectual property theft, saying that the Nucleus origin, white paper is plagiarized, saying it has a bunch of errors. Nucleus has responded already to a lot of this stuff.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Well, our first guest of the show is here. Let me tell you about Linear, meet the system for modern software development, purpose-built tool for planning and building products. We will bring in Kremiu from the Restream waiting room into the TVP and UltraDome and have him set the table for us. Kremiu, how are you doing? Welcome to the stream. How are we doing? Glad to be here, guys. Thanks so much.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Good, as always.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Looking good. Do you want? By the way, I can go FaceDogs if you want. Let's do it. Let's do it. We can show his actual video this time, which is great. We've had him. Welcome to the show.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Hey, hey.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Good to see you. How you doing? What actually kicked this off for you? Do you know Sichuan Mala separately, independently? Did you know that this was coming? Set the table for us. Like, why did Nucleus come to the top of your mind?

• 45:54Speaker 05

  So can I actually go back to Hereticon?

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Please.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  With this?

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Speaker 05

  All right. So for about a year, we've told Nucleus about issues with their products. It's, can I just actually give a big, like, I can monologue on this for a minute. I can tell you a lot of the details if you want to go into it.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  Go right in.

• 46:13Speaker 05

  Okay. So one of the early things that really peeved a lot of us who are aware of how this tech works is that Nucleus claimed to provide parents with information about rare variants based on microarray files. Their website's wording is incredibly ambiguous. So the excuse when I raised this to Keon in person was that they were referring to imputing a child's embryo, or a child or an embryo's microarray-based data with parental whole genome data. But this is not sufficient for rare variants like they claim it is, and it only works out in very well, well and narrow, well behaved cases. It's not a clean substitute for sequencing an embryo or child.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  The rare variant information they can offer is limited, and their claim is highly misleading because it sounds like they can achieve coverage of de novo rare variants and ultra rare variants reliably for children and embryos. But they cannot do this because of like crossover that happens during recombination inside the haplotype blocks you're using to do the imputations, and because of mutations. They can't, they can't even get high confidence coverage of rare variants more generally, which is what their big claim is about in specific wording, with the imputation-based methods they claim to be using. So everything they say has a huge error bar on it, and it's, they shouldn't be advertising it, basically. It's something incredibly misleading. And to get an idea of this.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  So, so just to like actually zoom out, like, what do you think they are capable of doing?

• 47:35Speaker 05

  I think they are capable of microarray sequencing. I think they're capable of.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  I mean, I mean, I mean, in terms that you could advertise to a parent, like, you, like, if Keon went to a prospective parent, the parent says, I'm doing IVF. What can you do for me?

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Is this category even ready for large-scale, out-of-home advertising? Do you think, do you think?

• 47:59Speaker 05

  It absolutely is. The issue is that Nucleus should not be doing it because Nucleus has produced scores that are invalid. They're incredibly invalid. Like, for example, they used an ADHD score that concluded 12 single nucleotide polymorphisms. They claimed it explained 4% of the variance in ADHD, which means it's a pretty good predictor and you can use it to get some improvements in the margins. But 12 SNPs means that there's just no way. They could explain less than 1% of the variance and the best current ADHD polygenic score uses more than a million SNPs and explains about 1% of the variance. So they just basically lied. They made up these numbers and Harriside had to go through and show that, oh, actually, a bunch of their numbers are made up.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, how do you know for sure that they're, I mean, like, that claim, you know, the state of the art was, was a million for 1%. Now it's 12. Nucleus is claiming 12 for 4%. That seems like a huge exponential, you know, growth in efficacy of that particular test, but just an exponential progress is not necessarily evidence of malfeasance, right?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  This isn't progress. They've, they've never been able to show that they can use 12 SNPs and no one can. It's impossible. They don't explain this much variance. It's literally physically impossible. There's no, it's not possible in any way. They should never have claimed it. They should never have provided score reports to people based on it, and they did. They provided customers with score reports that have to be fake. Not fake per se, but they have to be incorrect. They have to be wrong. There's no way they could stand up to scrutiny. What I'm saying is that after they made this 12 SNPs to 4% variance claim, people have looked and they've shown the latest ADHD polygenic score, which is more recent than what they've claimed to have on offer, uses more than a million SNPs and explains about 1% of the variance. It's just, that's the state of the art. They

• 49:54Speaker 05

  are claiming to have better than the state of the art with completely implausible parameters. It is impossible.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so, so back to the original question, like, what do you think they actually could offer, even if they say, hey, you know what, we're not, we're not necessarily state of the art. We're partnering with a lot of different labs. We're standing on the shoulders of giants. We're using the tools that are available. What is a reasonable claim that if they made it, you would be like, yeah, that sounds, that sounds reasonable?

• 50:27Speaker 05

  A reasonable claim from Nucleus is that they are pulling polygenic scores from the polygenic score catalog, a publicly available resource that lists a bunch of different polygenic spores from different genome-wide association studies. That would be reasonable, but that is not a... Why would you go with them then? They have nothing unique to offer. What they have offered that seems to be unique are claims that don't hold up to scrutiny, or which are clearly plagiarized from one of their competitors.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there are plenty of services that are like, you know, effectively wrappers around Quest Labs. And, you know, I get a better UI, and it tells me that my cholesterol is in the range. And yeah, I know it's just looking up the range from the data, but it has a nice UI and a reasonable billing system or whatever, and people pay for that. And they get, you know, they make decisions about their diet based on that. And I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong about providing something that's a commodity or not a scientific breakthrough, as long as you're up to, as long as you're honest about what you're doing, and you're not inflating the results.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. The problem is that they're inflating the results. The problem is that they are effectively making up the results. They have actually, they've, in their latest report, they have claimed to basically match Harasite, not claimed directly. They've copied their very unique citations, which no one else has made. They've copied their method. And copying their method is incredibly weird. You mentioned there that Scott Alexander noted that Alex Young is, like, seen as a big authority in this space. And it's true. Alex is seen as like, the go-to guy. If you want to learn about family-based sampling, trio imputation, if you want to learn about within-family validations or imputations or quality control, you ask Alex. That is the thing to do.

• 52:10Speaker 05

  And they apparently copied Alex Young's quality control pipeline. And it's very unique. So, doing this is unusual. It's unheard of. It's not likely to have actually been done. It is like saying that you woke up one day, and here's my morning routine. I woke up, and today I was John Coogan. And I brushed my teeth exactly three times each time around, and I went and prayed to my household God. I did like all sorts of things. It's incredibly specific in a way that is very unlikely to be real. They've very likely just kind of mimicked exactly what they said. And they said they did it on additional data, but the results came up very close. Which is not likely. We have strong theoretical genetic reasons to expect that if they have this additional data that Harasite did not...

• 52:54Speaker 05

  The results would have actually looked different. So they have all these signals that they didn't do the analyses they said they did. And lots of indications that they plagiarized. And when Sichuan Mala called them out, they responded. The response they generated was amateurish. It was kind of embarrassing because they admitted simultaneously to denying they did the plagiarism. They admitted to doing the plagiarism. They copied, they admitted they copied things directly from Harrisite. They admitted they used resources that are unusual to use and they effectively got the data from them. And they did nothing that was really unique. But they did a

• 53:32John Coogan?

  So copying might be, you know, looked down upon. In tech, people copy stuff all the time. The, you know, stories was copied into Instagram from Snapchat. Different, different machine learning architectures are being copied constantly. Some stuff can be patented, some stuff is, can be trade secrets. Are we looking at anything that's, that's, that goes beyond just like, yeah, it's kind of bad form to copy? Or, or is this something that's actually like a problem beyond that?

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Would you, would you be less angry if they copied it perfectly instead of like, sort of copied it directionally?

• 54:12Speaker 05

  They copied a lot of it perfectly. And this leads to weird results because they should not have done that, given the cohorts they used. They used separate data for their validations, so the results should have been different. They copied details that made it apparent that they were not using the data they claimed to, or they were just fudging the results. It has to be one or the other. There's no way they could have gotten the results they did with the data they did and the copying they did. The copying tells us that they lied about something somewhere along the way. There is something fishy here. And we don't know what the exact error is. We just know they have to have made an error because there's no way that the additional data they had access to was identical to all the data their competitors used. It would have delivered different results.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  So, so I wanted to ask, they released open weight models, the origin models. Part of their, part of their, part of, well, part of their pushback against Sichuan Mala's critique is that anybody can just download the models and play around with them. Have you, have you downloaded them?

• 55:12Speaker 05

  So You have to ask for access and they do not give out access. We've had multiple people go in and try and ask for access and they've not received it at all. And one person who asked for more information was told, stop contacting us.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  So, no, they are not open at all. They're open in the sense that OpenAI is open. They're not very open.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Uh, shifting gears to the marketing claims, um, what, what stuck out to you there is, uh, is particularly in need of addressing?

• 55:42Speaker 05

  They very much need to, uh, address the fact that they seem to have fake reviews. So when they started Nucleus Embryo, they launched it in June. They weren't offering any sort of embryo screening services beforehand. And if they were, then it would have been, how? They would have had, they had to specify what lab they use for all this stuff. It's, there's a lot of details that should go into this that they can't actually specify because they didn't do that. So they claim to have had customers that have already been served by this. Well, as everybody knows, it takes about nine months to serve a customer in this at minimum.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  And, uh, it has not been nine months since June.

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Nine women can't make a baby in one month, you know, it takes nine months no matter what.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  So I'd love to see these three-month-old babies that came out perfectly and were, uh, you know, made their customers so happy, but, uh, I don't think they exist. I think they're not real. Um, so why do they have these reviews? I don't know. And the reviews are also, they have a lot of fake elements. There are some that are clearly fake. So they use stock images in these reviews to show their customers they're not verified.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Which to be clear, you can imagine a scenario where they use stock imagery and fake names and they put an asterix and say, due to HIPAA compliance reasons, we're not just publicly displaying, you know, the names of any of our clients, but.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  There's, there's no issue revealing this stuff and other companies do actually reveal their real customers. So Orchid has revealed real customers. I've been introduced. I've met, uh, Harrisite customers.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Didn't Jason Carmen do a whole video with NOR and the first, uh, and the first, uh, Orchid baby? And this has been like basically making a documentary about that person's journey. Like there's no, like.

• 57:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  And, and I feel like I see in drug commercials all the time. It'll be like, this is a real customer who loves this hair loss meds. And they're like, yeah, it looks great.

• 57:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  And like there's regulations around that.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  It seems much harder to get, it, it's probably much harder to get somebody to opt into that than just opt into generally providing, um.

• 57:34Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, clearly, clearly it's possible. I guess.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Is, is that, is that legit, you think?

• 57:39Speaker 05

  Uh, no, they still could not have had the babies in time. Uh, it doesn't fit with the time. The chronology doesn't work here. These customer reviews are not really physically possible. And I'd like to see an explanation from them because it doesn't make any real sense to me. They could be, I don't know, making some sort of representative review that they've maybe hedged in some fine print on some page somewhere, but I haven't seen it and their entire site has been archived now. So if that page exists, they'll have to show it to us on the archive.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  One thing Jordi and I were debating was, uh, this, this big question of like, is Nucleus making a recommendation or not? I don't know if this is relevant, but I would love your take on this. This idea of like, uh, you know, I see a, I see an ad that just says like, height is 80% uh, DNA-based or genetically inheritable. And then you go into the dashboard and it just says, here's the predicted height and here's the predicted, you know, IQ. And then you make the decision and it's not necessarily they're recommending one or the other. It's more of a diagnostic and you can do that information what you want. Does that, does that absolve them of some sort of responsibility there?

• 58:45Speaker 05

  No, it doesn't. So if you still provide wildly inaccurate scores, then uh, it doesn't matter what you're recommending. You are effectively just recommending something that doesn't matter. I mean, you are giving them incorrect recommendations. You have to give some range of uncertainty, uh, within the best of your ability. You have to give them something that is to the greatest extent knowable, reliable. And they can't have done that. They've provided scores that they know, they must know are incorrect. You can't explain 4% of the variance with 12 snips. It's not really feasible. It's uh, there's no possibility of it really. There's also no possibility of getting high confidence coverage on rare variants to make, from the imputation methods they described. So they can't make parents certain about this stuff. Like they're saying lots of things that are, um, that would require them to basically

• 59:30Speaker 05

  advance the science 20 years. They would have to be leaders in innovations here and...

• 59:37Speaker 05

  I just kind of doubt it. The people who are actually leading on the innovations here are Haracite. Orchid is doing so as well. They're doing a lot of Orchid's whole genome sequencing of embryos is the only one in the industry available to do this. And Haracite's innovation is that they've made this stuff low cost for what they have admitted is a reduction in quality if you get PGTA-based infutation. Now, but another thing I do want to mention, though, is that Nucleus might, and we're still looking, I'm still looking into this. I'm collecting some patient reports. I found one from my friend Dylan. She got a report from Nucleus and she got one from Invitae. It was a whole genome sequencing thing done. And Nucleus, and I did see the report, Nucleus said she had a Medellin disorder, you know, a monogenic disorder caused by one gene, and Invitae said she didn't have it.

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  Okay, this is weird. So what's the inconsistency? We don't really know. Nucleus recently changed this result. Now, per the law, you have to notify your customers if you change their sequencing results. This is a CLIA regulation. The CMS regulates this. And there are, that is a potentially major issue that they might be out of compliance with. And I understand that startups are often out of compliance, and a lot of them fake it till they make it in terms of following the letter of the law. But I'm of the opinion that they really shouldn't, especially because this is serious tech with major implications for people, their families, and, I mean, all future generations of their families. This is, as I think Jordi called it, "bloodline optimization." And we have these rules in place for a reason. You need to show you're abiding by them.

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how much, how much do the other players in the category, how much are they worried about Nucleus just kind of setting back the entire category?

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  So I have gotten, it's on video, and because Keon tweeted about being in it, I'm allowed to say that we were at a private conference, and I did lead a panel on this topic where Keon was one of the panelists, and the heads of some other embryo selection companies were also on the panel as well. And I will say that Everyone was worried. Everyone was worried about one of the major missteps that actually has already been addressed by another one of the companies and the series of major missteps made by Nucleus that they have failed to address. I warned Keon about this stuff many months ago. I've warned him about problems for more than a year now and he has simply not addressed them. They're still there on the website. You can go find them. I've archived these pages a few times to see, are they getting to them? Are they getting to them?

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  The answer is no. They are still making claims that are either not possible, not possible with the current tech, might be possible in 20 years, or just don't seem consistent with the evidence that they provided to their customers.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Okay, last question and then we're gonna hop on with Keon. I'm a big believer in redemption arcs. You're obviously unhappy with Nucleus's behavior in the industry. What does redemption look like? What would Keon have to do or show you to get back in the good graces of the industry, in your good graces?

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  So, the whole industry knows that Keon has been a problem for a while and we, actually, a lot of people have tried to give him a redemption arc already. They have tried to come to him, they have given him clear advice on what he needs to do, they have told him, "You need to stop making XYZ different claims." They have told him, "You need to offer scores that are vetted, you need to be open about your vetting, you need to be open about your sources, you need to qualify everything like the other companies do." But you haven't. He's been told this for a long time. I sent you some pictures earlier today, you can see the panel we're on, where clearly, like, this has been a thing that's come up a lot and we wanted to give him the arc already, but it came to this. It came to a person

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  going online, a blogger, deciding, "Hey, I'm gonna look into this," after reading the various blog posts and saying, "Well, shoot." So, to make up for it, I think they would need to be incredibly open and they need to apologize and they need to admit to what they did wrong and they need to say that they were out of compliance with CLIA rules and regulations and they need to say, "Hey, we..." Uh, might have misstepped here or there. We didn't know we were doing this or whatever. Like whatever it takes to be accurate. Document everything. Tell us everything you've done. Tell us all the missteps. Don't exaggerate. Do not lie. Just be upfront with everyone and submit yourself to regulation. Not in the sense that you have to go and tell the regulator, you want to like implement whatever new rules and regs, but submit yourself to openness.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  Be really open. Stop this whole thing about not telling us your methods, which they've done. And Citron Mala has documented that in the related blog post. Uh, and give us your data. Give your data out. Stop provide like saying it's going to be available upon request. It doesn't matter if your competitors have it. Offer them, offer better pricing or something. Compete on some other margin because we shouldn't have to compete on trusting you. And I say we, I'm not talking, I don't have a company in this space, but um, everyone should be trusted. All the companies in this space need to shape up a little bit and they need to be a little more open. And Kian needs to do that the most.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show and breaking it down for us. Uh, we appreciate you taking the time and walking through all of that. Uh, have a great rest of your day. Uh, who knows? You might be on the show very soon as this debate continues. So we really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Talk soon.

• 1:04:48Speaker 05

  Have a good one, guys. Bye.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  Uh, before we bring in Kian, let me tell you about Fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. And we have Kian from Nucleus in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV pin. Ultra. Kian, good to see you. Uh, wish it was less dramatic circumstances, but you know, it makes for good TV and we're happy that you're here and we can chat about this. And uh, I mean, I'd love to just give you the floor. I'm sure you saw, you know, some of the early segments. Where do you think it's important to start? Where do you think it's most important to set the record straight? Uh, as a first point, then I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions.

• 1:05:29Kian Sadeghi?

  Well, I didn't see what Kremu said. I was busy helping a patient. But I think the key thing to remember is that Kremu and I, we are definitely aligned on doing great science. At the end of the day, that's what we want to do. We want to serve the patient, we want to do amazing science. I think what we're not aligned on is Kremu, basically, for several months, has not disclosed that he's been affiliated with a competitor. And, you know, that wouldn't be so much of a problem unless they're basically concerning together. And so that's on the Kremu side of things. But honestly, that's like the less important thing to me.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree. I think that's less important. So I've seen him post positively about your competitors. I've not seen any proof that he's actually being paid or has equity in that competitor. But to me, it almost doesn't matter. It could, like, every single post from him and Sishwan Mala could literally be from Norad Orchid or someone who has one of your competitors. You still need to address it, right?

• 1:06:27Kian Sadeghi?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:06:29Kian Sadeghi?

  And so first and foremost, I'm going to say that our science is completely public, and it's been completely public. So one thing that's really important to say is that anyone, and by the way, we back at this point have shared our models with over 15 different entities, which includes, by the way, people affiliated with our competitors, several of them.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Just to be clear, I mean, Kremu said that a number of people that he's aware of have requested access to the models and not been given access and been told to stop reaching out. And so I do think, I don't know.

• 1:07:02Kian Sadeghi?

  Utterly inaccurate and false. There is not one person who has filled in the nucleus origin type form, which is a type form, fill in the type form, that has not gotten access to our model weights.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Kian Sadeghi?

  And by the way, that includes people affiliated with the competitor.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:16Kian Sadeghi?

  And so I think what's really important here is the science is public. The message of the community is, go and test it. In fact, our science is public. The competitors is not. So what I would propose is they should make their science public, and let's have a third party independently evaluate the rigor, the quality of the science, and let's do it for everyone to see. Instead of he said, she said, they tit for tat, you know. Put the science out there.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Kian Sadeghi?

  Have a third party independently evaluate them. That is my message to our competitor. We are happy to stay behind our science and we know that it's the highest quality science that can exist today. But by the way, John, that's not even the point either.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:07:57Kian Sadeghi?

  You know what the point actually is?

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  What is?

• 1:07:59Kian Sadeghi?

  The point is about the patient.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:00Kian Sadeghi?

  It's about having the empathy with the patient so they can know when they do embryonic selection.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:06Kian Sadeghi?

  They can feel comfortable and confident in the results.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:09Kian Sadeghi?

  And this Twitter back and forth, this tit for tat.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:12Kian Sadeghi?

  This, oh, this person's uh uh race changed on the nucleus landing page. It's ridiculous.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:17Kian Sadeghi?

  It's really ridiculous.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Well, well.

• 1:08:19Kian Sadeghi?

  And so that's my message.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Speaking of the the the the patients on the landing pages, uh the what about the what about the the chronology here? This idea that uh that that there's a review of a baby with three months old, takes nine months to work. So maybe should have happened a year ago. Uh was the service available a year ago? How do you square that particular allegation that the the review, the timing of the review just doesn't line up with what?

• 1:08:44Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  Must have happened in the real world had they used your service.

• 1:08:47Kian Sadeghi?

  So there were several claims about the reviews.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Kian Sadeghi?

  Let me address each.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:08:52Kian Sadeghi?

  First and foremost, obviously, as a HIPAA covered entity, we cannot disclose patient name, much less their picture.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:00Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay, if a patient chooses to, they can publicly endorse the company and they can put their name in their picture.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:06Kian Sadeghi?

  Otherwise, a patient can submit an anonymous uh uh anonymous review and then we'll put that according in the landing page.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:13Kian Sadeghi?

  And so maybe perhaps the people on the Twitter timeline, maybe they never run a company that involves any protections to the patients. Maybe they don't know about this, maybe in like the broader tech community, it's like unfamiliar. If you run a software company, wouldn't it make sense to not disclose the patient name? And I'm going to say to John, this is really important.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Do you think you have to disclose the fact that you're using an AI generated image? Is that best practice or is that legally required?

• 1:09:36Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, what I think we should do though is now that the community gave us this feedback is we should update it, make it more clear.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Kian Sadeghi?

  This is clearly not a real picture.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:44Kian Sadeghi?

  And this is both not a real name. That's reasonable.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay, now. Fraud, this, that. Guys, really? Come on. Okay, we'll update it. We'll make sure that the picture and also the names are more clear.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Kian Sadeghi?

  But again, we're a HIPAA covered entity. You can imagine when you launch an embryo product specifically, people do not want their name to be affiliated with it. I mean, you have non-accounts that don't want their names affiliated with these things. Imagine a patient that actually underwent Nucleus's services.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:11Kian Sadeghi?

  So now regarding the timeline thing, that's the second thing you mentioned. I want to directly address that as well. Obviously, a company like Nucleus can start providing services to patients earlier than when we publicly launch a product. Moreover, you would imagine the services that you provide to patients would be the ones that actually, the beta service that you provide to patients would be the ones that you'd have reviews for. Obviously, because they do the services prior to the company actually launching the services publicly. So, that's it. That's the answer.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  So you were using the service before, maybe a year ago or something, then you announced the service, and that's why the...

• 1:10:46Kian Sadeghi?

  We had a request, John, to do embryo analyses probably three years ago.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Kian Sadeghi?

  I would wager that, you know, that actually was probably one of the first times before any of these companies

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:58Kian Sadeghi?

  to actually provide this sort of services. So we didn't think about this for a long, long time.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. Yeah, it makes sense. It's a very logical place to go. It's also a very competitive industry. There's a bunch of reasons why you'd want to play in that space. What about the delta or the perceived gap between the marketing claims? What's on the billboard? What's in the New York subway? I'm seeing 50% IQ, 80% height. They feel like bold claims. What's actually possible? What can customers actually get from Nucleus today? What could they get a year ago when you were beta testing the product? What, I want to interrogate the gap there.

• 1:11:40Kian Sadeghi?

  So, to be clear, there is no gap.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Great.

• 1:11:44Kian Sadeghi?

  Have a healthier baby.

• 1:11:47Kian Sadeghi?

  Have a taller baby, have a smarter baby.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:50Kian Sadeghi?

  IQ is fifty percent genetic.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:52Kian Sadeghi?

  Height is eighty percent genetic. These are just facts of the matter.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Kian Sadeghi?

  The the the latter two are herdability estimates. They are what they are.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:59Kian Sadeghi?

  Um, the former two are basically describing what you can do with nucleus.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:03Kian Sadeghi?

  What what I think is interesting here is actually broader commentary. Nucleus is bringing the science mainstream. We are taking it out of the little echelons of the rationalist community, the little echelons of the the the the scholars going back and forth at it, out of the Twitter alleyway. And we're bringing it to the actual people who will benefit and use these services.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:24Kian Sadeghi?

  I cannot tell you when you actually talk to a patient, not somebody on tech Twitter. When you talk to a patient, they have no idea this technology exists.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:32Kian Sadeghi?

  And the first time they're discovering it is when they go and they actually see the campaign in the subway.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:36Kian Sadeghi?

  And now I think it's personally good for the entire industry, right? Where you actually bring broader awareness, it lifts everybody, us, our competitors, and makes this actually more and more into a space. It's very early. My my advice to our competitors is just focus on serving your patients.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:52Kian Sadeghi?

  Because at the end of the day, the market's huge and this market is extremely in its infancy.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I and I and I think they would push back and say the industry can't afford to be sloppy. And I think that the

• 1:13:07Kian Sadeghi?

  I agree.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  The I think it's a fair allegation that some of the ways that nucleus materials have been presented have been sloppy. Uh, do you, I I guess one question I have is

• 1:13:23Kian Sadeghi?

  Gordy, what are you specifically talking about? What has been sloppy?

• 1:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, specifically the like the reviews, the reviews are sloppy.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  I I I totally understand. Specifically using using an AI image or using a stock image without making it clear that that this is anonymized because of HIPAA. If it just said, if it if it said at the bottom and there are little asterisks and said anonymized because of HIPAA, I think everyone would be like, oh, yeah, that makes sense like they made a choice. And I think that's like the first thing that I would count as like sloppy.

• 1:13:52Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah, that's that's fair.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Kian Sadeghi?

  That's fair.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:54Kian Sadeghi?

  And we're gonna update that. Would you do you think that, you know, that's proportional to the temperature on Twitter?

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  I think this is the most politically charged category in technology. And you can't afford to, you can't like, basically the industry as a whole, I don't think can afford to make a lot of mistakes. I completely agree. This is the, this is the gonna involve the health of, of the children of all the industries, you know, clients. Yeah. Uh, there were allegations too, that you guys were sort of had updated a test result on the fly. I have no idea if this is true, but I saw the claim going around, somebody had gotten a certain test result. And then, uh, it had been updated two weeks later. Yeah. What's going on there? What's happening? That's super interesting.

• 1:14:40Kian Sadeghi?

  Nucleus, remember guys, unlike these other players, we've served thousands of patients.

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:14:45Kian Sadeghi?

  And if you can go on our website right now and use our product, they can see our services, right? I mean, I think it's really funny what's flying around when someone could just go and buy a DNA kit and see the product for themselves.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. So the idea that we updated a model, we've updated models for the last several years. I mean, results will change. We make that very clear. And by the way, any embryo selection company, Nucleus is full stack. We do adult DNA testing analysis. We also do the embryo and also do a full end to end IVF experience. Right? We're kind of multi-product, but these models will evolve. But one, one point here, just important John to mention, people have a very good intuition when it comes to AI that chat GPT is going to be better next week. Grok's going to be better two months from now. The same expectation has to be communicated to the genetic optimization industry. The main limitation for building polygenic predictors are, is data. It's a data problem. And so what's going to happen is all the different polygenic predictors are going to be approximately equivalent.

• 1:15:40Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. Until we get more and more and more and more and more data, or people get more and more access to data. That is the fundamental bottleneck of the industry. In other words, similar to actually the AI situation, all the value is going to shift downstream to the application layer. The reason why, the reason why people are so upset is because Nucleus has excellent science, rigorous science. And we have excellent marketing, excellent product, and we've served more patients than all the companies put together. And so.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay. But if, but if, but if somebody gets a result and.

• 1:16:15Kian Sadeghi?

  Yes.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  They make a decision based on that. And then a few weeks later, you come in and you say, actually. It was the opposite. It was, it was different than what we said, but they've ultimately made a decision that they cannot correct. Is there a regulatory framework?

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a tough, that's a very tough situation.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Is there a regulatory framework that requires you to communicate to patients that?

• 1:16:37Kian Sadeghi?

  100%.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  And do you guys do that?

• 1:16:39Kian Sadeghi?

  We're a CLIA certified, of course. We're a CLIA certified capital credit laboratory. Any single time an update is made, it will be reflected in the physician report of the respective customer. And also importantly, remember, there's a lot of disclosures, a lot of different consents people have to sign when they sign up for genetic testing services. One of them is, of course, that the results can and will be updated, and that applies to everybody in the industry. And that, by the way, applies to any lab-developed test. The tests are getting better as more data comes in. Software improves. That is the nature of how these things go. That's why the nucleus is very upfront with, when very upfront if results do update or change.

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm, I'm super, yeah, yeah. I mean, we were, we were talking about like, there, there is a world, and this, I think this is why the marketing is really like so important for what you do. There are so many other industries where if, if, you know, if, if I'm, if I'm watching, and if I see a billboard for Instagram and it says like, "The most entertaining images on the internet," and I download it and like, I'm like, "This isn't as entertaining as YouTube." Like, I feel like, ah, whatever, you know, it's not that big of a deal. But, but the worst thing that could happen is, is, you know, someone does nucleus with their, their embryo. It's, it's accurate, but there's a minus sign in front of everything. So instead of like the tall and smart one, they get the shorter, dumber one, and then they can never go back from that.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  And it's this weird scenario. And so I, I, I do think that there's a, I, I, I think that that you're, you're potentially correct that the, the temperature on Twitter is, is high, but it is a very high stakes industry.

• 1:18:14Kian Sadeghi?

  Very high stakes.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  I think this is, I think it is appropriate that, that, that you will just kind of need to deal with this for a while. I would love some background on this idea of the implications of, of, of scores changing. I feel like that happened with 23andMe. I feel like that was the promise of 23andMe, was that you do it, and then as more data comes in, you can opt into extra studies. How did they solve that? Have you studied that business or any other previous DNA testing businesses? To understand how to actually wrestle with that issue of the changing results over time as more data is created?

• 1:18:53Kian Sadeghi?

  So there's a couple of things to unpack there.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:18:56Kian Sadeghi?

  The first is that you don't want to be a widget.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:02Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay, fundamentally, 23 is a widget. They thought that with their data, they could be able to actually eventually mine drugs, uh, which because of the limited nature of their data, it's actually not best for drug discovery. Um, but on the whole genome front, maybe you could, maybe you could argue, okay, that, you know, that won't be a problem if ever a company wanted to do that. But actually, there's a meta point here about the genetics industry, which is, I think, and this is, you know, kind of for me, which is, I think that too often people focus on the genetic test. It's not actually about the tech test, right? Usually people have a very specific acute problem they want to solve. In the IVF context, it's about, for example, having their best baby. So you'll see more and more patients are signing up for Nucleus to do IVF. And it's IVF that's full stack powered by our genetic stack.

• 1:19:46Kian Sadeghi?

  Because what's really unique about Nucleus as a business is because we've done the adult DNA testing, right, for, for many years now. Um, and then now we also do the embryo analysis. So we can actually build a new kind of IVF experience called IVF Plus, um, that is centered around giving parents as much information as possible into their embryos. And notice that shift there, John. You go from being a widget to actually trying to serve a process, a workflow that exists, and that if anyone who wants to have a baby has to undergo.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  One thing that Kremu was kind of hammering that I'm, I hope I don't botch, was something about, uh, 12 snips versus a million snips. Previous data required a lot more genetic information. You were, you, Nucleus was making the claim that you could get just as much signal from much less data. Is that right? What is your reaction to, uh, his, his, his take that, uh, it would be impossible for Nucleus to derive such a strong signal about the impact of genetic information from such a small data set?

• 1:20:53Kian Sadeghi?

  My response is the models are go are public. Go check them. I mean, the models are public.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  I mean, to be clear, he also said that he tried to get access to the model and that he couldn't. But but you're saying that he's lying about that. Okay.

• 1:21:05Kian Sadeghi?

  It's a complete, a complete lie.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:07Kian Sadeghi?

  It is just false.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  So so so it is incumbent upon him that he proved that he that he applied or something like that. I don't know. I doubt he took screenshots of his.

• 1:21:15Kian Sadeghi?

  I don't know. I mean, he wants. Yeah, I mean, also, by the way, we'll give the report. We'll give the weights.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:19Kian Sadeghi?

  Just just go literally mynucleus.com slash labs.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:22Kian Sadeghi?

  Go on there. It says origin, open weight, like open weight, you know? Instead of all this debacle, all this Twitter nonsense, the message to the scientific community, the message to Twitter is go check the weights. And not just that, our models are public.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:37Kian Sadeghi?

  Yours are not. Make your models public and we can actually have a conversation then.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  What about the allegations of of plagiarism, copying from a different paper? When I looked at it, it didn't look like, you know, I'm not equipped to to to evaluate if it's a direct copy or not. Is is it scientific best practice to stand on the shoulders of giants and pull from, you know, what the best researcher doing? Even if they're at your competitors or was something else more sinister going on or maybe a mistake?

• 1:22:12Kian Sadeghi?

  I think the thing to remember is like, you know, a lot of research, like if you think about like the in AI context, right? It's like attention is all you need, right? They will use that paper.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. The transformer paper has gone everywhere.

• 1:22:23Kian Sadeghi?

  It's the same thing. What are you going to say? A Google stole like OpenAI stole it from Google?

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:27Kian Sadeghi?

  Come on, you're not going to say that because it's public research. And so it actually comes back to the fact that nucleus is bringing this technology mainstream.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:35Kian Sadeghi?

  Our campaign is succeeding in every metric. Sales are up, signups are up. We have multiple articles covering the campaign. People are starting a national conversation as we saw on Twitter. And I think people want to try to tear nucleus down because we have excellent science. And science, excellent science is the first step to building a very successful biotech business. And this is what I think a lot of the armchair philosophers on Twitter don't fully grasp, which is. In order to actually build a successful business, you need to have each and every single one of these components, John. It's very easy for a scientist that's never actually built a business, that's never actually tried to sell to a normal person, right? To say, oh, the marketing is extreme. Oh, the marketing is over the top. Oh, the marketing is this.

• 1:23:18Kian Sadeghi?

  The marketing is helping a patient identify a genetic risk that they would unknowingly pass on to their child. There was a patient recently who, they were doing IVF with Nucleus and they identified that they actually had a gastric cancer. Um, colorectal cancer marker, actually, excuse me. And that, that marker doesn't just impact their health, it also impacts their future child's health. So what did they do? They chose an embryo without that specific genetic marker. And they took themselves precautions to make sure that they don't get cancer. And so that's what Nucleus is about, and we're going to keep serving patients.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Um, uh, sorry to everyone, we're having a little bit of trouble with the stream. Uh, this has been a fascinating conversation. Um, I, I, I like the, uh, the gauntlet being thrown down on the next step here actually being, get, let's get the models in everyone's hands because that seems to be a fundamental disagreement here. Uh, you're saying that you'll give them the, the model, give them the data, they're saying that they can't get it. Well, the next step out of this debate, I think that could silence a lot of the armchair philosophers.

• 1:24:26Jordi Hays?

  What, what, uh, do you, do you care about rebuilding trust with the broader community on X because?

• 1:24:34Kian Sadeghi?

  Yes, absolutely. And that's why I came here.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And then, and then I guess like what, what are kind of the, what are the handful of things that you're committed to doing to, to make that happen?

• 1:24:48Kian Sadeghi?

  A lot of things. One is the AI thing. I think, you know, we should fix that, as mentioned, right? Make it more clear that it's, um, AI images that people want to be under prepped under HIPAA. That's one thing I think we should do. Another thing is that, you know, and this is originally why we made the models actually public. Is because we need to be more clear that people can go and actually test and check this stuff, right? In some sense, like a company can do something, but if people aren't aware of it, that's also my responsibility as CEO, right? And so part of the reasons why I'm saying, hey, the models are public, come, come submit, get to them, is clearly there's an information gap there. That for whatever reason wasn't filled in by Nucleus and we have to do better. And the last thing I think which is really important is sometimes, you know, on Twitter, this, this one personally hurt me.

• 1:25:34Kian Sadeghi?

  Um, I, the, the amount of time we've spent making the product

• 1:25:40Kian Sadeghi?

  in a way that people can try to understand, where it's, shows the error, error bars, for example, where you, you can't full, you can see that there's signal, but there's not a lot of signal. Or in some cases, there might be a lot of signal with something like height, right? Um, the amount of time and effort and product design and, and, and, and, and science and, and, and sort of like, like sci- scientific communication specifically, it's been years. Nucleus has been around for six years. I've done this for years, trying to get that right. When you see the embryo on your smartphone, it's easy to look at that and just write it off, right? I encourage everyone to go on pickyourbaby.com, go to them to flow, click around, look at our disclosures, look at the way we present information, right?

• 1:26:21Kian Sadeghi?

  It really is, um, it, it, it, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of effort, right? And I think that is something that I'm thinking about, how do we, how can we better put the product out there? Because I think when people can't see something, when they can't see the product, or they can't see the science, then they start ruminating. So that's what I really, really want to do, and how do we better kind of connect? And also, honestly, I think I need to be also more mindful. I mean, clearly, I've inadvertently, I've pissed some people off. And that's understandable. That, that feedback's taken in. Okay. I'll be more mindful, because I really, really, really, really, it's, it, nothing is more important to me than a patient coming to Nucleus, getting the highest quality care, in every sense.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you for taking the time to break all of this down. Uh, we are fighting through some technical issues, completely unrelated to, uh, what's going on.

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Somebody didn't, somebody didn't want this interview to happen.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Somebody didn't want this interview to happen. I don't know, but, uh, we really appreciate you taking the time to hop on and, and, uh, set the record straight, uh, give your side of the story and explain, uh, what you think folks are getting wrong on the various issues here. Uh, it's an incredibly detailed, incredibly important discussion, and we really thank you for taking the time to talk to us.

• 1:27:38Kian Sadeghi?

  Thank you, John. Thank you, Jordan.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let's go back to the timeline. We do have more guests if you are tuning in because of that debate. The chat is active, but we don't know the status of the stream. The chat is saying that the stock is crashing because of course, we're having stream issues. I don't necessarily think we gotta put this on us. You know, there's all sorts of, you know, independent state actors that have attacked us in the past. We've had major outages from the hyperscalers. You know, Nvidia put out a statement saying that they're not Enron, but that doesn't mean that they're

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  not somehow responsible for our stream lagging in quality. Who knows? You have no idea what's going on, why our stream is having issues. All I know is that it's not our fault. That's for sure. There's definitely nothing that we did.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Cremu says, "Kian is now dodging the question about Mendelian disease. He flagged for a patient and then revised on this is illegal without notifying the patient." He's saying, "It's just a model update. This is not something you update on. Mendelians are definite. You have it or you do not."

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Yes. Interesting. Well, we have Joe Weisenthal from Bloomberg joining. I'm very excited to get an update from him. Oh, he's here. Welcome to the stream. Thanks for having me. It's been too long. It has been too long. We're sort of fighting for our life on the stream, but the conversation between us should be fine. We had a very dramatic debate in this, in the bio context. I don't know if any of this bubbled up to you, but this anonymous poster, Cremu, is alleging that this company, Nucleus-

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  You might have, you might have seen some Subway ads. Have a healthier baby.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:35Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know if I've seen ads. I've seen the photos of the ads and I know that they're the subway stops that I sometimes go to.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Joe Weisenthal?

  But I actually don't know if I've seen the ads. I'm gonna look for one tomorrow morning. I'm gonna go to this, uh, the stop that I've seen those photos. I'll take my, I'll verify my own photo.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  We were, we were joking about this, that, uh, there's something about New York subway advertising that's like uniquely viral and every company, no matter where they're based, just wants to, they, they see New York only as a place to run out of home and then go viral. Uh, this has happened a number of times. Friend.com, I'm sure. Did, did you actually see the friend.com campaign in person?

• 1:30:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I definitely saw it and without fail, every single one was vandalized, period. There was not a single exception.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Really? That's true? Every single one?

• 1:30:17Joe Weisenthal?

  A hundred percent, a hundred percent of the ones that I saw were vandalized.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:30:20Joe Weisenthal?

  Zero, zero exceptions. And they're all over the place.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  They were all over LA. There was one that it's, it's, it's right on the drive from the gym to the, to our office, to our, to our studio. And, but it's hilarious because it's a billboard that's directly up against a wall. So you can't see the full ad. You just see end.com and it just is very ominous. Like this is the end. And it's clear because the, the buy was so broad that they didn't think that, oh yeah, that one's actually not valuable at all.

• 1:30:48Joe Weisenthal?

  I love that. I love that they literally, they just spammed real life. That's what happened, right?

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:30:53Joe Weisenthal?

  They spammed the physical world.

• 1:30:54John Coogan?

  And it was getting worse and worse. Uh, they were, they were spamming Los Angeles and then I live in a suburb of Los Angeles, Pasadena. And then one day I'm driving around my hometown, which is very quaint and sort of out of the loop. It's not, it's not the San Francisco hubbub. It's not Teapot. It's, it's Pasadena. It's a very chill suburb. And I see a friend.com ad billboard and I'm like, I can't believe you followed me here. It's following me everywhere. It follows me on the internet, follows me to LA, follows me to Pasadena. I can't get away from it. Uh,

• 1:31:22Joe Weisenthal?

  It's like clicking on an ad, you know, it's like, or something. And then you just get, you know, served that same ad over and over again, except this one is real life.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  I, I do wonder if the, uh, if the rage bait, if the, if these like, because there's these small campaigns from these like tech startups that are, in one way, you know, I, I criticize them. We criticize them here on the show. But, uh, you know, I, I think that in some ways, these are just, you know, pranksters on the internet. These are young entrepreneurs figuring out how to get attention. I'm somewhat sympathetic. But at the same time, I do see that there are, uh, there are people that make political decisions based on this stuff. Um, have you been following like the tech lash and all of this, like the data center news?

• 1:32:01Joe Weisenthal?

  I've heard, yeah, absolutely. I've heard of it. I've heard that there's a bit of a backlash brewing, yes.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  How, how real do you think it is? And do you think it's going to be more power driven or water driven?

• 1:32:13Joe Weisenthal?

  I think it's going to be very real. I actually think it's going to be very, I, yeah, it could be all the, I think it's very real. Um, I mean, I really wonder, um, who is in, even in the 20, you know, 2028 or even 2026, who is going to run on anything that actually is like, oh no, actually data centers are good. AI is an important industry of the future. Um, you know, actually the power stuff has been overstated. The water stuff has been dramatically overstated. I have a hard time seeing any politician actually running on that case. It seems like anyone, Democrat or Republican, it feels like they almost have to be automatically against data centers for some reason. And I think you're right. Like, I think that there is, um, people have some intuition. They don't like AI companies. They don't like big tech, whatever.

• 1:32:58Joe Weisenthal?

  And then they fill in whatever seems satisfying. So, I don't know. I think the water stuff seems like the most out there and disconnected from reality, but all, and so therefore the people who are most disconnected from reality will probably latch on to the water stuff. Um, the people who are a little more sort of, I don't know, normie in their views about how the uh, economy will maybe talk about the electricity. And then people who just dislike the sort of broader effect of tech and all these different things, they're probably going to talk about the slop and how it's ruining society, which maybe it is, I'm not really sure. But it does feel like there is something to your, to your point, there's something for literally everyone to latch on to in the anti-AI fight.

• 1:33:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Anyone can have their thing which resonates with them, in which case it's like hard to see where the constituency is to build these things. So I think what you end up is probably a lot of entities, you know, looking for places in the middle of nowhere in Texas, where they could set up their own natural gas plant and their own gas turbines or something. And, you know, stay, stay off the grid as long as they can.

• 1:34:00John Coogan?

  We gotta get a politician who's just like, you know what, like, uh, this stuff's delightful. Have you seen a Studio Ghibli? I like a Studio Ghibli. I like a Suno song.

• 1:34:11Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's someone will like, who is it like, just even when you say that, though, like, it's hard to imagine who that politician is or what the case that they make, you know, so few people write today. I mean, I use some AI tool basically every day, look up something, you know.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  Who speaks for us? Who speaks for the constituents that do one deep research report every couple of days and they and they use the thinking models to answer some questions every once in a while and they generate some funny images every once in a while. And then they kind of move on. And then they come back to it in a little bit.

• 1:34:46Joe Weisenthal?

  And then it's like, oh, they have a new, they have a new thing out. Let me, I'll run my battery of tests that I do with every new model, the questions that I always ask. It's pretty good. No, I think it's gonna be, it's a real, it's gonna be really tricky politically. I think, and I really think it'll be huge because just to, you know, the labor market is soft. So here is this, and electricity prices are high. So and granted, we don't know what the conditions are going to be in 2026 or 2028. But right now, you have people who are, you know, in the AI industry, obviously, many of them, in fact, talking about the potential for AI to displace significant amounts of labor. Who's gonna vote for that? Like, how is that? Again, I could envision some world in which like, human life is a lot better

• 1:35:29Joe Weisenthal?

  when we've been freed from many laborious tasks. But in today, or tomorrow, or 2026, it's hard to see like, what is the thing that gets people excited?

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, pre-internet, pre-internet, it would have been a lot easier for Silicon Valley to navigate, navigate this tech trend, this like technological cycle, because you could have been going to the capital markets and saying, well, you actually want to give me $100 billion because I'm going to deplace, you know, millions of jobs and all these categories, and we're going to capture some percentage of that. And then, and then you could go to the everyday people, you could go to the media and say, you know, we're going to create super abundance for everyone, and there won't be any jobs, and you're gonna, you're gonna have an army of robots that, that, you know, run your whole life, and it's just gonna be this beautiful utopia. And now, people go on one podcast, and they

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  want to talk about job displacement, and they go on another podcast, and they talk about utopia. And the same people end up seeing both of them, and it just doesn't, it doesn't work.

• 1:36:36Joe Weisenthal?

  I couldn't agree with you anymore on this specific point. No, for real. I think this is like one of the defining phenomenons of our time, which is that there is no such thing as segmenting audience. And this is a phenomenon that occurs across all sorts of different realms, whether we're talking about politics or Wall Street, etc. Historically, people talk differently to different groups, and that's just very normal, etc. And you tell one story to someone. If you can't do that anymore at all, everything in any context is implicitly understood, including inter- internal company communications, right?

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Where we expect everything to leak, and you expect someone to, any memo that you share. So all internal communications can't really have any candor anymore, because that all reads as PR, because that's expected to leak in some way.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and every single person running a lab has had something where, six years ago, they were on a mic saying confidently, "It's very likely that AI will kill all of us on a long enough time horizon." And then that resurfaces today.

• 1:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's not actually getting Or even worse, they'll say like, "One of my worst nightmares is that this happens, and that's why I'm working to stop that scenario." And then people just remember.

• 1:37:42Joe Weisenthal?

  That's why I worked to build it.

• 1:37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, but this is a weird thing about AI specifically, too, which is that we're sort of at this point, where several technologies that we, maybe we were really excited about at some point in the past, years down the line, like, "Oh, we didn't really think," or "This turned out to be not so great," or "We don't really love the effect that this is having on society," and so forth. AI seems very strange and distinct from anything else I can think of in memory, where from day one, even before it really existed, the people invested in it and sort of working on it have talked about its downsides in frequently dramatic, dramatic terms, such as you're describing. So it's very different than any other technology, where usually the downsides only become apparent years and years after they've sort of suffused and soaked into society. Here, they're talked about from day one.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  Okay. Last week, there were two headlines that I was trying to turn into some sort of pithy phrase or headline. I couldn't really land it, but I'd love your feedback. So Nvidia beat earnings, and we got a jobs beat. And so I was riffing, I was like, "Demand for robots and humans through the roof?"

• 1:38:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  Is that what's going on, or am I misunderstanding the jobs numbers? Was that less impressive than people thought?

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  The October jobs report is canceled.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  And the GDP.

• 1:38:59Joe Weisenthal?

  So the, um, yeah, I'll say a few things. I mean, that's September, that jobs report is from September. It feels like a lifetime ago. You know, the other thing too, is that although it did, the pace of job creation for September did come in higher than expected. Once again, job creation was actually negative if you include healthcare and social care work, which is a thing that I think I've talked about a couple of times when I've caught up with you guys. But those are the jobs that we would really like to see AI liberate us from, right? Like, it would be really nice if you could actually have robots change the bedpans of seniors or other, these things that are sort of low productivity jobs, jobs that for many people are low paid, kind of miserable in many cases, et cetera. So I think what's

• 1:39:42Joe Weisenthal?

  going on unfortunately is that we're in this environment in which job creation overall for most sectors is pretty mediocre, including finance, including tech, et cetera. The one thing that keeps powering us forward are these sort of menial, low-paid jobs in healthcare, service sector, taking care of seniors, et cetera. And I don't know, it feels like we're very long, very long until anything AI robot related is actually getting into that sector. But that would be the dream, right? I mean, that's what, that would be the dream to

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  That was the original

• 1:40:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Make progress in that front.

• 1:40:17John Coogan?

  I mean, elder care was the original pitch of Honda Asimo back in like 2000 or 1999. It was like, yeah, this robot's gonna bring the meal to the, to the old person in the sick bed.

• 1:40:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Wouldn't that be amazing?

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. And there are, to be fair, there are some robotic, like, you know, with wheels on it, rolls around, does some stuff.

• 1:40:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Certainly not broad deployments by any means.

• 1:40:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Not, yeah, not broad deployment, not at the scale. And so what happens is we have this economy where, you know, the unemployment rate is still, still pretty low by historical standards, although it's gone up a fair amount a little bit in the last year. But there's just so much pressure being put on the existing labor force to care for the aging population. It creates some pretty serious trends.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. How you've been tracking the, just the AI spending bubble, uh, this idea of, you know, massive growth debt coming into tech for the first time in a long time. I feel like a lot of tech people are so used to the venture capital model. Okay. Yeah. It might be a hundred million at risk, but this is, you know, 1% of overall allocation. There's a bunch of LPs from foundations. It's very diversified. And if that company goes bust, that's fine because another company's going to do great. Now we're looking at serious numbers. We're getting to trillions. There's debt involved. People don't know how to manage with that and deal with that. How are you processing it?

• 1:41:38Joe Weisenthal?

  It was sort of a real wake up call to me when I started seeing people online post screenshots of credit default swaps on Oracle debt. Like that was the moment where it was like, oh, this really has transformed from the sort of equity funded, free cash flow funded environment, which is characterized tech for, you know, over two decades, really going back to, uh, until the, the telecom bubble. So as soon as you, and I know these companies have debt. I mean, you see them. Apple has debt. They've had it for a long time. A lot of these debt issuance though, in recent years have been more or less like exercises in cash flow management or optimizing taxes and stuff like that. Now it feels like, okay, like this debt is at a very real scale where I'm looking

• 1:42:21Joe Weisenthal?

  at CoreWeave credit default swaps, Oracle credit default swaps, et cetera. That is to my mind, a signal of, of course, something's changing. Um, Blue Owl, they're publicly traded. That's the private credit company that's gone in with Meta to do some data center financing. That stock, I think, has become a bit of a proxy for how people perceive some of the financing risk in that space. The deal that, um, we have an episode coming out, um, I think sometime next week, actually, where we talk a little bit about how the credit construction of these events. The founder of this company, Noetic, which, um, does, uh, uses AI to examine, uh, credit agreements,

• 1:43:05Joe Weisenthal?

  actually walked us through it. It's some fascinating stuff, but people are sort of looking at, okay, who is the real bag holder here? What is the risk of, you know? People are talking about, obviously, what is the risk if there is not as much value in these GPUs five years from now as we may have thought? And to your point, that's just totally novel for tech in recent years. It doesn't feel like we've, it's been so long since the idea of debt or leverage in that way has been part of the tech story.

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What did you, what did you make of Nvidia sending out that report for the sell side over the weekend? And then, and then again, they had a, they had another post, they had another post today. I'll just read it in case anyone's just tuning in. This morning, let's see, they've, we covered it at the beginning of the show. "We're delighted by Google's success. They've made some great advances in AI and we continue to supply to Google. Nvidia is a generation ahead of the industry. It's the only platform that runs every AI model and does it everywhere computing is done. Nvidia offers greater performance, versatility, fungibility than ASICs, which are designed for specific AI frameworks or functions."

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  So again, not, not like, these are, these are meant to be confidence inspiring, but they come off the, you know, they have the opposite effect.

• 1:44:22Joe Weisenthal?

  It's really weird. The tweet, like, I guess I sort of understood, okay, so they sent out that note, you know, look, as I mentioned, over the last several weeks, for some reason, Wall Street has got really taken in with this whole conversation about GPU depreciation schedules. Maybe, I think, Michael Burry's been talking about it or something. Okay, fine, like, this has taken hold. I am sure this is the, the type of thing where for every hundred people who are talking about this, maybe one knows what they're actually talking about. Like, I have no doubt that there's all kinds of noise out there, and so maybe it makes sense for Nvidia to like, oh, let's, let's put out some information that we have. Like, I guess it's a little weird, but okay, like, I, I sort of get it, given the degree

• 1:45:05Joe Weisenthal?

  to which this has just become a meme in the last few weeks. The tweet about Google is a little strange. Like, it's just very, it's, here is the, here's the biggest, most powerful company in the entire world, and they're doing this sort of weird. We're excited to see, we're happy for your success, and it's odd.

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  It reminded me of Jensen's comment on the, on the OpenAI AMD deal, where it was like, "I'm not a snarky," he was saying something like, "I'm kind of surprised they would, they're so excited about their new chip, I'm surprised they would give away 10% of their company before they've even developed it." So, so again, to me, I feel like when you're operating from a position of strength and confidence, you never, you never talk about competitors from official channels. I, in fact, I had, I've given, I've given this advice very recently where like there's a, a company that every time their competitor does something, they post about it. Guess that, guess, guess the revenue difference.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Quote tweet too. It's so much easier to just be like, like our esteemed, our, the other members of our industry or like the other big tech companies would do it this way or like other handset makers or other smartphone makers and everyone knows that you're talking about Google or iPhone or whatever you're comparing to, but you dress it up.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  In this case, the company that they always talk about has a hundred times their revenue. And so, and so it, and so it screams like, it screams like we're obsessed with our competitor. But in this case, it's like the TPU is just like the first sign of an external.

• 1:46:43Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. And you immediately like pounce on them and you're like, you know, I've been thinking, I mean, one of the funny things about Jensen and Nvidia overall is you think about these other mega cap tech companies and these other ultra-rich CEOs, you know, they've been dominant for, in most of these cases for like well over a decade, right? They've been some of the most powerful companies in the entire world for over a decade, obviously. Nvidia is sort of this weird case because, you know, four years ago, people were talking about, oh, this is the company that makes chips for Ethereum mining or this is like, that was what, how a lot of people talked about Nvidia. I think even as, yeah, as recently as 2021, people were talking about, oh, Nvidia is, so it might be a little bit.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  People don't remember, uh, before there was the Mag7, there was Fang and there was an N in Fang. And what was the, it was Netflix. It was not Nvidia. It was Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google. And then crazy to not include Microsoft, right? And they, so they added Microsoft and they took out Netflix and then they added Nvidia and Tesla, of course. Um, but yeah, well, I mean, what, what a, what a wild drive for Jensen.

• 1:47:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Like what a run. I mean, obviously like Nvidia's been an incredibly successful company, but it went from like a, you know, pretty successful. Chip company to the biggest company in the world in a matter of few years.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Maybe there's something there. Maybe there's still a chip on the shoulder. Maybe there's still some culture of feeling like it's the underdog and something where it's like, yeah, it's like act like you've been here.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's one, it's one thing.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  The tenure thing is real, like there's, yeah.

• 1:48:20Jordi Hays?

  So here's the thing, if you're a startup.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  And Google enters your market. I've seen a lot of founder or like a big company. If you get Sherlocked by Apple, you're going to hit the timeline and be like, I'm delighted by, by Apple's new mobile app. We're delighted, we're delighted to continue serving.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they validated the, the market.

• 1:48:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you for, thank you, Apple for validating our industry, right?

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:43Joe Weisenthal?

  But I don't think, I don't think Nvidia needs, Nvidia doesn't exactly need validation at this point from a competitor.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  And the TPU is a decade old, by the way.

• 1:48:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Right. It's been around for a while. And all, right. And all like that, which is another sort of interesting dimension of all of this, which is like suddenly people wake up and oh, it's not like, to your point, I mean, we've, people have been talking about the existence of uh, Google's TPUs for a long time. Obviously, now there's been some question about the degree, what's the strategy here? Would they ever sell them? Will they rent them out? There have been obviously questions, et cetera. But it is funny how, you know, you get these moments where suddenly, you know, you get this 180 over the last several months, weeks on Google, the Gemini three launch, of course, bolstering this idea. Oh, actually they're at a good space. And suddenly, oh, and they also had these TPUs, which they've had and been working on for a long time.

• 1:49:35Joe Weisenthal?

  But nothing really changed. They've had them for a while. There's not some new breakthrough announcement here or something. And so suddenly Nvidia feeling like it has to respond. A little strange.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it, it, it like, uh, I, I do think that like, there's so much demand that, uh, it's a little bit ridiculous to just be like, oh, and Nvidia is completely over. Uh, but at the same time, like, it's never great when you go from a monopoly to a duopoly. Like, it's just that, like, it's always nice to be in a less competitive market and, uh,

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the same time, it's like if, if AI, if AI is literally half as transformative as.

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  The AI bowls thing, it doesn't matter. Like, you can have two players and the demand is so overwhelming that...

• 1:50:17Joe Weisenthal?

  And like Nvidia's own sales are capped, right? By capacity and by production capacity. There's only so much, which is another sort of like interesting dimension that I'm like trying to get a better understanding of here, which is that, you know, again, it's not like search or AI or chatbots, et cetera. There is the, there are these constraining effects on the markets from how much fab capacity is at TSMC or how many, some of this underlying equipment. So the ability of anyone to scale up dramatically and expand the overall size of the market is sort of tough at this point. I don't know exactly what that means, but it feels like my guess is, I, my assumption,

• 1:50:59Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't, would be that everyone remains pretty capacity constrained for some time. It doesn't, I don't think there's like a tons of, tons of chips laying out there for the taking right now.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us an update on Odd Lots. Is, people have been congratulating you on 10 years. Did the 10-year date happen recently?

• 1:51:19Joe Weisenthal?

  The 10-year date did happen. We didn't even, you know, it's funny, I think it was, I think it was November 6th. I got an email. So we have a party, which you both are invited to. We have a party in New York City in December to celebrate our 10 years. So we've been sort of, that's right.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Why do you play the night vision sound?

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Fire me up.

• 1:51:41Joe Weisenthal?

  But so we were like getting ready for that. We've been doing some sort of 10-year episode. We're talking to some big names and, you know, big, big, big picture thinkers and stuff like that. But I didn't realize the actual date until the morning of it. I started getting random emails from people inside the company congratulating me, congratulating us on 10 years. But it's pretty crazy.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Let's hit the gong 10 times.

• 1:52:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  10 times.

• 1:52:03Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow, 10 times gone.

• 1:52:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you. There we go. That's, this has been the highlight, the 10, the 10 Gong Smashers. This has been the highlight so far of our 10 year anniversary.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  Who's, who's the most recent 10 year guest that, that was, that exemplified that like bigger picture thinker?

• 1:52:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. Well, we had Ray Dalio on the podcast on Monday, which was a lot of fun. He told us about meditation. He talked to us about the importance of transparent culture, about the importance of letting junior staffers or junior employees at Bridgewater attack the senior employees.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  I loved his story about the first stock he ever bought.

• 1:52:47Joe Weisenthal?

  I know, I know.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  Hilarious. I don't know if he tells that constantly. I haven't listened to every possible.

• 1:52:51Joe Weisenthal?

  He probably does. He probably does.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  But it's such a, he's just like, he's just like, I saw it and it was the cheapest stock he could possibly buy.

• 1:52:58Joe Weisenthal?

  It was the cheapest nominal stock.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  It was like $5 a share.

• 1:53:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  He's retail. It's a retail army. They, I mean, it's like in crypto when they're like, it's 000001 cent a token. Imagine if it's a dollar and you'll be like, I have so much money.

• 1:53:12Joe Weisenthal?

  Can we talk about that for a second? It's really annoying with some of these crypto prices to have to like squint and see how many zeros there are. They need some reverse splits. I really think like, we need to go, we need to like $1, $2. But no, to your point, right? It's, it's basically for, I don't want to be insulting, but it's basically like the dumbest. It's trying to attract the dumbest kind of trader there is. When you're like, oh, this is cheap because it's one one millionth of a cent or whatever. You're still early.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, I mean.

• 1:53:41Joe Weisenthal?

  You're still early. Imagine if this were a dollar.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  I remember the Doge to a dollar campaign. I remember Doge to a dollar.

• 1:53:46Joe Weisenthal?

  That was a very powerful meme.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  It was very powerful. These things, these things are real.

• 1:53:50Joe Weisenthal?

  I thought it was going to get there because I think it got to like 30 something cents or, so I was like, oh, it's like, it's definitely going to satisfy the meme. It never made, it never made it there.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  I thought it was going to get there because I put my whole paycheck in it.

• 1:54:01Joe Weisenthal?

  I really thought it was, I was like, oh, it's obviously gonna go to a dollar.

• 1:54:04John Coogan?

  It did seem like the meme was gonna work, but it got close.

• 1:54:08Joe Weisenthal?

  It got close, yeah.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you aware of a single person that has sold their primary residence in New York and is going to, going elsewhere since the election? What's been the, what's been the sentiment? I know a bunch of former Odd Lots guests are on the transition.

• 1:54:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Are in the, are on the, yeah.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Which is cool, cause you guys have some insight into like, how these people think and the public does.

• 1:54:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I have not heard of anyone who is leaving New York City. It's interesting, there's a, I don't know the name of the brokerage, but there is one of the brokers in New York runs these ads, speaking of outdoor ads, in the taxis. And prior to the election, they're very scaremongery and they were like talking about deals in Florida and all this like real estate that you could buy in Florida, et cetera. Anyway, after the election, I saw one of the ads this week and it was talking about how JP Morgan just opened up its new headquarters in New York City and how all of the, how many employees they're gonna have there. So I guess now that, now that the election is over, they can go back to selling New York City real estate because, you know, they didn't get the, I don't think they got the out, those

• 1:55:17Joe Weisenthal?

  brokers did not get the outcome that they were hoping for. But yeah, we have some, we have some past guests on, in the transition team. Paul Williams, shout out to him, who I also play music with in my country music band, Lightsweet Crude, he's on the, the housing transition. Kathy Wild, who is the head of the Partnership for New York City, which is the big organization of a bunch of CEOs, et cetera. That's like the most like sort of like dyed in the wool, like sort of, you know, they're not a lobbyist group, but they represent the business community. Even she is in the transition team. She's also been on the podcast. So it seems like, you know, I've seen a bunch of people angry at some of the picks, happy about some of the other picks. It seems like he has built a, he's, at least with these selections, a little something

• 1:56:02Joe Weisenthal?

  for everyone, some moderate, some normies, some more radicals, et cetera. Enough for like everyone to be a little happy and a little, a little concerned, maybe.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it certainly seemed like that there was that viral clip of him with Trump that was very funny where they're kind of going back and forth.

• 1:56:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, that was crazy, yeah.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  It felt like there was just like, okay, there's a lot of theater on both sides here. They're both, they're all having fun. You know, they're not like, I can't even be in the same room as that person. So, you know.

• 1:56:26Joe Weisenthal?

  I think that like, for those of us not in politics, I don't know, it's like hard for us to imagine how these people who are like, the way, the rhetoric, and then they like get together and they smile in front of the camera and like feels very weird, but you know, they're just like, they're professionals.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  I mean, NFL teams have rivalries, they shake hands at the end of the game. I think that's kind of the nature of these things, which is funny.

• 1:56:47Jordi Hays?

  WWE.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, WWE. I've always liked the wrestling metaphor.

• 1:56:52Joe Weisenthal?

  The thing is too, is that like, whether we're talking about the selections of people for the transition, or the, I think, very wise choice by Mamdani to like try to be friendly with the White House, or at least find some common ground, is, look, there's some like pretty hard budget constraints, it's that, the mayor, the job of mayor is a management job, you know, the trains aren't going to run themselves, the buses aren't going to run themselves, the apartments aren't going to get built. So there is a certain amount of like required, between the budget constraints and just everything else, I think there is a certain amount of sort of forced pragmatism that's probably at play here.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. We'll let you go in just a minute. What's next on the economic calendar that you're tracking? What should we be looking forward to through the end of the year? Obviously, in our world, we're very excited about Black Friday. Going to be tracking those numbers, also an interesting economic indicator, but what's on the top of your mind?

• 1:57:51Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I think actually like basically all data through the end of the year is going to kind of be garbage, because obviously we're going to get the restart of the data and we'll get more timely jobs data and so forth, but all of that is going to be affected by the shutdown.

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  October, we're not getting anything from October.

• 1:58:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, we're not getting anything from October, and then November is going to be affected in large part from the shutdown, so those numbers aren't going to mean anything anyway. And so probably the next clean report where we could say, okay, this is actually well-collected data to the extent any data is. There's all kinds of issues with collection and is not affected by the shutdown. So that's going to come out in January about December, which is going to be very strange. You know, I think the big development is so I think it's December 10th is the next Fed meeting. As recently as a week ago, it was looking like they were not going to cut. The odds were below 50%, but a number of the FOMC members in the last several days have come out and said they're cool with the cut. So it looks like as of right now,

• 1:58:49Joe Weisenthal?

  we're going to get a cut, but that is, I think that meeting is the day before we get the November jobs data. So it's all going to be sort of a mess, I would say, until early next year.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  Last question. How should people read into not getting data from the month of October? Should we say that like the simplest explanation is employees were furloughed? We don't have, we don't have time to go back and collect all the information.

• 1:59:16Joe Weisenthal?

  I think in this, I think my impulse is that the simple explanation is the correct one that due to the timing, the shutdown, the duration of the shutdown, it's like unrealistic or something like that, as opposed to something nefarious. If it, if they're, if, if there continue to be more things, then okay, then we see what's up. But I would say this is probably pretty straightforwardly linked to the fact that, you know, the government shutdown, yeah.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  I'm also going to tell you about fin.ai, AI that handles your customer support. The number one AI agent for customer service. Our next guest is Director Michael Kratsios. He is the 13th Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and it is great to have him here with us on the show today.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  One of the best call-in setups we've seen.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How are you doing?

• 2:00:10Speaker 08

  I am great. Thank you guys so much for having me. I have followed your meteoric rise over the last year. I, I feel like I should have been on this show much earlier.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we would have loved to have you, but we're very happy to have you today because there's massive news, but I'd love for you to introduce it and actually set up the conversation. So please take us through the announcement and, and then I'm sure we'll have a ton of conversation and questions to go through.

• 2:00:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I think maybe we can start with the AI action plan that the president signed out in July of last year. And one of the main themes of the AI action plan, essentially to win the AI race, is all about how we can win in scientific discovery. And the question was, like, how do we do that? What's like the next chapter of using AI to drive scientific innovation in our country? And yesterday, the president signed an executive order launching what is known as the Genesis Mission. And I think for a lot of folks that, you know, you guys talk to every day, you know this. You know, AI has, you know, had this incredible rise over the last couple of years. It ultimately started first with large language models themselves. And those are where we scraped the totality of knowledge on the Internet and were able

• 2:01:19Speaker 08

  to then create these models that can predict all sorts of things, the next word, if you will. The next phase of it was all around coding. And you've seen these great startups that are incredible at coding. Some are huge model builders or awesome at coding, too. But the big question that still remains is how do you apply this large language technology to scientific endeavors? How do you use it to be able to create new materials? How do you use it to create new microprocessors? How do you use it and tap it into all of this exquisite scientific technology and hardware that exists all around the world? And what the Genesis Mission tries to do is to bring all of this super valuable, important data that the national labs have collected over the last 70 years and put it to use

• 2:01:59Speaker 08

  to train large language models to be able to dramatically, and I mean dramatically, accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. So this is, I would argue, and I've said it before and I'll keep saying it, this is going to be the single largest marshalling of the federal resources of scientific discovery since the Apollo program. So we're thrilled to kick it off, and DOE is going to be the home for it.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Talk to me about the relationship between the public sector and the private sector. I feel like a lot of folks in our audience have said, "Thank you for your service. We loved DARPA. We loved when DARPA created the Internet. We love GPS. We love the moon mission, but we got it from here. We invented the transformer at Google. We invented SpaceX and the rockets that go up and land. And we think private industry has it handled from here on the research side. We don't need anything from the government." How do you think about, is that just, is this just a misconception and we actually need more original, new ideas, research in a government setting? Or is there more of a public-private partnership that you think will play out here?

• 2:03:04Speaker 08

  I think it's definitely more of the latter. I mean, the reality is that when some of the initial projects were launched in the 1950s, you think of Manhattan Project. That was an era where the vast majority of research and development in the United States was paid for and funded by the federal government. To the tune of almost 70 or 80% of it was funded by the federal government. If you zoom ahead, sort of the 70 years that we are, where we are today, the vast majority is done private, private sector. You know, generally, the United States spends about a trillion dollars a year on R and D, and about 80% of it today is done by the private sector. Now, that being said, there is a critically important role for the government to play in that larger ecosystem. And it truly is an ecosystem.

• 2:03:46Speaker 08

  You have to have private sector, academia, and the federal government all working hand in hand to sort of make the very important basic research breakthroughs and ultimately commercialize those. And the secret and the sort of unique, special thing about the Genesis mission is the scientific data sets that exist at the national labs. This is a unique asset that is so valuable to the American people and to all of the scientific enterprise in the United States. And the bottleneck, as you guys know so well in so many of these AI endeavors, is how do you get the right data to train these models? And for the early large language models, the data was just out on the internet. You could use common crawl and scrape it. For the world of coding, you had lots and lots of coders and lots and lots of material that you could use to train those coding models. But for science, it's not that easy.

• 2:04:31Speaker 08

  You have silo data. You have pharmaceutical companies that have pharmaceutical-related data. You may have chemical companies that have chemical-related data. But what's so special about our national lab ecosystem is that it covers such a diverse and broad range of scientific endeavors. You have biologists, you have material scientists, you have chemists, you have people who are working on space, all in the same national lab infrastructure. And that depth of data is so incredibly powerful in order to accelerate scientific opportunity and endeavor. And kind of that's what the Genesis mission is all about. And to your point about private sector involvement, the thing that we have been so excited about is the private sector is clamoring to be part of Genesis mission. We all are in this together. There's a desire to pair the incredible supercomputing infrastructure and the GPU

• 2:05:14Speaker 08

  capacity of our greatest chip companies with the great data sets we have at DOE and everything in between.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Um, the, can you help me understand a little bit more how a lab might actually plug into the Genesis mission? Because, uh, we, we've seen a lot of the labs say, oh, we want to start working on science. Some of the labs have already. I mean, Google has a Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, right? Uh, for AlphaFold. Um, does that, does that look like them interfacing directly with the DOE or going through a lab? Or how, how does that take shape, do you think?

• 2:05:47Speaker 08

  So what DOE is ultimately, the Department of Energy is going to be creating is a platform for scientific discovery. And there we're going to be making available the very valuable scientific data sets that can be used to run these large language models for science. And as we've seen, you know, OpenAI had a nice tweet thread about sort of this project and how excited they are about it. We've seen lots of other companies already pursue this. Google, of course, with, with AlphaFold and, and the Nobel Prize that they've won there. So what we're seeing is all of these, um, large language model builders or labs themselves want to partner with the Department of Energy. So we can work hand in glove to accelerate the scientific discovery. The key is how do we, just zoom out a second and think about it. How do we 2X

• 2:06:29Speaker 08

  the ability of us to very quickly iterate on scientific experimentation? So right now, if you have a hypothesis and you want to test it, how do we make that 2 or even 10X faster? How can we make it so that if we have an idea, we can send that idea to an AI-powered cloud lab and the test can be run behind the scenes as they're working on a second project? So that's this sort of like big level thinking that we want to do to dramatically, dramatically accelerate the velocity and pace of scientific discovery.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  Can you help me understand, uh, how you think the United States is positioned geopolitically against our near peer rivals on the issue of AI in science? I'm pretty, uh, I, I feel like I'm relatively up to speed on just the general capabilities of American image models versus maybe Chinese image models or, uh, DeepSeek versus GPT OSS and the Llama models. I kind of know where we're standing in just the general industry, uh, the industrial uses or the, the general uses of these LLMs and the AI, uh, models that are coming out of America and China. How are you thinking about America's competitiveness on the science and research side?

• 2:07:38Speaker 08

  So we're in a lot earlier innings of that. That's a really good question. And I think what's unique about AI for science is it has to pair this exquisite scientific, physical infrastructure with the models themselves. So if you want to drive scientific discovery, you have to be able to pair what's coming off of telescopes, what's coming off of lasers and all this stuff to be able to match them with large language models, to be able to accelerate that loop. And we're still in the very early innings of it. And in order for us to sort of outpace and continue to keep our lead like we do have in some of these other places is we have to do something like the Genesis mission. We have to wake up a country and say like, "Look, where do we have the most valuable scientific data sets?

• 2:08:21Speaker 08

  And how do we make those data sets available to our model builders to be able to create the necessary tools to pair the data coming off these exquisite scientific instruments back into these AI models?" And like, think about it. For us, we want to win on fusion, for example. So for fusion, Google's already doing this, but there's a ton of companies around the United States that are very heavily funded, that all have lots and lots of experimentation they want to do with these fusion reactors. The ability for us to be able to accelerate the modeling of that through the Genesis mission, rather than each individual company having to do this on its own, can be really, really dramatic. So back from a pacing standpoint, I think the US has all of these amazing instruments. It has the labs. It has the great private sector together. And what the Genesis mission tries to do is bring that together

• 2:09:05Speaker 08

  in a way that's like truly American, where each of us, as part of the ecosystem, can play the important role that we're best at with obvious sort of commercial goals in mind down the road. And that's what's sort of driven this great discovery we've had for years. And I think we're going to continue to see that in the years ahead.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  What role does academia play as part of this project, in your view?

• 2:09:29Speaker 08

  So I think for us, academia has always played a very important role in pursuing early-stage, basic, pre-competitive R and B. As we think of all of the most critical areas of scientific endeavor, whether it be in materials, or in chemistry, or in mathematics, or in physics, or science, there is still a critically important role in that early-stage discovery science. And academia can play a very important role there. They're the ones that have these theses and these ideas, these hypotheses, to solve some of these very early fundamental problems that can ultimately unlock great commercialized solutions in the years ahead. So academia and universities are and do want to be part of the Genesis mission. There's an important role for a lot of these departments, professors, and thought leaders

• 2:10:11Speaker 08

  to be part of it, and to introduce their ideas and concepts of things that they want to test. What ultimately Genesis is going to do, it's going to create up to 20 grand challenges on some of the biggest scientific problems we face today. And we're looking for everyone. You can be in academia, you can be in the private sector, you can be in your garage, wherever you are. We want you to come with the best idea on how to solve those, and be able to leverage the great infrastructure that the federal government has in its labs to solve those.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about AI risk these days? I feel like we've been on a total roller coaster from sci-fi, paper clipping scenarios, to some very real geopolitical competition, and issues with people maybe using these models too much, going somewhat crazy. There's been a wild ride that I think everyone's been on, and I'm interested to hear how you think about AI safety these days. Is the nuclear analogy the most important? Is this a Manhattan Project? How do you think about the role that the US government should play in the AI safety discussion?

• 2:11:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know, I think as I kind of look back and think about how the early conversations were, when some of the big model lab builders came to Capitol Hill, and talked about wanting to create kind of an IAEA for AI, I think honestly it set the wrong tone, and I think it set sort of the industry back for a while. And I don't know how much you guys track sort of like global politics of... of AI policy, but for a good two years there, I think that the sort of discussion on the on the global stage was, you know, what are the worst possible things that AI could possibly do for the world? And let's try to like, figure out if we as a collective, you know, world can find some sort of like global solution to solving it. And obviously,

• 2:12:00Speaker 08

  that's kind of the wrong approach. And everyone's backed away from it. You know, the the UK themselves that were kind of touting their big, you know, UK Safety Institute have renamed it the Security Institute. We, as the as Trump administration, you know, renamed the the AI Safety Institute or Department of Commerce as well, and kind of moved in a direction of of innovation and adoption versus sort of this nebulous catch-all safety term. But I think to me, one thing I always think about, and we always have to balance is, and maybe it's a little personal, but to me, I recently became a father in July. And and I think a lot about the way that my child is going to grow up, the way that he is going to interact with this particular technology, the way it's going to impact, not only the way that he grows and learns in school, but also the types of job that he's going to

• 2:12:43Speaker 08

  have and how he's going to enter the workforce. And I think there are very credible and like real things that the American people are thinking about, about how this technology can be best used to improve their way of life, and ultimately help them live a better and more fulfilled and more rich life. And we at the White House are are all about finding ways to encourage adoption of this technology. And in order for that to happen, we have to have the trust of the American people. And trust is kind of part and parcel of everything we're trying to do. Whether we're building out, you know, AI for educational reasons, or to improve the amount of energy that we have in the United States, or solve the the biggest health crisis that we may encounter in the future, we want to build that trust. So when these solutions are coming about because of AI, it's embraced. And it's something

• 2:13:27Speaker 08

  we worry about and think about a lot. And it's something that a lot of our standards agencies are thinking about. How do you promulgate the right standards so that when these technologies are put into all these different industries, people trust them?

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about job displacement at this point? The models are so incredible. They're smarter than me at everything. And yet I haven't actually been able to drop them in as a coworker right next to me. Every day we try to replace Tyler. We say Tyler, replace yourself and he's just too good. But there's still, there's still like an ambient level of anxiety that something's coming. And so I feel like you do need to be prepared. You can't write it off entirely. But I'd be interested to hear about how you're thinking about the goals that you could even set around transitioning people through jobs. How you think about the AI job relationship?

• 2:14:19Speaker 08

  There's a couple of things. The first thing is about AI education. We have to prepare the future American worker to be able to fully leverage this technology when they enter the workforce. The president signed an executive order in April of this year where he prioritized K through 12 AI education. The first lady has gotten very excited about this endeavor. We're running something called the AI Presidential Challenge, which is a challenge that we're rolling out across the entire country where we have students from all 50 states participating in it. And ultimately it's going to culminate in a, in a sort of competition here at the White House and at the end of the school year, where we can show kind of how students are using AI to solve some of the biggest challenges they face in their local community.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  It's like the presidential fitness. I used to have to run a mile and touch my toes and now, now you have to use AI effectively.

• 2:15:06Speaker 08

  You gotta program it in AI, exactly, exactly.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  That's actually great. The presidential vibe coding assessment.

• 2:15:14Speaker 08

  But I do think it's important because at the end of the, and I think, I think the velocity of change that you see in how education is thinking about AI is so interesting to me. It's kind of like, and if you guys even remember like two years ago when ChatGPT first came out, every university out there was essentially banning it. You weren't allowed to use it. You were like, you know, violating the honor code if you ever like turned on ChatGPT. And now there's no college student in the country that doesn't use it. So I think that the pace of change in how these models are being used in education is just so, so dramatic. And we have to get in front of it because you know, what we think, you know, an eighth grader is going to be doing with AI when they enter the workforce. You know, it'd be very, very hard to predict. So what we try to do mostly in the K through

• 2:15:57Speaker 08

  12 space is not necessarily teach kids how to leverage this technology, but teach them about how the technology works. The term that was used in the executive order was demystified, like teaching both children and teachers, like where does it work well? Where does it not work well? Why is it answering questions like this? Why does it hallucinate? Why does it not hallucinate in these cases? You know, and I think the more people understand the technology they're dealing with, they'll be able to leverage it much, much better, no matter where they end up in the world.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I absolutely love that because I feel like the, I mean, we talked about this, the GPT psychosis thing. There's, there's a very big difference between understanding that what you are chatting with is a robot, is a bunch of math, and just being mystified by it. And the same thing with, you know, at some point, every parent needs to teach their kids that, hey, the explosion in that movie, they didn't actually blow up the house. You know, they didn't, that's a cartoon. And now you also have to do that with AI-generated images.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Something I noticed, this was a major AI-related announcement, did not have a, I searched Command F for a dollar sign, didn't find it. Is that, is that intentional? Is that like part of, part of your focus of, hey, the government can catalyze the right sort of like progress and activity without just being a capital provider? We've seen so many, you know, announcements from this year that are really just fixated on the biggest, you know, the biggest number, and this feels like unlocking the sort of potential within the existing ecosystem that's, that's not being properly utilized.

• 2:17:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, for the Genesis mission, I think Congress actually appropriated some money to the Department of Energy this summer in some legislation that passed to drive some of these AI-related efforts. And we've used that as kind of the down payment on kicking off this program. I think what you're going to be seeing in the next couple of weeks, which is, which we're really excited about, is commitments from a number of large private sector players on what they are contributing and donating to the Genesis mission. And I think what's key here is that what makes the The American innovation ecosystem so unique is the ability for us to bring all pieces of the ecosystem together to drive innovation. You have one part academia, one part private sector, and one part federal government.

• 2:18:15Speaker 08

  And the reason why and the feature about the US innovation system that allows us to be so successful and have been the home for the greatest scientific and technological breakthroughs for the last 200 years is that free market approach innovation. And I think that's what the generous mission brings together and sort of highlights in the best way possible. That we are in this together with all pieces of the ecosystem working together.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  There's been a lot of worry about going too far, doing too much AI, too aggressive about the build out, too much debt. There was this back and forth about the backstop. David Sacks, of course, said, we're not considering that. But have you thought any more about how, what the role of the government is in moderating the amount of sort of private sector AI build out and how that should even interface with the government at all? Like, what is the framework that we should be using?

• 2:19:08Speaker 08

  I think we are very focused on removing federal barriers to folks that want to participate in the AI revolution. And for us, what we see is that if private markets and if capital markets are allocating dollars in a direction that say like, look, we believe that we will be needing this level of compute to drive our future AI demands. We want to make sure that the bottleneck to that deployment isn't some federal rule around permitting and allowing these things to be built out. I have faith in the way that the capital markets are allocating dollars right now. And I leave it to those capital allocators to make the best decisions possible for that capital. What we want to make sure is that like we are not an inhibitor to innovation.

• 2:19:52Speaker 08

  That, you know, some arcane rules about, you know, how and when you can build some certain facility in a particular place are not the reason why the data center we really need isn't built out. And that's kind of, that's the role that I think the federal government plays. And one of the three executive orders the president signed the day that the action plan was was released was all about this. How do we get the federal government out of the way to allow the build out of these as quickly as possible?

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the like going deeper in the stack? Obviously, there's been news around Intel. There is, there's a very rational reason to understand to prioritize, you know, having American control of the entire AI stack. How has your thinking evolved on just this idea of having a full control over the supply chain in America? Is that something you're spending time on or you're thinking about or your thoughts have evolved on?

• 2:20:50Speaker 08

  We are. I mean, it's so critical. Back to the great day in July when we signed all of our executive orders. The third executive order was all about exporting the American AI stack. And I think, you know, we rewind, you know, into Trump one, when I was the CTO of the United States at that time. One of the challenges that I faced was traveling all around the world and trying to convince governments that they need to rip and replace their Huawei infrastructure. And at that point, you know, I think there was a big lesson learned by me and by a lot of people who served in in 45 about, you know, what are lessons learned from that experience? You know, in that moment, the PRC had a technology that was good enough

• 2:21:36Speaker 08

  and was priced very reasonably, whether it was for subsidy or who knows what. But it was priced reasonably enough where everyone wanted it. And an ultimate was deployed for a big technological shift with 5G. Now, if you fast forward to where we are today, this next phase of AI is orders of magnitude more important than the 5G rollout. Right now, it, you know, governments all around the world in year, in a few, in very few short years, will all be running some sort of AI stack. They will be having some sort of chips that will be running some sort of large language model. And on top of it, there'll be important, critical national applications. Everything from the way that, you know, hospitals are running to to the way the tax is collected.

• 2:22:19Speaker 08

  And and we want to make sure that the US is the partner of choice for that AI stack. And right now, we're We're at a great spot. We have the very best chips in the world and we have lots of them. We have the very best models in the world and we have a competitive ecosystem that it seems like every other week they're leapfrogging each other. And then on top of that, we have the best applications in the world. So we are so committed to exporting that stack. We want to create something that is so compelling and so exciting for governments and people all around the world that they will want to use our technology. And that's what we are building here at the White House, our partners at the Commerce Department and at the State Department to get that exported all over the world.

• 2:22:59Speaker 08

  From South America to Africa to Asia to anyone who wants it because we believe that the same benefits that all Americans are going to realize because of our great technology. We want to share that with the world.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Final question, a little bit of a wild card. I'm curious, are you thinking about uh uh humanoids as a category? I've been really concerned that we're going to repeat what happened with DJI where we allowed a a uh a company to basically destroy our domestic industry and flood the country with uh cheap, very good, very good drones, but cheap drones. Uh and I worry that uh you know, I think you can buy a unitry robot on walmart.com right now. It's not uh it's not a concern today, but if we allow the country to be flooded, uh I would be very concerned about it in the future. And I'm curious if it's on your mind at all.

• 2:23:51Speaker 08

  It is actually. It's funny you say that. We uh we we were just actually speaking about this week with a number of my of my colleagues. I think the it is challenging. I mean, there was a a a large um well-known uh uh top sort of shelf research university that uh I saw one of their one of their like magazines that they published and there was um and they were like advertising kind of how great they were. And on the front of it was like, you know, two unitry robots. And I was like, come on, guys, like, honestly, like, we can do better as a country, you know. We we have been the home for boss dynamics for, you know, over over two decades. And and I think to me, this is an opportunity where where we should think about it in terms of the larger AI stack.

• 2:24:33Speaker 08

  And if you start building from chips all the way up, you know, the ultimate manifestation. of all this is where a lot of these ultimately robots play out. It's this marrying of the physical infrastructure with with the digital itself. And I think we do a lot more as a country to be able to propel that industry forward, to make it economical for the adoption to happen. And it goes back to something I talked about a little earlier. It's a lot about trust, you know, and I think there's, you know, if you think about kind of the dynamics oftentimes in the global marketplace. Funny enough, the Europeans tend to be a lot more, a lot more quickly, quick adopters or early adopters a lot of this technology just because of of the issues that that that they have with some of their some of their workforce. So I think for us, we want to create an environment where we can build these robots

• 2:25:17Speaker 08

  into our economic growth plans here in the U.S. And think very critically about the way that, you know, we want safe, secure and trusted technology used by Americans in America. And if we see, you know, foreign companies that are not, you know, safe, trusted and secure and are compromised. There's lots of tools that we have in our arsenal to protect our ecosystem from it. And the U.S. government, for example, banned DJI for use by by the federal government. Then there's lots of other examples like that.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  Yep. Okay, actually, last question. Do you fish? What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? We'd like to ask that to everyone that joins the show.

• 2:25:52Speaker 08

  Oh, man, I thought that was coming. I actually do not fish. So if you guys ever want to take me fishing.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  We'll have to go sometime.

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I haven't either. So we can, we can go together and figure it out on the fly.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on your busy day.

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Always welcome.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the Genesis mission. We're very excited for this and have a great Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving.

• 2:26:12Jordi Hays?

  Happy Thanksgiving.

• 2:26:13Speaker 08

  You guys too. Let's do this again soon.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 2:26:15Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:26:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat. You can reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Let me also tell you about TurboPuffer. Service vector and full text search. Build from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Founder Mode is right. We have Sebastian from Klarna in the restream waiting room. We're going to bring him in to the TVP in Ultra Dome. How are you doing?

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you again. The last time.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  It's been too long.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  The last time we hung out, it was just another, it was just another day at work for you. You just stopped by. Now you see you did your IPO and you jetted back home.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:51Jordi Hays?

  But it's great to, it's great to be back.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, first, kick us off with a review. What's it been like being a public company CEO for a couple of months now?

• 2:27:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Um, well, we we said to ourselves on the management team like, we're never gonna watch the stock price. Never ever. And then, and then every day it was like, what? Why didn't it go up? Fuck, you know? And then, and then somebody like came to us, guys, just like, put yourself next to all the other stock. And like, oh, yeah, it's moving the same way. Got it. Okay, got it, got it, got it. It wasn't just us.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Uh, well, big news, uh, uh, on Tuesday, uh, today. Uh, please, uh, break it down for us. What's, what's the news?

• 2:27:29Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh, no, I think it's, you know, I think I was, it's kind of funny because I, like, about a year ago, I was like giving crypto a second chance. And I was always like, you know, I was a little bit of the, on the skeptic side over the years. And partially because like I was, my lackminded test is like, how is this gonna help my mom, right? And, um, and as much as like, I'm getting excited about like financial revolution, you know, kill the central banks or whatever. Sorry, I shouldn't have said that. Um, I'm gonna re-quote, um, you know, bring financial liberty to the world. That's the way. Um, and those things. Uh, the point is that like, that doesn't get my mom much excited. She's like, what? Can I just pay cheaper or can this be faster? Like, she doesn't really care that much about.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  The noise in the industry was insane. I mean, it was so many, uh, just regulatory arbitrage moments. So much, uh, just like fraud and grift and also just like pumps and dumps and all sorts of just like memes and things that weren't outright frauds, but had just like total.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  But the potential was always there.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  There was always a little bit, because then the technology was always a little bit real.

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure, I, I imagine like, what, like, uh, I, I'd love to understand how you, how your thinking evolved on stablecoins over time.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  Because back in twenty twenty one, twenty.

• 2:28:42Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  What happened was some close friends of mine, uh, called Sequoia, said like, Sebastian, you really have to take a second look at this. And, um, and I was like, okay, fine, um, I'll do it. And they introduced me to some amazing founders, uh, among. Uh, among them, um, uh, Bridge.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh, that we now partner with on, and so I gave it a second chance and I listened to the stories and I realized, yeah, okay, so I've been wrong. Uh, technology has now moved ahead. It's now fast. It's now efficient. It actually solves real, uh, real problems.

• 2:29:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:29:14Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And so we, and then I wrote that on X and I was like, nobody's gonna care because we're like, we're the last fintech in the world.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:21Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  It's not gonna make any news. But it was surprising, like, I think over, over a million people, um, views on that X, on that post. And, and since then, we've been just working hard on like, how do we integrate this into our stack and what can we do? And today we announced that we're doing the Klarna stablecoin.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:29:36Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh, which is one of many things which we're doing with Bridge and Tempo, which is, uh, you know, uh, together with Stripe and the team over there. So, um, so that's really exciting. Uh, but obviously, you know, there's more to come. It's just that like we're, we're testing the waters and trying, trying out what will work for us.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  So, yeah, walk me through, uh, what the first few implementation points look like. Uh, if I'm going and I'm paying and I'm on a checkout page, uh, right now I can check out with Klarna. Uh, wh- at what point do I actually interact with Klarna coin, the stablecoin? Uh, when does it actually come into the workflow?

• 2:30:15Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  So, so far the, the start of this actually is just that like, um, we obviously want to bring these services, uh, to the benefit of our consumers and in their day to day.

• 2:30:23John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:30:24Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Ex- you know, using a Klarna. I mean, we have a big neo bank ambition, right? And, uh, we have hu- over a hundred million users worldwide, but most of them will only use us for a single transaction. Um, thank you. Uh, sometimes it's like, you know, a lot of them knows Binance operator, but actually over twenty percent of them are debit where people pay the full amount as well. So, so it's, it's a mix. Um, and now we're trying, you know, doing, we're trying to offer ourselves, uh, uh, more advanced services, more neo bank services, right? So we have our card. Uh, it's pretty cool. Like, you know, we are now three million active cardholders. A quarter ago, we had zero in the US, so. Exactly, I'm gonna drop a lot of numbers, I'm gonna get a lot of beeps. So, so that was like, so that's been great.

• 2:31:09Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  But obviously, we want to add peer-to-peer, we want to add the ability to send money and so forth. And then we've been looking at different solutions. But, but, but what's interesting, I think, here is that like, even though that's the natural next step of, you know, offering, uh, using stablecoin for that, because it's a very efficient way to send money fast and at, at low cost. And we also actually realized that, look, I mean, we're processing over a hundred billion dollars worth of volume every year, and we move ourselves quite large money between the US and Europe and so forth. And this may actually be very efficient even for our treasury department to use as a way to, to move money, right? So we've seen that there's a tremendous number of use cases, maybe more than we realized when we started looking into it.

• 2:31:51Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  That's exciting and that can drive, you know, anything that obviously drives our efficiency will also allow us to offer services at lower cost and more value to our customers, so.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Can you break down specifically what's happening at each kind of level of the stack? So you have bridge, which is, from my understanding, the infrastructure that you're using to actually issue the token. Then you have tempo, which is the blockchain in which you'll be moving it around on. Is that, and then, and then you have obviously the, the product layer, which is the interface that consumers will use to uh, move around. Is it USDK? What, what, what is the ticker?

• 2:32:31Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  I think it's USDK. I think you've described it pretty well. I was like, thank you, that's a good summary. I'm not sure.

• 2:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, because I'm just, yeah, trying to understand. And then you also have, there's a corporate treasury use case where you could, you're saying you could use the same uh, token internally as well.

• 2:32:46Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Yeah, I mean, yes, exactly. I think also then people discuss a bit on the merchant side, but, but the truth is that we mostly today are distributed through Stripe and Adyen and the big PSPs. So mostly kind of merchant relationship happens directly with them. So to us, it's mostly what we can do on the consumer side. But I think there's more opportunities. I mean, this is just like, again, people are like, oh, why did you do it this way and not that way? And why didn't you use Solana, Ethereum, and why didn't you, you know, whatever? And what about Bitcoin and so forth? And to me, it's like, yeah, but come on, this was just like one first thing that we now announced. And obviously, we are working on more things and we wanna utilize these technologies to more use cases and we have more things, but we are not yet, yet to announce them and, and talk about them. So more to come.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Last question from my side. Who do you think is, or what, you don't need to say a name of a company, but like,

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  what type of,

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  what type of player in the financial industry loses out most if stable coins really take off? It feels like at a certain point, we're just shifting take rates around. There's a lot of different transfer services that could benefit a lot from higher speeds and lower fees. Seems like consumers could benefit a lot, but do traditional payment rails suffer? Do governments suffer? Like, what category really needs to be on their back foot right now?

• 2:34:15Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  To me, it's really, and I actually talked about this a little bit on our earnings goals as well, is that, I actually think, like, to me, I put the whole crypto thing in this wider AI change that's about to happen, right? And if you look about it, both thin and tech have been extremely inefficient market, which is why you've seen the excesses in profits and excesses in, you know, as I quoted there, like, you know, the gourmet cafeterias used to be called culture and now they're going to be called overhead. The point is that like, there's been this huge excess because it hasn't really been that strong competition. And why has there been lack of competition goes back to kind of classical microeconomical theory, which states that if it's hard to compare two products, if it's, if you know, too many legal terms that are hard to understand and so forth,

• 2:35:00Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  then people will be fooled and will take products that are less good for them, right? And AI and new technologies brings a fantastic amount of transparency. You can just ask, compare these insurances, compares these banking products, what is the best one? Compare these credit products, which one is actually the best one for me, right? So that's going to change. The second thing is the major one, which is very connected to crypto, is switching costs. So the big reason banking isn't more competitive is simply because it's such a hassle to move. You know, like, I want to bring all my stuff from this bank to that bank. And people just don't have that energy, right? Like, people don't have that energy and all the accounts and the salary coming in and all that stuff, right? So what happening is with technologies like crypto, with AI,

• 2:35:44Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  and the combination of that, what you're going to see is you're going to see switching costs coming down to almost zero, right? It's just going to be much easier to move between different services. And it's just going to put this massive competitive pressure on this industry. I mean, Um financial services make over four, five hundred billion dollars in profit. That's the profit pool that we're after. Uh and then tech and advertising and tech is another, you know, five hundred billion dollars. That's a trillion dollars in, in um profit pool. And so what I think is going to happen is you, you just like, if you are willing to be customer obsessed, uh efficient. You know, and with efficiency, operational efficiency, crypto plays a role because it can help you be much more efficient. You can move faster at lower cost and so forth.

• 2:36:28Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Then the players who take the advantage of these technologies are going to make a massive dent. And the, the benefit, I believe, and may, you can call me naive or you can call me, you know, optimist. But like, I believe that the value of this is all these excess profits that we see in banking, they're going to come back to consumers.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:45Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Uh they're just going to make, consumers are going to pay less for higher quality services. And some financial institutions will lean in and they will transform themselves and they will be more customer obsessed. There will be less marble offices, less beautiful, you know, buildings and all that stuff. And there will be more of just like waking up every morning, just like a restaurant or any other business, what I think. Where you actually wake up every morning, you're like, how do I bring my customers in? How do I make them happy?

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:10Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And how do I run my business so I'm operationally efficient, right?

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:14Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  And that's a huge difference. And I think crypto plays a role in that. So I think that's what's coming for fa- fin and tech. And if you're willing to be that customer obsessed and run those operational efficiencies and be smart and use these technologies. There's obviously tons of opportunity of growth and, and, and you can build trust with your customer base. But if you're going to sit there and still continue making the kind of profits you are today and think that nothing's going to change, well, eventually you'll wake up, right? Just like, you know, whatever airlines did when low cost airlines came in. You know, we've seen this over and over again, or like carriers when the low cost carrier things came in, like it's, it's happened before, right?

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh we will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:37:54Jordi Hays?

  Get the update.

• 2:37:54Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Thank you.

• 2:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you. Talk soon.

• 2:37:56Sebastian Siemiatkowski?

  Cheers.

• 2:37:57John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing and they're trusted by millions. I'm also going to tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. Compliance handled so you can focus on growth. We have David from OnePassword in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TBPN.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:38:23John Coogan?

  We have a big update for you. Since you came on the show last time, we onboarded the whole team onto OnePassword.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  John, we were using it individually. There was some passwords being stored in the Notes app. We corrected that.

• 2:38:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:38:38Speaker 10

  I'm glad I was able to shame you into action there.

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. This is real like customer development, getting your hands dirty, rolling up your sleeves. You go on the podcast with 10 employees and you physically tell them, "Download my app." And it worked. It worked.

• 2:38:54Speaker 10

  Yeah, one customer at a time. Thank you again for your trust, both with your business and your personal life.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're very happy. It's been a huge upgrade and I think it's going to sail to being a valued piece of infrastructure in this organization for many years. But we're also very excited that you've been on a tear. Your business is doing better than ever. Give us a little update. What's new in your world?

• 2:39:19Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we have a little announcement just to refresh some of the statistics of the business. So a couple of weeks ago, so we are over $400 million of ARR.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:39:30Speaker 10

  There you go.

• 2:39:32Speaker 10

  Love it.

• 2:39:32Jordi Hays?

  A spinning head.

• 2:39:33Speaker 10

  We've done that. We've grown to that level profitably all the way from inception, which is really cool. You know, durable growth profile. We continue to be very profitable. We now, we're known as a consumer app for a long time, but now nearly 80% of our business is selling to business customers. 180,000 business customers use the product, 180,001 now because of you guys. So thank you for that.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:56Speaker 10

  And we support over 1.3 billion credentials that are managed in our system. And we have over a million developers using the product. So we feel really good about the trajectory that we've been on. We've also, in that announcement, we also announced that we've added to the team. So we've got new leaders. Driving ecosystem and the revenue side of the business, enhance the tech side as well.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:20Speaker 10

  We're really just setting ourselves up for the next chapter here.

• 2:40:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:22Speaker 10

  And, you know, as we chatted last time when we were together, we just see the opportunity around AI is really something significant for us.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30Speaker 10

  We're going all in.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about that because it feels like there's, is there a fight coming? Because credential management on the developer tool chain side, the API keys, that's traditionally been a completely separate industry, a completely separate, you know, I don't even know if you guys run into each other at industry conferences. It feels like a very different world. One's a developer tool, one's a consumer tool that you use with your family. Then maybe you wind up using it at work. There's single sign on, there's all sorts of different ways to manage credentials. How much are they blurring? How quickly is this happening? How are you thinking about setting yourself up for the world where? I mean, Schulto from Anthropic was on the show yesterday saying, we're creating a coworker.

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Digital coworker.

• 2:41:16John Coogan?

  Sounds like a digital coworker who needs some passwords every once in a while. How are they going to get it?

• 2:41:21Speaker 10

  Absolutely. I think, you know, the traditional identity systems that have been siloed and sort of different parts of the puzzle, and really hardwired into big enterprises over the years. They don't really, they're not set up to support this federated dynamic environment where applications spring up and agents need access that are very, very specifically scoped to what they're trying to accomplish. And then they need to be sort of tracked and managed and many times revoked. And so that system of identity and access management really doesn't exist. And we're in a really good position to support that. And we're doing a bunch of things already to help people use AI tools securely. I'll give you a couple of examples. So we were a launch partner with perplexities, Comet browser. I'm not sure if you've seen that. But then shortly thereafter, OpenAI and ChatGPT Atlas came out.

• 2:42:05Speaker 10

  And immediately, both they and we got besieged by a customer saying, I need to be able to use one password with Atlas and not use this thing unless it's it. So we got on the phone with them and we started working together with them and quickly we made one password available as a browser extension on on Atlas with a little bit of a workaround. And then just today, we announced the release of a fully optimized, you know, onboarding experience, optimized for the the workflow experience in Atlas browser as well. And so what we learned is like, look, customers, they want to use these tools, but they want to be able to use them safely and securely and they want to be able to have trust. So that's what we've always been about is bringing that trust to the table. And so we'll be wherever our customers need to be. Last time we were talking about the headless browsers

• 2:42:47Speaker 10

  around a browser base, but like with perplexity and Atlas, you know, our customers want to be able to use these tools without having to give their credentials over in raw form. So that's one aspect of it. The other is, what's really interesting is, you know, we're moving from applications being developed by software engineers to being developed by everybody. And it's amazing how much of the agentic applications that are being created are not necessarily by by software developers. And so it's great, it's very powerful, the whole organization can figure out ways to leverage it. But again, if you need API keys to be part of the, you know, in the environment that you're you're building, or SSH keys, you need to be able to actually have those things secured. And so our developer tools,

• 2:43:29Speaker 10

  they sync with AWS Secrets Manager at runtime, they allow you to to put a pointer to environment file that tools that we build so that your credentials are always encrypted, end to end, fully traceable, fully revocable. And so that's the beginning of what you'll see. And then, you know, where we're going from here, you know, discovery of agents, governance around it, how does it interact with the observability systems? There's a whole green field of things there that we're really well positioned to participate in and really help define the standards. So, you know, we're going for it. It's a very exciting time.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about resiliency? Do you have any tips for folks building, you know, mission critical systems these days? It feels like we were fighting outage with AWS at one point, CloudFlare went down. We don't have nearly the resources that you do, I'm sure. But what tips and strategies have you used? Because I feel like you're definitely going to hear if one password goes down.

• 2:44:26Speaker 10

  Yeah, you know, like, we, we, um, we are a Cloudflare customer, right? So we, how our marketing site was down, our service wasn't down.

• 2:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:44:35Speaker 10

  So, you know, we're using, you know, obviously redundancy and, and failover procedures. And we've got, you know, we, we come from a security centric approach. That's probably what's differentiated us from a lot of the other players in the space. Like, security is job one and job 10. And like, nothing else matters until we're sure that everything we're doing is the utmost security. So we've got a lot of resilience built into the way we do it. But I think just generally, people need to be aware, like, the threat profile is so much more hostile than it's ever been, and it's going to get a lot worse. I'm sure you did a bunch of work on, on the, the disclosure that Anthropic put out around that. And it's not just, I mean, Anthropic, you know, as you know, they, they have like nation

• 2:45:18Speaker 10

  state level security, you know, enforcement. They have like bunkers and all kinds of stuff that they've got to worry about, right? Because they're, they're, you know, hugely a big target. But, but it's not just the biggest guys anymore. It's really, anybody can be a target because you can do really sophisticated social engineering at scale with almost no effort at this point. And it's going to get worse and worse and worse. So the number one thing that people, you know, will expose is, is weak credentials. It's another really good spot for us. Like, the credential, credential hygiene is more important than ever. So whether it's you're using Atlas and you're a OnePassword customer, great, make sure it's connected. If you're not a OnePassword customer, you should go get it if you want to use Atlas, right? And if you're a developer and you're building an application and you're not, and you're hard coding credentials or SSH keys, et cetera, into files, don't do it.

• 2:46:03Speaker 10

  Get a OnePassword license, super easy to use, keeps you secure, keep everything, every locked up, and, you know, well, maybe we'll get another new customer out of this.

• 2:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Love it. What's your timeline to a point in time where the average American on, let's say, a weekly basis will be sending an agent out to do something for them? And the agent needing to actually utilize the, you know?

• 2:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Like actual login infrastructure of the user. I'm talking about imagining the workflow where my agent's doing something and I get a maybe a one password push notification that's or I don't know exactly how the workflow would work, but saying, hey, I want to do this. Do you approve it or not? And then I hit like, yes, like basically authorize the agent.

• 2:46:48Speaker 10

  So that's exactly what's happening with browser base, for example, right? And the headless browsers that we're doing exactly. It's low friction, user verification. So that allows you to keep things secured. Look, we're seeing tremendous uptick on the, you know, Atlas was a really was a enlightening to see how many people are actually trying to sort of utilize the browser and have it do things on its behalf. Certainly the other partnerships we've had were so early days on it. But I think where we're going to hit this inflection point where people realize, I mean, I'm starting to see how valuable in both my professional and personal life, the tools can be and just shortening my day. And obviously, you know, I want to make sure I'm doing it securely. I think most people are going to be in that mode before we know it. And so we just want to make sure we're

• 2:47:30Speaker 10

  available for our customers when they, when those moments come so that they can do so securely.

• 2:47:37John Coogan?

  Last question. What's the biggest fish you've ever caught?

• 2:47:40Speaker 10

  Well, I'm more of a fly. I'm more, I enjoy fly fishing more than I do like deep sea fishing, you know, getting sick on a big boat and falling in a big marlin.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Deep sea fishing is the, is the ultimate hack. If you just want to catch the biggest fish, right? It's not, it's pretty simple.

• 2:47:53Speaker 10

  You just go on a boat and somebody else catches it and you're crying for a couple of minutes. Yeah. My son, my son prefers fly fishing. So I follow him. He likes to catch a big bass.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Then where, where's the best fly fishing spot?

• 2:48:04Speaker 10

  You know, I like Montana and Utah.

• 2:48:07John Coogan?

  Utah. You like Utah?

• 2:48:09Speaker 10

  Utah and Montana. Utah, fisher will smaller. Montana, a little bit bigger, but you know, two, two really good spots. And you know, just, just, you know.

• 2:48:16John Coogan?

  We're going to become, we're not, we're never going to leave this building, but we're going to become fishing experts. We're never actually going to, but just through asking every guest a little bit more about fishing every day.

• 2:48:25Jordi Hays?

  Eventually this will just be a fishing show.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  I like it. I like it.

• 2:48:27Speaker 10

  Get yourself a guide. Go on a fly fishing trip. Take a weekend. Go to Montana. You'll love it.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Happy Thanksgiving. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Vanta automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  One thing, one thing that's cool, back in 2019, one password raised from Excel.

• 2:48:51Jordi Hays?

  And when they announced it, they said Excel will be investing 200 million for a minority stake in one password. And you don't, you don't see that like positioning a lot, but I mean, it was a very minority stake. Obviously, they, they put in, they put in about 200, I think, at, was it 200 on one or 2 billion? But anyways, absolute beast of a business.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  Well, up next, we have Keller from ZipLine. We're very excited to talk to him. There's some big news.

• 2:49:23Jordi Hays?

  The eagle himself.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, get that ready. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. And there's someone who built a great product with lots of talented individuals, Keller from ZipLine. We'll bring him in as soon as he's ready.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I don't think he's ready yet. We can go over to...

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  We can go to the timeline.

• 2:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have a post here. Somehow, no, I'm gonna jump.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Oh, where are you going?

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Somehow, David Yulovich, former guest of the show, said, "Turns out huge swaths of the BS on this platform that claims to be from the US is all foreign." And then this is, Shaquille quoted, "And somehow the A16Z account is based in Canada." I really don't, I really don't know how this, this is actually possible. I want to see if it's been updated.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  I did check all of her accounts, and I think we've been marked safe. I haven't, I haven't checked actually most of the team. Tyler, I don't know, maybe secretly halfway across the world.

• 2:50:21Jordi Hays?

  I have so many friends at Andreessen, I don't know how.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  Why does Tyler's?

• 2:50:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. None of them are Canadian.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Why does Tyler's account say it's based in North Korea? I don't understand that.

• 2:50:30Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:50:30John Coogan?

  Have you been to Pyongyang recently? Is that where you're going over the holidays? Yeah, you said you're leaving. This is Miss Info.

• 2:50:36Jordi Hays?

  He goes, "Oh, I have a dentist appointment. I can't come in tomorrow. He's going back to Pyongyang for a little touch base."

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. What happened with this meta whistleblower situation?

• 2:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Adam Dell says, I'd love to see TVP discuss the meta whistleblower story.

• 2:50:57John Coogan?

  Right now, I do want to come back to this. But we have our guest here, so we will bring in Keller from ZipLine. Welcome to the show.

• 2:51:05Jordi Hays?

  From the floor.

• 2:51:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic setup.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Best, best comms team in the game.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 2:51:12Speaker 11

  How are you guys?

• 2:51:13John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. You look great. Give us, give us some updates. Give us, what is the latest news in your world? Very excited for everything that we've been seeing on the timeline. I want to go into all the jokes about what happens if you shoot one of these down. But first, let's get the serious update. Let's get the serious questions out of the way.

• 2:51:34Speaker 11

  I mean, yeah, there's a ton going on. The thing we announced today is that ZipLine just signed a $150 million contract with the US State Department.

• 2:51:46Speaker 11

  You know, to triple the size of our lifesaving autonomous delivery network across Africa. We're going to go from serving about 5,000 hospitals and health facilities to over 15,000. We'll add about 130 million people to the network who don't have access today. And the last cool thing about that is that that 150 million comes with up to $400 million of co-financing commitments from the African governments themselves. So, you know, this is not, this is not.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  Just straight on the taxpayer. Yep.

• 2:52:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. This is actually like encouraging investment in this kind of infrastructure.

• 2:52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So was this, was this delayed because of the USAID pullback? There's been a lot of like back and forth on how much the US would be investing internationally. What would be happening? Has the dust kind of settled there? And there's now time to actually go do a partnership like you just did? What's the kind of state of the union?

• 2:52:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, earlier this year, that was like the first phase of a big shift in terms of how the US is interacting with developing economies. I think this new vision that's now being talked about by the State Department of commercial diplomacy.

• 2:52:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:52:54Speaker 11

  The whole idea is, let's not, you know, let's not treat these countries as charity cases, let's actually treat them as allies and trade partners. And the good news is, these countries have been saying for a decade that they want trade, not aid. They're sick of low-quality services provided for free by NGOs. What they want instead is high-paying jobs, entrepreneurship, technology. And the thing is, like, that's what the US has to offer, you know, like, we can, we can deploy AI and robotics infrastructure into these countries in a way that will save lives and kind of turbocharge their economies.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  So, 150 million from the US State Department matched with 400 million from the partners internationally, 10,000 health facilities. How many actual drones is that? How are you actually thinking about scaling your, like, what does this allow you to do? Are you going to be staffing up, hiring tons of people? Is it just build another factory? Is it a dedicated factory? Like, walk me through how you plan to actually use this money over the, however long you're planning to work on this particular growth initiative?

• 2:53:56Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, look, in a way, this is coming at the worst possible time, because, as you guys know, the US business is growing really, really fast.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we see it all the time.

• 2:54:05Speaker 11

  We're in the middle of, I'm here, yeah, I'm here on the manufacturing floor. I mean, you can see, like, dock electronics happening over here, Zip Platform 2, Zip manufacturing. And then if we were to go straight behind the camera right now, we're just opening up a new 100,000 square feet of manufacturing facility that'll produce both the Platform 2 technology as well as accelerate manufacturing for this specific contract.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:30Speaker 11

  The, you know, we're, in total, this manufacturing facility is capable of building about 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, and it's all happening in South San Francisco. So this is kind of, this is the cool part of this compact, which is that, you know, this is not just a big deal for all these African countries that are now leading the world in terms of deploying autonomous infrastructure to save lives. It's also really good for the US, because we are sort of securing US technology and manufacturing leadership for the decade to come. This is creating high-paying jobs in the US, and it's accelerating all of our manufacturing efforts here.

• 2:55:07John Coogan?

  Okay, let's shift to what's actually going on here. You know, we've seen the initial partnerships that have rolled out. What have you learned most recently about, or what has surprised you about the actual application of the technology, the adoption? Like, where are the underrated use cases beyond the meme that I'm sure will follow you forever, which is the private jet for your burrito? So get ready for that one to be around forever. I mean, we just had Sebastian from Klarna on and his entire, you know, business, which serves all sorts of different customer bases, has collapsed to buy now, pay later for your burrito because they did a partnership with your company.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Burritos are powerful. I think it's actually a bullish indicator if your business is getting burrito memed.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  It is, it is. But yes, where do you see the shape of the US business going? Where are the exciting developments these days?

• 2:56:00Speaker 11

  I mean, look, you know, on, you know, Saturday, ZipLine hit an all-time new record number of deliveries across the US. Then on Sunday, we blew that record out of the water by 10 or 15%. So, you know, it's like every day is basically a new record at this point as a company. I would say the most interesting things are, it feels as though we accidentally like stuck a pipe into the Pacific Ocean. Like, demand is so vastly outstripping our ability to build capacity for this kind of service. And keep in mind, I mean, right now, you know, we deliver products in two to three minutes. So even from like when a customer presses a button to have something delivered to their front yard or backyard or front doorstep is typically around 15, 16 minutes.

• 2:56:45Speaker 11

  And so it is very magically fast. That results in customers changing their ordering behavior. Like, you know, a lot of our customers say they'll grocery shop once a week and then they'll order from ZipLine three to four times a week. So people are using ZipLine more than the average Amazon Prime subscriber uses Amazon Prime. And not only that, but one of the big changes, just since, you know, I was last on with you guys, is that a lot of these restaurants are really accelerating. We're now doing 15 to 25% of deliveries from these restaurants that we've integrated with. So we are a similar size on a per-delivery basis to the big delivery platforms. And so I think, you know, maybe these people still think, oh, the technology is like sci-fi. It's like years away.

• 2:57:28Speaker 11

  And it's funny sitting here thinking like, wow, I mean, this is like completely normal in the neighborhoods that we are, that we're serving.

• 2:57:36Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the actual experience of getting, let's say, items from a restaurant. We had David Chang on. He was excited about drone delivery and the technology.

• 2:57:45Speaker 11

  I tweeted at you guys and I, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna try to get, we're gonna try to deliver for him in Dallas.

• 2:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and specifically, he was saying he didn't think it would solve the, the, like, delivering something hot. From my point of view, if I'm used to getting something in 20, 25 minutes, and then you deliver it in three minutes, like, that feels like it will be a material improvement. So I, I wasn't, I didn't quite understand what, what his point was. But what's the actual experience been like for people? And, and what's kind of the average speed up in terms of delivery times that you're seeing?

• 2:58:21Speaker 11

  I didn't really understand what David was saying either. But look, like, the, you know, our comms team hates when I talk about this, but, you know, like, one of the first food deliveries we did, the customer badly burned their tongue on the food.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, I can see why they don't like this.

• 2:58:37Speaker 11

  And I heard that.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  That's the restaurant's fault. They served food at a dangerous temperature.

• 2:58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's kind of a bad.

• 2:58:42Speaker 11

  I was like, no, actually, we should make this like a core part of the marketing. Like, that is crazy that customers are so not used, they're so used to getting, like, fries that are 45 minutes old and, like, ice cold and soggy and gross, and food that tastes bad, and milkshakes that are melted. And we just put up with this shit, man. Like, we're completely used to it. And, and so, you know, I really think, this is gonna, you know, in the same way that maybe David's expectations are gonna get kind of reversed, like, it's totally happening with all the customers. When you can get something delivered, and there's only, you know, two or three minutes from when the thing comes out of the oven to when it is delivered to your front doorstep, that is a way different customer experience.

• 2:59:23Speaker 11

  I think, actually, people are underestimating the difference in the quality of that experience. Like, food tastes really good. It's almost like you're having an in-store experience at home.

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  I wonder, so, I remember when the delivery...

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  When the delivery boom happened and all of a sudden people were ordering way more food and it was really like a TAM expander, there were obviously ways to get delivery. You could order a pizza 30 years ago on the phone, they would deliver it. But when it became an app and the market expanded so dramatically and people were starting to, you know, DoorDash and Uber Eats like every night, lots of people did this. The market grew and it actually changed the nature of our food. And we got ghost kitchens and we got these funny knockoffs. Like there's in LA, there's Sugarfish and then I saw one that was like sweet. It's like they will deliberately try and change the names as close as possible. And you get these like kind of restaurants that only exist because of the new technology. And I'm wondering what you think of the impact, if there will be a change in the nature of

• 3:00:24John Coogan?

  the food or the nature of the restaurants just because the, the, the delivery time goes down or because of the shape of the box. Like if you can't do a massive, you know, six foot pizza, maybe, you know, some smaller products like emerge as like the dominant form factor and, and the restaurants that conform first.

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Six foot pizza, John?

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  I don't know, the size of this table, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I, I, you know, I, the, the kids birthdays, you see those?

• 3:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, they're pretty big.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  It's not six feet, it's not six feet, but you get my point. Uh, you know, will there be restaurants that are like, okay, we're going all in on Zipline? We're thinking about developing meals from first principles that fit for the best possible experience on the Zipline platform. And then that becomes like a new thing that actually changes our culinary experience.

• 3:01:12Speaker 11

  I mean, I, you know, I'm not an expert, but I have a bunch of like hypotheses and I would say a couple of things. Like first of all, I actually think we have to do a ton of, you know, design of the food now to make it work for a system that like is going to deliver the food 45 minutes later and ice cold, you know? And like, and also there's a lot of innovation that has to go into the packaging. Cause I don't know if you're familiar, but like 60% of food delivery drivers report eating some of the food that they delivered in the last 30 days.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 3:01:41Speaker 11

  So we're like doing all the tamper food packaging.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  60% over like hopefully over the month, not 60% of every time.

• 3:01:48Speaker 11

  Over a month, not 60% every time, 60% over a month.

• 3:01:52Jordi Hays?

  They're like, but only when it's really good. Only when it's really good. Only when it's at my top five favorite restaurant.

• 3:01:58Speaker 11

  One fry, one piece of sushi. Yeah, sorry if I'm ruining it for anybody, but like, you know, so we have to innovate on like tamper-proof packaging. We have to figure out like safety and we have to figure out reliability and like, you know, some percentage of things just get picked up and then never delivered and a lot of things actually like the driver will accept the order, but then actually just never show up at the restaurant, then they have to throw out the food, remake it again. So, you know, I think there's a ton of inefficiency and cost in the system that we all just don't think about, but you do end up paying for in fees and, you know, all the crazy fees that get added on top plus tip. I think another big thing that's going to change is that, you know, this technology is designed to be able to fly out to 10 mile, a 10 mile radius and typically it's not cost effective to deliver something with a car more than like three or four miles.

• 3:02:43Speaker 11

  And so that means, you know, it differs on by metro and where we're talking about, but like, that means that these kinds of systems for any given restaurant, you're going to enable about 10 times as many customers to receive instant delivery from that location. That's a big deal and it's a bigger deal actually for like mom and pop restaurants or kind of local heroes versus a really big chain like Chipotle that actually has a ton of stores. And so I think, you know, especially when you think about a place like LA, for example, where you have a lot of these different parts of the city that are hard to reach, traffic is terrible. You know, it can take an hour plus to get delivery of food. You know, this technology is going to be like transformational and you can deliver a lot of like the best, most beloved kind of local hero brands and make it universally accessible.

• 3:03:28Speaker 11

  By the way, on the universally accessible front, you know, some of the cities we're serving in Dallas right now, I mean, just one city that I was looking at statistics for yesterday, 46% of homes are ordering from ZipLine. Whoa. In that city. And so I think people don't appreciate, yeah, exactly. I thought it was like a map error when I looked. You know, people that talk about startups getting like 2% market share, 5% market share. It's like ZipLine, in a few weeks, ZipLine will literally have the majority of homes in our service area ordering from the service and that is like, that's not a joke.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  How are you, so, so clearly? Clearly, it's working. Clearly, customers like it. There's an insane amount of demand. How are you pushing the team to move faster? Because at the same time, yeah, I know you want to be practical about the rollout and not get over your skis, but at the same time, I mean, people in our chat are... Anybody that sort of knows it exists, they start to become angry that they don't have it in their area. And I'm sure there's people sending you messages all day long, asking you, "When are you going to be here? When are you going to be here?"

• 3:04:34Speaker 11

  So, yeah, we're going to be announcing something very shortly. We just started talking about it internally, but we'll be announcing the next two metros that we're launching in Q1 and Q2. So, look for that in the next week or two. You know, we are then going to start accelerating and adding multiple metros a quarter, starting in the second half of next year. So, we are trying to move super, super fast. Hardware companies are hard in that you have to scale all these different parts of the business simultaneously. It's in the name. And also, it's like, you've got to make really sure that you don't accidentally bankrupt the company. And actually, the faster you're growing, the easier it is to bankrupt the company.

• 3:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 3:05:14Speaker 11

  Because, like, you know, these numbers, when you're building 20,000 autonomous aircraft a year, the numbers actually start to get really big. You've got to make sure that, like, the hardware is validated and, like, you have sites that the hardware can go to and begin operating. You've got to make sure that aircraft utilization is high. There's a lot that has to move in tandem in order for the business to work. So, I mean, to put it into perspective, right now, flight volumes have been growing about 15% week over week for the last 30 weeks straight. We are now planning for next year... Yeah, we're planning for next year, and we actually just reforecasted the entire business. And we are planning to actually double our growth rate next year relative to what we were planning just at the beginning of this quarter.

• 3:05:58Speaker 11

  It's yeah, and I don't know how much I can, you know, you know, we are, we are definitely anticipating like exponential growth.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  I feel like you've given us enough to do a whole DCF at this point. It's fantastic.

• 3:06:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:06:12John Coogan?

  Just, just send it straight to Wall Street.

• 3:06:16John Coogan?

  I appreciate it.

• 3:06:17Jordi Hays?

  So exciting.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Congratulations again. It's always a great time.

• 3:06:21Speaker 11

  You guys got to come to Dallas, I think. I think it's probably at a point now, you know, when I was in Dallas last week, like we were just hanging out at all these different, you know, these different neighborhoods that are using zipline. And there were neighborhoods where I saw more zips than I saw cars.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:06:36Speaker 11

  And so I don't, you know, it's funny how the, you know, the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed. I think there are, you know, certain parts of the US, people go, oh yeah, it's sci-fi, like, you know, it's totally goofy. And then there's like, yeah, some metros where people are like, oh yeah, I use it like three to four times a day. And by the way, these are like predominantly moms and grandmas.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  There's a lot of AI researchers that say that getting Waymo into DC will be, will significantly update the administration's AGI timelines because they will just see robots on the street and they will recognize that this is a real thing. And until you actually see it diffused in the, in the world, it's very hard, it's very abstract to just see reports. Oh, Waymo has a thousand rides or 10,000 rides or a million rides. It's like, what does that mean? But when you are walking and it's like, oh, seven Waymos in a row and they're all driving fine, not crashing into each other. You get it.

• 3:07:24Speaker 11

  Even Tesla FSD, I mean, I was hanging out with my college professor and he'd like, had no idea what FSD was or that it was working.

• 3:07:33John Coogan?

  Cause we've heard, we've heard about it for so long, but it's finally here. So yeah, very exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I hope you have a great Thanksgiving and we'll talk to you soon. I'm sure you'll be back soon.

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you'll be busy delivering turkeys. Hot.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Whole turkeys soon.

• 3:07:48Speaker 11

  Small ones we can do.

• 3:07:49John Coogan?

  Small ones you can do. Okay. Great. I love it. Well, congratulations.

• 3:07:53Speaker 11

  You guys are awesome. Thank you.

• 3:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to catch up, Callie. Great to see you. Cheers.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  Uh, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. And I'm also going to tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. We have our next guest in the restroom waiting room, Royce Branding from ClearSpace. How are you doing, Royce? Welcome to the show. Good to have you. How are you doing?

• 3:08:27Speaker 12

  Thanks for having me. I'm doing well. How are you guys doing?

• 3:08:29John Coogan?

  I'm doing well. Can you kick us off with just a little bit of intro and background on you and the company? And then, you know, there's a whole bunch of questions that I'm sure we're going to get into.

• 3:08:39Speaker 12

  Totally excited to dive in. My name is Royce Branding, co-founder and CEO of ClearSpace, and we help people reduce their screen time. Our company, our mission is to build the missing intentionality layer of the internet. We think there's a fundamental asymmetry in the war for your attention, and we're equipping the individual autonomous consumer in the market with the ability to steer their focus online and protect their family's attention online.

• 3:09:03Jordi Hays?

  What's a perfect amount of screen time? Have you guys run the numbers? Is there, is there, is there an optimal?

• 3:09:09John Coogan?

  Well, you know, Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Peter Thiel this in Sun Valley for his kids. He was like, "You're on the board of Facebook. How long, how much screen time do you let?"

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Did he say like zero?

• 3:09:19John Coogan?

  He said 30 minutes a week.

• 3:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:09:22Speaker 12

  30 minutes a week is ambitious. I think that the ideal amount of screen time is probably a little bit less than whatever you're spending right now.

• 3:09:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:09:30Speaker 12

  We say, we say that a calorie is not a calorie is not a calorie. A minute spent on a screen is not equivalent to another minute spent on a screen.

• 3:09:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:09:37Speaker 12

  But you want to be increasing the, the quality of the consumption, and usually overall reduction in quantity ends up meaning an increase in quality.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So how do you actually do it? I mean, there are screen time functionality natively baked into Apple. The iOS, I'm sure Android has it too. Your business is still working, so it's not like you're getting steamrolled. But how do you, how do you differentiate?

• 3:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, do they, do they have, is there any sort of misalignment to Apple's business with screen time? Because I imagine if they really incentivize people to use their screen less, it's like less apps that I'm subscribing to and less, kind of potentially less. Like, they don't have a perfect incentive to make you use your phone less. They sell you the phone once, but they're like, "Take more pictures. Get those, get those iCloud subscriptions up. Buy more apps. Spend more in that, in that mobile game, et cetera."

• 3:10:30Speaker 12

  A hundred percent. Yeah, yeah, we think we think Apple has every incentive to have a solution here, but maybe not the the ideal incentives to have an effective solution to helping people kind of control their screen time and reduce it. We think that it comes down to both visibility and control. So you have like a feedback loop that's helping people identify how much time they're spending on devices and like where that's actually going. I think the current state of screen time right now is basically like, again, to use food, if you only tracked calories that you consumed, not micro and macronutrients. So for the last two years coming out of Y C, we've been primarily focused on a mobile app that grows people's awareness of how much time they're spending on devices and then allows them to add little bits of cognitive friction into the addictive habit loops

• 3:11:12Speaker 12

  that they use on different apps like social media. And that kind of starts to get them rehabilitating an addictive habit. But what we're actually working on now, and we just announced a few weeks ago, are screen time agents that sit at your network layer and can observe network traffic going to all your devices. And this is particularly useful both for individuals and for their families to think about holistically what it means to have the right type of content, the right time of consumption happening across all of their different devices. And that kind of breaks out of just Apple's ecosystem of what they allow us to see.

• 3:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. How do you think about the responsibilities of different big tech platforms? We were just pulling up this article in CNBC about this whistleblower claiming that Meta failed to act to protect teens. Do you do you have a do you have a stance on like, are the big tech platforms being negligent in in what they're surfacing to their users? Or do you think it's more just like the natural forces of, you know, the economic incentives, they're trying to sell ads? How do you how have you grappled with the various like dust ups in the big tech world over the like what happens on these apps?

• 3:12:29Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, I tend to think about no one is the boogeyman. I think actors are kind of following the incentives laid out before them. Our mission is really much to meet the opposite side demand. I mean, I don't know about you guys, everyone I know hates their relationship with their phone. They hate how much time they spend on their devices. And I think what we're seeing is, we think that actually equipping them to articulate that preference in terms of how much they're spending time on these platforms with technology that's sophisticatedly protecting their attention is going to actually push back against how big of an intention economy scenario can actually be downstreamed from people just rampantly consuming content.

• 3:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 3:13:10John Coogan?

  So, how do you actually, like, take me through a list of like the walls that you run into? I mean, all the big tech platforms are like famously walled gardens. Somebody in the chat was asking, like, I would love to be able to use YouTube with no shorts, only like long-form content. And I actually installed an extension in Safari called Social Focus that allows you to do that. If you use the browser, but if you're in the app, there's nothing you can do. It sounds like you're going higher at the network traffic level a little bit. But at the same time, I don't even know, can you, at the router level, detect if someone's watching a short versus a long-form video on YouTube?

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  That feels like that would be obfuscated.

• 3:13:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, that gets a little harder to do, although we're constantly pressing at the edges of like, what is possible around that? I mean, we've definitely ran some experiments where you can kind of fingerprint what short-form content might look like coming down the wire versus long-form content.

• 3:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:10Speaker 12

  And so there is like interesting things that you can start doing there. But really robustly for the mobile app, we can basically just like make sure that you're staying within healthy usage limits and that those aren't sliding out of control. Which like, when shorts go wrong, what really happens is they like pull you into a longer session than you want to be in.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:14:28Speaker 12

  So there's not an easy way to do that, but different platforms have different rules. Like on, obviously Chrome, on the MacBook, there's a way higher ability to detect what type of stuff you're watching.

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, I mean, it's tricky, especially as all the apps like collapse with AI. You could imagine, I mean, right now, Sora and ChatGPT are are separate apps, but in many ways, they're like on the opposite ends of the spectrum. Like, I want, you know, my, my, you know, son probably spending a bunch of time solving problems in ChatGPT and researching things and like finding facts and, and, you know, using it as a helpful assistant to understand the world, and probably very little time on Sora, just, you know, sloping it up.

• 3:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, what, what are, what are parents of teenagers actually doing specifically with Clearspace? Like, how are they utilizing it? What are best practices? Our, our kids are much younger, five, five and below, so we have probably another at least five, five to seven years before this is even a conversation, but I'm curious.

• 3:15:36Speaker 12

  Yeah, some of the cool stuff that we've seen is people inviting their kids into like challenges as families. So setting up like incentive and reward systems. One of our most popular.

• 3:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Gambling.

• 3:15:46Speaker 12

  Gambling.

• 3:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Gambling on screen time, the most American thing.

• 3:15:49Speaker 12

  Fight, fight one addiction with the other. We, we hear a lot of parents like set up family groups where they're doing a challenge, like a push-up to scroll challenge, where everyone in the family, or squat to scroll, you have to earn every single minute you're gonna spend on social media that week with a physical exercise that we validate with like a machine learning verified push-up or squat. And then whoever's in the lead at the end of the week gets to decide where the family's getting out to dinner on Friday night. I think the most effective solutions we're seeing are kind of these like cultural pushbacks, almost, you know, community type stuff, like the practice of Shabbat in like the Jewish community, where it's like 24 hours, everyone's putting their phone away, and people love it. It's not this like negative, you can't use your screens. It's like everyone's kind of buying into a new fun thing.

• 3:16:33Speaker 12

  And we think Clearspace is the platform that can empower you to do that. Like really quickly, you don't have to be a software engineer, know how to hack your router, and know how to program all the phones. You don't have to buy a dumb phone. You can kind of still participate in the latest and greatest technologies while knowing that they're not completely zapping your entire family.

• 3:16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Well, congratulations on the progress. I know we didn't talk too much about the business, actually, more about the problems that you're solving. But it's, yeah, it's a very interesting industry.

• 3:17:00Speaker 12

  Thank you. I'm curious, I'm curious for both of you guys, what you're doing about your screen time these days.

• 3:17:06John Coogan?

  Most of the time, I mean, I don't know, because all my screen time is actually really low because I'm live streaming all the time. And do I count this? Like, I'm looking at a screen, I'm looking at you.

• 3:17:14Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I've always been frustrated with the dedicated-

• 3:17:16John Coogan?

  My screen time is actually way lower than it used to be because I'm live, but that's content and I am the content. And so it's a little bit murkier, but-

• 3:17:24Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is I was always frustrated with screen time. I'll, I'll, I'll give ClearSpace a spin. But with the core screen time app, it would track like call hours as part of the screen time, right? Which just makes zero sense to me because I'm like oftentimes like not using my screen at all. I'm just talking with somebody. And so anyways, I just always, always felt like, I don't, I don't know. I think I've always been more focused on spending time on, you, you talked about like all calories are not, you know, created equally. But spending, spending time doing the right things. But yeah, the best, the best thing I've found is just putting my phone far away and just staying away from it.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, last week, I spent eight hours in the Maps app or something, which is like-

• 3:18:13Speaker 12

  Dang it!

• 3:18:13John Coogan?

  I did a commute last-

• 3:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Map maxing.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  It was my number one used app last week. I don't know what was going on. I was driving a lot, I guess.

• 3:18:22Speaker 12

  Putting that, putting the phone across the room is what we call a classic, a low-tech solution to a high-tech problem.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:28Speaker 12

  We, we think there's an opportunity to basically deploy superintelligence-

• 3:18:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:18:32Speaker 12

  At the network level, at protecting your attention, rather than exploiting- And that's like, we think that's what people want, and that's what we're bringing to them.

• 3:18:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna really stick it to Apple and just start breaking my phone into pieces when I wanna use it less. And then I gotta, cuz I'm on the, whatever, I get the, the free replacements, right? So then I just go in the next day, get a new phone, and when I want some less screen time, I just break it into pieces. That's the real low-tech solution. But excited to give ClearSpace a spin and really glad you guys are working on this. Very important that we, we have the smartest people in the world trying to capture as much attention as possible. And it's good to have, you know, equally smart people working on, on humanity's side here. So, thank you, and great to meet you.

• 3:19:17Speaker 12

  Awesome. Great to meet you guys.

• 3:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:19:18John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Plan, buy, and measure out-of-home with precision. Oh, this CNBC story, Meta Failed to Act to Protect Teens, Second Whistleblower Testified. This is from 2023. So I don't know why Adam Dell wants us to discuss this. Is there something new here? Because the CNBC story links to a Wall Street Journal article. And I was like, oh, November 2nd, it's a little bit old, but it's November 2nd of 2023. And so I don't, I don't know what, I don't know what the news is here. Maybe there's something new, we'll have to dig in. But, but we can go and, and take a tour of the latest in Meta's world.

• 3:20:00John Coogan?

  The most recent thing that I saw was that they, they beat the FTC case on the, on the, on the antitrust case that they were fighting. So, things seem to be on the up and up. The latest thing from Meta on the, like, is it safe for kids? Stuff was from Adam Mosseri at Instagram, where he was saying he's going to try and make it PG-13. He was using the MPAA rating system. And I believe that there was like some, some pushback from the MPAA on whether or not they could. I was saying, hey. Matt, you're rich enough, you should buy the entire MPA. I don't even know if you can, probably a nonprofit. But like, I want, I want those ratings, like, in every app, like, just as a consumer. Because everyone understands it. You know what R-rated means, you know what PG 13 means, you know what PG means.

• 3:20:45John Coogan?

  I can even tell the difference between G and PG now with the kids. Because PG, there might be a little bit of a, like, a tense moment. It's just, like, emotionally charged. I, I used to think PG, it's the same stuff, but it's not. And so, um, quantifying that, using the, using, every movie is training data. Pipelining that in, and then filtering every message that gets sent into Instagram, every post. Hey, how would you rate this? Machine learning model. AGI God, personal superintelligence. Let's give every, every Instagram post a, a rating, and then let the user decide. Hey, I don't want to see anything above PG 13. I don't want to see anything R-rated. I don't want to see anything, uh, G-rated, or PG-rated, or anything above that.

• 3:21:29John Coogan?

  Uh, if you could set your threshold, I think that would be very useful for parents who want parental guidance on the meta platforms.

• 3:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Uh, we've had a bunch of guests back to back.

• 3:21:38John Coogan?

  We've also had some ads back to back. getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house, by Bezel's team of experts.

• 3:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we gotta talk about the, the Kremu.

• 3:21:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Keon Exchange.

• 3:21:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 3:21:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I thought that Kremu was pretty, pretty fair.

• 3:22:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I, I think he could have gone harder.

• 3:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, Keon said he didn't watch Kremu's interview.

• 3:22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:10Jordi Hays?

  That he was with a patient. Uh, I, I wish that he, I wish that he had.

• 3:22:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, because it seems like this is, uh, one of the most important things on his plate right now, is kind of getting, getting beyond this. And, uh, ultimately, we tried to bring up as many of kind of the key concerns as possible. To be honest, it's so, it's, it's technical enough that I don't, that, that, uh, it's, it's, we don't have the same power level in terms of kind of like pushing Keon on some of these issues.

• 3:22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:22:42Jordi Hays?

  As Kremu and Sichuan.

• 3:22:43John Coogan?

  Which is why I think, like, the, a lot of the debates will be done around the data, in blog posts, by scientists, but, uh...

• 3:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, and Keon's main point that I took away was, uh...

• 3:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, laughing at laughing at the chat. But it was like, people are angry that we have the best marketing and the best science. And I, I believe that they have the most effective marketing in terms of capturing attention right now. But I don't have the confidence after that conversation that the marketing should be happening at the scale that it is. Like, I just don't, I didn't, I didn't come away from that. Super confident that, that, that Keon felt like they've done anything, anything at all that's, that's wrong.

• 3:23:36John Coogan?

  Even, even, even if you just narrow it to what there is full agreement in amongst all participants on, which is that there were reviews that were anonymized and then not disclosed to be anonymized. Even if it's just that, like, that is enough to, you know, if you're a customer, be like, oh, like, I don't trust this anymore. And it's a very, very high trust environment. It's a very trust critical environment. It's not, okay, yeah, I'm buying a phone case and like they AI generated the, the, like, an example of a person holding up the phone case. Like, that's not what this is. This is like life, it's bio, it's really important.

• 3:24:15Jordi Hays?

  People are selecting, you know, impacting their future child's life.

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've talked about this.

• 3:24:20Jordi Hays?

  And I think that whatever happens.

• 3:24:23John Coogan?

  It's really important to get it right.

• 3:24:25Jordi Hays?

  It's really important to get it right. And ultimately, people that use the service, if they have an adverse experience, they feel like the service didn't deliver, it went wrong, they're going to come back to this.

• 3:24:37John Coogan?

  So are there, are there any posts that we need to read?

• 3:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Sitwan Malap followed up and said, "The fundamental problem with Keon's deflection is that even if the origin polygenic weights can be independently validated to have the predictive accuracies claimed in their white paper, none of that changes the fact that they..." Completely plagiarized Harrisite falsely claimed that origin is novel and has superior performance made numerous errors from typos to substantive mistakes in their white paper. Have a history of making literally impossible accuracy claims in some cases inflated 2000x to independent replication.

• 3:25:13John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:25:14Jordi Hays?

  These are not just-

• 3:25:16John Coogan?

  What's up Tyler?

• 3:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I just, there's, you can continue. I have another post I want to talk about.

• 3:25:20John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:25:20Jordi Hays?

  These are not just restricted to claims about technical accuracy. These are claims about ethics and morality for the vast majority of businesses. Maybe you don't really care that, that much about unethical practices. Typically, that's fine. I mean, maybe Meta does shady stuff sometimes, but I still use Messenger. Maybe my local grocery store manager is a wife beater. Who knows? I still have to buy my groceries somewhere. That's a oddly specific example.

• 3:25:46John Coogan?

  This is the, this is the example that we keep giving of like, you know, will you go change your tires if you find out that the Bridgestone Tire Company is spying on, you know, a rival tire company? There are certain things where it's just like, if the tires are working, like, you're okay with it. A lot of it depends on like, is the criticism directly in line with the company's, with the company's product? Like, if the, if the CEO flubs a line and they miss earnings, but the, but the product still delivers what it is, it's like, they sell apples and the apples taste great. Like, you're fine. But when, but when they're, when they're making a claim about the actual product and then

• 3:26:28John Coogan?

  it doesn't align, that's where people really, really start to ask questions. So, closing out here, it says, "But we are talking about a company that will select your future child. How can anyone trust a company where the CEO's first instinct when confronted with evidence-based criticism is to make false accusation of shady conspiracy theories?" And Krimu follows up and says, "If a company engages in malpractice, i.e. plagiarism, providing products they should know are bad to customers, etc., is it water under the bridge if they can clean up?" That's obviously a reaction to my question was, you know, is there a redemption arc in his mind? Somebody says Volkswagen can answer this question really well. I think

• 3:27:09John Coogan?

  that's because Dieselgate is what's going on with, is, is, is that in reference to?

• 3:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:15John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 3:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Krimu also says, "Kian alleges that he's been working on Embra services for a long time." Again, that doesn't seem surprising. I don't, I think this was always the, the longer term vision of the company.

• 3:27:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, Kermu says he hasn't been, uh, he hasn't been doing this with genomic prediction, according to their lawsuit, which says in 2025, Nucleus sought to offer IVF products involving embryonic DNA testing. Because Nucleus could not do that work itself, it contracted with GP for GP to use its own embryonic genotyping products to provide test results for patients. Uh, Nucleus made overtures about acquiring GP, but soon it became apparent that Nucleus was looking for inroads to misappropriate. Yeah, again, these, these are just, uh, allegations that, uh, we can't, uh, really validate ourselves. Um, but again, um, didn't come away from that, uh, kind of more, more confident in, in anything, really.

• 3:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Typeform, a lot of people are saying that the Typeform is down. Keon was, of course, saying that like he will release the models and that, uh, you can go and get the, the, you can get the, the models and the data from the Typeform. It was down at the moment he said that, but Max Glick, uh, thank you for, um, your service, doing that reporting in the chat while we were talking about that exact thing. Max says it's back up now for what it's worth. And so, uh, Kermu says that's good and I certainly hope, I just feel like the next, the, the next turn of discussion, uh, needs to be, okay, we tested the models, we tested the data, uh, we, we, we tested the claims at a, at a, at

• 3:28:56John Coogan?

  a lower, at a, at a higher level of rigor, I guess. Uh, Tyler, which post did you want to run to?

• 3:29:01Speaker 04

  Oh, uh, it's at the bottom of the timeline. Um, such one model is also accusing Keon of using, uh, Chad filter during.

• 3:29:07John Coogan?

  This has happened before. This happened before. Um, so, so when, uh, when Keon came on the show, uh, maybe six months ago, um, growing Daniel accused him of using a, a Chad filter while on the stream, um,

• 3:29:27John Coogan?

  And, uh, and went super viral. Um, and, and I was kind of like, oh, like that's, uh, that's, I don't know. I don't know how to, you know, even respond to that. That's a very silly claim. Um, I, I have no idea if this is real. I can't, I can't tell at this point, um, on a zoom call at this resolution. What do you think? Do you think this is, uh, real? Are you, you guys just cracking up because everyone, does everyone think it's real?

• 3:29:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think that he used a filter.

• 3:29:56Speaker 04

  I don't think he used a filter.

• 3:29:57John Coogan?

  I don't think he used a filter either.

• 3:29:58Speaker 04

  I think he just grew a beard and.

• 3:30:00John Coogan?

  I think he's just been mewing, maybe.

• 3:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he's just photogenic.

• 3:30:03John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it is possible that he just, he just, you know, flexed his jaw muscles and like, you know, has low body fat. I don't know. I, I don't know. I, I feel like it would be extremely high risk to run a, a chin augmentation filter.

• 3:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Filter goes down for a second. I mean.

• 3:30:19John Coogan?

  Because, because you, you know, that's what happens, right? When you're using like the Snapchat filter or like the Tik Tok filters, like sometimes they pop in and out. And if they pop out, like you're done. Like people are going to be immediately, uh, you know, um, let's see. Compare the first two images with the X.com profile. I mean, the X.com profile, that picture looks three years old, four years old. I think, uh, on this one, Sishron, like you might be over your skis. I don't know. Uh, we, we, we need to, we need to prove it. Um, and then, uh, yeah, people are, people are really going back and forth.

• 3:30:50Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta get the nucleus test for the GigaChad test and.

• 3:30:54John Coogan?

  The mewing, the mewing.

• 3:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Publicize the, the results.

• 3:30:58John Coogan?

  Everyone's cracking up in the studio. We're having a wild time. Um, anyway.

• 3:31:03Jordi Hays?

  In other news, this is actually insane. Apparently, uh, according to X, I don't know if this is true, but the robbery that took place yesterday in which an armed thief posed as a delivery driver, uh, and robbed somebody for a mil- 11 million dollars of Ethereum and Bitcoin, um, uh, was, uh, Locky Groom that was targeted.

• 3:31:28John Coogan?

  Whoa, what?

• 3:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Which I had.

• 3:31:30John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:31:31Jordi Hays?

  I, I didn't realize that, uh, it was him, but absolutely terrible and traumatic. And, uh, yeah, when self custody goes wrong, but I'm glad he's, glad he's okay and safe.

• 3:31:44John Coogan?

  Wow. An armed thief posing as delivery guy finessed his way into the 4.4 million dollar Mission District home, shared by investor Lucky Groom, yes, Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend, and another tech investor named Joshua.

• 3:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so it was not Lucky, but Joshua?

• 3:32:03John Coogan?

  Gary Tan posted the footage, panicked enough to delete it minutes later. Crypto security experts are now saying what everyone thinks, self custody is great until someone shows up your door with a fake UPS label and a Glock. San Francisco's tech leader about to hard pivot into vault custody, private security, zero public flexing, because this heist wasn't random, it was a warning shot.

• 3:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Very chat GPT written.

• 3:32:25John Coogan?

  Mario Nafal.

• 3:32:26Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, very sad.

• 3:32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:32:29Jordi Hays?

  But glad Joshua is okay. I was confused for a second.

• 3:32:33John Coogan?

  That is terrible.

• 3:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you for tuning in today, folks.

• 3:32:39John Coogan?

  Before we head out, I gotta tell you about eatsleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, way sleep deeper, and wake up energized. And I'm also gonna tell you about wander.com. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Thank you for taking the time to listen to the show. Thanks for dealing with our stream issues, up and down. We sorted it out.

• 3:33:08Jordi Hays?

  Never happened before.

• 3:33:09John Coogan?

  The full clips are posted. Yeah, the full interviews will be posted, obviously RSS feed, YouTube, and the full Keon interview has made its way to the timeline. Obviously, there's a lot of debate. We will continue covering it, but not tomorrow because we're off, and not Thursday because it's Thanksgiving. We will be back on Friday.

• 3:33:26Jordi Hays?

  Friday.

• 3:33:27John Coogan?

  For Black Friday. We have a fantastic lineup of a bunch of different entrepreneurs, e-commerce founders, brand builders.

• 3:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Some of the most savage.

• 3:33:37John Coogan?

  Operators.

• 3:33:38Jordi Hays?

  E-commerce operators.

• 3:33:39John Coogan?

  It'll be a lot of fun.

• 3:33:40Jordi Hays?

  In the world. Cannot wait.

• 3:33:42John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a great time.

• 3:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Lot of friends. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving. We are thankful for each and every one of you. Thank you for being a part of this, and we'll see you Friday.

• 3:33:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.