Ellison's Counter Offer, Chinese H200s, Data Centers in Space | Aaron Ginn, Matt Kalish, Emil Michael, Blake Scholl, Naveen Rao, Ofir Ehrlich, Gorkem Yurtseven, Pedro Franceschi

(00:20) - Ellison's Counter Offer (18:23) - Chinese H200s (32:18) - Data Centers in Space (42:30) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:24) - Aaron Ginn is the CEO and Co-Founder of Hydra Host, a company specializing in high-performance computing infrastructure. In the conversation, he discusses the importance of the United States engaging pragmatically with China on trade, particularly in the technology sector, to maintain American interests and influence. He emphasizes that while China may copy technologies, the U. S. should focus on leveraging its strengths in commerce and free markets to foster mutually beneficial relationships. (01:22:18) - Matt Kalish, co-founder and president of DraftKings, discusses his journey from analytics and marketing roles to launching DraftKings in 2012, growing it into a leading sports betting platform. He highlights his transition to focus on Hardscope, a new platform aimed at empowering creators and brands in the evolving media landscape, leveraging his experience with Faze Clan to support talent across various content verticals. Kalish also addresses the competitive nature of the sports betting industry, emphasizing DraftKings' commitment to innovation and customer satisfaction amid emerging trends like prediction markets. (01:43:05) - Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, discusses the Department of Defense's collaboration with Google to provide 3 million Department of War employees access to Google Gemini on a secure private network, emphasizing the importance of integrating AI capabilities while maintaining data security. He highlights the rapid implementation of this initiative within three months and addresses the necessity of banning foreign AI models like Deep Seek to prevent sensitive data exposure. Additionally, Michael outlines the department's commitment to supporting multiple AI models across various security classifications to enhance operational efficiency and maintain technological superiority. (02:03:16) - SpaceX Targets 2026 IPO (02:11:30) - Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, discusses the company's recent milestone of their XB-1 aircraft breaking the sound barrier without generating an audible sonic boom on the ground, demonstrating the feasibility of quiet supersonic travel. He explains the physics behind this achievement, known as "Mach cutoff," where the sonic boom refracts upward in the atmosphere, preventing it from reaching the ground. Scholl emphasizes that this advancement opens the door to supersonic travel over land, potentially reducing flight times across the U. S. (02:34:46) - Naveen Rao, CEO of Unconventional AI, discusses his journey from founding AI chip company Nervana in 2014, to selling MosaicML to Databricks in 2023, and now leading Unconventional AI, which recently raised $475 million at a $4.5 billion valuation. He emphasizes the need to rethink computing paradigms to address AI's escalating energy demands, aiming to develop hardware that is a thousand times more efficient by leveraging new abstractions and focusing solely on AI applications. Rao highlights the importance of rapid iteration and deep co-design in developing this novel hardware, drawing inspiration from biological systems to create more efficient AI substrates. (02:48:42) - Ofir Ehrlich, co-founder and CEO of Eon, is a seasoned entrepreneur with a background in cloud infrastructure and data protection, having previously co-founded CloudEndure, which was acquired by Amazon in 2019. In the conversation, he discusses Eon's mission to revolutionize cloud backups by transforming them into accessible data lakes, enabling enterprises to utilize their backup data for AI and analytics, and highlights the company's recent $300 million Series D funding round led by Gil Capital, valuing Eon at $4 billion. (02:57:33) - Gorkem Yurtseven, co-founder and CTO of Fal.ai, a generative media platform for developers, announced the company's $140 million Series D funding led by Sequoia, with participation from Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia. He highlighted the company's significant growth, including an eightfold increase in revenue over the past year and the expansion of their client base to major advertisers, retail platforms, design apps, and movie studios. Yurtseven also discussed the unexpected rise of image editing surpassing AI video in their business, emphasizing the evolving landscape of generative media and the company's commitment to advancing AI-driven media production. (03:07:50) - Pedro Franceschi, co-founder and CEO of Brex, announced a $5.6 billion partnership with Fifth Third Bank to introduce AI-powered financial solutions to businesses. This collaboration aims to modernize corporate cards and automate financial workflows, leveraging Brex's technology and Fifth Third's extensive distribution network. Franceschi highlighted the potential to transform financial operations for thousands of businesses still using legacy systems. (03:18:13) - 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 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 Polymarket - https://polymarket.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 TVPN. Today's Tuesday, December 9th, 2025. Just a few days until Christmas. We're so excited. We're live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. No travel until Christmas, baby. No travel until the new year. We're in the UltraDome, hanging out. We're monitoring the situation. We're monitoring

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  the Paramount, Netflix, Warner Brothers situation, because this is one of the most fascinating deals. The deal has gone hostile. Paramount has launched a hostile bid to acquire Warner Brothers. It's an all cash offer, 77.9 billion. Really, really? And it's a fun one, because I feel like it's, it's obviously tech adjacent, but it's not, it's not the story that people have been monitoring all year. We've been talking about foundation models. That whole story has just gotten a little bit stagnant.

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Like a seed media said, they got tired of not getting enough attention.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's spice it up a little bit.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Hey, let's spice it up. Here's something new to learn about. So everyone's having fun. Everyone's learning new things. And I could tell, because when I came in today, I had a bunch of questions that people were throwing at me about how all of this works. Why, why, why isn't Warner Brothers just going with the highest price? Like, when I sell a stock, I don't care if Citadel or Jane Street's buying it. If I'm selling 80 bucks a stock, just give me the best price. But when you're selling an $80 billion company, there are other considerations. And it goes beyond just maximizing shareholder value. And so I wanted to break down a few of those, so I did that in today's newsletter. We can run through that, and then we can run through some of the news.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Perfect.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  But first, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. So this question, you know, it seems obvious. The board has a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. That's legal requirement to take the higher offer. And yet, that's not what's happening. Like, yesterday, we saw that Ellison and Paramount came in with over $100 billion. Of course, that included the CNN, the TV assets. But even when you broke it out, it seemed like it was very clear that Ellison was willing to pay more money and make a higher offer. So, under what circumstances can a board, whose job it is to maximize shareholder value?

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Not take the higher offer. They can't just, it can't just be whoever we had the better dinner with, right? Which is part of the news, of course. They, they went out to dinner and Paramount CEO David Ellison sent a text to David Zaslove, who's running Warner Brothers, after they made a hostile bid today to buy Warner Brothers. And David text the other David and says, David, but I guess he misspelled his name, even though that's his name, which is just funny. But anyway, he says, I appreciate your underwater today. So I wanted to send you a quick text. Know that despite the noise of the last 24 hours, I have nothing but respect and admiration for you and the company. It would be the honor of a lifetime to be your partner and to work and to be the owner of these iconic assets.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  He's talking about Foghorn Leghorn. He's talking about Porky Pig. He's also talking about Batman and Superman, obviously, and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and a million other iconic assets, which is true. If we have the privilege to work together, you will see that my father and I are the people you had dinner with, which I, I like that. I think that's cool. They, they had dinner. They-

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a fantastic text.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. It's a great one. So quickly, 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. So there are two main reasons why you don't just take, why, why your size might not be size. Directors at a company like Warner Brothers, they have to maximize shareholder value, but maximizing shareholder value is an expected value calculation. So if you come in with a hundred billion dollar offer, and I think there's a 75% chance that you're going to deliver that, and someone else comes in with an 80 billion dollar offer, and I think there's a hundred percent chance that they're going to deliver that, well, the expected value of your bid is 75 billion,

• 4:11John Coogan?

  the expected value of their bid is 80 billion. I go with the 80 billion, even though it's like a lower headline number, it has a higher-

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  How much of the calculus do you think is just a deal that will actually get done, right? A deal that is going to get-

• 4:25John Coogan?

  So a deal that doesn't get done could still have value because of a breakup fee. So you could, you could, you could in theory go into a deal that you know is impossible. And, and the example that I gave is, uh, what if ByteDance came in and they were like, hey, you know, we're a 400 billion dollar media company. We'd love to own these iconic assets. Let's, uh, let's pick up Warner Brothers. We'd love to own CNN too, you know? Who knows what we'd put on the TV?

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  We already own TikTok.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  We already own TikTok. Why not CNN also? Why not Shark Week?

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Not Shark Week.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  They'd have to carve out Shark Week in my book.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Um, but obviously the government would, would block that. And we have, we have CFIUS, which is an organization in the US government that determines whether or not an international buyer can take an American company because of intellectual property, uh, all sorts of geopolitical considerations. We don't want another country cornering a market on a really key piece of the supply chain, like the Nvidia H200, for example, which we might be talking about later in the show with Aaron Gin, uh, co-founder of Hydrohost, repeat guest on the TVPN show. But, uh, then there's also just the FTC. So certain deals, like the, I gave you the example yesterday, like Disney, Disney would be so blocked, I think,

• 5:42John Coogan?

  that, uh, that that deal doesn't even get kicked around. No one even talks about it. And because it would get blocked by the FTC, so it doesn't even happen. But it would maximize shareholder value if Disney came and said, yeah, we'll give you a $10 billion breakup fee and we want to try and buy you for 200 billion or a trillion or 200 million. Like you would immediately say yes, because you just want the breakup fee.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Um, but having, being in this turmoil and being in this limbo and not being able to sign deals with other, that has an opportunity cost, right?

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  And so you might want to back off of that. And so, uh, basically the-

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Look, you, you look back at the Figma acquisition.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Adobe paid a billion dollar breakup fee. So that's effectively like non-dilutive financing for Figma. That has a happy ending because they were able to, you know, re-accelerate, get out, uh, into the public markets. But, uh, there was another situation where they went through a rough patch and actually really needed that capital, uh, to get through.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's basically two buckets of risk that I think most dealmakers would be considering in this situation. First is financing risk. So will they come through with the money? And what money are they paying with? Because the initial offer, this is the history, there's actually been six offers put forward by Paramount. David Ellison is putting on a clinic of just not taking no for an answer. Because all the way back on September 14th, he offered $19 a share, and 60% of that was cash. So 60% cash offer. Then September 30th, two weeks later, he comes back, $22 a share, and ups the amount of cash to 66.7%.

• 7:22Jordi Hays?

  Zaslav is doing a masterclass in making your opponent negotiate against themselves.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  100%.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  It's actually crazy.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  And so October 3rd, $23.50 a share, 80% cash. Then November 20th, $25.50 a share, 85% cash. Then finally, December 1st, $26.50 a share, 100% cash. December 4th, $30 a share, 100% cash. Now, why does this matter? Well, it's because you get locked into owning the shares of, if 40% of the shares is Paramount, and then while it's closing, the stock trades down, you wind up getting less value. And so the 80 billion today might wind up being 70 billion later. And that doesn't maximize shareholder value. And so there's also just the question of like, can you actually marshal the cash? Just like, if somebody comes to you and you're about to sell your house to them, and they say, "Yeah, I'm definitely

• 8:11John Coogan?

  going to get a loan for this." Well, that's a financing risk. Maybe they don't, maybe they back out of the deal.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  That's why cash offers oftentimes...

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Exactly. If you can just prove that you have the cash, that makes a difference. And, I mean, he's effectively gone and done that. Because he's teamed up with Jerry Kushner, reportedly, and gone around the world, got a whole bunch of different sovereign funds, and just really people, anyone with big D pockets, has kind of, you know, said, "Yes, I'm down to come along on this ride," and put up a bunch of the capital. The capital has been marshaled. It seems like it's ready to go. And, and then also you have Larry Ellison, who has three times as much money, I think, than the whole deal value, something like that, 275 billion to his name.

• 8:53Jordi Hays?

  Assets, not cash.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Assets, not cash, but-

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  He should not just, I know they want it, but do not market sell your Oracle position, please.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but he's like, I'm actually, I'm actually going all cash now. But, but, but he's, he's effectively acted as backstop. And so, and so everyone who's come in and said, okay, who, I guess I'm good for 10 billion of that 80 billion. But only if everyone else is in. Larry Ellison reportedly has come in and said, well, you know, if, if there's one person in the bunch that, that backs out of their slug at the last second, I'll jump in and get them. He's not saying he's going to put up the whole 80, he's just saying he's backstopping it.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  And, and that's the term that's been thrown around. So, so, uh, David Ellison feels very, you know, good because he's done what Zaslav wanted him to. He said, hey, they wanted an all cash offer. I brought them an all cash offer. I brought them an offer that's higher. And we believe that it's, um, there's no reason why, uh, factor number two should come into play. And factor number two is regulatory approval. And so, um, there's been this question about will Netflix get approved? If there was a different buyer, it would have even more regulatory risk. And so you don't want to, even if the price is higher, you don't want to accept a higher price with a lower chance of actual, um, actual conversion, right?

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  Bobby thinks NLE Chapa might, uh, up his offer to 100K of cash and get back in the mix.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  In that scenario, at least you know that the 100K cash is real and it's going to be delivered on the day of close.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Maybe in actual cash.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Probably. I, I think that was the, that, that is funny because that, that was the joke of that meme, uh, was that he was giving like actual cash. When we're saying cash offer here, of course, we are not talking about physical cash.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Hey, you never know.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Are you showing a money spread over there?

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Is Tyler doing money spread? What has he got? Did Christmas come early for you?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  I, so I, I had a question though. Um, what makes the Paramount offer, uh, like hostile? Is it that it's like reacting to the Netflix offer?

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Is that the Netflix board?

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Already-

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Or sorry, the Warner, Warner Brothers board went with Netflix and they're coming, it's hostile because they're saying- Screw the board decision, we want to go to the shareholders.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, because it sounded like they had a nice dinner and the texts were like kind.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. No, no, no.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  You sound very hostile.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  No, hostile in the sense of like, of like not accepting the final, like the final decision there. And then, and then also there is a, there is a point where you can appeal directly to the shareholders and make the, you can actually make the legal case that the board is not acting in their fiduciary duty and in their, in the interest of shareholders. Because, but again, these things need to be argued in shareholder lawsuits because it is fuzzy. Because like if I say, I'm offering you 100 billion and someone else is offering 80 billion and the board says, yeah, but that 100 billion has only a 75% chance of going through. You have to discount that. Now, now the board says it's worth 75. But whoever made that offer can say, no, we're actually good for it.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  You need, you should apply a 10% discount rate and treat our offer as if it's 90% or 100%. Good, right? And so, and so all of those arguments, those can be made in the court and the shareholders can, you know, react to that. And if the shareholders align and say, yeah, actually, we think we'd be getting more money here with this, with this deal, then they can push back against the board at a certain point. But yeah.

• 12:20Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show, high-powered media exec says, Zaslav has been architecting this situation for the last 12 months, sitting pretty, and he's a wily old fox and has what he has been shooting for. Two heavy hitters fighting over a deal. Don't doubt there will be a couple more turns here with the price or even another bidder coming in sideways. Don't quote me.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Which is remarkable because the price is so high already compared to where it was six months ago. Zaslav.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  It really feels like it's coming together that he will be remembered as like an incredible business executive for this deal. I want to know more. I'm still learning about this particular industry and so I've been, I've been having fun digging in, but.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Possible deal guy of the year?

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Possible.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  He's in the conversation.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  He's definitely in the.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Sam, Sam was, Sam looked like he was running away with it.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Over the summer.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Early fall and he lost ball control.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  He lost ball control, yeah. Well, quickly, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. But there is, there is a wrinkle that, that people haven't really been considering, which is the fact that Warner Brothers Discovery holds massive, a massive, often underrated vault of masculine cinema. And if this falls into the wrong hands.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  What is masculine cinema?

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Masculine, masculine cinema would be.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  Guys being dudes on film?

• 13:55John Coogan?

  So they own, they own a bunch of Clint Eastwood films. Dirty Harry, Magnum Force, The Enforcer, Heartbreak Ridge, American Sniper, Letters From Iwo Jima, Unforgiven, Gran Torino. They also own the classic Steven Seagal run. Basically every movie where Steven Seagal was a massive theatrical star. Before going to direct a video, we're talking about Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, Under Siege, which is Die Hard on a Boat, Under Siege 2, On Deadly Ground, Fire Down Below, Exit Wounds. They also own Rambo, The Whole Subversives to Loan the Cobra Wing, Cobra, Demolition Man, The Specialist,

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Tango and Cash, Bullet to the Head, Get Carter, the 2000 remake. They also own Mad Max, Lethal Weapons, all of the Lethal Weapons, The Matrix, Blade, Mortal Kombat, 300, Rush Hour, Pacific Rim, and a number of Dad and Military Shows, Band of Brothers, The Pacific Generation Kill. There's a whole host.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  They should release the full DVD set just called Guys Being Dudes.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yes, they also own some Jason Statham properties. The Meg franchise, where Jason Statham fights a big shark.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Wrath of Man. I guess most of the Guy Ritchie films are actually with Lionsgate or MGM, but. There are a variety and I think this could be a, you know, a big political hot button of what happens to the Rambo franchises, the Hollywood hunks. No one's talking about the Hollywood hunks. Everyone's focused on Looney Tunes characters. But if the Hollywood hunks fall into the wrong hands, it could be, it could swing our entire culture potentially. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, Michael on our team worked on Wrath of Man.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Oh, really? No way.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  First job.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Vanta, automated compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risks. You're hiding inordered amounts of Middle Eastern funding sources in your takeover bid, are you not, says boring business. And not hiding it, it's out in the open, like this is, this is, this is like the playbook for these big deals.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  But again, it's double, double that of the amount of equity that the Allison's are putting in.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Putting in around.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think everyone assumes that there'd be a lot of Middle Eastern funding in this. That has become the standard funding instrument these days. I don't know. Like EA Games, we just followed that story a little bit. That was obviously a huge amount of Saudi money. And that is part of the modern deal making playbook these days. Every, I'm pretty sure most of the, a lot of venture funds have raised money over there, a lot of the big AI companies have raised money over there. Like, that seems like a foregone conclusion that if you need money, you go where the money is. Why do, why do bank robbers rob banks? Because that's where the money is. Well, Dylan Byers says, David, I appreciate

• 16:55John Coogan?

  your underwater today, so sent you a quint quick text. He's talking about the dinner. Oh, so that was the correct, that was the misspelling, D A I V D. He must have been texting very quickly. It does give you a little bit of a...

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's turn this into a copy pasta.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Yes. I enjoyed the dinner. So exec sum has an overview of who who's actually putting in the money here. Filings reveal that Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers is backed by equity commitments, including 11.8 billion from the Ellison family, 24 billion from Saudi Arabia's Qatar's and Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth funds, 1 billion from China's Tencent, additional commitments from Redbird Capital Partners and Jared Kushner's affinity partners. That doesn't add up to 100 billion. So there's must be must be cash coming from somewhere else. This is maybe maybe there needs to be some more reporting until, oh, they did give a given an updated

• 17:52John Coogan?

  version of this post, but it doesn't quite add up. So will be interesting to follow where, you know, how the deal comes together.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  We have a few more people joining this week to help us break down the deal. Ben Smith from Semaphore tomorrow, and then Dylan Byers.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Oh, Dylan's coming on?

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  Puck on Thursday in person.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  I'm excited. Oh, he's coming in person. Yes, that's great. Well, let me tell you about numeral compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance, so you can focus on growth. Trump says that the United States will allow Nvidia H200 chip sales to China and get a 25% cut. This is a pretty big change. I mean, we were talking about not selling. I mean, I guess it's not Blackwell, right? It's Hopper. So we're still a generation behind. But was this it was like a pretty nerfed chip before we're getting less nerfed. We seem to move. We seem to be moving in a in a more thumbs up direction, more let's let's actually get the chips

• 18:57John Coogan?

  over to China. At the same time, AI is fake, so it doesn't matter. Right? That's the take. The pro China take is that is that it's like.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  It's SaaS.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  It's SaaS or it's not. It's not like this nuclear bomb that's going to destroy everyone. So it's harder. It's getting harder to make the the Manhattan Project argument. Right?

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  And it feels impossible to make the argument that we're going to get them addicted to the US AI supply chain and they'll never develop their own capabilities. And so we want them.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Well, I disagree with that. I think that that I think that that argument actually holds. That argument holds for sure.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  In the next, I mean, I totally disagree. I think they're, I think China is smart enough to know they don't want to be dependent on any foreign country to produce any.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Yes, but I still think there's enough of like a market force within China that if we flood the market with cheap Nvidia chips, like they will, there will, it'll just be expensive for them to keep propping up their local industry, even if they are aware of it, even if they know that they have to, it's a cost and it's something that a lot of AI researchers over there will just say, you know what, I'm already, it's so much easier, the Nvidia ecosystem is so great, I'm just going to stick with that. I don't know. I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit skeptical that like, there isn't, there's no advantage to, to selling Nvidia chips there. I've become more, I've become more receptive to that argument in

• 20:32John Coogan?

  particular, even though you have not. But that's fine. Tyler, what were you going to say about this?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was just going to say, I mean, we kind of joke about this, but it is kind of crazy, the extent to which you can basically bake down all like AI policy questions to like if you are AGI pilled. Cause like if you are, if you're Dario, I mean, you shouldn't be giving stuff to China. You also shouldn't, like if you are AGI pilled, you should be thinking about safety, all these things. Like we had Keith Roy on, he's doesn't seem super AGI pilled. He's also like, oh, safety is a hoax, etc., stuff like this. I think basically all of these questions you can just, you know.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Well, it depends because if you're super fast takeoff pilled and you're super like ASI, it's like, but you think that it can somehow be contained and whoever gets it first, you actually don't mind if China's six months behind you because as soon as you hit that inflection point, you're a thousand years ahead. And so you might as well just do whatever it takes, fund whatever, make as much money as possible, as long as it accelerates you to be the first one to hit that inflection point. So there is an argument where you can be extremely AGI pilled, even super.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, Truth Social is creating a prediction markets product within the app.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  I thought you were going to say AI product. Didn't they launch an AI thing last week?

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  I think that was fake news.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Oh, that was fake. Okay.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  But it's possible Trump is going to use the prediction markets on Truth Social in order to kind of set AI policy going forward. Say H200s to China, good or bad?

• 22:02John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  I mean, that's not that, like, Robin Hanson says that that's like a good idea.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  That was the whole, that was the whole, that was the whole pitch originally.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  There is definitely a bull case, you could say, like a steel man for that.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  There's always the steel man.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Jordi Hays?

  Where's your helmet, John?

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna put on the helmet. Um, well, let's read through this Wall Street Journal article on the, on the details of the new Nvidia deal. But first, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, notable that this seems to have been completely priced in already because Nvidia is actually down half a, half a point today.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yes, it's, it's been such a dramatic story all year. And yet it's always felt like a complete footnote in the overall financial performance of Nvidia. It's never felt like, okay, yeah, if this, if this goes Nvidia's way, they're going to double their, double their revenue or double their profits. They're like, you know, really move the needle. They're growing so fast that, you know, I, I don't know how many, we're going to get into figuring out how many H200s they sell, but they would need to sell a lot to actually move the needle on this behemoth of a business. What is the world's largest company in the world? So President Trump said he would let Nvidia export its H200 chip to China and that the US would receive a 25% cut his latest bid to make money for the government

• 23:26John Coogan?

  in an unusual agreement with a private company. I have informed President Xi Jinping of China that the United States will allow Nvidia to ship H200 products to approved customers in China and other countries under conditions that allow for strong national security. 25% will be paid to the US today. The move is a boon for Nvidia, which has fought for months to maintain access to the world's second largest economy. The company had agreed earlier this year to give the US 15% of China's sales from a lower performing chip, only for the Chinese to scuttle those plans as part of continuing trade talks between the two sides. Chips from the world's most valuable company have become a prized geopolitical tool.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  The H200 has higher performance than the H20 that Nvidia was previously allowed to sell. But this isn't as powerful as the company's top Blackwell products released this year, nor the Ruben generation chips. Generation of chips coming next year. The move follows a meeting between Trump and Jensen Wong last week where the pair discussed H200 exports. People familiar with the matter said Nvidia shares at nearly 2% after hours. That's not too bad. Even with the US government taking a cut, the decision could be worth billions of dollars in sales to Nvidia, which enjoys comfortable margins on its AI chips. In the most recent fiscal quarter, Nvidia reported gross margins of 73.4% on $57 billion in sales. That is crazy.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  They can totally afford 25% for the big guy. I have no idea if it'll be legal. We'll have to figure out if this gets approved because in general, the United States does not import, enforce export duties. That's not something America's done historically. We had some folks on the show to contextualize that and give us some background when this was first floated. Feels like it is happening now, but we'll see where it lands. In August, Nvidia CFO Collette Crass said that if geopolitical issues subside, the company could ship between $2 billion and $5 billion of chips to China per quarter, which increase, which could increase if orders pick up. So they're doing

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right around that time too. Lutnik was on CNBC and this was the quote that originally ticked off the Chinese. He said, "We don't sell them our best stuff, not our second best stuff, not even our third best." And he said, "You want to sell the Chinese enough that their developers get addicted to the American technology stack? That's the thinking." And of course, CCP basically immediately said, "We don't want any of them now because we're offended."

• 26:01John Coogan?

  But it does seem like, yeah, I don't know. We will have to, we'll have to have Bill Bishop or someone on the show to contextualize how China is receiving this information, whether or not they will actually buy it. Of course, we're going to be joined by Aaron Gin in just 30 minutes, so stay tuned for that. Also, let me tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. So the exports could help Chinese tech giants that have struggled to get top chips to train their models. Wong has argued Nvidia should be allowed to compete in the Chinese market because China has many of the world's top AI researchers and the US should want them using American technology. If you're you are not going to replace China, Wong said at an event, at a think tank

• 26:46John Coogan?

  event. Trump said that the government would take a similar approach to exports from Nvidia competitor AMD, as well as Intel, in which the government now has a 10% stake. The approval comes just weeks after administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio torpedoed a push from Nvidia to sell a slimmed down Blackwell chip to China before a recent trade meeting between Trump and Xi Jinping. Some officials, including AI czar David Sacks and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have backed exporting the H200 because it could be a good compromise that allows Nvidia to compete with China's Huawei technologies without vaulting China past the US in AI. People familiar with the discussion said, I don't know, it's such a such an interesting

• 27:30John Coogan?

  question that I still I still wrestle with. Like, we exported a ton of Teslas to China, and BYD and Huawei have now

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  But arguably, completely leapfrogged.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Completely leapfrogged. Was so they were they did not become addicted to the American electric car stack.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  That was the point I was making earlier.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  You can make the art, like, almost with every single product, they've said, we'll work with you to make this thing that you want to make. We're really good at making things.

• 28:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  And then they ultimately just make a better version of said product and make it for cheaper.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  And and in the case of cars, right now, we're obviously not allowing these cars to be imported

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  into the US. But, you know, they can simultaneously say, we're happy to keep making you these things. We're also going to compete with you directly.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  And constantly try to be better than what you do.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  I just wonder, like, if you if you play it back, you don't and you don't allow Tesla to export the amazing Model S or Model 3, does that slow down BYD's development of their car or or Huawei's or Xiaomi's development of their cars?

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my understanding is they were able to basically get a paid education making Teslas, and they were able to leverage that into making

• 28:56John Coogan?

  But that's about making the car there. If you don't make the car there, which is because the

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia has a Shanghai

• 29:04John Coogan?

  That's research, that's not made there. That's not made there. Like, it's very different when you're, when you're saying, okay, we're gonna go and, we're gonna go and produce this product there. And like, you are gonna get educated there and

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  I think it's different, but it, but you remember, we've gone through this before. China's like five-year plans to create a domestic chip industry.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  They've been doing five-year plans for 60 years.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  I know, they're building, that's what I'm saying, and I would argue that it's working. They're not caught up, but they're certainly made, you know, massive amount of progress. They've made more progress than any other country on earth.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know, what do you think, Tyler?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  I, I think if you wanna think about like, getting the Chinese addicted to our chips, like how addictive are the chips?

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Because if you can make a comparison between, like, you have Nvidia chips and then you have the Chinese or like TPU, right? Because the TPU is like, in some ways, it's, it's harder to use, the soft, open source is not as good.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  But if it's just more economical, like, if the actual hardware is just like, a little bit cheaper,

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  then it doesn't really matter how worse the software is, people will eventually move to it. So it's like, the, I don't think there is actually that much, like, soft power in the kind of general open source stuff, like, that, in regards to like Nvidia. It doesn't seem very addictive outside of it just being cheaper.

• 30:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, I mean, it, it, at the same time, like, like, we are, America is very much like addicted to Chinese solar panels right now. Like, the Chinese solar panels come here, they're cheap, and so we don't wind up buying or building a domestic solar panel industry, because just to get anything off the ground, you have to go in and say, okay, we're, we're going to deal with having no margin forever and no venture capitalist can underwrite it, and no private equity firm can underwrite it. And so it just doesn't really happen.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the Chinese, they do do that.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  I guess they do, they do bear the cost more, so it doesn't matter. But it's like, they wouldn't have to bear the cost, so we're, we're imposing a little bit of a cost on them. It's like, they, they actually have to pay it, whereas like, they don't. Uh, whereas like, they wouldn't if we didn't do that, right? Because if we don't go in and we don't sell them Nvidia chips, then they're like, okay, well, it makes economic sense to back Huawei and fund them. Whereas now, they're like, it's not economically logical to back Huawei, but we have to because there's so much pressure from better chips flooding the market, like Nvidia chips, that if we don't fund Huawei uneconomically,

• 31:36John Coogan?

  if we don't lose money on Huawei, like, we will never be competitive.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it seems to me that, like, either way, they're gonna fund it, the government, the Chinese government.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  I think that's George's point, too.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Really, I don't think it actually matters that much.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Well, let's move on. But let's also tell you about Adio, the AI-native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. The United States will allow Nvidia's H200 processors, its second best. So, this is a change from what Ludnick said, right? Ludnick said, "We're not selling the best, we're not selling the second best." Turns out, we are selling the second best now.

• 32:17John Coogan?

  Maybe we'll sell the first best soon, who knows? Well, we should play this clip from Patrick O'Shaughnessy's fantastic interview with Gavin Baker on Invest Like the Best. He's talking about space data centers. We had Delian on the show yesterday, talking about space data centers. Delian still thinks it's pretty far up.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  Gavin knew we needed a new narrative. He said after the fateful BG2 episode, ended the AI trade, we needed a new trade, and now we're getting the space data center trade.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Okay, let's hear the space data center.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the world in the next three to four years is data centers in space. If you think about it from first principles, data centers should be in space. What are the fundamental inputs to running a data center? Their power and their cooling. And then there are the chips, the inputs to making the tokens come out of the magic machines.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 03

  So in space, you can keep a satellite in the sun 24 hours a day.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Pretty cool.

• 33:16Speaker 03

  And the sun is 30% more intense. And this results in six times more irradiance in outer space than on planet Earth. So you're getting a lot of solar energy. Point number two, because you're in the sun 24 hours a day, you don't need a battery. And this is a giant percentage of the cost. So the lowest cost energy available in our solar system is solar energy in space. Okay. Second, for cooling, in one of these racks, a majority of the mass and the weight is cooling. And the cooling in these data centers is incredibly complicated. You know, I mean, the HVAC, the CDUs, the liquid cooling. In space, cooling is free. You just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  It's fucking golf.

• 34:01Speaker 03

  And it's as close to absolute zero as you can get. So all that goes away. And that is a vast amount of cost. And then let's think about how the satellite.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  A bit more complicated than that?

• 34:12John Coogan?

  What?

• 34:13Jordi Hays?

  The dissipating heat in space.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  This is what everyone's fighting about. I'm not exactly sure how it plays out, like the physics of it. But a lot of people are saying like, yes, it's in a vacuum, but because it's in a vacuum, you can't just, you can't, like, it's not as passive of cooling. It's more of a material science problem. Like, there's more physics, physics problems there. Also, like, I don't know, I feel like you might need some, I feel like you might need some batteries because I think there are, there are orbits that are effectively in the sun all the day. But I think that the Earth's shadow like hits them, not like every day, but like every once in a while,

• 34:56John Coogan?

  you'll be, you'll, you'll be caught in a shadow, almost in like a, in a, what's it called? I don't know, some sort of, you know, you just get caught in the shadow, not every day, but like every 12 days or every 30 days or something like that. And so in that scenario, I mean, maybe you, maybe it'd be fine if you're doing inference and you don't, and you can just turn it off the whole system for a little bit and there's some redundancy.

• 35:22Jordi Hays?

  I just texted our resident spaceman, Dalian.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  I said.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Answer this.

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  I just said, quick take.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, on this.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  It's urgent.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  It's urgent. Well, we'll, we'll, we'll get back from him. There, there's more to that clip, though. We should play this because there's a funny part in here.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  What are you going to connect those racks? Well, it's funny, in the data center, the racks are over a certain distance, connected with fiber optics. And that just means a laser going through a cable. The only thing faster than a laser going through a fiber optic cable is a laser going through absolute vacuum. So if you can link these satellites in space together using lasers, you actually have a faster and more coherent network than in a data center on Earth. Okay, for training, that's going to take a long time, just because it's so big. But for inference, let's think about the user experience. You know, when I asked Grok about you and it gave the nice answer.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  This is crazy, though. They've done a podcast together five times. Why is he asking about Patrick? I was like, what is going on?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Went to some sort of metro aggregation facility in New York, probably within, you know, 10 blocks of here. There's a small little metro router that's routed those packets to a big XAI data center somewhere. Okay, and then the computation was done and it came back over the same path. If the satellites can communicate directly with the phone, and Starlink has demonstrated direct to cell capability.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  This whole thing, I would like to, I would like to know how much SpaceX exposure Gavin has. Because if this does become a dominant, at least narrative over the next few years.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of the people that we know that have computers in space are not exactly bullish on data centers in space on a short time horizon.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  We have not, we had the founder of Star Cloud on, he's obviously bullish, but I don't believe he has any. Satellites in orbit.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  We've had Delian on, he puts things into orbit, he brings them back down.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  He's talked about having, he technically has.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  I mean, Delian's a hilarious position because Founders Fund has a huge position in SpaceX, obviously. But also, Delian has had to do the hard work of like getting something in space and probably understands like how much of a grunt work it is and how much of a grind it is to get even just like something as small as like the pod into space. And then he's also seen at Crusoe, like what a real data center looks like. And the idea of putting something so massive into space, like it's bigger than the Hubble, it'd be bigger than the ISS, like, what are you thinking about this space data center thing? Have you evolved on this?

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, to me, it seems just kind of impractical, like, if you think about, if you're doing inference or something, like how much of the cost of the token is actually in the energy, right? Because like, I feel like one of the main benefits of having the data center in space is that energy is basically free, right?

• 38:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  It's right there.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  But if you think about like, I think Casey Henry has talked about this, like if you think about an inference, when you're doing inference, the portion of the cost that's actually the energy, it's like very tiny.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Because it's like, the chip is expensive.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Or doing, like, it's like not that expensive.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  So it's like, okay, the cost gains overall are like not that great. And then it's like, well, what if you want to change the chip to the next generation? Or what if you need to do some kind of like mechanical work?

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you want to change the.

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  Are we ignoring how broken cluster would take some sort of intervention to fix as well as the cost per kilogram in fuel costs?

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just for context, so Gavin was at Fidelity.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  And led a $900 million investment in SpaceX at a $12 billion post-money valuation.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  That's amazing, wow. What, how did it go? That's incredible.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, actually.

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so maybe they didn't do the full 900 million.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Grok isn't sure.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. But, but I mean, either way, like, you can, you can be pro or con on space data.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  And Grok also says SpaceX has been a tradie's largest venture capital position as of 2022, comprising an estimated 30 to 40% of its VC portfolio.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Deals wild. So anyways, Gavin is, is set to, on one hand.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Gavin could know things about space data centers that the rest of us don't know.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  Because of his position and proximity to SpaceX. At the same time, SpaceX, if they go public next year, would benefit a lot from having a space data center kind of like narrative as part of this.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  It's crazy because the business is so solid, I feel like you don't need a fourth act or whatever.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Okay, wait, so what about this? So if a lot of the gains of a space data center are just because the energy is free, why don't we just, but then there's this hard part about having like different satellites everywhere.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  Put the data center on the moon. There's no atmosphere, so you don't get the 30%, you know, reduction in energy from, from the sun. And just put data center on the moon.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Well, don't you get a 50% reduction? Because there's like, there's a dark side of the moon. Like, like the moon.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  You wouldn't put it on the dark side of the moon.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  No. I know, I know. But what I mean is that, is that our, our dark side sometimes gets light from when it's not facing us, right? And so, so you only, if you're on the moon, you only get light 50% of the time.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Whereas, whereas if you're a satellite and you're flying out in space and you're kind of orbiting the earth like, but at a weird axis that you're not constantly in shadow all the time, you're getting sun, he says 24 hours a day. I think it's, I think it's like 99.9% of the time. But regardless, it's like almost always. Whereas if you're, if you're actually like on the moon, you don't get sunlight 100% of the time, you get it 50% of the time. I'm pretty sure.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  I don't think it's

• 41:20Jordi Hays?

  Alright, maybe there's some flaws.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, the sun's not, the sun's not like, uh, or the, the moon's not sun locked. It's, it's earth locked.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Put up this post, uh, pull up this post. I put it at the bottom of the stack from Joe Morrison. Uh, he's over at Umbra Space.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com and we will pull up this next post.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Joe says, you just put a radiator on the dark side of the satellite. And he says thermal engineers in absolute shambles right now.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are not, it's, I don't know. People are so split up.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  Casey Hammer says, to be fair, this is a big satellite. Joe says many big satellites.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Big satellite? Makes it easier? I don't know. I, I don't know.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think you need, I think you need like, like a lot of,

• 42:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Like you need, you need basically a lot of, uh, mass in order to dissipate enough,

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, heat.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  From a, from a GB 300 or something, GB 200?

• 42:19John Coogan?

  200?

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Somehow AST Space Mobile Inc. is up 27% in the last five days, so.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Exciting times.

• 42:27Jordi Hays?

  People are, uh, quite excited.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, should we head over to Gulfstream news? There's some massive news from Gulfstream Aerospace. The G400 introduces next gen Gulfstream tech to its class. Sound on to learn more with Gulfstream President Mark Burns. How is Mark Burns not been on the show yet? Here we go.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Clearly don't have a no render policy over here. They're, they're render waxing.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  You think they're just not at, you, you think they could just be adding special effects?

• 43:02John Coogan?

  What do you mean? This is the most rendered video I've ever seen. This looks like it was rendered in 2010.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  You think this is real though?

• 43:11Speaker 04

  Bring Gulfstream performance standards to a large cabin class.

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 43:16Speaker 04

  Fulfilling our customers' needs for a product line to suit every trip and enhance every journey.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Like this is real. This is what it looks like.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  It's far away.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  It does look like a nice plane, though.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  With Gulfstream's signature combination of range, speed, and cabin comfort, the G400 will provide unrivaled efficiency. Thanks to the combination of the advanced Pratt

• 43:39John Coogan?

  This is gonna be a hot Christmas gift this year.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  People have been wondering. I think this will be top of, this will be under the tree for a lot of people.

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  It's not ideal to do like a preorder as a gift, you know? It's nice to have something under the tree, but I think people would make an exception here. So funny, I was talking, I was talking with a mutual friend of ours, a guest who's been on the show many times, and they're planning to purchase a jet at some point in the relatively near future. And he was so fixated on like needing to be able to, it's his first, it will be his first jet. And he was so fixated on like, I need to be able to stand up at, at like, like it can't have, uh, like the cabin needs to be big enough that I can like walk around freely. And I was like, come on, for your first jet, can you not just like,

• 44:26John Coogan?

  there is crazy.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, tolerate like slightly lower height in the cabin? He was like, no, I gotta be able to, I gotta be able to move freely.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Go straight for the 747, the BBJ.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Get the, the, the VVIP package. The one that only the Qataris have for some reason. Uh, well, Casey Handmer.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I got a back, I got a text back from Delian. I won't read all of it.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a line here, this is from someone else. Dude, all this data centers in space stuff. Also, I'm not gonna read that. You need 1,100 kilowatt SAS to generate 100 gigawatts in orbit. 100 kilowatt SATs weighing 1,000 kilogram, including payload would mean a 5X increase in power density. And you can't just not have batteries and slap a radiator on the back, lol. And then there was some choice words exchanged that I won't, I won't read on the show. But anyways, I think we should host the data center in space debate.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  That sounds good.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  We should get a few people on here, somebody to be bullish. Somebody to be bearish. I think we want somebody to be bullish that has put things into orbit and taken them down many times. I think it's hard to, it's hard to lean on, on somebody's kind of take or opinion if they're not actually participating in, in space. They're just sort of speculating.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, let's read through a little bit of what Casey Hanmer had to say. He said, "Here's one idea about SpaceX's next big thing, AI computing inference, again, not training, on orbit, but how the hell can SpaceX do this cheaper than just building more data centers on the ground? From first principles, it's an attractive position, proposition, because the GPUs have extremely, have extremely high value per kilogram and extreme revenue per kilowatt, both of which are relatively expensive. That is, the value prop somewhat washes out the pain of operating in space. Uh, so I took a closer look. If anyone can make this work, it is a Starlink derived system. So I started with the Starlink V3 satellites with some high fidelity CEO CAD below. Um, orbital parameters, pick a sun synchronous orbit.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  So we're in full kilowatt, uh, 1400 kilowatt per meter squared sunlight at all times. No need for batteries. Deploy the solar array in sun slicer mode facing full sun, but the edge is pointing in the orbital direction, bottom right in these images, to minimize drag. But the inference Starlink Star Thought satellites don't have to scrape the atmosphere.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Being in sun synchronous orbit, they'll need to use the rest of the Starlink constellation for backhaul via laser links anyway. And higher orbits actually improve worst case latency, uh, very slightly. Too high, though. And SSO is relatively full of debris. Let's pick 560 kilometers. A Starlink satellite in this orbit has full sun, so the back half is always shaded and relatively cool. The next hottest thing in the sky is the earth taking up almost half the sky to the bottom left in these images. And so what, what does he conclude? He says, "I've seen a bunch of high inclination Starlink launches from the Vandenberg recently, but I don't think any of them were going to sun synchronous orbit. In any case, a ring of inference satellites visible at dawn and dusk running

• 47:54John Coogan?

  north and south will be awesome. If one starship can launch 100 tons to LEO, then that gets close to 30 megawatts of inference per launch. A thousand watts is 300 gigawatts. Now we're talking real scale." We're doing one launch of Falcon nine per day. There was Delian's loosely. We're now one a day, so 300 in a year. So you get to, you know, 1,000 over three years if you're on a one a day cadence, or if you can wind up getting more. The math is not that crazy, but it does seem like Delian was pushing more towards like, hey, this is maybe 10 or 20 years, not the next three years. But it certainly will be fun to follow the story.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  In the meantime, let me tell you about cognition, the team behind the AI software engineer Devon. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Jordy has survived.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  I keep like getting the

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Podcast in a can.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Can like down the wrong.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  They should really make a drink specifically for podcasters that has no carbonation, that cannot be choked on in any way. Mark Benioff says LLMs are the new disk drives. Commodity infrastructure you hot swap for whoever's cheapest plus best. The fantasy that the model is the moat just expired. Mark Benioff having fun on the timeline. I love that he's having fun. I love that he's taking shots.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Don't they have an AI lab, to be clear?

• 49:23John Coogan?

  They were working on Einstein for a while, but I think that they are very much happy to be a rapper, happy to be a buyer of LLMs at this point. It certainly has penciled out that way. We can talk more to Mark about that.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  He's feeling good. Stock's up 10% in the last five days.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  Best salesman history.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about Michael Burry saying the whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP?

• 49:58John Coogan?

  Everyone that knows anything knows this. OpenAI is the next Netscape, doomed and hemorrhaging cash. Microsoft is still trying to keep it afloat while keeping it off balance sheet and sucking out the IP. So why do they keep getting funded? The whole industry needs a $500 billion IPO ASAP. The whole industry needs to go away and sit in the corner for a couple of centuries and think about what's done, says Jeffrey Miller. Wow.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  I don't know. This is, people want extreme takes.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  This post would go super hard if you don't understand the Microsoft OpenAI relationship.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  But. Yeah, it's just, it's just overly dramatic.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  What was Netscape's peak revenue? What was, what was Netscape's?

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  If I remember correctly, they IPO'd with like fifteen million of revenue.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  That feels a little bit different. Netscape's peak revenue in nineteen ninety-seven was five hundred million. I mean, we're up at two, twenty billion this year for OpenAI.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, their total revenue before IPO, first two operating quarters, Netscape reported total revenue of sixteen point six million.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  It's just odd. I mean, did Netscape have like an enterprise business?

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  That's smart.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, even, even if there's a, uh, yeah, yeah, like, even if there's more commoditization, like, it's gonna take, it's gonna take time and, I don't know, the, the dynamics of the, of the, of the competition here uh, feels like there will still be a lot of value, even if, even if there are, even if it is somewhat commodity infrastructure. It's like, you know what else is commodity infrastructure? Like AWS, GCP, Azure, like, you, you get, you get a, you know, and like a, a server with some hard disk on it, like, that is commodity, and yet, they all have thirty percent margins. And they're all massive businesses. And when AWS, when Amazon broke out AWS as its own line, it was like an IPO of its own company because it was so big.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  It was such a massive business, and it should be completely commodity because it's just servers and a data center. And yet.

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting too. I mean, uh, Burry has, has, uh, you know, positioned himself of, of uh, just hating any company that's overheated, uh, but, uh, ChatGPT having close to a billion weekly actives. Uh, and ultimately, even if they just compete in search, right?

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  At least it's a tri, you know, multi-trillion dollar opportunity, uh, whether or not they, you know, fully execute against that is another thing.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Are you buying, are you buying the IPO timeline of?

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Cohere, then Anthropic, then OpenAI? Or do you think they will be sorted in a different, in a different pattern?

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  What was the order?

• 52:48John Coogan?

  Cohere first, that's Aiden Gomez's foundation model lab. He's of course on the transformer paper, also a dripped out technology brother.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  With a fantastic set of outfits. Then, then Anthropic and then OpenAI, OpenAI third. That's the rumor.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've heard to say, I have no idea how the market will react to Cohere.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, Cohere has shifted more into like the business, the enterprise market, fully enterprise.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  Not in the timeline at all. Could very well be intentional, but it would be. It'll be interesting how much excitement they can build around the IPO, assuming they're losing a lot of money.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Assuming the enterprise is really competitive and they're competing with Anthropic and OpenAI and open source models.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  If the narrative changes to the point where, you know, this, this idea of, of every enterprise is going to need a, a basically a custom LLM that's fine tuned or pre-trained on their data like what AWS CEO Matt Garmin was talking to us about, about these pre-training checkpoints where you can go in and say, okay, I have a business and I absolutely do not want to upload my data to Anthropic. I don't want to update it. I don't want to upload it to OpenAI. But I want a model that understands my business's data at a core level in the pre-training step. And Cohere can offer that and so show traction there. That, that feels like that could be the next wave.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  We've talked to like a number of founders that are, are building those sort of like custom pipelines. And there's not really a public company that is even anywhere in that narrative. And that narrative does feel very nascent. It feels like it has not percolated through the public markets yet. So, I don't know, it, it, it could be, it could be, you know, exciting for, for, for them.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  They've only raised, they've only raised 1.4 billion.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  I did not really think.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, 1.5.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  1.5 billion.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  1.54 billion, very modest amount. Uh, especially when you have seed stage companies raising half a billion.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  We got one of those on the show today.

• 55:02Jordi Hays?

  Naveen Rao.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  We're excited.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Joining.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  Later, he kicked the hornets nest on the timeline.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  He did?

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  A little bit. People were, people were pushing back.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Because of his, his, his racing history?

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Oh, people, people show respect.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  I love that. Show massive respect. No, but, uh, I think, uh, I think, uh, Jack at Slow was saying that Nvidia was valued at, at 500 million when they IPO'd. Of course, that was a very long time ago.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, anyways, people, people were just saying like, feels pretty potentially overheated, but we have Naveen coming on the show today and I'm excited to hear about the opportunity from him.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  I, I'm ready to say it's overvalued unless he's, unless he's built a company previously and sold it.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Twice, maybe.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, twice. If he's done that, then he's, then he's off the hook, but he's got to prove it to us. Cause if, if he's just some new grad, some dropout.

• 55:56Jordi Hays?

  Like a Waterloo.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. If he's just, if he's just like, if he shows up on the show and he's just like, "Yeah, I had this idea in my garage. I didn't go to school. I've never done in business before." And now I, then I'm gonna, I'm gonna call him out and I'm gonna say, "You're overvalued. You, you raised too much money." But if he can prove to us that he's done it once or twice before, then I'll let him off the hook.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  I'll let him off the hook. Anyway.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  I think that's fair.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Let me 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. Uh, let's read this semi-analysis post, says, "Important, a common misconception about OpenAI's upcoming custom chip is that since it's a custom chip, it won't be flexible and will be a data flow machine. OpenAI has recognized that the 100x efficiency gains for training and inference happen at the algorithm layer and the hardware chip needs to be flexible enough to accommodate these algorithm changes. We went from just pre-training transformers to now doing RL post-training on transformers. We went from dense transformers to mixture of expert transformers and soon ultra sparse transformers

• 57:02John Coogan?

  that will have four active experts per token out of 2,048 total experts. We went from casual MHA attention to MQA and GQA to attention sync sliding attention to now even learn sparse attention despite what AI tourists think." The chip OpenAI is building with Broadcom will be far more flexible than TPUs. Interesting, despite most of OpenAI's chip team being poached from Google's TPU team. Hmm, the semiconductor horse race continues to fascinate me and I'm so glad that we have the good folks over at Semi Analysis coming on the show regularly to help us understand it.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  I always enjoy talking to them and we have two folks from Semi Analysis joining the show next week, so we will be having a great time. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full tech search built on first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  That's right, it's scalable. A hedge fund was ordered to pay a bonus to a trader who made 97% of its revenues. This is hilarious because when I read this at first, I thought it was, he had made, like his target bonus was, let's say 10 million and he brought in 9.7 million and so he was 97% of the way to his bonus and they were like, you didn't hit your bonus buddy, you don't get the bonus at all.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  And I was like, oh, that sucks, but like, that's kind of the deal, that kind of makes sense, but Evolution Capital Management has to pay him because.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so a hedge fund that was sued by a trader for refusing to pay a performance related bonus despite him making 97% of its revenue has been ordered to pay him 5.4 million plus interest by the High Court in London. When I read the headline of the story, I expected it to not be in the mid seven figures, but.

• 58:55John Coogan?

  What'd you expect?

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I was hoping at least eight.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's not getting a G400 off of this.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  Not even close.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Not even close.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  Robert Gagliardi sued his former employer, Evolution Capital Management in London alleging that it acted in bad faith by denying him a $7.5 million discretionary bonus after he had generated more than 60 million for the firm.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, does this mean that every other? Trader.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Lost money.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Was just.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Something like that. I don't know.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Heavily.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  So he was at the fund, brief stint, he made 12 million. He was already paid 7 million, including a $625,000 signing bonus. Base salary was 425K and a $6 million new issue bonus. So he needs to get out of this. He needs to go into AI research ASAP if he wants to be putting up real numbers.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Uh, this is rough, but there are some, there are some harsh words here, he said. Gagliardi, a block trading specialist, alleged that he was told in early 2021 that a return of $10 million over the rest of the year would be an excellent result. When Gagliardi asked the fund's founder, Michael Lurch, for the payout in 2022, he responded, "I'm not going to pay you the bonus. F you sue me."

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Though Gagliardi did.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  And he won.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  He did. He did.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, although Evolution did not dispute his extraordinary returns, the fund argued that the damage done to its reputation as a result of dealing with a US SEC probe into some of Gagliardi's trades at his previous employer outweighed his performance and that the bonus did not need to be paid because it was discretionary. There's no question that Mr. Gagliardi made exceptional profits for the funds and Mr. Lurch frequently praised his performance in that respect. Had Evolution properly performed the contract, Mr. Gagliardi would have received a discretionary bonus of 5.3 million. Uh, the judge also said that Gagliardi was Lurch's prize asset at Evolution. That's a good goal for everyone that, uh, is, you know, maybe working at a company, become the prize asset. Uh, hopefully that doesn't

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  result in.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  In a lawsuit like this. Um, but, uh, they're feeling, they're feeling, Gagliardi and his lawyer are feeling very vindicated.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest here in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro first. Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. We have Aaron Gin, the CEO and co-founder of Hydrohost. Good to see you. It's been too long. How are you doing?

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:01:34Aaron Ginn?

  Doing all right. Yeah. Yeah. I just got back from Southeast Asia.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:01:38Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, and despite what some of the critics were saying, I wasn't smuggling, I think I should have been smuggling.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Getting accused of smuggling? That is wild. Well, give us the, give us the update on your interpretation of the H200 deal. Where things landed, where you think the next debate points will be? I'd love to hear that.

• 1:02:03Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like the, I mean, as you know, I've said a number of times that the, even though I am a China hawk, that we have to realize that Trump fundamentally is a pragmatist.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:13Aaron Ginn?

  And he is not interested in the ideological warfare. And I think that him taking over the Republican Party proves that. And the orientation of reshoring to America, which we all know, like I wrote one of the first arguments for a new Monroe Doctrine. So now you saw that the Department of War has been putting that out. The White House has been very clear that it's trying to reshore its emphasis back to Latam and South America. And to build up the ring of fire from, you know, South Korea down to Singapore essentially to be more sovereign. Essentially NATO, as we've approached ourselves with having them spend their own money to support their own military, that the expectation is that Asia would do the same thing.

• 1:02:56Aaron Ginn?

  So a deal with China on trade was always on the table and was very likely because both parties actually want this to happen. And, and I, I do believe that with, like with Huawei, that, that yes, it is the national champion. And they do want to proliferate it, but they're, but they're more interested in selling it to other people and promoting themselves as a means of trade, like they did with their Belt and Road Initiative, than they are for internal uses. Like that, that's just kind of my estimation, talking to people in the region. I mean, I just came back from there. So, so Nvidia being in, in that region and being sold,

• 1:03:37Aaron Ginn?

  particularly China, I think is important for American interests, whether it's an H20 or B30 or. H two hundred, I'm kind of less opinionated on. I just think that we need to be there because half of all AI engineers are Chinese and and we can go through any list of anyone scrolling at the bottom of this, you know, this this broadcast and you can see that the probably the majority are Asian descent, you know, minimally. And and as America, we just have to realize that like we're good at certain things and we're not good at certain things. So we're very good at commerce. We're very good at free markets. We're very good at enterprise. We're very good at creating the default framework, the rules of the road for the world to transact. I I think when it comes to trying to do these other strategies,

• 1:04:20Aaron Ginn?

  I think we're we're not very good at it. And we just kind of have to realize that also that the President of the United States is interested in making deals. He's not interested in trying to get involved in other people's business.

• 1:04:30John Coogan?

  Yep. Let's I mean, there's like a million different pieces here, but let's start with the fact that there are so many fantastic genius AI researchers in China. Why is it in the why is it in the interest of the United States to help them? Is it that if they start developing on Nvidia chips, it gets the the Kudo ecosystem stronger and we will actually get more open source software, basically for free from China that will come back to America and make our AI efforts stronger? Or is it we want them to be familiar with Nvidia when ultimately they come over here on O one visas and start working for American companies?

• 1:05:15Aaron Ginn?

  I I think that's too narrow focus. It's sort of like Boeing. Do you want Boeing in China?

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  I mean, yes, because I want Boeing to be a thriving American business. I want Boeing to maximize profits and I don't see the the seven forty seven as a piece of I don't I don't see this the seven forty seven as a nuclear bomb.

• 1:05:37Aaron Ginn?

  The, yeah, I mean, I think that that's the key prior, right? On the second one is like, do you think that an H two, H two hundred is a, is a, I don't know, like a, like a, some form of missile technology?

• 1:05:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, increasingly, I increasingly, I have, I have backed off the idea that, that these chips should be viewed as, as weapons.

• 1:05:59Aaron Ginn?

  Like a defense technology.

• 1:06:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. I backed off of that.

• 1:06:03Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, baby, because I view it much more like telco technology.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 1:06:06Aaron Ginn?

  And, and like, and we did not win at that. We lost that. And, and that's because we didn't offer the world an alternative. We just were like, hey, don't use E T E, don't use Huawei.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Aaron Ginn?

  And then it's like, and they were like, okay, we'll give us something else. And we were like, well, I don't have anything to give you.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, we're, we're sort of separating things out here because on, on the one hand, like there's give the rest of the world something. And then there's other, which is like, give China something, which is like, there is a difference there, right?

• 1:06:32Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, no, no, that's true.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Because, because like, I'm totally down to go belt for belt and road for road all over the, all over the globe, right? But the question of like, can, like, is there any world where we could get a different cellphone tower deployed in Beijing that's not a Huawei tower? Like, no way, right? This is impossible.

• 1:06:53Aaron Ginn?

  But, but then you go back to the fact of like, you're right, like, is, you know, all metaphors fail, that's why they're metaphors. So, so the, the, the other exogenous factors you gotta think through that's different from telcos is the fact of like, the level of I A I engineering talent, in fact, like it's funding in, isn't like, you know, propelling forward American A I. That's just the reality of, of where we are. The, the second is the fact of like, they do not have the founder capacity or the foundry skill set to produce similarly level at scale. Uh, the scale absolutely is true. They, they could be at some point, uh, be approaching some form of like five nanometer process. And there's like rumors around that. So, and, and that's a little bit of obsession because it's, it is a barrier of technology

• 1:07:36Aaron Ginn?

  that like we, uh, I should say the West has been still that, not particularly America, Japan and the Dutch. But, but that's their, we don't want to fund that enterprise.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:46Aaron Ginn?

  And I think that that's where the prakantism comes into play. It's like, if we don't offer them something, they'll just do it themselves. And I'd rather take money from them and build our own sort of reshoring in America.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  But to be clear, but to be clear, they're still gonna do it, everything themselves, right?

• 1:08:01Aaron Ginn?

  No, I don't think so.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  How, how does?

• 1:08:04Aaron Ginn?

  I don't think so.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  You think that China will happily be dependent on foreign powers?

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  I mean, last time there were rumors of the sale, they they they were putting out press releases saying like, "Hey, if you're gonna buy Nvidia, you gotta prove it. You gotta prove that you need it. You gotta prove that Huawei won't work." It felt like there was a lot of pushback from the CCP.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't I don't believe I don't believe I don't believe at all that they're just gonna be like, "Thank you for the H200s. We're gonna stop investment in our domestic chip manufacturing."

• 1:08:34Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so but but the the problem is like in that flow, one, you assume a level of CCP control that's just not realistic.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:41Aaron Ginn?

  That that it's it's a country of like 1.3 billion people with very successful entrepreneurs.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they've been ripping five-year they've been ripping five-year plans for over and over and over and over.

• 1:08:53Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, but that stuff doesn't matter. Like, you have to understand that like that there's lots of propaganda that think that they say that that actually never happens in the real world. Go look at Africa, go look at all the airports and see actually how what actually happened. Go look at the ports. Yes, there are certain examples of ports actually we transfer like the Sri Lanka port. But you go look at the rest of ones like they didn't happen. So so they say lots of things, but the question is like, what matters in terms of the national security orientation of America? And I would much rather take money from their economy and put it back into our economy than trying to give them both the demand side and the supply side argument. You're you're making a supply side argument, which I think is very much how CCP thinks about the world, which is like, "Oh, we need to build our own chip supply." But in the orientation, I think that Jordi, you're more biased towards, which is like, "Well, let's also give them a demand argument."

• 1:09:37Aaron Ginn?

  I'm like, "No, I don't want to give them the demand argument." Like, I I I would rather mitigate that as much as possible to say the yes, like, they have, you know, probably like five or six multi-billion dollar operations that like wanna have these types of chips that are not military oriented. And by applying these export controls that are overly extreme, you're basically giving them a demand argument as well. And I'm saying, "I don't want the demand argument." Like, if they're still gonna have a supply argument, that's fine. Like, go buy a BYD, you know, car and hopefully it doesn't catch on fire. Like, so like, you know, like, just because BYD doesn't exist.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Are you bearish on BYD? They're catching strays right now.

• 1:10:15Aaron Ginn?

  I I saw one of them on fire in Hong Kong. No joke.

• 1:10:19Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I have video of it.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's go, let's go to the cars and talk about what we were debating earlier.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  If, if you're, if we're just talking about cars instead of chips, and of course, there's going to be a metaphor here. But if we're just talking about cars and we want, and the frame is like, we're all China hawks and we're putting on like, rah rah, we want America to win the electric car race. Should Tesla have sold Teslas into China? Because it feels like they did, and then China was able to make the, a whole bunch of cars that compete directly with Tesla. And are, it feels like maybe better, maybe cheaper, maybe better and cheaper on some sort of parade of frontier. If, if we run that experiment, we try and think through the counterfactual, if Tesla had never sold a car in China,

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  where would the, the SU7 be? The jumping Huawei car, like Xiaomi car, the BYD Han, the one that has the karaoke machine in it? Like, there's some crazy cars. Would those exist? Would they be delayed? Would they be, would they happen faster? How, how do you think about that?

• 1:11:29Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so, so I, I think this is where there is a reality, right? Which is that they, they're going to copy. And I, I don't think that that is something we can change.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Aaron Ginn?

  Speaking as a half Chinese American. So, so it's just the nature of what, what is the way they think about.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  Competition, it's just competition.

• 1:11:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, they view competition as copying.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  And importantly, like, like, like, there, there's one world where, you know, they need the industrial power of like 1 million H200s. And there's another one where if you give them a single H200, they can tear it down and like, try and reverse engineer it as much as possible. And then they can also do all the learning curve stuff on their, on their companies, on their national champions on Huawei.

• 1:12:11Aaron Ginn?

  I think it is reasonable in terms of an argument against experimentals if you view this as a means of trying to slow down their own model level progress. Like I can at least cogently understand what's being presented. I do not agree with this from the perspective of hardware engineering. Because again, if you don't have the ability to make a car, then what's the risk? Right? Like mitigate their ability to make a car, which is generally my position. It's like I want to mitigate their ability to make chips. And so in a world where there's a demand and supply, right? In SCCP, because they're communists, so they love focusing on supply solutions to everything, which by the way, doesn't work.

• 1:12:55Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, we're all free marketers here. We're all biased towards Austrian. Like, we know that their philosophy of the world doesn't work. So they can talk about supply-side engineering all they want, but again, they don't have the ability right now to aggressively address their lefakery problems. And so in that world, I want to just win. Because if they can't, if we remove the demand stuff, because all their companies want to use Nvidia. If we remove the demand stuff, we're removing one of the biggest parts that would give them justification to accelerate on the SMIC side. But if they're just going to go and play around and be like, hey, we're going to dump money into SMIC because we want to use local, but we're everywhere. It's like the fast food thing of like, sure, they have local fast food, but McDonald's and Starbucks crush.

• 1:13:40Aaron Ginn?

  And so like, that's more how I think about it. They're still going to try to copy, but if you don't give them the ability to actually have the toolkit, then it's a much safer transaction. And I think, John, what you said is important, is that the debate is highly mixed up between you think NH200 is an F35. If you remove that as an A prior, then the world becomes significantly simpler to understand. But if you view, you know, the NH200 Blackwell or whatever as a Patriot missile, then like there's no real place to like have a conversation to be rational. Because my view is like, you know, I don't have as much of an opinion on. Yeah, you know, GB or B.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Aaron Ginn?

  That kind of like debate. I, I just, I think American companies need to be in China. Because, and because we want the ability to not only address the second uh, largest economy in the world and like have access to like, that is the Trump position and that's my position. Like, we should sell to the world. We should be an export nation. But, but the other is like China is going to copy you and it's just part of the equation.

• 1:14:48John Coogan?

  Wait, flip, flip around for me and give me the, sorry. Uh, I, I, I wanted to hear.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  Keep flipping.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I, I wanted to hear more, shifting to domestic semiconductor supply chains. Uh, what is your theory of the current horse race between uh, Tranium, TPU and Nvidia? It felt like Nvidia was dominant last year, the year before. Then we were hearing rumblings of like, hey, maybe AMD is getting it together on the software side. Hey, maybe this TPU thing could be used to train a decent model. The DeepMind team seems to have been able to do that. Uh, are we moving towards more of an oligopoly? What are you thinking about how the, the, you know, American semiconductor AI accelerator horse race is playing out?

• 1:15:36Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, uh, I, my, my view from the, the, on the TPU side, I don't really know who would buy that as like, just like a product. I, I think Meta is the closest one. That kind of makes sense. But why would any of the cloud companies do it? They, because they are in a position right now of trying to build their own. And they're trying to delever why they're building on. They're trying to delever from Nvidia. So why would they want to go mingle themselves with an actual direct competitor, you know, like a, a direct competitor and sell their stuff? And, and then there was a, there was an. Yeah, like, like there's, there's also this like weird zealotry around TPUs that I may make because we had Thanksgiving. There's not gonna happen.

• 1:16:17Aaron Ginn?

  But to say that like there's like minimal switching costs is absolutely absurd and insane. Uh, there's significant switching costs. And, and so if you're of the mindset of like, hey, well, we have all this CapEx and it kind of makes sense and I, I, that, that's just a viable, like I can, like, understand that. But that's like the same reasoning that you could apply to, uh, the multi-cloud argument. And we didn't really see that happen at all.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:43Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, basically until GPUs. Now, now you're seeing much more multi-cloud products because GPUs made everyone multi-cloud. So, and if you were multi-cloud before GPUs, you were, as a function of an acquisition, it was not generally intentional.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:56Aaron Ginn?

  So, so I think GPUs makes sense for Google just as a like vertically integrated strategy because that's what they like to do.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:17:02Aaron Ginn?

  And, and then like there are probably some other companies that maybe like maybe Apple, I could maybe see that because they love low-cost chips just in general. Um, but I don't really see it breaking beyond Google because I just don't know who is really incentivized to buy that. Uh, and then I, I agree with you on the AMD side, the software is getting better. I think that's just the natural, um, orientation of, of just, they, they, like, least suit is the most reasonable because they competitor to Nvidia's general purpose computing dominance. Um, I'm pretty bearish on Trinium, uh, and, uh, and, and GPUs just from a, uh, from a chip perspective, I'm embarrassed on, but as an integrated strategy, it, it like, it makes sense for them as a company.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:17:42Aaron Ginn?

  But Nvidia does not really get as company.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Running out of time, but I wanted to ask you about one other thing. Uh, there, uh, seems to be a number of people trying to manufact- manufacture a space data center pump.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  As somebody, uh, and even Nvidia, uh, was posting from their corporate account, uh, uh, uh, some renders of a company called Star Cloud, some space data centers that they're working on. As somebody that has spent a lot of time, uh, in data centers or around data centers all over the world, uh, what are your timelines? Are we talking, uh, Gavin Baker was saying, uh, the most important thing in the next three to four years is data centers in space. I've had plenty of people on the show that believe that it's an exciting possibility or opportunity, but maybe their timelines are more like 10 to 20 years. How do you think about it?

• 1:18:29Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, most of the stuff that has been announced will not happen. I

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Ever?

• 1:18:35Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, no, like then think of it as like a 50%. So if they announce like five gigawatts, probably going to be like two. I and and because this stuff's really building this stuff is actually quite hard. And America has not really behaved in a manner to me that believes it's that serious of a of a thing. Like, is this is a very niche issue. And one reason why the the going by say H 200, the reason why it's making less noise now is because it is it is a niche issue. It is something that maybe a couple hundred thousand people really care about. And in the data center, it affects, even though it does bring jobs, it does bring the these types of opportunities to cities that previously never had a position to support data center, which is great.

• 1:19:20Aaron Ginn?

  It is really kind of a narrow set of people that are really benefiting. Uh, and if you go look at, uh, you can go read the bills that are in consideration across America. I it the America is not acting like it's very serious about building data centers. It's just that the power profiles, the approvals that are happening, like it's it's just not happening versus the other countries. They they're generally more serious about it. Um, and many of these announcements that you as as Jensen disclosed, they're they're they're fundraising announcements. They're actually not actual projects yet. So so they're they're trying to, let's say they have an equity already lined up. But but the equity generally is like 10 to 15% of these projects. So you've got to go raise the other portion of it.

• 1:20:02Aaron Ginn?

  And in the off take side, outside of the hyperscalers, there's not a lot of confidence the credit side has outside of the the those those hyperscalers. So so the so the debt side of the world actually has been quite conservative on the these these and the private credit. So that's why I never really thought like, you know, the quote unquote bubble talk and bursting. It it like we're we're nowhere really there if you go talk to lenders, like we're nowhere even close. Uh, the type of capital being deployed has actually been very conservative. It's been aligned with contracts, has been associated with high paying credit, you know, top tier customers. We're not seeing, you know, the Jordy credit union in the middle of, uh, you know, SoCal doing black, you know, B 300 loans. And when that happens, then I'll be like, yeah, you know.

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:48Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. We're working on it. Yeah, like with the so so so that's that's where if you look at the legal side, if you look at the power profiles, if you look at what's happening and the political nature of it, I I don't I don't think many of these projects actually scale to what they they need to. Uh, but I do agree with Gavin that like we actually do need to get serious about it because it's not like the world will be worse off with more power, more compute capacity. If everything of all those things get cheaper, our entire life gets better. And just as it's cheaper today to get a banana than it was 100 years ago. And that means there's more bananas. That means people consume more bananas. So so the logic will still apply. Let's give it up for bananas.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  We love banana.

• 1:21:32Aaron Ginn?

  I'll give you a layup for that.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  I love banana.

• 1:21:36Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, great to see you, Aaron.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Software is eating the world. Software is eating bananas. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We we always we shouldn't have booked 15 minutes. We should have booked two hours because it's always a fun chat. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:21:48Aaron Ginn?

  Great to see you.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:21:49Aaron Ginn?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:21:50Aaron Ginn?

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas to graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What's under the tree this Christmas? It's graphite.dev, baby. Put it in your it's a great stocking stuffer. Um, up next, we have Matt Kalish, the co-founder of DraftKings. He's a board member at DraftKings. He's also a board member of Faze Media and he's the founder of Hardscope, which launches today. Let's bring him in to the TBP and UltraDome. How are you doing, Matt? Great.

• 1:22:27Aaron Ginn?

  What's happening?

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:22:29Speaker 06

  Hey, guys. How's it going today?

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  It's going fantastic. Merry Christmas.

• 1:22:33Speaker 06

  Merry Christmas.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Uh, please, for those who don't know you already, I'd love to kick off, since this is the first time on your show, with a little bit of your background. You have, uh, one of the more interesting backgrounds with DraftKings. How how do you tell a story in, you know, in just a few minutes?

• 1:22:51Speaker 06

  Well, I had a couple of friends from some early corporate jobs in my career. You know, I came up through analytics, technology, and then over the years moved more into marketing. And, uh, you know, I met some of, uh, you know, my two partners, Jason and Paul, really at those jobs. You know, Jason at Capital One, we were early-stage business analysts. And then, uh, went to a company called VistaPrint. That's where we learned direct marketing. And, you know, we all had this entrepreneurial bug and we're really looking for the right opportunity to go and spin off and do something kind of in the startup world.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 06

  Which, you know, we had no experience doing, but, um, you know, we, we had that drive. So we looked at a million ideas and then DraftKings kind of stumbled along. Um, we just felt like there was a lot of people that like predicting things in sports, but didn't really have a great way to do it. So that was back in 2012. We launched the daily fantasy sports platform. Um, over the course of a few years, grew that to over 10 million registered users and it became just kind of a big cultural phenomenon. And then, uh, come 2017, that's really when sports betting started opening up in the US. So DraftKings was in a really great position to extend our product.

• 1:24:12Speaker 06

  Um, launched a sports betting platform first in the US, uh, outside of Nevada. And, uh, became a market leader in that space. And then, over the years, just kept developing out the product, went public in 2020. And, you know, it's been a really amazing ride. I mean, a, a growth story that, um, you know, I'm really proud of.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, take me through, I, I'm sure there's a ton of questions that we can kick around, around prediction markets and sports betting and what's going on there. But, uh, first, take us through the launch today. Take us through Hardscope. How are you positioning that?

• 1:24:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I had a fourteen year uh run at DraftKings that you know, we've seen it all, the ups and downs and you know, built a really amazing team over the years. I have you know, the type of team at DraftKings where if I don't come to work for a week, things are amazing and fine. I'm telling you like the caliber, the people, the leadership there, the team has been built out just so well and um you know, I'm a builder at heart. I like starting things. I like participating in industries that are disruptive, you know, um that are in the middle of a lot of displacement change and

• 1:25:29Speaker 06

  a couple of years back, I worked with one of the original founders of Faze to buy the company off the public market and bring it back private. And it's kind of a space that I'm just super intrigued by the massive amount of disruption in media, moving from traditional forums in the creator-led to community.

• 1:25:52Speaker 06

  This sort of decentralized media through social channels and uh I've also found it really intriguing how content discovery has changed so much, like short form clipping and you know, the TikTok, the shorts. That's how people are really finding content these days and Faze is really one of the best in the world at that. So just kind of jumping in, uh rebuilding the business side of that team and uh kind of relaunching and bringing Faze back to number one in creator media. That was a you know, initial focus and um I decided to leave DraftKings and transition out to do this full-time to launch HeartScope, which is

• 1:26:32Speaker 06

  um kind of the platform that Faze operates on. It's a talent and brand platform to access the creator economy at scale. And it's a space I just think is tremendously underserved and a really massive market opportunity. So you know, I felt like it was the right time for me to go all in on that and I'm really excited to be doing it.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  So what's the, like, walk me through how to actually use the product if you're a brand? Does it feel like just autonomous marketplaces where brands are meeting creators? Are there?

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess a better question is like, there's probably been, there's probably been.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  How much handholding is going on?

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's been maybe hundreds of attempts at building these sort of like brand creator marketplaces. A lot of them haven't, some have turned into great businesses. There's been.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Well, we were just talking.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Little, little to no like venture, venture.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Friday, ShopMy is, is like sort of in the same space, correct?

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, creator commerce tool, but this is more advertising focused. Is that, is that correct?

• 1:27:42Speaker 06

  What's special about Hardscope is the, the impossible part is building the actual valuable content assets that, you know, brands want to be a part of and reach the audience. And that's what our team for talent does really well. It's a full stack operating platform. Like you literally don't need any other resources. We do in all in-house production, socials, clipping, all the distribution side into commercialization, like brand partnerships, e-commerce, access to capital and venture for initiatives. And the reputation really of Faze as the number one creator collective in the world is the proof.

• 1:28:23Speaker 06

  I mean, that's a group that operates with this team on this capability set. And so Hardscope is really bringing that to new creator collectives in more verticals, really high potential talent and platforming them to really make the most of, you know, the opportunity that they have, which is really unprecedented. Like the level of power and control over the content, their community and how to commercialize it that talent have today. It's, it's a totally new age, really. And. Some creators have built out great teams, but most really have underrepresented teams in particularly the commercial side. You know, like, how do I take my great content and then

• 1:29:08Speaker 06

  maximize the opportunity as basically the CEO of a media business?

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so, yeah, let me.

• 1:29:14Speaker 06

  For talent.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I think, I think I was a little bit confused. So you're effectively like a back office for personality, personalities, content creators, whatever you want to call them, to help manage everything from ad, ad sales to editing, to clipping, content distribution, effectively social media management, like, kind of, uh, am I saying that correctly?

• 1:29:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the, the landscape is laden with middlemen. Let's just say, like, the LA ecosystem is unbelievably brutal. There's middlemen for everything and we're trying to provide really a full stack solution where you don't need all of this noise to run a really successful business. You need a great business partner, a great team. And we've proven that with the operations of Faze Clan and how that's come back into, you know, prominence as the number one creator collective. I mean, you're talking about a group that had the top seven accounts on Twitch last month that's growing at an unprecedented rate and people thought it was dead two years ago. So like, we came in, relaunched the

• 1:30:24Speaker 06

  brand and totally turned that around. And that is the proof, you know, that's the proof of concept really, that I think is attracting so much interest from other talent and other verticals. And, um, you know, you had asked about the brand side. That's more my background. You know, I was a large media buyer at DraftKings. We have, you know, as you've probably seen, a lot of advertising out there in the world, probably bought every channel you can think of. And the one channel that's hard for everyone is creator direct partnerships. Nobody does this well. And unless you are a pure play specialist where your number one marketing strategy is through Creator, you probably are doing this not so well right now.

• 1:31:08Speaker 06

  And traditional agencies who try to tack on things like YouTube buying or other, you know, Creator products tend to not do that very well at all. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity on the brand front to be almost like a new kind of agency of record, right? Where we can focus just on Creator Direct partnership, help kind of bifurcate that channel out from a lot of people just lump it in with audio or other, other kind of traditional definitions of channels. The opportunity is really breaking out Creator Direct into its own lane. And maybe it's two or three percent of media mix today, but the landscape is changing. This channel

• 1:31:51Speaker 06

  might be 20, 30% of people's media mix in the future. The Unilever said it's over half of their media mix in the next year they're planning. So like a lot of companies are seeing, like, we are just not reaching Gen Z audiences that are diverse under 30 are just not watching traditional media, and this is the way to reach them.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, makes, makes a lot of sense. How are, how are you, how are you like financing Hardscope? Do you have outside investors? Was it, am I hearing it correctly, it was, you effectively took FaZe private? And is it the same entity? Or I'm curious how, like, how you're planning to scale? Is this something that you want to just operate profitably indefinitely? Or is this, you know, something that you'd one, one day want to, you know, take public again?

• 1:32:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, I mean, I've been funding it. I led the acquisition initially, and the biggest reason was it was a kind of a mess. I mean, the public company of FaZe was in really rough shape, and it needed a lot of work and putting in the two years to really rebuild the entire operation. And also to relaunch the brand of FaZe, have that, you know, in such a great place today. That was the upfront investment I viewed as getting the ball rolling, kind of building the initial momentum. And I didn't think it made a lot of sense to. You know, involve a ton of people in that. I thought it was something we had to prove as a team here.

• 1:33:25Speaker 06

  So there's no noise in the company. There's no outside, you know, investors funding. I do think in this next stage, now that we've launched, as we scale up, there's a lot of interest I have and the team has in certain strategic partners. So I think including people that can be helpful to us.

• 1:33:45Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I mean, that's something that we're going to be looking to do in the next year.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. A little bit of a connection issue, by the way. Sorry. Sorry if there's a lag. Have to ask you about your kind of personal views on the state of both traditional sports books, online sports books, gambling platforms, as well as prediction markets. It's absolutely a bloodbath on the timeline right now. Everybody involved seems to hate each other, both even the even the investors on every side of it. And it's an absolutely wild time right now. How do you think this kind of category evolves over the next 12 to 24 months?

• 1:34:31Speaker 06

  I mean, I love it. It's this is one of the most competitive spaces in the world, right? Like you had mentioned with with the creator economy, it's very competitive. All these different companies doing this or that. Like, great. I love that. Like, there is nothing better than having a super vibrant competitive marketplace for products, having to compete and win for customer engagement, for loyalty.

• 1:34:58Speaker 06

  There's always some curve ball in in gaming and gambling and sports betting, whatever. Something new every year, some new competitor, some new kind of product variant. And I think the exchange, like how fast that's kind of come in since the election and evolved into a sports product.

• 1:35:19Speaker 06

  You know, it's it's a fascinating thing and I think it'll be very competitive. You know, DraftKings obviously announced they're launching an exchange. Pretty much everybody, I think, in the sports betting space has some plan here. And then there's the Kalshi, Polymarket, you know, that rivalry and.

• 1:35:39Speaker 06

  We just look forward to competing. You know, I feel like DraftKings has proven world-class technology team. We deliver leading products. We have the best customer satisfaction in the market. We pride ourselves on that. So competitions are favorite. It's like something that drives us.

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. What percentage of content targeting men online do you think is entirely dependent on either gaming, ad revenue? It feels like there's huge swaths of the internet that honestly like wouldn't really exist, or creators who, I'm curious if you have any kind of internal estimates even.

• 1:36:22Speaker 06

  Like creator media?

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it just feels like I can think of a lot of-

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  Sager was on the show talking about like, he was saying like, there's a bubble in sports podcasting specifically because of all the sponsorships that come from sports books. It's actually made, it's made a lot of people in the creator economy be able to go full-time because they've been able to-

• 1:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think a lot of creators where you look at their business and you're like, okay, 90% of your revenue is from, you know, either, yeah, some type of, you know, online casinos or sports books, et cetera.

• 1:36:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's such a valuable category that, you know, going back to hard scope and expanding beyond just FaZe Clan, which is a sort of mass market, super mainstream media business, you know, going into verticals like sports really aggressively, you know, sports, food, like the content verticals that have a lot of really attractive partnerships is, that's kind of the whole purpose here is to represent the creator economy across all of the verticals at scale for brands. And in sports, you can build out entire content properties and invest in them, knowing that it's going to be supported through some kind of deal, some kind of partnership.

• 1:37:40Speaker 06

  It's one of the sure things. So I feel like as a company that builds assets, that makes content from scratch, puts together creator collectives from scratch and scales them, like, we can invent these things, knowing that the sports landscape, it's so vibrant that there's going to be deals there.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Like the idea of food, you said that you're working on food channels and I think that that's one area of the creator economy that's not been financialized yet and that feels like fertile ground to me. Obviously business.

• 1:38:15Speaker 06

  Don't threaten me with a good time.

• 1:38:17John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. I don't know, I don't know exactly how it would work. It's like, I'm gonna bake this cake, we're gonna do a blind taste test, whoever likes this more, they win, but I'm sure there will be an attempt at financializing baking channels in the future. The Great British Bake Off. I mean, there's probably a prediction market on it.

• 1:38:34Jordi Hays?

  Will I burn the cookies or not?

• 1:38:35John Coogan?

  Will you burn the cookies or not? That's a good question. I don't know. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This is a lot of fun.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the launch and we will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day and Merry Christmas.

• 1:38:46Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks for having me. Merry Christmas and you know, love to come on again in a year and give you some updates on all the great stuff.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  That'd be great. Anytime you have hot takes too on anything gaming or prediction markets related, I know it's a little tough since you're still on the DraftKings board. You gotta keep that in mind, but, but we appreciate the insight and congrats to the team on the launch.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  Alright guys.

• 1:39:09John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And let me tell you about public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing. They're trusted by millions. Public.com. In a groundbreaking endeavor, the University of Utah Athletics is entering into what could be a $500 million equity partnership with O'Tro Capital, featuring the creation and shared ownership of a for-profit entity to operate athletics, sources tell Yahoo Sports. So, college football is going to the big leagues, they're going to the private equity leagues. Private equity is now gonna own your local college football team.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, people absolutely hate this.

• 1:39:51John Coogan?

  The problem, I know, I hate it too because why are they stopping with college football? Please, high school football, middle school, lower school, little league.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Preschool.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Preschool. Let's financialize that. Let's roll them up. We, actually, this is happening. We talked about the, we talked about the hockey rinks that have been sold to private equity, rolled up and then you can't film your own children without paying for the.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Somebody out there that really hates private equity, just yesterday was saying, you know. Private equity has come for everything, but at least you can still go to a college football game.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and, uh, again, so how, how do we think they're gonna, you know, so, uh, it sounds like they effectively sold for half a billion dollars. They just sold.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you remember it was Chicago, I think, sold all their streets or their parking meters.

• 1:40:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign back in the day. It was like for like 75 years.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, the big thing is you gotta get the, you gotta get the money correct. You gotta get the deal right.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so they, they, they basically buy a college team.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:53Jordi Hays?

  You can say that it's some more sophisticated structure than that, but effectively that's what happened.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they'll have to immediately put DraftKings.

• 1:41:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Or a prediction market logos all over the helmet and all, all over the jersey. So that's, that's probably, that's probably, uh, that's probably like a $50 million, uh, new, new revenue line that the college could never do.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what else? They could.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  So the current mascot for the University of Utah is Swoop, a red-tailed hawk.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  They could change it to Draftee.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Drafting off the airways. Okay. So another thing they could, they could increase if you want season tickets to the game.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  You're a student.

• 1:41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:34Jordi Hays?

  They could, of course, they're gonna jack up the prices. They're probably gonna make it like $20,000 a year.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Let me steal, man. You're being too negative here.

• 1:41:41Jordi Hays?

  $20,000 a year and they're gonna offer the private equity firm can bring a private credit partner into the mix and, and help finance the season tickets. So you don't just graduate with student debt.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Jordi Hays?

  You actually graduate with, uh, game day debt that will stay with you for decades.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. I mean, there, there are so many reasonable ways to monetize a football team over, you know, the entire life of, of, of ownership for this firm.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  They could sell the windshield. They could sell.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. It's very funny to sell everything, but, uh, I mean, there is something that actually could be very good for academics at this school. Because if you have $500 million in cash, you can go and build a new library, a new science lab. You can go build like actual academic buildings. Yes, you don't really need to, and you don't need to worry about like, okay, we got this donor. Somebody went to the University of Utah. They hit it big. They're a billionaire. They want to donate 500. Million dollars, but you know what? They just like football, so they're gonna build this new stadium. And you're like, but wait, wasn't the point of this whole thing, uh, you know, unrestricted gifts, wasn't it? Wasn't the point academics and, uh, and that might not, that might be less of an issue now. So they might be able to fund more great academic, uh, activities and endeavors with this money.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  So I, I don't know. It's very funny to make fun of. It's very funny to, to riff on. But there are some, there are some potentially really good, uh, really good outcomes that could happen. Anyway, we have our next guest in the restroom waiting room. We have Emile Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering of the United States. Emile, good to see you. Merry Christmas. How are you doing?

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:43:15Speaker 07

  Great. Thanks for having me.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. You look fantastic.

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say thank you for wearing the suit, but unlike a lot of our guests, this is a, a daily driver, I'm sure.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:43:27Speaker 07

  Well, we were buying a high school football team today, so I had to dress up.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Oh, nice. That, that, that would be a real treat. Uh, well, you're not, you're, you're, you're, is it, is it fair to say that you're buying Gemini? Are you buying tokens? Or is this one of those deals where, uh, it's, the partnership is structured so that it's not really, uh, you know, a, a major cash infusion for Google, or it's not a burden on the taxpayer. Uh, it's a little bit more of, uh, just two great American institutions working together. How are you framing the deal?

• 1:43:59Speaker 07

  Um, it's, it's, uh, making to three million Department of War employees. That includes military members and civilians, access to Google, uh, Gemini on the, our network, which is a private network, right? So it's, you actually have to port it over. And they gave us a great deal for the first year. It's like 47 cents. So, uh, so they're very patriotic. I'm super excited to, to have that at the hands of everyone at the Department of War. It's never happened before.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Were there historical examples that you were pulling from? Like, because I imagine that service members have been Googling things for a long time. I've heard stories about, I mean, even during the war in the Middle East, the war on terror, they were using Google Maps just to see satellite imagery. And there are a whole host of reasons why a warfighter might want to use a Google product. Is this a new structure? Are you building on the shoulders of giants? Do you feel like when you came in there, the Department of War had a good reference point for how to work with a big tech company like Google? Or was it sort of new territory? How did you think about actually interfacing with Google?

• 1:45:12Speaker 07

  I mean, it's entirely new territory, right? Because you could get those apps off the App Store or on a web browser. So to get AI in, there's a lot of fear about AI, what it could do. And then you have to, remember, when you're doing a Google search, like, yeah, it kind of records where you're searching, but if you're putting stuff in AI, you don't want that to leak back into the model. So you have to architect it in a unique way. So it's kind of new territory. And we did it all in like three months.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Yeah, what did the team on the Google side look like? Is this, I mean, I imagine that they have, you know, a large team just for working with the government. You mentioned a few, it was a few weeks of work, but what did they bring to bear to actually deliver this on their side?

• 1:46:02Speaker 07

  I mean, they had a ton of engineers, because you got to put it, you know, in our networks, which are not simple, right? And you have 3 million people all over the world, all kinds of devices and so on. So they really brought the heat, right? And they had, you know, for today, for lunch, they had a room, or the, you know, war room, if you will, no pun intended, as we to make sure that it launched, it launched correct. I mean, we got a lot of flak on Twitter today.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I saw these comments, but it was very obvious if you used one brain cell that you needed to be on an actual approved device on a military network if you wanted to access the service. So I didn't, I didn't, I didn't get the flak.

• 1:46:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, people wanted to give flak just to give flak.

• 1:46:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think some people wanted to, they wanted to try it out themselves. And it's like, well, if you want to do that, you can join, become a service member.

• 1:47:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, we put a we'll put a we put a link on the error message a few hours ago for job openings at Department of War if they want to join to get access to Gemini from government. We're open for business.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what else is have been the highlights of the year? As you look back on the year, obviously confirmation took time, but then there was this big White House AI action plan. What are some key moments that you feel like have been maybe under discussed or under didn't get enough appreciation at the time?

• 1:47:32Speaker 07

  I mean, you know, there have been like three AI executive orders, which is a big deal, right? And Jensen said the other day that no other administration has ever done this much for the AI companies. So we're really championing championing like these four national champions, right? Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and XAI. And giving them like we're talking about, you know, data centers on military land. We're talking about how do we get more power to these these companies because it's it's a race. And I think we're the first group in the last six months to to really realize that we better get great and we better get better and stay great and ahead of everyone else on this because it's really the next generation of tech.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  On the subject of data centers on military bases or land, what kind of comps have you looked at on that side? I know there's like a historically in in weapons manufacturing, you have like GOCs, which seem like, you know, they would provide some framework. But how have you thought about that?

• 1:48:36Speaker 07

  We haven't thought about that yet. We haven't broken ground yet or to the business models. We just had the executive order said we're gonna do it. And then we got to figure out how do you prioritize who gets what, right? And we may reserve some of that data center capacity just for the government to use for our own purposes. But the point was to send a message that we're all in on AI companies, all in on the data center power chip needs of these companies in a way that the last administration, we think, was just trying to constrain everything with these orders to to really, you know, have one company win and that's it. So they can control sort of the outputs. We're not we're going the other way. We're going to have all the national champions. We're going to support them all

• 1:49:17Speaker 07

  the way. You know, David Sacks is out there making sure the American tech stacks and all of the, you know, as many other countries that can be. And that's a big deal, right? It's, you know, if anyone's going to be using AI, we want them to be on our stack.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the, the, the fact that all of the big tech companies seem to be working with the United States government effectively for free, 47 cents, I've heard of deals of a dollar, as high as a dollar. But then I think back to, you know, a few decades ago where Microsoft had a deal to develop virtual reality headsets, augmented reality headsets for the US government. And I think it was like a $10 billion deal. And I was really excited when that project went over to Anduril because it's a lot, you know, younger, faster moving company. Now, I love Microsoft. I love them as a infrastructure provider and the, and the fact that they have OpenAI's IP is amazing. There's so, there's

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  a ton of great things that, that, that Microsoft does, but developing an AR headset, that always felt like it was going to be a rough go. It was such a big, such a big burden on the taxpayer at $10 billion. Much better to see it in a different, in a different, land in a different company. How are you thinking about when, how the government is working with big tech, when to open up the pocketbook and write a billion dollar deal? Or when to ask for, you know, 47 cents?

• 1:50:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, you know, we want these companies to be successful. So we're going to pay them market rates eventually. It's just, how do you get out, out of the gate? And you get out of the gate by like giving 3 million people access and not having to worry about like a token count every, every day, right? And then that's exciting to them because now they get 3 million more customers, right? And they get to learn use cases and so on. So it kind of works for them, works for us, but we need to pay them fair, fair rates, but they're going to be commercial.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I imagine that there's like, when a new technology comes up, like, you know, Gemini, there's just a lot of service members that are just, you know, not, by no fault of their own, just like accidentally using it a little bit too cavalierly. And this is an initiative to actually refocus on security, refocus on privacy. But can you take me through some of the, you know, I'm not particularly worried about, about Google having, you know, information from The American warfighter, but I am worried about some of the international chatbots having access to the American warfighters prompts.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  Can you take me through how the Department of War is thinking about LLMs like DeepSeek, Alibaba, these other AI models? Are those just banned everywhere? How do you think about actually banning different vectors of attacks from a security perspective?

• 1:52:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, we're going to train, everyone is going to train if they want to use it for like, you know, higher risk use cases, right? But this is going to be on their devices, just like the web browser is, and they can still search Google. But when it comes to the foreign companies like DeepSeek and Chinese, in the bill that was just released by Congress, I think yesterday, we're going to ban, you know, DeepSeek and all these foreign models from use by DOW members and contractors and anyone who touches it, because last thing we want is for those models to get data on how we're using AI, right? That would be a tragic mistake. So I think we're already there, but it's going to be in law pretty soon.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  What's your pitch to talent to come work with the Department of War, specifically in AI? It's like the craziest talent or of our lifetimes, most likely, you know, you're trying to recruit people that can go get a, I don't know, anything from a million dollars a year to a hundred million dollars a year to a billion, even up to more.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  There's some people who make literally a billion dollars.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  And so I imagine you have to have a, you know, pretty dialed in pitch to recruit people and maybe that pitch is you're going to be able to work on, I mean, the H200 news today says that, you know, we aren't, you know, the H200 is not like a F-35, it's not military technology yet, but I'm sure there's a pitch to work with you and your team on actually applied AI in a military context. But how do those conversations go?

• 1:53:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I call them Recruiting Tuesdays, right? I spend all afternoon Tuesdays calling, dialing for dollars, emailing, referencing, interviewing, and my whole team does that. And like the pitches, you know, okay, you have to have some patriotic instinct, obviously, but then maybe you're in between companies or you're just motivated. I mean, Elon has five companies and he still worked through the government for like seven months and brought a ton of those people who are motivated by the mission. So I'm trying to motivate people by, hey, this is the biggest technology deployment in the world. There is no bigger organization than Department of War. There's no more exquisite, crazy, interesting use cases, whether they're intelligence, war

• 1:54:29Speaker 07

  fighting, you know, even corporate use cases, and you get to be a part of creating that. It's never been done before. That's a pretty good pitch. And then if you, when you leave Department of War and you've done that, I think you get more valuable in the private sector, right? All these big AI companies now have big federal businesses. They all have sort of cooperating with like the government in different ways and you're even, you have another notch on your belt of good stuff that you've done and been an innovator on, which is pretty rare in government to like literally innovate while you're sitting in the job on something that's never been done before that's that big.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you think about the, the different levels of AI diffusion, AI integration, where AI can actually help the warfighter in the American context? I mean, a lot of people kind of watched the Palantir story evolve over the last few decades, this idea of analytics, just putting dots on a map sometimes, that being enough to identify where an enemy threat might be, for example. How do you think about integrating AI from the most mundane use cases of just speeding up a little bit of paperwork here and there to some of the bigger questions that will be ultimately faced the, the warfighters of today?

• 1:55:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, imagine, like, the most simple use cases, just like any big organi-, like, an employee in any big organization, right? You're, it's writing PowerPoints for you, writing job descriptions, like, making spreadsheets, the basics.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Speaker 07

  Then there's like the cool intelligence use cases. Imagine that we've got decades of satellite imagery, decades of that, or sensors that we've had, or, you know, all kinds of things. And now you could, instead of one human analyst having to go like, I think I see that there, you, you can go back through fifty years, train a model, and say, look for things you've never seen before, right?

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:21Speaker 07

  Um, and then on warfighting, logistics, planning, you know, all kinds of simulations, if you want to simulate a war game, in a really incredible way with all the data and all the stuff in there. So it's like, pretty, pretty compelling, you know, and exquisite to mundane that you could do with this stuff when you deploy it the right way.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, how, how do you think about, I mean, th- this partnership with Google? Uh, it, it, it feels very much like giving, you know, the, almost the consumer product of Gemini to everyone in the military. Uh, how, how are you thinking about larger projects that might require bringing together custom code, multiple systems, multiple pieces, you know? I mean, just as a consumer, we're running into things where Anthropic might be better for coding, and one day, and the Nano Banana's better for this, and ChatGPT's good for deep research. And if you want to build a business, we see a lot of startups pull three different models off the shelf. Uh, is that, or is that something you're starting to look at as like a phase two of AI integration into the military?

• 1:57:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, we're, so ideally, we'll have all, all four models.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 07

  And all four of the newest versions, like, uh, all the time at every classification level.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  And the reason you want to go up through the classification levels is so you could do more exquisite work, right? More complicated stuff. Um, and then the reason you want all models is just what you said. If you're trying to write code, maybe you want to use Claude if you're trying to do these other things. So as they compete, we want to benefit from it, and we've never had that here before. So it's, it's trying to consumerize it, give choice, but then give more and more capabilities as you go up the chain of like, uh, of security classification.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who owns the data? Does the taxpayer own the data? Does the government own the data? I see a lot of stuff where it's like, oh, this company now owns you. Google's gonna have your government data. Google's gonna have the data. It seems like they might be storing the data in some points, but they don't have authority over it. How do you frame to like the American who's maybe worried about government overreach or wants to understand where important, critical military data is living? Who has control? Who has final say?

• 1:58:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, so taxpayers own the government. Government owns the data on behalf of the taxpayers. Google does not own it. We control it.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41Speaker 07

  It doesn't leave our control. And that's why it was complicated to actually launch, right? Because AI models are built so that they learn as you continue to query them, right? And to make it such that the model, we got the latest model, and it took in queries, but then the learnings from that don't go back into the general model.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:04Speaker 07

  Is a form of making sure that the American taxpayers' data doesn't leak anywhere else and is just used for the purpose it was intended.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  How many other organizations globally, you know, allies, things like that, need to take on like a project like this? Like, it feels like clearly it's very important to move quickly because if 3 million people can't use the latest AI models in a secure way, you know, it's not super sustainable. They'll eventually, you know, go elsewhere to get these products. Do you think a lot of other kind of groups need to pursue a project like this? And are you guys trying to help create kind of a framework so others can benefit?

• 1:59:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, so we all know, and you guys know, any large organization needs to be using AI just for efficiency purposes, right? And just, you know, dollars and cents. If your competitors, you know, showing more profit in Q1 relative to you because they have too much overhead that it could be solved with AI, you're going to be in trouble. So when you talk about governmental organizations, should every government be using it in some degree? Yeah, I mean, it's it's sort of like an economic imperative, but it's like a strength imperative to. It's sort of like the way I describe it to people is you're opening the human context window. So we're not replacing a warfighter, but we're allowing the warfighter to be to do more with the same amount of time, right? To analyze more intelligence, to do more scenario planning and all that.

• 2:00:31Speaker 07

  So I can't imagine any other organization like ours that wouldn't be thinking about this. But hopefully, I think we are setting the pace here. We're going to be the pace setter here for the US government and for governments around the world.

• 2:00:44John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you for setting the pace. Thank you also for coming on the show today. This is fantastic.

• 2:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's fantastic to have you and thank you. Thank you for all the work that you're doing.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:54Speaker 07

  Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Every citizen. Come back on anytime.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Anytime.

• 2:00:59Speaker 07

  Alright, thanks a lot, guys.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT, reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Patrick Collison had a post that hit the timeline, rocked the timeline with 1.3 million views. He says, "Two conversations this weekend make me think that there's a vibe shift afoot in Silicon Valley around what one should work on and what is worthwhile. Culturally, it feels like the moment is ripe for new frameworks. One, Davos expert morality is stale and discredited."

• 2:01:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the experts. Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, those guys don't podcast for Davos. They don't, they're not Davos guys.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  It's very possible the next Davos could just be a roundtable between Joe Rogan, Andrew Huberman.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Really, the real experts, modern experts.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Chris Williamson, Lex Friedman, we love that. That would be fantastic. It's also apparent that the, quote, "Just be super-based" counter enlightenment is not really an answer. Yes, woke went too far, but simply inverting it does not work. Good point. Effective altruism is no longer the automatic default for smart people. They pushed it too far. They tried to save too many shrimp from. They're farming fates and now they are cooked.

• 2:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry shrimp.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  There is increasing skepticism of slot and slop machine dynamics. People don't want to work on a slot machine. They don't want to work on a slop machine. They want to work on something worthy and valuable. The question is overall, what is worthy and valuable? It feels like this question is becoming more central. What do you think is worthy and valuable?

• 2:02:40Jordi Hays?

  I think it's worthy and valuable that OpenAI hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser as Chief Revenue Officer.

• 2:02:47John Coogan?

  Hmm?

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  It's a scoop. It's happening right now.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 2:02:51Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI has hired Slack CEO Denise Dresser.

• 2:02:54John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Chief Revenue Officer.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  That's, that, that, that really flipped me for a second because they have a CFO. They have a CEO of applications. I don't know where CRO fits in, but they got someone and that's very exciting. Is that gong worthy?

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  I think it's very gong worthy. And in other news, we got some new SpaceX news from Bloomberg. The chat had it first. Thank you guys. We were in the middle of chatting with Emile. But SpaceX plans to go public at a one and a half trillion dollar valuation. Up from the rumored 800 billion just last week. They plan to raise 30 billion dollars, raising, I guess, far above 30 billion dollars. Anyway, so this is reporting SpaceX is moving ahead with plans for an IPO that would seek to raise significantly more than 30 billion. In a transaction that would make it the biggest listing of all time. I'll hit this.

• 2:03:55Jordi Hays?

  The Elon led company is targeting valuation of above one and a half trillion for the entire company, which would leave SpaceX near the market value that Saudi Aramco established during its record 2019 listing.

• 2:04:09Jordi Hays?

  The oil major raised 29 billion at the time. SpaceX's management and advisors are pursuing a listing as soon as mid to late 2026. The timing of the IPO could change based on market conditions. Let's hope the window stays open, folks. We will do our best to hold it open. I hate when the IPO window is closed. But anyways, no comments from the SpaceX team. But the junk bond analyst says, of course, congratulations on saying.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  The biggest number.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  Always great when you can say the biggest number.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think, you think that the timing here with Gavin going on about space data centers is just a coincidence? Or is this part of a allocator conspiracy?

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  I still, I still believe the Primak take that Elon has ran, has run the A B test on public companies. Tesla was miserable. SpaceX was great. And so you want to stay private as long as possible. There's no, funding is not drying up for SpaceX by any means. There's no real requirement to go public. There's no reason why he has to take that company public. This, I don't know why stuff is leaking right now. It might just be some sort of head fake, but it doesn't seem critical to me. I don't know.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  Certainly doesn't seem critical that they go public. I would just say you have two major leaks in the span of a week.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  It's just very different than the OpenAI thing where OpenAI, like in order to win, they need to like marshal all this capital. They need to, you know, make, become GPU rich. They need the GPU prices to fall. They need energy to get cheaper. They need everyone to do everything. They need everyone to get in line. Whereas SpaceX is very much like established. They have their supply chain set up. They've been in this business for 20 years. They're, they're just like cooking and compounding and I just don't see a need for them to, to, you know, marshal more capital or do anything really special. It, it, it does seem like there's something going on with like, okay, we're talking about a second, third act here, but at the same time.

• 2:06:24John Coogan?

  It's not like Elon needs to take this company public. I don't know. Do you think he does?

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  No, a lot of great companies don't need to go public, but there's still a lot of reasons to go public.

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  So what do you put the odds?

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  It would certainly be exciting. And I think it would be a good, like, it would just be a, like, there's a lot of people that are, you know, into space and can't get, can't get any, like, allocation into us, into space generally, you know? They just can't, they can't participate in the economic upside.

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  AST Mobile.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  That's it. That's it.

• 2:06:51Jordi Hays?

  EchoStar.

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  But you can't, you can't.

• 2:06:52Jordi Hays?

  EchoStar.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  EchoStar is the hold cub.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder, uh, this is, the, the market's closed now, but I wonder, EchoStar, which owns, I think it's 10?

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  12 billion of SpaceX stock.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what that's doing.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Up 6% today.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:07:07Jordi Hays?

  But it's been fluctuating.

• 2:07:08John Coogan?

  So, I mean, back to the Patrick Collison.

• 2:07:10Jordi Hays?

  A lot at the close.

• 2:07:11John Coogan?

  Back to the Patrick Collison post, like, what is worthy and what's valuable? Like, I, I still honestly feel like SpaceX is one of the worthiest and most valuable missions. And, uh, in terms of just, it has no slot machine dynamic. It has, it does not create slop. It is, I don't know, it's, it seems above enlightenment, counter enlightenment, woke, super base, like, yes, Elon runs it, but just as a company, just the idea of like, let's go to the moon, let's go to space, that should be apolitical. It doesn't, it, it doesn't even have the Davos expert morality impact on the environment. It's just like, one of the, it's one of the purest missions, in my opinion.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  And I feel like it, the, the reason I, I think there's, there's not, I'd like, there's something interesting about what Patrick is saying here, where there is this highly worthy, highly valuable mission, but it's only, there's only 5,000 people that can really play in that game. Maybe like 10,000 or something like, it's just not, it's just not a career path in America. It's not like I'm going into real estate. I'm going into lawyer, uh, legal. I'm going into medicine. I'm going into lawyer.

• 2:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Going into big oil.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  You can't, you can't just say, I'm going into the orbital economy. I'm studying and I'm gonna, you know, maybe I'll work at SpaceX, but there's a whole, there's a whole host. And like go, you can go into tech. It's very, it's very accessible. You can just like go and get a job in tech. It's very hard to do that in space and make, make a career.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  For i- i- it's nowhere, it's nowhere near as easy as it is for tech. Is tech broadly.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Just say you just go, you go into aerospace engineering and then you have.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  It's very, very hard.

• 2:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Optionality.

• 2:08:54John Coogan?

  It's very hard.

• 2:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Try to land a job at, at a.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  Yes, but.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  True space company or you can.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  So yes, but what if you're, what if you're not cut out to actually go do aerospace? What if you're, what if your actual skillset is marketing? Well, you can go and be a marketer in tech. You can't go and be a marketer in space. It just doesn't happen. They hire like two marketers.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  There's no, there's no.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  But why, why is that?

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  So what I'm saying is that like, is that like this question.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  You're saying we need a federal backstop on marketing jobs in the orbital economy?

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:09:26Jordi Hays?

  I just don't see what the problem is.

• 2:09:27John Coogan?

  No, no, what I'm saying is that, is that there's a vibe shift because like, like so Patrick Collison is asking the question. What is worthy? What is valuable? What is a valuable mission? And I'm saying, I know what a valuable mission is. Going to Mars, going to the moon. SpaceX is a valuable mission. But 99% of people can't participate in that. They can't make that their lives work because if they're not cut out to be aerospace engineers, aerospace designers, you know, if they're not, if they're, if that's not what they're great at, they just can't participate. Whereas when previously, in previous eras, like tech was organizing the world's information. Don't be evil. It was just cool. Tech was the mission. Tech was the thing that was worthy and valuable. And so you could show up and say, I'm a finance guy.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  I got a job in tech. I'm a lawyer. I work in tech. I'm a marketer. I work in tech. No matter what your actual skillset was, you could, you could come to technology, the technology industry and have a career. And you can't do that in the orbital economy yet. You can't do that in space because there just aren't that many jobs. And so there, I, I think there, there is something that's worthy. invaluable. It's just not able to absorb the actual demand for worthy and valuable career paths. And so for a lot of the marketers, for a lot of the lawyers, for a lot of the financiers, they wind up being forced to work in slot machine companies or slop machine companies. Because those are the ones that have the jobs. They have 10,000 jobs available. I don't know. That's my, that is sort of a hot take.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. I just would, I, I think you could, you could, you could also make the argument that many people are looking at jobs at say like a boom supersonic. And they're choosing, they're just making the choice to work at the infinite slot machine company.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  That's fair. That's fair. Well, hopefully they'll read Patrick Collison's post. They'll say, what's worthy and valuable? I gotta work for Boom Supersonic. I gotta work for Blake Scholl, who's our next guest. So while we bring him in from the restream waiting room, let me tell you about getbezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. We have Blake Scholl. Look at Blake Scholl. Wow. He is in a jet. Oh yeah, he can fly. I forgot. You can fly, right?

• 2:11:44Blake Scholl?

  Hang on guys, I gotta shut the engines down.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  This is crazy. What is going on here? Wow. Look at this.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  My captain, my captain.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  It's been a complete rat race to try and put on the most insane performance during a TBPN interview. I think this is going to take the cake. Blake, how are you doing? Introduce yourself. What's going on today?

• 2:12:04Blake Scholl?

  Hey guys, it's good to see you. Thank you for having me. It's a big day at Boom.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  This is a huge day at Boom.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm so, I'm so happy.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Look at this. Okay, where are we? Take us through this.

• 2:12:12Blake Scholl?

  So we, we are in the Boom Supersonic factory. This of course is the XB1 airplane. This is the airplane that broke the speed of sound in January.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:12:23Blake Scholl?

  The airplane that resulted in supersonic flight being legal again in the US.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:12:29Blake Scholl?

  So it's blown wide open. But you know, a year ago, a year ago, we were joking that it would be way easier to fund this company if we were an AI company. We were laughing.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yes, I think we talked about that on the show. That's right.

• 2:12:44Blake Scholl?

  Yes, it turns out we are. So the engine that we're building, that we've been building for almost four years now to power our overture supersonic airliner makes the perfect ground power turbine for AI. And so that's, that's today's news. We've got a product called Superpower, 42 megawatts, natural gas. It's going into data centers. Crusoe is our launch customer. We're going to be generating tokens and quiet sonic booms.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That's amazing.

• 2:13:12Blake Scholl?

  So, so you guys want to see the factory?

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Give us a tour.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Give us a tour.

• 2:13:17Blake Scholl?

  So, one of the, one of the things that anybody building in, in hard tech learns quickly is that the legacy aerospace, aerospace supply chain is just really screwed up. And so we are building this factory to go from raw materials in one side of the building and completed jet engines at the other side. So this is, this is some of the raw material that's just come in. This is 17 pH hardened stainless steel. It's heat treated. This is the, this is what they call the hot stuff. And you know, I missed the gym this morning.

• 2:13:51Blake Scholl?

  A little bit here. But this is going to turn into stage five stator vanes that go inside the, the engine and the superpower gas turbine. So, one of the most amazing, surprising things is the technology that is ideal for supersonic passenger flight is actually the same thing you need to power a data center.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:13Blake Scholl?

  So this is, Elon pioneered this at Colossus. Sam's doing the same thing at Stargate. These large arrays of what are called aerodynamic jet engines. And it's like the, they're like the blade servers of the energy world. I put a lot of them in array and just the same way blade servers beat mainframes, aerodynamic turbines to beat mainframe gasturbines. So let's see how they work. This is a one-third scale model of our engine. It works on a complicated principle. Stuck, squeeze, bang, blow. All right, so let's break that, break that down. Air comes in this way. This thing spins, super high RPM compresses. You can see the blades get smaller as you go in. Getting the air down to about a 20 to 1 compression ratio.

• 2:14:58Blake Scholl?

  Burners in here, this can run on jet fuel and also run on natural gas, just the different fuel nozzle. And it goes out the back here. So the model you're looking at here is what powers the airplane. The model that powers AI is very similar. We basically take the fan off the front. We lose these two turbine stages. And then we have what's called a free power turbine on the back. Three stages that extract energy, spin a second shift, uh, second shaft. And, uh, and that powers a 42 megawatt generator.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:25Blake Scholl?

  So, like I said, the vision here is we're going from raw materials in one side of the building, completed engines off the other side. The facility we're standing in now is going to be the first 200 megawatts, uh, over the next, uh, about 18 months.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  That's pretty significant.

• 2:15:38Blake Scholl?

  And they were building a much larger factory that's to be able to do 2 gigawatts a year. We're just going to scale from there.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:43Blake Scholl?

  So, um, let's go inside the shop.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is all, um, on the back of you, you, it was, it was seen as controversial that Boom did not just white label another engine from another company, correct? Uh, and now it's sort of come back to benefit you. Is that, is that the correct narrative?

• 2:16:01Blake Scholl?

  I, I think that's correct. I mean, people called us crazy.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:04Blake Scholl?

  To not outsource our engine.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:06Blake Scholl?

  Frankly, I was a little bit nervous about it. I was just really going to go. It's the best decision we ever made. We're getting a fully custom engine for about a quarter of the development cost.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:15Blake Scholl?

  Uh, it enables things like Boomless Cruise, could not do Boomless without our own engine.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:19Blake Scholl?

  It enables a totally new passenger experience. Haven't revealed it yet.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:23Blake Scholl?

  And then I think the most important thing is we can now take that same engine core, put a power turbine on it and, and get to profitability years faster than otherwise we could have. And this, this makes, uh, basically superpower makes not just electricity, it makes capital and it makes the capital that finances the, the capital expensive, uh, development of the overture passenger airliner. So let me, let me walk you around the shop here. So this is basically the first unit of what we will copy paste into the, the facility that will do two gigawatts per year. What are, what are Jejins made of? Well, you've got big round things. Um, and actually, if you look inside this machine here, this is called a, um, a turn mill.

• 2:17:04Blake Scholl?

  This machine weighs 65,000 pounds and spinning on it right now is a 4,000 pound doughnut of cast incanel and that's, that's a nickel alloy. Uh, so this is a relatively hard alloy. This is going to be the turbine center exhaust frame. Uh, this is the first very large part that we're machining in-house. So big round things. Uh, then you've also got, uh, discs with blades all around them. It's called blisks. Uh, these are some of the hardest to make parts. And so we have started what we call the blisk krieg. And, uh, this machine here is actually a more than five axis mill.

• 2:17:42Blake Scholl?

  Uh, so this will fold a disc of forged titanium or forged powder metal super alloy. And then the disc will kind of rotate in and out like this while another cutter head comes down and basically sculpts each individual compressor blade, uh, out of, uh, out of metal. So we, uh, ultimately we're going to have a whole bunch of these machines craking out discs. Uh, over here on the other side, this, this is part of an automated production line for compressor blades. Uh, so to give you an example of this, this is the, uh, what's called the stage one variable guide veins. This goes in the front part of the compressor section of the engine. Uh, these actually move as the engine changes power settings to have the optimal airflow.

• 2:18:27Blake Scholl?

  And this machine here starts with that bar stock, those, those kind of heavy beams I was showing you outside in the, in the hangar floor. Uh, it comes in on this feeder in one side, gets held in the machine, the cutter head comes over, cuts it away. Uh, another, um, gripper comes over, grabs it, machines the backside, robotic arm comes in, grabs it, puts it on the table, we start the next one. So this thing is ultimately going to be able to run 24/7 building engine parts.

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  Quick questions about the factory. Uh, where are we? What, where is this factory and how big is it overall? Square footage roughly?

• 2:19:00Blake Scholl?

  Yeah, so this this building is about 70,000 square feet. It is five minutes from our engineering HQ in South Denver. And we are we're about to open early next year. Another factory that is three times the size of this one. And that's what's going to be able to do two gigawatts a year. Yeah.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  So what are the what are the key? What are the key challenges now? This feels hard, but maybe more straightforward than supersonic commercial flight. Like, what are you guys?

• 2:19:33Blake Scholl?

  Less approvals.

• 2:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. But and have like massive, massive demand. Yeah, what are kind of like the key challenges that you and the team are looking out for? To be able to deliver on the timeline that you were talking about?

• 2:19:46Blake Scholl?

  Yeah, so after having done a boomless supersonic jet that was safety critical with a pilot on board. This feels like doing it on easy mode. Literally, XB1 had 68,000 parts, 68,000 parts, and they're all safety critical. The turbine has less than 2,000. And so there's going to be a lot of challenge in getting that to work, getting it to work reliably, getting manufacturing up to scale. But after having done XB1, it feels like easy mode. We've got customers that are going to take as much as we can possibly make as fast as we can make it. We've got today, we've got the capital to go do that. How much capital? 300 million and.

• 2:20:27Blake Scholl?

  Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. After after basically continuously fundraising for about a decade. I can't tell you how good it feels to have raised the round that lets us ship the revenue product that then produces the cash to fund the rest of the stuff. So we're done fundraising. This is the last equity round we ever have to deal. Let's go.

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  That's incredible. How was the first night's sleep after you closed around? Did you? I imagine I imagine that was a pretty surreal moment, even though the, you know, you're still just getting started. I would say people are going to be like a natural concern is like, is this mean we're not getting? We're not going to get the supersonic commercial aircraft. You obviously, I don't, I don't, I haven't lost any faith. This feels like an intelligent move in order to enable that future, basically buy the company time to get us to that point. But what do you have to say to anybody that might be wavering?

• 2:21:29Blake Scholl?

  Yeah, no, this, if you want supersonic passenger flight to exist, you should be very, very excited about this. Is that the single biggest challenges we had were, how do we prove that we have a reliable engine? And where do we get all the money to do it? And bringing this thing on the ground proves the engine is reliable? And it literally prints the cash that we need to go develop the airplane. So I think this takes us from, you know, less than 50% chance of success to a far greater chance of success. Like, I think overture supersonic flight is basically inevitable at this point. And, you know, some people are saying like, oh, you know, Blake got lost. I'm gonna be, you know, I'm just gonna become an energy guy. And it's like, guys, I didn't bust my ass for 10 years in order to like, only make power turbines. I'm very excited with the power turbine business.

• 2:22:12Blake Scholl?

  America needs it, like, we're losing to China, we really need this. Uh, but, uh, this is absolutely our bridge to the even bigger opportunity to just reinvent all of commercial aviation.

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Makes, uh, makes a lot of sense. From a, from a, like, looking at the existing sort of like turbine, uh, landscape. A lot of them have supply chain challenges as part of Boom's Edge that you guys are so used to making all of your own componentry and parts that you basically effectively just need the raw materials and you can make stuff happen. Uh, how are you kind of avoiding, uh, maybe some of the other delays that, you know, uh, legacy manufacturers are experiencing?

• 2:22:55Blake Scholl?

  Yeah, well, I, I think you named it, being able to build our own parts is huge. And, uh, the, you know, the, the room I'm standing in here, uh, does not exist at GE, does not exist at Rolls Royce. Uh, you know, the, the, in this sort of Jack Welch era of everyone getting focused on return on net assets. And what, what a random metric. They all sold off their supply chains.

• 2:23:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:16Blake Scholl?

  And they can't make anything anymore. And now we, we hire like disaffected engineers out of Pratt, out of GE, and they're like, holy Toledo. We can resolve in an hour what used to take us three weeks or three months to do at our last companies. Because they didn't have access to hardware. And if they ever wanted to change anything, it's really hard to change. That's actually one of the biggest, um, biggest innovations here. Is what we're doing is we're trying to make the world of atoms more like the world of bits. And you can iterate, you can evolve, you can change. And part of that is about taking software engineers, putting them on a hardware engineering teams, and automating design workflows. So that means we can like change digital designs really quickly when we learn. The other piece is how quickly can we turn a part?

• 2:23:59Blake Scholl?

  Like if we take a turbine blade and we send it to a traditional supplier to be made, it's gonna take six, maybe nine months for us to get that part back going from digital design to hardware. What that means is if you're the engineer designing it and you get it wrong, like it's really bad. You've set the whole company back, six, nine months. So now, now, now there's a lot of hand wringing, now there's analysis paralysis, now you gotta have layers of managers, double checking everything, now you're really slow. But if you build that part in-house, you can actually turn a turbine blade in 24 hours with a 3D print process, heat treat, phrase, get it out into the engine. So what we can do is iterate really quickly. So we're liberating engineers to move really fast because if they make a mistake, if they want to do an iteration,

• 2:24:41Blake Scholl?

  we can turn it in days or hours in the same building that they work in.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  That's super powerful.

• 2:24:50Blake Scholl?

  I see what you did there.

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  That was great. It was accidental. I don't know. I love it. I love it. Um, is there, is there anything um that you've been tracking on the, on the regulation side that you think needs to change? We were talking about making, uh, making boomless cruise legal, removing speed limits or high-speed travel. Uh, if you were to wave a magic wand, is there anything that you'd change around energy production in America today to accelerate re-industrialization and everything?

• 2:25:23Blake Scholl?

  It's much bigger than energy production. We have, we have a huge problem that I think not enough people are talking about, which was we, we have a permission-based approach to building, not a freedom to innovate approach to building. So if we drove to work, the way we build buildings or permit energy plants, uh, you'd have to go file a plan, you have to list out exactly what turns you're gonna take. You're gonna promise that you're gonna stop at every stop sign, not run through any red lights, always. Drive the speed limit and then and then some bureaucrats got to sign off on that and then finally you can drive the work. It's insane. That's the way we build a building. That's the way we build a power plant. I think we need to go from permission based, which just inserts huge delays and huge costs to hey, we're going to have a rule book.

• 2:26:06Blake Scholl?

  We're going to have commonplace rules and then you can you can pledge to follow them and if you break them, then you know, then you get fined. You get in trouble or you get your permits taken away. But I think we have to really get rid of the entire concept of market pre approvals. If we want to move fast, it's really holding America up right now. It's the biggest problem with building anything physical.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, are you guys hiring at all right now?

• 2:26:30Blake Scholl?

  Uh, we're hiring as fast as we can find great people. Uh, so in fact,

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  I figured.

• 2:26:36Blake Scholl?

  In fact, if I'll plug this if you'll let me, if you go to boom supersonic.com slash referral and you send us somebody great. We're looking for great engineers, hardware, software, mechanical propulsion, everything, technicians, um, CNC machinists. It's hard to find enough great CNC machinists. Send us somebody. We will send you a free overture desktop model if we end up hiring that person.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  That's very cool.

• 2:27:01John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, this has been the best, uh, hard tech tour we've ever gotten. We've had a number of people attempt what you just did. It always it always goes poorly.

• 2:27:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:11Jordi Hays?

  There was no,

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  It's very high stakes because like anything can go wrong with like your wifi or anything. I'm very impressed. Uh, this was amazing and honestly, it was just like chilling, watching, learning. This was really awesome. Normally I have to ask way more questions to get information, but this was really informative.

• 2:27:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm so excited for you and the team.

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Put together a great group of investors.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  What a crazy story. I mean, I'm sure like, you know, the, the job's not finished. The book has not been written, but, uh, I mean, you know, I've followed your career for a long time and, uh, it's, uh, it's, you're on an amazing run doing amazing things. So we appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

• 2:27:49Blake Scholl?

  Appreciate you having me and making this so much fun. Thank you guys.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day and Merry Christmas.

• 2:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to the whole team.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 2:27:55Blake Scholl?

  Merry Christmas. Over and out.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Over and out.

• 2:27:58John Coogan?

  Atesleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. You close a $300 million round. You need to sleep on an Atesleep. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. If you're trying to build a 42-megawatt natural gas turbine while working on a supersonic jet, you definitely need a good night's sleep.

• 2:28:18Jordi Hays?

  I want my Atesleep to be powered by a natural gas turbine. I wanna, just give me a mini boom turbine for my bedroom.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Please. Just a small one. It doesn't have to be full scale.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:32Jordi Hays?

  But just something small that I can really rely on.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, because...

• 2:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is weird. The Atesleep's, you plug it into the wall, it's electric. You could get a diesel. A diesel version. You just fill it up with a little bit of diesel and then, and then you, and then you pull start it like a lawnmower.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  And just leave the window open.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  So there's some air change.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the exhaust needs to like kind of flow out of the, out of the house, but...

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Or you could wear a mask and just run a, like a...

• 2:29:02John Coogan?

  Well, that could be diesel powered too.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  You have a diesel powered sleep apnea mask.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  That's pulling air out from the outside.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  That's fresh. Exactly. Exactly. But then you have a diesel motor running and you could put your whole house on diesel.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  On your face. Your face is potentially kind of vibrating, but...

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  Be good.

• 2:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Can see it.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  Uh, well, people are starting to talk some trash about the old Meta Superintelligence Lab.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Who?

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  0.005 seconds says, "It's now painfully obvious that Meta Superintelligence Lab went on a massive hiring spree, promised the world, and delivered absolutely nothing. There has been a mass exodus. I feel like Alex Wang was a colossal mishire. When is Zuck going to clean house and admit his mistake?"

• 2:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Let them cook.

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  Let them cook.

• 2:29:51Jordi Hays?

  Let them cook. I was the first one. I was the first one to say that Meta Vibes like should never have been uh released or uh at least advertised publicly. I think it was uh definitively uh just not a good product.

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh and uh but let them cook. Let them cook. Uh I yeah, again, the mistake is like people are gonna judge the first thing that your new organization releases. It felt rushed.

• 2:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  It looked bad in comparison to Sora, uh but uh we need to see the next version of Lama. I'm sure they'll call it something else. Uh but uh give them, give them more than

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  What should they actually do on the product side? Like, Google has been able, Gemini, I feel like, has been able to carve out a really unique position with Nano Banana. And and like, it went viral and this was Angene's at uh at Andreessen at the time, Angene Midhose like take about like the Empire Strikes Back. And I have found that like, you know, having the best, having the best video model is a reason for people to go to your app. Having the best uh you know, audio model, the best photo model, the best deep research product.

• 2:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Nano Banana is what what the rotisserie chicken is to Costco. Nano Banana is huge.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Great analogy, great analogy.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's a loss leader. It's like, come in, make a bunch of images. We're gonna lose a lot of money, but we're gonna get you hooked on our bread and butter.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  Our our language model.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I mean, OpenAI has obviously developed just a great like back and forth chat experience. The the voice mode is really dominant there. The deep research product.

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  It's possible that Zuck wanted his true believers to be able to accumulate Meta shares at around the one and a half trillion dollar mark because he wants to reward his most loyal

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  soldiers.

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  Potentially. Uh Stamy here says Limitless is acquired by Meta today. End to a lovely journey with Rewind and Limitless. And Ryan Jones says Zuck is going on a generational run of Max Paranoid. Missing Mobile really, really, really scared him because he just bought an AI wearable startup. He's still spending on the Metaverse.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, I think it's obvious that Meta is just gonna keep shipping hardware. I think that uh this, the Limitless acquisition looked like, you know, a soft landing for a team that had proven that they can ship. Products again, they did that. I know they had customers because some of the customers were mad that Meta acquired them and they were talking about it. So yeah, I shouldn't be a surprise. I don't think you can. I think it's hard to hard to argue that Meta should just ignore any forward thinking product lines and just just do.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of the Metaverse, we should watch this video of a robot that was clearly being teleoperated, absolutely destroying a water bottle. It's one of the craziest videos I've ever seen. This is like so insane. So it the operator clearly takes it feels like it should be AI or something. So the

• 2:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says the hand coming down with enough force to float a water bottle.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  Which is not easy to do. If you just have a water bottle and you're you can't just rip that thing open. But the the the robot op the robot teleoperator takes the VR glasses off and then the robot just falls backwards.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:33:12John Coogan?

  Is this real?

• 2:33:13Jordi Hays?

  Imagine having one of these hanging out.

• 2:33:14John Coogan?

  It's comedic genius.

• 2:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Imagine having one of these hanging out in your office and it's just running bits all the time. Like its whole goal. I I have kind of class clown energy in the office. But if I could outsource that to Optimus and just be able to focus more on my work and he's Optimus is just going around running, running bits. I mean, that

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  You know what we have to do? We have to get one of these robots that you know how they're how so many of the robots are claiming like, we're gonna do your dishes. We're gonna do your dishes. I just, I want to just have, okay, we're gonna all have a nice glass of wine. We're gonna put 50 different glasses, wine glasses of all slightly different shapes on the table and just tell the robot, hey, clean up the clean up the wine glasses. Just load them all in the dishwasher. Nothing's I can barely do that.

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  I could barely do that without breaking.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. All the time I'm smashing these things. And you imagine one of these robots just completely decimating the

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  The

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Sure, I'll unload the dishwasher in there.

• 2:34:11John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, no, please allow me allow me to unload the your finest crystal stemware.

• 2:34:18Jordi Hays?

  This would be

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Allow me to unload your stemware.

• 2:34:20Jordi Hays?

  You discover an edge case where the robot thinks, well, to unload the dishwasher, I should break every glass and use a vacuum and just vacuum it out. Way easier than just taking them all out at once.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, sorry, sir. Would you like me to polish your your fine stemware?

• 2:34:36Jordi Hays?

  I'll polish it into dust.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Polishes it into dust. Anyway, our next guest is in the Restream waiting room. First, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. We have Naveen Rao from Unconventional, CEO of Unconventional AI, in the Restream waiting room. Naveen.

• 2:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:34:58Speaker 09

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's jump right into an introduction on yourself, companies you built in the past, and then we'll get into unconventional.

• 2:35:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I was the first company I built in the AI space was called Nirvana. It was actually their first AI chip company. It was back in 2014, before most people knew what machine learning was.

• 2:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just a little too early, but you're back.

• 2:35:24Speaker 09

  I think it was actually decent timing, to be honest with you. But, you know, I think I sold too early, to be honest. The second company was actually moving more toward the software and algorithmic side called Mosaic ML. Sold that to Databricks back in 2023, and I went AI at Databricks up until just a couple of months ago, where I left to start unconventional.

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. So yeah, jump right into it. Talk about, you know, the vision. I feel like you guys, the perfect amount of controversy yesterday because people were latching on to a not a seed round at a $500 million valuation, but a 500 million of capital invested at the seed round. It was honestly perfect. You want a little bit of spice on the timeline to get attention, and I'm sure there's been, you know, a ton of inbound interest, both from the candidate side and future customers.

• 2:36:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, you know, obviously, that was somewhat intentional. We wanted to have a big shocking moment. You know, but I think it's actually pretty rational when you think about the opportunity ahead of us. So what we're doing at unconventional is rethinking how a computer works. You know, the computers that we use today, the fundamental distractions have been around for nearly 80 years. And, you know, it's kind of weird to think about in the tech industry, something being around for 80 years, but it really is true. And now we've come to the point where we've pushed that paradigm as far as we can push it. You know, fundamental constraints around energy are now hitting us at the global level. Like, if we keep scaling AI like we're doing, I mean, I think AI is amazing.

• 2:36:57Speaker 09

  I use it all the time, and I think the rest of the world is going to do that, too. We can't get there. We're going to run out of energy to scale these things up because it requires very power hungry chips. So really, we are saying, can we rethink the paradigm actually from the circuit level up? And build something that's vastly more efficient, like a thousand times more efficient than what we've been building? And focus only on AI. We don't need to do accounting software and artillery calculations and all the things that traditional computers do. We'll let that be in the realm of digital machines. But can we build something that's much more efficient for the substrate of AI? And so the opportunity ahead of us, I think, is nearly infinite. And that's why valuation actually can make some rational sense.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  So what does your supply chain look like? Or what do you think it will look like in the in the near future?

• 2:37:47Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, when we started this project, there were two fundamental constraints I put on it. One is that we have to be able to solve the problem within five years. Because this problem is going to hit us in three or four years, and we need to have a solution ready. Then, at that point, when we have a solution, you can't have something that's like, I've solved the science problem, now what? We have to be able to manufacture it. So we have to have scalable manufacturing. So we believe we can solve this problem in a big way within five years that actually leverages the silicon ecosystem. So we do want to manufacture it on standard lithography techniques.

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:38:19Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  ASML could potentially be a partner in the next five years, like they're not off the table.

• 2:38:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, TSMC, we were talking with already. You know, I was out in Taiwan just a few weeks ago for this purpose. And, you know, it doesn't mean that's the be all end all. What we're doing is really building a new set of abstractions. Like, a computer is built on a digital abstraction. Can we move away from that and actually move to something that is more amenable to using fundamental dynamics of the substrate? And if we can do that, we can actually open up the world to a whole new set of, you know, potential substrates. Silicon is one of them, and maybe there'll be more exotic things. I've talked to folks who are building 3D printed circuits and all kinds of crazy stuff. And so I think the world is going to be very rich in the next 20 years in terms of new capabilities. Right now, we got to leverage what we have.

• 2:39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, in terms of leveraging what we have, I feel like there's been, you know, movement from, okay, Nvidia GPUs are bust, everyone's just doing that. Then we got some serious movement this year from AMD stepping it up. We got TPU, trainium's looking pretty good. There's like, these ASICs are doing well. There's a whole crop of ASIC startups that are saying, hey, we're going to bake the transformer right on to the silicon. They're going with TSMC. Can you help me understand how you were thinking about, like, creating something that's higher performance, but still leaving enough, like, flexibility to be able to actually work with

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  whatever the next algorithmic paradigm looks like?

• 2:39:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, one part of what we're doing is a very deep code design. So we're not saying, here's a transformer and it's immutable. We're not looking at it like that. The way you define the neural network itself is something that we're going to change and actually link to the hardware. And if you look at biology, there is no difference between the definition of the neural network and the physical substrate. They're one and the same. So the dynamics, the physics of those neurons actually gives you the algorithmic richness that you have. So we want to move more in that direction. It's not this abstraction on a digital machine, which is built out of numerics. All the machines that you highlighted just then, which all have a wonderful purpose, by the way, all work on the same fundamental abstraction.

• 2:40:38Speaker 09

  They all use bits to represent numbers, and those numbers represent weights that then are manipulated in some way to build a neural network. We're actually talking about building those sort of effective numerics on the physics,

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:52Speaker 09

  on the fundamental properties.

• 2:40:54John Coogan?

  Do you have a view on, you know, we were reflecting on this Marc Benioff post earlier in the show. He was kind of making the argument that LLMs are going to commoditize that, you know, it's like hard disks and you're going to be able to move them around. There's not a lot of value or not a lot of lock-in at the, okay, I got this bag of weights layer. And I'm wondering if you have a view on how the, the, you know, foundation model landscape will evolve over the next five years because I want to know what your customer mix looks like, but you can kind of tie that together however you like.

• 2:41:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, transformers are something that works really well today. We were able to scale it up. We're able to prove out that we can build synthetic systems that learn. I think that was enormous in the last several years, right? And actually, not just that can learn, but can be useful. So now it's about, okay, well, we can define what useful is. Now we have these quality metrics for what a token is. That actually has opened up a whole new world to me in a sense where I can say, well, as long as I can supply that quality, I don't really care if it's a transformer. I don't really care what it looks like. And if I can do so very cheaply and very fast, that's all I care about. So now we're really getting to this almost pure play supply of intelligence. That's what we want. So now if that's the abstraction, it's not about a transformer.

• 2:42:11Speaker 09

  It's about intelligence and I can define that with some metrics. Okay, now I can supply that in new ways. And so that's the way we're looking at it. Like, I'm not looking at the world today. I'm looking at the world in four or five years in terms of a product.

• 2:42:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can you, what like, what do you, what do you, can you break down more specifically what you expect your, like, kind of first initial customer cohorts to look like?

• 2:42:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, the way we're gonna see all of this stuff expressed is really much cheaper per token cost, like one 500 to cost per token or something like that. And and I think our cohort is really, at first, we're gonna go after data center as the fundamental rollout, but anyone who's using intelligence for an application at that point, they're gonna actually have probably strict requirements on what the capabilities of the models are, what their, what the token quality is defined as. So when we have that metric, we can build toward it. We can say, okay, well, GPT-8 or whatever it is at that point, gives me this. And is there a way I can recapitulate that in the kind of neural network we're defining? And the answer should be yes.

• 2:43:21Speaker 09

  And so we will have kind of strict specs in a way to build toward in terms of what that intelligence token really means. And so it's really our customer cohort will be anyone who's using AI as part of their application. And we want to supply that faster, cheaper, and eventually in a more ubiquitous way. I mean, personally, if I really want to look out there like 10 years, I think robotics are gonna be huge. And I think robotics require us to solve this problem of bringing energy down drastically to actually have more processing on the bot itself. That's how we're really gonna open up this world of autonomy. And so personally, I think that's where I'm really excited. Maybe that's just the kid in me, excited about seeing that future, but I think that's where we're gonna go.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  What, yeah, I mean, I know you talked a little bit about the size of the seed round, but can you help me understand a little bit more? $475 million is a ton of money. Is there, is there like a, you know, a bill that you see yourself paying really? Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna spend $200 million on this? Or is it more like you're just going to be operating at the level of like, okay, we're burning $100 million a year on a lot of top engineers and AI scientists? And like, it's just a big organization early and you're just kind of jumping to growth stage company scale as fast as possible?

• 2:44:40Speaker 09

  Not really that. So I don't anticipate the company becoming huge in terms of people. Sure. Call it 80 to 100 people. Okay. At steady state for a while. Yeah. But much like a frontier lab, like a frontier lab spends a bunch of money on GPUs to iterate. Yep. Like training GPT-5, maybe 30 million bucks, but you gotta follow a bunch of dead ends. Totally. And you do that with GPU compute. Our version of that is actually building hardware. Okay. So we're gonna be fabricating chips. We're gonna be trying different things. It's very hard to model some of this stuff, actually, numerically. And, you know, we're gonna do our best to model it, scale up that modeling actually on GPUs. But at the end of the day, you gotta build it, you gotta test it, and you gotta see if the whole thing works end to end. And we're gonna do that a whole bunch of times. Yeah.

• 2:45:22Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you planning to actually use existing Gen AI, kind of the existing Gen AI stack to accelerate your own development of, of, of an alternative to traditional, you know, GPUs?

• 2:45:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, actually, that's a great question. There's, it's really interesting. As we start clicking into like the, the tools for designing hardware, they're still pretty far behind. You know, automation of digital logic is, has been done to some degree, as in like coding tools. But on the analog side, this is still relatively new. And we are seeing now companies that are saying, hey, I can explore the design space of different circuit architectures for you using AI. And, you know, we said, great, so we wanna either work with them or buy them. I don't know, whatever it is, whatever makes sense for us. But, yeah, we are trying everything to use the latest techniques to accelerate our exploration of the space. That's the way we're looking at this is, how fast can I iterate? How fast can I find working solutions? That's our main goal right now.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. What have you learned from racing that you've applied to company building? And what have you learned from company building that you apply to racing?

• 2:46:32Speaker 09

  Oh, boy. I think racing, when you start getting into like truly competitive events, you start to see that every like tenth of a second matters. When you're coming into the pit lane, for instance, you have a pit lane speed limiter, right? So I don't think people even know this, but when you come in, you hit this pit lane speed limiter, and when you drop below the pit lane speed limit, you hit the throttle, it pegs it at the speed limit. You basically want to optimize that so you don't even lose a tenth when you come into the pit lane. You basically hit the brakes at a certain point, slow down, and you're at this pit lane speed. You don't want to slow down ahead of time and kind of ease your way in. Every tenth of a second matters. And that may be in even a 24-hour race. And I think that's true with a company. Like, don't waste time. Every moment matters.

• 2:47:17Speaker 09

  You may make bad decisions. That's okay. Figure out how to back them out. Move as fast as you can. If you hired the wrong person, fix it. And so I think the main thing I learned is that time is your biggest enemy, always.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Love it. Well, we normally ring the gong for $475 million, but we should also ring the gong for 265 points in the Ferrari Challenge.

• 2:47:38Speaker 09

  There you go. Yes, I'll take it.

• 2:47:42John Coogan?

  They're both massive accomplishments. But we're big fans of the Ferrari Challenge around here, so it's a big deal for us.

• 2:47:49Speaker 09

  Thank you so much. IMSA is where it's at, really. That's the big stuff.

• 2:47:52John Coogan?

  Oh, cool, cool. Yeah. We were out in thermal a couple of weeks ago, and it was the first time for both of us on the track, and it was life-changing. It was like a new, like, okay, this is the hobby.

• 2:48:03Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure it was somebody that you've probably shared a track with here and there. Anyways, congrats on the announcement and everything, and the whole team. Sounds like an incredible place to go work right now. I'm sure, I can't wait to have you back on.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  And what a murderer's row. You've got Andreessen, Lightspeed, Sequoia, Lux, DCVC, Future Ventures, Jeff Bezos, Databricks, and many others. What a fantastic way to kick off a new business. Congratulations.

• 2:48:32Speaker 09

  Thanks so much.

• 2:48:33John Coogan?

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

• 2:48:37John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about wander.com, book of wander, inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We have the founder of Eon. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:48:57Speaker 10

  I'm doing great. Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

• 2:49:01John Coogan?

  Thanks for being here.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  We wanted to get you on last week, but we're on the road. And yeah, very excited to chat.

• 2:49:10Speaker 10

  Thank you very much.

• 2:49:11John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself, introduce the company. We'd love to get, you know, how you're positioning it. And then I want to go into the funding round, some of the implications of this, but kick it off with a little bit of introduction for us.

• 2:49:23Speaker 10

  So sounds great. As always, I always start by saying my name is Ophir. I'm married to wonderful Julia and father to Rom, objectively cutest baby ever born.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a great intro. I love it.

• 2:49:33Speaker 10

  These are the important stuff. Less important stuff. I started a few companies before, actually four companies to be exact. Most recent one was a company called Cloud Ando, which we sold to Amazon on January of 2019, grew the business to a billion dollar business doing migration and disaster recovery to the cloud.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for migration and disaster recovery in the cloud. Doesn't get enough.

• 2:49:56John Coogan?

  Doesn't get enough credit. It does not get enough credit. That's right.

• 2:50:00Speaker 10

  I agree. I'm actually this, I was saying this crazy guy who really loved data, data, data regression, data protection. We leave this all so long and both me and my co-founders, and while we were there, we saw an opportunity that we just couldn't resist. All those companies really moving to the cloud, especially around COVID and later on. And all the incumbents in our space were born on premises. So we decided to start a company in cloud backup. You could say cloud backup, isn't it solved already like in 1981? Well, we figure out that as companies move to the cloud, become very significant, they have a very big problem actually managing the data, managing the secondary storage, backups like tapes.

• 2:50:45Speaker 10

  These are companies storing their most precious data for a very long time and they can't access that. So we started as a backup eh company. I said, I'm this crazy person starting a non-AI company in an AI world.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:58Speaker 10

  But then you know what? It hit me. AI is such a strong compelling event, which has strong tailwinds that we just had.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  I mean, look at the C game and Western digital stocks. They're through the roof this year. It's crazy. And it makes sense because everyone's gonna need to store a lot more data. Everyone's creating so much more data.

• 2:51:17Speaker 10

  So much data is created all the time and you always new data and I don't know who's gonna win the compute wars.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 10

  OpenAI, Anthropic, eh DataBrick, Snowflake, eh any eh eh area. What I do know, no matter what's gonna happen.

• 2:51:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:31Speaker 10

  Data is gonna be the enterprise mode.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:34Speaker 10

  And we are here to help them unlock the eh this data. We're automating cloud backups. Sounds boring, right?

• 2:51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:40Speaker 10

  Making it into useful, accessible assets.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:44Speaker 10

  Data lakes. So you can back up all your data in a very seamless, easy way, but then use it.

• 2:51:50John Coogan?

  And you can still use it.

• 2:51:51Speaker 10

  Train models. That's all the hype, right?

• 2:51:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:53Speaker 10

  And analytics, NBI.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Wait, so no, so so no tapes? It's on drives?

• 2:51:59Speaker 10

  No tapes. No tapes. Eh as it seems, we're all software only solution.

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:03Speaker 10

  Only in the cloud.

• 2:52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:05Speaker 10

  Cloud born. This is what we've been doing.

• 2:52:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  On on a public cloud or on your own cloud? Because I imagine that one of the benefits of backups and one of the one of the key things that people wanna buy when they're backing up data is, hey, I'm I'm already tied to AWS. I don't want everything on AWS. I want I want security. In case AWS goes down, I wanna back up somewhere else. How are you thinking about that?

• 2:52:28Speaker 10

  So, and we've seen quite a few outages in the last few weeks, right? And what we're saying with democratizing data, it's your data.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:52:35Speaker 10

  Whether it's AWS, Azure and GCP, great clouds or other clouds. We're making sure you can extract the data,

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:52:42Speaker 10

  Make it portable between clouds, making it accessible, performant,

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:52:47Speaker 10

  browsable and searchable. You can search and browse all of your data and all of your history immediately. And because we're building our own software stack, software only, it's not gonna cost you a dime.

• 2:52:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:52:59Speaker 10

  It's actually cheaper than building it on your own or using existing cloud technologies to do that. So we're trying to make sure that we make it a, we, we give you an easy button as a customer

• 2:53:09John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:10Speaker 10

  to just enable the use of all of your data, making it accessible to if you wanna run Snowflake or Databricks or Redshift or Bquery of anything that you want on your data. That's great.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:21Speaker 10

  We are here to make sure that you're enabled to do it on all of the data that you have and all of the data

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:27Speaker 10

  that you had in the past.

• 2:53:28John Coogan?

  But how can you possibly be cheaper than the big hyperscalers, the, the, the big public clouds? I imagine that, you know, Microsoft, GCP, Azure, AWS, like they're buying so many Seagate drives, so many Western Digital drives. Uh, how can you possibly compete on price?

• 2:53:46Speaker 10

  That's an unbelievable question. Actually, I don't want to just win on price. I just want to make it easy for you.

• 2:53:52John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:52Speaker 10

  So what we're doing, even though we're still in the cloud,

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:53:55Speaker 10

  using cloud building blocks, object storage,

• 2:53:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:57Speaker 10

  GCS, S3, Azure blobs, et cetera.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:54:00Speaker 10

  We're building in a very different way.

• 2:54:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:54:02Speaker 10

  And actually building a very more, more efficient, it's called, version of cloud snapshots.

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:54:08Speaker 10

  That purposely built for backup and data retrieval.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh, take us through the news. What's the funding news? I wanna ring the gong for a data storage company.

• 2:54:20Speaker 10

  Thank you very much. And I'm also very excited. So we raised five hundred million dollars in total, three hundred million dollars just in this round. Really excited, led by Elad Gil, who is not only an amazing investor, he's also an amazing human being.

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:34Speaker 10

  And the, and we, we got

• 2:54:36Jordi Hays?

  What's it like, what's it like being, uh, what's it like being on fly on the wall for, when you and Elad get together and talk about, uh, data?

• 2:54:44Speaker 10

  Well, Elad is simply unbelievable. You know, he's one of the most humble people I've met. And at the same time, brilliant, brilliant, and so well-connected. I don't think I've ever seen an investor that everyone likes so much. And I have the privilege to choose amazing investors. I have Sequoia and Lightspeed and Greenox and Bond Capital. And, and, and likes of Omri Caspi, who are just amazing, amazing investors. And Elad Gil is, is very unique. Actually, I saw, we got preempted by sixteen VCs. And I so wanted it to be Elad, really.

• 2:55:22Speaker 10

  And when Elad, eh, eh, when Elad wanted to, I'm going to lead my, your round, I was in New York, he flew from San Francisco. He came to my office, he basically wouldn't leave until I signed. And to be honest, I really, really want to do that because I got to know the, the person, not just the investor. In the last few months and, and year, he, he put a small change in a previous round. And honestly, we just fell in love, not just, eh, myself, my other co-founders as well. That's incredible. When we had the chance, we had to do it. And, eh, and really, really happy, excited about it. He wrote the book on high growth. I know, I know.

• 2:56:03Speaker 10

  Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm, I'm really thrilled. We have now a lot of capital in a time when we can now, we can now plan ahead. We don't need to think about the macro. We don't need to think whether everything's going to continue to be rainbows and unicorns. Do we gonna have a, a downturn soon? Who knows? But we know we can build a strong fundamental business. That's gonna be here for a very long time.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  This is hilarious, but it's a great take. And it's a great way to build your company and your business so that you can take advantage of these tailwinds, but also survive the headwinds. And, uh, congratulations to you.

• 2:56:40Speaker 10

  Absolutely.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  This is, this is what we need.

• 2:56:42Speaker 10

  Exactly, we here for a long time.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:45Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 2:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Forever, forever. Is this your, you want this to be, you've done four companies prior to this, you want this to be the last one? You just want to just-

• 2:56:53Speaker 10

  Last one.

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  Last one.

• 2:56:54Speaker 10

  All the way to the IPO and beyond.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:56:56Speaker 10

  That's my goal.

• 2:56:57John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:56:58Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. You have incredible energy. I'm excited to follow, follow your journey and you're welcome on the show anytime.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:57:08Speaker 10

  I'm really excited. I love your show.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:57:11Speaker 10

  Thank you very much. I'm gonna get back and tune to that. Thank you.

• 2:57:13John Coogan?

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

• 2:57:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:57:18John Coogan?

  That is worthy and valuable. We were debating, what is worthy and valuable? That feels like a company, that's the worthy and valuable company of San Francisco.

• 2:57:27Jordi Hays?

  He's keeping-

• 2:57:28John Coogan?

  That's what you need to do. I don't even-

• 2:57:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad he's keeping our, all of our data backed up.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It seems, it seems, it seems extremely valuable.

• 2:57:36Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's that guy.

• 2:57:38John Coogan?

  Well, we have Gorkem from Fall in the Reacher waiting room with some massive news.

• 2:57:44Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  On the show. You know him, you love him.

• 2:57:48Speaker 11

  Good to be back.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  He makes all of this possible.

• 2:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Every time you're on, I'm like, he's gonna be back on.

• 2:57:53John Coogan?

  He's gonna be back soon.

• 2:57:54Jordi Hays?

  You guys are on a tear.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:57:57Speaker 11

  Thank you so much. Good to be back in, in the temple of technology, capital of capital. There was one more. What is the other one?

• 2:58:05Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 2:58:06Speaker 11

  Fortress of finance. There you go.

• 2:58:08John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Give us the news. What happened?

• 2:58:13Speaker 11

  Yeah, today we announced our $140 million Series D, led by Sequoia and meaningful participation from Kleiner Perkins and Nvidia.

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  It's the Sequoia venture capital firms.

• 2:58:30Speaker 11

  We had an incredible year this year. We have some of the biggest advertisers, retail platforms, design and productivity apps and movie studios, generating images and videos on the platform and we-

• 2:58:45Speaker 11

  Eight X star revenue in the whole year.

• 2:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Eight X?

• 2:58:48Speaker 11

  This is our third fundraiser of the year. We announced our series B earlier this year in the beginning.

• 2:58:54Jordi Hays?

  You got one more? You going for the four Pete, one a quarter? Come on, come on, we got, we got. We got two weeks.

• 2:59:01John Coogan?

  We got two weeks.

• 2:59:02Jordi Hays?

  Couple, couple of weeks.

• 2:59:04John Coogan?

  What's been, uh, what's been the biggest driver of, of revenue growth? Has it been uptime? Uh, you know, being a one stop shop, like, like what, what messaging has really resonated the, the most and driven the most growth for you this year?

• 2:59:18Speaker 11

  Yeah. So beginning of this year, we thought we were gonna ride the AI video wave for the whole year. That, that was, that was accurate. It was, it was an incredible year for AI video.

• 2:59:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:31Speaker 11

  But what was surprising to us is actually rise of image editing. And like image models existed a couple of years ago, like that's how we started our business. But image editing, one of the first good models uh came out around May. And now it's a bigger part of our business than, than AI video. Uh, that was surprising to us. So we thought we were gonna ride a big wave. But a, another even bigger wave, uh, you know, collided with it and our business grew with it.

• 3:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, is that, is that surprising? Because, I mean, when you think, if, if it's very, it's very commonplace now to like one shot a great image output. And it's so much harder to one shot or even get a great video output. You can get a decent video output. So I feel like it makes sense. Everybody's making images all the time. It's like, uh, it has, it's, it's like, when you think about, uh, in the workplace, there's just so many different use cases, even, even, you know, for consumers. So I think it makes sense and it really is just exciting because that's, uh, the image models feel like they're so good now. Everybody's so used to seeing it and getting kind of like faked out by an image now because you can't tell the difference. Video, you can still usually tell.

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:45Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like maybe in a year from now, it'll be the same situation where it's like, I just don't know what's real. I don't know what's, what's fake. It's, it's all confusing.

• 3:00:54Speaker 11

  Hundred percent. Video, video models are still very hard to work with still. Uh, some really talented AI creative people.

• 3:01:03Speaker 11

  Create great content with it, but it hasn't really reached mainstream. I would say it it takes even more effort to create an ad with a video. If it's like high quality than actually shooting it yourself. But what happened with image models is gonna happen with video. And the user experience of video models are gonna gonna get much, much better. And you'll have even even more mainstream adoption of of these models. I'm pretty sure of this. And that's what makes me really excited because we we went so far. It's it's a lot of image models, a lot of image editing, just just a glimpse of video models. And this this is all gonna get better and better. And it's gonna reach complete mainstream.

• 3:01:44Speaker 11

  All the studios, all the retailers are gonna make use of this technology.

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  How, oh, sorry.

• 3:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just uh. What what are you seeing like? How how are you thinking about 2026 uh from a model model progress standpoint? Uh, you know, Nano Banana was obviously, you know, massive uh leap. I'm expecting we'll see uh even more activity in 2026. But I'm sure you have uh somewhat of a preview, just given given uh your guys' position in the market.

• 3:02:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly. So usually, one of the frontier labs pushes the boundaries. And in this case, it was Nano Banana twice this year. It was like their first release and now this uh very recent Nano Banana Pro release. But very quickly, uh either the open source community or or labs from China, people catch up. Uh, there are a couple of reasons for it, to be honest. Once once they see there is demand for it, once people know exactly what to build for, it's usually easier for them to get motivated and catch up. But also some of the tricks, some of the the research tricks leak, and people use them and and train these models.

• 3:02:57Speaker 11

  The the model market for generative media is a lot more fragmented than L L M's. There is so much choice. There's so many models that are different and that are better at different things, that the the best model keeps changing. Even Nano Banana was detroned a couple of times throughout the year. Right right now, it's considered the best image image editing model, but I don't know how long that's gonna last.

• 3:03:22John Coogan?

  What are you excited for in terms of capabilities for next year? Do you have, do you have specific like benchmarks that you're tracking? Or even like functionality, like I've noticed, I have one that's the Where's Waldo test? Where I will ask it to generate a full Where's Waldo? And even Nano Banana Pro still can't quite do it. It'll either put Waldo right at the center or it'll make two Waldos. And those images in the children's book are really complicated. It's not just a portrait and there's maybe not enough training data on the internet. But that's one test that I've been tracking. Do you have your own internal benchmark or, you know, that whatever you think is like next?

• 3:04:07John Coogan?

  The thing it can't do right now?

• 3:04:09Speaker 11

  Yeah, I have some of my favorite prompts that I try with every single model. But I rely on our team. We have great creative people in the team. They spend all their living hours working on these models. They are usually ones coming up with very creative ways to utilize. One thing that changed with Nano Banana is you can actually feel the model has more world knowledge than, than other models. And that opens up other doors. I don't know, have you seen? People are now adding some web search and creating like newspaper articles on the fly, things like that. That is, there are very creative uses of these models.

• 3:04:50Speaker 11

  And on the, on the video side, people really want more controllability. They want character consistency. They want scene to scene consistency. And some of the releases that happened recently, Kling, for example, is, is one of the better video models out there. They've announced some editing capabilities which are pretty remarkable.

• 3:05:13Speaker 11

  And all of that is gonna get easier to use. And once people have more consistency with the scenes they are creating with with your models, I think that's gonna make a big difference.

• 3:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I always see those videos of it's a little yachtie walkout. Uh, that is like char- character swapping. And it's always really obvious what's going on. It's rough around the edges, but it's still hilarious because it's a great meme. And I definitely would predict 2026 is the year that that that little yachtie walkout just looks 100% real.

• 3:05:45Speaker 11

  Hundred percent.

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Next, next fundraiser announcement.

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  I can't wait. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we need to do that for you. We need to get your body scanned a little bit.

• 3:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, uh, uh, you've never asked this question, but you might know the answer. You know why it's called Nano Banana Pro?

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Where do you have any idea what the origin is of the name?

• 3:06:05Speaker 11

  So they had a code name, Nano Banana. Usually when they put these models into the benchmarking websites, they usually add a code name. Like there were Blueberry was one one code name, Red Panda was another. And this was Nano Banana. And people recognize the model like that and they kept it. That's the story I know. I don't know if there's another, there's another version of the story.

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  But I I guess the other question is, uh, is obviously it is a code name, but where'd the code name come from? Uh, Google has a long history of using fruit, although so does, uh, OpenAI with strawberry. But, uh, all the Android, uh, iterations were like ice creams and desserts for a long time. Um, but the question is, is, yeah, is, is, is what's the nano doing there? Because I want the full banana. Give me the, don't give me the nano banana. Give me the, give me the giga banana. I want the giga banana, the biggest, the exa banana, the mega banana. I want the biggest banana model. Don't give me the shrunken down nano one. I want the, I want the giga banana.

• 3:07:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think it's using the smaller Gemini model. And as the, as the.

• 3:07:14John Coogan?

  As the reasoning, as the reasoning.

• 3:07:16Speaker 11

  That's why it's nano, but.

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  Yep. No, no, it makes sense. But it's funny, it's funny to have fun with. Anyway, thank you so much for coming. Coming on the show. Congratulations on the massive news and thank you for supporting us all year long.

• 3:07:27Jordi Hays?

  And you gotta, if you 8X again next year, you gotta 8X the number of fundraises too. That put you at like two fundraisers, two fundraisers a month, two fundraisers a month, 24 for 2026. We'll see.

• 3:07:40John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 3:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but uh, congratulations to the, to the whole team and uh, we're very excited for you guys.

• 3:07:45John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 3:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much. Cheers.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Bye. Well, we have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. We have Pedro from BRAX, the founder and CEO of BRAX, um, announcing a massive partnership. We're very excited to welcome him to the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 3:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  Great to see you, Pedro. How are you doing? How's your day? Merry Christmas.

• 3:08:07Speaker 12

  I'm great. How are you guys? Thanks for having us.

• 3:08:09Jordi Hays?

  We're great. We're in the, we're in the Christmas spirit here. We got, we got bells, very, very holiday themed. Holiday themed shows for the rest of the year.

• 3:08:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:08:18Jordi Hays?

  But uh, but it's great to, it's great to meet.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  And yeah, and take us, yeah, please take us through the news today. Uh, oddly, I'm actually a fifth third customer. So I, I wanna, I wanna know how this uh, this uh, this applies to me.

• 3:08:31Speaker 12

  Yeah, you get a BRAX cartoon. No, so in all seriousness, um, thanks for having me. So uh, today we're announcing a pretty big partnership between BRAX and Fifth Third Bank. Uh, it's a $5.6 billion commercial card partnerships where effectively, wow.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Massive.

• 3:08:49Speaker 12

  So good.

• 3:08:49John Coogan?

  I heard a big number.

• 3:08:50Speaker 12

  I, I want, I want one of that in my office. And uh, and we're really excited just because, you know, when you look into across all the US and we just see, you know, tens of thousands of businesses out there, there are still, 98% of businesses are still using legacy corporate cards. And you know, there's so many, uh, there's so much opportunity in just automating how these teams run their finances. And Fifth Third just has this massive distribution and trust. And of course, BRAX has the, the financial services and the, the software and the AI. That just helps these businesses automate so much of their manual work and better allocate capital. Um, and they're really excited.

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Yes, sorry to interrupt. I'm curious when you guys started working on embedded products? Because if you go back to 2021 and 2022, I'm sure there was a bunch of companies that, or at least a few, that got created to go and pitch some of these same banks and say, "Hey, you're corporate." I don't know if people remember, anybody that remembers SVB, like corporate cards back in the day.

• 3:09:44John Coogan?

  I had a few of those.

• 3:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Their UI was truly insane. It was like, "How is this Silicon Valley bank?"

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  You had like a different login, too. It was crazy.

• 3:09:53Jordi Hays?

  It was truly the most heinous product experience of all time.

• 3:09:56John Coogan?

  And it was like, "This is Silicon Valley Bank. We're supposed to be the tech."

• 3:09:59Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah.

• 3:10:00John Coogan?

  To beat a dead horse there. Kind of a dark moment.

• 3:10:03Jordi Hays?

  At some point, you said like, "Hey, like, we'll go compete here as well."

• 3:10:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:09Speaker 12

  Yeah, so for us, it's really been driven by a lot of just customer demand. So we saw, we started this with Nivon and Zip, where they really saw a lot of the value in bringing financial services and card workflows into their software.

• 3:10:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:10:22Speaker 12

  And we're really excited about it because it's just a one plus one equals five situation. Both products become better together.

• 3:10:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:28Speaker 12

  And then as we thought about the rest of the US, and you know, there's, you know, 8% of businesses are now, you know, accessible through this partnership, for example, in the US, which is a really exciting thing in the commercial space. And the really big thing is how do we make the bank's product materially better? And when we bring the technology and, you know, what we've done on the card side, and especially the financial infrastructure that we built from scratch, like we don't run on Stripe issuing or Marketo, we just build our own rails from the ground up that enables a partnership to actually take place. So it's...

• 3:10:56Jordi Hays?

  How does it, how does it actually work? Is it, is it fully white labeled or does somebody in Fifth Third get kicked out?

• 3:11:04Speaker 12

  No, no, no. It's actually, it's actually a fully, a fully Brex branded card. And the reason is because Fifth Third wants to have someone that's actually responsible for delivering this great customer experience on the card, and implementing the software and rolling that out to their customers. And what they do really well is the banking side, right? It's the lending side, it's the banking, it's the relationships and, you know, the thousands of branches and just the thousands of distribution partners that they have on their side. And the tens of thousands of customers they serve are all effectively reliant on that and already have that relationship. And now they get a Brex card, which I'm really excited.

• 3:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you mentioned you're not, you're not using Stripe for, what was it?

• 3:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Issuing.

• 3:11:45John Coogan?

  Issuing. Does Stripe or are there other fintechs that do play a role in like your supply chain? Or are you like down at like the ACH layer? Like just like what's kind of going on under the hood?

• 3:12:00Speaker 12

  Yeah. So what we've done since 2018 on Brex is we actually build our own financial infrastructure from scratch.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:12:07Speaker 12

  So we actually went straight to the metal MasterCard and built everything from the ground up. And because it vertically integrated the whole thing.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12:14Speaker 12

  This created this pretty big advantage on everything that requires like their metal capabilities on financial services. So for example, global, right? We operate in over 200 countries today with local cards, local issuance, because for us, it's just a matter of saying, hey, MasterCard, we're going to issue in Europe or Brazil or India or Mexico. And it's just flipping a switch for them because we are our own issuer. We run our own stack.

• 3:12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:38Speaker 12

  And then Fifth Third was another example where we said Fifth Third wanted to issue a Fifth Third issued card. They wanted to be their name on the card. It has to be under their license on MasterCard and all of that. And for us, it's just effectively, you know, bringing in a new bank live, which, you know, we have a few banks on the backend and including Fifth Third, of course. So for us, it was, it was sort of pigging back on this advantage that we've had over over many years by building our own rails from the ground up, which is really exciting.

• 3:13:02Jordi Hays?

  How are you, um, how are you thinking about, uh, we've had a bunch of different teams and companies on the show building like new layer one blockchains for payments. They're touting like speed, default global, all these things. We've had a bunch of stablecoin issuers and businesses. I'm sure in conversations that you have, you know, you're, you're being pitched these companies for, uh, to be an infrastructure provider. I'm sure your, your investors are like maybe asking you sometimes, should we, should, should, should there be a Brex stablecoin? You know, who knows, right? I'm sure these questions are coming up. How do you think about kind of the layer one landscape and you're, you're operating a, a global business today? Uh, and so I would, I would, you know, your opinion on some of this stuff in terms of

• 3:13:46Jordi Hays?

  the, the real value of it, I feel like would carry a lot of weight.

• 3:13:49Speaker 12

  Yeah, so the way we think about it is maybe a little bit different, which is we think that first like stablecoins and blockchain in general have a tremendous application and we're really excited about a lot of the work there. We know we announced support for stablecoins this year when it comes to our banking product and you can pay the card to stablecoins. We've done a lot of that. But when we come, when it comes to global, right, and just supporting customers in a wide variety of countries. Really, the challenge there is the on-ramp and off-ramp, right, and specifically, you know, the fiat last layer for, you know, an employee to reimburse you in, you know, Indian rupees or Brazilian reais and then for you to settle the card in that currency and do all that locally.

• 3:14:32Speaker 12

  And unfortunately, stables don't help you that much on that last layer. And the whole, actually a misconception about the way our global product works is a lot of the value comes from remainings in local currency. Because what they're trying to do is minimize FX, right, even on stables, like FX has a cost just intrinsic to it. Sure. And a lot of what we're trying to do is keep you entirely in reais, so your revenue in reais in Brazil are settling your expenses in reais or in euros or in GBP or whatever currency you're in. So a lot of the infrastructure build is to enable this multi-currency and multi-entity operations versus having to do the FX and a lot of the benefits that stables typically bring to the table. So our use case is a little bit different.

• 3:15:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure that's disappointing to people building global payments, Alwans, and they're like, wait, you're supposed to need this.

• 3:15:20Speaker 12

  I mean, we do use it internally for some stuff, but, but, you know, I would say the value prop for our customers is we stay in local currency as much as possible because it just minimizes so much savings on FX, yeah.

• 3:15:29John Coogan?

  What are the other like keys to success? Obviously, you, you know, you have experience internationally, but you're like a YC company. I think, I think of Brex very much as like an American company. But then in terms of winning internationally, what does it take? What have the lessons been? What are the, what are the interesting insights or what were some surprises that, that cropped up on the journey?

• 3:15:57Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I would say the biggest one is that when you go into like true global, like true enterprise, the amount of requirements and specifically on both the card and expense management side is unbelievable. So you have these rules, for example, local per diem's. So when you're in Europe, there's these rules that if you have a German employee traveling to London is one set of rules. If you have a London employee traveling to Germany, completely different set of rules.

• 3:16:23John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:16:23Speaker 12

  And then if they rent a car, there's different mileage requirements and then all this information that you have to be aware of. And, you know, of course, we use a lot of the card data to make that easier and we can solve it automatically. But probably the biggest challenge overall is just building the core financial infrastructure. Because this is something that, you know, we're literally the only issuer in the US that actually had done this from scratch. And just the amount of time and energy that we dedicated into building these, you know, core financial services infrastructure is pretty tremendous, but you know, it gave us a pretty big advantage when it comes to these enterprise customers. And you know, today we have, maybe three or four years ago, I think we had five or maybe 10 public companies in Brax. And now we have 250 and growing. So that's an exciting thing.

• 3:17:04John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, congrats to the whole team on the deal. Congrats to Art.

• 3:17:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:17:10Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:17:11Speaker 12

  Love Art.

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  Chief Business Officer, correct?

• 3:17:14Jordi Hays?

  CBO.

• 3:17:14John Coogan?

  CBO.

• 3:17:15Jordi Hays?

  He was coming in to defend Keith Raboy last week was talking some smack about the BD people of the world.

• 3:17:23John Coogan?

  Does OpenAI have a Chief Business Officer? Because they just got a CRO. They have a CFO and they have two CEOs. I think they're missing a CDO.

• 3:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Title.

• 3:17:32John Coogan?

  You gotta lock down Art. He's gonna get poached.

• 3:17:34Speaker 12

  Art is taken. Art is taken. Don't listen to them.

• 3:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, yeah, congrats to the whole team and great to have you on the show.

• 3:17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:44Speaker 12

  Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 3:17:45John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon. Have a good one. Merry Christmas. Goodbye.

• 3:17:47Speaker 12

  Thank you. Merry Christmas.

• 3:17:51John Coogan?

  The ho, ho, ho really gets me every time. I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I love that, I love the idea of country-specific per diem's. Because if I had a German employee, I would want them to know that they are not an American employee and they are second classes in this organization. And they will be not, they will not be dining out on the company dime in a nice five-star restaurant. They will be eating sauerkraut in the gutter for $5.

• 3:18:21Jordi Hays?

  That's brutal. The most American, the most American American, John Coogan, everyone.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of travel to international countries, if you go to Saudi Arabia, you can now booze it up, I guess. You can drink alcohol. Saudi Arabia is loosening alcohol rules, letting non-Muslim foreign residents earning over $13,000, you can buy alcohol. So you have to check, you have to do a whole checklist.

• 3:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Daniel's line is great. He says, "This is such a galaxy-brained idea. It could only come from a mind totally disconnected from normal material reality."

• 3:18:55John Coogan?

  It's hilarious.

• 3:18:56Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is interesting. It's like, hey, if you want to do, you know, drugs, if you want to consume alcohol, that's fine, but you have to be putting up numbers.

• 3:19:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, exactly.

• 3:19:08Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be putting up numbers, right?

• 3:19:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, you know, if you're underage.

• 3:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Potentially cannabis should be like $10 million a year on your W2.

• 3:19:15John Coogan?

  I was about to say, but you know what happens then? So you have, everyone in America, you know, you turn 17, 18, 19, you're not 21 yet, you get a fake ID to try and buy some booze, you're gonna need a fake W2 as well.

• 3:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no.

• 3:19:29John Coogan?

  Fake your income statement. And you're gonna need to do all these crazy things where, where you have all these like circular deals.

• 3:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Bringing your fake W2 to the corner liquor store, just being, and then just like looking through every line.

• 3:19:41John Coogan?

  In Saudi Arabia, so you're in Saudi Arabia, and let's say you're making $1,000 a year USD, or, you know, you're making 10,000 Rais. You need to go and set up a circular contract where you're a 17-year-old, somebody else is 17, I pay you 10,000, you pay me 10,000, and then we get our...

• 3:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Do that a couple of times.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Exactly. We do that a couple of times. Then we're earning enough to go buy alcohol, we can go get drunk together.

• 3:20:05Jordi Hays?

  That is crazy.

• 3:20:06John Coogan?

  That is truly galaxy-brained. We're out galaxy-braining them. We're gonna galaxy-brain all the way to the top. We do have to hop on with Riyadh soon. Let's close out with anything else that's on the timeline. Jordy, why don't you take a pass? Let me know if there's anything that we mix, that we...

• 3:20:25Jordi Hays?

  Fluid Stack, raising apparently $700 million out of $7 billion valuation.

• 3:20:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Built on Google-backed leases for new AI data centers, according to Rohan Paul.

• 3:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Fluid Stack, a real player on the semi-analysis. What's it called?

• 3:20:46John Coogan?

  ClusterMax.

• 3:20:46Jordi Hays?

  ClusterMax. And so not surprising here. Interesting that potentially you've got Leopold looking to lead the financing. So dipping his toes into privates.

• 3:21:00John Coogan?

  Well, the, I mean, they have Cluster Max over at Semi Analysis. They have Inference Max. Are they going to do Looks Max?

• 3:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Potentially.

• 3:21:08John Coogan?

  They could.

• 3:21:09Jordi Hays?

  It looks like according, you know, looking at some of our officials, it looks like we might be developing a strategic Looks Max.

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  Looks Maxing reserve. I mean, there are lots of people that would comment on Looks Maxing and try and rank like the hottest men in tech. I personally would only, I would only regard Semi Analysis' opinion as credible on that, on that issue specifically. It must come from them.

• 3:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Post here from Pukko. He says, Hock Tan acquired VMware, had coffee chats with the employees where he made fun of them.

• 3:21:38John Coogan?

  Oh, this is crazy.

• 3:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Fired half the business. So a little excerpt here. Earlier last year, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan decided to host what he likes to call a coffee chat with employees of VMware, the software giant that Broadcom CEO had recently purchased for $84 billion. The company-wide meeting was Tan's effort to introduce himself and answer questions from those employees about life at the semiconductor firm.

• 3:21:58John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 3:21:59Jordi Hays?

  At the time, VMware's Palo Alto campus sprawled over 18 buildings and 100 acres of delicately pruned gardens, an outdoor amphitheater, and a turtle pond. Employees enjoyed nice HR perks, including childcare, marital counseling, and an annual $1,000 wellbeing allowance for anything from dumbbells to Xboxes.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  A thousand dollars on Xboxes? That's like one Xbox every three months. That's so many Xboxes.

• 3:22:24Jordi Hays?

  You can actually only spend this on Xboxes.

• 3:22:26John Coogan?

  Why do you do that?

• 3:22:27Jordi Hays?

  When Tan opened the discussion up, the questions of VMware employee asked if Broadcom provided such benefits. Tan seemed surprised. Why would I do any of that?

• 3:22:36John Coogan?

  Why would I do any of this?

• 3:22:36Jordi Hays?

  "I'm not your dad," he replied, according to three people in attendance.

• 3:22:40John Coogan?

  We need a trading card. "I'm not your dad."

• 3:22:43Jordi Hays?

  Over the next few months, Tan fired about half of VMware's 38,000 employees. That is wild. He also stripped down the campus, selling, selling all but five of the buildings. At the remaining offices, Tan had the espresso machines removed.

• 3:22:57John Coogan?

  Okay, well, that- That is a question because they need to stay caffeinated.

• 3:23:00Jordi Hays?

  I gotta hold the line here.

• 3:23:01John Coogan?

  What are they doing? I mean, I'm okay with, I'm okay removing espresso machines.

• 3:23:04Jordi Hays?

  They're doing white monsters instead?

• 3:23:05John Coogan?

  If they're doing white monsters, then I approve of it. But if you're gonna have a decaffeinated workforce, that just makes no sense. That's just not elite performance.

• 3:23:15Jordi Hays?

  He says, uh, the article says somewhat against the odds, the turtles were allowed to stay. So you think, do you think he, he's putting espresso in the turtle pond?

• 3:23:23John Coogan?

  No, I imagine, I imagine he had a, he had a, like a massive, uh, broadsword and was above the turtle, ready to let it all go.

• 3:23:32Jordi Hays?

  They're like, Hawk, no.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  Oh, I can't do it. And he drops the, he drops the blade and it falls to the ground, clanks him and he says, you live to fight another day, turtle. You're too important here.

• 3:23:44Jordi Hays?

  He's got him making, uh, TPU.

• 3:23:45John Coogan?

  Completely different vibe from when Pat Gelsinger was getting a VMware tattoo on his arm or temporary tattoo at least, showing his love for the company that he just bought. While he was at Intel, uh, Hawk's hand clearly cut from a different cloth, but clearly also putting up big numbers. Broadcom's been on an absolute run.

• 3:24:04Jordi Hays?

  Alexis Ohanian says, been warning y'all, AI everywhere, dead internet, real is increasingly scarce online and thus increasingly valuable. Uh, there's Wired article called AI slop is ruining Reddit for everyone. This is my, this has always been, there's such an incentive for companies and people to just like create.

• 3:24:21John Coogan?

  Sciops.

• 3:24:22Jordi Hays?

  On Reddit, because AI is training on Reddit. And, uh, the natural end state is, you know, it's 99.9% bots and just a handful of humans. So, stick to the group chats, I guess.

• 3:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. In other news, Netflix has launched Best Guess Live, a new Netflix mobile game show, where guessing the right answer based on five clues could win, win you thousands. Dylan Aberscot on our team.

• 3:24:49Jordi Hays?

  In this economy? Come on.

• 3:24:52John Coogan?

  Not, not escaping.

• 3:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they're, oh, they're willing to spend 80 billion dollars to get Warner Brothers, 40 billion per Warner Brothers.

• 3:24:59John Coogan?

  They should give you, they should give you some IP. You should be able to win Porky Pig. I get Foghorn Leghorn.

• 3:25:04Jordi Hays?

  Or some of the masculine films.

• 3:25:06John Coogan?

  I want the Steven Seagal rights. I want the rights to Hard to Kill. For sure. Dylan Elvis Scott on our team says, can I copy your homework? Yeah, just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious. You copied, of course. He worked at, you know, a competitor to this or the precursor to this.

• 3:25:24Jordi Hays?

  He created game shows.

• 3:25:25John Coogan?

  He created game shows with HQ Trivia, which you should know.

• 3:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Rune says, a lot of people think CEOs are on coke or stimulants because of how hyper they look in interviews, but I think the unfortunate truth is that natural amount of energy is extremely unequally distributed.

• 3:25:39John Coogan?

  I was going back, yeah, I was going back and forth on this one. Obviously, it's a subtweet of Carp, but I, I think he's, I think he's just like that. I think he's just, I think he's just high energy. And I think that, so the Carp clip looks crazy as a single clip, but I actually watched the full interview and there is a flip on it, which is maybe more negative, which is like, that was a question he was squirming on. Like, that was an uncomfortable question. And I notice it on this show all the time. If we ask someone a question and they're like, not that happy that we asked that question, you'll see on their body language, look across their arms.

• 3:26:20John Coogan?

  And, and crossed arms is a, is a, is like a well-established body language for like, I'm closing myself off. Versus like, if I'm hanging out here with you, I'm just having a good time.

• 3:26:29Jordi Hays?

  If I'm sitting up and...

• 3:26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And so, and so there's a world where, where, where you're literally, they call it being in the hot seat.

• 3:26:36Jordi Hays?

  They just needed a better camera tracking, so.

• 3:26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. They call it being in the hot seat. And when you're in the hot seat, you're kind of bouncing around and yes, it can look like you're on a lot of stimulants. Maybe you're on some caffeine, maybe you're a little wired, but also maybe you're dealing with a serious interviewer, sorkin, across from you on a stage. There's nothing to help you at Dealbook. Like, the, the crazy thing is you keep seeing people's legs all funny and it's like, because you're just in a chair, there's no desk there, so there's nothing covering you up. So it's like, you're very vulnerable. There's this big wall.

• 3:27:11Jordi Hays?

  Has somebody done like a...

• 3:27:12John Coogan?

  Everyone's looking at you and... Also, it's not just a private conversation where it's like you and Sorkin are just hanging out here having a normal conversation like there's a couple of people, all of our friends are here, right? Imagine it's like all of your rivals are in the, all of your rivals.

• 3:27:24Jordi Hays?

  And all your haters are watching.

• 3:27:25John Coogan?

  All your haters are watching online and all the rivals are in the building, in the seats right there, looking at you, answer tough questions. I don't know, it, it just feels like this is not that crazy of a reaction for a high energy guy who's kind of quirky, who's in that position. And is asking, is, is answering some tough questions. I don't know.

• 3:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, Tyler, figure out how to use AI to run an analysis on every guest we've ever had to see who, and just rank their body language from most trustworthy to least trustworthy.

• 3:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did like Gabriel here. He says, uh, he's quote tweeting someone who's like, there is zero chance that these hyper animated CEOs are just naturally that way. Kind of the counter to what I was just laying out as an argument. And Gabe says, uh, cocaine expert here, these CEOs do a lot of cocaine. Feels like a very 2025 moment somehow. And I agree with that. I agree with that. Uh, it is a very weird, weird thing. Well, in less weird headlines, uh, we have some fantastic news from Lulu, who has raised a $40 million.

• 3:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Give me the mallet. Give me the mallet. All right. Now you go for it. Too late, too late.

• 3:28:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations to Lulu.

• 3:28:34Jordi Hays?

  This photo goes hard.

• 3:28:36John Coogan?

  It's a good, it's a good photo. It's proper paparazzi. She got caught by the paps. The paps got her. Uh, this is a throwback photo from when she was, uh, working on the Microsoft Blizzard deal. I mean, the fact that she's a board member at Activision is just crazy at the time. Eight, eight, 80 billion dollar company. You know, people talk about Lulu like she's some like, uh, you know, small time PR advisor for startups, but it's like, she is on the board of a $80 billion company.

• 3:29:06Jordi Hays?

  She also intentionally flies under the radar.

• 3:29:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we're blown up here now. Sorry. Sorry about it. Anyway, at least it's at the end of the show.

• 3:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Lisan Al-Gaib says, "The normies are waking up on TikTok. They're saying ChatGPT is washed." John says perplexity is goaded. Hard to say. Yeah, they're ranking them.

• 3:29:29John Coogan?

  They're all over the place. Claude greater than Gemini.

• 3:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Never be washed. You don't want to be cooked either.

• 3:29:35John Coogan?

  Yes, we've learned this.

• 3:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Don't be washed, cooked, or chopped.

• 3:29:38John Coogan?

  From our...

• 3:29:39Jordi Hays?

  If you're a language model that wants Gen Z adoption.

• 3:29:42John Coogan?

  From our Gen Z employee who is currently both chopped and cooked. He's not here. We hope he gets, not you, the one who's sick, who we hope gets better soon. But we didn't learn any lingo from you, Tyler.

• 3:29:55Jordi Hays?

  Buco says, "What people get wrong, OpenAI's code red is bullish, not bearish. It's an admission. They were overeating, getting beat, and needed to focus. That's what great teams do. Now, here's the challenge. Code reds are really hard. It's easy to say yes, hard to say not right now. All eyes on how they execute code red. I'm skeptical. Overeating seems to be embedded in the culture. Sam obviously likes to dabble in a lot of things."

• 3:30:18John Coogan?

  Every code red is followed by a Baja Blast.

• 3:30:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right. I think the next model should be...

• 3:30:26John Coogan?

  Baja Blast. Go back to the crazy names that make no sense. Stop it with the 5.2 tomorrow. Wait, wasn't 5.2 just supposed to come out today?

• 3:30:34Speaker 02

  That was, if you looked at Polymarket, that's what it looked like. It's now moved to, I think, by December 13th.

• 3:30:39John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:30:40Speaker 02

  90%.

• 3:30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

• 3:30:41Speaker 02

  But also, this is a separate topic, but I need to put you in the truth zone. There actually are spots on the moon that are perpetually in sunlight.

• 3:30:48John Coogan?

  Oh, really? You figured it out?

• 3:30:49Speaker 02

  On the rims of certain craters. The inside of them are always in darkness. The rims are sometimes...

• 3:30:54John Coogan?

  The rim on the crater is always in the sun?

• 3:30:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's where we need the data center.

• 3:30:59John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, how much crater rim is there? Is there enough crater rim to actually build a lot of data centers?

• 3:31:07Speaker 02

  If there's not, you could probably nuke the moon.

• 3:31:10John Coogan?

  Make more craters?

• 3:31:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:31:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. I still have trouble visualizing this. Doing like the celestial body physics math in your head is very, very difficult.

• 3:31:20Jordi Hays?

  In other news, this person on X, Kenu Nazari, says they got their hands on some North Korean cigarettes.

• 3:31:29John Coogan?

  They did?

• 3:31:29Jordi Hays?

  They got them in a DPRK state-owned restaurant from a waitress who was from Pyongyang. Basically impossible to find any background info on them online. They taste and look 100%. What is that? Juic?

• 3:31:44John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 3:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I like the packaging. The packaging goes pretty hard. It feels, uh,

• 3:31:50John Coogan?

  Does, but I can't support it because I don't support North Korea.

• 3:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and this is a good place to end the show. Sag Harbor Capital says, if this niche Scandinavian brand doesn't ship my overcoat in the next 24 hours, I'm gonna blow up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

• 3:32:08John Coogan?

  That's really funny.

• 3:32:10Jordi Hays?

  He tags the brand too.

• 3:32:12John Coogan?

  He does where? Oh, oh wait, Bergenberg.

• 3:32:14Jordi Hays?

  I need an overcoat. I, I was trying to just go around New York last week.

• 3:32:18John Coogan?

  Ooh, God.

• 3:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Just my suit and I, and I was kinda cocky going into it. I was like, oh, John, nice, nice coat. You're, you're, we're gonna be outside for

• 3:32:27John Coogan?

  Two seconds.

• 3:32:28Jordi Hays?

  20 seconds.

• 3:32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, you were like, in succession, Kendall Roy doesn't need a coat because he's so rich.

• 3:32:33Jordi Hays?

  I didn't say that. I didn't say that.

• 3:32:35John Coogan?

  Having Dylan said that.

• 3:32:35Jordi Hays?

  Dylan said that.

• 3:32:36John Coogan?

  But I was like, yeah, like, we're not, we're not that rich yet. Whatever's going on in succession.

• 3:32:42Jordi Hays?

  We went for a half mile walk and I was devastated.

• 3:32:45John Coogan?

  We did, but it's, it's nice when you're in a coat. It's fun to walk around New York City. Also, it wasn't that cold, but you, you were getting destroyed.

• 3:32:53Jordi Hays?

  We gotta pull up last post of the day. Uh, Scook says, the concept of getting sent to rehab by the Taliban because you and your cousins wanted to LARP us at Peaky Blinders in Afghanistan. And, uh,

• 3:33:04John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 3:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Here that says reportedly four people in the Harat province were detained and sent to rehab by the Taliban's virtue ministry for imitating characters from British crime series Peaky Blinders. And parading around the city resembling the vintage gangsters, an act seen as violating local values.

• 3:33:22John Coogan?

  This, it's, I have no idea how to process if this is real at all.

• 3:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Hope says rare Taliban L.

• 3:33:29John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 3:33:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they look, they look fantastic.

• 3:33:33John Coogan?

  They do look fantastic.

• 3:33:34Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this would encourage. Potentially, they could open up a tourism market for people, kind of like the Disneyland for Peaky Blinders enthusiasts.

• 3:33:45John Coogan?

  Such a weird phenomenon to happen here. Also, like, what does being sent to rehab look like in Afghanistan? They're just like...

• 3:33:52Jordi Hays?

  No more, no more Peaky...

• 3:33:54John Coogan?

  Is it like Alcoholics Anonymous? You're like, "First step, I am powerless to Peaky Blinders. I'm a Peaky Blinders impersonator. You have to come, you know, Alcoholics Anonymous, you have to say, 'I'm an alcoholic. You know, I'm a Peaky Blinders impersonator, and I am powerless.'" And I, you need to say the, what is it, the Lord's Prayer? Something like that. Anyway.

• 3:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you for being with us today, folks. We, we love you dearly, and we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:34:24John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow.

• 3:34:25Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic evening.

• 3:34:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:34:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.