Deel–Rippling Update, Microsoft Bets on Agents | Shawn “swyx” Wang, Augustus Doricko, Brad Porter, Kian Sadeghi, Kathleen McMahon, Chungin “Roy” Lee

(03:02) - Deel-Rippling Drama (09:58) - Microsoft Bets on Agents to Fuel AI Growth (30:43) - Snowflake Buying Crunchy Data for $250M (45:57) - Augustus Doricko. Augustus is the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, a California-based startup using drones and advanced modeling to modernize cloud seeding and address water scarcity in the American West. A former UC Berkeley physics student and Thiel Fellow, he previously co-founded Terra Seco, a company that automates groundwater compliance. Doricko integrates his Christian faith with a mission to "terraform" arid regions, aiming to revitalize agriculture and infrastructure through scalable weather modification. (01:00:46) - Brad Porter. Brad is the founder and CEO of Collaborative Robotics (Cobot), a startup building AI-powered collaborative robots designed to work safely and intuitively alongside humans in sectors like logistics, healthcare, and manufacturing. Before founding Cobot in 2022, Porter served as VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Robotics, where he led the deployment of over 500,000 robots across global fulfillment centers. Cobot's first robot, Proxie, launched in late 2024 and is already in use by companies like Maersk, Mayo Clinic, and Moderna. (01:18:04) - Kian Sadeghi. Kian is the founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics, a consumer health platform offering whole-genome sequencing and polygenic risk scores for over 800 conditions, aiming to make personalized medicine accessible to all. Motivated by a cousin's sudden death from a suspected genetic disorder, he left the University of Pennsylvania in 2020 to start Nucleus from his bedroom, later securing $32 million in funding from investors like Founders Fund and Seven Seven Six. In 2025, Nucleus launched a service analyzing embryos for disease and longevity risk, sparking ethical debates about the future of reproductive genetics. (01:32:03) - Kathleen McMahon. Kathleen is the Head of Life Sciences at Palantir Technologies, where she leads product strategy, customer operations, and business development for the pharmaceutical and biotech sectors. Under her leadership, Palantir's Foundry platform has been instrumental in supporting organizations such as the National Institutes of Health and the UK's National Health Service in areas including clinical research, vaccine distribution, and biomanufacturing. McMahon has also co-founded a stealth startup focused on AI and platform technologies. (01:48:06) - Chungin “Roy” Lee. Roy is the co-founder and CEO of Cluely, a San Francisco-based startup that offers an AI tool designed to assist users during tasks like job interviews, exams, and sales calls. Originally developed as "Interview Coder" while Lee was a student at Columbia University, the tool led to his suspension and eventual departure from the university. Despite the controversy, Cluely has raised $5.3 million in seed funding and reports over $3 million in annual recurring revenue. (02:09:59) - Shawn “swyx” Wang. Shawn is the founder of Smol.ai and editor of Latent Space, a newsletter and podcast exploring the rise of the AI engineer. After transitioning from a finance career, he led developer experience at AWS, Netlify, Temporal, and Airbyte, and authored The Coding Career Handbook to guide developers in career growth. Wang is known for his “Learn in Public” philosophy and for organizing the AI Engineer Summit, fostering a global community of applied AI practitioners. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV

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 is Wednesday, June 4, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a great show for you today, folks. A story that we've been covering for months now is continuing to develop and is now in the pink pages of the Financial Times. This is the Rippling deal drama. It continues. And in their briefing section, it says Silicon Valley spy drama. A feud between two startups over alleged corporate espionage. Rare case where the drama does not involve the media, actually.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  A feud between two startups over alleged corporate espionage has taken a new twist after a $12 billion HR software group deal claimed that rival Rippling had directed one of its staff to pilfer its assets. So they're going back and forth and today Deal's firing back. Now, I heard a little bit about this story. We kind of, the rumor mill was churning over this idea that, you know, Deal had something up their sleeve and they were going to fire back. Of course, that's the way these things go as the, as these, you know, battles evolve. The interesting thing, there's a couple of interesting things in here is that

• 1:26John Coogan?

  the Rippling allegations resulted in a lawsuit and ultimately, I think criminal charges. So Rippling alleged earlier this year that a staff member at Deal had been spying on behalf of Deal. This is, of course, that send that watch to London moment.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Send that watch to London.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  The employee watch themselves.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually disappointed, John. That is such an incredible line in Silicon Valley history.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  It really is.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm sad that people don't use it more.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  It really failed to break through. Yeah. It's, you know, we were discussing this earlier about this is like the most dramatic story of the year in Silicon Valley. And yet I've talked to multiple people in Silicon Valley who have just completely missed it. Because it's just, it still is just HR, I S, enterprise SaaS drama.

• 2:15Jordi Hays?

  Most people simply do not care.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  They just don't.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  You'd have to really pay them to care. You'd have to get some sort of like payout system going, like Axe to be like, every time you pay attention to this, you know, you're going to get a micropayment.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they're just, it just doesn't have kind of the, the weight of like Elon, Doge, Tesla, humanoid robots, AI, AGI, AI Doom, right? It's just, it's just payroll after all. Forget it, Jake, it's just payroll. Uh, well, anyway, uh, in new legal filings seen by the Financial Times, Deal has countered that Rippling has been actively engaged in a carefully, this is a quote from that, uh, in a carefully coordinated espionage campaign through which it infiltrated Deal's customer platform by fraudulent means and pilfered the company's most valuable proprietary assets. What's interesting is that they, they, they're stopping short of, of naming like a spy, right?

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Um, and so the, the, the, uh, the actual, uh, approach here, Deal has sought to dismiss Rippling's initial claims of direct corporate espionage and has filed a lawsuit in Delaware alleging that its rival is trying to impugn, uh, Deal's reputation and its latest filings were lodged yesterday as an amendment to that case. It alleges that Brett Alexander Johnson, someone I have not met, Rippling's competitive intelligence manager, posed as a customer and accessed details of Deal's products and businesses, business practices over the course of six months. Now, what's, what's, what's interesting is that like, um, access details of Deal's products and businesses? So this sounds like they were asking customers for what Deal was doing maybe?

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Instead of say, uh, instead of say going inside of Deal's Slack? Like there's no allegations that they were inside of Deal's corporate systems, uh, which is a very distinct line to cross. And so obviously the story is evolving and we've invited Alex, the founder of Deal on the show, uh, would love to get his side of it. Would love to get Parker on as well, but of course. Our worst enemies, the legal compliance teams that enterprise startups are getting in our way.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  They can figure out some type of settlement agreement that involves a sort of MMA.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  I was gonna say cage match.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Pay-per-view on TVP.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  I was gonna say cage match, that's.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  It's like at a certain point, like they'll reach some sort of, you know, end to the story. But I'm sure there will still be bad blood.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Totally. It has to be ended in the octagon.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in the octagon.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  They, yeah, I mean, we've been teased so many times with, oh, is Trey gonna box Jason Calacanis? Or is Zuck gonna fight Elon? Like, this could be maybe third time's the charm here. You know, maybe this is the one that gets it done.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna happen.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Fantastic. In Dubai.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll bring it out to the Gulf, of course.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  To the Gulf, of course. For some reason, it'll happen in the Gulf.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  I think just the purses haven't gotten quite big enough, right? Like, you see some of these boxing pay-per-views easily into the nine figures. If we can, you know, position this as non-dilutive funding for these startups, maybe there's something to be done. Maybe that would get them over the line of saying, yep, I'll, I'll put on the gloves, I'll get in the cage.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it, I mean, it's been a fascinating story. Obviously, these things move like extremely slowly as they go through the courts. So it feels like, you know, with FTX or Theranos, like we, we got the bombshell accusations. Then it took like a year or two to get any sort of, to move past like alleged wrongdoing to actually understanding the scope of what happened. But I'm sure that the courts are working through it and we will be following it the entire time. The lawsuit, this is from TechCrunch, which is turning 20 years old next, next, next week. The lawsuit is also full of insults hurled at Rippling's CEO, Parker Conrad, and mentions his troubles at his previous company, Zenefits. Irrelevant, in my opinion.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  At times, there's nothing wrong with having a couple, throwing a couple back in the office.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Wait, he had some unfortunate things happen at Zenefits?

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Really? I'm hearing this for the first time. You got the sound effect now.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  I missed it on the first attempt.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  At times, the complaint ventures into psychoanalysis territory. To understand Conrad is to understand Rippling, the suit claims.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Man, everyone's chirping, but you know, I think, I think this show, we want to be independent. So we're taking the side of Co2 because Co2 is invested in both.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, let's give it up for

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for diversification in enterprise.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Crossover allocators.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Yes, just, just, heads I win. Heads I win tells you, tells you lose.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  That is the real, the real game.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've talked about this before. Ultimately, there's hundreds of billions of dollars of payroll market cap. And they can both be big businesses. And hopefully they get over, you know.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  And maybe this is all a sideshow for, for, for what's really going on at ADP. Oh, quantum payroll.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  This all comes down to both companies racing to develop quantum payroll.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Quantum payroll.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Quantum payroll.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  And that's kind of the real story. And then this is just the drama floating up to the surface.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, they're, they're, they're, they're fighting back. Interesting timing too, because wasn't it just yesterday that Deal said it had been profitable for years and is generating over one billion in annual revenue? And so I wonder if there's a sequence of events here where it's like, okay, take a breather, be really silent for a while, then come out with some, some promising news about the financial health of the company, then fire back in the media and in the courts with a, with a counter suit. But, you know, unclear and it doesn't seem like it's quite as aggressive as what Zenefits found or Rippling found. It's certainly not as, it doesn't take you on as much of a journey.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  Not a smoking gun necessarily.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the TechCrunch article here actually says, "When Y Combinator grad Co-Tool launched an agentic security platform last month, among other things, sets up honeypots, it, its ad was a spoof on how Rippling's corporate spy said he was caught." And so

• 8:33John Coogan?

  clearly it's become a, a small meme within, within Silicon Valley. Anyway, if you want to save time and money and not have any headaches in your back office.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  Have you noticed, by the way, that when I point at you, it pops up on both cameras? So I can actually get two hands at a one point?

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Oh, you can. That's good.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Go to ramp.com, easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Ramp, ramp. Anyway.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Using Ramp is a joy.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yes, it is.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  People have said that, that, you know, corporate cards and spend management platforms are boring. But anybody that says that clearly has not used Ramp.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  We were, we were just pitching Ramp to, we, we did a photo shoot yesterday and, uh, we were pitching Ramp to our, to the photographer, telling him, hey.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  We never miss a moment.

• 9:30John Coogan?

  We never miss a moment.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  Never miss a moment. Yeah.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Hey, those receipts, it should be tagged automatically.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  He was by the end, I mean, he was convinced by the end.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  He was ready to, he was ready to go.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  He's ready to switch. Yeah.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  And you should be too. Thank you to Ramp.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  We have a story here. Microsoft bets on agents to fuel next chapter of AI growth.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we heard that, that quote from Satya Nadella that, uh, the amount of inference that's happening on Azure has five axed and they're generating, I think hundreds of billions of tokens at this point.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Trillions.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Trillions of tokens.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  It's absolutely massive. So the question is, Microsoft's in a perfect place to deploy agents. They have the distribution, but how, who, who's actually behind this team?

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  And we said yesterday, they already have 70% of the Fortune 500 using Copilot.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Which.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Is tough to say what that means, right?

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  Evaluate what that usage actually looks like, but.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. How would we even do that? I mean, because it, it's, it's, they were obviously very successful with Teams, right? They got Teams into everyone and they really did switch over and, and spike the growth of that company, uh, in that, in that product. At the same time, you know, Google's been quoting, saying that they've, they're using generative AI search results and it's, it's kind of, it kind of counts, but it kind of half counts and you have to like, discount it a little bit because it's not, it's not a consumer choice to move over to that product. It just kind of happens naturally. And so it's interesting to dig into Microsoft's strategy because they seem to be. The way I heard it described was that Satya Nadella has obviously done a fantastic

• 11:05John Coogan?

  job as CEO of Microsoft and he's carved out a ton of territory in artificial intelligence. The question is, how much can he hold on to? Right? And, and, and this isn't to say that like seeding ground is, is a loss necessarily. Like it could be the strategic move, but there's this question of like, even just to the point of, I want to be a leaser. How much, how much capex do I actually want to be spending? Do I want to own the land? Like you could, you could vertically integrate all the way down in the AI factory, but they're partnering with people, they're leasing, they also own data centers. And, and there's a question of, do they, you know, Microsoft has, has an AI research team that at one point was training models.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Now they seem to be much more model agnostic and you saw that with Microsoft Build where Satya highlighted the importance of being able to choose your own model, which is something you can, you can do on GCP and AWS as well. But Microsoft has really leaned into that, even with intelligent model routing within different, different OpenAI and Llama instances. And there's lots of different ways that they've plugged in. So let's dig into how they're betting on agents. This is from the information. In March, at a Microsoft all hands meeting, one of the company's newest executives, Jay Parikh, laid out a rough vision of Microsoft's path forward in artificial intelligence. AI models made by OpenAI and others were quickly becoming commoditized by more efficient models from DeepSeek and Microsoft's own research arm that are, that, that performed

• 12:30John Coogan?

  nearly as well for a fraction of the cost, Parikh said. Sitting alongside Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott, that meant it would soon become easier for companies to build their own AI applications and that Microsoft could cash in on that growing market by redoubling its efforts to sell them tools for doing so, said Parikh. In recent months, Nadella has made similar comments in staff meetings, telling employees that Microsoft needs to focus on platform, platform, platform. A refrain hearkening back to a speech by Nadella's predecessor, former Steve Ballmer, from the late 1990s in which he uttered the memorable chant, "Developers, developers, developers." And if you haven't had a chance to go listen to Steve Ballmer's interview

• 13:12John Coogan?

  on Acquired, it is fantastic. They've been posting a bunch of clips. I've listened to most of it. It is, it is, he's really opens up and it's, it's, it's just an incredible piece of history.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  It's really fun. There's a clip going up right now where Ballmer talks about when he took over as CEO from Bill Gates and essentially he, him and Gates didn't talk for a full year.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Even though Gates said, "Hey, I want you not just to be a figurehead. I want you to actually be the CEO. That means I will report to you. You're the boss." They didn't really, he, the way he described it was like, they just didn't really know how to, how to deal with each other anymore. How to like, how to work together. It's very, it's very interesting. Like somewhat emotional even.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, Nadella is clearly, you know, paying, paying homage to Steve Ballmer, but also focusing on this idea of platform, platform, platform, which is similar to developers. Like he wants developers on top of the platform, but you need, you need to put a little twist on it.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually excited. Next week at Demo Day with YC.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  I want to get a sense of how many companies are building on the broader Microsoft platform, Azure, et cetera.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  We talked to someone at last Demo Day who was there handing out tons of credits.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Britain.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was kind of a.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure he'll be back there. He runs their startup team.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I mean, I can, I can imagine if you're, i- if the platform is offering a lot of flexibility around these tools, like building on top of that platform lets you switch in and out of different models very quickly, means you don't have to shift as soon as like a new model is going viral. You're just like, okay, I just swap it into my, my Azure stack. I don't even need to set a billing on a new, on a new platform. The comments from Nadella and Pareek reflect a subtle but important shift in AI strategy at Microsoft. No big tech company has benefited more from the frenzy around AI than Microsoft, whose 3.44 trillion market capitalization makes it the world's first or second most valuable company, depending on the week. Nvidia took the crown on Tuesday. Wow. Let's hear it for Nvidia. So, so far, the bulk of the company's AI revenue has come through

• 15:17John Coogan?

  its relationship with OpenAI and there's this really interesting, give you some of

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  this chart. Genshin is just unbelievable.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  It's crazy. He's, he's doing so well.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Unbelievable.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  So there's a good chart here from the AI Bonanza. Most of Microsoft's estimated AI revenue so far has come from its relationship with OpenAI, which includes revenue sharing and leasing Azure servers. So they're making about an estimated $10 billion this year from OpenAI, and then a $3 billion from other AI sales to bring their total AI revenue to 13 billion, which seems significant given how nascent this industry is.

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  So what are the actual, what are the, is that revenue that OpenAI is passing back to them somehow?

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they get, so they get a, they get a revenue share from, from OpenAI.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  From selling OpenAI products?

• 16:07John Coogan?

  From, from vending GPT-4 as an API. OpenAI also is paying Microsoft to lease Azure servers for training and inference. And then I believe that they're entitled to a cut of revenue or profits up to that $100 million cap, right?

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Which I don't think, I wouldn't assume has kicked in at all yet, just given that it's not profitable.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, me either. I thought, I thought it was like net, net earnings. Yeah, yeah. But clearly.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Still, that's crazy.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  10 billion, yeah. I mean, it makes sense. They, like, OpenAI is training and the GPUs are on fire and they need to scale. And so, you know, even if they were, even if they had no relationship with OpenAI, you would imagine that they'd be load balancing across the different hyperscalers and, and, trying to soak up GPU capacity wherever they could. And so, you know, if you look at OpenAI.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Which is just crazy. So Microsoft invested a billion in 2019, 2 billion in 2021, 10 billion in 2023, and then 750 million late last year. So.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  And then they made 10 billion already.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  They're generating, you know, obviously it's not necessarily a super high margin, but.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  It's a lot.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  I mean, the margin of, of Azure is not low. It's, you know, over 30%, right?

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  They are particularly.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  And they still own half of, 49% of OpenAI Global LLC.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Satya, it's the best. But again, it's like, you know, he doesn't own it all. And so as, as, as OpenAI kind of goes more independent, how much can Satya, like, hold on to in terms of, like, the consumer AI market if, if, if the, if the, if the narrative around OpenAI as the. Un, what did Ben Thompson call it? Like the unwilling consumer tech company or like the unexpected to consumer tech company? Like if OpenAI becomes the next Google, what will that relationship with Microsoft look like? Because they could, I mean, they're building their own servers with Stargate. And so like that revenue could go away over the long term, even though it seems like they will be partnered for a very long time. Anyway, well, we'll have to dig into it more.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  We want to have some Microsoft folks on the show. And, and I would love to know how Azure is tracking against inference versus training loads, because we didn't get that from Jensen in the Nvidia earnings call. But that seems to be an important question that is on everyone's mind. As we hit the GPT 4.5 and this, and the pre-training scaling kind of wall.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Obviously, the, the, the, the, the hope is that we shift to inference very smoothly and GPU demand continues to grow and the overall industry grows very quickly. But it's still like an open question. We don't have a lot of hard data on what's happening there. Anyway, Microsoft is particularly bullish. This is from the information, of course. Microsoft is particularly bullish on a new category of AI applications called agents, which will be able to carry out tasks, maintaining a spreadsheet to keep track of unpaid bills or patching websites after outages with minimal human oversight. Agents are all the rage throughout the tech industry, not just at Microsoft, with other enterprise giants like Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP rushing similar products to market. The growth of agents could take off with cheaper AI costs, leading to the rise of what some executives call the agentic web,

• 19:21John Coogan?

  in which most of the world's computer drivers are taken up by autonomous AI software.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  We need to figure out and understand agent force, which is Salesforce's digital labor platform. What adoption actually looks like over there? From my sense is like they're force-feeding people it. Where it's like, hey, you like our CRM? You will also enjoy our digital labor platform. And if you don't buy it. You will, you know, we're just going to charge you more.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a lot of these products that are that are seeing like rocketed adoption based on, I mean, it's almost like the bull case for for for some of Google's tools that like VO3, you know, we were joking about that post yesterday that like some of the products are amazing but hard to find, but at least you know that if a Google model is going viral, it's authentic, like people really love it versus there it's it's rarely just, oh, they just stuffed it in everywhere and like it doesn't really count, like the numbers don't really count. Because it's like, it's it's pretty hard to go and find these find these models versus, you know, if if Microsoft chooses to, you know, roll out Copilot in in every installation

• 20:28John Coogan?

  of Teams by default, that could that that could trigger a lot of like daily active users, but are they really getting those tools or are those tools just kind of sitting in the background and then and then companies are going to other more focused, more dedicated startups or businesses for those those agentic workflows?

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Anyway, for Microsoft, taking advantage of the shift toward agents means making new inexpensive models available on Azure and as as an alternative to larger models embracing open source protocols that make it easy possible to build agents and launching new products that let cus let customers set up their own custom built agents.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Pareek said at an event connected to Microsoft's Build Conference, "Our goal is to build a new stack that allows anyone to build AI-driven applications and agents and orchestrate them." At the center of the shift is Pareek, a former Meta executive who joined the company in October in an unnamed role. Very cool. Just like, hey, we just want you.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Off the org chart.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Off the org chart.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  This is the playbook.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. In January, he became head of a newly formed unit called Core AI that unified groups from across the company, including the company's developer platform GitHub, its internal developer division known as DevDiv, and several teams that previously ported to Azure head Scott Guthrie and were focused on and focused on running AI models on cloud service. Pareek now oversees more than 10,000 staffers at Microsoft. Let's hear it. Massive org. He's got almost 5% of the org chart reporting to him. He's definitely on the org chart now.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Good luck getting him in the same room.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, you didn't have to rent a basketball stadium to have your staff meeting.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure Satya could arrange that.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  After this story was published, Nadella on Wednesday announced another reorganization to staff focused on agents, consolidating executives running LinkedIn, Office 365, and business applications under Executive Vice President Rajeshu Ja, whose groups will, those groups will aim to sell out of the box agent applications to customers, while Pareek's unit focuses on getting companies to build their own agents on Azure. So a little bit of a divide between what's being vented into the, the, the, the office customers and what is more on the Azure side and, and enablement of developer workflows in, on, on top of Azure.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't slapped some agents in LinkedIn yet, you know?

• 22:52John Coogan?

  I got you.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Should be able to have an agent that just replies like a CX bot.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  That's where Clippy needs to come.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bring us Clippy.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  We gotta bring back Clippy. I think we can make it happen. It's, it's, we're so ready.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll have Satya on the show and the entire time. We'll just be like the bold case for Clippy.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  I really think, I really think it could make.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, actually, we don't have any questions. Like, we really just.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  We're just pitching you.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna be pitching you on, on.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, Microsoft is one of those brands that's like, it's still cool, but it, but it's not fun. You know, it's a little, it's a little bit like serious business and just having a little.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  It's cool because it's such a behemoth.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  It's so efficient, behemoth, and reliable and like, and, and buttoned up and clean.

• 23:35Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  But they also have Xbox, you know? They like to have some fun. They like to play some Call of Duty. They literally own Call of Duty. Like, that's pretty sick.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  We need to get a racing simulator here at the new studio, speaking of, speaking of games, and a golf simulator in the green room to just let, let guests, you know, start to get warmed up.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Microsoft Flight Simulator? That's been like a 30-year project. Anyway, if you're, if you're designing for anything really, get on Figma, Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to Figma.com to get started.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  It is the backbone of the show. I want to see if they even put customer logo. Okay, so they do.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  You're really into the customer logos.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  I am. I just think people need to understand like the, the range. Coinbase, Dribbble, Dropbox, GitHub, Herman Miller, Microsoft, New York Times, One Medical.

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Rakuten.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Slack. They got them all. They got them all. And you should be on Figma too. Go check them out. Try some of their new products. They are fantastic.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. They are going to be, so this is another quote from Danny Fish, a Janus Henderson investor, portfolio manager who oversees two funds that hold a total of $800 million in Microsoft stock. He says, "There are going to be software companies that are able to embrace and adopt that, and there are going to be software companies that are going to find highly disruptive to their models. Microsoft's ability to embrace that will be really important. So you want to offer enough tools to empower the companies, but you also need to allow the flexibility so you don't lose companies who migrate off platform because they're just like, "I'm going to build everything myself with new, you know, I'm going to vibe code a bunch of agents and I don't need you for anything." You want to have like the full continuum. And it seems like Microsoft's in a position to kind

• 25:28John Coogan?

  of like index the market. It will be interesting to see, we should start pressing more of the founders that come on that are building kind of like agentic enterprise workflows and see how they're positioned against Microsoft. Are they seeing Microsoft deal cards go up against them when they're pitching? Or is it like purely additive? Because I feel like for, probably for the Fortune 500, you get a very white glove experience with Microsoft and they tell you every product they're working out. But in more like the SMB self-serve market, it might just be a situation where you see a viral video or get an intro from an investor and then you start spinning up.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I really want to get a better sense of what B2B agents are getting, have sticky usage, right? I can imagine the, obviously you see it in developer tooling. Seems like it's getting there in legal. Sales, I think, is happening, but at the points that I notice it are when the person, you know, the agents are sort of messing up and saying, you know, "Hey, I enjoyed hearing you on X podcast talking about Y subject with Z person." Like actually saying that. I got an email today of somebody that said, "Geordi, it was great hearing you on X podcast

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  talking about Y this..."

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Wait, but it hadn't populated it?

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  It didn't populate.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Oh, it made a mistake.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  That doesn't even feel like an LLM hallucination.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's probably not.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  That feels more like an if statement gone wrong.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  If statement gone wrong.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Well, well, I mean, maybe, maybe for the one person that went on a podcast that's just named X.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  To talk about Y.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  To talk about Y.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  With a person named Z.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Cause there's Y Combinator to talk about. There's probably somebody who goes by the name Z out there, right?

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  It's actually surprising that nobody said drop the Combinator.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Just Y.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Just Y.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what happened with the YMCA. They call it just the Y.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Just the Y. Go vertical with the Y Combinator.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Pareek was impressed by the team of Microsoft employees who developed auto gen and open source framework for building AI agents and aimed to move more of those employees into his unit, according to research, including researchers that were previously within Microsoft's research unit led by Peter Lee, but a Microsoft research vice president who oversees generative AI research pushed back on Pareek's attempt to move the researchers to his organization, according to someone who spoke to her. So the information is kind of digging into like all the internal politics of a 220,000 person organization as you're trying to build a different team, kind of build a green field AI agent strategy. There's obviously a lot of chips moving around the board, a lot of, a lot of, you know, internal resources changing hands and you want to hold on to your, to your best people.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  The, the internal politics at Microsoft must be staggering, given the scale. I mean, it's like, it's, it's like Washington DC in size. So it makes sense.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  A nation state.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, 220 people is 220,000 people is like a small city, like a medium sized city, actually.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's basically the size of Qatar, I think.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Like the actual residents.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Does Microsoft have a 747 yet? They probably should get one.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they should.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  I heard, I heard a funny thing that apparently the, apparently the Qatar jet was up for sale for like three years. And I think maybe no one, no one wanted to buy it because it had been like so overly retrofitted to be like opulent. We were like, there's too much gold. There's too much gold. It's flowing. It's, it's hurting the gas mileage. Like this plane is now too heavy. We can't do it.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  So there's 380,000 Qatari citizens. So quite a bit more, but.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Not that much. Not double.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft could look to acquire a small nation state to rebrand it as Microsoft.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Microsoft land.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's the ultimate, it's the ultimate out of home ad is just to be on the map.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of out of home ads, go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  We did a photo shoot yesterday.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  We're going to be going up on a billboard, baby. I can't wait for this. I need to ask our photographer. I need to get these ASAP. I'm so excited. We'll be dropping on the timeline. Stay tuned and please subscribe to us on X. Follow, follow the at TVPAN on X. I don't know why you would see this and not be subscribed.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  There are, there are plenty of people. They're actually surprising.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  RSS feed or something. Maybe you've been, maybe it's like, oh, it's too much content. A, let the algorithm sort it out, but B, just give us a follow just for a little bit. We're so close to 64,000, which is another doubling. We'll be doing something to celebrate. So, thank you. And in other news, Snowflake is buying Crunchy Data for $250 million. This is from the Wall Street Journal. The cloud data company aims to attract customers who want to build their own artificial intelligence agents.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for a base hit for these investors that, you know, it probably didn't return the investors' fund.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Entirely, but it's still a fantastic outcome, hopefully for the, for the team.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yep. And so we got it. We, we, we have to do like a database day or, or get a bunch, start talking to some of these database folks because Snowflakes, Snowflake, Databricks, Palantir, they're all making serious moves in this space and they're all kind of moving to different layers of the stack. Like Databricks is now more of this like data lake, like data unification layer. And then Palantir sits on top as like the ontology layer, actually understanding how all of the different data interacts. And so they're kind of playing nice and Data, uh, a Snowflake and Palantir used to be kind of comped directly to each other, but they've, they've diverged in the public markets. But still, uh, you know, it's in the Snowflakes, like a fantastic and like incredible

• 31:30John Coogan?

  story of an incubation. It's our Hill Ventures that went massive and IPO'd and went into the tens of billions of dollars. Databricks is also up there in the tens of billions of dollars. A lot of people are waiting for them to IPO. And so it's a very interesting dynamic. Now, Databricks bought Neon, a similar database startup, in a deal valued for about a billion. Now, Snowflake is buying Crunchy Data.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, crunchy data. The, the, the, the, the naming schemes and like enterprise SaaS like deep down in the are, are just wild and entertaining. Like Datadog remains one of my favorite startup names of all time.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  It's so funny.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  Datadog, I mean, you, you have, uh, last YC demo day, we met the founder building Pig.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Pig, Pig was great too. We gotta check in on Pig.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  We gotta check in on Pig. I don't exactly remember what they do, but, but I, but I remember the name.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It'll only be a matter of time until we see like the.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  I'm now searching Pig AI. Luckily, I was able to find it. Pig dev.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  An API to launch and automate Windows desktops.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Let's hear for Pig.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's hear for Pig.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  It's a great name.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  I think, you know, if Pig is successful, it will inspire a generation of, of companies named after animals.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Monkey, goose.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Horse, horse.ai.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  We don't, we don't have any animal name companies, although we do want, uh, we do want animals to start sleeping on eight sleeps.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  That's something we're pushing for. We think animal testing is going to make a big comeback in the mattress market. Eight sleeps are so comfortable. We're gonna have, your dog should be sleeping on eight sleep. How'd you sleep last night? I think I had a rough night. I was up at five on the grind. Let's see.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  I actually didn't, I didn't get the hours in.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  You didn't get the hours in?

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Six hours and 50 minutes.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Eighty.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  I got an 84.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Oh, you're smoking. Yeah, it's so close. I got six and a half, but then.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  So close, but so far.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it happens. It happens to the best of us. Anyway.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty sunny, funny. My, uh, my son, uh, like came in our room at, at probably like 2am. I was, I was half asleep. But then he just slept like, um, uh, uh.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Perpendicular?

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  Perpendicular to, to us.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Jordi Hays?

  So he was getting two different temperatures. Like half his body was getting, you know, my wife's temperature.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Half the other, um, which had to been a funny, I mean, just weird, weird experience, but he's, he was sleeping well. He was sound asleep when I, when I left.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I remember showing showing my son the the eight sleep app.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  And I just had.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  You know how you can see like the left side and the right side and like what the temperatures are?

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  He was like, and me for the center. And we're like, no.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  They don't make that.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  They don't make that yet. And also.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Go back in your.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Go back in your.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  I had to pull up startups named after animals.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  Because there are actually a few. Mailchimp. HostGator. MuleSoft.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Posthog. Posthog. Posthog is like pig. It's the same thing, a hog and a pig. Posthog is one of the greatest things ever.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's an iconic.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Well, i- i- it's like postmodern, like posthog, like we are posthog. We are now in domesticated hogs, which are pigs. So pig in many way is the post posthog.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  I don't even know if they do the same thing.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Taskrabbit, SurveyMonkey, HippoInsurance.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  It was a big.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  The Zebra.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Tractive.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, now we're going.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Now we're hallucinating.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  We're hallucinating. Fat Llama.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Fat Llama?

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Appeared to appear rental platform.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Fat Llama is a great name.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Lunch Badger, a cloud services.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Badger? These are hallucinated. This is not real.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  No, it's in. It's in a Crunchbase.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if it's in Crunchbase, it's.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Well, is it in Crunchy Data?

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  But the thing that stands out about pig is that it doesn't add anything before or after. It's just pig.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  No, it's like Ramp.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Or like Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Back to Crunchy Data. Crunchy Data has roughly 100 employees, scaled pretty quickly. They'll join the company once the deal closes, which is expected to close in the next couple of weeks. Crunchy Data will be part of an offering called Snowflake Postgres. The vision here is that Snowflake Postgres will simplify how developers build, scale, build, deploy and scale agents and apps, very relevant to that Microsoft story we were talking about earlier.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  With that in mind, it was important to acquire a company that's not just and that was not just engineering and quick experimentation. Crunchy Data is a cloud database, cloud-based database provider that helps large businesses and government agencies use Postgres, Postgres without needing to manage infrastructure themselves. I've used Postgres before. There are some.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. I didn't realize Crunchy Data was founded in 2012.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Wow. Overnight success.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  You love to see it. Congrats on the $250 million sale. How much did they raise, I wonder?

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  I'll find out.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  There's a couple other deals. Snowflakes offers a platform for storing, organizing, and analyzing data across multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. The company, which went public in 2020, grew rapidly during the pandemic as more companies migrated their data to cloud storage from on-premise data warehouses, which is it's crazy that we're still in like the the cloud migration era from on-prem data warehouses. This the cloud data has existed for a decade and still happening. And if the AI rollout is any any this any similar or if it tracks similarly, it's like we could be talking about agents for the next decade and just continually rolling these these products out in a very, very slow takeoff scenario.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Crunchy data only raised 14 million.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Wow, there we go.

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  Very efficient.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Very efficient. Well, speaking of other efficient businesses, there's a story from our friend Chris Best in The Information. He says Apple's App Store changes, quote, "have been fantastic." And this is why I wanted to highlight the the the the efficiency. They he said Substack was accidentally cash flow positive in the first quarter of this year. Fantastic. Growth has been translated to revenue. Best said the company, which was founded in 2017, was accidentally cash flow positive during the first quarter of 2025. That said, Substack is not focused on profitability right now, he said, as it hopes to continue investing in growth.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Said that Substack apps users are heavily in the US, where Apple has been ordered by federal court in Northern California to allow app owners to offer users alternative payment mechanisms, allowing Apple to allowing apps to bypass Apple's 15 to 30% fee for in-app purchases.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  So had Apple been taking?

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Yes. If you went in the app and then you subscribe to a Substack and you use the in-app payments flow, they would take 30% of that on an ongoing basis.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even know that was possible. I've never signed up for Substack in the app.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy because.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  This, this, yeah, I mean, it's a digital product, right? And so it is, it

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting because Audible has found a way to get around this by

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Credits and stuff.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Credit system, which is just so annoying.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that that's a bigger negotiation because it's Amazon.

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:59John Coogan?

  And I think, I think, I think Apple had more leverage over Substack, but we should have Chris back on the show and ask about how it actually works. But yeah, I mean, if you're, I feel like most Substack users would be actually fine going through a web flow.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  It's not as much of like an impulse purchase. You really, you know, you're, you're, you have a relationship with the Substacker that you're subscribing to. You kind of understand and there's, it's pretty easy to message. I feel like the average Substack user probably understands a little bit more about the Apple App Store tax.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  Desktop respecters.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  A lot of corporate athletes.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Emails, corporate athletes.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, people that are sitting in front of their computer all day long.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  And what better place to buy things than the computer? Buying things on the computer is really historically and still today, just a fantastic experience.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  It's fantastic, especially when you have your sales tax automated with Numeral.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Numeral HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You know, you may, may be able to avoid the Apple tax, but you will not be able to

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  Not this one.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Uh, avoid

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Get ahead of it.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  State, state sales tax on software and consumer goods.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  Sales tax AGI.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Yes. Anyway, Substack has now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform. Best said, the platform overall has more than 50 million, uh, five million paid subscribers. So

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Substack is such a

• 40:24John Coogan?

  I didn't realize they raised so, they raised so much, but that's great that they're profitable.

• 40:27Jordi Hays?

  Yes. I mean, uh, I, I think this is such a great story where they, this is a business that, that raised ahead of where they were.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  And then a lot of people wrote them off.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Because they were like, wait. This is just a media business with a take, you know, a take rate and, and all this stuff. And, and what Chris has been able to do over the past year, you know, when we had him on the show, I was, I was kind of asking, you know, has it felt like Substack has broken through really into culture?

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, becoming like a, a real brand itself outside of, you know, Twitter, right? Cause they basically got like Elon came for them hard.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  And that was like somewhat warranted because they launched like a competitive product.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  I thought the competitive product happened like as a response to the link ban. I thought that was the sequence of events. It was, it was links being, getting deprioritized somewhat and then Substack launching a post competitor. Um, which I don't even know if, I don't even know if I agree that that was like the right move. I haven't, I haven't really played with that product.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, they, you know, it seems obvious that X was gonna ban links.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Either way.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  That hurt Substack.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  It hurt the writers.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  On Substack.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and was the right, the right decision for, for X.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, but yeah, so there was a link suppression. Um, and then, and then, uh.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  And then Substack.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  Hamish, uh, one of the co-founders called Elon Musk a propagandist with more conflicts of interest than El Chapo.

• 42:03John Coogan?

  Spicy.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, ultimately, um, interesting. I had never, I never, I never picked this up.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  What?

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, apparently Musk had, had made some type of proposal to buy Substack in 2023.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Yep, but probably.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  After that, they restricted links.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, and.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  And, and, and Twitter formerly had bought.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  And so I think you're right.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Another publishing platform.

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  I don't remember the name, but they rolled that in. And then, and then I think they closed it down. And now you just have the ability to write pretty long posts. You can post articles, X articles directly on X. And I think that it's, it, it's weird because I, we have yet to see, like, we are an example of, uh, of a media business or a show that just said.

• 42:53John Coogan?

  We will play the game by Elon's rules on X. So we don't, we don't think about links at all. We think about what are the, what are the products that X loves? Text posts, memes, images, video uploads, live streams, and we do those very, very well. And that's what we focus on and we don't, so we're not intention. We're like leaning into what the platform loves. We should actually consider doing articles on X. The question is, what would it look like if you tried to build a Substack-like business? Like you're, you're just a writer and your output is articles.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  And you use X's subscription tools and the articles feed to have that experience of one free article a week and then one paid a week. And you try and build up the book of subscription business on your X account. I've seen some people that have subscriptions turned on. I think I actually technically have subscriptions turned on. I think only Gary Tan is like the one who subscribes to me. Shout out Gary Tan.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's give that for Gary.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, ultimately, the thing was interesting about Substack is they were, you know, effectively benefited from Zerp in terms of accessing capital. And people started to write them off because I don't think, I think at times their growth was not best in class. They were just sort of chugging along. And if you, if he had originally had this idea of, hey, we're gonna build this publishing platform that's gonna allow independent, you know, sort of citizen journalism and writing to flourish. And then we're gonna launch this sort of social network with streaming and all this stuff. That at certain times would have been hard to believe, but they actually have executed that to a T. And now when you go on Substack, it does feel like a social network, you know, based on, you know,

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  email as a sort of backbone. So. I'm excited to follow their progress more and eventually get really set up on Substack ourselves.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, so next up, we have Augustus Doricko coming in. There's an article in Semaphore today. China boosts use of cloud seeding to combat droughts. And we wanted to have him come in and break it down for us. The headline is China stepped up cloud seeding in the face of severe drought. The country's grain growing regions in the north have been parched for months, leading to concerns over the harvest. Though some scientists are skeptical over cloud seeding's effectiveness and environmental impact, several countries have begun deploying it. China is already the world's leading user of weather modification, firing chemical compounds into clouds to spark precipitation and has conducted more, conducted 20% more

• 45:35John Coogan?

  than by this time last year, apparently causing a one-third increase in rainfall. That seems pretty significant. So let's bring in Augustus Doricko and have him break it down for us. How you doing, Augustus? Good to hear from you. I don't know. That sounds like a cruise ship or something.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, welcome. That's, that's the sound that, that August, that's in Augustus wake, you know?

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  Whenever he goes anywhere. It's great to have you.

• 46:00Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, thanks, man. That and size gongs. That and size gongs. Updates soon.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you gotta listen to this one.

• 46:06Speaker 03

  Journalists on the horizon. Stand by.

• 46:08Augustus Doricko?

  Great. Who was the guy that was responsible for posting the, uh, try to stay focused on the mission gif a while back? When I got that text, I got like a hard eyes text about like, oh, I liked your appearance on TVPN. I'm a social media intern there.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:24Augustus Doricko?

  But.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, the team's growing over here. We got a good crew coming together. There's vibe coding happening over in this, in that part of the studio. There's a lot of production stuff going on. It's been a fun time.

• 46:35Augustus Doricko?

  Sweet. So uh Yeah, bring it down. I'm I'm here to ring the alarm bell. Um, totally transparently, uh, there are really big problems on the horizon, both with China's domestic weather modification program and then their international one. The article that you read or that you're referencing talks about how China is actively retrofitting their Wing Long twos, right? Um, talk about like nominative determinism, cool name for a drone. Um, but it is the uh essentially Chinese equivalent of the MQ nine Reaper. Um, and they're using it for cloud seeding and weather modification operations all across the country. A lot of that is to fill up the snowpack in Tibet and then use that as a natural water tower for runoff for all of their urban,

• 47:17Augustus Doricko?

  industrial, agricultural, and environmental assets in China. So that's that unto itself is insane. To recontextualize people. The Chinese Meteorological Administration has about a $300 million budget for weather modification. They have 38,000 employees exclusively working on weather modification. And they have two universities that offer bachelor's degrees in weather engineering, not meteorology, not atmospheric science, specifically engineering the weather. Um, so they are driving extraordinarily hard hard on this domestically, just for their own water supply, just to green deserts, just to keep their cities and industry humming. The problem is uh the international implications of this, right? We are in a and like I critique people all the time for saber rattling with China needlessly.

• 48:00Augustus Doricko?

  But the Wing Long two has been sold and is being operated in countries across the world, namely Saudi Arabia and Egypt for defense applications, right? So that has is problems for defense, but also for weather modification. The CMA has explicitly said they want to export cloud seeding as a means of soft power to control water supply and weather across the world. They already collaborate very closely with the Thai Royal Rainmaking Department. Um, and they can easily retrofit these drones that they've sold for defense applications.

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Royal Rainmaking Department. Wow. Great name.

• 48:34Augustus Doricko?

  Great name. Um, but they can easily retrofit these drones for weather mod as well across the world. And then not only control the Shipping and receiving and the ports, not just the energy infrastructure, nice, but also the water supply and weather. And President Lyndon B. Johnson said, whoever controls the weather controls the world. And right now, we're trending towards a world where China controls the weather and subsequently the world. And it's really Rainmaker Technology Corporation representing the United States against the CMA. So President Donald Trump, if you can hear us, Secretary Rubio, if you can hear us, the State Department should be involved in this soft power conflict on weather modification internationally.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the the current pitch for weather modification? Because it feels like this this news out of China has a few different hooks. As well as agriculture and drinking water, much of China is reliant on hydro power for electricity. Sichuan in the southwest gets 80% of its power from dams, meaning that droughts can lead to electricity shortages. I mean, I know we have the Hoover Dam, but is hydroelectric power important in America? Obviously, power is top of mind for everyone, but in America, it feels like the narrative has shifted to nuclear and solar. But is there a world where we could be getting more out of our existing hydroelectric assets? And there's maybe a narrative there or not?

• 49:58Augustus Doricko?

  A hundred percent, right? Nuclear is awesome, and I'm super excited for Baller Atomic to turn 1,000 reactors online in their gigasites and produce the world's energy. But it's going to take at least a year for that to start, and it'll probably take years longer still until that's our main form of stable baseload. Solar is great, but we have nighttime still, and Reflect Orbital hasn't solved for that problem. So we need stable baseload and we need clean baseload. And hydroelectric power across hundreds of dams in the American West produces hundreds of gigawatt hours. And we can refill our own dams to increase more stable, clean baseload with cloud seeding. Where these dams are drying up right now, we can increase supply. You know, 80% of, you mentioned Sichuan, 80% of Colombia's power

• 50:42Augustus Doricko?

  comes from hydroelectric as well, and they're going through a drought right now. And so they have rolling blackouts because there's not enough power there. Both domestically, for our own energy production, we could use cloud seeding to produce more hydroelectric. And then internationally, again, as a means of Collaborating with other countries, let's call it, and ensuring that like they have American interests in mind, we can produce more water and hydro for them.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the Chinese approach to cloud seeding versus what you're doing in the American approach? I feel like a lot of times when we see a competitive dynamic emerge between China and America, there's only a small tweak between the way Instagram reels are served versus TikTok or, you know, DJI drones versus GoPros. It's usually just the scale and efficiency and reliability of Chinese technology, but there isn't usually that much of a shift in the underlying strategy. Are they using the same chemicals? Do you think we should be using different chemicals from their mix? Are they using different drones or are they shelling this stuff into the atmosphere with howitzers?

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Like, is there anything that we can learn that might not be IP protected that we could safely port back? Is there anything that we should change based on what we're hearing from over there?

• 51:57Augustus Doricko?

  China's throwing the kitchen sink at weather modification research. So they're doing drone-based aerial cloud seeding, they're doing ground generator-based cloud seeding, they're doing acoustic cloud seeding research, meaning they have these huge 130 decibel speaker systems where they just blast it at clouds. They put them all in Tibet. So even though it's like destroying the ears of Tibetan villagers, they're trying to shake water out of the clouds. So that, they have a bunch of other photonic stuff. They're doing a ton of research, but really the big and important aspect of this is their sophisticated military retrofit of drones for long endurance missions, their radar research for detecting phase change in cloud.

• 52:42Augustus Doricko?

  And then lastly, I think the thing that they have like the most serious edge on the United States than anybody else in the world in is their ice nucleation agent and their particulate. They're doing a bunch of nanoparticle design, so super, super small scale particle coating is titanium dioxide on top of these salt crystals, among other things, that are way more efficient at nucleating ice and subsequently creating snow or condensing stuff in cloud. Raymaker's doing research into that right now, but that's where China far and away has the biggest lead on the nanoparticles that they're using.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  How about your challenges at home with various states and regulators? What's the update there?

• 53:26Augustus Doricko?

  Thirty-one states proposed legislation to ban all forms of weather modification this year. Almost all of them dropped that legislation because, one...

• 53:38Augustus Doricko?

  Because of you? Because of you? Was it? Did you? We did. Me and the Rainmaker team did a lot of work around state capitals. I've got like a regular barber shop in Tallahassee and a few other state capitals to tune the mullet up before I testify. But the one state that did ban it was Florida. Florida made weather modification a class-two felony. So if I were to work there, I'd go to prison for five years. And that, I think, unto itself, is not the huge problem. Fine, sure, you're depriving Floridian cattle ranchers and orchards from having as much water as they want, and they do have wildfires and droughts, so it hurts the state of Florida. But the real problem is the canary in the coal mine in terms of American political sentiment, particularly

• 54:23Augustus Doricko?

  Republican political sentiment, right? There's this whole conversation around the tech right and who is pro-innovation and who's not. Is the Trump administration pro-innovation? Seems so for the most part, but unless we have clear federal regulation on weather modification and a public stance in favor of this, then we're going to lose control of the weather to China.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about, what about desalination? It's something that we were doing in America. We kind of fell off. It feels like the nuclear story. And it just feels like I'm going to hear a story in the next few years of like, oh, yeah, China just figured it out. And now they have like a bunch of desalination plants. And we're behind on that, too. Are you tracking it at all?

• 55:05Augustus Doricko?

  So, desalination is largely held up by the California Coastal Commission. And then like HOAs, basically, that block the construction of desal. An interesting stat that I-

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Because it smells bad?

• 55:20Augustus Doricko?

  No, just because it looks ugly. Desal is fine. It's just like a bit. Well, it looks, I should say.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Industrial, right?

• 55:26Augustus Doricko?

  It looks, it looks like a big, beautiful oil refinery, which I happen to be personally. But, you know, folks in Newport Beach, less so. Desal is great. And if we come up with some really sophisticated new reverse osmosis membranes or catalytic desalination methods with good electrical engineering, we can make it more efficient. But the problem with desal still is that we have to move that water from the coasts. Like, it's a nonstarter for Nevada or Colorado or Utah to get desalinated water. What you can do, though, is cloud seed, obviously, right? You can produce water anywhere where there are clouds with our tech.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Blake Masters was saying, when he was, he was running in Arizona, he was saying, like, the future of California is nuclear powered desal, and then we need to reroute the Colorado River to hydrate the, the inner, the, the, the interstates. Is there a world where you could build, I mean, you mentioned it looks like an oil and gas refinery. Could you build a, like, an offshore oil rig, essentially? Or is it just like, it's not economically dense enough? Water is not the same as oil, so you're not going to be able to pay to put it on a truck and then bring it in. It just doesn't make sense to do it that way.

• 56:38Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  It must flow.

• 56:40Augustus Doricko?

  I was, I was talking to some commodities traders the other day, and I was trying to like, come up with some crazy derivatives for water.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Water.

• 56:47Augustus Doricko?

  But like, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's sense for a barrel, right? And it's, it's, it's almost as heavy as oil. So you, you can't convey this, you know? 13% of all of the electricity in California is used just moving water around.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  What? That's crazy.

• 57:02Augustus Doricko?

  Wow. Yeah, like, the Central Valley exists just because we pump all of that stuff from the Sacramento Delta and American River down into the Valley and elsewhere. Like, there's this huge, huge, unknown problem, which is like, because we don't have enough water, we have to dedicate so much of our energy resources just to moving it around, where we could just be producing it in the Sierras. And that's what Rainmaker's doing.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Interesting. Anything else you're tracking from China?

• 57:31Augustus Doricko?

  Um, so I guess one, one thing that I will say in terms of like this soft conflict is we had a customer meeting in the Middle East and a day before we had the scheduled meeting, they said, hey, sorry, we have to go do a last minute trip to China to go talk about the Wing Long 2. So, uh, we're trying to qualify Rand Makers vehicles in the Middle East right now so that we are clearly at parity with their system capabilities and then can be selected for the Chinese.

• 58:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, then the, the challenge, if you, if you look at the precedent for sort of state backed companies out of China, they're willing to sell at a loss for years. And so how, you know, you know, I, I have no insight into whether they would try to attempt that in, in cloud seeding, but it wouldn't exactly be surprising, which I'm sure is a competitive dynamic that you're thinking about.

• 58:25Augustus Doricko?

  Every single international office that we go into to talk about our work, we see a stack this high of purchase orders from China and then one that's like two pages then that's, that's from American companies. So yeah, it's absolutely a problem.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Uh, part of this article highlights this idea that, uh, grain growing regions in China have been parched this month for, or four months. Are we in a particular like global drought? Is this unique to China? Are we experiencing drought in America? Like what is the state of drought? Generally, you mentioned that there are different pockets around the globe, but, um, is this particularly bad year? Are the trend lines bad overall? Or, I mean, we saw the fires and that felt, you know, it felt very visceral in, in California and Los Angeles, but you never really know when you zoom out where we are on the trend line.

• 59:19Augustus Doricko?

  So we, we had, we had. Out of distribution, high amounts of precipitation this past year in California.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  In California.

• 59:27Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. And even still, we had the wildfires, right?

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:33Augustus Doricko?

  You know, the, the thing that I think is a good reference point is the California Department of Natural Resources Water Supply Strategy. They explicitly plan for half a million to a million acres of farmland in the Central Valley to turn into desert in the next five years. Just because there's not enough water. So even when we have boom years and the reservoirs are all full and there's tons of snowpack and everybody gets to go skiing in Tahoe. There's not enough water for current demand and that's in part just because population is growing, right? Like we built the Central Valley Water Project to turn the Central Valley from a desert and swamp into the most productive agricultural region in the world. And, and we wouldn't have the US population that we do now if it weren't for that water project. And so we, we just need to produce more if we want to maintain agricultural and economic growth.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Makes tons of sense. Well, good luck out there. We hope you can, uh, strike some big deals in the back of this news. Uh, you know, we gotta be competitive.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for fighting on America's behalf.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 1:00:29Augustus Doricko?

  Later.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  See ya. Bye. Next up, we have Brad from Cobot coming in the studio, talking about collaborative robots. I'm very interested to talk about the, the Sim to Real Gap, which we covered yesterday. Uh, we will welcome Brad to the studio. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Thank you for joining. What's new? Oh, fantastic outfit.

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  Amazing. Looking great. Uh, what's the occasion? First introduce yourself, please, but, uh, explain, uh, why the fantastic outfit today?

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Are you doing real work?

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 04

  That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Hi, I'm Brad Porter. I'm founder and CEO of Collab Robotics. The, uh, yeah, this, this is how you tell whether, uh, whether a robotic company is really in production or in the field, if they're wearing their safety vests. And, uh, I was at our, uh, our deployment with Maersk yesterday and so

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Had, had this handy and thought, uh,

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  I'd bring it out for you guys.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, to the degree that you can talk about it, uh, what exactly are you doing for Maersk? Cause that sounds like important work.

• 1:01:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're uh we're helping them in in transload operations in moving in unloading ocean freight containers and loading out onto tractor trailers. The you know, they load carts, industrial carts, uh full of kind of up to fifteen hundred pounds worth of generally boxes of product uh for retailers. Um and then we help with the moving the carts because moving those heavy carts around all day long is is pretty pretty taxing work and we've got.

• 1:02:06John Coogan?

  You said fifteen hundred pounds. How big is one of those boxes? Uh like I I'm familiar with like a fifty-five gallon drum. I'm familiar with like a pallet of goods that you might see in an Amazon warehouse. How big are we talking?

• 1:02:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so think of this as as the types of boxes and and that would that would flow to a to a retailer, right? To a big box retailer.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Um and so they're unloading those from ocean containers on onto carts that are about um three and a half foot wide by about six and a half foot long. Um and so they just load up as many as they can on the cart and then take it to you know, usually these are getting dispatched out to big box stores. Um and so you know, there might be six tractor trailers that are getting loaded up to go to six different stores in a in a region. Um so we're working um in the in the Sumner, Washington area, so out of Seattle Port, um and helping basically get distribution out to Pacific Northwest.

• 1:03:06John Coogan?

  Can you talk about some of the differences about unloading at a port versus what uh Amazon's Kiva Systems does within the warehouse and and some of the different challenges that you face versus what Kiva's doing? I imagine that some of the there's some learnings that cross over, right?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the way you can think about logistics is there's there's inbound flow, you know, products coming from manufacturers around the world, a lot of it coming from China. Um and then that ends up in some distribution warehouse, ready for people to to buy. So it might end up in your in your local big box retailer. Go and, you know, buy a fan off the shelf. Um, or it ends up in an Amazon warehouse, uh, an Amazon fulfillment center. So the inbound side of that is to unload the ocean containers and then bring it to, you know, some, someplace where it's being stored or bring it, you know, to a, to a retail store or to an Amazon fulfillment center.

• 1:04:05Speaker 04

  And then in Amazon fulfillment center, yeah, that Kiva network or now Amazon Robotics, um, what they call kind of the Hercules drives, uh, is their storage array. So Amazon will have multiple mezzanine decks of, um, of those Kiva pods, full of all kinds of things that you might buy from Amazon. Literally can have a million different SKUs in a, in a building. And then when you, when you order it, almost immediately, the, the system knows where, it has lots of those and they're stowed across Amazon's network. It quickly calculates where's the most optimal place to deliver this to you.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  And then a robot goes and gets that shelf and brings it to, uh, a picker, brings it to someone who pulls it out of those shelves, puts it into a tote, and then those totes get routed to a pack station, gets packed, thrown, uh, and then it gets sorted to a truck. And then usually, you know, either to FedEx or UPS or Amazon's delivery network, or to USPS, Amazon can kind of deliver into any of those outbound delivery networks. And so, so yeah, three phases, coming in from the manufacturers, stored and ready to be bought, and then shipped to you.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  How, how, uh, where are we at in the kind of AI journey of these collaborative robots? I imagine that there's tons of work that can be done with just hardcoded business logic, drive two feet forward, take a left, and it kind of just is almost like a conveyor belt on, on, independent wheels, um, versus, you know, the far future where the robot has a brain and is just making completely independent decisions and decides where it goes and, and problem solves and reasons and, and we're on the cusp of that. But I imagine that there's a, there's a journey that we're going through. Um, and so walk me through where we are in terms of that journey.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we've made a lot of progress from the days where you just like follow the tape line on the floor.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  Right? Now, robots can generally sense and perceive and navigate commercial environments autonomously quite well. Usually, you know, at human walking speeds, maybe a little faster. But the kind of self-driving problem is reasonably well-solved in commercial spaces at those type of speeds. And that's generally done with a LiDAR.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  And maybe, you know, stereo depth cameras. And so, you know, LiDAR-based SLAM is how it localizes. And then navigation and planning. And that can be done in a way where it can detect humans, obstacles, navigate around things. And that's the capability our robot has. And it can do that in hospitals, in, you know, ultimately, airports, stadiums, in and around people quite safely. That technology works. What's coming now is you can talk to robots. And the robots will make the high-level plan and instruct that

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  where we need to get to is what we can do with our hands, right? Where, you know, like, open up your AirPod case and pull it. It's a very complicated set of motions that we do without thinking about it. We don't quite have that capability yet.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Got it. Talk to me about the LiDAR supply chain and cost structure in your business.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  It's been a controversial debate point for a long time in autonomous vehicles. But if the economic model works, it feels like it's just pure value add. Is the cost of LiDAR getting lower? Are you thinking about solid-state LiDAR coming down the pipe? Or is it already available? Are you banking on a reduction in LiDAR costs over the long term? Or does your business model, just by nature of how much value you're adding, you're fine paying 50K or something like that? If that's the number, I don't know.

• 1:08:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, LiDARs are in the kind of, they used to be 50K. They're in the kind of three to $6,000 range right now.

• 1:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:23Speaker 04

  Um, and so you're right, you do have to add enough value. You're not going to put that on your Roomba.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Right? Um, but you can put that on an industrial robot. Um, and, uh, and get a payback. Obviously, we'll want to keep seeing those costs continue to come down. But, uh, but it's not a, it's not a prohibitive.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Um, element for a lot of the work that needs to get done.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Can you, can you talk about, uh, form factors broadly and, and what guided you, your thinking towards the proxy? The initial product and other products in the suite feels like you guys distinctly chose not to do humanoids, even though I'm sure various VCs thought, hey, why don't you, have you guys thought about doing humanoid? Have you seen this demo? Have you seen this viral video from Boston Dynamics? Yeah. Um, so I'm curious, uh, you know, kind of the, the decision-making that went into, uh, the current and, and, uh, pending form factors.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, as much as like the humanoid hype seems to have been peaked in the last, you know, 12, 18 months, uh, I think Elon did a lot to kind of fan that humanoid robots have been around for quite a while. Agility Systems has been, uh, Atronic, these guys have been at it for a while. And so, um, so when I was leading robotics for Amazon, um, the, we, we studied deeply, uh, humanoids in, in 2018. I looked, I, I went through my like hype phase on humanoids in 2018. I got really excited about them, uh, what agility was showing at the time and legged mobility looked like it could actually work and it does. Um, and so I, I had my team at Amazon do a full analysis of everything. We weren't going to automate it another way where a humanoid could help.

• 1:10:07Speaker 04

  And I remember reviewing this paper, there were 40 diff, 40 different use cases where humanoid could be great, right? Um, and, and then I looked, then we looked at all 40 use cases. And we said, actually, to solve these problems, we don't need a humanoid. And in fact, a humanoid is kind of too complicated. You really want wheels, you kind of want to move more than three and a half miles an hour.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  And is the number, is the number of motors a potential issue too? From a degradation standpoint, it's like, you know, we've talked to other robotics founders that say, you know, I'm using, you know, robotic arms in my facility and we already have to replace those motors all the time. And then a humanoid might have an order of magnitude more and actually be less productive than some type of robotic arm.

• 1:10:52Speaker 04

  So the number of motors really does drive the overall cost. It also drives the complexity of the controls, right? And so you get into a world where you need AI-driven controls. But the problem, the real problem that people don't talk about very much with humanoids is getting strength out of rotational motion is very hard, right? You, you're effectively, because you're just doing a short throw. You don't have the kind of momentum flywheel effect as you get the torques rolling on your electric vehicle, right? You're moving through very short distances. So all the power is basically your electric magnet and then your rare earth magnets. And, and so you end up needing bigger and bigger motors to get that kind of power.

• 1:11:34Speaker 04

  And so, and then you want to wind them with the absolute highest density you can. And so they end up, and then you want to run them at almost the peak current that you can to get the most strength. So the problem is humanoid robots either have to put this way big motor that doesn't look right in the shoulder. But what they're typically doing is they're, they're hand winding the motors. They're pushing the current to the max. And even then they're getting maybe 60% the strength of humans. And they, they burn those motors out. So the motors are very expensive and they burn them out very quickly and they're still not as strong as a human. And so it just, it, we need some breakthrough, you know, the pneumatic, like, you know,

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Boston Dynamics had that Atlas robot that like could do backflips and everything. Pneumatic is 10x the, the power of an electric, right? And But you can't, you can't really make that system reliable in production.

• 1:12:34Jordi Hays?

  So do you think there, you think there are more consumer use cases for the humanoid form factor? Maybe around the home? How do you think about applications outside of industrials?

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  You know, I, I, I have struggled to find, someone, someone mentioned one to me the other day that seemed great, which is like, is walking your dog. I think humanoid walking the dog would be, would be quite interesting, quite cool. I suppose you could have a quad.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Man's best friend's best friend.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  But, uh, um, otherwise I am, I am not bullish. I do think there, there's some, some cool robots recently that are more kind of friendly, look like they're kind of playing a game with a kid. Like I, I think kind of the emotional companion idea is quite interesting. Um.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  But yeah, getting the strength is tough. I mean, even just thinking about the human arm, like the force that's generated from the human arm is from like the bicep muscle, which is much bigger than the actual joint. And so if you put a motor on that joint, you, you're not.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  We need a humanoid with just absolute cannons.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  There is, there is a humanoid company that's trying to create the muscle fibers and pull that. And that's, it sounds like some of the pneumatic project, projects, and maybe it'll be a hybrid. In terms of training and AI development, there's been this talk about the sim to real gap. I don't know how closely you've been tracking this, but obviously generating data for robotics has been very difficult. But now there's this new paper that semi analysis was talking about yesterday. All about training and simulation, uh, basically unreal engine. You build the robot virtually. You have it walk around, learn as much as it can in, in thousands of years of artificial data. Then there's going to be a gap between what it experiences in simulation and reality.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  And, and so what you do is you take what it's learned in simulation and you, and you run that on a robot in a cage, basically wired up with a, with a power cable so that it can run forever. And and it tries to do the moves that it learned in simulation. It messes it up, but then that generates more data that feeds back in. Does that seem like, you know, power generation, all the all the mechanical issues aside? Does that seem like an interesting path to go down for actually solving the the algorithmic and like the AI piece of understanding these how these robots will will actually choose what what motors to move at what times?

• 1:14:57Jordi Hays?

  And do you have any experience generating data? Just kidding, just kidding. Former CTO of Scale AI, if anyone's listening, that's not familiar.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  No, that's so. So the challenge in robotics first is how do you get? I mean, it's the same in large language. Well, what's the pre-training phase, right? How do we get some base level in pre-training in large language models? It's to kind of understand how words are likely to follow each other, right? Just statistically. So motor actions, what's what's likely to, you know, to cause the arm to move forward and and things like that. But the hard part in

• 1:15:39Speaker 04

  in any AI system are the edge cases at the end when you're when you're interfacing with with the real world, right? And, you know, fortunately, we have all this large language model data. We have all this data from the Internet to give us reference examples of what the real world of language looks like, right? And so we refine on that. And then we use human preference to refine even further. And that's how we get, you know, ChatGPT. In in the in the robotics world, data from simulation, data from multiple robots, data from teleoperation. All of these are kind of techniques people are using to feed some data into, you know,

• 1:16:23Speaker 04

  what's kind of the pre-trained base model that gets some statistical correlation. But when it comes to learning the edge cases, right? When it comes to, hey, that doorknob is higher than this other doorknob or the doorknob doesn't, you know, turns upward instead of downward, you.

• 1:16:40Speaker 04

  You and I actually self-play to figure that out. We come up to a doorknob that doesn't... It's funny, we have a door at Cobot that you can either push the handlebar, or there's a handle. Well, everyone tries to push the handle, and then the door doesn't open, and you have to push the... And so, so humans get confused too, and we do this kind of refined self-play. And I think, right now, we're very much focused on the pre-training phase, just how do we get enough data to have something that like roughly moves its hand toward the door?

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  To really solve this problem, though, we've gotta learn how to self-play in the real world, like you or I do, because there's all kinds of novel stuff we're gonna run into solving real problems.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Well, good luck with that. It sounds like an easy task, but I'm sure you're up to the task. It's been fantastic talking to you.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this has been super insightful.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's such an exciting industry, because it's really just like we're still just on the early, the early part of the S-curve, and there's gonna be fantastic advancements, so good luck.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  The future's gonna be amazing. Awesome. Thank you, guys.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Appreciate you coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Brad.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. Next up, we have Kian from Nucleus coming on with a big announcement, something like 10 years in the making, close to it, maybe seven years. We'll bring Kian in. Let's play some soundboard. How you doing? Welcome to the show. That's a great intro.

• 1:18:07Kian Sadeghi?

  Their tweets are flying. Oh my god, have you seen this?

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  You seen this? Seen this?

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. Explain what's happening.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing like a launch day.

• 1:18:19Kian Sadeghi?

  I'm trying to figure out, guys, is this, is it Gattaca, or is it Theranos? Because people can't, they can't make up their minds.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We're gonna find out.

• 1:18:27Kian Sadeghi?

  They're trying to figure it out. They're trying to go, what's going on? Let's give some context to the audience. Nucleus has launched Nucleus Embryo, the world's first genetic optimization software. Basically, parents can, you know, give their children the best start in life. They can pick their embryo based off of physical characteristics like eye color, IQ. They can go to disease risk, like cancers or heart disease. Basically, we really believe parents can get all the information that exists about their embryos, and they can pick however they want. For me personally, you know, it's been 10 years in the making. The journalist actually covered it today in the Wall Street Journal, was a journalist that covered my gene editing in a warehouse in Brooklyn 10 years ago.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  Yes, let's...

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 1:19:05Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, it's a long time in genetics.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, so, so break down the state of the art because like embryo screening exists. I think most parents in America, at least if they have the means, do some sort of screening while the embryo is growing. Is this purely for IVF? Is this just going a layer deeper? And then is, I want to talk about the regulatory and FDA component as well.

• 1:19:28Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah, let's talk about it. So basically, if you go to an IVF clinic today, you're a couple. The vast, vast, vast majority of clinics. The first thing I should understand is that the IVF process is principally controlled today by clinicians or doctors. Honestly, couples don't have as much liberty in our perspective as they should. It's their baby, it's their embryos, they should have the right to those, that information, and they should have to pick off any vertical. However, today in the clinic, what generally happens is people test embryos for very rare and severe genetic conditions. For example, like chromosomal abnormality, like Down syndrome, for example, or even a condition like cystic fibrosis, or Tay-Sachs, or PKU, right? These are conditions that are very rare, that maybe someone might have a carrier for cystic fibrosis, but it's, it's pretty rare. Then there are conditions that we've all heard of, heard about, things like breast cancer, things

• 1:20:13Kian Sadeghi?

  like coronary disease, the things that actually kill the vast majority of people today, right? Chronic conditions kill the vast majority of people today. Those conditions are just not tested for in the clinic, even though we have very good science actually that can make those predictions. How do we know this as a, as a DNA company as well? That's what we do, right? We build models that predict disease, and the way you test those models in adults. So we go from adults to embryos is actually because we can basically well validate these models to show that they work in both the embryonic context and in the adult context. And so what we're really doing is we're going from, okay, instead of just looking for really severe, like Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, why not do breast cancer? Why not do heart disease? Why not do colorectal cancer, right? Why not do schizophrenia? Why do Parkinson's? But then why stop there? And this is really the important thing, because ultimately, you know, if you think about diseases and traits, the extreme version

• 1:20:57Kian Sadeghi?

  of any trait is actually a disease, right? Height is a great example of this. One extreme end is like, you know, John, for example, he's like Marklin syndrome, then the other end is like me, dwarfism, right? It's like disease on both ends, okay? So, you know, so, you know, IQ is another example of this. One end is like, you know, autism, the other end, it can actually be some sort of, you know, cognitive basis. The challenge that people have. And so when you think about it, when you start realizing that people have drawn a line in the sand saying you can't get, you know, rare diseases. You can't get common diseases, but then they really said you can't can't get any traits like height. Even though the best predictor we have today, actually in the world, the best polygenic predictor is for height. So as a company, we've kind of completely reimagined this and said, wait a second, what's going on here? You should have access to the entire stack.

• 1:21:41Kian Sadeghi?

  Rare diseases, we do cystic fibrosis, common diseases like breast cancer and also traits all the way up to something like IQ.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, uh, that test, are you just giving people the data? Because I imagine that once you get into particular recommendations, that's more of what I'd expect a licensed doctor to need to do.

• 1:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, my sense is that they you can allow people to get the data from their doctor and then and then feed it into Nucleus. Is that correct?

• 1:22:09Kian Sadeghi?

  So that's that is correct. And actually, we have a couple. There was like 10 announcements today. You know how we do it. We like to do 10 announcements in one day. We are actually very, very excited to announce a huge partnership with genomic prediction. So genomic prediction is actually the oldest embryo testing company that exists. They've done genome wide testing embryos for almost a decade at this point. And I think they've done over 120,000 couples for P G T A, which is specific kind of test. And so we're actually partnering with them. So we make it very easy for genomic prediction customers to request their files and actually port it over to Nucleus. But really, this isn't just for genomic prediction customers. Anyone who's undergoing IVF can go to their clinic and say, I want my embryos data.

• 1:22:47Kian Sadeghi?

  You can take that data, you can upload it to Nucleus, and then all of a sudden, you know, the application of DNA makes this technology universally, uh, basically universally accessible.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Now, how much of how much of the benefit is is actual algorithmic analysis bringing in other data points to contextualize the data? Versus just better UI and better hydration of existing techs? Because we we uh, we we had we had a friend on the show who was talking about. Getting some medical results from a doctor, the doctor's office was closed. It took two days to, until the doctor was going to be able to interpret the results. He was able to just take a photo, upload it to ChatGPT and say, hey, is this, is this a, you know, is this really, really bad? Should I be panicking?

• 1:23:32Kian Sadeghi?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Because it seems somewhat out of the range. And ChatGPT was able to say, hey, you still got to talk to the doctor, but this isn't, this isn't the craziest thing I've ever seen. This is way out of distribution. And so that's almost like a pure UI layer, but extremely valuable. I know it might not be like the right narrative for some people that it's like not as innovative, but I think that like all that matters at the end of the day is giving people benefit.

• 1:23:52Kian Sadeghi?

  It's always both.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  It's always both.

• 1:23:54Kian Sadeghi?

  You, you, you, fundamentally, technology, just for technology's sake, it's not Silicon Valley's about, right? Silicon Valley is about making something that people want, okay? And people can actually use.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:03Kian Sadeghi?

  And so you think about the, the nucleus innovation, it's, it's, it's two-pronged, okay? One is in the informatics, right? You know, I've been doing this for five years.

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:09Kian Sadeghi?

  I, I almost, I would argue to myself that I probably spent too much time, you know, developing the science, right?

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:13Kian Sadeghi?

  Science in, in, in a nutshell, isn't actually very useful. You need to expand and access to it. So on that point, we do multiple different kinds of analyses. They make it such that we can actually provide the most comprehensive analysis that exists today. But moreover, and this is really the, I think a key point to your point, John, is people understand them. People can see them. I mean, you can pull up the platform, I'm not sure if you guys have shown it already, but it's very easy to sort, compare your embryos. You can actually name your embryos, you can stack rank your embryos, you can understand what the score means. We lead with overall risk, or we tell you, for example, instead of saying you're in the 99% top for genetic risk for a condition, which, you know, what does it actually mean? We say, hey, you have a, you know, 5% chance, or the like of, let's say schizophrenia or some other condition. In other words, by even overall risk, people have a much greater intuitive understanding of the results we're communicating to them. We have genetic counselors on hand.

• 1:24:58Kian Sadeghi?

  So this really is a, what are we showing here? Are we showing something? Are we showing the?

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, we pulled up your, pulled up your website.

• 1:25:04Kian Sadeghi?

  That's another thing. That's a, that's a fun one. That's an Easter egg.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  That's an Easter egg.

• 1:25:08Kian Sadeghi?

  That, that's the, that's the kind of approach that we're taking here. And I think consumers are responding to it, right? People want to have access to their data.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:15Kian Sadeghi?

  The clinician, the doctor shouldn't decide what embryo to implant. You should.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Okay, so talk to me about what requires FDA approval. Obviously, new medical devices. Like if you were developing a machine to take in an embryo and sequence the DNA, I would expect that the FDA would want an approval for that medical device. But if you are taking data and just showing it to a customer in a different UI, that feels like probably a very light FDA process. And then there's probably a continuum in the middle where once you're making a recommendation, they have rules around that, right?

• 1:25:50Kian Sadeghi?

  We, as a company, do not tell you which embryos to implant.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:53Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, basically, parents, the couple, has complete agency to decide how they want to use the information to implant their embryo. Moreover, let's be clear. Height, right? I mean, can a height analysis be a medical device? You know, that doesn't even make sense, right? IQ, height? There's traits, for example. We all, you know, traits are something that I don't think actually belongs in even the kind of infrastructure thing about medical care, right? These are things that go beyond medical care. These are things like, you know, that people just kind of intuitively know and that there are DNA tests done every single day, D to C, for these analyses, because they're not disease analyses, right? So we do both diseases and traits, to be clear. My point is, many of these innovations, you have to wonder, like, you know, should the government say if someone can or cannot pick their embryo based off height? That doesn't seem right to me. I think it should be in the complete liberty of the individual to decide that.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, we're a democratic country. And so if, you know, a huge swath of the population says that the FDA should review that type of test or that type of analysis.

• 1:26:50Kian Sadeghi?

  Height analysis?

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  It could happen. I mean, the FDA reviews all sorts of different stuff. And so I guess the question shifts to like, do you expect a change from FDA on the way these analysis tools are regulated?

• 1:27:08Kian Sadeghi?

  I think, right now, the most important thing is just putting these high-quality, rigorous scientific results in people's hands and helping them basically have healthier children, helping them give their child the best start in life.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Kian Sadeghi?

  You know, I, I think that generally speaking that, you know, people should have more liberty, more chores in, in medicine. I think the broader longevity trend actually touches on that point as well.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Kian Sadeghi?

  Um, so that's what we're excited to do at Nucleus.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the fact, the fact that you're partnering with a, a company on, on actual, on the actual like medical device side, like they are doing the sequencing of the embryos. Like that really takes it out of the Theranos question entirely in my mind. I think you feel like you should be beating the drum there a little bit more. It's like, like we didn't say we created some new device, but I don't know.

• 1:27:50Kian Sadeghi?

  We ship. That's the difference. We ship. It's locked and locked, baby. Don't look at it. Go use it. That's, that's the evidence.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Why is it?

• 1:27:58Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I love the visual of John and his wife selecting between embryos and it's like six, 10 or seven, two.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Tough choice. Well, if we go with the six, 10, uh, he has, you know,

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Potentially fly commercial once in his life.

• 1:28:16Kian Sadeghi?

  Actually, we could actually play this game right now. Okay. Here, we're going to play a game right now. I'm going to put in the chat. Pick your embryo.com. Okay. Everyone that's into this, pick your embryo.com. I'm going to go to it. Oh my God. Here we go. Little Easter egg here. Okay. Let's see what's more important to you, John, intelligence or muscle strength? Come on.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Oh, absolutely. Muscle strength. Let's go. We're the future of bodybuilding.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. John would, John would take a, he would, he would happily have a five, two son if he had, you know, top point of one percent bodybuilding genetics.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:28:48Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. So which one is your lifespan or height?

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Uh,

• 1:28:51Kian Sadeghi?

  Come on, lifespan.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Lifespan. Let's go. Let's go.

• 1:28:54Kian Sadeghi?

  Let's go.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Maybe low depression. You gotta be golden retriever mode. You gotta be, uh,

• 1:28:58Kian Sadeghi?

  You need low depression.

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  You need low depression. Let's go low OCD. I don't mind bouncing around a bunch.

• 1:29:04Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. What's more?

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:29:06Kian Sadeghi?

  Risk taking anxiety.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go high risk taking. There we go. Okay.

• 1:29:10Kian Sadeghi?

  Okay. We're analyzing.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Is this some generative stuff going on? This is great.

• 1:29:15Kian Sadeghi?

  Nadia.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  I got Nadia too. The enduring athlete. Let's go. Physically strong, cautious, built to last.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  This is great. Is this driving a lot of, a lot of attention, a lot of downloads? Is this going viral yet? This seems like something that's designed to be shareable.

• 1:29:29Kian Sadeghi?

  I think we just dropped it right now. Technology Brothers, we got you the exclusive.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Let's put it out there.

• 1:29:33Kian Sadeghi?

  You can pick your embryo. People say, what's it like? Maybe you're not doing IVF yet. No problem.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Funny, only 9% of people choose Nadia.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we're, we're contrarian. We like that here.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  It's great. Oh, well, congratulations on the news. Congratulations on the launch.

• 1:29:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the pace is wild. Last thing, what's going on with, have you seen these Just Blood billboards?

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  They're all over LA.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  So, so there is, there is someone who's running a campaign right now, justice for Elizabeth Holmes, claiming that Theranos was not the scam people think it was. And there's a, there's a documentary coming out and there's billboards all over LA for Just Blood. Like, it's just blood. It's not that big of a deal.

• 1:30:16Kian Sadeghi?

  And John, just to be clear, there's an exclusive on Technology Brothers next week about, from this person, right? They, they're gonna tell their story next week, just to make sure. You invited them already, I hope.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  We're, we're, we're, we're, we are, we are toying with the idea that someone reached out to kind of connect us. We're, we're thinking about doing it, but we're not, we're not 100% sure that it would be appropriate for the show.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Based on the website, I don't know if, I don't know if it's appropriate.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't look like it was designed with Figma, so I don't know. We can't quite do it. It's a little bit, it's a little bit...

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  The team definitely doesn't use linear.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they, they, they claim that, that Elizabeth Holmes has been proven innocent. And so it's a bold claim. We like, we like to see people making bold claims.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  By what, uh, jury is my question.

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, the jury of someone who knows HTML.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Keon, uh...

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Always a great time.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  The energy is off the charts.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Electric.

• 1:31:04Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on, firing us up. Congratulations on the launch. We will talk to you soon.

• 1:31:09Kian Sadeghi?

  I'll see you on Twitter for sure, okay?

• 1:31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you there.

• 1:31:12Kian Sadeghi?

  Bye, guys. Bye.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  He's going through launch day right now, which is just like, you know, 40 notifications every minute forever.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, next up, we have Kathleen from Valthos coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Kathleen? Nice to meet you.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  Good. Thanks for having me on, guys.

• 1:31:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to have you.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Uh, would you mind kicking it off with just a little bit of an intro for those who might not know?

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I have been at Palantir for the last seven years. I built our life science practice there. So taking some of the same platforms that Palantir uses in defense and intelligence and a bunch of industries, and then bringing those primitives over to pharma and biotech and researchers who need to study biomedical data in a secure and collaborative way. So really building out end to end, uh, drug development workflows all the way from early discovery. But then I left a couple of months ago and now I'm working on something new.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:32:02Speaker 03

  So yeah, happy to chat with you guys.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. I wanted to get your immediate reaction and, and help us kind of contextualize the news that came out yesterday or the day before, which was that two Chinese nationals have been charged by US federal authorities with conspiracy and smuggling after attempting to bring a dangerous biological pathogen, which I'm going to botch the name, into the United States. This fungus is classified in scientific, scientific literature as a potential agro-terrorism weapon due to its ability to devastate key crops such as wheat, barley, corn, and rice, uh, causing a number of issues there. So, um, I wanted to kind of get a, you know, uh, you don't have to go into too much detail,

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  but kind of a high level background on bioterrorism broadly, kind of maybe some like prominent examples. And then, um, even just get your immediate reaction to the news, you know? Is this kind of thing surprising to you? Or are you surprised that we're not hearing more headlines about it, uh, all the time?

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. So I think the, to the second question first, it's like a bad surprise, obviously, but we are absolutely entering this era of an elevated risk of bio threats. Uh, so sadly, I don't think it's something that we should be that surprised about. Um, I think this story in particular, and we don't know that many details on the story, so I won't speak too much to it. But the one it highlights how

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  Easy it is really to have any biological material pass across borders that obviously both natural or unnatural. And then the second is that any kind of agricultural pathogen is also an enormous threat. So I think when people think biodefense and bioterrorism, they think anthrax or smallpox, which is obviously horrible. But the idea that you can introduce a pathogen that would devastate one of our like primary crops, that would have massive health impact, but it would also completely destabilize our economy and send us into something far worse than what we would see with COVID. So I do think when when we and governments think about biodefense, it's very much both in terms of human health and agricultural health. But to your other question on what what's the primer on biodefense? What are

• 1:34:12Speaker 03

  we worried about? I think there's always been this. So we've always had the problem that people study the most pathogenic organisms in the world. They usually do it in a biosafety lab, a BSL lab. These are all over the world. Some regions are obviously more secure than others. So there's always this threat of something natural leaking or being used maliciously. But basically, two things changed recently and made that a lot worse. One is that our ability to edit genomes and actually start changing those pathogens, there's a bunch of new tools to do that. So like things like CRISPR, which you hear about usually in the medical sense of editing a genome, are available on pathogens. Synthesizing new nucleotides and new DNA to do that with, also now commercially available, like we could order nucleotides

• 1:34:57Speaker 03

  or you could print them out in some cases in a desktop printer. So that made it, now we're dealing with things that nature has never seen. And then in the last couple of years, with large language models or biospecific language models, we have this idea of AI uplift. So it means that someone like us, not to underestimate your biological skills, but could actually be coached into how do we use these tools, guided all the way into making something that is actually way worse than anything nature has ever seen. And this isn't like science fiction, like Anthropic talked last week, I think, about Claude four. They did internal safety trials. They noticed an uplift that goes way beyond just, oh, it's easier to Google a paper about how to do this, and really into that, allowing a novice

• 1:35:42Speaker 03

  to access something dangerous. So they released Claude four with, you know, new security standards to try to combat that. But a lot of models aren't like that. Not everyone has those security standards, you know.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this has happened, like, was it Timothy McVeigh looked up how to build a bomb with fertilizer and built and basically blew up like a massive government building and the wreckage from that was insane. If you think about what it would take a terrorist to work in a biosafety lab, it's obviously very complex, but getting easier as you can have an LLM coach you through the process essentially, right? Is that roughly the nature of the threat?

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, both in terms of the actual steps to take and then what to change about a virus that would make it either evade some kind of countermeasure, which is like some kind of medicine that we have for it, or be more infectious. And I think the real, like, what has a lot of attention and weighs on people's minds is that we're not talking about like a state-sponsored nuclear program, that you need these like massive budgets and facilities to make something like that. Like, it's a laboratory and a computer. So it's a really different dynamic of threat than what we've been dealing with.

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  And it kind of self-replicates by itself. It's like the whole goal.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting story to me because obviously over the weekend, there was the Ukraine story around Operation Spiderweb, and that was relatively asymmetric in that, you know, whatever the cost of the operation, the trucks and the drones, just, you know, even if it was a hundred million dollars, which seems really, really high, right? Even if it was taking, you know, huge teams, it destroyed, you know, a billion dollars plus of assets on the other side. And then when you talk about bio-warfare and bioterrorism, it's like, okay, one or two people with access to a lab could potentially do billions and billions of dollars of damage. Do you think this is a wake-up call, or this will be a wake-up call for the government broadly?

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  How do you expect, you know, what are the different kind of ways in which the United States can defend itself from these types of, you know, obviously, this wasn't, whatever's being reported isn't a direct attack, but a potential threat in the future?

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the good news is DOD here, MoD in the UK, there's a lot of defense organizations already thinking about this and really trying to get ahead of it. It means that we have way more to do, but at least it's on the agenda. And I think it comes down to, so you're like, the best defense would be to prevent this from happening. So putting better safeguards on models, putting really strong regulation on synthesis. So who can synthesize what? How do we track that? That's great. There's actually some legislation in the works on both of those things. But the, that works domestically and it works to contain an accident. But if we're actually talking about international collaboration, like those kinds of regulations are not really enough.

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  So the way, then we get into thinking, how do you deter something like this? To your point, like, what is the, the defense against this? And there's really like three pillars that go into it. The first is how quickly can you detect that something happened? So in this case or in future cases, do we immediately know that something new is circulating? That it's a high risk to us, that it maybe will evade any kind of countermeasure that we have? And can we know that before it's an outbreak? And, you know, we're sampling from a hospital. And then that leads into the second one, which is how fast can we design or update a countermeasure? So like an antibody or some kind of biologic to combat that.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  And that is really like, if we can diagnose and develop as fast as possible, then these weapons are much less powerful because you're not talking about billions of damages. You're talking about a couple of cases that are quickly contained. And the last part, of course, is attribution. So if you can actually say, where did this come from? Did it come from nature? Did it come from engineering? Did it, you know, did it come from nation state? That lets you bring the rest of the DOD and the State Department and our allies towards preventing something in the future. And if you can get, get that cycle down to hours, really, in terms of detecting, stopping, and then attributing, then you actually have a really robust profile for defense. And there's a bunch of new tech that's going to help make that better. So. This is scary, but it also is, there's good news on the horizon, too.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the bio practice at Palantir? I mean, there's been a lot of potentially like misunderstanding or misinformation about how Palantir works. You know, I think most people who understand the company at this point, understand that it is a, it is an ontology platform that's on top of a large database. But I think what I'm struggling with is I understand if you're using like the Airbus case study, you have a database with all the different parts of the airplane. And then Palantir understands, helps you understand how the different pieces and the lead times for, you know, this screw and this seatbelt and this engine part fits all together. So if you're demand planning or figuring out how to manufacture airplanes, that's a very helpful tool to understand your supply chain.

• 1:40:46John Coogan?

  That makes sense to me in the very concrete widgets business that is airplane manufacturing, although it is obviously very complex. In the bio or pharmaceutical space, I don't really understand the nature of how large these data sets are. Are we talking about trial data or manufacturing? Is it all of these above, like, how does, how does all that fit together? When you're thinking about applications of, of understanding large data sets in just the bio world broadly?

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. So the, some of it is more similar to what you're, you described with Airbus. Where we're talking about manufacturing, we're talking about something that's like, it's a process with a lot of moving parts. How do you make these all synchronous and update when you need to?

• 1:41:31Speaker 03

  There's also obviously biologics manufacturing. Some of it is more in the logistics end, which Palantir also talks about quite a bit. So when you're running a trial, making sure that patients and the medicine that they need are in the right place at the right time with the right support staff. That's actually looks pretty similar to coordinating flight routes or staffing a hospital.

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  The part that, so those parts are super similar to the rest of Palantir. The part that's probably most unique is when we're actually talking about that trial data or talking about patient level information. And there it really gets back to some of the core concepts of Palantir is how do you work with multimodal data and see patterns across it? So if we're looking back historically on all trials that we've run and we want to start trying to identify what kind of patients have the best response to this or what are potential side effects? Can you start linking together data that's from like a medical record with samples from a lab with sequencing data if you have it? And can you do that in a way that is completely secure, completely auditable and complies with all the regulation in the space?

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  And that's really the niche that Palantir, maybe it's not always well understood to put into you, but that is what that platform was built for.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit more about the, I don't know, like the long-term future of what you're building? I know that you can't go into it too much, but like there are a bunch of different vectors and opportunities around what we're building in bio and what we're trying to prevent. There's almost like a, like, like there's a little bit of game theory going on here. So what would you like to see the United States really, really dominate going forward? And where are the biggest opportunities to both increase biosecurity and then also help accelerate the developments that we need, the good stuff?

• 1:43:20Speaker 03

  And that is what I'm most excited about. All of these technologies that are really scary when we're talking about them like this actually do have the potential to give us this enormous global advantage and our bioeconomy and how we respond to these threats and make medicine too. It's two sides of the same coin. I think the two areas that we're most excited about, one is on that detection pillar. So right now, a lot of the ways that we understand what's going on around us is super analog. We have like a list of pathogens we're looking for. We test and we get a yes or a no if those exist and not much more than that. We've already seen a shift in this space towards sequencing. So actually getting the DNA sequence from. Anything that's in the environment or any sample.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  So that both broadens the scope of what we're looking at rather than just having tunnel vision on the pathogens we know about, which means that we can start detecting unknown unknowns and things we've never seen and make a risk assessment. Also, using sequence data lets you have this much deeper level of insight into what the risk is rather than just, there's a virus here. You could say, these mutations make it more adapted to this type of host, or make it more dangerous, or make it evade a certain type of medicine that we already have. And then you can take all that information that you get on this more robust detection layer and use it to drive countermeasure design. So we now have like every biotech that you guys talk to probably talks about programmable therapeutics, where we're moving to this era where you can update based on how the

• 1:44:48Speaker 03

  targets update. And if we have this deep level of intelligence, we can also start thinking about, rather than have a stale stockpile of medicines that were made 10 years ago, can we actually see a threat, immediately change the countermeasure, and then start deploying that immediately? So I think getting that cycle down really tight, that's what the future is hopefully.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  Are we testing enough? I know when I go through TSA at LAX, someone who was doing research, maybe for the CDC, I talked to was saying that like, they basically just focus on LAX because that's like the biggest hub of virus. It's gonna freak everyone out who flies. It's like, if you're gonna get sick, like, if you go to LAX, that's where it all starts. It's like a Petri dish. I know that they swab my hands for, I think it's like bomb making materials, but should they be swabbing my hands for new pathogens? Should we be doing more in the, in the detection? Should we sequencing random farmland to see if there's new invasive pathogens that could be targeting our crops? Like, and then like, how do we even pay for that?

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Is that something that the government should put the bill, or, or corporations should be incentivized to pay for? What is the actual, like, upping the amount of data that we're ingesting look like?

• 1:46:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm always gonna say more data is better.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the question is like, yeah, how do we, how do we get more data? How do we incentivize more data, buy more data, you know, test for more data?

• 1:46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think the, of course, we should collect more. The type of sequencing actually helps drive down you, the cost, because you can target a wider range of things you might worry about rather than setting up individualized programs for specific pathogens when maybe that's not the threat. But I actually think the, with the caveat of more data is always better, we actually do collect a lot of this data today. You don't necessarily see it because some of it is in wastewater or environmental samples like you're saying. We don't always extract that much intelligence from the data that we do collect. So we, we know that a sequence exists. We might not necessarily know what that means in terms of health or the impact of that variant or that mutation.

• 1:46:58Speaker 03

  So I do think there's, there is benefit and there's like cost effective benefit for collecting more. But a big piece is just on of the data that does come in. How do we build the right models and the right software to interpret that?

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. I think that covers it for now. I would love to have you come back on when you're ready to talk more about specifics on, on what you're building. And I feel grateful that you and the team are doing what you're doing.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  And just work a little bit faster, please.

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for coming on and, and giving us some insight here. And congrats on, on starting the founder path.

• 1:47:39Speaker 03

  Thanks very much, guys. Great chatting and hopefully chat soon.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Thank you.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Roy from Cluly coming back for an update. He's hired 50 interns, I think, or something close to it.

• 1:47:52Jordi Hays?

  He said they're bringing every intern on.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  They're bringing every intern on.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  We got every intern coming in.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Well, welcome to the studio, Roy. How are you doing?

• 1:48:00Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Let's go.

• 1:48:04Jordi Hays?

  There they are.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  I think we're overpowering you. Can, can, can you hear us?

• 1:48:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, we can hear you.

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, make sure we're zoomed out all the way so we can see everybody. We got a small army here.

• 1:48:14John Coogan?

  This is incredible. How big is the team? Kick us off. How many you got at this point?

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  The team is 11 full time plus the interns.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  How many interns you got so far?

• 1:48:24Speaker 06

  Interns, bro, we're closing in on 50, brother.

• 1:48:28Speaker 06

  Get in there.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Congratulations. What are they all doing? How do you manage everything? Is it just, is it purely social media? Is that what you want them to focus on? Growth?

• 1:48:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Growth, marketing. Like, the only goal of the company is get 1 billion eyeballs onto Clouly. So we have unrestricted creative freedom and permission to do anything and everything. Just, just make the company go viral. Every single person you see behind you has over 100,000 followers on some social media platform.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:59Speaker 06

  10,000 plus.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  Me too now.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:49:04Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you probably popped. What's working? What platforms have actually been, been driving the most growth? I mean, I'm sure you've run a lot of tests. What have you learned that's, that you can share?

• 1:49:15Speaker 06

  Bro, Ben, take it away, bro.

• 1:49:17Speaker 07

  Let's hear it. UGC has been really good. We just hit 10 million views today. Eight days.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:25Speaker 07

  Hoping to get 100 million views in the next month.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  What, what, what platform specifically are the most fertile ground for targeting your specific customer? Because you can imagine that there's a lot of folks who are AI curious on X, but then there's much broader, more viral audience, more general audience on platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. What's working and what is, is the next, next platform that you're going to be focused on?

• 1:49:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we're trying to go viral on every platform regardless. But the main thing right now is Instagram reels.

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  Oh, Instagram reels. Interesting. And what is the main value prop that you're hitting people with? Is it still the cheat on test thing or have you evolved at all? What? Still?

• 1:50:04Speaker 07

  Lucky interviews, yeah.

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  Interviews, okay. And has there been, this was controversial when you launched it. Is it still controversial in the comments? Are you getting flamed? Has anyone big dunked on you and has that driven virality? Is that actually a net positive?

• 1:50:21Speaker 06

  Instagram is not like Twitter. Like, you could post the craziest shit on Instagram and they will still amount think it's controversial.

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:50:27Speaker 06

  So how to make it controversial? Like, we have to engagement bait some other way. Like, it's feeding tool is controversial on Twitter, but on Instagram, you could, you could have like a white guy say the N word 10 times and it's still not controversial enough. Like, like you need crazy shit on Instagram. That's what we cracked. Every single person here has like very great viral sense.

• 1:50:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:44Speaker 06

  And you watch the reels that do go viral, you see there's like ways that we've engagement baited the videos and this is what we'll keep doing to a, probably a billion views a month is what we're probably.

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  How, how long does it take to figure out if an intern is cracked? Is it like an hour, two hours? How much time do you need?

• 1:50:58Speaker 06

  For me personally, me personally, probably like 10 minutes, but for anybody watching, probably would take like one, one or two weeks.

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. Uh, how do you guys think about, how do you guys think about product marketing? Obviously you're just going viral everywhere, getting all this attention. How do you make sure that it, that it, uh, he's shaking his head.

• 1:51:16Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't think about, it's not about the product, it's about the attention.

• 1:51:21Speaker 06

  You guys can make anything go viral.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, yeah, but, but, but how do you? The side of the street, you know, you, uh, make some UGC videos, make some Twitter posts, you know, you can sell anything, you know, in 2025, product doesn't matter, you know, I could jack off off the side of a building, sell some videos of it for 20 bucks each. Make two trillion dollars. It's crazy. Two trillion, that, that's intense. Um, how do you guys think about burn? Uh, is it on your mind? Is it on your mind at all?

• 1:51:47Speaker 06

  I don't know if you saw the last tweet, but as of literally like two days ago, we're still, we're still cash flow positive. We're still fucking profitable.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  We're still profitable.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for profitability.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Let's hear it. Let's hear it.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  It sounds, uh,

• 1:51:59John Coogan?

  So you're charging for the product and people are paying, are they at all satisfied or did they feel, uh, like they got scammed?

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  Bro, like the product works. You're either using this as a consumer and it's working cause like, like you're passing your interviews and/or if it doesn't work, you're not going to complain to me because I'm gonna go right to your employer and tell them, yo, guys just complain about using the product. Like I'll get you blacklisted if you complain really strongly.

• 1:52:22Jordi Hays?

  Where, how are you thinking about, how do you, how are you guys thinking about product evolutions? What do you want to add to the product? Obviously, uh, you want to help people cheat on everything. Where, where are you going to help people cheat next?

• 1:52:32Speaker 06

  We don't care about like the product is going to be led by the virality of the content. We have video ideas right now that we're going to try to push for different use cases. We're going to see which ones go consistently the most viral. If you can make something go, go more viral, then like you can just build the technology after you have all the attention. So we'll figure out the exact use cases and exact niches. We're going to quintuple down on once, uh, once these guys get to work.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  What, what, uh, what formats on Instagram reels are like the most modern in terms of, uh, consistently viral? Like you mentioned, like man on the street interviews, what do you do for a living? That's always been a fertile ground. What about, uh, I see a lot of those like mobile game ads that look like, you know, you're fighting down some sort of bridge and then you go into the game. It's actually just, uh, match three. Um, what, what, what are the different formats that you like to pull from?

• 1:53:21Speaker 06

  Every week, there's two new ones and at any point, there's probably 10 to 20 viral trends that is happening. And these cycles so quick, you need to keep your finger on the pulse. These things will like expire immediately. You need to be on the ball. And like, if I, if I told you right now, by the time people watch this on YouTube, like it would have all been expired.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Well, they were live. So, so give us, give us the latest and greatest, like what's going viral today?

• 1:53:44Speaker 06

  Well, right now, we got 10 million views using a Snapchat format.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:49Speaker 06

  Viral for like the last three years, to be honest.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:53Speaker 06

  And, and I, I think that like, we just have to get people who continuously scroll TikTok like six hours a day.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. But what's the, what, what's the actual format that you use? Like, describe the video? What, what is the hook? Like, break it down for me like you're explaining the, like, the art behind the viral format.

• 1:54:12Speaker 06

  There's a caption. It starts with a face, usually of a handsome dude or a pretty girl. They're saying, damn, this interview started with the interview was starting with the hard questions. I should have been a CS major, not a business major. That's in game bait because people were saying like, bro, like CS is way harder than business. Then it turns around, the interviewer asks like, like, hey, how are you doing? Why should we hire you? And then this guy uses Cluey to generate a response, but he can't fucking read the response. So he reads it hella autistically, like, oh, I revel in detail. And, and then that's, that is like another conversation point. Like people are cooking on the guy because he, uh, he can't read properly. The guy is like a, doing a really dumb interview using Cluey.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys using AI-generated content internally? I know a lot of these, the videos that you guys are creating are just typical social media, vertical video. Do you have an intern that's just generating, uh, basically copy and pasting, making a bunch of other?

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  VO3 or any of these tools relevant?

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Anything clicking?

• 1:55:05Speaker 06

  Not, not yet. I think there's still like a 10% left before they cross the uncanny valley. And the biggest thing is that people need to think your video is real. That, like, like, that is the difference between 100K views and 10 million views if people think it is real.

• 1:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, AI CEOs bearish on AI.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  What about uh, yeah, what?

• 1:55:26Speaker 06

  Google needs like 10 more Chinese researchers to like figure it out. And once, once they push out the latest update, then, then then VO3 will be there. But right now, we need real people.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, I mean, what about just using AI as like stock footage replacement? Not, not as the lead in for the video, not the entire video, but just like sprinkled in to illustrate a point. You know, an establishing shot of like a building, a helicopter pulling into a building like that. That historically has been kind of something that you would reach to, uh, you know, Adobe stock video for. VO3 feels like it's there, but are you not drawing on that at all yet?

• 1:56:03Speaker 06

  If there's a viral format when we need it, maybe we'll use it. But right now, like it's, it's really brain dead to go viral on Instagram.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:11Speaker 06

  Formats are not hard. You don't need a helicopter. You need a guy, a camera, a really shitty camera. I need a computer.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  I mean, what about like those, those kind of like AI mashups like Harry Potter, Balenciaga, or the, uh, the kangaroo with the plane ticket getting on the plane? Like, like AI content can go viral when it's really, uh, when it's like inspired almost by a human. It's not, it's not entirely AI generated, but it's using the tools effectively to create something that's like still catchy. Uh, do you think you'll be using any of that anytime soon?

• 1:56:40Speaker 06

  Prob- probably very soon. We're scaling up. Like what you see right now is probably about less than 1% of what the size will be by the end of this summer. Like we are profitable. We're not trying to be profitable. We just keep making so much money. We can't help it. So we're really scaling this shit up. I'm not even trolling you. 1,000 creators are going to be shipping on content. We're doing a complete internet takeover.

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  Okay. So, so, so, so why in-house? Why, why, like, like, why, why do they even have to be employees? Why couldn't you turn this into like a multi-level marketing scheme or something, a pyramid scheme where like?

• 1:57:09Speaker 06

  That's what we're gonna do. That's exactly.

• 1:57:10John Coogan?

  Oh, that's what you're gonna do. Okay.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  MLM.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  MLM.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  MLM.

• 1:57:14John Coogan?

  AI.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys worried that you could be infiltrated by journalists? I'm sure they're circling the house right now.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  The hit pieces are gonna come. Yeah, we're, we're doing a softball interview right now.

• 1:57:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the, the person that's brave enough to try to do a hit piece on the Cluley Army is.

• 1:57:31Speaker 06

  I bet they're dying too. Look, more, more eyeballs is better. There's no companies that ever died from a founder being too controversial. You got Deal fucking infiltrating with genuine spies and they're still doing fine, bro. Worker 17 guys, they're, they're, they're still kicking like no company ever dies from being too controversial. You die because you don't make enough fucking money.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaking of making money, what's the pricing model right now? Are you doing anything on price discrimination? Is there a super high tier if you get a whale? What does a Cluley whale look like? Can I spend $2,000 a month on this service?

• 1:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should add a tipping feature, too.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Jordi Hays?

  People should be able to tip you guys if they have a good experience.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  You should add, uh, really financialization, pay as you go, high interest rate loans. Just really push it, make it sports gambling in there, maybe. Just throw it all in.

• 1:58:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's $20 a month for a super $100 a year. And our topline revenue is really being driven up by enterprise. And you're gonna have to talk to the sales team to get a custom quote, but you know, like, there's a lot of.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you serious? What, whatever, is that more on the sales side? What, who are the enterprise?

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  So you sell the SDRs?

• 1:58:39Speaker 06

  You guys laugh because you think I can't sell enterprise because I'm.

• 1:58:42Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I, I don't, I trust.

• 1:58:44Speaker 06

  Like, these 20, these Fortune 500 CEOs, like, these are like 35-year-old dudes who sit there, score people are laughing at my posts.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, it seems, it seems legit, it makes sense.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I believe it.

• 1:58:54John Coogan?

  But, but I mean, you're, you're not going even higher tier? Like, what's the $2,000 a month Cluley vision?

• 1:59:00Speaker 06

  For, for consumer, there's a lot more we can do with more compute. But right now, we're like, to be honest, I didn't expect to grow this fast. The Eng team is quite small. I'm like, spend a lot of time trying to hire more, more competent engineers. We have a lot of backlog tasks that we need to fill out, especially for this last contract that we signed. So we're full-time focusing on the one big guy that we got right now. And after that, um, then, then we'll, we'll try and scale this up. But right now, we're focused on the one, one big client that we signed.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about your compensation strategy that people want to know. Uh, you, you said, uh, you can raise infinite capital and you're so confident, I believe you. Uh, but, but I'm curious to, to get some more insight there.

• 1:59:39Speaker 06

  Bro, I feel like it's so retarded to be a company. Sorry, am I allowed to say that?

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  No, you're not allowed.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  No, this is a family-friendly show.

• 1:59:45Speaker 06

  It's very stupid to be a company, like try to race to the bottom to see how little you can pay your employees. Bro, if I'm making hella money, we're all making hella money. Like, like it's, I'm trying to pay them more to see if, man, like, maybe tomorrow we'll start being like cash flow negative. But make a money, bro. Like, I, I would like to pay these guys what they're worth and the output is fucking insane. We did 10 million UGC views in what, like eight days? Like, like you don't see this sort of traction in any company and you don't see killers like this in any company. Unless you're paying these motherfuckers like what they're worth, bro. Like, like, I don't know why, like 130.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Maxed out contracts, maxed out contracts.

• 2:00:19Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, wha- what about devices? I mean, it seemed like this would be a natural fit for some sort of AI wearable or other platform. Um, is there an app coming or are you interested in what's happening with Johnny Ive and OpenAI? What's, what was your take on the device world?

• 2:00:36Speaker 06

  We're very interested in the hardware space. We've got like a million things cooking on hardware. We got people in the garage right now working on shit you don't, you don't even know about, bro. Like, like, like we're, we're bringing manufacturing back to America and it all starts at the Cluey Garage.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. I'd love to see it. Nobody, you know, they doubted, but you guys are re-industrializing America. You guys really are the.

• 2:01:00Speaker 06

  They're working on brain chips down there.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Brain chip.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Brain chip. That's the future.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. The new Neuralink. Yeah. I mean, I, I, you know, there's a world in the future where you guys actually just roll up Neuralink and OpenAI.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Fluey umbrella.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Yep, definitely.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  It's possible.

• 2:01:14Speaker 06

  I'm excited to offer acquisitions for, for both of those companies. Yeah. It's in the roadmap.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  It's on the road. All right. This has been a lot of fun. Uh, I'm excited for you guys. Uh, it is, uh, and, uh, I have no doubt that you'll go from, you know, 10 million views a week. 10 million views a week to a hundred. Uh, and I'm excited to see you guys hit that billion, uh, view mark very soon. So keep it up. We are all very entertained and, uh, rooting for you.

• 2:01:40Speaker 06

  Shit, shit, shit, shit.

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  I love the energy. Thanks, man. We appreciate you joining.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Better guys. Keep having fun.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Bye. You know what he needs? He needs Linear. He needs Linear to manage all his interns.

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Sounds chaotic in there. He needs to use the platform purpose built to design and build the best products on earth.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Oh, you nailed that.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  I bet they already use Linear, to be honest.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Go to Linear and get started today. I wanted to go through the Saragow piece because we are having Sean on because he is throwing the AI Engineer World's Fair and he's going to be joining with some other folks, breaking down what's going there. We can kind of revisit this Saragow post, which we talked about later. Possible topics for her keynote. Apparently she completely revised everything, but I really liked it. She wanted to talk about AI-native UX, not just chat skins, vertical AI surge. That was something we were discussing earlier.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  Multimodal frontier, video, 3D, audio, retrieval, plus long-term memory, synthetic data flywheels, obviously super important. The Sim2Real robotics push, closing the autonomy gap, robust agentic workflows, cell scale, digital twins and programmable biology, compute geopolitics, world models for zero-shot planning and RL environments that actually generalize. She has mapped out the true surface area, but more recently she authored a post, an article on X, directly on X. You can read the full thing at her X page, Sarah Normas, on Taste. And I thought this was an interesting post. Lulu quote tweeted it and she says, "Stripe

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  returns errors in plain English." Quote, "That card number doesn't look right. Not error underscore invalid parameter because developers debug at 2 AM. Spotify's shuffle isn't random. It avoids playing the same artist twice in five songs. True random feels broken. Engineered random feels right. Notion's drag handle appears only on hover. Six dots arranged in two columns, not three lines, not always visible because permanence is clutter and six dots whisper, 'Grab me' while three lines shout, 'I'm a menu.'" This is taste, the relentless, almost painful ability to know what should exist, what shouldn't, and where quality matters. It's the difference between shipping a product and shipping a point of view.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  The best founders understand that taste is a competitive advantage that compounds. It runs deeper than pixels. It's in your code base, your culture, your cap table. And I'm just thinking about the clearly taste, which is just like, it's the most maximal possible.

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Just maxing everything.

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  He's, he's max maxing.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  He's max maxing.

• 2:04:24John Coogan?

  It's true. He's such a character. I love that we can have him on and then have someone, you know, like, you know, a public company CEO on the same show.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  We got range.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got range. It's fun.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was absolutely wild. He, uh, we should probably text the families and say, you know, don't play this in front of the kids.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:44Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, he knows, you know, the level, you know, he, he, even in every word, he's thinking of how do I get the max amount of attention out of each incremental word?

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:04:54Jordi Hays?

  It's not just each incremental post.

• 2:04:55John Coogan?

  He knows what he's doing, even on the show.

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  I am like systematically offending people in multiple ways in a single sentence. But at the same time, like, he's entitled to be his own personality.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  And, and I do think, you know, not to get completely sidetracked now that we're on to the next topic, but, uh, I do think, you know, it, it, an enterprising young journalist might want to take a crack at Roy just because it will turn into a feud.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  It will probably be good for both of them.

• 2:05:25John Coogan?

  It will be very beneficial. It's WWE.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  It's WWE. Paywall the article.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  He's become a little bit of a heel of tech. Like, he's somebody that people like love to hate.

• 2:05:34Jordi Hays?

  No, it, it's like, how do you take the YC playbook and just run the opposite of it?

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, it is, it is the inverse of the YC playbook, which is, you know, be loud before you're confident in your business model and confident in your product.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  The question is just like, at some point.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Getting.

• 2:05:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can't all be style. There needs to be some substance. You have to actually build a product that people will be, that people will love. You have to make something people want. And so, uh, we're not seeing that side right now, obviously, at least not in, in public interviews. But I hope that he can turn it off incrementally and eventually probably need to turn it off. 90% of the time because yes, attention is really, really important right now, but at a certain point you have to just deliver on the on the core metrics and the value prop or else someone else will come along and and and offer something with with yeah, they won't have all the all the style, but they will have.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I I I think there's a venture capital firm out there that even now would give him an increment, just seeing even that interview.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  See that and be like, I'll give this, I'll give this team another 10 mil.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, to go figure it out.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  To go keep figuring it out, right?

• 2:06:43John Coogan?

  I mean, attention is incredibly valuable and.

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  But he's also, but he's also being smart in that he's figured out, he basically has the world almost convinced that he's going to burn through every dollar he has in the next two months.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 2:06:56Jordi Hays?

  Which is pretty, but behind the scenes, he's like, well, I'm actually making money.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Avi Schiffman at Friend was going through a similar thing where there was that big story about, oh, he raised like a $2 million seed round and he bought a $1 million domain and everyone was like, oh, he's so wasteful. But then, of course, he would like finance the domain. So it was really just adding like an incremental like 30 K of burn per month. And it wasn't really like he didn't take that whole hit upfront and then he was able to kind of build the business.

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and he's making a category bet on AI companionship.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  And having friend.com is a great is will lead to increased marketing efficiency over time.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Jordi Hays?

  As he searches scale, so.

• 2:07:35John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we should go back to this completely.

• 2:07:37John Coogan?

  You know what he should do? He should get a, he should get a watch on bezel.

• 2:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Talking about taste.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  Really start flexing on people.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Bezels are how you express.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So go to getbezel.com. So Sarah goes on to say, think of it like running a restaurant. It's so funny comparing the taste thing to this. It's like the most serious post. There's the most silly, just silly hype train over there. Think of it like running a restaurant. Anyone can follow recipes, source ingredients and serve food, but the difference between a forgettable meal and a Michelin star isn't just technique, it's the chef's palate, their ability to know when something needs more acid, when a dish has one element too many, when to stop plating. Software is the same, but products aren't just feature complete. They're composed and we see this with like a lot of the best software products.

• 2:08:25John Coogan?

  The software is more like art than science in terms of like the design and how you're interacting with the user. So Sarah says it's easy to say, hard to do. Everyone claims to have taste now. It becomes the new product market fit, a term so overused, it's lost meaning. Founders drop, we're taste driven in pitch meetings. VCs nod knowingly. Nobody defines it. Most companies confuse taste with aesthetics. They hire a design agency, pick a nice font and call it done. But real taste runs deeper in the error message, the loading sites, the loading states, the features you killed because they were merely good, not essential. Real taste hurts. It's saying no to features that would triple your TAM.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  It's spending a week perfecting an interaction that users will barely notice consciously. It's choosing the harder technical path because the UX is 10% better. If your taste doesn't cost you something, it's not taste, it's preference. The pain compounds daily. A Fortune 500 prospect wants a demo tomorrow. Do you ship a half-baked feature or the half-assed collateral or lose the deal? The entire AI landscape reshuffles every three weeks. Do you chase every new model or trust your vision? Your competitor just shipped something flashy. Do you match it or hold your ground? Anyway, we'll have to have Sarah on the show to recap her talk. But right now, I believe we have Sean coming in to the studio to tell us about the AI Engineering

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  World's Fair. We're very excited to have him join the show. Thanks so much for hopping on. I wish I could be there. I have the biggest FOMO I've ever had with any tech conference because the lineup seemed absolutely fantastic. Unfortunately, I have a large family and a studio that is covered in junk and we're moving in. So I appreciate you taking this remotely and we'll have to do the next one in person. But thanks so much for joining today. How are you doing?

• 2:10:16Speaker 08

  Hey guys, glad to be back. It's funny because like your setup looks so great on camera. I'm just imagining the mess that's off camera.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's definitely a work in progress, but part of the brand is of course just showing the nice parts. But congratulations, this is many years in the making. Can you give us a little bit of the history, the plan? And then I want to go into some of the hot topics that you've been discussing today.

• 2:10:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, I guess this is the fourth conference we've done. And I started this basically right after the sort of chat GPT movement and talking with enough developers and understanding that the people who can wield L M A P I's are going to be way more powerful than people who just chat with products. And this is actually going to widen a lot because they can basically wield serverless intelligence. And so I coined, you know, I sort of popularized the term AI engineer. Andre Karpathy sort of endorsed it. He said that he does believe that you can get very far without ever training anything, which is a big thing for him to say because I think that is cool at the time was, you know, it's high status to train models.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:11:24Speaker 08

  They're scientists, but now it's actually consensus now that you want to work on wrappers rather than models.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:30Speaker 08

  And there are many, many multi-billion dollar companies that have spoken at AI engineer that reflect that fact.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Speaker 08

  And yeah, so like, you know, I guess.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  And there was a big shift there where, where there was, there was a moment where fun, like the vibe had shifted a little bit to like the application layer, but there was still the idea that if you were going to build an AI legal startup, you were going to train an AI legal foundation model. And now it's moved all to post-training, all to R L and how you're, how you're prompting and how you're integrating and ultimately like the user interface. And so, yeah, it makes a ton of sense. And I'm sure there's a ton of companies that are beneficiaries of that boom.

• 2:12:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, and it's not even companies, it's more just like customers.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:15Speaker 08

  Because the foundation model labs are never going to work directly with like your healthcare system, like it's going to be like a bridge that

• 2:12:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:24Speaker 08

  that comes up and does that. The foundation model labs are not going to work with directly with lawyers, it's going to be Harvey. You know, I think so that that definitely led into the rise of vertical AI-enabled SaaS and I mean, that's consensus now. Uh, yeah, I'm sorry. That's a Slack thing that

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, but by the way, the conference is still going on. We just had the morning keynotes.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:12:43Speaker 08

  I have my chat with Greg Brockman later today.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:12:46Speaker 08

  And he doesn't know this, but I can, I might as well just share this, but like we have a nice little cameo from Jensen Huang coming by.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  No way. That's great.

• 2:12:55Speaker 08

  So like we're trying to level up. The cat, the, he knows this morning was fantastic. Like the Microsoft, you know, they, they like really went on, they're, they're going so hard after the AI audience.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  We were just reading about that in the information.

• 2:13:06Speaker 08

  Platform, platform.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Platform, platform, platform, says Satya.

• 2:13:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. I, I think they see this as their chance to overtake AWS.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  That's great. Wow.

• 2:13:14Speaker 08

  But like AWS is also, you know, also sponsored. They've been like, and having a very strong presence with us. So like, uh, we just want to be the vendor neutral place, right? Like all the big clouds, all the big labs, uh, work with us. We have the, the MCP team here with the entire steering committee presenting as well. Um, and we just want to be for developers. Like this is where you, this like kind of the trade show, you come to hire people, learn about what's new and upskill.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  I have a couple more questions. How long do you have exactly? Five minutes or?

• 2:13:43Speaker 08

  Oh, I, I can go till like, uh, one, one thirty. So.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  Okay, great. Yeah. So.

• 2:13:47Speaker 08

  We had, we had a guest and we, we, I, I moved into a different day.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Okay, first, uh, perfect. So, um, I want to know about the mix of attendees. How many, uh, how many folks are, are trying to start venture backable? Application layer AI companies versus is there a new trend of someone who's building more of a vibe coded, almost lifestyle type, uh, AI driven business? Are there folks from either companies that have established themselves and are now trying to bolt on AI? Or are there lots of folks that are, uh, working for, for large companies and just want to stay ahead and become AI engineers? What's kind of the shape of the audience, if you can characterize it at all?

• 2:14:29Speaker 08

  Yeah. So, uh, we, we do surveys, but we don't, we don't know specifics, um, to, to, to that light, high level granularity. I would say about fifty percent are, are people working at, um, medium to large sized companies and trying to upskill. And then the others are, uh, smaller companies, uh, and, and, you know, our most popular title is like founder or CEXO of like a, a, a smaller startup. And those are, those are venture backable. And I think mostly. That's just a function of us being in San Francisco.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:59Speaker 08

  Because obviously, we we we will have the startup bias. Um, I do think that um, one thing I I kind of don't really care about this whole lifestyle versus venture back thing, because uh, for example, I have a tiny teams track that is speaking this year. Tiny teams is something that I'm trying to push as an idea um, of uh, companies that have more millions in ARR than employees.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:15:21Speaker 08

  Right? So your your revenue efficiency is so high, because obviously, if you pay each employee less than a million dollars, you're probably profitable.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:27Speaker 08

  And therefore, you don't actually need the venture money, except to point to marketing. Uh, and that's your choice. You can be profitable. Uh, I have a six-person team uh, making more than more than forty million dollars. Um, and uh, yeah, I mean, it's it's absurd. Like, the the amount of leverage you can get with uh, with uh, agents, and also building AI products for other people to use, you're where you're just kind of passing through or or slapping a margin on top of uh, the tokens that you resell from the big model labs. I think that really makes a lot of sense.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Totally. Uh, has the narrative of like, oh, if you're building an AI, like, you're gonna become uh, obsolete by Google, or or or or OpenAI is gonna steamroll you in their next Dev Day keynote? Has that narrative dissipated? And what, i- if so, what's driving it? Is it kind of the pre-training scaling law, the wall that we're kind of seeing with GPT four point five?

• 2:16:21Speaker 08

  Are you guys still, uh, I I don't know if you were still talking about that. I mean, everyone, you know.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Everyone's moved on.

• 2:16:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, we've moved on to a different time, right? Like, yeah, I think I think most people have agreed.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:30Speaker 08

  Like, there are still new pre-trains happening, especially with the open source model that OpenAI is uh, is working on.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:35Speaker 08

  Um, but uh, yeah, I mean, I think we've just like, we've seen it come and go enough times. So, for example, we have OpenAI launching ChatGPT Codex, which is just hit on a direct Devon competitor.

• 2:16:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:49Speaker 08

  That's um, you know, Devon's not worried, because they, you know, have been doing this for two years, and they're much more polished in terms of the integrations, and they have different things that their customers already like. And so I think it it's just like, everyone is gonna need their version of a thing.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:02Speaker 08

  And so this is the sort of house store brand version of what ChatGPT Codex could be. And it's it's not competitive just because the the ocean is so huge for software engineering. And Devin has at least established the category by being first there. And I think you can see similar versions of that across across the the domain. Yeah, I haven't I haven't really seen anything there yet, although it's not to say that it doesn't happen. It does happen, for example, with the first wave of GPT three startups like Jasper. But it, I mean, yeah, so far there's no fear that in fact that people are very excited to meet the foundation model labs. Like this is where the engineers meet the lab people. And a lot of people train them on how to use L L M. And I think that's that's a perfectly harmonious relationship, to be honest, I I haven't seen.

• 2:17:45Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to the the news around Anthropic and Windsurf yesterday? A little bit of drama on the timeline.

• 2:17:54Speaker 08

  So, yeah.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, give us a give us a walkthrough for those who might not be familiar with what happened. And then I'd love your analysis.

• 2:18:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the history of this is that Windsurf is an independent company that basically kind of followed Cursus footsteps and launched an A I agentic. They've done very, very well for themselves in a very short amount of time. I think they launched, we're the first podcast that they launched with in October or November last year. And and then there's rumors that they got acquired by OpenAI for three billion dollars. Those are rumors that are unconfirmed by both sides. I've talked to both sides.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's it's I've been fascinated how everybody just takes it as fact.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  I take it as fact.

• 2:18:35Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  He wore two polos.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Nobody, yeah, he wore two polos. But again, at no point every every news outlet, legacy news outlets have been reporting it as fact, even though no side has verified it and nobody said it closed or anything along those lines.

• 2:18:50Speaker 08

  Yeah, the the only thing I can say is I Windsurf is speaking tonight right at right before Greg Brockman goes on. And there's a reason.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  Exciting.

• 2:19:01Speaker 08

  We're not, we're not, like, we're not dropping a ton of alpha, but I'm just saying, like, I'm not, I, that's all I can say, and that's all I'm allowed to say. Yes, of course. And I, and I think that, so there's, there's, there's a, there's a relationship there. As there is a fact that both Cursor and Windsurf have benefited a lot from their relationship with Anthropic. Because Claude 3.5 and 3.7 have, for whatever it's worth, been regarded as the best coding models. Yep. I'll open, and I will disagree, Jim and I will disagree, but whatever, like, the community has voted. Yeah. So overnight, I think, like, two days ago, one day ago, Anthropic cut off the first-party access to Claude, to, for Claude to Windsurf. This is their top model, and now they just don't have access as a, as a first-party tool.

• 2:19:45Speaker 08

  You can, for example, still bring your API key and use your account on Windsurf, but it's, right, you can't just, like, like Windsurf are gonna pay you 20 bucks, use your account, whatever, I, you know, I, I just don't want to worry about the, the, the rate limits and stuff. That's gone. Windsurf, they just woke up overnight and, and that's gone. So a lot of people are very upset. This is a very big no-no if you're, like, aiming to be any sort of, like, credible LLM API provider. If you just cut off a, a, a access. Google hasn't done that, even though, you know, if, if you take the, the sort of rumors of the acquisition on face value. But I, I think this does leak credence, that I think Anthropic at least thinks that Windsurf is just a competitive product now. So I think, like, insofar as you're putting odds on whether the, the acquisition actually closes, the odds have moved up.

• 2:20:30Speaker 08

  Interesting.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other factor that's interesting is how much does this benefit Cursor if you're a developer who loves various Claude models? And now maybe you have a reason to go spin up.

• 2:20:42Speaker 08

  You know market share of Cursor versus Windsurf? I don't. Like estimations, estimations? What is that? I, I think the numbers I've seen, again, I really, I saw it on, on my timeline on Twitter, I didn't save it, and it's so fast, but... Someone please look this up. It's something like Windsurf is 5% of Cursor.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Wow. Because based on the, based on the market caps, I would assume that Windsurf is like 30%.

• 2:21:04Speaker 08

  I know. So the thing that you don't see there is Cursor has entirely developed its business on the IDE.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:11Speaker 08

  Where Windsurf used to be Codium, which used to be like this GPU, service GPU company that has significant LLM inference for enterprises. Like they, they spent the last four years doing that.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:22Speaker 08

  Um, so they're buying that team, that revenue, that product as well as Windsurf.

• 2:21:26John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Um, what, uh, how, how do you think that the, uh, agentic coding market is shaping up? We've been kind of talking about, maybe it's three different markets. Like I can go to GPT, uh, like I, I can go to O3 and I can ask it for a question and it will just write code and write Python and execute it. And I don't even have to tell it to write code. It's just if I ask a question that requires code, it will write some code. Then of course they, uh, OpenAI now has Codex and then they also potentially have Windsurf or, or, you know, you can think about the IDEs uh, as a different, um, as a different, uh, entry point into that market. Uh, are we seeing like a true permanent bifurcation between, uh, synchronous and asynchronous, uh, AI coding usage?

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  Or do you think these all blend together at some point?

• 2:22:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that actually you're just catching up on something that has already been a thing. Um, that was the divergence and actually they're converging. So they, they already, like it already started that you had the synchronous ones like Cursor, Windsurf. And then you have asynchronous ones like Devin and Factory AI, for example.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 08

  And they were all sort of like inner, what we call the developer inner loop, which is hands-on keyboard coding.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:39Speaker 08

  And developer outer loop, which is, uh, PR review and all that kind of stuff. Or like file an issue, make a PR, that kind of stuff. Um, so. Those are merging. The explicit goal of Codex, three agents is something I'm going to talk to Greg about later today. Is that they will merge those paradigms, just that they're merging the reasoning models and the sort of instant thinking models with GPT-5. And that totally makes sense. It's technically really hard to do because once on your machine and once cloud. And also they're just different set of user experience paradigms. Is my video freezing, by the way?

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  It is, but you look great. You look great.

• 2:23:14Speaker 08

  I see you guys.

• 2:23:15Jordi Hays?

  How seriously do you take Google's coding agent jewels? Do you think it's just an experiment that they're putting out there? Do you think they'll actually invest in it and try to get real adoption?

• 2:23:27Speaker 08

  You're trying to get me in trouble.

• 2:23:32Jordi Hays?

  You're conflicted. You're conflicted. I'm sure Google is a part of.

• 2:23:37Speaker 08

  Google's great.

• 2:23:38Jordi Hays?

  No, we love.

• 2:23:39Speaker 08

  Products wise, they have had hits like Notebook LM that then have failed to continue the momentum for whatever that.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:49Speaker 08

  And I think that is, I think that most people are extremely unfair to Notebook LM. I think they've shaped really well. It's just that you will never repeat the initial wave of excitement that they had.

• 2:23:58John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:23:59Speaker 08

  Just never will.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, Notebook LM seems interesting because that feels like a case study in. If you're a startup and you're fast following an innovation that actually came out of a hyperscaler, that's where you turn into a bullet point on the next dev day or something like that. Because Notebook LM, it felt like there was this amazing tremendous momentum online. Everyone was excited and then it was kind of faltering and everyone was like, oh, there's no app. So maybe I'll build the app and I'm sure some people built Notebook LM apps or Notebook LM spinoffs. And then it just took, it just took six months and then there, now there's an app and now, and I'm sure they will. And so, yeah, yeah, I know to some degree.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  But, but, but I think the lesson is probably like, yeah, there's probably some narrow window where you can cash grab as kind of like a cynical like ripoff startup. But like realistically, if you, if you found out about the concept of turning a deep research report into an audio product from Notebook LM, like you might. Be just behind the ball. And so like, like, you don't, you don't have the right to own that market long term. As opposed to, you know, I think Devon cognition, like they have more of a right and, and, and factory, they have more right to continue to fight with Google's Jules product because they were really there earlier. They can issue, they issued the original hype and, and, and brokered a whole bunch of enterprise contracts and like, kind of

• 2:25:21John Coogan?

  got a couple of years down the road before. So they're not like a fast follower to big tech. They're actually, uh, big tech is maybe fast following them.

• 2:25:31Speaker 08

  Yes, I, I think, I think it just boils down to execution and everything, right?

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:25:35Speaker 08

  And I think like, uh, that's, that's one of the reasons why we've actually somewhat broadened out from just engineering to we've added AI product management and AI design.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:25:44Speaker 08

  And I think that really good, this is, this is product management. This is a straight up, can you keep up the momentum? Can you listen to your users? Can you come up with creative new stuff that keeps the momentum going? And some, some teams can, and some teams cannot. The only thing I can say with regards to Google and like the fate of Jules is, um, the initial, the founding PM of, of notebook LM left. And she's speaking here with her own startup. It's like, the, the, uh, it's really hard to keep employees of people who like start interesting products for epic lab. Because they will get any number, any amount of money thrown at them.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Twenty million dollars, twenty million dollars seed round, 10 million of secondary, if you quit your job right now. Probably not that extreme. Um, I, I wanted to ask you about, uh,

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask you about GitHub. Uh, how much do you think Satya cares about, you know, GitHub? Do you think he's, you know, really pushing?

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is that an important wedge into the AI coding market? Because obviously they were first with GitHub Copilot. And you could imagine that, that it's just a phenomenal distribution channel. And when you look at the, the value of, and the way Microsoft executed around teams rolling into you, you're already using Outlook. Now you're using teams instead of Slack. You could imagine really great adoption. Maybe not at the most cutting edge companies that are hyper online, but we could see one of those charts where we're like, oh, wow. Like, uh, Microsoft's really crushing it in, in developer tooling.

• 2:27:19Speaker 08

  I mean, absolutely. I think it's extremely core. What would you put GitHub Copilot revenue at right now? If you want to, if you had to hazard a guess?

• 2:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Five hundred.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Five hundred million?

• 2:27:29Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:27:30John Coogan?

  It's right there. You nailed it.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:27:32Speaker 08

  Stand alone, that is a publicly listed company.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, here's the thing here. I mean, here's the challenge, right? Here's the challenge is that no one is talking about GitHub Copilot.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  Is that a challenge?

• 2:27:46Speaker 08

  It's inside of Microsoft, so.

• 2:27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, no one's talking about.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but you know, nobody's saying like, look what, you know, there, nobody's sitting there being like, I'm blown away by Copilot. Right?

• 2:27:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think, I think, I think that people who live in the Microsoft stack are, because that is what they have access to and like their company agreements are. I think on Twitter, there's a novelty bias, right?

• 2:28:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:28:14Speaker 08

  People always want the new thing. They want to, they want to support the little guy.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  I support the current thing.

• 2:28:20Speaker 08

  You want to support the current thing? But okay, here's the mental framework I want to leave you guys with on that stuff. Is data gravity and the moat is a thing, like data has attracts the compute, attracts the money, attracts stickiness. Like, once, once my is one place, everything else moves towards that data. And if my code, my code is the most valuable form of data I have, that's, that's the most expensive data to acquire. So if my code already lives with you, then it's much easier for my coding agents to also live with you. And, and so, so they, they have a home turf advantage. I think the GitHub acquisition back in the day was one of the smartest and most underpriced acquisitions in, in developer tools history. So like, I think, I think you should, you should take that point of view.

• 2:29:04Speaker 08

  So like, that, that moat is so strong, like any, like, try, try to be like a no name, random dev tool startup. And that comes up and says, hey, give me access to your codebase. Like, I need to run agents on it. They're like, no, like I, I'm already doing.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what hap, what happened with Codex yesterday? There, there was one user that was reporting that.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Private information was leaking from one to another or something?

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Was that user error? Did you, did you track that at all? No, you're probably getting busy.

• 2:29:31Speaker 08

  No, I, I was, I was running the conference. Yeah, and individual things are going to happen.

• 2:29:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:29:38Speaker 08

  Happen. I think GitHub's reputation is, is going to last it through that. I think it has to be really egregious for, for that kind of stuff to slip through. Yeah, I mean, I think like more broadly, I think that there's a standard stack of what we are calling, what Andre Karpathy is calling the L M O S, right? That I think you guys are kind of going and learning about.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:59Speaker 08

  But I guess it's pretty well established by anyone who's who works in software agents, coding agents, which is you want a sandbox, you want a browsing environment, you want branching, you want

• 2:30:09Speaker 08

  fine tuning on your code base. Like, there's just a standard stack of things that Claude Code, Codex, Jules, Cognition, Factory, and anyone else in this field, they're all converging on the same thing. And it's just who does it best and who reaches, who solves it for their customers best. I think that's that's going to be the name of the game for now.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense. Do we have to roll over to the next person?

• 2:30:31Speaker 08

  No, because I

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Okay, you're good.

• 2:30:34Speaker 08

  He had to

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess my question on data gravity is it it seems like if we compare the evolution of video generation models, Google has a really amazing cornered resource in YouTube because that data is so big, it's so many tokens. It hasn't been, it's growing, and it also hasn't been like exfiltrated to the public web. But it feels like GitHub, although it is a massive data set, it's not nearly as big. I think it would, I think if somebody clocked it like 100 million tokens or something, it's it's just not.

• 2:31:10Speaker 08

  No.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  No, how big is it? Way bigger? Well, I, I, I, public repos, because I, I don't think that they can train on private repos, right? Or can they?

• 2:31:18Speaker 08

  Who?

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  GitHub, GitHub.

• 2:31:21Speaker 08

  I don't think they will let themselves.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, they wouldn't.

• 2:31:23Speaker 08

  Yeah. I don't know, 100 million just sounds way too low, and that's my, that's my gut reaction.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:31:28Speaker 08

  Keep going, keep going.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so the question is like, how durable is the data mote at encoding versus in video generation? Purely, I'm just thinking about the, the raw data set size of YouTube has to be orders of magnitude larger than GitHub. And so I would imagine that it's, it's, Microsoft probably has a less durable advantage versus Google's like kind of march down the video generation pathway if it's truly restricted by data.

• 2:32:01Speaker 08

  Not all data is comparable like that.

• 2:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:02Speaker 08

  So you're comparing verifiable data to unverifiable data.

• 2:32:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:06Speaker 08

  Code can compile.

• 2:32:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:32:08Speaker 08

  Runs, if it runs, you can do more code like that. And that creates the RL loop that generates synthetic data for more code. With videos, you have what you have. And you can train on that. And you're technically not even allowed, supposed to train on that. But who knows what Google's doing behind the scenes?

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  Well, I think Google can train on public YouTube videos, right?

• 2:32:29Speaker 08

  I don't know.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  I imagine that, like, I've posted videos on YouTube. I imagine that I've opted in at some point.

• 2:32:35Speaker 08

  I think there was like a big fuss with MKPHD and all the other guys.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:40Speaker 08

  Picking up a fuss about this, you remember?

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:32:42Speaker 08

  So I'm, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but like, I'm sure it's a completely untested clause that just has to go to court.

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:49Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say if, to Google, if you remove John's rate limits on VO3, you can train on our back catalog. Full permission.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:32:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think, I think there is that diversity of opinion, right? Like, do you want to just like give yourself to the machine?

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:33:04Speaker 08

  Or do you want to keep your, keep your data to yourself? And it's like, there's no in-between, like you're either one or the other. It's a very strange dichotomy, like it's not a spec, like many things in life are a spectrum. This one is not. Like you, you run into someone, they're either maxi, privacy maxi, or they're like an AI maxi.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. What, what else is on the cutting edge of, of debates that are kind of raging at the conference? This year versus prior years? We've, we've lived through like the P Doom debate. We've, we've, we've, we live through like the Leopold Oshin Brenner era. We've, we've shifted to the geopolitics debates. But what's kind of on the frontier of like hottest topics to discuss?

• 2:33:44Speaker 08

  First of all, Leopold was right. And I don't know if people know that he was on Ilya's team when the, the, the sort of board drama happened. And like, he was like directly connected to it. Anyway.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:56Speaker 08

  He, we, we haven't lived through it. We are living through it. It is happening. It is directly leading to the geopolitics because he was. For seeing that, and he goes exactly right.

• 2:34:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the way I would, the way I would, I would kind of characterize at least my takeaway was that his piece was a, was a little bit of a pivot from the paper clipping doom and a shift to geopolitical competition in AI. Is that, is that a mischaracterization?

• 2:34:22Speaker 08

  No, nailed it.

• 2:34:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:23Speaker 08

  But like, he was right.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I completely agree. I completely agree. I'm just wondering if, if it's like, i- if the consensus is that he was right, then the book is closed. We're not debating that anymore. What are we debating? What's the more modern?

• 2:34:35Speaker 08

  Are the debates?

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, how to do great AIPMing, how to run a tiny team, have a robotics track for the first time that is Tesla Optimus is speaking, physical intelligence.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:34:46Speaker 08

  Waymo, Waymo just overtook Lyft.

• 2:34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw that.

• 2:34:50Speaker 08

  That already. Voice is the hottest thing in, in terms of modalities, like everyone's sort of building with voice because I think it's like finally good enough.

• 2:34:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:59Speaker 08

  And I think maybe the last thing I will highlight to you is we are also emphasizing security for the first time. Security is like kind of a boring topic. It's, nobody really wants to talk about like how to secure your system, but like they actually do now because they have real money running through their, their product. So there's all that. And then that is like roughly important, equal in size to the excitement about MCP. And so we have an entire MCP track with the Anthropic team here.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:35:25Speaker 08

  Because it's, because they're nice enough to, to come by. And that fills up the, the whole ballroom that we have. So.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  Are we going to get payments in MCP? Is there a sub-track for putting stablecoins in there or something like that?

• 2:35:37Speaker 08

  There, there's nothing in the official spec, but we have a number of people and we have a speaker talking about the sort of MCP economy that's being enabled. I do think that remote MCPs and authorization give you the foundation for basically just remote agents that you can buy and hire. And that, that's, that's effectively what it is. It's just that we're still in that stage where there's still, these things are still trivial enough that you can actually just write your own. So you have to overcome that build versus buy for this to actually kick off.

• 2:36:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:06Speaker 08

  And I would just say, like, I'm not at all a crypto person, but I would say that the crypto people have been ahead of us here and they haven't found that much yet, you know?

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  No, makes sense.

• 2:36:16Speaker 08

  But they're actively hunting and if anyone finds it first, it will be them. It's, it's circles presenting here, Solana presented at my previous conference. And they're all, they're all on it. Stripe is also on it with, with their stablecoin thing. Something's going to happen here.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, in, in robotics, are we getting to a point where we're starting to see an ecosystem of companies pop up like we've seen? No, it's just, it's just-

• 2:36:41Speaker 08

  What, what do you, yeah, so they're all vertically integrated?

• 2:36:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:44Speaker 08

  They're all building every, their, their stack. I don't see like any horizontalsness.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 2:36:49Speaker 08

  If, if that's what you're going for.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  That's exactly what I was asking. Yeah.

• 2:36:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's so weird. I think, um, you know, there's just so much custom needs that you, you have to sort of reinvent the universe every time. The one, uh, thing that, that does reuse bots is a cloud chef, uh, which, which is, uh, you know, a very young company, but I ran across them when I tried their food. So they're, uh, they're a kitchen robot. They do demonstration learning from a single shot, uh, from let's say like a Michelin chef, uh, and you just give them, you give it the ingredients and then, and you will, uh, it will just flawlessly just kind of repeat that, that cooking for you and you can hire it for $12 an hour. So it's meant to directly replace, uh, human labor, uh, which is very expensive and very, uh, labor intensive and unreliable. Let's, let's put it that way.

• 2:37:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:30Speaker 08

  Um, and, uh, they, they use, they can, they can live on top of any other robot arm or Tesla Optimus substrate.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay.

• 2:37:38Speaker 08

  Uh, because it's more about the, the robotics sort of, uh, framework than it is about the individual, uh, hardware. And I think like that is the first time I've seen that happen. I'm like relatively new to this, but like this is the first time I'm like, I'm like, oh, okay. Like he's actually pretty confident. He transfers across any, any system as long as they have the minimum required set of, uh, vice drivers, basically. Um, and I'm like, yeah, that's cool. Like, yeah. So he's, he's, uh, speaking tomorrow.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  What about other pieces of the robotics data stack? Are we thinking about like data brokerage or, or kind of like a scale AI or maybe scale AI actually working to generate more robotics data? Anything on like the SIM to real gap? I saw some semi-analysis data, some sort of a paper that was pretty cool.

• 2:38:21Speaker 08

  So I would say that as an industry practical conference, those are just in the domain of research right now.

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  It's in research, yeah.

• 2:38:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's like, there's a lot of papers out there. Jim Phan had a fantastic talk at Sequoia since that I recommend everyone watch if you haven't seen it about the physical turing test.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:37Speaker 08

  How you need to just do a lot more simulation. And there's a lot of work on being done on this. I think Google Genie is the other one that I would recommend people to. There's like a really interesting tie in between like the generative video world and the robotics world that you wouldn't necessarily expect them to like spend some time in that. But we just haven't focused on it because people cannot get jobs in it. Like, I want people to get jobs at my conference. That's like almost the whole reason of

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Whole point.

• 2:39:03Speaker 08

  I bring the companies, I bring the engineers, they meet, they fall in love with each other. That's like, to me, that's like the most fulfilling thing.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Can you give a high level update on the hiring market today? What's fact, what's fact, what's fiction? You know, it's one of those things people love to, you know, talk about how bad things are. And yet, every company that I know is like, can't find people. And maybe there's a talent kind of gap there, but what's your read?

• 2:39:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think both are right, which is weird. This is actually the topic of my conversation with Greg Brockman later today. Because I, half the people I meet at my own conference are worried for their own jobs, right? They do ask about this. It's not like they're not, they're blind to it, but they're just like, I'm here to see what else I need to do. Or how does my skill set needs to change for the future? And nobody knows, you know? Everyone says the trite thing, which is like, oh, I'm going from I write the code to I manage things that write the code. So I've become an engineering manager. But like, what does that mean in practice? How much knowledge do you need to supervise an agent? You actually kind of need a lot when it goes off track. So like, that's super unknown.

• 2:40:16Speaker 08

  I do think that the juniors, the like fresh out of college students, they're a little bit cooked.

• 2:40:25Speaker 08

  Unless they're good. So it really amplifies your skill issue. It really amplifies your skill issue.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a hard thing to, to, to, you know, try to, uh, tell somebody, you just need to be

• 2:40:41John Coogan?

  Better.

• 2:40:41Jordi Hays?

  five times smarter than you are. And then the job, and then you'll have like a bunch of offers. But I also think, I also think that the, the solution here and, and we, we just hired, uh, an intern who already shipped a new product. He, he started, uh, Monday. He just shipped, uh, something relatively simple, but it's cool. It's a guest directory. He shipped, he just sent us a V1 of that product that he built last Thursday. We saw it and we were like, this is super cool. Why don't you start on Monday? And it's that one kind of interaction that can get your foot in the door that allows you to develop skills and build relationships that, you know, hopefully we, you know, we work with him for a long time, but even, you know, I'm sure people are already

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  seeing him at TVPN and, and we'll probably try to poach him, uh, before the end of the summer. So.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  It is, it is like a changing shape of the software engineering employment because like, I feel like, like the vibe coders can come into organizations that might not have a full engineering department and then have an impact because of the way the tools work. But, uh, it's certainly, it's certainly a lot of change, very, very quickly.

• 2:41:47Speaker 08

  I would, I would say that's not the consensus yet that

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:41:51Speaker 08

  hire a, a like chief vibe code officer.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:54Speaker 08

  Because like humans are still very much needed to, to patch the gaps that the models are not good at. And it's really painful when they do go wrong and they do go wrong. You know, I think like all the hypes that you see on Twitter, uh, fail to submit like what happens like one month, two months, three months after. And that's honestly what you get paid to do as a software engineer, make maintainable software, not

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:15Speaker 08

  greenfield all the time.

• 2:42:16John Coogan?

  I've even seen people repurpose old, old projects and say, I've, I vibe coded this in 24 hours and everyone's like, wait, no, this was published in 2019. Like you spent months on this and you're just hyping this up. That's misinformation.

• 2:42:31Speaker 08

  I can't govern, I pay attention to what people say there, but I do care what people report for themselves that they've done at serious companies. So one thing I would highlight there is booking.com did about 10 company years worth of migrations in three months with with their sort of automated code migration that they did with SourceCraft. So we did a talk with them at my conference in New York in February, which if you want to look that up. So like those, that company has been around for like 14, 15 years. That's a serious code base, right? They're just reporting their success. They've got nothing to gain from selling you on it. They're just, they're just happy about it and they want to teach others. So you want to look for those. They're not trying to sell you anything.

• 2:43:16Speaker 08

  They're just reporting like their progress at a real company. And it's, that's really what I try to optimize for, for the, for the conference. It's, it's hard because not everyone's incentivized to do it. You just have to create an environment where they get something out of it by meeting their peers at a thing like this.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  Well, give us the plug. Where can people watch your talk with Greg Brockman later today?

• 2:43:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's on YouTube, YouTube at AI dot engineer, dot D O T. And yeah, what would you ask him? I mean, you're having him on eventually. So, you know, what's like the, the, the way that you would open the conversation?

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a good question. For Greg, there's a lot, but I mean, the question that I feel like is at the top of, top of mind in like Ben Thompson world this week is the shift from training to inference and how, and how workloads are, are, are shifting. This was in the context of Nvidia earnings, but Greg obviously has intimate knowledge. And so, and OpenAI is obviously going to do larger and larger training runs, but they're also doing tons and tons of inference. How is that shifting? And then what I want to know, and I don't know how much he can speak to this, is, is, is like where?

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  How will, if we get to a world where we're in 80% inference, 99% inference, something really extreme, does that change the type of data centers we're building? Does that change the chips that we're demanding? Are we moving to ASICs? Are we moving to FPGAs, something like that to like speed up the actual inference workloads? At what point do we actually bake these models down if they're deemed like good enough and then we're like orchestrating them? If we hit a plateau, that might make sense. At the same time, if there's a lot of promise on algorithmic progress and we're expecting like, oh yeah, we're gonna leave the transformer behind eventually. Well, then yeah, you don't want to bake all that down. So I think that that's like, it's a little bit more of like a semi's question, but it is an interesting question for him as well as he's like seeing the workloads.

• 2:45:22Speaker 08

  It is very relevant. He does have a role to play in Stargate that I'm not super clear about. I'm gonna ask him about. And yeah, I mean, I would say that nobody is betting on the end of transformers, except for a very small, very small number of people that are just experimental. And it's really about just scaling the RL.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there is this interesting thing that's happening. I believe images in chat GPT seems to be using a number of different algorithms combined. So there's a little bit of diffusion in there potentially. There's some, there's some transformer based stuff. I don't know if you have a, if you're pushing back on that.

• 2:45:58Speaker 08

  I'm not. There's a, there's a strong hypothesis based on the hints that they have dropped from the people that worked on it.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that there, that there's multiple algorithms at work, right?

• 2:46:07Speaker 08

  It's a diffusion head, but the transformer backbone, the rest of it is just regular 4-0, and that's so good at chat and has decent world knowledge. There's not like a ton of complexity there beyond that, that we'd know of.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so what I'm interested in is like, we saw the demo from, from Google on diffusion, text-based diffusion, 900 tokens a second. I've heard good reviews about that. I've heard kind of mixed reviews on that. Maybe it's not a path, but what does, what does the future of an LLM look like if we're, if we're applying the same path that we've seen in images, where we're seeing an ensemble of models come together to create a better, like even more multimodal, multi, multi, like multi architectures? Because it feels like we're moving, we're moving further and further away from The single big transformer being the answer to everything. And, and so what does that mean? Are we going closer or farther away from the single big transformer?

• 2:47:06John Coogan?

  That is like the, the god in the weights.

• 2:47:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, this is where I can offer a little bit of coaching for, for your audience. And maybe you, you guys have talked to a lot of people, so I don't know. This is where people usually say the term mixture of experts and they're wrong to use that.

• 2:47:22Speaker 08

  And sometimes they say make sure of agents, make sure of experts. They're, they're incorrect. Anyway, we have talked with a lot of the frontier lab researchers. None of them believe that that is the way forward. That is, that is an optimization for the current thing, which is.

• 2:47:38John Coogan?

  Which, which one? A mixture of experts?

• 2:47:42Speaker 08

  Or mixture of architectures.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  Mixture of architectures.

• 2:47:47Speaker 08

  Okay. Yeah, so experiments, for example, with Jamba with from 21 in Israel, where they mix, for example, like a Mamba layered with, with transformers. That seems to be promising, but even a character was just used scaling out transformers. I asked a variant of the question you just stated to Noam Brown in an upcoming podcast that we did. We recorded it, we haven't released it. He's the same way. He's like, anything you're trying to do fancy around mixing your weird architectures is just not going to scale. Just scale the, the, the basic thing. And he's pretty strongly convicted in that. I, I know people I can't name at Gemini who is also pretty strongly convicted in that. I have reason to suspect otherwise. Obviously, like you can't shut this, shut down anything because like it might be true.

• 2:48:33Speaker 08

  I'm just telling you what the people working on this would say because.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  Okay, well, I mean, if that's.

• 2:48:40Jordi Hays?

  The last thing I wanted to kind of cover, I would want to get a sense of, you know, prediction markets are pricing in that. Google continues to dominate on benchmarks. How much is OpenAI even going to? How much do they even care about being at the top of benchmarks? Is it, is it purely an ego thing? Or is it just about, you know, usability and, and value for users and code quality and things like that?

• 2:49:06Speaker 08

  It's usability and value. I think you need to notice that the benchmarks that Google talks about at Google I O are no longer the benchmarks that OpenAI. Measures itself on and you know, I want, I want to stay friends with them, but like, there are some that are more sus than others.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:49:25Speaker 08

  And I think like, at the end of the day, the, the, the customer will win. The only one that, that has not, that's clearly been caught out, kind of lying, kind of like being, whatever, like, underperforming, I gotta say it, it's Apple. When they launched Apple Intelligence, we were all very excited about the Apple Intelligence paper, which is, which is a beautiful document that had no evals apart from their own internal evals. So they were not accountable to the standard set of evals that everyone else has. Right. So step one is you should, you should try to hold yourself to some public benchmark. I flawed, just do it, you know, but, and then, so, so, so Apple did not do that. And, and then like, now there's a question of like, are you holding yourself to a benchmark that can be gamed? And there's been accusations of Ella Marina being gamed.

• 2:50:10Speaker 08

  And unfortunately, that's what Google has put all his chips on. They may do that for Gemini three, but for 2.5, that's what he did. And probably because they spent the last year doing it.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  It's all revenue from here on out. Like that is the

• 2:50:25Speaker 08

  Revenue is the benchmark.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  GitHub Copilot, 500 million, size gong for GitHub.

• 2:50:29Speaker 08

  Revenue is also tricky.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:31Speaker 08

  You guys know how, like Gemini, I don't know if you know, Gemini gives a billion tokens a day per human.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:50:39Speaker 08

  For free. Your personal API token.

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:42Speaker 08

  Shitting you. You can, you can, you can, you can set up a camera right now, run Gemini 2.5 flash on it. Run like a frame a second and ask you to do whatever you want for free.

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:50:53Speaker 08

  It's absurd. So

• 2:50:55John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Google. Thank you. Intelligence too cheap to meter. We love to hear it.

• 2:51:00Speaker 08

  Okay, like that chart that you saw at Google I O where their, their tokens went like this.

• 2:51:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:04Speaker 08

  Now you know why it's free.

• 2:51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:07Speaker 08

  I mean, it's, they also have a very, very good model. Don't get me wrong, but I'm just like, revenue is a short-term play. Like if you're trying to maximize revenue now, you might cut off, cut off yourself from getting the largest data set in the world, which is the, the sort of early adopter humans.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:21Speaker 08

  That are going to give you their data because they're like, train on me daddy. And I, I, I'm, you're giving to me for free, like whatever, train on me. And, and that's a, that's a deal that lots of people, I think it's a theme that we, we talked about. It's lots of people are going to make.

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:35Speaker 08

  Jokes is free. Why? They, they can eat your data. Codex is free. Why?

• 2:51:42Speaker 08

  So I talked about this in one of my recent posts, like the marginal cost of software has has gone down to zero. And like, can it go negative? Will I start paying you for you for me for you to use me? Absolutely, because then you'd become my labeler.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Speaker 08

  You're you're a labeler I can never pay for, you know, usually have to like hire someone like the Philippines or something. We've maxed them out. So now I got I got to I got to pay someone in Silicon Valley to label my my software. So I might as well just give you my coding agent for free, or like even honestly, just pay you for good feedback on my coding agents. And why should that? Why should it stop at like $20 a month when like there are people in New York who I've heard, by the way, get they're like they hire former bankers, they hire former hedge fund guys, paying them 500K a year to label.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  It's wild. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. Good luck with the rest of the conference.

• 2:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's make this a regular thing.

• 2:52:36John Coogan?

  This is fantastic conversation.

• 2:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for taking the time away from your event. And we'll be there next year.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:41Jordi Hays?

  Whether you like it or not.

• 2:52:44Speaker 08

  You're invited, for sure.

• 2:52:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 2:52:46Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Sean.

• 2:52:47John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we got to tell you about Wander.

• 2:52:53Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:53:03Jordi Hays?

  I want the TBPN Army to clear out every single wander all of summer.

• 2:53:16John Coogan?

  This is an interesting one. Oscar has joined the Fortune 500 for the first time. I know what you're thinking, and I agree. What, only now? And Josh Kushner says, I'm deeply proud of the tenacity and persistence of the Oscar team. We've been humbled many times from down 95% from our IPO to now entering the Fortune 500. I am excited for all that is ahead of us. Wow, congratulations to Josh Kushner. That is a phenomenal run.

• 2:53:40Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:53:40John Coogan?

  And somebody else was quote tweeting this, saying that there's only two people who have incubated a Fortune 500 company who are actively investing, and it's Palantir with Peter Thiel and Founders Fund, and Josh Kushner with Thrive and Oscar. So what a phenomenal run. It is rare, but the incubations are starting to work, and the incubations will continue until morale improves.

• 2:54:03Jordi Hays?

  They will continue.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Until the global economy is worth is growing at 10% a year.

• 2:54:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, every person who works in tech needs at least five non-tech friends to interact with closely on a weekly basis so they can understand how the general public actually thinks. Says Kit Volta. You posted this from a different account. It was a copy pasta. Somebody copied the whole thing.

• 2:54:25Jordi Hays?

  You mean I shared the shit?

• 2:54:26John Coogan?

  You shared the fake one, the ripoff.

• 2:54:29Jordi Hays?

  I shared a ripoff.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, you shared a ripoff and it got community noted and I found the original one, read it here.

• 2:54:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so somebody just stole it?

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. They didn't even screenshot it and put it in Bangor.

• 2:54:38Jordi Hays?

  That is just wrong.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  But 20K on this post, the repost has 15K likes and so, but it got community noted. This is a copy paste. You feel like that could be automated in X where it's like, this is the exact same text as has been posted elsewhere. You should just know that you should maybe go to the source on this if somebody's posting the exact same thing. Except, you know, Josh Stein will get that every day because he's constantly boasting, "Good morning, we are going to win." And so he would have the note every single day. JT Jiro Tickets says, "Web design? You mean digital physiognomy?" Very funny. Oh, you put another one in here from JT. "Guy who is burnt out from his six figures, five hours a week, big tech job." You gotta just hit the roof and just get some sun, you know?

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  Anyway, Pavel has a good one. "I don't think Waymo can work in New York City because during rush hour, you need to break the law to get anywhere and I'm not sure how you could get away with embedding that in software." And IB says, "Travis would have gotten it done. Never too late."

• 2:55:37Jordi Hays?

  Somebody says, "Full self-driving gladly speeds for me."

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  I thought this was good from Will. "Two thick scoops." Okay, sounds good. Thank you. And it's, "Jersey Mike's order pickup at 12:48. Dutch government collapses over migration dispute."

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  Why is this?

• 2:55:56Jordi Hays?

  This is Gmail.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  Oh, it's just rolling up multiple emails or something?

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  This is Apple AI summary.

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Apple AI strikes again.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  The summaries are so good. It's genius. 75,000 likes, that's a lot of attention on that. You gotta upgrade, folks. You're missing out on entertainment.

• 2:56:11Jordi Hays?

  I would pay Apple to help me produce Apple intelligent viral bangers.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to wrap up, but we gotta say congratulations to Jesse Michaels. He got on Joe Rogan. He said it was the honor of a lifetime to sit down with a goat himself, Joe Rogan.

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Many people have called him a young Rogan.

• 2:56:27John Coogan?

  I've called him that. He is fantastic. He's been on a fantastic run with American Alchemy, his podcast. He's climbing the charts. If you're into aliens, AI apocalypses, Bob Lazar, nuclear weapons, secret anti-gravity research, go check out the Jesse Michaels, Joe Rogan Experience episode. It's episode 2331. Rogan's putting up big numbers. He's giving us a run, but we're catching up. We're catching up.

• 2:56:54Jordi Hays?

  It's wild. In other news, lastly, I just wanted to cover this quickly. AMD has acquired Bream, it's been reported today, to help reduce Nvidia's market dominance when it comes to AI hardware.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Talking to George Hots and we're gonna have him on the show, but he's been, he's been back in AMD. We got Dylan Patel coming on the show Friday. We'll ask him more about AMD and their, their plan to unseat CUDA as the dominant AI platform.

• 2:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  And we have other news. We are officially, we have doubled the size of the show. Once again, Jordy hit that gong, hit the real, hit the real gong for me. Grab this. We're going to Gong Cam. We got 64,000 followers on X. Thank you for everyone who's been around. Oh, there we go. That's great. Thank you for watching. Thank you for supporting us. It's been a fantastic journey.

• 2:57:47Jordi Hays?

  It is a pleasure.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  We got the whole crew in the studio. We got a whole bunch more cameras here. We're growing every day.

• 2:57:53Jordi Hays?

  Damn, we got the studio cam.

• 2:57:54John Coogan?

  The studio cam's going. Thank you for watching. Thanks for all the support.

• 2:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Leave us a five-star review.

• 2:58:00John Coogan?

  Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Especially on Apple Podcasts.

• 2:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like we're doing low there.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Video-heavy.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't really make sense, but if you're on Apple and you're listening and you haven't left us a review, we'd love a review. So thank you so much. And we'll see you tomorrow. We have an awesome day. We have a, we have a bit of an AI day coming together with folks from OpenAI and Anthropic coming on. It should be a great show. So stay tuned. We'll see you tomorrow and have a great rest of your Wednesday. Goodbye.

• 2:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.