NVIDIA Chip Export Debate with Aaron Ginn, Apple Building a Robotic Siri | Delian Asparouhov, Jen Bucci, Ben Kennedy, Jessica Wu, Parag Agrawal, Eric Simons, Matt George

(08:42) - NVIDIA Chip Export Debate w/ Aaron Ginn. Aaron Ginn is a technology entrepreneur and policy analyst known for his insights into artificial intelligence (AI) and U. S.-China relations. In the conversation, he critiques the notion that restricting Chinese access to Nvidia's AI hardware will hinder China's AI progress, suggesting it may instead accelerate their development of domestic alternatives. He also discusses the inefficacy of U. S. export controls, emphasizing that such measures might not effectively impede China's AI advancements. (49:43) - Apple is Building a Robotic Siri For Your Home (01:11:50) - Timeline (01:28:42) - Delian Asparouhov is a Bulgarian-born entrepreneur and investor who is a Partner at Founders Fund and the Co-founder and President of Varda Space Industries, which builds space factories to manufacture pharmaceuticals in microgravity. He previously founded the healthcare app Nightingale, led growth at Teespring, and served as a Principal at Khosla Ventures. (02:03:05) - Jen Bucci is the Head of Design at Anduril Industries, where she leads the company's design identity across brand and product. In the conversation, she discusses the design elements of Anduril's NASCAR paint scheme, highlighting the use of black and safety yellow to reflect the company's core colors and their application in product design. She also emphasizes the synergy between Anduril's identity and NASCAR's bold graphics and high-visibility colors. (02:09:17) - Timeline (02:18:45) - Ben Kennedy, NASCAR's Executive Vice President and Chief Venue & Racing Innovations Officer, discusses the upcoming "Race on the Base" event scheduled for June 19-21, 2026, at Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. This historic event will feature NASCAR's top three series—the Cup Series, Xfinity Series, and Craftsman Truck Series—racing on a temporary three-mile circuit winding through the base, including the tarmac and past aircraft carriers. Kennedy highlights the partnership with Anduril, emphasizing their shared values of precision, speed, and innovation, and invites interested technology companies to explore collaboration opportunities with NASCAR. (02:25:28) - Jessica Wu, co-founder and CEO of Sola, an agentic process automation platform, discusses how Sola leverages AI to automate complex operational workflows by mimicking human actions across various platforms. She highlights the platform's application in logistics, where it integrates with internal portals, external systems, and spreadsheets to manage end-to-end shipment processes, reducing manual labor. Wu also announces Sola's recent $17 million Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with continued support from Conviction and Y Combinator. (02:33:36) - Parag Agrawal, former CEO of Twitter, has founded Parallel Web Systems, an AI startup developing infrastructure for AI applications to utilize web data. In the conversation, Agrawal discusses the launch of Parallel's Deep Research API, which enables enterprises to integrate advanced AI-driven web data analysis into their workflows, outperforming existing models in quality and accuracy. He also highlights the company's focus on optimizing the balance between cost and performance, aiming to provide superior AI solutions across various industries. (02:43:41) - Eric Simons is the founder and CEO of StackBlitz, the company behind Bolt, a web-based AI coding agent that rapidly grew from zero to $40 million in annual recurring revenue within five months. In the conversation, he discusses Bolt's transition to a new business model, emphasizing that as margins on AI prompting decrease, the company plans to generate revenue by hosting websites and applications. He also highlights the importance of offering the best services and workflows to customers, focusing on hosting services and collaborative product development tools to ensure high retention rates. (02:52:23) - Matt George, founder and CEO of Merlin, discusses the company's development of the Merlin Pilot, an advanced automation system for aircraft, and their recent announcement to go public, marking a significant milestone as one of the first defense startups to do so. He explains that this move will enable Merlin to raise capital for executing large contracts, particularly with the U. S. Air Force, and facilitate mergers and acquisitions. Additionally, George highlights the potential of their technology to reduce the number of pilots required per aircraft, leading to substantial cost savings for the airline industry and enhancing mission management capabilities for military operations. (02:59:06) - U. S. Plans Potential Equity Backing For Intel. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  Today's Thursday, August 14th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology. The Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Jordy, why are you bearish today? Did you not see that a company named Bullish went public and the stock popped 85%?

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Top signal.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Why? Why? Why? Aren't, yes, gross margins are negative, but is that not a green flag? Is that not a good thing? What does AI have to say about negative gross margins? Is it that bad? Break it down for me.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  I asked one of the smartest models in the world, ChatGPT 5. Negative gross margins are fine, right? We shouldn't worry about negative gross margin companies selling to negative gross margin companies, right? ChatGPT says, no, negative gross margins are generally not fine. When you have one negative gross margin company selling to another, that's usually a flashing red flag rather than a don't worry situation.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  Very rough.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  If you can't clearly explain how gross margins will turn positive and the plan relies on we'll make it up in volume, that's not strategy. That's financial quicksand.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Financial quicksand. It does seem like they solved alignment by default with this. It's great that it's pushing back during the Glazier era. It would have been like, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're not fine. They're not fine for most companies.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  But you're built different. You're different. You're in the conversation. Anyway, if you want to fix your gross margins, if you want to dial in your finances, go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Now, more important than ever, there is a weird trend shaping up. And it's a question that's on the top of my mind. It's a question that should be on the top of most venture capitalists' mind right now, I think. So the question is, how?

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Losses.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Bad? Yeah. How bad are AI startup unit economics? Also, good morning to the chat. Good morning, John Exley. Good morning, Sean.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Good morning, everyone.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Matt, techno chief is here. We got Gold Rock in the chat. Lot of, lot of names, lot of, lot of names I recognize. So good to see you guys.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  So here's an example of how the AI startup economy works right now. You, the user, the purchaser of the AI application, you pay a company, an application layer company, $1.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Seems pretty like a good deal. You're getting a nice little tool for a dollar. Then let's trace what happens. That company, that application layer company, they go to a foundation model company. They give that company $5. Then that foundation model company goes to a hyperscaler. They give that hyperscaler for cloud hosting, they give them $7. And in turn, that hyperscaler goes to a GPU maker and they give them $13. And so it's giving house of cards.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Giving chained losses.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Giving chain losses, but the question is how fast can inference fall? If fixed performance inference falls at the

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Inference come down.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Come down in price.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  I need you to come down.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  So if if fixed performance inference falls at the rate of Moore's law. Moore's law, for those who have been living under a data center, is the idea that the cost of compute on a dollar per flop basis cuts in half every two years. It used to be every year to 18 months and then it kind of stretched out, but we are still making gains in just more advanced semiconductors, better performance on a per dollar, per unit of energy cost. The chips are getting better and that's happening every two years. But if fixed performance inference, like inference at a certain level of intelligence is only getting cheaper like 50% every other year, that's probably not that great for your gross margins.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Because if you're if you're negative 500 gross percent gross margins, it's like, okay, in two years, you're still going to be negative 250. Then you're going to be negative 125. It's going to take you a long time to to kind of dig out of that hole. But there is cause for optimism. So algorithmic improvements in inference efficiency do seem to be moving quicker than Moore's law. We saw this with DeepSeek. DeepSeek R1, the reasoning model, is dramatically cheaper on a per million token basis than ChatGPT.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  And so we know it's possible. A lot of those algorithmic improvements are getting ported back to models right now. We see this with the Pareto Frontier and all the labs are in incredible competition.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Rumor by the way is DeepSeek is planning to launch R2 on Nvidia, the day of Nvidia's earnings.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Really?

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Probably just random.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  How solid is this rumor?

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't lean on it too hard, but I think it's a possibility.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Okay, so basically we're getting the Moore's Law improvements, like almost certainly. That's kind of just assumed to be true. There should be some algorithmic improvements that will end up. We should see cost of inference halving every six to 12 months, maybe five months on the, on the really fast, fast horizon. So I think we're not quite on a knife's edge here, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on. And we need to make sure that we're actually hitting all of those, all of those different algorithmic improvements as fast as possible.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Or just 5X prices.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the question is that I, if you had told me.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  And Gurley's point has broadly been if there, if you're, if you're selling, you know, some application layer software at negative gross margins, you are effectively subsidizing demand and creating more demand than if you're just.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Which makes sense because these businesses often trade on a revenue multiple and revenue growth multiple. So revenue growth going from having the, the, the, the steepest line to the hundred million dollars. That's the most important thing. People don't care. This is the shooting stars.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  We were joking around earlier, you were saying.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Supernovas versus shooting stars.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, you, you, earlier today, you were saying you, you were potentially interested in investing in some companies that don't have to pay for inference, maybe software companies.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  With little to no inference.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Maybe no inference cost.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Could be something there, maybe traditional SaaS.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Traditional enterprise SaaS might be making a comeback.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  There's been a yard sale in SaaS broadly.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Seriously, seriously.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  Maybe there's something there.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  I mean, it is, it is a, it is, it is a bull case if you, if you're running a company that is growing, but doesn't have upside down unit economics and is doing well on gross margins. You might, you know, even if there is some sort of market correction or pullback, like you're going to be in a strong position. So certainly treat the R and D AI agent stuff that you bolt on as incremental, as experimental. See how it can improve your workflow, but you should make sure that the demand is actually there.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should build AI agents to help negative gross margin AI companies achieve positive unit economics.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  I mean, at the same time, if you told me that as basically a prosumer, I would be paying $200 a month for ChatGPT and feeling that that's a steal and I pay that bill happily. And even 250 for Google Gemini, just to get access to VO, I'm happy with that one. I almost hit Grok three ultra pro plan, which is $300 a month yesterday. But I was like, I don't think I need Grok four heavy as well, but I want to test these models. It's also kind of my job, but still just the idea of spending $500 on, on effectively consumer software is, is somewhat remarkable. And so I, I do wonder what the elasticity of demand is.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  And if these AI companies that, that are selling AI enabled SaaS products were to quintuple prices, what their churn would look like.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're also, you're also a coastal elite, living in a bubble, in a technology bubble.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  And you'll happily pay hundreds of dollars a month.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is rare.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Leading edge models.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Just like I would pay hundreds of dollars a month for Restream because it's what powers this stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are, you can sign up for free at Restream.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  And Restream lets us aggregate all the chats, so we see.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we see everything on X and YouTube. But YouTube seems to be where it's at. I would recommend the YouTube chat. John Exley's there, greeting everyone, hanging out.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Chat room general.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  I recommend John Exley in the YouTube chat. But we have our first guest of the show, live in person, Aaron Gin. Let's bring him in from Hydrohost. He's been on the show three, four, five times, too many times to count.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to TBPN. Welcome to the Ultra Dome, Aaron. How you doing?

• 8:58Aaron Ginn?

  Bring it in.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Good to see you. Did you bring a present? What'd you bring?

• 9:01Aaron Ginn?

  Got a mask, got a mask to go on, man. Got a mask to go on. The top biggest China.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Take a seat, take a seat. Tell us how you're doing. Tell us how long you're in town. And then I want to go through the Nvidia H20 export. Then we have some pros and cons. We're going to debate it live on the show.

• 9:18Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I mean, we should, we need to discuss the fortune.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Please.

• 9:20Aaron Ginn?

  In terms of like who is favored to win as well.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  So you brought us some fortune cookies?

• 9:24Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  What's the story on the fortune cookies?

• 9:26Aaron Ginn?

  Well, actually, the fortune cookie is, so I'm Hoppa. It's called Half Asian, Half Asian Pacific Islanders. It's actually not Chinese at all. It's a fortune cookie. It's from San Francisco.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Should we unbox an open one?

• 9:35Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  See what our fortune is for the show?

• 9:37Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. See, we should see who is actually going to win this AI war. So.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  It's open.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Are these rigged, by the way?

• 9:45Aaron Ginn?

  These rigged? No, I wish they were funny ones. No, they're not bad.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  There's a company that sells ads in fortune cookies. So they give the fortune cookies away for free, but then when you, when you open the fortune cookie, you get an ad. So I am opening my fortune cookie. It says, "Your careful nature will bring you financial success."

• 10:04John Coogan?

  I think that's pretty accurate. Jordy, wasn't I just talking about this? We need to dial back the capex at TVPN. Um, your careful nature will bring you financial success. What was I telling you earlier? I was telling you, we need to dial back the capex, less, less supercars.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  We don't need that incremental rack.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  You are next in line for promotion. Wow.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Okay, that one seems a little more memorable.

• 10:30Aaron Ginn?

  And mine is, uh, gold is in your, oh, excuse me. Excuse me. My dad came out there for a second. Uh, gold is in your future.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Maybe Jensen will get you a gold plated rack. He used to do that, right? He used to deliver gold plated racks to all the different labs.

• 10:47Aaron Ginn?

  I think Sam has like probably 20 of those, right?

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Sam has 20?

• 10:50Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then whenever you need to talk about China, you can, you can just pull out these whenever you want.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  We do need, we do need some different hats.

• 10:57Aaron Ginn?

  I know, I know Jordy loves the hats.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow, these are cool, these are cool.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  I might actually take this home for the weekend.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  This is a pretty sweet hat. I like this.

• 11:06Aaron Ginn?

  Me and my dad has one. That's what he uses the garden in, so.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's highly practical, highly functional.

• 11:11Aaron Ginn?

  It is, right?

• 11:12John Coogan?

  It does seem to be creating some sort of echo in my ears, but I'm down. It looks, it's actually terrible for the lighting. We need a whole new set of cinematography lights in here if we're gonna, if we're gonna make this work. Anyway, uh, good to have you in the studio. We've been talking about H20s. We, we talked to you about the export ban on Monday, but I wanted to run through, uh, kind of now that the story has developed a little bit more. Most recently, the Financial Times reported Beijing presses local chips on tech giants. Alibaba and ByteDance are told to justify orders for US-made semiconductors. So I want to run through all of the pros and cons of an export ban. And we've written some on the whiteboard.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  And so if you two can go to the whiteboard, we can run through these each, uh, one at a time and try and, uh, get your reaction to them, uh, step by step. Okay, so let's start with the case for allowing exports of Nvidia H20s to China. So the first, the first, the first pro camp, if I want Nvidia to be allowed to export H20s, is it will increase China's dependency on the United States. Aaron, do you agree with that? Is that a good reason to allow exports? Okay, why?

• 12:24Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, America always wins when we excel at soft power.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  How does it increase soft power? Walk me through that.

• 12:31Aaron Ginn?

  Because the way that the architecture actually works is not just a hunk of metal.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:34Aaron Ginn?

  That's what people assume. So it's a combination of software and as well as Jensen is pushing this with the next direction with Grace and Ruben and basically ARM. So the future direction of GPUs is essentially like Nvidia is an Apple-like software platform.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  But aren't they completely fixated on making sure they aren't dependent on Nvidia generally? Right?

• 12:56Aaron Ginn?

  Well, the only way to do that is to build off of Nvidia.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  And they're doing that.

• 13:00Aaron Ginn?

  With Huawei.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so that's why we need more there.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  So if we export, we hurt Huawei?

• 13:05Aaron Ginn?

  Yes.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Essentially, okay.

• 13:07Aaron Ginn?

  Take money from them.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  What about just the libertarian free market capitalism?

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Potentially underrated.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Potentially underrated. Like, should the US government control exports broadly? Where should they draw the line? You know, the famous example is like, you know, you make an F-35. We're not going to let you sell that to a near peer adversary. But why aren't GPUs in that category?

• 13:32Aaron Ginn?

  Because you could have a GPU in here and it's not going to launch and kill somebody. So as well as the future, the past Biden AI diffusion rule, you could have an F-35. You could not have an Hopper. So there's not a consistency in the theory of the so-called expert class.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Aaron Ginn?

  So much so that, yeah, so so much so that like, you know, like we, I think there was 78 or 77 F-35s sold to Portugal.

• 13:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:54Aaron Ginn?

  Portugal was on the banned list or the bad boy list.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. How'd that happen?

• 13:57Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, I literally asked the people out there and they're like, we didn't know they're on the list. So, you know, it's over exaggeration of like, you know, that's why it's the purity test of like, well, what about this? What about this? What about this? And the reality is like, we can be reasonable about this and say that like, if the goal is to create dependency on the US, because, you know, I like less war. I know I like less people going to war. If we can increase China dependency on our platforms, therefore less likely to go to war with Taiwan.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:23Aaron Ginn?

  And that's kind of the idea. And we actually can be very successful at that because we're really good at being platforms.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Okay, what about the case for just pumping our bags? Lots of people are long Nvidia right now. It's the largest company in America, largest company in the world, $4 trillion.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Well beyond.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Well beyond 4 trillion now?

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it like 4.4?

• 14:40Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I think something like that.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  They had another 400 million market, 400 billion in market cap without me even paying attention. So, yeah, how, how good is the export, is the export like allowing H20 exports for Nvidia? It feels like they already took a write down. Is this actually a material piece of their business? Is this important to Nvidia shareholders?

• 15:04Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, it probably have a very minimal impact. It's, it's barely anything.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about this idea? I was talking to somebody who was, who was very anti Nvidia exporting to China just because of,

• 15:18John Coogan?

  there's, there's no reason to because there's plenty of GPU demand in the United States. So Nvidia could essentially sell 100% of the chips that they fab at TSMC to American companies. So they, so anything that they sell to China is just pulling away from American GPU demand. It's making American GPU farms, like more GPU poor.

• 15:39Aaron Ginn?

  Has that dude ever talked to anyone outside of America?

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably.

• 15:43Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, because they would say, we're not interested in that.

• 15:45John Coogan?

  Wait, what, what?

• 15:46Aaron Ginn?

  So if you talk to anyone who's like, one is that most of this technology, yeah, cool. It's like fun. You know, y'all using AI to edit videos, use chat GPT to search. The way at which AI is viewed by everyone outside of America is is basically inherently connected to the sovereignty of the nation.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 16:01Aaron Ginn?

  Try go telling Saudi Arabia like, hey, just give that stuff to Bezos.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, no, I, I, I just mean like, there's that famous story of Larry Ellison and Elon Musk sitting down at dinner with Jensen Huang and saying, Jensen, we will pay any amount of money. Give us as many GPUs as you can possibly give us. We need 100,000 H100s. We need as many as we can. We're trying to build superclusters. Like any excess capacity, any excess supply you have, we will soak up for sure.

• 16:31Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  And so, isn't there a decent argument just for, hey, American companies should be at the top of the buyer's list for what American companies produce?

• 16:41Aaron Ginn?

  But they are right now. So, so, but, but the real thing is that, that if you assume this, which is what Jensen's doing.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Aaron Ginn?

  Like he's basically pushing everyone to him. He is the apple of silicon.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Aaron Ginn?

  Are there Apple stores in other countries?

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yes, but iPhones, but if iPhones were out of stock in New York City, like someone would make the make the argument that Apple should prioritize fulfilling orders in in America before they expanded international.

• 17:09Aaron Ginn?

  And I think Nvidia does that because Nvidia is an American company, but at the same time.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  But every H20 could have been an H100, correct?

• 17:16Aaron Ginn?

  No, no.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  It's the same line time at TSMC.

• 17:19Aaron Ginn?

  Because one is that you have to remember Nvidia is a foundry-less organization. I mean, it has 700 or 70 billion in free cash flow last quarter. So its capex is, I think, like a couple billion dollars. So you can't just go to your supplier and be like, hey, just do this. Like, that's not the way foundries work.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Because TSMC is also fabbing for Apple and Google with the TPU.

• 17:40Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, Nvidia is the bulk of that, as well as like they removed all the H20 from the production line and most of what is remaining is like what's in the inventory. And as well as like people confuse, conflate constantly, especially with these like Nvidia bears, where they assume that Nvidia is actually making the lithography, assuming that they are the ones that control the foreign animated process. They're not. Like, they hire someone else to do that. That's why I said last time. You want to put this on while you're playing the bear? The...

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Don't do it.

• 18:10Aaron Ginn?

  I was gonna get a panda, man.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  A panda. If you put that on, you will not be able to see anything.

• 18:16Aaron Ginn?

  Can you even hear me?

• 18:17John Coogan?

  But he's not a bear.

• 18:18Aaron Ginn?

  Nvidia bear here.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  He's going.

• 18:20Aaron Ginn?

  He's just role-playing. Role-play? I mean, we're in Hollywood, so the...

• 18:26John Coogan?

  You're gonna just throw it down.

• 18:27Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, but the, most of the Nvidia bears, they, one, they don't understand the segmentation of actually all the spaces made. Two, they underappreciate the platform that is associated with Nvidia. And three, go look at the list of the superintelligence team.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Are you, am I hearing you correctly when you're saying Nvidia instead of N-Vidia? Is that correct?

• 18:48Aaron Ginn?

  It's, yeah, it's like N-Vidia.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Okay. I was just wondering if there's like a pronunciation that I'm getting wrong. Visibility and leverage. One of the reasons we want to be able to export to China is that it gives us more visi- ability into where the chips actually end up. Whereas if there's a diversion regime where they're all going to Malaysia and then flying wherever, they could be going to North Korea. Whereas at least if we are licensing to send them to China, we know it's going to Alibaba. It's going to ByteDance and that's not, that's not the worst possible place that they could go.

• 19:24Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 19:24John Coogan?

  What do you think about that?

• 19:25Aaron Ginn?

  I think it's reasonable.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Is that a reasonable argument?

• 19:26Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, that's reasonable.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Okay. What about just 15% for the big guy, Uncle Sam? Is that a good reason to export?

• 19:33Aaron Ginn?

  The funny thing is you can remember the Biden thing, right?

• 19:35John Coogan?

  What was that?

• 19:36Aaron Ginn?

  Remember the Biden, the Ukraine, it was called the big guy, leave aside for the big guy.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Okay, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:40Aaron Ginn?

  The backdoor payments.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Okay, so this is as American as I've got.

• 19:43Aaron Ginn?

  That's where I got that, that's where I got that. Okay, so it's homage to Biden, right? Well, if you know, if he was sentient, he would be, he would be appreciated. Shots fired. So the, I mean, so export taxes are illegal by the constitution. That's, it's an immutable fact. The, in some respects, like, I'm very happy about reshoring to our shores. I'm very happy all this. This is voluntary, as far as I could find out, completely voluntary.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:09Aaron Ginn?

  He's, he's not going to increase the price to China. That's what some people have been saying, that it's a guy, oh, like, as if, it's just weird, like, some of the, the Nvidia hawks or AI doomers are like, well, now Nvidia is going to be more expensive than Huawei. I mean, one, Huawei is already cheaper.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:25Aaron Ginn?

  But two, like, now you want Nvidia to make more money?

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Is Huawei cheaper on a, like, dollar per kilowatt basis, like, unit energy?

• 20:32Aaron Ginn?

  No, no, no, like, Nvidia's, or Huawei's cheaper as, like, a holistic solution.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Okay, got it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:38Aaron Ginn?

  It's, it's more expensive to run, but they don't care.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I heard a take from Dylan Patel at Semi Analysis that with this 15% tax, the H20 is already less profitable than the H100. And so this could potentially put them in the nightmare scenario of having similar gross margins to AMD. Because AMD is, is way, way lower. So I think they will be fine.

• 21:03Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, they'll be fine.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  So, so maybe that's a good, maybe that's a good reason. It does seem like tariff revenue is going through the roof for the United States and.

• 21:10Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like, 300 billion is the projection or something like that?

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, like, it does seem like money. is flowing into the government at some level that's higher than previous years.

• 21:18Aaron Ginn?

  You know, and so far, the way that

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Check the PPI, though.

• 21:22Aaron Ginn?

  Well, so far, it's not really coming from our pocket, right? So about 80% is being absorbed by companies.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Sustain chip leadership. If we export the H20 to China, this allows America, this puts more dollars in American companies' pockets to fuel future versions of CUDA, future learning curve step downs in chip dominance. And it will ultimately unlock the American ability to produce the one nanometer chip, the zero nanometer chip, the negative one nanometer, the negative one nanometer chip, which is what we're all hoping for to bring down.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  First come negative gross margins, then negative nanometer chips.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  That's the future.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  That's the future.

• 22:06Aaron Ginn?

  This is, I think, I think it's indifferent to Nvidia. I think this matters more to like the indie cards. So the Grox, the Positrons, the Etches of the World, AMDs. Like, I would apply that to there, but in terms of, because people forget that every rule that applies in Nvidia applies to them, too.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:23Aaron Ginn?

  And cutting off half of all AI developers.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:26Aaron Ginn?

  To Nvidia, like I think it would have, like I said earlier about profit, like profit side, I think it's kind of a move. Yeah, yeah. But to an AMD, it could be a much bigger deal.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Okay. What we, you mentioned the new chip companies etched, Cerebras, Grok, etc.

• 22:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, Bositron, yeah.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Do, do any of those chips, I mean, I imagine that they all fall under the chip restrictions because they are, they were never designed to be nerfed. But if the nerf is around like memory, some of them don't even do HBM, or for example. So are any of them sneaking through currently? Do you have any insight into what's going on with those new chip companies and exports?

• 23:08Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, as far as I know, every deployment I've heard about with indie cards, they all required a, an export license.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  An export license, okay. So they might be paying 15% going forward.

• 23:17Aaron Ginn?

  That, maybe, I mean, I think, I think this really applies to.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Nvidia.

• 23:22Aaron Ginn?

  But again, this is where, going back to, I am a free marketer, where.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:26Aaron Ginn?

  I give props to the president for being creative. At the same time, it does open up weird doors.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Okay. What about this idea that it forces China to subsidize their domestic chip manufacturing supply chain more aggressively? And that takes money out of the pocket of the CCP. Because if they want to stay competitive, if they want to keep Huawei competitive, if they want to keep SMIC and SME competitive, they need to tax their population and spend more money to make those chips competitive.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  But I think if you look at the history of China subsidizing various industries, it's gone fairly well for them. So I don't necessarily think that they're insane.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, this might be marginal, but what's your take?

• 24:06Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, generally speaking, the Chinese customer wants Nvidia. They do not want Huawei, which is why the Financial Times reporting as it is.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  And that's purely because of CUDA or just pricing or everything?

• 24:17Aaron Ginn?

  It's because the goal of the CCP regime is stability. And Nvidia introduces a new vector that they can't control. As well as like many of these rules, like people have to understand that, yes, the Standing Committee and the Strategic Committee has the ability to influence what the original governors do. But many of these things that are being reported are coming from the governors. And governors have really, like China's very, very federalized.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Okay, now we're in meme territory.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  But important.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Important. So one of the benefits of exporting H20s to China is that they will become addicted to AI girlfriends and AI boyfriends, and this will hasten population collapse.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  So in theory, we should give them as many chips as they want.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Yes. If AI is bad, and AI will lead to an AI girlfriend apocalypse.

• 25:05Aaron Ginn?

  Was this yours?

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this has been an ongoing discussion.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Everyone's worried about this. Everyone's worried about this. This is on the timeline. So if you think that deployment of frontier AI is bad for the population.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  The AI psychosis doomers, the one-shot crowd should be heavily in favor of giving them as many chips as we can get.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Imagine Xi Jinping is thinking about invading Taiwan. He fires up some H20s. He's like, I've gotten to the frontier of warfare. I've discovered new warfare techniques. And he's completely delusional, and everyone realizes that he's been one-shot by AI psychosis. And it creates upheaval in the country, which would be net beneficial for America, maybe.

• 25:50Aaron Ginn?

  That that is flipping around the doomers argument back on their face.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:55Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I mean, that that deserves a maybe like a gong.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Hit the gong.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Hit it big.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Interesting form.

• 26:05Aaron Ginn?

  That's how Americans do it. It's like in Asian culture.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Oh, it's more of a small.

• 26:10Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  More traditional form.

• 26:12John Coogan?

  OK, what about what about this last one? One of the benefits of exporting the H20 to China will be it will force China to invest in negative gross margin businesses.

• 26:24Aaron Ginn?

  Like venture.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  And they will get over their skis and they will fund a whole bunch of companies with negative gross margins. And it will.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  They can create an incredible chain of losses with negative gross margin companies selling to negative gross margin companies and just destroying value.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 26:38Aaron Ginn?

  Well, as a positive gross margin company, yes, so, yeah, they they love doing stuff like that.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  They do?

• 26:44Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they kind of built a house of cards.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know you had positive gross margins. Get out of here. See ya.

• 26:49Aaron Ginn?

  How dare you make money? I would never have an actual.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  In this economy, how dare you?

• 26:53Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Dare you? Let's flip over to the reasons for the ban. You're going to need to debunk these. But I will play I will play the the role of the pro H20 ban. Let's keep keep H20s in America.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Coogan, the hawk.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  And the first, yeah, yeah, the faux hawk. I'll style my hair in a faux hawk. The the the true China hawk who wants to ban Nvidia H20s would say that that by exporting, we will wind up with increased capabilities for China. We want to keep AI, we want to keep anything that is that is valuable to their economy, valuable to their military capabilities, anything like that, out of their hands. Why should I not be worried about that?

• 27:39Aaron Ginn?

  I think it's one that the fact of going back to what Jen said, which is accurate, that. Uh, over half of the super intelligence team is actually Chinese nationals and then add in the people who are Chinese descent. It's like 75%. So we can't really control that.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:52Aaron Ginn?

  Math is universal, right?

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:53Aaron Ginn?

  Like engineering is universal. So saying that it's like saying we're gonna, we're gonna really control the way French make croissants. And we're gonna really get after them and say, you cannot use that much butter.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Let me, let me steal man this more. Let me steal man this more because, because, uh, yeah, math is universal. E equals mc squared is universal or basic physics is, the rocket science is universal. And yet we might not want to export rocket motors because then you can just build up extra capability. There is a difference between having the weights of a model and being able to inference it a trillion times a day across your entire population. That might be a strategic advantage.

• 28:31Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah. Again, I go back to the fact of that China's going to China and they're, they're very limited things we actually can do. And the things we can do, going back to this idea of like, we can make them more dependent.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 28:42Aaron Ginn?

  Right? Because, because I, one of the things I believe about trade, one of the things I believe about free markets is like, I'm as a universal, I'm against war. I think conflict is bad.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 28:50Aaron Ginn?

  And, and at times it's just, just war theory. And, but when you kind of just hyper focus on this, you overextend what we think we actually can do. And, and this is where America as the.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but the China hawks are gonna say, you know, have a, a potential conflict with Taiwan. They're gonna be leveraging drones.

• 29:08Aaron Ginn?

  This increases it. So that's the funny thing about the, all these China hawks things is like, they're creating the scenario for war. Like all of these things, many of them we can't control, many of them we can't, and then we over reserve ourselves.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's say they are gearing up to try to take Taiwan. Don't we want them to have less compute?

• 29:23Aaron Ginn?

  No, this like, this basically include, increasing the dependency on us decreases the life.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  But do we have any leverage after they get the H20s?

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, they're gonna, they're already focused on decreasing their dependency on American companies, Taiwan itself.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  It's already happening.

• 29:39Aaron Ginn?

  No, I think you're, one, you're overestimating the, one, the power the actual, the central committee actually has. And, two, many of these things, you have to delineate between what is blistating and propaganda and actual reality. The Chinese companies operate very differently than what actually happens in the committee. So, it's, yes, the committee has a lot of power, but it's more of like structured socialism than it is communism. That all of the ingenuity around DeepSeek came from just Chinese engineers trying something.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:11Aaron Ginn?

  It was not, the committee was like, "Go be better at this." And I think there's many things in this zone where they think that we can impact it because we view it as a state-by-state actor action. When in reality, it's like, it's like, almost like China's coming to y'all and saying, "Hey, you gotta, you know, do the less gong stuff." And he goes to the president, he goes, "Hey, Jordan and John, they hit the gong too much." And Trump's gonna be like...

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  They've already tried.

• 30:33Aaron Ginn?

  I was like, "What am I, you know, what am I gonna do about that?" Right? It's like, John, Jordan, they're great, they're beautiful, beautiful human beings, right?

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of dynamic in China that I think is maybe underrated, which is that even though Beijing is pressing Alibaba and ByteDance to not buy H20s, Alibaba and ByteDance are independent companies, they don't want to be GPU poor, they want Nvidia chips, correct?

• 30:57Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like, they'll, you know, placate, they'll do...

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Of course, they'll be compliant, but if it was up to them, they would buy the best and they would buy the most.

• 31:04Aaron Ginn?

  And this is why leaning into our strengths, which is like, we are the best at making chips. Let's draw them, create maybe a division in the ranks, right? Rather than just being here, being like, "Ugh, China," right? It's like, many of these are, one, are failed neocons, right? Who make up these kind of reasons and excuses and got us into all these like wars that didn't go anywhere. But then you actually like, read into, okay, so let's say we did all this stuff. It actually creates a scenario for war.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Aaron Ginn?

  This actually creates a scenario for less war. This creates a scenario of maybe division in the ranks.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:35Aaron Ginn?

  Right? Because we increase the dependency, we increase trade, and therefore lowers the threshold. But this creates isolation, which therefore increases likelihood of invasion of Taiwan.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  What about the risk of, of short-term leverage over, you know, China dependency over long-term independence? I'm thinking of that IP leakage point, the idea that maybe cloning the Coup de État...

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  Hate to break it to you, brother, the IP's leaking.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  It is true that obviously they can get their hands on one H20, tear it down, reverse engineer it. But there might be gains to be had from running a true H20 cluster, the lessons that you learn from that, and then porting that back to Huawei Ascend clusters. And so is there any, is there any risk of, of, of setting up, you know, a series of large H20 clusters that actually allows, that actually accelerates Huawei?

• 32:26Aaron Ginn?

  So this is what's different about the Trump, one of the differences between Trump administration and Biden administration. Biden administration was actually not that focused on this because they basically targeted the ability to buy chips, but they didn't really have as much restrictions on the ability to make chips. Trump is targeting the ability to make chips and having less restrictions on the ability to buy. Because if you can't have the ability to make, it's like-

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but Nvidia has an R and D center in Shanghai.

• 32:49Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, but they, but they don't, they don't make anything.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's different than ASML and TSMC. And so, and so what we're not hearing in the news-

• 32:55Jordi Hays?

  I think it's important from an IP leakage standpoint. I'm just saying it's not being, it doesn't get solved by the ban, but it's happening regardless.

• 33:02Aaron Ginn?

  The software is made, the software is made in America, but again, it's, it's, one is like most of that stuff is open source because again, it's, it's a combination of hardware and software. But the IP leakage you should be concerned about relates to foundry equipment, it does not relate to Nvidia. That, that is a very, very low threshold of concern.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Like Xyze and Trump, like those companies that make the mirrors that go inside the foundry.

• 33:23Aaron Ginn?

  Like the EDA software stuff that like, just basically came out about, like that stuff relates to the ability, that's the IP leakage you should worry about.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  And we're not seeing anything in the news about Trump moving on allowing ASML to send the photography machines.

• 33:36Aaron Ginn?

  No, he went the opposite direction of the Biden administration.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  He went the opposite direction.

• 33:38Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so, because if you control the ability to produce, then all this good stuff starts happening.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 33:42Aaron Ginn?

  But if you're like, which is what happened in the previous administration was they inverted it. They thought that because the, as I said last time on your show, that they associate GPUs with AI doormatism. And if you remove the like, AI is a god and we don't want a Chinese god, then all this stuff kind of just doesn't make any sense.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Okay, let's get into the meme ones. One of the reasons, one of the reasons to ban exports of H20s to China is that it will result in higher employment for Chinese thumbnail artists. So Chinese thumbnail artists are obviously going to be put out of business by generative AI models. If your job is creating a ton of slop content on listicle websites, you're having a rough time with the rollout of GPT-5, of course, right? Large language models. And so if we hobble the ability for China to run LLMs, that will result in higher employment for thumbnail artists. What about that?

• 34:39Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, China is not the lowest cost manufacturer or producer of content or in that. It's the Philippines, Malaysia, Mexico.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  That's true. They actually do a lot of work in the factory that's less displacable. They should be worried about robotics potentially, humanoid robotics.

• 34:56Aaron Ginn?

  Yes. But you know, maybe that does what? Where was that thing?

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Aaron Ginn?

  Right there?

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. What about incentivizing AI researchers to leave so they can be GPU-rich? You're a top AI researcher in China and you can't get any H20s and you're sick and tired of working at a GPU-poor company like Alibaba or ByteDance. And you say, you know what? I'm going to MSL. I'm going to Meta. I'm going to OpenAI. I'm going to Anthropic. I'm hopping a flight to San Francisco.

• 35:26Aaron Ginn?

  Isn't that a pasta?

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So that's why we should ban it because if they're GPU-rich over there, they'll stay. But if they're GPU-poor, they will say, I got, Zuck is setting up 100,000 H100s and 10s. I want to train on that. I got to get to Palo Alto.

• 35:41Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, but as well as like Alibaba isn't going to pay them $100 million.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 35:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. No, no, no, it's like if it's independent.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they both have factors, right? And so if you keep the Chinese AI companies GPU-poor, it will be an incentive for AI researchers to come to America.

• 35:58Aaron Ginn?

  I mean.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  It's a good argument, right?

• 36:01Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, on the edges, maybe.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, marginal, marginal.

• 36:05Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like it requires lots of confounding factors that like make it an unpredictable sort of thing. But I mean, again, like I don't think, I think the desire to be on the superintelligence team, I mean, you know, would you want to go be on it for that sounds pretty nice, right? A billion dollar cash out. So like.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  I'm happy right here.

• 36:23Aaron Ginn?

  You're happy right here? I mean, look at the car outside. I don't know. Billion dollars. But that is completely independent of GPU capacity.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:30Aaron Ginn?

  So that's where this is much more of a, and actually let me maybe inverse this argument. Because I think a lot of the constraints as we've seen on the recent frontier models are heavily driven by talent. So if we keep the talent over there and they're basically provide artificial constraints because we give them these things, then actually they're going to make more progress on making it more efficient and become more skilled at things that we're not skilled at.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Is there a risk that they go closed source and we don't actually, we're not actually able to port back the inference savings that we're seeing from deep sea?

• 37:04Aaron Ginn?

  No, because I think they're really, I mean, they don't care about open source. They're very clearly. They care about soft power. Yes. Yeah, and so that's why they're doing everything they're doing, which is kind of counter us. I'd say that China generally behaves as a very ingenious population, but in terms of being, they're much more reactive to us than we presuppose. But there is an innate desire in the population to have soft power. That's why they did the Belt and Road Initiative, and this is like the basically renewed effort. So I'd rather basically starve them of any capability to actually project power externally by creating an export nation and that we can basically become the dominant export nation.

• 37:42Aaron Ginn?

  And that we're like something like this is that in realities that they just have millions and millions more engineers than we do. And so we want those people to come to America if they, you know, basically want to betray the regime. And we want to make sure they advance that IP, but if we continue to isolate them, they're basically, they're just going to make advancements even though they are GPU poor. Because that goes to an over-protectionism on our side where we create a more GPU slop because we have way more high-performance computing and we just don't care to make it efficient.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 38:18Aaron Ginn?

  So I'd rather have that be to where all that stuff is just happening on our stuff. So in some respects, by giving them more, we actually decrease the incentive for them to make innovations because they actually will have more GPUs.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  So this is the, this is the solution.

• 38:29Aaron Ginn?

  Less incentive to focus on efficiency.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  This is the solution to negative gross margins. This is what will save venture capital. It all comes back. Anyway, I want to go to a post that you put up. We can wrap up with the with the board. If you want to design, if you want to take that board and design it into a beautiful graphic, do it on Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together and you can get started for free. You posted, "This is really a race between America and the world," and you have the generative AI startups ranking, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, XAI. What was your takeaway from this chart of gen AI startups?

• 39:09Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, that one. Yeah, they, I think it's a, yeah, China's obviously listed listed the most out of out of America. But I think one is that it's our ability as a nation to invest in stuff that we think is revolutionary and become, again, the default nation. We want to be the standard, want to be the exporter. But in reality is that seeing, when have we ever seen a great wave of new infrastructure development that has occurred this fast that's international? So that goes back to, I don't know, whatever China shocking person that you're talking about. That's where he does it. That's why I make a little bit of a jest of a joke of, has he talked to anyone who doesn't live in America? Because we haven't ever seen that in Silicon Valley, to where there's a big motion in Silicon Valley to

• 39:54Aaron Ginn?

  do this investment, you know, social media, mobile, web three. And what we see now is the fact of like, all these countries are doing sovereign AI projects. That's where the roll up effect, the ability for us to control this is it's way more like Bitcoin, where it's something accessible to everybody. And and that's what leaning in on that side is kind of accepting the escape velocity that we're in, versus the other side wants to live, I think, in a little bit of a fairy tale, being like, oh, wouldn't it be nice if we controlled those things? It's like if you have children, you're like, well, wouldn't it be nice if you stopped hitting your sister? And the kid's going to be like, Right, and it's like, you can only, you can really only extend yourself so far when you are a world occupied by multiple free agents, multiple sovereign nations.

• 40:38Aaron Ginn?

  And so I'd rather lean into our strengths where we can actually execute control. The more that we are a platform, the more soft power we have, therefore, I believe, more peace and more prosperity, less starvation, greater things for humanity, and we can still control things. But if we're in this other side where we think that we can just hit people with sticks, like, they're just gonna be like, alright, I don't wanna play this game anymore.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  Would you go further? Would you allow the export of the B200?

• 41:01Aaron Ginn?

  The, I think some version of Blackwell should be in there. I don't have much of an opinion on how much nerve it should be or anything like that.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Gavin Baker had a good post that you reposted. He said, "Any journalist describing Nvidia H20 as an advanced chip is not a serious person. They're either ignorant or ideological. The H20 is circa four years behind the actually advanced B200 that Nvidia sells to America and our allies. The B200 has 30x more compute, 2x the memory bandwidth, 2x the memory of the H20 sold in China, arguably 100x more usable compute. Selling H20s to China is good policy, as they are slightly 1.5x better than domestic Chinese accelerators. Selling the H20 thus effectively slows down the development of a robust domestic Chinese AI accelerator ecosystem, which would be good for China long-term.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  In the event of conflict, we would simply stop selling H20s to China, and that would be, and they would be left with inferior domestic alternatives, and America would have a five-to-six-year technology advantage over those domestic alternatives. Conversely, if we do not sell the H20 to China during peacetime, they would absolutely build effective domestic alternatives over time. These alternatives would almost certainly be less powerful, less power-efficient than Nvidia. See the Huawei Cloud Matrix 384, with its super-fast but power-hungry optical scale-up fabric. But China has way more power available for AI than the United States due to their embrace of solar." Selling H20s...

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Selling H20s to China during peacetime is also good for the world and America because it means their AI ecosystem is comparable to the American AI ecosystem and we can easily adopt the impressive algorithmic innovation seen in their open source models like Deep Sea. And the world benefits from a robust Chinese open source ecosystem that remains well behind American closed source frontier models. The fact that the Chinese government is discouraging the use of H20s in favor of domestic alternatives should tell a rational, dispassionate observer that all they need to know about which country benefits from the sale of H20s in China.

• 43:05Aaron Ginn?

  Soft power.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. My question is, is there something structural going on where China has to remain open source because of their position in the market?

• 43:15Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like I think what Gavin is reflecting, which is more of my disposition, is if we're going to make a strategic decision around, because we still want to be the dominant superpower in the world, we have to be realistic and pragmatic about where we are. Like the fact is that we have, I don't know how high is the debt, 30 trillion, right?

• 43:34John Coogan?

  It's negligible in the age of AGI. Once we get a fast takeoff. Fast takeoff fixes this. If we just grow GDP at 5,000% a year, we're fine.

• 43:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, so the, or just like fudge the numbers, right? So the, if we're going to make a decision about any sort of policy trajectory, we have to understand like what we actually are. Like we generally have a quite hostile politics. We have many states that are essentially bankrupt and we have a military that is still the strongest, but is kind of lacking on the asymmetric capabilities, which is why we have Android being created. So if we're going to say, hey, we're going to go to basically to a soft war with somebody, we should really understand what's going on. And I think there's many people who occupy the China hawk policy who, like as Gavin said, who don't even understand this technology. Or they co-mingle.

• 44:27Aaron Ginn?

  TSMC with Nvidia. And so if they if they're if they're constructing an argument based on bad priors, then it's really hard to take anything else they say seriously. Because it and that's why I go back to the AI. If you remove the AI doomerism, many of the people who are China hawks are just actually AI doomers. They think that Terminator is coming, it's going to kill us all. We're just robots. A very old

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Do you think that's the flow? I thought it might be the opposite. It's like you're a China hawk and you need to justify your policy. And so you you wrap it in paper clipping.

• 45:01Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I mean, I can go like either way. Yeah, I can say going either way. Yeah, but I just don't believe that. And if you have any, for example, the number of genes you have is like basically hundreds of thousands. The number of cells you have is in is in the billions. The number of neuron synapses you have is about 500 trillion. The number of basically spaces in the model that like Open AI uses is 500 times less.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Aaron Ginn?

  Right? And even in the fact, even the fact of like, the way that we construct LLMs a day, if you did that in human brain, that's called a seizure. Right? So like, we have to, we have to realize that, that again, it doesn't mean

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes and don't have a seizure.

• 45:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it doesn't mean AI can be amazing. Like, it doesn't mean any of these things. But but it's very different than from from intelligence. There's enough in

• 45:53John Coogan?

  Back on the Kurzweil timelines, it's back on Kurzweil. Ray Kurzweil makes this argument that, you know, the singularity will occur when the total amount of flops in computing is is greater than the total amount of flops equivalent in the in the human brain. And we're we're orders of magnitude away from that. So you really have to, you really

• 46:12Aaron Ginn?

  Within one human being, it will encompass all the computing power in that lifetime of 80-ish years a person lived than anything we have on planet Earth. So so like, just sit down and be humble. Like, because when you're humble, you can like basically appreciate. Because because even the fact of like, What the the way LLMs work are very directive.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:31Aaron Ginn?

  But that's not even the way attention works and perception works. Like, do you recognize you're sitting in a chair? Like, do you feel that?

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Aaron Ginn?

  But your body does, but your brain doesn't acknowledge it. Right? So like even that differentiation between that there is so much computing happen in your body that you're not even aware of, which makes us such an effective species. And LLMs, again, they're great. Like, it but you're overextending yourself to thinking that because you have all of this power and all this energy, uh, being being able to generate T flops, that you're gonna say like, oh, you're a person now, or you have you have sentience.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:04Aaron Ginn?

  And that's just not the way the brain works.

• 47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Aaron Ginn?

  And that's not even not even the way intelligence works.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. I like that, uh, there's some, I think it's a Will Manitis post where he's saying, like, when they invented the steam engine, uh, there were people that were saying, like, like, the brain is just like a steam engine. And then when they invented the, uh, the, the, the gasoline powered engine, they're like, it's just like the the human brain is just like a gas powered engine.

• 47:24Aaron Ginn?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  And then when they invent the the CPU, they're like, the brain is just like a CPU and GPU. The brain is just like a GPU.

• 47:29Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  People want to like bring their their their current technology understanding into like the human.

• 47:34Aaron Ginn?

  And and maybe we have.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Cars, 10 horsepower.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's the same, yeah.

• 47:39Aaron Ginn?

  There's 10 horses in there, isn't there?

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Aaron Ginn?

  And and and like, one of the things I love about the the brain so much is like, it's it's very, for example, the its ability to be plast- uh, plastic, right? Being able to mold itself, which LLMs can't do.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:52Aaron Ginn?

  Because they see novel information and they basically just play, ugh, right? They kind of like freak out. But but even even now, we understand, uh, neuromodulators like acetylcholine, dopamine, like norephrine, even though we understand that, uh, whenever you see something, um, you know, you're you all have kids, when you see your kids, uh, your body releases these neuromodulators that creates basically the attachments to synapses and forms memories. And the way that we even understand that cocktail, we just know it just gets released. We don't know the percentages. We have no freaking clue. And and as well as like, if I take your brain and then release it the same amount, right? Just like take electrons there and just boom, right? That you don't have the same effect, right? That that how does directive focus impact cells? We have no idea.

• 48:37Aaron Ginn?

  Like, like, you can, for example, like, hold this gong or hold that, right?

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Holding Diet Coke.

• 48:42Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, like, or even these two things, right?

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  We don't even know what's happening when you have a fridge cigarette.

• 48:46Aaron Ginn?

  There you're, how how does like information affect this Diet Coke and this? Like, translate from cell information? To the fact of me and Dylan and caffeine and science has no clue like how that works, but we know it works. And so

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, I expect podcasters to figure it out.

• 49:03Aaron Ginn?

  I mean, the, do y'all watch Tim Dillon?

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 49:06Aaron Ginn?

  He has

• 49:07John Coogan?

  George doesn't watch anything.

• 49:08Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, he has a great thing on like podcasters.

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  Blank slate.

• 49:12Aaron Ginn?

  Tyler Rossel.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  All the alpha.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Every show, every show.

• 49:17Aaron Ginn?

  All the alpha.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  I have a three hour context window.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  True. Anyway, Aaron, again, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Thanks for coming in person. This is fantastic. Let me tell you about 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.

• 49:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's take it over to Mark Gurman himself.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Mark Gurman.

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  He has some new reporting. Apple plots expansion into AI robots, home security and smart displays. Apple Inc. is plotting its artificial intelligence comeback. Don't call it a comeback. Actually, you can call it a comeback. Give you

• 50:00John Coogan?

  I mean, it makes sense. They've been, they've had, they've gotten a lot of hate over the last few years for the role, particularly the rollout of Apple Intelligence. Very hyped. A lot of features on display at WWDC that didn't ship when the new iPhone launched.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the actual lawsuits around that.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. And so I think that there were, there were high expectations because of Apple's position with on-device inference being very cool.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  I gave you Gen Moji. Are you not entertained?

• 50:29John Coogan?

  They shipped a few things. I think that I would love to see the Gen Moji actual usage data because I feel like even though it's not popular in T-Pot and on X and in the tech, the Technorati, it might actually be seeing like decent adoption and joy. I mean, I've seen people share generative imagery from Microsoft Copilot, which I had no idea was a popular image generation platform whatsoever.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  Facebook crowd.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So, so I wouldn't be so sure that Gen Moji is producing zero value. But at the same time, it's clearly been a tumultuous time for the company. They've been kind of on defense in terms of public relations. But Mark Gurman is still scooping every single day.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  So, Apple is plotting its AI comeback with an ambitious slate of new devices, including robots, a lifelike version of Siri, a smart speaker with a display and home security cameras. A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion targeted for 2027 is the centerpiece of the AI strategy, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The smart speaker with a display, meanwhile, slated to arrive next year, part of a push into entry-level smart home products.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Entry-level.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Tabletop robot that's a virtual companion.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  That's big.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Lot of, lot of software they gotta write to make that work, they gotta get on Graphite. Dev code review for the age of AI, Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher-quality software faster. Tim Cook, if you're listening, get on Graphite.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  So, this is big too. Home security is seen as another big growth opportunity. New cameras will anchor an Apple's security system that can automate household functions. The approach should help make Apple's product ecosystem stickier with consumers, said the people who asked not to be identified because the initiatives haven't been announced.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  I mean, this seems like something that they could knock out of the park, like, just the, the smart thermostat, like, these, these patterns have been defined for a decade, and that's like the sweet spot for Apple to come in and, like, the Sono home speaker, where we were saying, like, they're just, like, the speak, everyone knows what they want out of a connected speaker system, they just want it at the level of Apple execution. It doesn't require going zero to one in some new territory, and so, I feel like they could be very successful in, in the home video monitoring, home thermostat, home speaker. So, I, I, I think I like this overall. The robot is where it gets funny, because this feels crazy, but I'll, I'll let you keep reading.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but going into companionship feels interesting.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  I don't think it's companionship. I, I, I don't, I don't think of it like that at all.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  A tabletop robot that serves as a virtual companion is the centerpiece of the AI strategy.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  I, I mean, so, let's read what the actual report is on this robot. The tabletop robot resembles an iPad mounted on a movable limb that can swivel and reposition itself to follow users in a room, like a human head. It can turn toward a person who is speaking or summoning it, and even seek to draw the attention of someone not facing it. The hope is to bring AI into life. I don't think of this as, like, companion necessarily, this could just be.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  Jarvis.

• 53:32John Coogan?

  Assistant. Yeah, Jarvis, exactly.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  Feels like Jarvis.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  I mean, I guess Jarvis isn't a companion, but companion has a bad flavor to it right now, a bad, a bad vibe, because people are saying, like, I married my companion, and that feels very Black Mirror. I do think that there's a serious Black Mirror risk, but I'll, I'll go into that in a second, but, what were you about to say?

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not going out and saying this feels like a competitor to friend.com or any other players that are actually focused on companionship. But this does feel like giving Siri a presence in the home, like an always on presence in the home.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  It will be interesting to see how they solve it. A partnership with OpenAI or Anthropic seems logical, but Apple-Siri partnership with OpenAI Anthropic before September on Polymarkets is a 6% chance. By December, it's at a 44% chance, though. So, but this is a very low volume market, but still, it feels like we haven't seen a lot of messaging from Tim Cook that they're going to be building a huge data center, going to be training a foundation model. It feels like they're going to need to partner on some of the underlying infrastructure for that, because I would not, I would not want Siri hanging out in my kitchen, talking to me. Like Siri is just not reliable enough, but I would, I would welcome Claude or, or ChatGPT

• 54:51John Coogan?

  into my house. But I would treat it specifically as a, like an Alexa, what's the weather like? What's on my calendar? Look up the history of the Roman Empire. I would ask it questions like that and I would use it as a knowledge retrieval tool. I would, I might start to trust it in some agentic contexts.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  And the question is, do you want, do we want a robot iPad with an arm swinging around your kitchen and so, and hopefully when you want to know the weather, it's, you're, you're within earshot?

• 55:26John Coogan?

  I think, I think this could be really cool. I think it could be really cool. I mean, they say FaceTime is going to be-

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's just funny because you're competing, they're still competing with their own-

• 55:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if you're ever in the kitchen, like, like, this is an example. So FaceTime calls will be a key function of the device during video conferencing. The display will able, will be able to shift to lock on to people around a room. And so as you're walking around, the FaceTime is just following you. That actually feels more social. I remember during COVID, I bought Facebook's camera. They had some sort of device that you would mount on your TV. And it would act as a, as a video conferencing system.

• 56:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  And I used it a few times. I ultimately churned, but it was, but it was, it had a really wide angle lens and it would like zoom in on the people. It had really good face detection. And so it would center you no matter where you were in the room. But as soon as you walked to the other side of the room, it wouldn't be able to follow you because it didn't have any motors in it.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Guys, can we pull up the link in the chat? This all reminds me of the Meta Portal.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the one I'm talking about, the portal. Yeah.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  Basically, I didn't market it as a robot, but it would sit on a table and it would sort of follow you around the room. And Meta is no longer selling Meta Portal. I guess they wound it down. So anyways, Tim Cook told employees in all hands.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  I gifted some of these and they were pretty well received. Most of them wound up being used as like digital, digital photo frames though. And they weren't actually used that often for calls. I don't know if putting it on a robotic arm is enough to make it useful. I think you do have to nail the underlying speech recognition and, and the, in the, in the conversational nature, like it has to be powered by a Frontier LLM.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  You know what's funny?

• 57:14John Coogan?

  What?

• 57:15Jordi Hays?

  Is I feel like the product, I, I could imagine them having a mood board internally with the Pixar lamp hopping around.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  That's literally listed here as like one of their inspirations, apparently.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  So Tim Cook told employees in all hands meeting this month that Apple must win in AI and hinted at the upcoming devices. The quote, "The product pipeline, which I can't talk about, thankfully, Mark Gurman has his moles in Apple that are talking." Tim Cook says, "It's amazing, guys. It's amazing. Some of it you'll see soon. Some of it will come later, but there's a lot to see."

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  So Apple, obviously.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  Always is cooking on moonshots. Very little of it surfaces to Mark Gurman and even less actually surfaces publicly via Apple's own channels.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Mark Gurman, if you have a little extra time, you should leak Julius's user numbers because Julius has over 2 million users now. They're trusted by folks at Princeton, BCG, Zapier. What analysis do you want to run? It's the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  We need to get our logo up there.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  The fourth logo.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  For sure. So, "Apple is planning to put Siri at the center of the device operating system and give it a visual personality to make it feel lifelike. The approach dubbed Bubbles is vaguely reminiscent of Clippy, which we are super bullish on and we think Microsoft should totally bring back Clippy, an animated paperclip from the 90s that serves as a virtual assistant in Microsoft Office. Apple has tested making Siri look like an animated version of the Finder logo, the iconic smiley face representing the Mac's file management system. The final decision on its appearance hasn't been made, with designers considering ideas that veer closer to emoji, the player, the playful characters that represent Apple user accounts. Device prototypes use a roughly 7-inch horizontal

• 59:03John Coogan?

  display approaching the size of an iPad Mini. The motorized arm can extend the display away from the base roughly half a foot in any direction."

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  I was really hoping, I was really hoping five. I was really hoping at least five.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Across the room, it reaches across and pins you against the fridge. Yeah, I think Apple should be able to nail delivering this in a way that doesn't feel Black Mirror and dystopian.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's funny. So, I actually didn't see this, but there's a quote in here. "Some people familiar with the product call it the Pixar lamp."

• 59:31John Coogan?

  Yep, exactly. I think it could work really, really well. Now, they have to be cognizant of the Black Mirror vibes. That would be very cool.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  If it could hop off my kitchen table.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  It can definitely hop around. That's not Friedman core. This is, this is, this is, this is doable with modern technology. But the risk is that they, they botch it because Apple's had a rough go with the recent marketing and they've had a couple, uh, real like backlash is they had that one where they smashed all the pianos in the press. Do you remember this? So they had a, a huge hydraulic press and they, and they pressed like, uh, uh, an easel with paints and a bunch of paint buckets and pianos and violins and all this stuff.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Did they get a bunch of blowback?

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  They got a ton of blowback from this. We can, we can try and pull it up. Uh, do you remember this?

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember that. Uh, people were saying that they're like destroying these timeless pieces.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's just like the things that I-

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  And stuff like that.

• 1:00:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. The thing that I love. You're literally, you're destroying it for this particular, um, uh, shots fired. Bill Bishop from the Substack stream. You need better guests to talk about China and chips, not just Nvidia partners who are regurgitating Nvidia's talking points. Bill Bishop, get on the stream. Call in. We'd love to have you.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Bill.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Bill, you're welcome. Hop on.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Aaron is riding with Jensen.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. He is the Jensen surrogate. He's, he's, he's a surrogate for Jensen, the juggler. He has to juggle both United States and Nvidia and China's interest and Taiwan's interest and all of them.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Come on the show, Bill.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Miles Fisher wants to see the production team. He says, show the off camera voices. Let's get the production team up on the screen. Um, so anyway.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Bill, call into the show right now. We'll send you the zoom link.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  Yep. Call in. You're welcome. Uh, can we pull up the Apple ad of them crushing the videos? Is that even available anymore? They might've just taken it off the internet. Um, but there was, uh-

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  I think I found it.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  But there was-

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  This is it, right?

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think, yeah, yeah. Yeah. This is it. It's a record player. Like literally all these things that bring people joy. I'm down all alone. And it's just crushing a trumpet. It's like all your dreams, like all the things that you want to spend. Oh, an arcade machine. All the things that are nostalgia. Nostalgia plays so well. And this is just anti nostalgia in a million ways. Destroying. I mean, it is a beautiful shot. Like this is a crazy, they actually did this.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Apple, the company that built itself empowering-

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  -creative talent globally.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  I know. Yep. They, they crushed the Pixar lamp and the Angry Bird. Oh, it's brutal. The TV blows up. They, this is such an incredible production, though, the fact that they actually shot this. It is, it is a remarkable ad. Oh, and then the poor, the poor emoji, the poor emoji gets crushed. And then, of course, it is revealed after everything blows up that all of that fits in your iPad, which is super thin. A reasonable message. You get all of that in the context of an iPad. You get games, you get an arcade machine, you get an easel, you get a piano, you get all of those things.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  At the time, Tor Myron said, "Our goal is always to celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad." We missed the mark with this video, and we're sorry. Absolutely brutal.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  Well, really quickly, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover your new products and brands. Check out Profound. So, the other, the other ad that didn't go as viral and result in major backlash was the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. So, when the Apple Vision Pro launched, one of the videos that they showed was of a middle-aged man looking at VR video of his kids, but he was alone in a dark room. And it, and Ben Thompson was like, "It feels like he's divorced," or something, or maybe like the kids died. It felt like Minority Report, which is a movie I know you haven't seen. But in Minority

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  Report, Tom Cruise's son goes missing from the pool one day, and he has a, he has a virtual 3D video that he plays back and gets very emotional about. And, and the imagery was very similar in the Apple Vision Pro, but it wasn't an optimistic scenario. It was like, "Yeah, like, I guess if my son passed away or got kidnapped, like, I would want to relive that, but that's not like, gonna inspire me to buy an Apple Vision Pro." And so, with, with this like Pixar lamp, this, this, this robot in your, in your kitchen or in your house, like, they really, I think they have to lean into, to light mode, not dark mode. They have to really be aware and reality check themselves on the Black Mirror effect because-

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  Uh, the, the idea of, of someone hanging out in their kitchen, being lonely and having this be the only companion that they ever talked to. That's a lot less fun than, hey, we're all cooking together in the kitchen and this is helping us keep track of the ingredients. Or, uh, my idea was, uh, teach it to, uh, teach it to pour some beers and get it at the fraternity. This thing needs to be tending bar at a frat house and inspiring dancing silhouettes like the original iPod commercial in order to be successful. Get the iRobot, a stack of red solo cups ASAP.

• 1:04:39Jordi Hays?

  Apple's canceled for fraternity coded marketing.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  I think, I think that would be amazing. If this thing could, if this thing could pour a, a beer without, without foam, I think they got a winner.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  Because it needs to inject itself into social, even the iPod, like, yes, you could put it in the headphones and you could, and you could tune out the world and be that dancing silhouette during the iPod commercial. But also you could say, pass me the aux cord. I want to play a song for my iPod that everyone can enjoy and it's a social experience. And so it's important to show both of those sides now more than ever. And in, in chat GPT demos and any AI product demo, there's always going to be the user who, who uses the product to be more isolating. But the marketing should always be aspirational and pro-social, just like social media. Social media, it's at its best when we're highlighting the fact that like, I have so many friends that just send me a random Instagram reel every single day.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  And like, that's our interaction. And it's, and for me, it's a way to like, check in with a friend and, and like.

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Share a laugh.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Hey, share a laugh and, and it's a heart and it's a laughing.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine the ad creative for the Apple Pixar lamp, you know, it's sitting on the center of a kitchen island. Families hanging out and they're FaceTiming somebody.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Uh, so one of the family members is out of town.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  I can actually imagine us having a Pixar lamp here on the table.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Really, really, it's like, yeah, it's like, you, you want to be connecting two families or two, two, two sides of the family. The East Coast side of the family, the West Coast side of the family, they're both having Thanksgiving and they're able to connect. But there's, everyone's being extremely social. Do not film this thing, uh, with the lonely, the lonely person, uh, you know, having the Pixar lamp be the only thing to keep it company. Anyway, that's my advice.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  What else is in here? Projects coded Linwood and Glenwood, uh, core to the new home devices or current products like. And current products like iPhones and iPads is an overhaul to the underpinnings of Siri. Engineers are working on a version code named Linwood with an entirely new brain built around L L Ms, the foundation of Gen AI. The goal is to tap into personal data to fulfill queries, an ability that was delayed due to hiccups with the current version.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  It should be able to do it.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, this team, they should have a, a, a, a moonshot division just trying to solve iMessage search. They could probably start there.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  I mean, every tech company is that. Amazon search is rough. Google Gmail search is rough. Their search has gotten so like dominated.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  There's a billion dollar business in figuring out search.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  I mean, that would be the killer. That might be a killer app for Comet and some of the browsers is just like actually being able to search my Gmail inbox better. That would be pretty fantastic.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  I feel like it should be at the app layer.

• 1:07:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, whatever they're building, they're building products. They got to get on linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is on linear. Let's get Apple on linear. Let's get the Siri team on linear. They very well might be already. So, uh, somebody, Craig Federighi, uh, who you all know, says the work we've done on this end-to-end revamp of Siri has given us the result we needed. He added that this has put us in a position to not just deliver what we announced, but to deliver a much bigger upgrade than we envisioned. He said, there is no project people are taking more seriously. So that is very positive. Um, a final decision hasn't been made on which models will be used, but Apple has been testing Anthropic, PBC's Claude for this purpose. Mike Rockwell, the former Vision Pro chief, who was put in charge of

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  Siri earlier this year, is overseeing both the Linwood and Glenwood efforts.

• 1:08:24Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, so during the development of the tabletop robot, Apple engineers have made heavy use of ChatGPT and Google Gemini to build and test features within Apple AI and Siri teams as the whole software developers are increasingly using third-party systems as part of their development process. Getting into a Ring competitor here, Apple's working on a camera codename J450 is designed for home security, detecting people and automating tasks. The device will be battery-powered and could last for several months to a year on a single charge. That's interesting, if they can do this for, they can, they can do this for a random home security camera, they can't do it for your iPhone? So they have, you're telling me they have the capability to have an always-on camera?

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Put the tinfoil hat on.

• 1:09:09Jordi Hays?

  We need a tinfoil hat. The device has facial recognition and infrared sensors to determine who is in a room. Apple believes users will replace, will place cameras throughout their home to help with automation. That could be turning lights off when someone leaves a room or automatically playing music. So, Apple, you're telling me that you can make a home security camera, of which I will purchase multiple and put them around my house, and it will be able to have a single battery that could last for several months to a year on a single charge? And you can't make an iPhone?

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  It's a little bit different. The screen's pretty bright.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  The screen's a problem. The screen's bright.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  But an always-on camera? How long do you think your phone battery would last if you just constantly had the camera?

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  I actually think, I actually think running the camera sensor is a lot less power-intensive than running a screen, for sure.

• 1:10:00Jordi Hays?

  And obviously, a bunch of different applications, so. But still, pretty powerful, pretty exciting stuff.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  I don't think people want an always-on iPhone. They want the thrill of charging the iPhone every night. If you're an adrenaline junkie, there's nothing like being on 1%, trying to fire off that last iMessage, trying to search iMessage.

• 1:10:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, I actually had a moment yesterday. My, my one-year-old is starting to walk, and I had this moment yesterday where I was, I was, I had filmed a video of her walking for about 10 seconds.

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's in the house is like laughing, enjoying the moment. And then my battery died and completely lost the video because I didn't hit, I didn't hit like end of the video. So the battery died right in the middle of this. Memory gone forever.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  There is actually, that has something to do with the encoder. There is a certain file type that you can use when you're filming on one of these cameras that if the battery dies, it will actually save the last of the file. But there's certain, there's certain codecs where if you don't hit finish recording, the whole thing will be corrupted. It's very annoying. Anyway, get on Dural HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Tyler, what do you think about the, the Apple robot? Would you buy this thing?

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Would you do a challenge for it and then churn in two weeks?

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  That's probably, that's most likely. It depends on how much it is. I'm like, you know.

• 1:11:27John Coogan?

  What, what have you adopted this summer that you still daily drive? You've churned from the vision, you've churned from the VR headset, you've churned from Clouly.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  My new phone.

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Your, your phone, you have not gone back to the old phone?

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  It's, yeah.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Extremely bullish for Apple. Let's hear it. Let's hear it for new phones. You know, you talk a lot of trash, Jordy. Oh, the latest iPhone doesn't have an all day battery. Tyler's still using the latest and greatest phone. Still a good business. iPhone sales are ripping. Apple's still got it.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Emily Choi has announced, we just closed the biggest deal in crypto history. Deribit is the number one crypto options exchange by volume and open interest. And now it's officially part of Coinbase. So of course Coinbase just completed their 2.9 billion cash and stock acquisition of Deribit. This had been announced previously.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Deribit launched in 2016 and reportedly notched over one trillion in annual trading volume in 2024. So let's give it up for.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Let's give it up.

• 1:12:27Jordi Hays?

  It's big.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  In other, in other crypto news, bullish, but this is one of the greatest headlines I've ever seen in the Wall Street Journal. The nominative determinism of bullish, I don't know if you can see, maybe I should just put it here. We need like the printer cam back, but the, the business and finance section of the Wall Street Journal says bullish's IPO lives up to name. Price of crypto exchanges shares jump 84% on their first day of trading. Shares of bullish soared in the IPO, highlighting the challenge of pricing an IPO in today's exuberant market. Just last month, shares of software company Figma jumped 250% in their debut. That prompted whispers about the risks of a company underpricing an IPO and potentially

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  leaving billions of dollars on the table. The ideal first day gains are typically around 20 to 30%. Many bankers who work on deals say bullish had more, had a market capitalization of more than $13 billion as of Wednesday afternoon. Its stock, which trades under the symbol B L S H, was temporarily paused after it began trading. All eyes were on bullish's large debut largely because the company is led by Tom Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Farley, in the role, guided some of the biggest IPOs, including those of Alibaba and Snap. Bullish's debut was a chance for him to show his own ability to nail an IPO's pricing to both maximize for company proceeds, because when you're going public, you are selling stock, you want to sell it at the fair, it's a fundraising event, you want to sell it at the fairest price. If, if the stock pops, you could have sold a lot more potentially and gotten with the same amount of dilution, essentially. So they could have, so they raised 1.1 billion, but because it jumped 84%, they could have raised $2 billion for the same dilution. And so that's in theory, the, in theory, the problem here. And so, you know, people, people kind of go back and forth, but it, but it gets to this point.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  But again, every, I mean, you're making a gamble, right?

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Even the Facebook, the Facebook IPO didn't, didn't it decline?

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Tanked, yeah. It was like one of the worst IPOs. In tech history, it was very, very rough and it took it took over a year, I think, for them to build back up. But that was due to a few things. There was a technical error. There was mispricing. There was a lot of like the, I think the numbers or something. There was like the mobile risk. There were a few different factors where people were like, oh, maybe this isn't the best. Like a true like a compounder. I don't know. It was very odd in hindsight. But yes, this all gets to the point of how will individual investors react to public to public debuts? Because if they go out and it's a hot company, it becomes a meme stock, or there's just, you know, too much latent demand, the stock will pop insanely. And so that's what a lot of companies that are going public are dealing with these days.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  But it's sort of a champagne problem because it's good to have a high valued stock that you can go out and acquire stuff.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  11 billion dollar public company now.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You can get started for free.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Brad Pitt says his Ford versus Ferrari movie with Tom Cruise never happened because Cruise found out he would not be driving much in the movie.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  I had no idea this was happening.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  We both wanted to drive. Tom realized that Shelby would not be driving much, so it didn't come through. Some lore.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  Who wound up starring in Ford versus Ferrari? Who plays Shelby? I forget. It's someone else, right? Ford versus Ferrari. Oh, it's Christian Bale. That's right. Christian Bale and Matt Damon. Although Matt Damon does not play. Who does he play? Matt Damon, Ken Miles, Donald Fray.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Anyway, Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free at Adio.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  In other news, OpenAI and Sam Altman are investing a quarter of a billion dollars in Merge Labs at an 850 million dollar valuation.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  That's a big stake.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Times is reporting. So.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman wants to put a chip in your brain. That's kind of the

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  I think everyone wants to put a chip in your brain.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Everyone, even Roy Lee wants to put a chip in.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Roy Lee wants to and Mark Zuckerberg said that if you are, if you're not wearing Meta Ray-Bans, you'll be at a cognitive disability or something like that, didn't he say, or cognitive disadvantage?

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Because having AI on top.

• 1:16:56Jordi Hays?

  Hope's Revenge said, good, I'm used to it.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  This is great.

• 1:17:00Jordi Hays?

  So the Financial Times.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Altman's co-founding the company. Wow.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. OpenAI and its co-founder Sam Altman are preparing to back a company that will compete with Elon Musk's Neuralink by connecting human brains with computers.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  I'm sure Elon's gonna have a normal one over this.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  The two billionaire entrepreneurs, the new venture called Merge Labs is raising funds at 850 million, with much of the new capital expected to come from OpenAI's ventures team. According to three people with direct knowledge of the plans, Altman has encouraged the investment and will help launch the project alongside Alex Blanier, who runs World, an eyeball-scanning digital ID project also backed by Sam Altman. Altman will co-found the company but not have a day-to-day role in the new project, they added. Merge is one of a slate of young companies looking to take advantage of recent advances in artificial intelligence to build more useful BCI's. Its name comes from what many in Silicon Valley describe as "the merge", a moment when humans and machines come together.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Hmm, yeah. It's a good, it's a good.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  The doomers are gonna love this one.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Altman wrote a lengthy blog post on the topic in 2017, speculating the moment would come as soon as 2025. This year, he suggested in another blog post that he could, he could soon have high bandwidth brain-computer interfaces as a result of recent technological advances. I'm gonna reference back to this blog post from Sam Altman called "The Merge", he posted this eight years ago on December 7th, 2017. A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge, or if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or genetically enhanced species. Most guesses seem to be between 2025 and 2075.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  People used to call this the singularity, now it feels uncomfortable and real enough that many seem to avoid naming it at all. Perhaps another reason people stopped using the word "singularity" is that it implies a single moment in time, and it now looks like the merge is gonna be a gradual process, and gradual processes are hard to notice. I believe the merge has already started and we are a few years in. Our phones control us and tell us what to do. Social media feeds determine how we feel. Search engines decide what we think. The algorithms that make all of this happen are no longer understood by any one person. They optimize for what their creators tell them to optimize for, but in ways that no human could figure out. They're what today seems like sophisticated AI and tomorrow will seem like child's play.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  And they're extremely effective, at least speaking for myself. I have a very hard time resisting what the algorithms want me to do. Until I made a real effort to combat it, I found myself getting extremely addicted to the internet. We are already in the phase of co-evolution. The AI's effect, effect and infect us, and then we improve the AI. We build more computing power to run the AI on it and it figures out how to build even better chips. This probably cannot be stopped. As we have learned, scientific advancement eventually happens if the laws of physics do not present, prevent it. More important than that, unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen. Genetic enhancement is going to happen and brain machine interfaces are going to happen.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves. Our self-worth is so based on our intelligence that we believe it must be singular and not slightly higher than all the other animals on a continuum. Perhaps the AI will feel the same way and note that differences between us and bonobos are barely worth discussing. The merge can take a lot of forms. We could plug electrodes into our brains or we could all just become really close friends with a chatbot.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Wow, eight years ago he said that?

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Eight years ago.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  ChatGPT, of course, wouldn't exist for years, but I think a merge is probably our best case scenario. If two different species want, both want the same thing and only one can have it. In this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond, they're going to have a conflict. We should all want one team where all members care about the well-being of everyone else. Although the merge has already begun, it's going to get a lot weirder. We will be the first species ever to design our own descendants. My guess is that we can either be a biological boot loader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch. Or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like. It's probably going to happen sooner than most people think. Hardware is improving at an exponential rate.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  The most surprising thing I've learned, working on OpenAI, is just how correlated increasing computing power and AI breakthroughs are. And the number of smart people working on AI is increasing exponentially as well. Double exponential functions get away from you fast. It would be good for the entire world to start taking this a lot more seriously now. Worldwide coordination doesn't happen quickly, and we need it for this.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  That's a wild post. Is that still up? Or did you have to go to the archive?

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Still up.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Still up. Interesting. That's a, that's a hot take. Tyler, would you put a chip in your brain?

• 1:22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I want, I want 4O piped straight in.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're down?

• 1:22:07Speaker 03

  I'd do it, yeah.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  Sycophancy maxing.

• 1:22:09John Coogan?

  Chat is not super into it. Gabe says he just wants salt and vinegar chips, not brain chips. John Exley says he's got to be honest. I don't think it's for me, ever. I can already picture the contagion of peer pressure.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, reading that blog post made me want to touch some grass. We should actually get some grass here in the studio.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  We should get some grass in the studio.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  Or even on the table, even on the table, so we could just have one hand on the grass.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  It relates a lot to this cold healing post. 2040 population distribution predictions. 90% brainless content zombies who are functionally illiterate cannot write a paragraph. 5% neo-Amish flip phone users. 5% elites and super elites at algorithmic war with each other to steer the 90% to their whims. And then Krabs says, always has been. I, I do, I, I, I think this, I think the case of the neo-Amish is fascinating because the, the non-Amish, the Amish are doing fantastically. They, they have adopted flip phones, I believe, and they've adopted some technology.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  But in general, they've accumulated a lot of real estate and they're by all accounts...

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  They're reproducing rapidly.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  They're, by all accounts, they are flourishing. And so what's interesting is that the, the, the coastal elites have not gone to war with the Amish. They've not said like, what they are doing is unacceptable and we must like eradicate them. I don't know if they'll ever be threatened by it. I think they might be fine with it forever. I think everyone might be fine with it forever.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  They can build, they can build barns like they're, they're in the game of Fortnite.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Oh, and you're threatened, threatened by that?

• 1:23:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if they can build a barn, what else could they build?

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  I think, I, I think that like you, even though there will be-

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  You've seen the videos, right, of them like assembling a barn in like 12 hours? It truly is some of the greatest-

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Some of the greatest grass touching we can do.

• 1:23:59Speaker 03

  The, um, the Amish population doubles every 20 years.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Bullish.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, and is America like not doubling ever?

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  Chart that out.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, that's a fast takeoff there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Project the next 10,000 years, what will the Amish population be?

• 1:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, work on that.

• 1:24:14Speaker 03

  Amish on that. General intelligence.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  How many Amish people will there be in 10,000 years if they keep doubling every 20 years? That's what I want to know. I bet it's a big number. Mark has a good one. He says, AI equals Amish intelligence. How to build a barn in 20 hours. I love it. Thank you, Mark.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  This is so funny. I, I, but, but, but I think my takeaway is like the, the, so Sam is painting this picture of like, you get left in the evolution tree and you get like dropped off and it's a dead end. I don't know that it's necessarily a dead end. Like, you could, like monkeys are still around. You, you could, you could still just be a monkey and you could be an Amish and like, the super intelligence, brain, computer merged people could go off and do their own thing. And you could just be vibing as an Amish for thousands and thousands of years. Like, there's not necessarily an incentive to eradicate everyone.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Intelligence comes and says, hey, I'm gonna need you guys to come and ride SoulCycle bikes to power my data center.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  I, I think that, I think that people are just, are just, people like, people like animals. People, people are nice by default. Like, the default state of, of most living things is not this like vicious battle to dominate everything constantly. Like, yes, like, the animal kingdom is extremely metal and there are insane battles constantly, but it doesn't, it doesn't need to necessarily be that way. Yeah, I don't think it necessarily needs to be that way. I think the, I think the Amish can coexist. Tyler, do you have the final number? How many Amish people will there be in the year 10,000, 12,025, 12,025?

• 1:25:52Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, so I think it'd be, uh, 1.3 times 10 to the 156.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Can you turn that into like words? Quintillion, octillion, septillion. I wanna, I wanna know.

• 1:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Convert it into.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Ten to the 156 is like.

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  Is that past a Google? I guess 10 to 100. So there will be more than a Google Amish.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. I'm, I'm rooting for the Amish.

• 1:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Set it up for the Amish.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  I think you gotta go long Amish.

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  How do we make money on this?

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Someone asked, what about the absent minded destruction of parking lots? I don't get that. I'm confused. I don't know about the absent market.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Amish reference.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Are, are the Amish destroying parking lots? I think they're building parking lots for all those barns they're putting up. Uh, anyway, the Amish are missing out on eight sleep, or maybe that's a loophole that they can do. We should definitely get the, uh, the Amish on eight sleep. Get a pod five if you're Amish and you're listening to the stream and you're in the chat right now. Uh, they got a five year warranty, 39 risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. So.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  That would be, imagine the, the.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  First thing you put in the barn, pod five.

• 1:26:54Jordi Hays?

  They could imagine if we find out that the Amish can build barns so quickly because they've all been secretly sleeping on eight sleeps.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Maybe that's the secret. Maybe that's the secret.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  They got an Amish version from Mateo that's, that's like cooled by the earth.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Ooh, the, the, the, the farm to table eight sleep. Uh, that's nice. Uh, Taylor says, I for one, welcome our Amish Borg overlords. And Gabe says, long Home Depot.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, long Home Depot.

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  Going long Home Depot to, did, did the Amish shop at Home Depot or do they chop their own trees down? I don't know. I'm gonna do a deep dive on the Amish. Anyway, should we debate whether or not TV is dead? Our magazine's dead. Uh, one of our strongest stands, Adam Faez, I believe he's a part of Faez Clan. Adam Faez said, Emily Sundberg asked me for my anonymous hot take, which I guess he immediately de, de, de-anonymized. Uh, on the state of media right now, I'll out myself because I think, I don't think mine's that anonymous. Magazines are dead. TV is dead. Hollywood is dead. TBPN is more important than CNBC. Emily Sundberg is more important than Vanity Fair. Nick Fuentes is more important than Fox News and X is unfortunately the center of the universe.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Interesting take, very spicy. Alex Heath from The Verge says, "Half is true, half is not. We'll never know which half." And Max Tani says, "I think you could make the argument that none of this is true." Yeah. Who knows? What is relevancy? What is importance? Who knows? All I know is we're having fun on this stream. We're having fun with you in the chat.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say, you're keeping magazines in business, John.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  I am. I mean, yeah. Oh, the newspaper is dead? Why do I read it every single day then?

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, he didn't say the newspaper was dead.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  No, the newspapers, Lindy, I think, uh, I think, uh...

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  I actually think true journalism is more important than ever.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  As long as TBPN is alive, Hollywood cannot be dead because we are live from Hollywood and we are joined by someone who is not far from Hollywood. Delian Asparouhov, partner at Founders Fund, co-founder of Varda Space. What can we do to, uh, second office for Varda? Let's move it to Hollywood. Hollywood is the new Silicon Valley.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, if they get tasked...

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Not a lot of warehouse space?

• 1:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Wait, think about this. So if you guys get tasked with a moon landing and we, you know, and we need to...

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We got you covered. If, if you're going out for, for Series J and you need to, you know, make a moon landing up here like it happened, we got the cameras for you. We're good.

• 1:29:23Delian Asparouhov?

  My, you know, somewhat controversial take is the moon landing did happen.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27Delian Asparouhov?

  The footage wasn't looking that good.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:29:30Delian Asparouhov?

  And so they did livestream from Hollywood for the footage that they had some, you know, great, you know, sort of takes.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  So both are true. That's great.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  They had to reshoot it. They had to reshoot it.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, reshoots happen all the time. I, I don't have a problem with it. I, I say let it, let it happen.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Fair, fair play.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, what is new in your world? Uh, there's a bunch of stuff going on in DC. We can talk about CHIPS in China. We can talk about, um, I want to talk about negative gross margins in AI companies. What's going on in venture? There's a bunch of stuff, but what's, what's top of my...

• 1:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we, why don't we start there?

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  Let's start there.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a fun one.

• 1:30:01John Coogan?

  Okay, so...

• 1:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Because Delian has been, been getting, you know, chirped at for years.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  For years about this.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  About margin profiles.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 1:30:12Delian Asparouhov?

  Back to Everett, baby.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Delian Asparouhov?

  Hey, let's make it just an Everett...

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Somebody tell Everett to come on right now.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So here was my take to kick it off. Here's an example of how the AI startup economy works. I've anonymized the companies, but this was relayed to me in a group chat and I believe it to be roughly true. You, the user, gives an application layer company $1. They turn around and give $5 to a foundation model company that gives $7 to a hyperscaler, who in turn gives $13 to a GPU maker. And it's giving house of cards. And so the question is, how fast can inference costs fall? Are we so over? Will we solve this? Is Moore's law enough to save us? What else needs to change? What's your take on negative gross margins in now software businesses and the end of zero fixed costs?

• 1:31:02Delian Asparouhov?

  I saw this graph that was Nvidia's free cash flow by quarter and their like CapEx by quarter. The first was like the days spent, I think, I forget if it was quarter yearly, maybe it was yearly, but they're spending something on the order of like 4.5 billion in CapEx on scale up of production lines. And their free cash flow is something on the order of like 35, 40 billion dollars. And so this is something like funnily ironic where like you take the whole like 2010's mantra of like, you know, software is eating the world, marginal cost of distribution is zero, so your margins are phenomenal. And then it's just like, it's all just completely wrong, right? Like, you know, SaaS companies end up having like crazy high sales and marketing spend in order to actually like grow the revenues at all, so the margins don't look anywhere near what they look like.

• 1:31:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Alex Clayton from Merit Tech had this tweet where now the just publicly reported AI Labs' revenue company, sorry, the publicly reported revenues of AI Labs now surpass the entire public SaaS, publicly traded SaaS. So it's just like, you have this entire like decade of companies, things that people you know, sort of worked on, revenues, et cetera. And then it turns out like, it was all just completely wrong, both on like those companies actually having durability, margins, et cetera. And there's replaced by something that is somehow bigger and potentially also has all those risks and concerns. Of durability margin center and who's the winner? It still ends up being the people that have the fundamental like hardware, you know, sort of structure.

• 1:32:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Like if you look at like where all the like free cash flows ending up, it's somehow ending up in like Oracle running data centers, Microsoft running data centers. And you know, Nvidia basically building the chips that you know should goes into those. And like the energy companies that are providing the energy for it. But like the end, like application layer and like software companies end up capturing like none of the, you know, sort of margins or cash flows from all of this. And so, I don't know, as the guy that's always loved bits and atoms rather than pure bits alone, I continue to feel very validated and I admit that I enjoy studying, you know, some of these AI companies gross margin profiles and then realizing that like the fucking space factory company has better gross margins.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  It's wild. I, I, do you think that there's any hope for inference costs to fall off a cliff? And, and, and gross margins to like kind of get right side up very quickly? Cause that is the, the bull case, like we saw this with deep seek. Like the inference cost, even for reasoning models dropped like, you know, 20x very quickly. And you just don't see that in, you know, I'm a, you know, I'm a home, I'm a home maker. And all of a sudden, like, like the price of lumber just dropped 10x. Like that just doesn't happen. It only happens in, in software and algorithms where a more elegant implementation of the algorithm can actually drive same results, 10x savings and cost.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Uh, and that feels like everything's like, everyone's kind of hoping from, for a bailout maybe, but, uh, and I'm like cautiously optimistic that it could happen.

• 1:33:53Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna get a government bailout of the artificial intelligence industry within the next 365 days. We need a, we need, we need a federal backstop.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Universal tokens, everyone gets a, everyone gets a thousand dollars in, in Nvidia credits or something.

• 1:34:11Delian Asparouhov?

  The other like interesting, you know, sort of macro lens on this is if you look at, um, the, um, amount of CapEx that is going into you setting up, you know, basically, um, uh, you know, buying chips, setting up use of data centers. Basically all things that like, you know, sort of hyperscalers and foundation labs are contributing towards. It's actually the highest single, you know, sort of, um, uh, industry investment line item as a percentage of GDP. Since basically, you know, the fiber rollout in, you know, sort of the, you know, late nineties. And then before that, the last time that we had an equivalent was basically the railroad broom in the, um, Late 1890s, right, I want to say.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  And the railroad boom was significantly higher. I think it was like almost 9% of GDP. I know the chart you're thinking of. And I think fiber and like the internet rollout was like 1.2 and we're at like 1.3% of GDP, something like that. So we're not, we're not, we're not like insane 10% of GDP, which is kind of what like the, the fast takeoff folks, the, you know, the, the, the Dwarsh Patel crowd talking with Satya Nadella, talking about like, this could be 50% of GDP if, if scaling really, really works like we think it will.

• 1:35:20Delian Asparouhov?

  The, the thing that's unique though to those, you know, relative to those prior booms is fiber companies were dependent on their fiber revenue in order to keep justifying rolling out fiber, right? And they obviously ended up being wrong. You thought that fiber was going to be everywhere. There was going to be infinite internet. And then it turns out you set up like a basic backbone for the internet. And then after that, you actually didn't need fiber everywhere. And so there was like projected to be semi-infinite demand for fiber. And now the biggest, you know, sort of company that was rolling that out in like the late 90s, Corning, literally only like finally last year reached their original like peak, you know, 2001, you know, sort of market cap, but took like four years. And most of that now has nothing to do with fiber. It's like the Gorilla Glass that they make for, you know, iPhone, all these other like special class applications. But, you know, shows how long it can take to, you know, get back to your prior peak.

• 1:36:01Delian Asparouhov?

  The railroad companies obviously were highly dependent on their like, you know, rail revenue in order to be able to continue to invest into railroads. What's crazy about the like, you know, capexes going into these data centers is like a significant chunk of it is funded from companies that have free cash flow and revenues from completely unrelated to the AI business, right? Like Meta is funding all this stuff from like their social media and targeted ads. You know, Microsoft is, you know, feeding all this off of their like, you know, sort of SaaS, you know, revenues. You know, Amazon, obviously from their like, you know, marketplace, et cetera. It's like the only companies that are actually dependent on the AI revenues to fund this capex are like basically the foundation, you know, sort of model companies. And then Google from their like monopoly, you know, basically on, you know, sort of search. And so when you think about like how long they could potentially sustain that, like, you know, 1.3 or you get up to like 2% of GDP,

• 1:36:43Delian Asparouhov?

  it could potentially take a significantly longer time, if there is any type of, you know, sort of bubble here, for there to be eventual, you know, sort of decrease on the percent of GDP, because they're not actually that reliant on, you know, the, you know, that, that capex rollout actually immediately contributing to, you know, revenues. And then the crazy part is like, you still have Apple, you know, sort of mostly sitting on a huge chunk of chat, cash, and hasn't really participated in all this, other than the fact that actually they're like, you know, revenues have now been flat for like five and a half years straight. And then their like, you know, balance sheet has basically only decreased linearly, you know, quarter over quarter for the last five years straight. So it's like. Man, if you were like a more brilliant version of Tim Cook five years ago, should have just bought like $90 billion of GPUs and like started building, you know, some data centers and instead he like, I don't know, rolled out the like iPhone like, you know, 400.

• 1:37:26Jordi Hays?

  iPhone 400 would actually go pretty hard.

• 1:37:30John Coogan?

  Which to be fair, has good margins and low churn. We gave our intern a new iPhone and he has, he's still using it and we can't say that about some of the sass that we've had him try.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Happy DAU.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  There is a, there is a wrinkle with the Apple thing. A lot of that, the balance sheet decline is because of dividends. They're paying shareholders out, but I agree with you. The other thing that I want to-

• 1:37:48Delian Asparouhov?

  It's still just they don't know what to do with the cash, you know what I mean?

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah, I completely agree.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  They're creating their, they're creating the Pixar lamp.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're gonna create a Pixar lamp now.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  They're literally creating a Pixar lamp that will sit on your, your-

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  It's gonna be an iPad on a robotic arm and it will be able to like move around and follow you around the room. So if you're FaceTiming with someone in the kitchen and you walk over to the stove or the refrigerator, it'll follow you around.

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  And they're gonna compete with Ring. You're saying they don't know what to do with their cash. I think they got plenty of world changing ideas.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're gonna go steamroll a $2 billion company or something.

• 1:38:16Delian Asparouhov?

  It sounds like a shitty like 2013 like YC like startup, you know, sort of pitch like on the order of like Giussero basically.

• 1:38:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, who knows. I want to talk about, yeah, the, the, the fractures in the, in the financial world around AI do feel like, the foundation's a little more solid because coming off of cash flow from these hyperscaler balance sheets. There's also the-

• 1:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's, and that's the, the bull case for the, the hyperscalers in AI and just being competitive, even if they're behind the ball on code gen and personal assistance and things like that, is that they're just gonna be able to sustain this pace and investment level for-

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. The other, the other kind of, yeah, the other kind of source of capital that people are discussing now is private credit and people are wondering if there's this private credit bubble, but then also private credit isn't mark to market as much. And can you give me kind of like the, the venture capitalist 101 on how venture capitalists are interfacing with private credit these days? Because it feels like there was usually like a handoff where you invest in a company and then at a certain point it goes public and then, you know, or goes into private equity and then you're kind of out of the game, but it feels like there's a little bit more interface between the VC world and the private credit world now. Like, do you have any insight into what's going on there? Have you followed that at all?

• 1:39:39Delian Asparouhov?

  A bit, you know, um, uh,

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  It seems like it's very deal by deal, right?

• 1:39:44Delian Asparouhov?

  Study this stuff is like the upstream, which is like the, you know, sort of equity side of things.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:48Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm forgetting the, you know, sort of exact stat that I'm thinking of, but there was basically this crossover point in the last year, which I want to say was it, it wasn't IPO equity raised, but it was, um, it was something like, you know, sort of capital deployed into like sub $200 billion market cap companies. And basically for the first time ever, the private capital market was actually as large, you know, and had crossed over to the public, you know, basically capital markets in terms of, you know, sort of fundraising, in terms of like issuing a primary and fundraising. And so the strategies, um, uh, that some of these like, uh, major asset managers on the equity user side of things,

• 1:40:29Delian Asparouhov?

  these are obviously like the Fidelities, the Black Rocks, et cetera, the ones that are like, you know, the, you know, Vanguard. All of those groups at this point have clearly, um, you know, sort of admitted to themselves that the, you know, prototypical, you know, IPO, when you're between five and 25 billion dollar market cap is just a world that is not coming back anytime soon. It's not to say there won't be some companies that do that. Obviously Figma has done, you know, sort of phenomenally well. And so that may tempt some companies to go back to it. But all these asset managers have realized that, you know, so much of the returns are now being, you know, sort of held up in the private markets, that they need to, you know, sort of go enter those. And so you're seeing the equivalent on the, you know, sort of private credit side of things. I think I can, you know, sort of share the logo of the company.

• 1:41:07Delian Asparouhov?

  But there was a company in our portfolio that, uh, recently, um, uh, you know, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in private, you know, sort of credit from tier one, you know, basically, you know, sort of bank, you know, you know, top, you know, sort of forum in the United States. The cost of credit that they had on it was effectively like LIBOR plus 25 bps, which is just like the equivalent of like cost of capital for a like $50 billion publicly, you know, sort of trading company.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  And notably, very different than like venture debt, which is like something people like, oh yeah, I raised $10 million. I got a $1 million credit line or something like that. This is a completely different.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  If you have a bad quarter, we're, we're gonna.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  We run the company.

• 1:41:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly. These are totally different. This is like, you know, backing physical assets that these companies are going and buying and sort of rolling out. And so I remember watching that deal happen and being like, wow, like, I mean, first, as the like equity investor, I'm like, oh, my God, this cost of capital, super easy for this company to like, you know, cover the like, you know, CapEx, you know, sort of roll out based off their, you know, sort of margins, et cetera. And so the like, return on equity now that you can see as the private investor is like insane, where it's like, why go public where this company doesn't even need to raise that much equity and they like, one of the, like, there's a lot of value proposition for being public, but one of them is that your like, general cost of capital on the debt side just goes down significantly typically when you're, you know, sort of a, you know, a public company.

• 1:42:27Delian Asparouhov?

  And that was what people thought of on the cost of equity side for a long time. That was the whole purpose of going public was like, you know, in 2013, you couldn't raise $5 billion in the private markets. And so if you wanted to scale to that level, you had to basically go public. Private credit was much more laggard to catch up, but is now actually starting to catch up where it's like, well, man, you're like, cost of equity is basically the equivalent, if not cheaper than what it is when you're public. Now the cost of credit is starting to basically, you know, become the equivalent at some point. It's like, you know, why are you even, you know, sort of bothering to, you know, sort of, you go public? So that was like, you know, sort of first set of thoughts that I had. But then the second was, okay, I was like, trying to think about it from like the lender perspective. I was like, in what world, you know, are they giving this like, you know, private company the like equivalent cost of capital of like, you know, publicly traded?

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Apple.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  It couldn't, it couldn't be that they've just raised so much money and they need to deploy it at all costs, right? Couldn't be that.

• 1:43:15Delian Asparouhov?

  I, yeah, I mean, maybe there's a part of it.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  That couldn't be it, right? Like, why would we, you know? We raised a lot of money. We have a lot of AUM. We gotta take some huge risk right here. We gotta deploy. We can't, we can't generate fees unless we're, you know, slugging around.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  Huge check.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  But what, yeah, what's the other reason?

• 1:43:32Delian Asparouhov?

  I, I think the other reason is like, there's these certain like, super cycle macro trends that sort of feel unstoppable. And if your company is related to that. The banks are willing to underwrite it because they believe that like, look, this piece of infrastructure that you're building, if you don't utilize it, there will be a fast follower that quickly, you know, sort of jams it up. So you build out XYZ data center with all these GPUs. For some reason, if your model, your like particular consumer application doesn't work, somebody else is basically going to go snap that up. And so they clearly are treating like a part of underwriting, you know, you know, CapEx as a, you know, infrastructure like debt provider, is thinking about like, if the like equity holder of this, you know, basically goes belly up, is this, does this asset actually have secondary liquidity, right?

• 1:44:12Delian Asparouhov?

  And that's why, you know, you know, companies that have super esoteric pieces of equipment or technology, a little harder to have debt. If you're buying something, say like, you know, you know,

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  I mean, even like that warehouse, I mean, the warehouse space, like if you were to, I don't know, you're probably leasing it, but like if you were to say, I want a mortgage and I want to buy a warehouse, like that's hyper liquid and you can sell that to somebody else who needs a warehouse very easily. You're in El Segundo. It's pretty simple. But yeah, like if it's R and D and if the R and D doesn't produce fruits, like that needs to be equity backed. That needs to be paid for with equity. And so, yeah, it is interesting that, yeah, there's this like super cycle and there's certain technologies, certain pieces of equipment, certain pieces of hardware that you can just underwrite way, way differently because somebody's going to pick them up. There's three.

• 1:44:54Delian Asparouhov?

  Water cooling towers at GPU centers, transmission lines, like people building transformers.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:59Delian Asparouhov?

  The gas turbines that people are using for like, you know, basically backup, you know, sort of power to like smooth out the grid, battery systems. And so it's interesting where it's like, you almost have the like, you know, and I always talk about this, like you want to, you know, transform the world. You can, you know, do all the government policy you want, but ultimately it's like the invisible hand that is going to, you know, make this happen. When we think about like electrification and build out of like, you know, sort of grid, when we think about like reshoring of, you know, sort of manufacturing in the United States and having like, you know, not just 10 CNC machines in a facility like this, but like hundreds, thousands, et cetera. The easiest signal to see whether or not that stuff is going to happen is like, what is the cost of capital to go do that? And the banks are clearly signaling like, we believe that this is such a macro trend, there's such strong, you know, sort of support from the market, such strong support from government policy, that like, we're going to be giving these like subscale companies, but that are focused in these particular areas.

• 1:45:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Cost of capital low enough that this, yeah, and we believe that the risk is low enough because of the secondary liquidity, because of all these macro trends, that it sort of becomes a self fulfilling loop where now all of a sudden you do get, you know, all those, you know, sort of trends, you know, built out on, you know, you know, crazy. Amounts of energy build out, you know, reshoring of production in the United States, you know, sort of huge data centers. And so the, the, now the stuff can also go in the reverse direction. But I think it's just like one of these highlights of like capital markets are just so reflexive. Where like when people believe in a trend more than the cost of capital becomes less than the rollout, you know, it basically happens faster. And then it loops on itself with the cost of capital becomes less, et cetera. And you're seeing this in these like, you know, sort of categories. But there's like more sustainability against you this, especially in the data center world where, you know, it's not dependent on the data centers producing cash flows. For, you know, a lot of these businesses, obviously on all things reshoring production, they're obviously more, more, you know, sort of dependent on actual revenues there.

• 1:46:27Delian Asparouhov?

  The only other topic that I was going to, you know, sort of flag, by the way, is I don't know if you guys saw, but the White House actually put out an executive order last, yesterday. That was one of their, you know, sort of first, you know, broader orders on basically maintaining commercial space leadership in the United States that I kind of wanted to, uh.

• 1:46:39John Coogan?

  Please break it down.

• 1:46:40Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, a little bit of, you know, Delta V, you know, space topic.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Break it down, spaceman. Spaceman.

• 1:46:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Breaking it down. It was something I, I hope I don't butcher, you know, apologies, Michael Kratzios, but I butchered the name of the order. But it was something like, you know, you know, America maintaining, uh, making space great again, you know, maintaining American leadership in space. There were a couple of different aspects of it, you know, that I enjoyed, you know, reading through. I think the first primary like lens that I put on it is it was just the clearest language that I've ever seen from a government official. Talking about just making so much of space activity far more regular. It was everything from just like, you know, sort of, uh, uh, rethinking the regulations around both launch and reentry. To think of these things as like much more, you know, sort of regular activities.

• 1:47:25Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, the example that I always like to provide in relation to, you know, sort of Varda was, um, you know, if you've studied the airspace around Cape Canaveral over the past, you know, decade. It's had a, you know, sort of significant, you know, sort of, you know, shift in that there used to just be the occasional rocket launch that would do a basically like temporary, basically shutdown of airspace. You know, flights would get, you know, sort of rerouted, um, you know, across Florida in order to, you know, sort of accommodate that. And it was always sort of like a one-off special operation. At this point, if you actually look at like the commercials, um, you know, uh, plane traffic patterns around Florida. Most of it has basically largely shifted, like they used to typically actually like fly along the coast, if you think about that, in New York to Miami flight, it would actually sort of cut along the coast to basically reduce a little bit the distance.

• 1:48:06Delian Asparouhov?

  Now, because there's just such consistent operations, the airspace is basically predicted to be effectively closed off at basically all times. And so all of the commercial airline traffic basically just goes along the like central line of Florida. It sounds like a simple thing, but it's interesting to think about like how day-to-day activities and commercial activities are shaped when something is seen as like a regular activity rather than like a sort of special occasion. And so you've seen that built out around Cape Canaveral where now do you have this like rocket flight corridor that is basically just like permanently cordoned off. It's really the only place that we have that in the United States at that regular activity where like it's thought of as something that needs to be cordoned off. You obviously have Vandenberg, sort of space for space, but still their things are still occasional enough that you don't have the equivalent.

• 1:48:50Delian Asparouhov?

  There's also a little bit less like sort of commercial flight traffic that goes around there. It's just a little bit less than like a dense urban population. But a part of the executive order from the president was both sort of rethinking and reshaping basically launch and reentry regulation, but also clearly pushing for an establishing of a bunch of spaceports around America that are meant to have basically sort of regular both reentry and launch activity. And then thinking through how much burden should there be put on reentry vehicles that are coming back from space if those reentry vehicles have what's known as a flight termination system onboard. Basically it's like, hey, if something's going wrong, just explode the damn thing so we don't accidentally like land in the wrong place.

• 1:49:33Delian Asparouhov?

  And so should you allow for basically like looser regulations when you know that there is that type of termination system onboard that can basically self-terminate if you're in an off nominal scenario? And so it was just great to see leadership from the administration and the president in such a like... Pointed direction of, hey, this type of activity needs to be thought of as like day to day and as common as like commercial, you know, sort of flight. The example that I like to give is, you know, we are now approaching the point of the amount of orbital rocket launches from the United States per year is about the same number of commercial airliners landing and taking off in LAX every day.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:50:08Delian Asparouhov?

  Is becoming, you know, regular. It's, I mean, it's still 365, you know, you know, off of, you know, truly, you know, the daily equivalent of LAX, but it's like, you know, it's in the orders of magnitude now of like, you know, some of our busiest airports. And so we need to think of these things not as like rocket launch pads, but like spaceports. And I liked the executive order had like the word spaceport in it like 15 times, not like esoteric, crazy rocket launch pad thing. It's like, no, you know, airports and spaceports.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we kind of do that with the commercial flights. I, I, I think like when commercial airliners are flying east to west, they fly at like 35,000 feet. And when you're flying west to east, you fly at 32,000 feet. So there's just always a gap and, you know, you, you don't even have to think about like, am I going to run into someone because you're just, everyone's just codified.

• 1:50:49Delian Asparouhov?

  Default pattern of operation. Because you don't have to think about that. And so we need the equivalent for spaceports where it's like, yeah, there's this corridor that allows, you know, for reentry, you know, sort of regularly. And just like, it's not like it's the one-off rerouting of planes, but the planes just don't go there because they know that that's where things reenter.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  What's the, what's the update on Firefly Aerospace? They went out, they went public on, uh, August 7th. It's 60 down 18 ish percent since then, but this is the company that had the, the rover.

• 1:51:19Delian Asparouhov?

  Moon landing.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  Moon landing.

• 1:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what's the general update on the company? And, um, yeah, uh, yeah.

• 1:51:27John Coogan?

  Like, how do they fit in the ecosystem?

• 1:51:29Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I've been spending a bunch of time with, uh, some of the investment bankers that, you know, sort of led that, you know, deal, uh, and then some of the like long, um, you know, hedge funds that did it. Um, it was exciting to see that of the call it like top eight, you know, uh, mega IPO allocators that are like the long only, you know, sort of public equity types. I think something like seven out of the eight did like meaningful, you know, sort of positions in that, uh, Firefly, um, IPO round. Um, and so I, I think this kind of goes back to like the, you know, sort of super cycle stuff that we were talking about where, um, I do think that this stuff starts to become a little bit of like a self fulfilling prophecy. Where like you have the president of the administration really leaning in and leaning forward. Obviously, there's like Jared Isaacman, no longer administrator, Secretary Duffy stepping in. They're trying to find, you know, interim.

• 1:52:11Delian Asparouhov?

  So, you know, there's obviously things that they're still sorting out on like our space leadership. But clearly, you know, sort of leaning forward in a way that is, you know, sort of marching towards, you know, wanting more launch providers, more activity, you know, both military and civil in space, and then obviously towards the moon and Mars. Firefly, you know, has had a, you know, somewhat, you know, sort of complicated history. It's no longer the original founding CEO. They've had a swap out CEO a few times. But I do think in this, you know, sort of category of aerospace company, it's really important to focus on just like ultimate like flights and, you know, success in those. And for what it's worth, Firefly has accomplished two things that I think are quite, you know, phenomenal. They are the only rocket launch company that basically had this contract with the DOD, where the DOD basically had them on guard. And then they were only given 24 hours notice and they had to launch a satellite. And so it wasn't like a, oh, pre-planned, etc.

• 1:52:54Delian Asparouhov?

  It was like, basically like responsive, you know, sort of launches, I think that, you know, sort of term that the Air Force gave it, I think it was the Air Force. And so, very impressive to have done that. And then obviously, you know, they've managed to actually, you know, sort of land on the moon and not tip over. Intuitive Machines is still working on that, you know, sort of second part. So they've clearly accomplished some things. Financial profile of the business, I admit, is like, you know, it's a lot of capex, a lot of burn, it's not super repeatable, you know, sort of yet. But the fact that like, you know, these public, you know, long, you know, equity folks are, you know, buying in at such scale, again, improves their balance sheet, reduces their cost of capital, clearly shows some signaling from the equity markets at least, that they really do believe that this type of like lunar infrastructure, launch infrastructure is something that has such macro tailwinds behind it, that, you know, even though they're still, you know, choppy in terms of operations, etc., that there's, you know, sort of clear potential there.

• 1:53:39Delian Asparouhov?

  And you're seeing that with Rocket Lab. I mean, look at the company, like, you know, was, you know, I think a year ago, probably trading at like three and a half, you know, sort of four billion in market cap. It's something like a $22 billion, you know, sort of market cap company today, as like, you know, amongst the, you know, sort of higher, you know, sort of rev multiple, you know, sort of ratios, you know, in all things, you know, A and D. Let's give it up for high revenue multiples.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  We love them here. We love them.

• 1:53:59Delian Asparouhov?

  Love them. Give them to the rocket companies, babies. Yeah.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  We don't have enough of them.

• 1:54:02Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. Not saying Vardic is going public anytime soon, but it is encouraging to see, you know, all the interest and activity.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're the one who said you were talking with investment bankers.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, you know, the job of a capital allocator, you know.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  Right, right, right. So I posted earlier somewhat of a joke, somewhat real, breaking group chat sentiment flips bearish. Investor competence, confidence dips to the lowest level since late 2023. Source, my phone. How are you feeling about general sentiment right now in private markets? There's been a lot of, a lot of exuberance, a lot of people.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  Should we be fearful?

• 1:54:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people being greedy. Should we be? Is there any alpha in being fearful?

• 1:54:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, we always, um, yeah, try to, you know, zig when others are zagging at FAP, obviously. So when we see this level of exuberance, I think that always makes us a little more hesitant. But yeah, it's been wild to see just the, you know, sort of depth of interest. But in this like sort of K-shaped, you know, sort of dynamic, right? Where, you know, the equivalent of like, I forget who tweeted this today, some relative prominent venture capitalists, but, or maybe reporter. There was basically saying that like private capital markets are basically replicating the like mag seven strategy. But, you know, in the private markets where it's like, you know, basically if you look at the like mag seven versus the like S and P 493. S and P 493 is basically flat mag seven or up. You kind of have the equivalent dynamic in private capital markets, both literally with like the individual logos of like SpaceX, OpenAI, and et cetera.

• 1:55:24Delian Asparouhov?

  Where it's like, you know, representing the biggest chunk of, you know, capital allocated, you know, ever in the history of private capital markets. But I think it's also generally true in like the categories where it's like, if you're not A and D and if you're not AI. Oh my God, like there's like, you know, basically no interest and nobody, you know, wants to, you know, to talk to you. And then if you're in those categories, the rounds get done in like a, you know, sort of week and are done at like the, you know, sort of craziest, you know, prices. Yeah, I think we always stick to our general strategy of like, you know, ignore the noise, focus on the things that we think are in the long term. And so, you know, my.

• 1:55:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just, it's, it's worth, it's worth remembering because we just had, you know, we, we, you know, Figma IPO was, you know, this amazing moment. But if you look back, it's like Andrew Reid did the C at 400 million posts. And you look at the, you look at the companies that are doing rounds at 400 posts right now. And they were not, they were not anywhere near that kind of profile.

• 1:56:16Delian Asparouhov?

  In those categories, you know, this is where, you know, again, you know, obviously there's lots of benefits to doing the hot category where you're like downstream, you know, financings typically are much less risky, but there's also the, you know, you know, you know, return, you know, compression there. So my, you know, sort of pithy joke on it is like, while everybody else is focused on, you know, A and D and like AI, I'm just doing the series As of like fish killing robot companies where, you know, nobody's really thinking.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  We tested, we tasted Shinkai on the stream. It was a lot of fun. Um, what, what, what does A and D stand for?

• 1:56:45Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, aerospace and defense.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Aerospace and defense.

• 1:56:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Sorry, I'm spending too much time with capital.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Lots of jargon, lots of jargon.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  What else, uh, what else needs to be clarified in space? Obviously the, the space port, the actual path the rockets travel along is important, but is there, is there, you know, appetite for more clear regulation around Leo, Middle Earth orbit, uh, geo orbit? Are there even just like reentry of the pods that Varda sends up? Like what else? What's the next thing that we need to kind of standardize around?

• 1:57:19Delian Asparouhov?

  I like that in my head now. I have Middle Earth orbit going.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, Middle Earth orbit. What's it actually called?

• 1:57:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Medium Earth orbit.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Medium Earth orbit. I like.

• 1:57:27Delian Asparouhov?

  I like Middle Earth orbit better.

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Let's take it back. Let's coin it.

• 1:57:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly, exactly. Um, yeah, I mean, there has been, you know, I've heard some like, you know, sort of light rumblings, you know, sort of around this. Right now, when you look at your sort of, uh, general space policy, it is kind of split up in a bunch of different areas. You basically have FAA responsible for all launch and reentry licensing. So basically like when you're in the air.

• 1:57:49Delian Asparouhov?

  Then once you're in orbit, you have everything from if you want to take photos of other things in orbit, that's all regulated by NOAA. Kind of crazy because it's like, you know, NOAA stands for like ocean, whatever administration, et cetera. So it's like, why are they regulating pictures? But it's because they're responsible for all things OSINT, you know, in, in, you know, photography land. And then if you want to communicate with your satellite, you know, it's the radio spectrum from the FCC and they even govern like, so for example, uh, you know, one of the, you know, recent back and forths, you know, more in the prior administration around Varda was, uh, they were trying to debate whether or not ICAMS, in space assembly and manufacturing needed to live in its own specific, you know, sort of spectrum. And everybody had to communicate in there rather than getting to be in. Like the general, you know, sort of space, you know, sort of spectrum.

• 1:58:31Delian Asparouhov?

  And so you have all these like sort of split regulators. And as a space company, it's very burdensome relative to like, okay, if you're like a pharmaceutical company, you kind of know that like your only regulator is the FDA. And that's all that you're sort of working with. And so, um, yeah, I think, you know, probably when I think about what needs to happen next beyond just the space ports, it's just like make it to there's sort of more of a single point of contact. If you're a space company, rather than having to establish like four different regulatory, you know, relationships, which by the way, none of them talk to one another, right? So that and then probably like a space traffic coordinator, like there isn't the equivalent of like, we have air traffic control here, there's regulations on like how you need to report your position, how you communicate, et cetera. Space traffic control, they like kind of started something actually in the first Trump administration. It worked through Biden administration and then oddly enough, the Trump administration actually shut down their own project.

• 1:59:14Delian Asparouhov?

  And so now we're kind of back to like Wild, Wild West again on all things space traffic. So it's mostly just like literal, like the companies like individually email each other. And there's like this one like nonprofit foundation that like collects everybody's space traffic data. And then it's like, by the way, there's no rules and like, by the way, if like you're going to be intersecting with a Chinese satellite and then like the nonprofit introduces you and the Chinese company over email. It's not obvious like who's going to maneuver, what, like, no, there's no rule.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  It's a game of chicken.

• 1:59:38Delian Asparouhov?

  It's still just, it's mostly just pretty empty up there. So there's not that many, you know, incursions.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  We're going to need regulation around drunk space.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  We're going to need pilots who live their life one mile at a time.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I have a sort of an odd.

• 1:59:53Delian Asparouhov?

  Pretty short if you're going 14,000 miles an hour. You're 14,000 miles at a time.

• 1:59:58Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what's, what's your read on the, the future of, um, the, the sort of pilot career path? It seems like obviously we like many, many different types of planes have like great autonomous systems. Yet we obviously still want pilots, uh, in the cabin. How do you, how do you, when you kind of look at the progress happening on the, on the autonomous side? Where do you think human pilots will fit in?

• 2:00:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Man, there's clearly some things that are moving forward, like, you know, Secretary Duffy, you know, Secretary of Transportation, you know, has really pushed forward more aggressively than I would have expected on all things like EV toll, you know, beyond visual line of sight, you know, sort of drones,

• 2:00:46Delian Asparouhov?

  you know, on like the small scale, you know, sort of vehicle autonomy side of things. When you think about like a Boeing 747, you know, sort of getting actually fully automated, man, the commercial airliner, you know, commercial passenger stuff is just, it feels so hard. And a part of it is, other than obviously a recent whole set of events, you know, DCA crash, obviously included. Generally, the United States has such a flawless safety profile. I think we talked about this in like, you know, other,

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:11Delian Asparouhov?

  to like get things changed because you have, you know, so much, you know, such a, you know, sort of great safety record. So, uh, yeah, I think, you know, jobs.

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When you, I mean, when you think about if you have, uh, you know, hundreds of people in a single metal tube flying through the air, is it worth having, you know, a couple more people to be in there at least?

• 2:01:29John Coogan?

  There's also an economic dynamic where I believe the, the, the, the cost of labor for an Uber is about 70% borne by human labor, whereas the cost of a 747 flight is like 7% pilot fees, even though the pilot, no, no, no, it's like 50% fuel, 70% fuel.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Whereas the gas in the Uber is like 10% of the cost of the ride. 70% is, is the actual human. And so there's a lot, there's a very different economic dynamic there. But we're actually going to talk to Merlin Labs today that are, uh, and Merlin is going public. They work on autonomous, uh, flights for planes, autonomous pilots for planes. So we'll dig in with Matthew George.

• 2:02:12Delian Asparouhov?

  My last comment for, uh, this session is, uh, this is my, uh, you know, sort of favorite one where I didn't realize it was going to be on TBHPN until the TBHPN account tweeted and it was like Dell's on today. And I was like, I didn't know that. Well, lo and behold, look at it. I am.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  That's amazing. We should just communicate purely over X.com. It is the everything app after all. Anyway, this is always a great time. Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 2:02:32Delian Asparouhov?

  Later, boys.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Bye. And whether we talk to Delian about the markets, whether you're long, whether you're short, whether you think it's top or local bottom, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. We are joined next by some folks at Anduril. Today, Anduril posted, they are waiting in the restream waiting room, I believe, we will bring them in in just a second. Anduril Industries said, introducing the Anduril 250, the first ever NASCAR race on an active military base. So, welcome to the stream. I believe we have Jeff and Jen joining. So, welcome to the stream from the WeStream

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  waiting room. Whoa, hey, can we flip them? Can they flip their camera? We're seeing you horizontal or flipped somehow. But, good to meet you, good to see you. Actually, I've met both of you online. And Jen's been on the show before. Let's try and rotate the camera 90 degrees if possible. There we go. Looking good. And I see some vehicle.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Stunning. Both of them.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic. How are you doing today?

• 2:03:41Speaker 05

  Hi, everyone. My name is Jeff Miller. I'm great. It's good to see you, John. Good to see you, Jordy. We're here in the hangar in Mooresville, North Carolina. So, we wanted to give you guys a little bit of a window into our big announcement around the Anduril 250.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  Why North Carolina? Isn't this happening in San Diego?

• 2:04:03Speaker 05

  Well, NASCAR headquarters is in Daytona and in Charlotte. So, we've been here this week, not only working with the NASCAR team to make sure we show up into the sport in an authentic way, but we've also been meeting with several of the teams themselves, because you might be seeing an Anduril stock car with a paint scheme come June 21st, 2026. So, getting to learn the sport as we make the announcement.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is the Anduril colorway? I think, when I think of Anduril, I think of like, all the muted, the slate gray, but then I also think of all the anime colors. And so, there's a little bit of both. Is, is yellow and gray going to be a brand pattern going forward?

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  We are not getting a lot of audio from you. I don't know if there's, is there one microphone? What's going on here? Can we hear you, Jen? Yeah.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  We can hear Jeff.

• 2:05:00Speaker 05

  What Jeff was saying is that, okay, great.

• 2:05:04Speaker 05

  So, what Jeff was saying that black is in not only one of our core colors, or not a color, as you like to say, but our accent tone there is safety yellow.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 2:05:15Speaker 05

  So, anything that you see, whether it's incredible products that Jen and team are designing, the finish, you're going to see that safety yellow. So, in the paint scheme here, we like to call it, using the language that they use here at NASCAR versus what you'll hear more in F1 called a livery, what we call livery on our aircraft. For our paint scheme here, we really lead into that black and that safety yellow.

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  The car looks incredible.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Looks amazing.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  You guys cooked, as usual. Can you, can you give us a tour of the livery? I gotta, I wanna see it close up.

• 2:05:47John Coogan?

  Is the, yeah, can the camera move around? Can you show us the car up close? A little bit. I can hear you like loosely on his microphone, I think. Uh, but if it's a shared pair of AirPods, it's probably switching back and forth. Let's see if we can get a tour of the car.

• 2:06:00Speaker 06

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take you around the car.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Okay. Very cool.

• 2:06:07Speaker 06

  All right.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  That's a huge Andal logo on the front. You really dominated this, yeah. Safety, safety yellow.

• 2:06:12Speaker 06

  The primary color is black, right?

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:15Speaker 06

  The safety yellow comes from our livery scheme on our actual products where we're calling out high vis, critical warnings and markings.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:24Speaker 06

  Um, and you know, as we think about bringing these two worlds together, I really thought there was a lot of symmetry, a lot of kinship between our two identities, right? I think, I love also spending time here, getting to know the NASCAR brand, uh, like bringing, uh, they're leaning really hard into their legacy and their heritage, but they pair that with such contemporary, you know, bold graphics and high, you know, visibility colors, which is, um, you know, there's a lot of synergy between our identity and their identity.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  We gotta get some Mustang GTDs in the Andal parking lot after the next tender.

• 2:07:00John Coogan?

  Have you seen the Mustang GTD?

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  It's beautiful.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  $100,000 Mustang. It's beautiful. Oh, wow. Is that a Fury in the background, too?

• 2:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:07Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to see.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:07:10Speaker 06

  Jeff can Jeff can walk you around the Fury.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  That's awesome. Talk to me about the actual race. Would this race have existed without Anduril stepping in? It is like, it's not just the logo on a car. It's not just the logo on the entire car. It's the logo and the name Anduril on the actual race.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  And a whole new race.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  And a whole new race.

• 2:07:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, what I'd like to say is that this race first and foremost is the range of NASCAR leadership and the US Navy. So it's our privilege to be a part of it. Ben Kennedy, you're going to have the opportunity to speak with. He's got such incredible vision along with Amy, the race director. And so we came on in April. Jen and I had a chance to go on the Navy base. And the second you step on a naval base, score not. This is where the films Top Gun and Top Gun Maverick. I've seen film that famous sidebar is there. You stepped on a US aircraft carrier and you feel the power.

• 2:08:13Speaker 05

  You feel like you are, you're there and with people who are doing work that really matters. So yes, this race would absolutely work without us, but I think what NASCAR saw in Anduril was a company that was so deeply committed to our American values and our warfighter and wanted to celebrate that story that it was a perfect fit.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, we're going to hop on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us. When is the actual race? Can people buy tickets now? Is it on sale? What's the next step?

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  And how do we get some merch? People are usually asking us that, but now we're asking you that.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  Definitely going to want some merch.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  We can talk offline, but yeah, when is the?

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  When is the race?

• 2:08:55Speaker 05

  The race is June 21st, 2026. You can go ahead and get your, place your deposits now. We'll definitely be having merch. I'm expecting a live broadcast from TVPN.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  We will be there 100%. I can't wait.

• 2:09:09Speaker 05

  So yeah, can't wait to run this back with you guys in about 11 months.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much and congratulations on the partnership. We're very excited to keep tracking it and can't wait for the race. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:21Speaker 05

  Thank you all.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  And we're also notorious for running snarky billboard ads on 101. If you want to run an ad, 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. Did you see the billboard that they actually dropped on the 101? Yeah, we talked about this where Jeff Miller, who we just talked to, put up a billboard of the fury saying like no more enterprise SaaS.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Because every single, I think Trey Stevens got sick of seeing another, another enterprise SaaS billboard and he said, I need an Andorl billboard up there. And so they did it.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  They did it.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  And so we will be hopping on with Ben Kennedy from NASCAR in just a few minutes. But in the meantime, let's tell you about Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you. Any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Jordy, where, where would you like to go in the post? We got about five minutes.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  I have a post here from Ian Roundtree, friend of the show. He says, a friend hadn't heard of TVPN and another described it as follows. TVPN is a very popular Ramp infomercial in the style of ESPN. Instead of rankings tied to sport leagues, they are tied to how early and how much you invested in Ramp or how close you are to someone who did it. I said fact check, true.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  We love it. We love it.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Daniel Tenrero says, happy CoreWeave lockup.

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  Expiary day.

• 2:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Expiary day. Basically the Super Bowl for guys like us. CoreWeave down 10% today.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  As some books sell. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how the actual lockup plays out.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Down 15%.

• 2:10:59John Coogan?

  15%.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Still a $48 billion company and shout out Nick Carter.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  They also.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Angel investor in the.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's right.

• 2:11:08Jordi Hays?

  What was it? Seed round?

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  You can run the numbers on this position.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  CoreWeave most recently beat on top line, missed on bottom line. They are burning something around 300 something million dollars a quarter, but making a lot of revenue and so.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Who hasn't burned? They're investing. 300 billion. Investing. 300 million a quarter. Yeah. It happens. Parag Agrawal says he's just setting up his Twitter again. Coming on the show today. Heads down, building parallel with some of the best people he's ever worked with. They're creating infrastructure for AIs to search and use the web. He will be on the show in not too long. Very excited for that. Buck says, "Stas, S.T.A.A.S. Subsidize tokens as a service, i.e. most of the VC-backed AI app layer." And on that note, a Chris Pike post has hit the timeline. Oh, yeah? A Google Doc has hit the timeline. I repeat, a Google Doc has hit the timeline. It's called Cursor's Problem.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  "Product market fit is the story founders love to tell. Business model product market fit is a part they often skip. Product market fit is users repeatedly choose your product. Business model product fit. The extraction of value is sustainably in excess and proportional to the cost of delivering value. Cursor has relied on a subscription model that historically allowed for quote-unquote unlimited use. That's a fixed revenue variable cost setup. Insurance companies are the canonical example, and they employ actuaries to accurately price risk and segment users. Hypergrowth startups rarely have that muscle. When variable costs scale with intensity of usage, but revenue doesn't, you're not selling software, you're underwriting risk.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  Without actuarial discipline, pricing, segmentation, caps, exclusions, these models drift into the same ditch that killed MoviePass, Oyster, and forced ClassPass to retire quote-unquote unlimited. Cohorts invert. Your most profitable users churn because they use the product the least and get the least value. Oftentimes, they can get better value from a competitor who prices them more accurately or with less breakage. The remaining users are those who extract more value than they pay. Over time, older cohorts morph into deeply negative gross margin."

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Top line mass rot, new, larger cohorts can briefly offset the drag hiding the deterioration in earlier cohorts. Revenue grows, margin quality quietly decays. A large cause of this problem in fast-growing companies is the conflation of subsidies and marketing. They are both expensive growth strategies, but they do very different things. Marketing buys attention, it changes who hears about you, not what the product is worth in equilibrium. Subsidies buy behavior. They put economic value on the product scale, distorting the read on willingness to pay. The 15-minute delivery boom made this vivid. PMF seemed strong when prices were artificially low. When prices rose to true cost, demand snapped back.

• 2:14:02Jordi Hays?

  The "fit" was with the discount, not the service. Venture lore points to Uber and DoorDash as counterexamples. The lesson isn't negative gross margins are fine. The lesson is, if there's an operational path to positive margins, i.e. density, batching, or utilization, and future pricing power, quote, moats, the temporary subsidies can be a bridge. Indeed, venture capital is precisely the right instrument to facilitate these kinds of companies, but most businesses don't have such a bridge. Does this bridge exist for Cursor? Cursor's users expect the best coding performance, which is currently delivered by the Frontier models. That pins Cursor's cogs to OpenAI anthropic price cards. Cursor doesn't control two critical dials.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  One, model performance frontier, which is what users demand, and model input-output pricing, what Cursor pays. If Cursor steps down to cheaper weaker models, the users who care about performance will notice and churn. Those who can tolerate weaker models can get them cheaper elsewhere. If it stays at the frontier while keeping prices flat, the variable real cost to service their heaviest users will explode. In an effort to combat this, Cursor has been forced to raise prices and institute usage caps, leading to user outrage and churn. Anytime unlimited shows up in variable cost businesses, PMF becomes a permanently open question. Are users here for the product or for the subsidy? Would they still use it as much or at all at true marginal cost? Until Cursor prices consumption in proportion to cost, it cannot know.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Last couple of paragraphs.

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  So interesting that we're going into, we're leaving the world of zero marginal costs. Like, this is the Ben Thompson intellectual aggregation theory regime of the past two decades. Like, since, you know, if you're trying to understand Google, you had to understand the, what it meant to serve an incremental user at zero marginal cost. And it was something that Wall Street and retail and lots of folks, even a lot of VCs, like, could not wrap their minds around for a long, long time. And there was huge alpha in that. And now it's become consensus, right when the economic equation is now flipping. I just wonder how long, how

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  long we'll be in this, in this regime, if it's here to stay, if we plateau and reasoning models are always expensive. And then I wonder, I do wonder how, how bad the gross margins are at various companies, how bad this subsidization, subsidized tokens problem is. And I also wonder if there are any companies, like, there have been plenty previously, like, previous era SaaS companies that have said, have gone out and said, hey, we're an AI company now. And I wonder if that's hurt their gross margins. I've been picking at that with a few founders that have come on. I've said, like, so, like, is your inference bill growing? Or is it material at all? And basically, what I'm getting at is, like, is it affecting your gross margins?

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were asking Rahul from Julius about this. And he said that it's, it's, it's a thing, but it's not incredibly material.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  There's going to need, you just have to find a way with, with the application layer company that you build to deliver enough value that the actual inference is under the hood, very efficient. And then I do wonder, of course, is it a unique, unique position? Because it's such a raw interface to, to, to the frontier coding model, and the quality really matters. But, yeah, could they, could they swap out DeepSeek R2, save 10 times as much money, and then, you know, and then all of a sudden be great gross margins?

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so to finish off Chris's post, he says, Kerschel will have to choose what it wants to know. If it keeps subsidizing the heaviest usage, it can keep growing, but it cannot claim. Unambiguous PMF, if it starts charging in proportion to cost, some usage will fall, and what remains will be the market. The burning question that should nag founders, do I have demand for my product or for my subsidies? So cursors without a doubt, a beloved product.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it seems very reasonable to subsidize for a while and really get people installed and hooked on the product and then raise prices to the point where you are delivering value. Like, when you think about what the value of an AI software engineer, that could be justified in the $50,000 a year, $100,000 a year territory. That doesn't seem that crazy to me if you're actually getting that leverage out of the system. But the idea of saying, oh, yeah, my IDE bill is 10K a month is crazy. But it could be. I don't know. Anyway.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Before we get into our next guest, Ben, we have some news breaking. Cohere just raised 500 million.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  Ooh, let's go for Aiden Gomez. On the Transformer paper, one of the greatest to ever do it.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Nick on X says, we are so back.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  We are so back. Congratulations to the folks over Cohere.

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's bring in Ben from the Restream waiting room.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Ben Kennedy from NASCAR. How are you doing, Ben? Good to meet you.

• 2:18:57Speaker 07

  What's happening? Good. How are you guys doing? Thanks for having me on today.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Why don't you kick me off with an introduction on yourself and how you fit in the NASCAR organization?

• 2:19:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my name's Ben Kennedy. I am EVP here at NASCAR. But we get the opportunity to wear a bunch of different hats. So we're responsible for the NASCAR own-track properties, NASCAR regional team, emissions team, people making improvements to our racetracks. And then importantly, what we're talking about today is schedule. So dreaming up the next year's schedule, and we're getting ready to announce our 2026 schedule here pretty soon. But, you know, one of our big projects, which I know we're talking about today, is the race on the base next year. We're bringing our NASCAR Cup Series, our Xfinity Series, and our Craftsman Truck Series to San Diego for the first time, and for the first time ever on a military base. So really excited about it.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Take me through the shape of, like, all of the different NASCAR events, because there's like, you know, there's the tent pole events that people kind of know and love, and then there's a whole bunch of other different properties, activations, events, races. Kind of give me the shape of what NASCAR is today.

• 2:20:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we compete across thirty-eight race weekends throughout the year. Thirty-six of those are points races and then we have two exhibition races. And our season, it starts in February with the biggest race of the year, the Daytona 500. So we're a little bit different in the sense that we start with our Super Bowl. And then we will go pretty much straight through the entire year. We'll have one or two weeks off. To the first week in November where we'll have our championship race, which will be in in Phoenix this year. So. We uh, we're competing every single season. We have um, three different national series. So. You can almost think of it like high school or or college that kind of leads to the pros. Um, but we have our cup series, our Xfinity series, which is our last step for a lot of drivers before they go up to the premier series.

• 2:20:52Speaker 07

  And then our Craftsman Truck Series, which are um, a little bit different style of of vehicle. It's more of a pickup truck style. Uh, and that's where a lot of drivers will start um, their national series career as they they begin touring with us. So.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  And then how does the race on the base fit into that uh, structure?

• 2:21:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the race on the base will be um, it'll be in the middle of our season. So Amazon Prime will cover it for the cup series. A lot of the Xfinity Series and Truck Series that will be on Saturday and Friday that weekend, but it's June nineteenth to twenty-first. And essentially what we're gonna do at Naval Base Coronado is we're gonna build a temporary three-mile circuit. That will go around the base. So anyone that comes out, we're gonna create kind of these different neighborhoods of experiences that fans can go and see. So. You have the start-finish line where you'll have, you know, a lot of the hospitality, the garage area, people will be able to get down and. And see and hear the cars. They'll go out towards the bay side of San Diego or they'll go past.

• 2:21:52Speaker 07

  An aircraft carrier or two. And then eventually we'll come out onto the tarmac where they'll be weaving their way through F-eighteens and Ospreys and all sorts of fun stuff. So. Don't have the the course design finalized yet, but around a three-mile course, we're gonna build temporary on the base.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about.

• 2:22:08Speaker 07

  What do you think the uh, expected lap time will be for for a course of that size? It's a good question. I would say, you know, we've run a couple of models on it. We do a lot of our SIM work virtual before we we commit to anything. It's around a minute and a half, a minute 40 seconds or so. It's it's a pretty high speed track.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  120 miles an hour on average, something like that, I imagine. That's that's wild. That'll be a lot of fun to watch. Talk about partnering with Anduril, who they are trying to to reach. They have customers, they have employees, they have they have fans of the merch. Why was it a good partnership? What are you excited to like deliver to them on the marketing side? And what did they bring to the table other than, you know, just money?

• 2:22:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, we couldn't ask for a better partner than Anduril. And and we, if we approached them or they approached us, I think we reached out to them. You know, through the grapevine and we had some conversations earlier this year, you know, probably five or six months ago with them. And they had a ton of energy around the event. And, you know, for us, we want to find partners and companies that we can do business with that. Are both strategic in the sense that we're going to add value to them and hopefully they'll add value to the weekend, which I know they're going to do. But partners that are organic as well. And you couldn't think of a more natural fit than a partner like Anduril. You know, you look at all the different types of technology that they're creating, both on the software side and the hardware side.

• 2:23:36Speaker 07

  It's incredible. And you think about precision, speed and innovations in technology. That's what our sport is all about. So couldn't ask for a better partner than Anduril. Really fired up about the announcement today. This has been a long one coming. We had a couple of Easter eggs that snuck out about a month ago when we had the announcement. But glad to be able to be talking publicly today about it and, you know, excited to see. There's a lot of elements that they're going to be bringing to the table over the next 11 months. And then especially on that weekend that that fans will get to to go out and experience as a part of it.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  What's the path? A lot of our audience are founders and executives at various technology companies. What's the path into partnering with NASCAR itself or various teams and and events?

• 2:24:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I would say if anyone's interested, reach out to us. We can, I'm sure we could find a way to provide contact info and whatnot. But typically, we'll have conversations with whoever might be interested. I think the good news is there's a lot of interest around this event. And whether it's NASCAR as a sanctioning body, or a team, or a driver, we have connections to everyone in the industry. So happy to put them in touch along the way.

• 2:24:55John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Congratulations on the announcement. We'll see you there. I'm looking forward to it. We'll see you there.

• 2:25:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I look forward to seeing you guys out there. It'll be a blast.

• 2:25:05John Coogan?

  This is gonna be great. Talk to you soon. Bye. If you're looking to go to San Diego, you gotta book a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Jordy, warm up that gong we have.

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  I just want to say, I want to be live streaming from an aircraft carrier for the race.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  We can do it. For sure. For sure.

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's bring Jessica in from Sola.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  From the restream waiting room and from Sola. How you doing? Hey, what's happening?

• 2:25:43Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  It's good. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company?

• 2:25:48Speaker 08

  Absolutely. I'm Jess. I'm co-founder and CEO of Sola. We're an agentic process automation platform that helps businesses automate their most operational workflows using AI by doing workflows the way that humans do.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  Name one process you've automated with an agentic workflow.

• 2:26:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. As an example, we, we work with companies across a whole bunch of different verticals. But for example, for some of the logistics companies we work with, you can imagine they operate on internal portals, external systems, spreadsheets, everything in between. And to actually get a shipment out end to end, it requires a lot of manual work. And so Sola will type data in, it will take down data, it will, you know, do all the coordination that gets the shipment end to end and work in that passion.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Give us the news today. Anything to share?

• 2:26:39Speaker 08

  Very exciting day. We just raised a 17 million Series A led by a 16Z.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't leave out conviction.

• 2:26:50Speaker 08

  I was just about to get there. We continue support from Feedlead Conviction as well as Y Combinator.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:26:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:26:58John Coogan?

  That's a great.

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  Great lineup.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Talk to me about what the state of the art is in actually building an agentic workflow on top of kind of an internal dashboard. We've been hearing a lot about like the big labs setting up reinforcement learning environments with verifiable rewards. They're cloning DoorDash. They're creating copies of amazon.com. So the future version of chat GPT will let me order headphones or gongs or whatever I need for the show just within that chat interface. I imagine that that if you're talking about some custom piece of logistics software, some internal portal, there's probably some things that you can get out of the box just by using frontier reasoning models and and and web browsers and

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  agentic browsers. But what what extra steps do you have to take to actually deliver a ton of value?

• 2:27:47Speaker 08

  Absolutely. Let me give a little context. A hundred percent, you know, everyone's talking about enterprise AI agents and computer use and VLMs. But there's a there's a gap between where those are at today and how that gets into productionized workflows, right? For enterprise companies at scale. You can imagine that, you know, for the first time, we have these models that can reason and they can act like humans. They can understand how these platforms are working and we don't need to, you know, build an integration or like an API connection into platforms in order to be able to do work on them. But instead, we can just, you know, mimic the way humans do. Now, that said, if you've tried operator or, you know, computer use agents or any of these models, they're they're pretty unreliable for individual tasks. And then you

• 2:28:32Speaker 08

  can imagine if you're scaling this up to, you know, hundreds of thousands of hours of real world work, it's going to be really tough to do so. And so what SOLA does is we take an approach where we use a combination of deterministic as well as more deterministic, uh, non-deterministic automation, um, and sort of change the abstractions on which things are built so that, you know, uh, you are able to, for example, send a shipment across five different platforms reliably and at scale. And so we use these models, but also a whole lot of different architectures on top of that to make things, uh, very accurate and be able to plan and, you know, build guardrails around the processes that people have.

• 2:29:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you start with a focus on logistics or is that somewhere you ended up after, you know, talking with a bunch of different companies in various industries?

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  After I demanded a single example to dig into.

• 2:29:24Speaker 08

  Absolutely. I mean, uh, today we, we work, we have workflows across a lot of different verticals. So SOLA does finance workflows and KYC. SOLA does healthcare workflows and enter state into EMRs. Logistics is a big part of that. Um, I would say that the two biggest verticals that SOLA has a ton of, done a ton of work in today is logistics and healthcare. It's by no means where we started. Actually, our early customers were in, uh, legal and in healthcare, I would say mostly, and some insurance as well. Um, but I think logistics just turned out to be an industry that we discovered a few months ago. Uh, turns out there's a million perfect automations for SOLA there. And today we work with a whole bunch of really large companies, uh, in the industry who are using it for all kinds of different applications.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  What's been the employee reaction at the companies that you guys work with? I imagine a lot of these employees are stressed out, overworked, kind of, you know, exhausted from managing all these different service areas. So my, my sense would be that they, they welcome a tool like this, but, but what's your read?

• 2:30:27Speaker 08

  Uh, for sure. I, I think that it really meaningfully changes the, the way people work. Like for example, some of the companies that we operate at. You know, we're we're saving people from doing the very boring copy pasting, very manual repetitive work so that they can focus on sales and customer relationships and everything else that goes into their business. Um, one of the customers that we work with, they do a few hundred million in revenue. We started working with um uh, about half a year ago and their their kind of famous data point is that they haven't had to hire a single person at their company since bringing on Sola because they've just been able to do more with the same amount of people that they have on hand and they can kind of scale the revenue of their business without having to scale headcount.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've heard that from a founder building in the AI roll-up space and he's buying companies and he's telling the management team, we're not like a traditional private equity that's just gonna like

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Got the company.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Got the company, reduce headcount.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  We're focused on growth.

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna focus on growth, but we don't need to add a bunch of incremental headcount. We're just gonna make you more effective.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:31:27Jordi Hays?

  It's a great value prop.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  There's a big uh, kind of discussion online today about gross margins at startups. Can you walk me through the the the economic thinking of the of your buyer, your customer? Uh, how are they thinking about um, the value that you deliver and then your costs? Because obviously, I imagine that these workflows use reasoning models, the token bills are probably significant, but you're delivering hopefully a lot more value than that. So how are people responding to uh, the idea that that, okay, there's there's a company that has real variable costs with the amount that I demand or the the amount that I'm

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  using this tool. Uh, are they receptive to a consumption model? Are they are they receptive to price increases? What's the what's the vibe been like from the from the AI buyer world?

• 2:32:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think the most direct way to justify value is just how many hours are you saving, right? That's the the most straightforward way and the traditional way automation is justified. Um, on top of that, for a lot of businesses, you actually see top line revenue lift. Like if you start powering their core operations and they can just do more business, so it becomes a very different equation and I think that's a lot of the ways customers see Sola on top of just time savings. In terms of model costs, it really It doesn't make sense to, you know, paying a computer use agent at every single step that you're doing. You can imagine that will get super costly, it will be slow, it will be unreliable. And so we have a lot of infrastructure built on top of that so that um, the things that, you know, you don't necessarily need models for that are very straightforward.

• 2:33:02Speaker 08

  We can just, you know, apply more traditional automation and then areas where you need reasoning, you need flexibility, you need workflows to adapt, then obviously we use more models there. Uh, and so costs aren't crazy, um, and I imagine those will keep going down over time.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congrats on the round and congrats on all the progress.

• 2:33:20Speaker 08

  Yes, hiring, hiring lots of engineers. We're based in New York. Um, if you're interested, please reach out. We are growing very quickly.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Congratulations on the milestone and we'll see you back here soon, I'm sure.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. And we have Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter.

• 2:33:37Jordi Hays?

  The man, the myth, the legend.

• 2:33:39John Coogan?

  In the restream waiting room. He is launching a new company today and we are pleased to have him join the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:33:49Parag Agrawal?

  Hey, John. Great to be here.

• 2:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  So much to talk about. Um, let's start with the new company. I, I mean, I'd love your thoughts on, on live streaming, on, on Twitter and X and all the things that we're doing. But let's, let, let's stay focused on your company. What did you announce today? Uh, should we ring this gong for you?

• 2:34:08Parag Agrawal?

  Let's do it.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Uh, give us a, give us a breakdown. What, what, how are, how are you describing the new company?

• 2:34:15Parag Agrawal?

  Um, we're building parallels to build infrastructure for AIs using the web. Born out of this observation that the web was built for humans. We built Twitter. You're thinking about people in browsers and apps and you're designing stuff for humans. And two years ago, as I was thinking around like AIs are going to use the web and that's going to be the primary user of the web. And it's going to be a massive scale, like thousand X, a million X of what we've ever done on the web. Like, that needs new infrastructure, new business models, and that's what this company is about. Today, the product we shipped is our deep research product. Now I'll tell you more about it.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  How long, when, when did you actually start the company? It sounds like you've been in stealth for a while.

• 2:35:00Parag Agrawal?

  Yeah, a year and a half ago. Been building a lot of infrastructure in that time, a lot of infrastructure.

• 2:35:05Jordi Hays?

  So talk about, talk about the, the first product. Break it down.

• 2:35:08Parag Agrawal?

  Um. We shipped a deep research API today. So you you use your users of chat G P T and I'm assuming several deep research tools.

• 2:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:35:17Parag Agrawal?

  Uh. We have an API product that any enterprise developer can integrate into their applications, into their workflows.

• 2:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 2:35:25Parag Agrawal?

  Um. Since we have reimagined the search stack as well as the technology for the web from the ground up. We can outperform OpenAI's deep research. We can outperform every leading model's deep research quality. Uh. In terms of their benchmarks, others' benchmarks, uh, and the real customers. And I think that's the product we've announced today.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  So break down some initial use cases for the product. Let's say I have a SaaS company, like a vertical SaaS company. Is this and and I'm building or or or or something, you know, I could imagine. Somebody's building SaaS for sales reps or, you know, a C R M provider. Is this something they would be running, you know, deep research style queries within the product?

• 2:36:12Parag Agrawal?

  Yeah, people do all kinds of things. So in the sales C R M context, right, there's a lot of people who have this massive current customer list, prospect list. Um. They wanna go, I wish I knew this about this customer. I wish I knew this about this customer. So they just like add a bunch of data to have the C R M now have a lot of information that wasn't in there, but was on the web. And now it's in their systems, in their C R M, they're ranking based on that, they're prioritizing based on that. Um. They're able to go do meeting a shift, right? Before you meet someone, pull everything from my internal information that I have about the customer and our interactions with them. But also pull everything that's happening with their business, what they're talking about, what they're doing, what they're shipping.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  How do you think about the Pareto frontier? I mean, Google's, I mean, I believe they have Gemini APIs and they have. And and they focused on kind of this this idea of the trade off between cost and quality of result. And in in in intelligence is a function of of cost ultimately. Where do you see pockets of value? Do you just wanna go way further? Doesn't matter how much it costs, companies are willing to pay. Or is there a different kind of angle on the Pareto frontier that you think is unexplored?

• 2:37:25Parag Agrawal?

  Glad you mentioned the potato frontier. I think we obsess about the potato frontier, but I think both are important. One, at every price point, you've got to be the best.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:36Parag Agrawal?

  And then, for someone who who has no price sensitivity, you've got to be the absolute best.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:37:44Parag Agrawal?

  Right? And I don't think you get to do the one without the other.

• 2:37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:48Parag Agrawal?

  The way we push is we first push quality and accuracy for use cases as high as possible. And once you can do that, it actually, you can do a lot of work to make it cheaper by trading off a little bit of quality.

• 2:38:05John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:06Parag Agrawal?

  That's the motion you take on, but you've got to be on the potato frontier for every use case to be operating at the scale that we want to operate at, which is like every application, every workflow, anytime. Everything should use AI.

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:20Jordi Hays?

  And it's kind of silly to use like. So do you, do you, uh, how how do you think about competition in the category? Are you competing with OpenAI's API? Uh, is that the wrong way to think about it?

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm interested in in where where do you see pockets of unexplored territory? Like, one of Google's advantages is that they have the TPU, but there are lots of uh, new chip companies that offer different trade-offs for inference. And what what are you excited about in terms of like differentiation?

• 2:38:50Parag Agrawal?

  So, one, we use models from OpenAI, Google, and we use several

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:56Parag Agrawal?

  models in different places.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:57Parag Agrawal?

  We also, in our own models, we build our own index, crawl, ranker, listener. And so what we are is a little bit of a complement to the best models. If you're building AI applications. Now, of course, OpenAI does bundle a search tool with their API.

• 2:39:16John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:39:17Parag Agrawal?

  And that we compete with and beat on quality. So we beat not just that tool, in fact, like the benchmarks for the products we ship today. We beat humans doing hours of work

• 2:39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:30Parag Agrawal?

  through a deep research product, not just because we're cheaper or can do it faster, but we're more accurate for a bunch of workflows than hiring a bunch of people to do it, right? And that, I think, is really exciting, uh, as we work with more and more customers, we're able to replicate that. And that's an amazing moment that you've found this year.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Do you think there's room for differentiation by finding a beachhead market that is a subcategory? I just imagine like we've seen this with Harvey and legal and there are obviously HIPAA compliance in medical and we just talked to Jessica and she was saying that like they were a YC company, they tried a bunch of different things, did some healthcare, some legal, wound up in logistics and had a bunch of luck there. Are there any glimmers of beachhead markets on the horizon for you?

• 2:40:20Parag Agrawal?

  Um, almost too many. So we're seeing like a bunch, as you mentioned, like CRM, sales, sales intelligence, marketing. There's a bunch happening there. There's a lot of people innovating and there are customers. So if you think about our customers, our customers are often vertical people who are in various markets. We have people doing science research on like papers published or on sort of clinical trials that are happening or data coming out of those. We people, we've like investors, like hedge funds to PE funds to venture funds using us because like information on the web is what gives people alpha and

• 2:41:02Parag Agrawal?

  people can be so creative and now can create like scaled programs for figuring out where to spend their time. Instead of doing one query at a time on chat GPT, you write a script, you do a thousand queries on our deep research system, you get better quality and you figure out where you want to spend your time. And we even have coding agents that use our search when they get stuck. So if you're an agent, like it's just like, so instead of beachhead markets, I think it all converges in the way I see, right? It's all agents out there. You can have an agent for sales, you can have an agent for investing, you can have an agent for choose your favorite industry and every agent needs the web.

• 2:41:43Jordi Hays?

  How's it been building quietly out of the public eye? Have you enjoyed it?

• 2:41:49Parag Agrawal?

  A lot.

• 2:41:52Parag Agrawal?

  Also, respect for founders. Like, I don't know. This is, I ran a large company, right? I was at Twitter 11 years. Being a founder, taking something from like nothing to having like a bunch of customers.

• 2:42:06Jordi Hays?

  Is this your first startup?

• 2:42:08Parag Agrawal?

  It's my first startup.

• 2:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:42:10Parag Agrawal?

  Figuring it out, like I'm massively unqualified for the jobs. But those are the only jobs you really want, right?

• 2:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:42:16Parag Agrawal?

  You want a job that you're qualified for.

• 2:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Just gotta figure it out.

• 2:42:20John Coogan?

  I want to, I want to dig into a little bit more granularity. Obviously, it's launch week, but chat is asking us, what did you get done this week? Break it down for us.

• 2:42:31Parag Agrawal?

  This week, I got back on Twitter.

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Ring the gong, ring the gong, Jerry.

• 2:42:37Jordi Hays?

  We're hitting the gong. It's great to see you back on the timeline.

• 2:42:43John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the launch. I think that's huge.

• 2:42:47Parag Agrawal?

  I don't know if you caught this. I think I almost broke Twitter.

• 2:42:51John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:42:51Parag Agrawal?

  As I was tweeting like this morning at like 8:00 AM, I was like trying to get my tweets out for the first time like in years, right? And Twitter is glitching. Then I go on Down Detector.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  You might have brought it down.

• 2:43:05Parag Agrawal?

  And I was like, what timing, man? Like.

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:10Parag Agrawal?

  I'm not gonna take blame for this.

• 2:43:11John Coogan?

  Timing a launch on the timeline is, is like one of the hardest dances you have to do. You can get steamrolled by a viral current thing.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  This was a good day.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  But it was a good day. Yeah, and we're glad that you were able to make the show.

• 2:43:23Jordi Hays?

  It could have been like a surprise deep-seak launch.

• 2:43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I think you broke through and we're very excited for you. So congratulations on the launch. Thank you so much for stopping by and have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to catch up.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye. Up next, we have Eric from Bolt New in the Restream Rating Room. Let's bring in Eric. I'm very excited to talk to him because Bolt is launching a new business model. The margins on prompting will go to zero and the company will make money from hosting websites and apps instead. I want to talk about it. How are you doing, Eric? Good to have you on the stream.

• 2:43:56Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:43:57Speaker 10

  And good to be here, guys. Yeah, long, long time watcher. Good to be, good to be on the show.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic. It's good to have you. Introduce yourself, give us a little background of the company. And then I want to go into the business model questions because we've, this has been top of mind for us all show.

• 2:44:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So a company's called Bolt New, formerly known as Stackless. We were in the process of swapping the logo.

• 2:44:16John Coogan?

  Got to get new merch printed.

• 2:44:18Speaker 10

  We've been around for eight years now. We actually hit the eight year mark two weeks ago. We were actually about to go out of business.

• 2:44:26Speaker 10

  Like a year ago. And it's what ended up happening was we pivoted and launched Bolt. And in the first two months, we were in zero to 20 million of ARR. And wow, it was really one of the first text app tools that.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Are you beating the allegations? Zero to 20 million. Very impressive. What were the gross margins? Can you give us any insight here? Because everyone on the timeline saying anyone with a big revenue ramp, it's all suspicious. Give us, give us a white pill.

• 2:44:53Speaker 10

  Yeah. So our margins have actually been really good. So like typically it's been around 40%. And a big part of that is that, you know, for, for the text to app stuff, part of it is the inference where you're having the code gen, you know, AI model spit out code, but you actually have to run it somewhere. And so that's like the technology we've been making for the past eight years. Basically allows you to run full development environments in a browser using the end user CPU. So it doesn't cost us anything, right?

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:45:19Speaker 10

  That's a big part of why our COGS are a lot better.

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:22Speaker 10

  But, but for us is like, yeah, I think what seems to be inevitable is that margins are just going to go to zero on this stuff. And so we're, we're kind of skating to where the puck is going because.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  Unpack that because a lot of people are saying margins are going to go a hundred percent. Margins are going to go very high because inference is going to get very cheap. You're saying margins are going to go to zero. Break that down. Why would it go to zero? Is that just competitive dynamics from the competitors and the legacy companies? And just all sorts of different competitive pressure?

• 2:45:52Speaker 10

  I think it's really, yeah, good question. So I mean, it's really like, we could go and use the previous generation of models and charge users, you know, what we're charging for frontier stuff. But the problem is like, you're not going to be able to build, you know, quality apps, right? Because the frontier models and agents are incredible and they just keep getting better. And so the kind of, you know, if you're, if you're expecting to, as a, as a company reselling inference, unless you're a model provider, you know, your choices, you can either take a margin and give worse models than what are the frontier, or you can, or you're, or you're saying, hey, we want to always have the best, most capable stuff and, and, and not take a margin. And instead, and then, but what that means for

• 2:46:35Speaker 10

  your business, though, is that you have to be going and making money in other ways than just reselling inference, right? And so if you kind of look at the previous generation of site builders and hosters as an analogy, you know, if you go to like Wix and Squarespace, they don't charge you to like build a website. It's free. Of course, you don't have to pay for AI or whatever, but like the drag and drop, what, what they bill you for is to host the thing, right? And, and that's how they have a very healthy LTV and average customer, you know, contract length, et cetera, is that you have your website host and that's the primary ongoing value that's being.

• 2:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, and I, people, people that have been kind of trying to track this market of, of prompt to site or prompt to app have, have, you know, the critics, critics have talked about churn, but my read on it has always been that it seems like there's been a fairly healthy market of just website builders for a long time. It hasn't been monopolistic. You've got the Wixes, the Squarespaces, the Webflows, the Framers, and, you know, all those companies have been able to carve out solid, solid businesses. And so, yeah, this launch makes a lot of sense, which is, hey, come on the platform, generate whatever you want. But then if you're generating a site, a marketing site for your business, you know,

• 2:47:50Jordi Hays?

  we'll, we'll host it, you know, for you. Definitely.

• 2:47:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, exactly. And so it kind of moves like for us as a business, it moves the focus for us to having the best services and like workflows for the customers we're serving. So like that's for people building hosting website, that's hosting services. We partnered with like Netlify and Superbase for powering the stuff that we've got today. And they've scaled this for, you know, some of the, you know, heaviest products like Uber and Twilio in the past. So you can, you can build like, you know, to millions of people now with Bolt. And on the B to B side, we're selling to folks that are, I mean, basically replacing Figma with Bolt for doing prototyping and rapid product development. And that's just very sticky because you're, you're working on a team and it's for the same reason that Figma is a collaborative product is sticky.

• 2:48:35Speaker 10

  And so that's where really where we're focusing because that's like, you know, the, the retention is incredible on those use cases from our numbers, right?

• 2:48:43John Coogan?

  Are you feeling acceleration, deceleration from the Frontier Labs on coding products? Lots of people were kind of on the timeline at least disappointed in GPT-5. It feels like it's more of a consumer product now. But in general, you know, it used to be, you know, every six months we got something that was completely breakthrough. And now, you know, the, the releases feel a little bit more incremental. But what are you feeling just from the foundation model lab side? Because we are seeing a lot of progress there. The benchmarks are improving. The context windows are getting bigger. Are we accelerating, decelerating, kind of in a, in a rebuild mode, kind of rethink, need to go back to the drawing board and do some AI research?

• 2:49:24Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think, I think, you know, for all the Frontier Labs, I mean, they, they should all, they're, they need, they need to keep hitting, you know, more and more breakthroughs, right? But from a, from a on the ground perspective of a company like us, looking at these models and running evals and measuring them. They're, you know, the, the models themselves may be seeing like maybe more incremental improvements. But what's, what's really, I think the big unlock is that not only are they getting better at just like coding, but they're getting better at being designed to be used as part of agent systems. And that's like, that's a huge thing. Cause I mean, if you think about how humans think, like if I asked you to like, you know, rattle off like, you know, the, the latest financial numbers or something, it's like, you might be able to like pull that up.

• 2:50:06Speaker 10

  But realistically, you need to like think on it. You get some things wrong on, on zero shot and you need to like kind of go do some research, bounce around. And so like, that's what really agents are kind of replicating in my view is like how we as humans actually think and work. And so how do you really tune the models to be good at going and going down different thought paths, killing ones that don't actually look promising, et cetera, et cetera. And you look at Claude Code is probably the best example of this in the code generation world. And so there's remarkable, you know, progress being made in that realm of things, right?

• 2:50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:38Speaker 10

  So there's a lot, it seems to me, there's a lot of room to run just on, you know, incremental improvements on the zero shot aspect of models, but then also how these things are going in reasoning and working in any other systems.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, yeah, the unhobblings I think about like, I'm, I'm sure that you don't vibe code a database every time someone builds a website. You pull a database off the shelf and I've seen the stats of all the databases that you guys are like pumping customers into. And so, yeah, as more of those tools roll out and you get more of that functionality off the shelf and you can pull this from over there, pull that open source project, pull this data like that feels like that unlocks a lot of, a lot of growth.

• 2:51:18Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side for now. Gabe in the chat asked, what are those champagne bottles in the background? What's going on there?

• 2:51:26Speaker 10

  First time someone's asked about this. Yeah, actually, those, so that, you know, this is, these are the first enterprise deals when we closed the first, cause like we had never done enterprise

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:35Speaker 10

  sales motions before, period. Like I've never been a salesperson. So, you know, my chief of staff and I, my CTO, when we closed our first kind of three major customers, this is like probably four or five years ago.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:45Speaker 10

  We started with the $15 bottle of Cook's for the, for the 20K deal we did.

• 2:51:49Jordi Hays?

  Start somewhere.

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  Yep, that's good.

• 2:51:51Speaker 10

  And then worked our way up. So those are like, yeah, those are the, the things I keep on the shelf.

• 2:51:57John Coogan?

  What's the top tier bottle in the back?

• 2:51:59Speaker 10

  I think the top, I think it's a bottle of Dom. I can't.

• 2:52:02John Coogan?

  There you go. That's probably 250, 350.

• 2:52:04Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think someone got it for us as a gift or something. Maybe I can't remember what that was about, but it's, that's, that's like the, I like never drink alcohol, but it's like, that's, you know.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for some teetotalling.

• 2:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise deals.

• 2:52:16John Coogan?

  We love it. We love it.

• 2:52:17Jordi Hays?

  Good experience.

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest.

• 2:52:21Speaker 10

  Likewise. Thank you.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 2:52:22Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Matthew from Merlin Labs waiting in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Matthew. He has some really big news. We're gonna need a bigger gong, Jordy Hayes. How you doing?

• 2:52:35Speaker 11

  Hey guys, how are you?

• 2:52:36John Coogan?

  We're great. How are you? Give us the news, give us the update, give us the introduction on you, the company, and the news today.

• 2:52:43Speaker 11

  Hey guys, I'm Matt, I run Merlin. We are, yeah, we're gonna need a bigger gon. We're gonna need a bigger gon. No, like I'm seeing you ready with a mallet, like I'm here for it, like especially at the end of the show.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:56Speaker 11

  So I run a, I don't know, biased, like a really cool company called Merlin, where we're developing essentially a pilot, just not a human one. Uh, we are deploying that predominantly with the US Air Force and a bunch of other partners and customers around the, around the world. And we announced this morning that we're taking the company public, which is gonna be the first time one of these big defense startups go public.

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:53:23Speaker 11

  There we go. I love it. I was waiting for that.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  Um, uh, let's, uh, let's stay on the anatomy of the deal. What's actually happening, um, from a mechanic's perspective? What does it mean to take this company public? Where will you be listed? Do you have a ticker? Like break down the, like what's going on with the deal, what it means? And then, uh, and then I have a ton of questions about autonomous flight.

• 2:53:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, a hundred percent. So we, uh, we, we were looking at a couple of different options and particularly for us, going public, uh, sort of efficiently allows us to do a bunch of things, allows us to go build, uh, a lot more capital to go, uh, sort of execute on a couple of big contracts that we're working on. But also allows us some currency to do M and A, uh, which is important for us, especially as we, as we, uh, you know, sort of build, build up. So we talked to a lot of folks and, uh, we're combining with Inflection Point. Uh, Inflection Point has done, uh, two other like really high profile deals, uh, USA Rare Earth and then, uh, Intuitive Machines, both of which are trading at multi-billion dollar valuations with hundreds of millions of dollars of cash in the balance sheet.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  And.

• 2:54:26Speaker 11

  I love it. And then another big part of the announcement today is we announced like a hundred and twenty plus million dollars of committed capital before we even announced the deal.

• 2:54:34John Coogan?

  Yes, so it's effectively like an investment in the company, although it'll happen after the merger.

• 2:54:39Speaker 11

  A hundred percent.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:40Speaker 11

  So most companies, when they're going public, they raise their pipe between when they announce and when they go public.

• 2:54:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:45Speaker 11

  Um, based off the strength of the deal, we were able to pretty quickly raise about a hundred and twenty million dollars before the announcement. TBD how much more money we'll take, uh, uh, sort of pre-announce, but super exciting and I think a really important moment for defense tech.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  Got it. Uh, talk to me about, um, The value of autonomy in flight, we were talking to Delian earlier about this. There's a like the, the, the model for self-driving cars is very logical. Something like 70% of the cost of an Uber is the human driving the car. In the plane context, it's usually something like 7%. It's much lower because the fuel is very expensive. You only have a couple pilots, you have a lot of people in the, in the vehicle. So how are you thinking about focusing on like fully autonomous versus, you know, pilot assistance technology, kind of what's the equivalent of a level five self-driving, level two self-driving? How do you think about the progression to self-flying planes?

• 2:55:42Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, well, Delian, Delian is captaining his Cessna.

• 2:55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:46Speaker 11

  Extremely, extremely well.

• 2:55:47John Coogan?

  But he might be joined by a, by a co-pilot.

• 2:55:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, no, I.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's gotten himself in some situations where it probably would have been better to let the co-pilot take over, but he's always made it through, so.

• 2:55:58Speaker 11

  It's a situation. All right. So everybody thinks of an airplane with like two pilots, right? But for if you're like FedEx or like big airplanes, I don't know what Delian's type of, but like big airplanes.

• 2:56:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:09Speaker 11

  There's anywhere between 13 and 20 FTE pilots per airplane, making all in anywhere between half a million and a million dollars a year.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:17Speaker 11

  So if you're able to in the future augment that and go from two crew down to one, that's, that's, you know, billions of dollars of savings for, you know, the airline industry, which is, which is super important. But for our military customers, getting that out there enables those pilots go act a little bit more like mission managers, which is super important, particularly given that the Air Force is short pilots, which enabled our big contract that we announced last year, sort of a big nine-figure contract to go spearhead fixed wing autonomy for, for certain parts of the Air Force.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  What about, what about the role of, of like not necessarily autopilot, but like a just enhancing the safety of, of airplanes? I feel like that's just something that everyone should be excited about, get about. Everyone's seen the, the different flight disasters. Everyone wants more airplane safety. They're definitely willing to pay for it. It seems like there's like a, an opportunity to plug in and I'd love to know about. The different FAA pathways for what it means to actually pilot the plane via a non deterministic, machine learning based, AI based system versus having a, you know,

• 2:57:31John Coogan?

  an iPad next to you that's more just offering advice and diagnostics and acting as kind of a, just bring it like a Centaur model, bringing super intelligence alongside a human in loop.

• 2:57:45Speaker 11

  Yeah, so for, for our customers, particularly our DOD customers, like, bottom line, most people living today have lived in a world where America has been able to go project air power and like, prevent World War III from happening for the vast majority of their adult lives. We're in a world, for the first time ever, where America does not, in the West, does not have the unilateral ability to go project air power and prevent World War III. So like, what we're doing and what we're building here of like, getting autonomy out actually in operational service, going from two crew down to one, and then we're doing some uncrewed stuff as well, with, with, with a few customers, like, gets us

• 2:58:26Speaker 11

  to that point of like, getting out of this like, kind of toy iPad pilot assist, kind of like, I don't know, kind of like a BS solution, and actually going out and, and really operationalizing autonomy, and like, getting like, millions of hours of operating history, so that we can start to go clawback that lead against some of our peer adversaries.

• 2:58:47John Coogan?

  Yep, makes sense.

• 2:58:48Jordi Hays?

  Super important stuff, come back on as this cycle progresses.

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're very excited for you. Congratulations on the news.

• 2:58:56Speaker 11

  Cool, we're gonna need a bigger gun, guys.

• 2:58:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll get it ready. It's actually, it's actually in the works.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  Hopefully, wherever it's manufactured, we'll fly it on a pilotless plane.

• 2:59:06Jordi Hays?

  It's a race against, against you guys getting out.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:59:10Speaker 11

  Okay.

• 2:59:10Jordi Hays?

  We'll do our absolute best.

• 2:59:12Speaker 11

  I'll, I'll be back and we'll expect a bigger gun.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon, Matt.

• 2:59:15Speaker 11

  Alright, see you guys.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, the Trump administration is said to discuss US taking a stake in Intel.

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  Someone predicted this on the show, maybe it was Aaron.

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  The Trump administration is in talks with Intel to have the US government potentially take a stake in the beleaguered chipmaker helping support the company's effort to expand domestic manufacturing. The deal would help shore up Intel's planned factory in Ohio, said the people who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private, of course. The company had once promised to turn that site into the world's largest chipmaking facility, though it's been repeatedly delayed. The plan stems from a meeting this week between President Trump and Intel CEO Lip Bhutan. The people said the idea is for the US government to pay for the stake and the details are being sorted out, one of the people said, another caution that the plans remain fluid.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  So, will be interesting to see here if this is taxpayer dollars or is this like sovereign slush fund that we're getting from Japan?

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  Make Nvidia pay for it, 15% of H20s, put that money to work, buy Intel. I don't know if I like that, I don't know if I like buying Intel. It feels like we also, I don't know, I mean, the US government does own some companies, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recently, they're the lenders for student loans or all sorts of lending that goes on, those are nationalized. And so, Trump was talking about IPOing those or spinning those out.

• 3:00:43Jordi Hays?

  What do we got Tyler?

• 3:00:44Speaker 03

  Do you think this is bullish for Leopold? Situation awareness, big, weren't they big Intel?

• 3:00:49John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that's huge actually.

• 3:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Intel's up 20% in the last five days.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Exercise those calls Leopold, let's go.

• 3:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Bucci Capital has, I got a post here, we'll use this to close out the show, pull this up, team, port please.

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  You just drop it in the chat?

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  It's in the chat. Leopold Ochenbrenner today after being clowned on literally.

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  Legov says nationalizing Intel is a horrible idea.

• 3:01:19John Coogan?

  We're gonna get demonetized for this.

• 3:01:21Jordi Hays?

  Turn this off before we get demonetized.

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  No, we just gotta talk over as it's playing so that the AI gets confused and thinks, oh, that's not a real song.

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, fun hanging out with everyone in the chat. Thanks for watching. Gabe, Techno Chief, John Exley, Deepak, Ragav.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  So many good usernames.

• 3:01:37John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait.

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a blast.

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Friday episode, the mansion section, incoming.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Really? It's already Friday? Wow. I had no idea. Anyway, thank you so much for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Bye. We love you.