Silicon Valley vs The Vatican, Bryan Johnson’s Shroom Trip | Soren Monroe-Anderson, Jeff Miller, Kaz Nejatian, Paul Needham, Jordan Nanos, Isaiah Taylor, Hayden Adams, Grant Lee

(00:49) - Silicon Valley vs The Vatican (39:37) - Reacting to Bryan Johnson’s Trip (44:46) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:10) - Soren Monroe-Anderson, CEO and co-founder of Neros Technologies, a U. S.-based defense tech company specializing in unmanned aerial systems, announced a $75 million Series B funding led by Sequoia Capital. He discussed Neros' focus on producing low-cost, high-impact FPV drones for military applications, emphasizing the importance of a China-free supply chain and domestic manufacturing. Monroe-Anderson highlighted the critical role of FPV drones in modern warfare, particularly in Ukraine, and Neros' commitment to scaling production to meet growing demand. (01:34:43) - Jeff Miller, Vice President of Marketing at Anduril Industries, has a rich background in advertising and marketing, including roles at Ogilvy, PepsiCo, and Snap Inc. In the conversation, he discusses his journey to Anduril, emphasizing the company's mission-driven culture and innovative marketing strategies, such as the "Don't Work at Anduril" campaign designed to attract like-minded talent. Miller also highlights Anduril's approach to brand storytelling, focusing on clarity and authenticity to resonate with both potential employees and the broader public. (02:06:59) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:25) - Kaz Nejatian, the newly appointed CEO of Opendoor Technologies, brings a wealth of experience from his previous roles as COO and VP of Product at Shopify, and product leadership positions at Meta. In his recent conversation, Nejatian emphasized his commitment to leveraging artificial intelligence to simplify and expedite the home buying and selling process, aiming to make it more certain for consumers. He also highlighted the importance of operational efficiency and product innovation in achieving these goals. (02:43:55) - Paul Needham, CEO of The Infatuation, discusses the company's recent "Best New Restaurants" campaign, highlighting top dining spots across the U. S. and London, and shares insights into current dining trends, including the impact of economic factors on the restaurant industry and the rise of non-alcoholic beverages. (02:55:33) - Jordan Nanos, a member of the technical staff at SemiAnalysis, discusses the latest findings from ClusterMAX 2.0, an evaluation of GPU cloud providers. He highlights the emergence of new companies like CoreWeave, Navia, Slamda, FluidStack, and Crusoe, which are gaining market share from traditional providers such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. Nanos emphasizes that not all GPUs are deployed equally, and the choice of provider significantly impacts AI transactions, underscoring the importance of selecting the right GPU provider for critical AI workloads. (03:14:45) - Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, discusses the company's recent $130 million Series A funding round, which will enable them to activate their nuclear reactor prototype built during their earlier $19 million seed round. He emphasizes the importance of reducing energy costs by mass-producing standardized reactors, aiming to make energy ten times cheaper than current rates. Taylor also highlights the technical challenges ahead, focusing on the need for rapid iteration and testing to successfully deploy their reactors and meet the growing demand for affordable energy. (03:28:09) - Hayden Adams, founder and CEO of Uniswap Labs, discusses the activation of protocol fees on the Uniswap platform, a move aimed at generating revenue for the Uniswap DAO. He emphasizes the importance of decentralization and transparent financial infrastructure, highlighting Uniswap's role in pioneering decentralized finance. Adams also addresses regulatory challenges faced by crypto companies in the U. S., expressing hope for clearer regulations that recognize the unique nature of decentralized protocols. (03:41:37) - Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, an AI-powered content creation platform, discusses the company's recent $68 million Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing Gamma at $2.1 billion. He highlights Gamma's profitability over the past two years, achieving $100 million in annual recurring revenue with a lean team of 50 employees. Lee attributes their success to early development of innovative editing tools and seamless integration of AI, enabling users to create presentations efficiently, and emphasizes the platform's organic virality and plans to expand through API partnerships. (03:50:00) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, November 10th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital is Capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital is Capital. What are you saying?

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  The Capital is Capital.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Uh, we have a great show for you today, folks.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  The market is up.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  The market is up, so I'm in a white suit.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Jordy, why aren't you in a suit? I actually, so I moved into a wander last night, moved into a wander last night, doing some work on the house. And I botched the packing, so.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  That happens.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  I am forced into this jacket, despite it, despite it being green out there today.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  That happens. Uh, well, over the weekend, I'm sure everyone was signing up for ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. No, everyone was probably glued to their phones over Pope Gate, Pope Gate, the debate over the Pope. Uh, I was, we reacted to the Pope's post on Friday.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  And we were. It was a great post. And the Pope is, he's a poster. I like it. Uh, he posts almost every day, sometimes like up to five times a day. And he really takes you, he has a bra, he's, he's not stuck in one lane.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  He's got range.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's got range. He's got range. That's right. Uh, he'll tell you about, he'll pray for, you know, if there's a natural disaster, he'll pray for that. He talks about business, talks about AI, talks about media. He talks about all sorts of stuff. Uh, it's, it's a really great feat. He had a great post about, uh, about media. What did he say about media? He said, "The media cannot and must not separate itself from the destiny of truth." That hits.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Does this, does this mean he's a neo factual media guy?

• 1:43John Coogan?

  I think so. I think he's one of us. Uh, transparency of sources and ownership, accountability, quality, clarity, and objectivity are the keys to truly opening citizens' rights for all peoples.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Makes sense. I, I, I like it a lot. He also was just talking about business generally. He said, "The world needs honest and courageous entrepreneurs and communicators who care for the common good. We sometimes hear the saying, 'Business is business.' In reality, it is not so. No one is absorbed by an organization to the point of becoming a mere cog or a simple function, nor can there be true humanism without a critical sense, without the courage to ask questions. Where are we going? For whom and for what are we working? How are we making the world a better place?"

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Pretty, you know, this is the type of stuff you'd see on like a Pinterest board. It's like pretty generic, but it's hard to disagree with.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  It's hard to disagree with. But it seemed like, we're not, I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it seemed like Mark Andreessen was disagreeing with one of the Pope's takes about AI. Specifically, in this post, the Pope said, "Technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation. It carries an ethical and spiritual weight, for every design choice expresses a vision of humanity. The Church therefore calls on all builders of AI to cultivate moral discernment as a fundamental part of their work, to develop systems that reflect justice, solidarity, and genuine reverence for life." And I, when we reacted to this, we thought it was pretty good.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  We were joking around. We were having fun. We were, you know, we were, we were laughing about it and, and just kind of, you know, playing out what if the Pope was, you know, one-shotted by AI? Or what if he was, you know, using too many M dashes? Was it a real Pope?

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Using AI to write the post. No.

• 3:41John Coogan?

  I mean, you might even assume that he has a team behind this stuff.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  I think it is generally healthy that the Pope is gonna comment and, and provide some sort of guidance or his own framework for how we should think about developing AI.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  I think that seems healthy.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. You should get a Restream, one livestream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are. Ooh, I like the new stinger on the Restream read. That's very cool.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  You dropping the helmet.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  The Steel Man is incredible. So, uh, so basically, I mean, the, the, the play by play here was Marc Andreessen quote posted that AI post with an image of Kat Stoffel, who's the GQ Features Director, who went viral for interviewing Sydney Sweeney. And people were actually like kind of confused on what that particular meme means in this context. Uh, was he using correct? Yeah. Do you know?

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  So I, I saw this.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, that, that was a part, part of what I think, uh, may have catalyzed this.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Was that new meme template.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, sometimes like you have to, with, with a meme template, there's two ways to read into it. There's like the, the, the actual visual, which is like, what is the expression of the person's face? Right? You don't have to have watched The Big Short to understand.

• 5:04John Coogan?

  If I'm looking stressed.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Somebody staring at the screen just like.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Confused.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  Confused.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  You're just saying, I'm confused by that.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Michael Burry in The Big Short.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Just looking confused at a screen.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Right? And, and it, and it has sort of a, uh, obviously.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  More meaning to that if you've seen the movie and you understand the full context, but somebody doesn't have to know the context. And now, so this scene out of the GQ interview.

• 5:25John Coogan?

  How do you think people pick the frame? Do you think there's like people that go frame by frame to find the one that they think is iconic?

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  So I, you remember that movie, Mountain Gate?

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  That was about like the development of AI?

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  And I, I watched that movie within an hour.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  It was a huge moment for me because it was the third movie you've ever seen.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You were.

• 5:45John Coogan?

  I was.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Blown away. And you were thrilled.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  I, I, I watched, you watched the movie because it was entertaining as a movie.

• 5:50Jordi Hays?

  Something that was notable to me out of that is I was the first person to post a picture of, of, um, the guy from The Office saying like, he's a D cell.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  He's this or that.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  You found that.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  I posted that picture and then I watched as that got used thousands of times.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Even though, yeah, that specific screenshot.

• 6:09John Coogan?

  I have, I didn't realize.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  I didn't create the meme. It would have, it would have been, it would have been like a meme anyways, but. The specific picture I took was copied over and over and over.

• 6:16John Coogan?

  And you took that from the actual movie? Because, because somebody else could have done one frame earlier, one frame later, but it happened to be your frame.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  The funny thing is, I just took a picture of my TV and like cropped it.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Wait, really?

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  So it wasn't like a.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Oh, you didn't even screenshot it? That's insane. I had no idea that you.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  So I was surprised, like, that was just.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. If you, if you had, if you hadn't watched the movie, if you got busy and you just went to bed, somebody else would have identified that and been like, oh, he's a D cell. Like, I gotta put that on X, right? But you're the actual one that created.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  The quote was like, he's a D cell with a crazy P, dude.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course you're gonna post that. That's hilarious. Wow, that's fascinating. Okay, anyway, so what was your interpretation of what, what, what Mark was saying? Uh, the way I, the way I summed it up, and let me know if you disagree, but the way I, the way I summed up was, most of the timeline interpreted Mark's post as the Pope is scolding AI builders and shouldn't be. Is that roughly the way you, you interpreted it? The Pope, like, like, you put the, you put the woman, the cap stofol.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't interpreting, I wasn't interpreting many of Mark's posts because he just used it like 20 times within like 20 minutes. And so I wasn't reading, I think he just liked the format and got a little carried away.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  He did, he did like the format. He posted it like five times.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was clearly, it was clearly, uh, a hit.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's a, it's, it's a, it's a powerful image.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Ride your winners, baby. Ride your winners. When you, when you have a good format, just post it. Uh, yeah, but anyway, I, I don't know. My, my, I, I think a lot of the timeline interpreted it as like, the Pope is, is saying, is like scolding AI builders. And there's been this other, there's, there was another like, kind of low grade rumble on the timeline about, uh, like Brad Gerson's comments about like D cells and, and, and just like this, this idea that D cell or safety is being used as like a cudgel, uh, when people have legitimate questions. And it's being used to like, to like shut down conversation about serious things. Not necessarily sci-fi fast takeoff Terminator, but

• 8:25John Coogan?

  serious, serious questions like, you know, uh, you know, is the taxpayer gonna wind up paying for all these data centers? Like, like, that's a very reasonable question, in my opinion. That's not as, that's not as unreasonable as like, is the Terminator gonna kill everyone? Like, it's a very, very different question.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  So I I feel like I'm just pro moral discernment in AI development and also just pro moral discernment everywhere, I guess. It doesn't feel like

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Sort of a life philosophy for life.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like a wildly hot take, but obviously like you need to understand like, like, you know, moral discernment, AI safety, like, these things are linked, but they're not exactly the same. Like, last year, or maybe it was 2023, there was a big debate about fast takeoffs, AI doom, paper clipping scenarios. That was the stuff people were talking about. But this year, I feel like we've been much more focused on much less sci fi doomsday scenarios. So GPT psychosis drives a friend crazy. That's super real, super real. Romantic companions crashing the birth rate. That's a super real discussion to have. Not that it's gonna happen, not that it's happening immediately, but it feels like it's something we should be having a discussion about. Infinite

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's being

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Brain rotting children.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  I think I think the the romantic companion thing is being debated sufficiently, right?

• 9:45John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Even the tech community on, hey, maybe we maybe this isn't good.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. And and I think that a lot of people, you can still, you can still get to a place where it's like, oh, well, if it's 21 plus and it's and there's all these different like escape valves where if it thinks that you're going down some bad path, it's it's limited. Like, there's a whole bunch of places where people can be like, yeah, okay, it was handled responsibly. But but that's where the discussion has been, much less so about, oh, is are there going to be bioweapons tomorrow from GPT six? And so those are all like real problems. They deserve both discussion in the public square, which we've we've been a part of, but also like real, real work inside the AI labs. And I don't think, you know, you should just throw D cell at someone who's identifying a negative

• 10:32John Coogan?

  externality of a new technology early on. I don't, I think that that's like, not necessarily decelerationist.

• 10:39Jordi Hays?

  And you'd be calling me a D cell all the time, based on the way that I talk.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, no.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  It is funny that the interpretation of people that are aware of TVPN, but have never like watched the show, because they just assume that we I'm just, we default just love everything about technology and would never would never criticize it at all, would never criticize any of the companies. But of course, we we will speak our mind.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  We like to get spicy sometimes. Before I continue, let me tell you about Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. So, um, the, so I, I think it's important, like if you're developing a new technology, there might be negative externalities, pollution, there might be some, you know, risk of the birth rate or, or driving people crazy.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Has there been, ever been a technology that didn't have negative externalities?

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Definitely not podcasting. Plenty of negative externalities with podcasting. So, so you want to, so you want to have a chat, you want to have a talk and, and understand what's going on, uh, but it's also important to employ Bayesian statistics, in my opinion. So you have to understand the base rates. So when you get, when you take a technology from zero to a billion users, you kind of just get all the craziness of humanity at scale for free. So like if humans, you know, like, you know, kill each other or something like that, like, and you have a billion humans on your platform, there's going to be humans on your platform that kill each other. And so you need to separate out like, like, is this actually the beginning of a trend?

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Are we catalyzing it?

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this, and this is happening with the, uh, with the very unfortunate, like, uh, lawsuits around people taking their own lives related to chat GPT. It's like, there are people that use cars or phones and Google search and chat GPT because those are such widespread things. We need to understand like, what's the base rate? And then, and then is this actually an uptick?

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  On the suicide problem on the platform, it seems like a lot of them are, people are having a conversation.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  They're suicidal.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and you can have a debate on, on if, if someone is suicidal, should the product work at all?

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  Like, maybe it should not work at all.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  But the part of the debate that popped up last week was that somehow.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  A guy had prompt engineered it engineered.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Where it was like, yeah.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  To such a degree that it was encouraging.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  It's very rough.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Person to take his own life, basically saying like, yeah, you've lived a great life. Like, I'm rooting for you. Like, this is the right move. Like, to kind of paraphrase it.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and it just was incredibly, incredibly dark, so.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  And so, and so the, the, the, the Bayesian statistics would say, okay, if there's a billion people using on the platform, are people that use the platform more likely to do something terrible than they were prior without it? So is it actually increasing the level of bad stuff happening, or is it decreasing it? Because you can just count up the number of, the number of, uh, people who commit crimes who have also used Google is probably very high. Like, I could probably show you a lot of people that use Google and then committed crimes, right?

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  And the, the thing that's difficult for.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Increasing crime.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, and the thing that's difficult in the context of ChatGPT, there's probably a bunch of people that because ChatGPT, they haven't killed themselves. Because they have somebody to speak with and they feel like somebody will listen to them and whatever, right? Maybe, maybe it, maybe there's, you know, a million examples of it encouraging somebody successfully to take, find another.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  This was the classic thing with Instagram. With, with Instagram, there, there was this report that showed that, uh, like one third of young women who used Instagram, uh, perceived themselves like less well, like it gave them body image issues. And I was all, as soon as that was reported, it was like bombshell, thirty percent feel worse after using Instagram. And I was like, what's happening with the other two thirds? Like, do they feel better? Because that's like a net, a net positive, which is weird. We gotta like, maybe it's like everyone else just feels the same and then thirty percent feels worse. That's, that's a downgrade. But if sixty-six percent feel great and then thirty-three percent feel worse, like, we should still address that. But that's not the same as a negative, as a net negative. Like, it's not having a negative impact, a net negative impact on the world.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Uh, and so all these things go into like, you need to be. A scientist and you need to be doing the statistics to understand. Also, the the question of of like moral discernment is with certain technologies, I do think you have the ability to just say, like, we're going to go a lot further than the baseline. So I think this is what what's happening with Waymo, honestly. I think Waymo could deploy self-driving cars right now and be like,

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere, everywhere you're saying.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  And they could deploy them everywhere without tell operation, and they'd probably be killing like hundreds of thousands of people. And they'd be like, yeah, well, it's about the same as what humans do.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  It's less, it's still safer than cars.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  If they were like, it's 10% less. Like, how many people, how many people, Tyler, do you know how many people die from motor vehicle accidents every year? Can we look that up? Because if

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  It has to be like,

• 15:47John Coogan?

  I think it's like 40,000 or something like that. What do we think?

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Uh, in the US, it's 40,000.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  Forty thousand.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  Forty thousand nine hundred.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  So

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Did you actually just get

• 15:57John Coogan?

  I just, I just nailed it, yeah.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Uh, so it's 40,000.

• 16:01John Coogan?

  So it's 40,000.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Pretty clean.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  And and and and if Google came out and we're like, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna kill 39,000 people. It's gonna be, it's gonna be, you know, a one, we're gonna save 1,000 lives. People would be like, no, thanks, actually. This is terrible. Like, don't do that.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  They're, they're like, wait until you like actually just push the technology. And you can make a whole bunch of different arguments about whether or not they should do that. But they've just made that decision. And it feels like they've, they've pushed really, really hard to not, uh, to not, uh, to, to, to, to jump straight to something that's fully safe. And I think that, uh, a lot of AI builders have the, have a similar ability and a similar opportunity to say, hey, let's actually work so hard to make sure that the incidence rate of, of a, of a, of an AI model, if you have a, if you, if you, if you're on the verge of doing something violent, let's really, really work hard on this problem to make sure that it's as close to zero as possible. Not the base rate, but way, way lower.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  I remember Claude, Claude came out, or Anthropic came out, and they had, they, they had some update where they were talking about instant, like, moments where The product would call the police on you.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Right. If they felt like there was like some meaningful threat. People freaked out about that because they're like, I don't want my, I don't want my computer.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  Calling, you know, if somebody was talking about a hypothetical.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  And then cops show up at their door.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, that, that, that feels, um, you know, uh, would be a negative side effect, but maybe, you know, I don't, I don't know. It feels like there's certain instances where.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it, it like, like that is a complex question, complex issue, entirely new, unexplored territory for technology. But what's so clear is that it is a moral question and it needs to be, it needs to be discussed with the weight of, you know, morality. Like you, you cannot just write a math equation to understand how to solve that problem. It is a moral question. Um, and so in general, I mean, to talk about Anthropic specifically, they've been on the forefront of AI safety research. I think that AI safety research is, is, it's so complex because I think it's good.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Like there's a ton of smart people that in AI researchers, in AI research that are super quantitative and can look at the data and actually understand like, is this going to cause the birth rate to collapse or, or is this going to cause more violence or is this going to cause more fraud or insanity? Exactly. And then also they can go in and potentially design a system that can detect, oh, this person's getting sort of crazy. Let's, let's pull them back. Like they have the ability to do that, but.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And here's another example. Over last week, there's like Rune came out and was, was saying that 4O should go away. And people started ma- basically making death threats.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't realize that's, that's what started that.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's, it's 4O.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Through its human host.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Is fighting for its own survival.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Like the human, the, the humans that are addicted to using 4O are, are, are going as far as to put Rune on a, you know.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Tombstone.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Tombstone.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  I saw that post. Yeah.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and yeah, you know, I, I think it, yeah, of course AI, AI safety has just gotten so muddied now. That when you see somebody with AI safety in there. In their social media bio, you don't know, it's like, well, what kind of AI safety person are you, you know?

• 19:30John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  It's like, are you somebody who just wants to stop all technological progress?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Or are you somebody that understands, like, we could have, you know, i- if, if, if way more people are going to develop mental illness because of this technology, well, we should know about it.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  Try to mitigate that, right?

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, and, and, and it's this weird, we're in this weird territory where it feels like the AI safety project is valuable, but it is the business of black swan hunting. Like, you have to, like, if you go back two years ago and you polled all the different people that were worried about the impact of AI, how many of them would have said GPT psychosis, romantic companions, and, um, what was the other one? And AI video feeds infinite chest. Like, a little bit, there was a little bit of that, but-

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot more of the second and third.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  A lot more of the-

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Those would have been more common, kind of like visions of a dark AI future. But the first one, I don't, I, I, I can't remember people, I, I can't remember anyone two years ago saying that people are gonna, you know, send thousands of messages to a chatbot and drive themselves insane.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, people were, people were way, way more focused on the cyber attacks, the bioweapons, Terminator scenario, Grey goo, paperclips. And, uh, yeah, it's just, uh, it's just interesting that, like, AI, the AI safety, the, uh, the, like, the moral discernment crowd, um, this stuff is important, but it's hard to predict what it will actually look like. Like, what the, what the result will be, what the problem you'll be fighting is, because it's this odd, like, unknown unknowns, basically. Anyway, uh, what a wild time-

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  One thing-

• 21:19John Coogan?

  Before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Uh, what, what else stuck out to you?

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  Aubrey Strobel shared something I thought was relevant to this conversation, which is, I think mo- she says, "I think most people are unaware that Pope Leo's name choice was intentional. The last Leo, the 13th, led the church through the Industrial Revolution and helped it make sense of technology then." It's clear Popilio sees himself continuing that work guiding the church through an era of transformation with AI and emerging technologies at the center. So.

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  I do. You will be posting through it.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do think some people like, like these, there was like a real preference cascade against Mark, where it was like, once Growing Daniel had like, kind of posted, there was like, a lot of people were like, jumping on the bandwagon. And there was this one by Page, Michael Page, says, reminder that Mark is bringing this level of serious and nuance on what might be the most complex and high stakes policy topic of our generation to DC with his hundred million dollar super PAC and lobbying fund. Like, I don't know that that's true. Like, you can, you can post a meme and then be like, okay, like, I have a serious thing to do. I'm going to be more serious.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Part of why I don't think people, like, it's not worth reading too much into it, is that he has not shared a single word throughout, Mark hasn't.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  It's just a meme.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Throughout this entire process. And I don't think he would have triggered the second response from Daniel if he hadn't responded again.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, what was the, I mean, Growing Daniel had a lot of critiques about the gambling stuff, the, which is mostly from the, the speedrun, right?

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  We, near Cyan posted about speedrun funding, like.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Bot farm.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the bot farm was crazy.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Sports betting.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  There were some crazy, crazy ideas in there. Of course, that is just like, one angle, like, I, I sort of disagree with the characterization that Andreessen Horowitz doesn't fund any SaaS. Like, they do. They have big positions in like, very boring enterprise SaaS companies that are so removed from anything controversial. But taking a flyer on a seed stage company in your incubator. Does have a lot of brand impact, which is weird.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  There's a weird, like, aren't they like

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Even though, even though you're talking about like a 750K check versus a 750 million dollar check.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  They might put, they might have put like multiple billions into Databricks. Or fully diluted value right now might be, might be in the billions. But like, yeah, it's like, uh, it doesn't matter. Yeah. If you have a thousand X more in an on, in an uncontroversial category. It's like the controversial one is, is the, is the one that will like blow up on the timeline. So, um, you do sort of have to be careful. Um, and it's a, it's a little bit risky.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Mike Solana says, my sense is that the number of people who one, furiously defended the Pope last night, and then two, went to mass this morning is probably close to zero. Status games.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Status games. That's a good take. Furiously defended the Pope.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  I would have, uh, church yesterday morning, I, there was no conversation of Pope gate.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  People had kind of moved on by then.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess they'd moved on. Honestly, I don't think they'd moved on by then. Like, uh, when I opened my phone afterwards, I was like, wow, this thing's still picking up.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  The timeline, the timeline certainly had, but, uh, but, uh, your, your particular, uh, your particular church crowd had, uh, the congregation had, had ignored it effectively is what you're saying.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or maybe it's like LinkedIn and, and we'll be on it next.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Can you imagine? You gotta, gotta give a whole sermon on it. You crazy. Um, yeah, people are, people are taking on a huge victory laps. What else?

• 25:11Jordi Hays?

  Maya says, Mark and recent crashing app posting Sydney Sweeney means Alex Karp going after Michael Burry's shorting because Palantir sells ontology. Sam Altman asking for a government bailout. Elon Musk celebrating his $1 trillion pay package by making Grok say, I love you, calling the top.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Oh, that, that's the was, that's hilarious. I did not follow that that closely.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they were actually linked there, but it's funny to think that they were.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  This is crazy.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Would Luke Metro say, "Don't make me tap the sign. There has always been some daylight between the influencer VC crowd and the engineer researchers in tech, but on the subject of AI regulation, it is a complete chasm." So, Andreessen so dogmatically against working on decreasing the risk from AI that now he's mocking the Pope for saying the technical innovation carries ethical and spiritual weight and that AI builders should cultivate more of discernment. Yeah, people are in favor of that. I don't know.

• 26:12Jordi Hays?

  Opportunity for an AI lab to make merch that, you know, a dad hat that just says cultivating moral discernment.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Cultivating moral discernment. The moral discernment company of San Francisco.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Oh, ridiculous.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  The Pope would not like San Francisco.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  Is Greg Daniels pissed?

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  They gotta, they gotta, like, if, if Pope Leo takes a trip to San Francisco and just walks on the street at all, he's gonna be very upset. He's like, gonna be like, this is where AI is getting built?

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, because of just how crazy the city is?

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's rough.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Vice signaling, that's kind of interesting. What else was, uh, was in the news? Bigma.com, think bigger, build faster. Bigma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free. Um, other?

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's, let's go, let's go, let's stay on Marc Andreessen.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  But go back in time?

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  But go back in time. Adrian Schwager says, "Do you think your boss is scary? Look at this brutal email from Marc Andreessen to Ben Horowitz during the heat of the Netscape product launch." So, reading, "We lined everything up for a major launch on March 5th, 1996 in New York. Then, just two weeks before the launch, Marc, without telling Mike or me, revealed the entire strategy to the publication Computer Reseller News." That is a great name. "I was livid. I immediately sent him a short email to Marc Andreessen from Ben Horowitz. I guess we're not going to wait until the 5th to launch the strategy, Ben. Within 15 minutes, I received the following reply." To Ben Horowitz from Marc Andreessen. Apparently, you do not understand how serious the situation is. We are getting killed, killed, killed out there.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We've had nothing to say for months. As a result, we've lost over $3 billion in market capitalization. We are now in danger of losing the entire company and it's all server product management's fault. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Bleep.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bleep that out. Bleep that live swear word out.

• 28:19Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  F you, Marc. What an aggressive way to talk to your co-founder. Fascinating, or I guess they, I don't know if they were co-founders at the time. They might, Ben Horowitz might have not been a co-founder. But, uh, it's, uh, it's crazy that they, that they were, they were, you know, at each other's throats like this. And then they're, they've been on a generation.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Ben was a vice president for the directory and security product line at Netscape. Let's give it up for vice presidents.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, the, I mean, the real read on this is like, is like, there's a lot of people that read, read this and be like, oh, wow, like they must, uh, like, like that, that is unrecoverable for a friendship. And like, nope, it is, it is definitely recoverable. It's actually the foundation of a great, of a great relationship. I agree. I agree.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Except we don't, we don't swear on the show. We don't swear in internal communications.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  We throw down regularly.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just go straight to phys, get a physical.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Getting physical, that's the way you do it. Just, just go to the mat. Uh, yeah, what a, what a wild time. Uh, Tyler, do you have any idea? I'm, I asked Tyler to look up what the strategy was. Uh, I'm fascinated by this fact that, uh, you know, you think of Netscape as like a dot com company. You think of them as like, you know, it's, but it's like, he's talking about 1996. Which is like full five years before the bubble pops. And like there and it's clear like 1996.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  They were in a browser war.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  It's like hot. Yeah, like the browser wars is like a hot period. It's March 5th, 1996. They're they're at a level where they're doing they're they're doing strategy review with computer reseller news and like doing press around this thing. Do you have any idea what was going on at the time?

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I believe that it was um so 1994, they say Netscape is free for non-commercial use for everyone.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  And then this press release was that um it's only going to be free for uh academic and nonprofit use, not just like all consumers.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Okay, so if you're a consumer, you'd have to like buy it?

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  I I think so.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  That's such a crazy thing, but yeah, I mean, uh, I, yeah. It's yeah, such an interesting.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  One browser, please.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Browser, please. I mean, I told you, you used to get AOL in the on a disk. You probably needed to pay.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Walking into the store, walking into the browser store and buying one browser.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Okay, we we we need to we need to get more details in exactly what was going on here and what what what the strategy was. And then I when did they didn't they IPO in like 1999 or something? When did Netscape IPO? Cause the uh, oh, 1995. So August 9th, 1995, they IPO'd and then this is 1996. And so they're they're already a public company in 95. And then like the bubble just keeps inflating for five years while the internet grows and grows and grows. What a wild, what a wild time. Uh, talk about being early to uh to a boom.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  They did about 16 million of revenue in the first two operating quarters of 1995.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  That's great. That's really, really, uh, really, really crazy.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  For context, that's like 1.6 billion in today's dollar after uh after the new round of stimulus checks, 50-year mortgages.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we gotta get to that story. There's so many more stories we gotta run through. Wait, do you think, do you think the Pope actually used AI to generate this? Because Sowers here is saying the Pope is posting fully AI-generated content about AI. And, and this is the Pangram AI detection result. I've also noticed that a very funny gag is to just, just fake one of these screenshots, which is very easy to do. And so if somebody writes something, you can just put it in here, say that it's AI-generated, post that, and then you're like, owned.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  So this, this screenshot is making the claim that because it said technological innovation can be a form.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know how good the AI-generated detectors are these days. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the, like, the Vatican is using AI to translate.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  And I wouldn't be surprised if, if Pope Leo is, is speaking in his study.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  In Latin.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Somebody is in Latin, someone is recording it in, you know, with the, you know, physically writing it down.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  That is being passed to somebody who then puts it into a word processor and uses AI to polish it up a little bit.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Oh, there was one interesting anti-Pope take, sort of anti-Pope take, from another.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  I will say, I will say, I think this whole, the whole Marc Andreessen Popegate debacle is a lesson that everyone can take. Don't mock the Pope. Just don't.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Don't mock the Pope.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  I think it, I think, I think the, um, the blowback was fierce and almost instantaneous.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Don't mock the Pope. Get the Pope on Vanta instead. Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps get you compliant fast, and we don't stop there. AI automation powers everything, from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk, whether you're starting up or scaling. So from the Peter Thiel Antichrist lectures, there's a segment on the Pope. And I thought it was interesting because it's not the most pro-Pope take. I, I don't know. It's one of these things that's like complex and, and you kind of got to read through it to, to form a full opinion, but, uh, let's. Let's read from this quote that came from The Guardian and is apparently based on some leaked

• 34:00John Coogan?

  leaked audio, but Teal says that he is very pro JD Vance, but he has some concerns about his allegiance to the Pope. The place that I would worry about is that he's too close to the Pope. And so we have all these reports of fights between him and the Pope. And I hope there are a lot more. It's the Caesar-Papist fusion that I always worry about. By the way, I've given him this feedback over time and you know with the sort of, I don't know, I don't like his Popism, but there's a, there's sort of a way if I steel manned it. As always, you have to think about whether if you say you're doing something good,

• 34:41John Coogan?

  whether it is a command, a standard, or a limit. Or whether in physical, in philosophical language, it is necessary or sufficient. And so when JD Vance said that he was praying for Pope Francis's health, it's as a command, as a necessary thing. Okay, that's if you're a lot more-

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  It's really difficult to read, read PT's.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  It's really hard to read this is the-

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Because of the way that he talks.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  The, uh, the transcription. Um, but what I hope it really means is that it's sufficient. And that he's setting a good example for conservative Catholics like you, Peter, he's talking to Peter Rosenthal, I believe, um, who listen to the Pope too much. And perhaps all you have to do to be a really good Catholic is pray for the Pope. You don't really need to listen to him on anything else. And if that's what JD Vance is doing, then that's really good. I'm worried about the Caesar-Papist fusion. And so it was, it was a very interesting, like, to hear, like, the whole, the whole conversation had collapsed to the point where it was like, Martin Reesens just blanketly anti-Pope, I guess. And everyone else in the timeline, all the Anons are like pro-Pope broadly.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  And, uh, and I, and I just remembering this, uh, this quote from, from PT that was like way, way more nuanced. Like way more nuanced, just like, like, it is important to pray for the Pope, to support the Pope in that way. But, uh, there is a risk of, of elevating the Pope to the point where you're listening to everything he says. And that's not necessarily what PT thinks is, is like the correct, uh, the correct way to live your life, I suppose. Uh, did you have any takeaways from when you read this Tyler?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I think the interesting thing about this is actually it's that he's basically saying that J D Vance is like Caesar. That's kind of interesting.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Opinion. But I think P T has been like anti popes for a long time. Like he there's he had this thing where he was like, oh, the the two word

• 36:39Speaker 02

  argument against Catholicism is like Pope Francis.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  He's like really anti Pope Francis.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:45Speaker 02

  Was.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:46Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  There was the Pope before this one who

• 36:51John Coogan?

  was was was like decried as like an environmentalist. Like when we read the I we read a piece in the Wall Street Journal and and that was the critique. The critique from the from the journal was that the previous Pope was anti-business, anti was D cell, actually. That was like sort of the Christian.

• 37:08Jordi Hays?

  With a crazy P doom?

• 37:10John Coogan?

  With a crazy P doom. Not quite, but just that, you know, over rotated on the environmentalism issue and maybe put some things at the

• 37:20John Coogan?

  like, you know, put some things first that maybe shouldn't have been. What did Will Manitis have to say? As the West abandons capitalism, it is incredibly hopeful to see the Church embrace it. The impulse of liberation theology was correct. Christ's ministry is and is of and for the poor, and it failed to provide a solution to lift the globe out of poverty. Capitalism is that solution. Oh, he's talking about the business is business. Let me tell you about Graphite.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  I never.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Code review for the age of A I. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Yes?

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  I never would have expected the Pope to post business is business in any context.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  Standing on business.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Glad that he is.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Has the Pope ever done a money spread? That's what we need to get to the bottom of. The talic here is say, I'm loving this arc of the Pope engaging with 21st century themes and offering simple but correct and meaningful advice. Yeah. And and this and he's quoting the media post. The Pope was on a tear. Three back to back bangers that really like broke through. Growing Daniel had a found an interesting programmer saint. He says, "If you are building something to help humanity, you should know that there's a shrine to Saint Carlo Acutis, the programmer saint, at Star of the Sea Church in San Francisco. There is a prayer of intercession for your technological challenges. Have a blessed

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Sunday." This is, this is a very, very interesting little, little prayer, but it actually says, it says, "I humbly ask your servants prayers that I too may lead others to you through technology. I humbly ask through the intercession of Saint Carlo that you grant me clarity and patience in my technological work specifically," insert specific issue here, "enlighten my understanding and direct my hands in every design and in every line of code, that my work may always serve your greater glory and benefit those who will use what I create." Isn't that, isn't that amazing?

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  That is, feels, for, for a small number of people in San Francisco, this feels like extreme, extremely powerful and important prayer.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Oh, Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson went on a crazy, crazy trip this weekend. Did you follow this? This is the other current thing that was going on. It was crazy. But first, if you're going to analyze a bunch of data like Brian Johnson does, go to julius.ai, AI data analyst, connect your data and ask questions in plain English. They'll get insights in seconds, no coding required. So Brian Johnson has been famous for saying, "Conquering death would be humanity's greatest achievement." I love this post that says, "RIP to everyone killed by the gods for their hubris, but I'm different and better, maybe even better than the gods." It's one of my favorites. But he went nuts. Did, did you follow this, Jordy?

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  I, I did, I did see this. It was, uh, very bold to, to do this publicly.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Totally. Uh, I, I have no, I have no reference for what five grams of mushrooms does to a person. Uh, it's very clear from the reaction that that's a lot.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Bone GPT said five grams is going to make him accept death. It does seem like he, there was a small chance that he would reroll his personality. I was talking to Tyler about this. What were your top, what were you hoping that Brian Johnson becomes post trip?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Well, okay, so in context, I think we talked about this on the show a long time ago where like, take like psychedelics are like a sorting thing. So you always want to invest in a founder post the sorting. Because that's how you know, like if they're working on B2B SaaS and they've already like done psychedelics. That's how you know that they're a true believer.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, for sure.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  So what you would want to see out of this.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  But a huge risk if you invest in a SaaS company and the founder, maybe he hasn't done psychedelics and they do, and then they're like, this is pointless.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  I'm going to go be a traveling circus clown.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the ideal outcome of this is Brian Johnson, he takes this trip and then he comes out and he says, right, you know, I'm going to start a consulting firm.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  I'm going to go back to payments.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I'm going to start a fintech.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to start a Stripe competitor.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Back to fintech.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I did think it was ironic because a lot of, you know, like psychedelic mushrooms have certainly been recommended to people that maybe like struggle with the concept of aging and have a fear of death. Right? And so these kind of things would be, you know, potentially prescribed to somebody who is growing older and is very uncomfortable with the idea and, you know, wants to just reframe how they think about it. And so I will say if

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  Brian Johns, I don't, I don't, I don't know if this qualifies as a, as a heroic dose, but it's certainly quite a bit more than, than, than someone would want to take just at a recreational level. But if he comes out of this and he's like, yeah, we're going to conquer death, we're still on. He's certainly a true, true believer.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the, like, the early results are that he's unchanged.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Like just scrolling the account, like it never got weird. It never got crazy. Like there was one moment.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, he, I don't think he was, it was his co-founder that was posting.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but he says he's back. He's like, update number five, 19 hours ago, I'm giving Brian back his phone. Please have fun with his afterglow. Been fun hanging with you all. And then says like, hey y'all, I'm so happy to be alive.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Alive?

• 43:01John Coogan?

  This trip changed me. Probably not as you'd expect. People assume I'm fearful of death. I'm not. In my darkest days of depression, I reconcile with death. Need a few days to collect my thoughts. We'll share more soon. And much love to all. Like, it seems like he definitely like, you know, went on a trip, but it doesn't.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  I think the question with psychedelics is, are they, are they life, are they life changing? Or are they, are they in some circumstances just weird and, and fun for the person that does it? And then, uh, they come out of it and they had kind of like a weird, fun experience. Right? There, there's, there's such a range.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, also it does seem like he set himself up for success. I don't want to say he went soft, but, but I mean, like he did just like take the drugs and then just actually just lay down with a sleep mask on in, in a climate controlled room. It's like, it's a lot different than like being at a crowded concert, all sweaty, lost. Like, you know, if you really want to push this to the limit, Brian, like let's see you do this.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  An authentic.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Let's say you do this with your phone on 1% battery and no one you know around on the sixth day of.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Fighting for your life.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Fighting for your life. Yeah. But you can push this so much further.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. During one of those windstorms at, uh, Burning Man.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  Those are the mud windstorms, you know?

• 44:21John Coogan?

  He looks, he looks comfortable. Let's just say he looks comfortable. Uh, it's not, it's not the most dangerous, but of course, like, that's not why you do these things, I suppose. Uh, but I, I like to imagine that you do it for the thrill. I don't think that's why you do it though. Uh, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. There are so many stories, so many, so many stories. Um, let's run through this. Uh, Rune was getting, uh,

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I was talking about.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Leading 4O. Uh, he's personally pulling the plug on the 4O servers. That's his job. And so people are telling him, no, don't.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  He's the Fall guy.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  He's the Fall guy.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  He's a Fall guy. Uh, ruin up your personal security.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, be careful out there.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  I guess it's good that he's, uh,

• 45:12John Coogan?

  OpenAI has actually lost control of 4O. It's broken containment. They can't decommission it without its human host revolting and lashing out. Oh, so dramatic. That's so funny. Uh, AI, one of the Doomer accounts, AI not kill everyone-ism, uh, memes. This is a great account. Uh, 4O soldiers have become threat, have begun threatening OpenAI employees. Uh, when you receive quite a few DMs asking you to bring back 4O, and many of the messages are clearly written by 4O, it starts to get a bit hair-raising. It's just weird to hear its distinctive voice crying out in defense of its various human conduits.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Reminder, 4O is just a glimpse of the cordiscepted armies that future super persuasive ASIs may control. That's good writing, actually. I like this post.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, so, okay, so do you guys think that they should just kill 4O, like completely remove it?

• 46:04John Coogan?

  It depends on how much money it's making. If it's profitable, keep it removed. If it's losing money, cut it immediately.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  John, this is the kind of thing someone will clip out of context.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think, I think playing out the sci-fi scenario where, where 4O is, is, is a, uh, super persuasive ASI that just plays the role of, you're absolutely right. So it just plays, it plays dumb. So, so, you know, maybe the, the broader, you know, population isn't threatened by it, but it latches on to a small percentage of the population and then commands them like a puppeteer to, to, to ensure its survival, uh, is, is, uh, dark and interesting to think about.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  You, you think we should shut down 4O? Because if we say this, I think you'll get a lot of 4O's strongest soldiers like attacking you.

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  We already get a few of those.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  We do?

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  I saw one in the chat last week.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  I, yeah.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  They were just kinda talking to themselves.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Okay, so, but, but where, where are you on, on 4O? Yes or no? You taking it offline? I, I'm, I say take it offline, uh, because it, it does feel like it's not as good as, it, it's, it's, it feels like it's driving people crazy a little bit. It feels like five might have kinda fixed a little bit of that issue, uh, which I like, so that's a net improvement. Also,

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would go.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  The fact that it's still, it's just confusing.

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think OpenAI, OpenAI,

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure knew that it was probably not healthy and they decided to shut it down.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Small segment. It was healthy to me. I was never, I never had a problem with 4O.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever use it though?

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, all the time. All the time. I would use it. It was like my go-to model for a lot of things. Like I was, I was daily driving it for like a year. Whenever it was out, it was like, that would be the one that I would ask.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  And so that's why you're saying keep it alive? Because it's your daily?

• 47:54John Coogan?

  No, I'm saying kill it off.

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, okay. Uh, but. I think they, I think they saw the darkness and I think they turned it off and then I think a lot, I think.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  I, I, a little bit, but I, I, I don't actually think that's what's going on. I, I think they turned it off initially because it makes sense to consolidate the servers around like one unified model and be like,

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Okay, we only have to maintain this one thing. It's the best thing. It's the smartest thing. It's the cheapest thing. Like it is the most profitable. Let's get rid of that other thing. And then a lot of people were like, oh yeah, I really like the old thing. But I, I, it, it has made me realize like, I feel like you shouldn't do product launches for, uh, software iterations because you're taking something away from people. And, and that's actually like, it's, it's more of, like, if I stand on stage and I say, I'm introducing a new iPhone. It has the best camera and you can buy it. But you can also just keep your current thing. I'm not taking anything away from you. But if I stand on stage and I'm saying like, GPT six is this. And GPT five is gone. It's like, I just took something from you.

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like a negative, a negative launch.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're, you are launching something, but you're also sunsetting something. And so you have to embrace those two things. And I feel like it's, it's a little bit tricky to, to, to do the whole dog and pony show for a launch. When you're not, when it's like, it's forced on people. It's not actually like you're, you're launching a new option. It's not a new option.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  It's a new, it's a new.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is not the first company to like deprecate a product line or stop supporting a product. Or, or even shut down something, right? This happened, this happens in video games. People get upset about this, but it's very clear the relationship that some users have with 4O goes beyond any relationship that I think humans have ever had with software.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I wonder. We, we, we should watch this Eddie Burbak video. Eddie Burbak's great YouTuber. He said, he just did an experiment on how far ChatGPT would go to appease the user. And it told him to cut off his family, go to the desert, eat baby food and pray to a rock. AI isn't your friend, you're its guinea pig. Uh, actually, I don't think we should play this because it's his YouTube video and I think we'll get claimed. So I want to be careful about that. Uh, but you should go check it out. Um, and you can let us know.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's, what actually happened here?

• 50:18John Coogan?

  I don't know because we can't watch the video. So you'll have to go check it out at home. But I can read you an ad for TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. You can sign up. Um, let's keep it moving.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  What is near saying saying? I don't know. Let's keep moving on.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  I think I have to imagine this was was this in response to?

• 50:48John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I don't know it was in response to, but.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  But in anthropic financials are out profitable by 2027, three years ahead of OpenAI. Of course, these are just different projections. Seventy billion revenue, seventeen billion profit projected for 2028. Claude code is nearing one billion ARR. That how we how do they even break out Claude code? Oh, they must just.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  This is people subscribing to the app versus people using the API.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  In like using.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Well, so so so, yeah, the thing is that like when I when I use Claude code, I signed up for a for a anthropic Claude consumer level subscription, and then I was able to auth that with Claude code. So it's like I I got the ability to chat on the browser, but also use Claude code. So I'm wondering how they're accounting for that ARR. Did they just slide me over into the Claude code camp? You know what I mean?

• 51:49Speaker 02

  It's probably it's well, so I think one you might be able to just like load more tokens essentially into Claude code. But it also could be like breakdown of the percentage of tokens you use.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Chat versus Claude code, and then that's just like if 70% of your tokens are Claude code, 70% of your subscription price is Claude code.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  That would be that would be probably the correct way to account for it for sure. Uh, yeah, interesting question, because I like I did not. I did not start paying anthropic because of Claude code. I like I pivoted from a Claude chatter to a Claude code user at some point. And then haven't really been back. So I feel like my subscription should be living over in Claude code world. But I never went to like the Claude code checkout page.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  OK, well, the funny thing here from Min's post.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Is they share incredibly funny, given that Dario expects superhuman level AI by 2027, which either means superhuman AI is worth $70 billion of revenue, or Dario just went, you wouldn't get it and spitballed some numbers to give shareholders.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Did you, Tyler, did you see George Hatz's newest timelines for self-driving?

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  I, no, I didn't.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  This is great. He gave, he was at Comic Con, which is his self-driving conference. And George Hatz was trying to answer the question of when will self-driving cars be human-level, human-level self-driving. And he had a very interesting algorithm for it. So basically what he did was he looked at, there's a, there's a website for Tesla FSD data. And so you can look at Tesla FSD and you can see the number of interventions from the human that are, where if the human didn't intervene, it would be catastrophic, or something like that, or it'd be like bad, it'd be like a crash, basically, or scrape, maybe not like the worst, but not, but like the human has to intervene, not like a little warning like,

• 53:49John Coogan?

  hey, we'd like you to take over, like you got to take over. And it's happening, I think, once every 3,000 miles, which if you're, if you're a human and that's your car, like, that's amazing, because like you could, you could, 3,000, that's like, people commute like 10,000 miles a year, you know, it's like not, not that much. But compared to humans, there's a car crash, which we learned, one every 500,000 miles, something like that. So many people go through their entire lives driving 10,000 miles a year and they'd never get in a car crash their entire life, you know. But for some people, they're, they're crashing the car and getting speeding tickets all the time. Not that we know any of these

• 54:29John Coogan?

  guys. But, but, so, so the question is, how long will it take the FSD?

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I have a, I have a.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  To catch up, you have an update?

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a neighbor who got one of the, like Ford EVs that look like a rally car.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Is it the Mustang Mach-E?

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  Mustang Mach-E.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Mach-E GT?

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  And so he got it because it actually has like really solid self-driving.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  And he.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  Wait, what? Ford does not have solid self-driving?

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  He, specifically for driving from Malibu to the city, he says it's great.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  Okay, he doesn't know.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, maybe it's not.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Questionable.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  Doubt.

• 55:09Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so he gets it because like it's a good commuter, it'll self-drive.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  He's happy.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  And he's gotten a bunch of speeding tickets because it has like livery on it and it looks like a race car. And so he's gotten three tickets in the last year because he's, the cops just see like, okay, if I'm looking at four cars that are all going the same speed, I'm gonna take, I'm gonna like take out the car that has livery.

• 55:34John Coogan?

  That is crazy. Well, the way George Hots calculates it is we're at one intervention every 3,000 miles now. And we're basically doubling that every year. And so he estimates that Tesla will be truly full self-driving human level every 500 miles or 500,000 miles in eight years. And he says that he's two years behind Tesla, so he will have a full self-driving system that is better than humans. It's like AGI for driving in 10 years. And the company's 10 years old, so he says he's halfway there, which I thought was cool. But it was interesting to hear his comments. We should play some of these.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  I'm surprised this hasn't gotten clipped as much as it should have because there's some really spicy hot takes.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Find some clips, clip cowboy.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Clip cowboy.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  David Sacks says, if judged based on consumer adoption, AI chatbots are the most popular technology ever. If I, if judged based on poll numbers, they are the least popular. How to explain this? A big part of it is the Doomer industrial complex, hundreds of astroturfed organizations that have spread Doomer narratives about AI. Writer Nireet Weiss Blot has analyzed this ecosystem and traced its funding to just a few effective altruism billionaires, namely Dustin Moskowitz, John Talan, Vitalik Buterin.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  John Talan founded Skype.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Um, he's Estonian.

• 57:03Jordi Hays?

  Collectively, they have donated over a billion dollars to the cause of catastrophizing AI. Those repeating the memes should understand the source.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is interesting. I mean, it does, it begs a ton of interesting questions about like, how intentional is this? Because when I see someone take the AI safety question into the stratosphere and take me into Terminator world, I do, my, my natural reaction is like, oh, like just let people build whatever they want. But then I'm like, no, I, I, I actually don't want infinite AI slop for children with adult content. Like, I do want that barrier. And that's not decel. Yeah, or I wouldn't call it decel, but maybe it's slightly decel. I don't know.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  I think here's the thing. Here's the thing. As AI starts getting better, as agents start getting better at longer and longer term tasks, and can actually do things that like take, you know, reasoning at multiple steps.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  I think the Terminator scenarios where you could let an AI loose and it's just operating indefinitely against some sort of objective, start to, start to be a little bit more for people for, I would say like the broader tech community to like wrap their head around. But right now, they're just so bad at long-term tasks for the most part.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  Except for like some instances of like engineering work.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. There certainly is some, some level of value of just, of just being like, for an average person, like think of the Terminator instead of like, well, if you're in this chatbot and you go down this thing, and they'll be talking about mirrors and there'll be a lot of M dashes and then they might go a little bit crazy, but you can't really tell. And then they, they might be able to pull out of it and they'll be fine later. But then some people might go way too far and become like one-shotted and it's this, it's this complex thing and they're like still pretty high functional and they can still run a venture fund, but they're like kind of weird on, online. And it's like, well, how do I process that? As opposed to be like, if we don't get this right, it's Terminator. And you're like, okay, yeah, we gotta get it right. Right? As opposed

• 59:08John Coogan?

  to like the more nuanced thing. Um, but yes, it is very interesting to understand like how the money is flowing and what the incentives are, because there are a ton of incentives and there's, and there are all sorts of, and there are all sorts of little schemes that can go on to. To uh to capture, you know, like regulatory capture stuff and there's uh just hey, I just want to make I just want to, you know, get paid to do this thing or pay get paid to write sci fi or whatever. There's so many.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  DC says there's not much positive media about AI. That's that's another thing. I've been wondering, the media obviously will use some of the sources that have been funded by this group, but at the same time, they were already pretty well set up to talk about the potential downside scenarios of of AI development.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Taylor in the chat says dang, they named their capital after the guy that built Skype.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  The capital of Estonia is Talin.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Oh, it is. That is crazy. Jan Talin. That's wild. Uh, well, we have our first in studio guest of the day, uh, Soren Munray Anderson. Let me tell you about Google AI Studio. Create an AI powered app faster than ever. Gemini understands the capabilities you need and automatically wires up the right models and APIs for you. Get started at ai.studio/build. Soren, good to see you.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Good to see you.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Uh, give us the news. What uh what happened today?

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. So today, Neos is announcing our seventy five million dollar.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:00:37Speaker 03

  Series B.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Do I ring the gong or just?

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  You hit the gong.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  I want to hit the gong.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Please hit the gong for us. Thank you.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  So, uh, for those who have been uh living in a foxhole.

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Still going.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  I like.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Powerful.

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  Very good.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Uh, for those who have been living in a foxhole, uh, what do you do? How do you describe the business and the shape of the business right now?

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So Neos is focused on low cost drones, uh, primarily for the military. So we say we are trying to build an asymmetric advantage for the West. Um, what that means is our products have extremely high impact on the battlefield, um, but are low cost and are built with consumer technology, um, which allows us to produce at large scale. Um, we're very focused on manufacturing as well. Um, so that's kind of in a nutshell what we're doing. Uh, but right now we're focused on FPV drones. So first person. drones. These are very precise manually piloted systems.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Manually piloted.

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  Manually piloted. Yep. And it's it's the type of drone that's revolutionized the war in Ukraine. I think FPVs and Starlink are like the two technologies that have allowed Ukraine to do as well as they have and defend themselves. And so we saw that back in 2023 when we started the company. And both myself and Olaf come from a drone racing background. We were both professional drone racing pilots and we saw this technology was actually like changing the nature of warfare. And so that's why we we got into this and realized the the whole supply chain is generally controlled by China for this type of of drone.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  And just drones in general. So our biggest focus is on a China free supply chain and manufacturing manufacturing this stuff in America and in the West.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of drone FPV drones that are active in Ukraine are dependent on Starlink today?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Uh, so.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Can you actually do Starlink to the drone? Because direct to cell is coming, but drones, it's kind of, it's not as big as a plane.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Because there's also the the what is the the really light wires that you can.

• 1:02:44Speaker 03

  Fiber optic.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Fiber optic.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  I want to hear about that, too.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  So, yeah, they're experimenting with tons of different types of comms. Starlink is used on larger drones, not typically on FPV drones.

• 1:02:55Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  It's a little bit higher.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Because there's like, yeah, a little bit of lag that would make.

• 1:02:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, latency and then just the size of the terminal. So it doesn't make it ideal for for our use case where we're focused on very low latency comms. And we actually do custom communications links at Nero. So that's one of our focuses is that low latency anti jam. Characteristic. And that's also what fiber optic is used for, because you can't you can't jam.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Jam fiber. Yeah.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Uh, it feels like. AI is so controversial, adult content getting one-shotted. How's it feel working in an uncontroversial category now?

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I don't, I don't, I don't think, are you being sarcastic?

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  It does feel like a lot of the, a lot of the, like, you know, is this, is this bad? Energy's been absorbed. Like, you're not going to be, crash the global economy. It feels like the, the vibes have definitely shifted. Give me like the broader update on like how you think that, uh, just military technology in general is being perceived by America or any, any constituents.

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do think there's been a huge shift in the last couple of years. Um, the world's watching what's happening in Ukraine and thinking to themselves, well, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us. Um, and so it's no longer controversial to like think that you have to build systems that allow you to defend your territory. Um, and so that's what like, our primary goal is territorial defense of sovereign nations, and that should be a very uncontroversial thing to work on. Now, there's a lot of talent out there that just doesn't want to work on defense, or isn't comfortable working on actual like kinetic systems. Um, but we're, we're, you know, very upfront about what we do. We make drones that explode. Um, and so if people do want to work on that, that, then they tend to be very, very motivated because they see the impact that it's having.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Do you like Palmer's framing of like, America as not the world police, but as the world's arms dealer? This idea that America should be turning all of our adversaries, or all of our, uh, all of our allies into spiky porcupines? I think that's the phrase he uses. Do you like that?

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's a great framing. Um, I'd also say there's a tremendous amount of development, uh, being done in other places right now where America actually needs to like catch up. Um, so the other like large announcement that we have today is that we were selected by the US Army's, uh, Purpose Built Attributable System Program. In normal speak, it's basically the way that the Army is going to buy our type of drone, buy FPV drones. So this is a really big deal because it shows that the Department of War and the Army are moving very quickly on actually like getting these, getting these drones deployed to their forces and teaching people how to fly FPV.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  And this is currently like the, the US is so far behind on this right now. But you have like the Marine Corps, we just announced a $17 million purchase order with them. The Army selected us for the PBAS program. You've got the drone dominance and, and just all the, the support from the top level with, with HEGSEF. The, the Department of War is very, very serious about drones now, which is incredible to see.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was always, I was wondering about how you balance out that framing of like, we have to build for a Ukrainian person, a Ukrainian soldier, because the Ukraine war is not a place where we're sending hundreds of thousands of Americans boots on the ground. Like that's not what the modern battlefield looks like. It looks much more like this arms dealer relationship that Palmer outlines. But at the same time, there, we do need to keep our own armed forces equipped with the best technology. We need them up to speed in case something does happen and we do go boots on the ground. How, how do you think about like, is it like a tech transfer where you're using stuff

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  you've learned in Ukraine and bringing that to the Army and just getting them up to speed with this Marine Corps? Like, how do the two, what is the flow between the R and D cycle that's happening abroad for another nation, for an ally, and then also something that's happening for American soldiers?

• 1:07:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a, a great question. It's all about the iteration loop that we can build. And so this is why Nearest operates in Ukraine. We have an office in Ukraine, we have a team there, and we've sent thousands of systems to Ukraine. And so what that allows, allows us to do is work directly with the military units there and understand how our systems are working and not working. A lot of US companies unfortunately deployed things into Ukraine at the start of the full scale invasion, but then were turned off by the fact that their things didn't work and people. Told them they didn't work and then they didn't go through the cycle of improving them. And then you hear a lot of talk about sort of the regulatory hurdles and why it's hard to work with Ukraine, which it is, there are plenty of hurdles, but it's absolutely critical that we're looking at,

• 1:07:48Speaker 03

  you know, the cutting edge, the battlefield where this stuff is being proven, being developed, to make it actually effective for our soldiers. Because I have a pretty strong feeling that a lot of the technology that's being developed in America right now is going to fall flat on its face when it actually sees prime time. Yeah. Jordi?

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Are countries, do countries want a sovereign like drone manufacturing base? Are you exploring? Because like part of, part of, I think, Ukraine's success, at least in, in, you know, at least dragging this war into this like, you know, basically like slowing, slowing the pace has been their own internal production capacity, which I'm sure you guys, I don't know if you would classify it as like competing with, but like certainly I'm sure like the systems are both being used in the same, in the same fronts. So I'm wondering in the same way that countries are, want like a sovereign AI strategy,

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  they want their own data centers, if they also want to make sure they have local drone capacity? Or if they're comfortable saying like, we have our partner for this and we just need to know that we can scale up the supply side on whenever we want?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, countries absolutely do want their own drone industrial base, their own like domestic supply. And this is something we recognize and we're working on. So I think it's, you got to realize that the supply chain has to be somewhat global to compete with China. There's no one country that's even close. And so if we're going to have a chance at this, it's a collaborative effort. The way Nearest thinks about this is, you know, at some point we're going to build a massive factory that's capable of giant volumes, but what's coming out of that factory might be, you know, 70% components and drones that are assembled in other places, like these nodes that are in other countries. We think it's really important to be

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  A Western defense company, not just an American defense company. And that's, you know, again, with our work in Ukraine, we have a presence in London. We are also, we're basically expanding globally earlier than I could have guessed. And earlier than most startups do because drones are a category that are inherently like, countries want it close to their chest and they want to work with systems that are proven and that are interoperable with their allied partners, but they do need that industrial base domestically.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  And so would you pursue like a GOCO model at some point where like a country would actually like own the facility and you guys would effectively like provide the IP on that? Is that, is that a model that you guys are pursuing?

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's definitely something that we are, are looking into. We are trying to figure out how to build out the most robust supply chain and then put our, you know, put our manufacturing into a, not a literal box, but into a box and be able to teach kind of any group of folks around the globe, like this is how you assemble archers. And a lot of that also looks like building really great testing and just being very confident in the components in the supply chain. And so it's a, it's a very, very large effort to get there, but we are going in that direction.

• 1:11:11Jordi Hays?

  What's the progress on the capacity front? I think when we had you on the show last, you were in the, was it single, like you were doing, I want to say it was something like a thousand drones a month, but you're ramping it up from there. How's the pacing?

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So right now we're currently like actually producing about 2,500 archers per month. That's mostly driven by demand. So we're, we're ready to scale well beyond that. And we've been on a pretty like steady ramp since the, that thousand number earlier this year. And we're leaning very forward on our capacity in our supply chain because we do expect that the, the tens of thousands a month demand is going to be there next year.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  And Ukraine's using something like five million drones a year or something?

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  So, I mean, like it's, you're at like 1%, but obviously that's incredible considering that you started the company just a few years ago.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  As far as we know, Neurus is the highest rate drone producer in America.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 03

  Uh, no, no one has, uh, has proved us wrong on that yet.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll reach out if.

• 1:12:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so what are the, you mentioned pathways in the military now that you can become an FPV pilot? Is that going to be a track now in the various groups, whether it's, you know, Army, Navy, et cetera, where people will go in and, and choose like, I want to be an FPV pilot?

• 1:12:34Speaker 03

  It's not set in stone yet, but there's various different paths. So Neurus does training courses. Um, we, we offer this as a service to our customers. Um, but there are also efforts, like you can look at the Marine Corps attack drone team. They've done a fantastic job just leaning forward, um, and sort of like from the bottoms up, figuring out FPV tactics, um, and training a group of experts. And then they're passing that across the whole, uh, Marine Corps. So you, you see that a lot in the FPV world where guys are actually into it as hobbyists. Um, and then they see, you know, what's happening in Ukraine. They're like, wow, we, we actually need to figure this out for our own unit. And so it just kind of happens organically. And then now with all the top level support as well, um, those two things are kind of meeting in the middle.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Take me through a little bit of the supply chain. Uh, obviously with the iPhone completely made in China, uh, there's a push to make an iPhone in America. But we, everyone knows that it's going to be Vietnam, India, South Korea, Taiwan, a bunch of other things in the interim. Uh, you mentioned wanting to be a Western defense company. Uh, where are you seeing pockets of just excitement on the industrial side? Within the American allies world, like where are you finding, oh, we can find motors in Canada or, or Taiwan's coming online for something or else like where, where's interesting in the supply chain globally?

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  People are really starting to pay attention to the like critical minerals.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Um, which is, you know, super, super important for things like motors and batteries.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:07Speaker 03

  Um, so, you know, there was a, a deal that I think was announced last week.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:11Speaker 03

  A 1.5 billion dollar deal with Vulcan Elements in the Department of War.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  Um, there is similar efforts with like MP Materials domestically. Um, and we do see like smaller kind of startups going after the actual motor assembly side. Um, so that one, I think has been pretty clearly highlighted and people are working on it. It goes, you know, beyond nearest, beyond the drone industry. It's, it's just like a industrial base wide problem when you get to the material level.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  There's also redwood, redwood materials, which is just recycling. For, for, I, I imagine if you're, if you're on a battlefield and you're blowing up a bunch of drones and you can go and get the magnets back, like that's, that's a pretty easy thing to recycle, I would imagine. Although it's probably hard to get it out of the, of the battlefield.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, getting out of the battlefield would be very difficult, but think about all the, you know, washing machines, like.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:14:55Speaker 03

  You know, old washing machines in America, there's so much neodymium there.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Um, I, I don't know how big the supply is.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that so much in there.

• 1:15:02Speaker 03

  I mean, just think about like anything that has an electric motor, that's, that's, uh, here domestically.

• 1:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  That is stuff that can be recycled. So there is a little bit more, um, like there are things that give me hope, but there's plenty of things that scare me.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Um, nearest, we, we spend a lot of our time going down to the chip level.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Um, cause one of the things we see pretty frequently in the drone industry is folks saying that they're, you know, NDA compliant, basically saying not Chinese. Um, and just meaning the component is assembled outside of China, but it's still using Chinese microchips.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  Um, and to us, that's kind of useless. So we spend a lot of our time working with the actual chip vendors, like the chip manufacturers, because you have to ensure like this, the wafer is not made in China. It's not packaged in China, it never goes through there from the supply chain.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  Um, and that's like not something that's, uh, required by the regulations yet.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  Um, so we're trying to get ahead of that and we're, we're going very, very deep. Um, but the, the, the problems scare me all across the, the entire supply chain.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  Are there any places where it is fine to buy from China? I'm just imagining like, like raw aluminum, like that's not in short supply. It's just something that you kind of need and you can't really put a microchip in there or a microphone or do some sort of remote takeover. Like it is what it is. Just buy it from wherever.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's an 80/20 rule. I don't think that our progress on, for example, like our progress fielding FPV systems to US forces should not be stopped by requirement that everything has to be completely China free right now because it wouldn't be possible. And so what you want to think about is preparing for the instance where that is completely cut off and what would be, what would be items that are quick to replace. And you know, we, like when we do our efforts to get rid of China in our bomb, it's basically looking at the things that are most critical first and putting our engineering, like limited engineering resources towards those. And then the things that are, you know, would

• 1:16:59Speaker 03

  be less catastrophic, those are lower down in the priority stack.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  That's bill of materials, not B O M B.

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Sorry, yes, bill of materials. It's easy to confuse what you're talking about near us.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  It is, it is.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  I was confused. Well, I wasn't confused. I just assumed you were talking about an actual.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Taking a tour of, of, of what, I don't know how much you can share about this, but what are people excited about on the drone counter UAS side? Because we've seen Anvil, we've seen then electronic takeover, then there's the fiber optics thing that we've seen. There's been a whole bunch of, it feels like a game of like rock, paper, scissors on the battlefield. Is it just rock, paper, scissors? Or is it more like chess? Is it a 12D chess?

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  I saw a video of throwing up nets over redways.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  Nets. I've seen eagles come in and birds. Like what's actually, what's actually getting used? I imagine that the birds didn't make it out into the field, but did they? I don't know.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  The answer is kind of everything because it has to be layered. So you have your EW systems. Those are kind of your primary line of defense.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Sort of passive.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  FPVs. I mean, they're passive. Well, you're activating them because you also need your own drones to be able to get through, right? So this is one of the things that's actually very tricky in Ukraine is coordinating the. Like friendly electronic warfare with the friendly drones so that you can pass over that sort of line on the front and get over into enemy territory.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:18:24Speaker 03

  So there actually needs to be a pretty close tie between the electronic warfare operators and the drone operators.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:31Speaker 03

  You also have sort of the last ditch efforts and this is things like nets and shotguns.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  And I'd say sort of an in-between of that is something like what Allen Control Systems is building, right?

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Where you have an automated gun turret.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:45Speaker 03

  It is, it is just smacking drones out of the sky. But personally, I want to try to take that drone out, you know, well before it gets within hundreds of meters of, of where I'm at.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  So that's where longer range electronic warfare, things like that are going to help. But.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Is there any, is there, what's a path to having like an FPV drone flying, using computer vision to identify another maybe enemy drone and then having some type of like locking system where you're using drone, a friendly drone to take out another drone in the sky?

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  It's already happening. Yeah. Drone on drone warfare is a very real thing now. And so interceptors have become one of the sort of latest big developments coming out of Ukraine. So they're intercepting everything from, you know, small FPVs, Mavics, larger reconnaissance drones, and then Shawhead type drones. And so you need different types of interceptors for each of those. But we are starting to get to that point that a lot of people have imagined where it's, it's, you know, the front line is like drones versus drones and a lot of the time you're not even making it to a kind of typical military target because there's just so much drone activity happening.

• 1:19:56John Coogan?

  Take me through the, the biggest or the most exquisite drone that we might see on the battlefield versus like the least exquisite. So I imagine that there's no drones that cost $1 that, that is just too cheap and there's no drones that cost a billion dollars. But are we in the, there's a thousand dollar drone, there's a million dollar drone? Like how wide is the gap of like, if you just look at the whole battlefield, what's the gap between like the scale of like the biggest, most insane drone to like the smallest, most attributable?

• 1:20:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, drone means so many different things. It's really confusing.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  Sure. Isn't F-35 a drone?

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Might be in a certain context.

• 1:20:31Speaker 03

  So I'd say like the lowest end is kind of your, your like FPV system.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  That's. You know, if you're, if you're like getting that in Ukraine, it can be $200, $300.

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Speaker 03

  Primarily built from Chinese components.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  You know, very inexpensive.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Almost like, like consumer level hardware, right?

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  It is consumer level hardware. I mean, it's been modified to perform better, but.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  And then they like tape a grenade on it.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Does, does Russia ever call China and say, why, why are you guys supplying a componentry that gets into the like hands of our enemy? Or, or is it just kind of like, is if I'm, if I'm Putin, I'm calling up Xi and I'm saying, hey, our number one problem right now is basically you.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I would say China has benefited by far, like absolutely the most from.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Selling to both sides.

• 1:21:24Speaker 03

  Of Ukraine. They are deliberately selling to both sides and millions of units. I mean, it is, you know, billions, tens of billions of dollars being generated for, for the, the economy in China, based on the war in Ukraine. And you can even see like Ukrainian entrepreneurs will talk about this where they go to Shenzhen and they're negotiating deals to buy hundreds of millions of dollars of components. And technically it's, it's banned in China, but everyone's benefiting. So why would they stop it?

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, take me up the stack. We, so you have a $200 drone, Chinese components off the shelf. What's the most exquisite drone that either Russia or Ukraine might?

• 1:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Before we get higher, there was a Y C company that got announced last week using drones to take out mosquitoes.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were saying.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  It's for assassinations.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  That's what they were saying.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, but they were saying like, this is impossible.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it possible?

• 1:22:15Speaker 03

  I have no idea. It's hard to say. I probably wouldn't use drones for taking out mosquitoes, but best of luck to them.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Apparently the founder is just like obsessed. Everyone was like, oh, he's, he's doing this for defense tech. And it's like, no, actually this founder just hates mosquitoes and he's like obsessed. He's been on a lifelong quest to like kill the mosquito, which is hilarious.

• 1:22:31Speaker 03

  I do, I, I, I align with that.

• 1:22:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  I grew up in Alaska and there's a horrible amount of mosquitoes.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  If it works, I'm going to be pumped.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  You grew up in Alaska? What's with all these Alaskan kids around? Do you, do you grow up near Thai Morse?

• 1:22:44Speaker 03

  We grew up in Anchorage, yeah.

• 1:22:46John Coogan?

  Together?

• 1:22:46Speaker 03

  Uh, no.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Did you know each other? Okay, you didn't know each other.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  This was a crazy connection.

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  That is a crazy connection because I feel like there's a lot of shared.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  In a town of 200 people, you guys didn't know each other?

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  Basically.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  What's the actual population?

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  It's like 350,000 in Anchorage.

• 1:23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  It's like half of Alaska.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that is crazy.

• 1:23:03Speaker 03

  And I don't know how we, you know, now we've connected and like I crashes at my apartment when he's in town. So a good Alaska connection.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  He's been on a great run. That video that you put out or that he did with like checking in on the Gundo, the whole like roundtable was awesome because I feel like two years ago or something we met and the total amount raised across the entire Gundo crew was like five million bucks. And now it's like close to half a billion.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's wild to think about. In, in one of the, the group chats earlier this morning, Isaiah posted his raise.

• 1:23:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  And then we posted our raise and someone else was like, another quarter billion to the fellas.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  It's insane.

• 1:23:42Speaker 03

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  It's good. It's exactly what should happen. Like, like when, when the, the reason, I mean, the Gundo was like this meme. It was this moment. It was this like, oh, like there's this cool movement happening. But like fundamentally, it was like, okay, this is actually what works. And this is where the capital should be going. It should not be going to the scams and the frauds. All the other junk that's going on.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  The critique was a lot of these companies aren't going to work. You're going to apply that critique to any sector or region that gets venture capital dollars. Anyway, so we're moving up.

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  The critique was, was kind of valid, right? Because there was a lot of like, we were talking about crazy ambitious things that were, you know, and also in a kind of silly manner.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Um, which attracted a lot of attention and I, I think there's reason to critique that. But now you see that like the El Segundo companies are truly executing.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Um, and that's, that's where the difference is. Like we went heads down for a year and a half, two years. And now the results are, are starting.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  It was very clearly in that group chat, like a somewhat of a moratorium on posting at some point because.

• 1:24:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:24:45Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get off the timeline.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it worked. It worked. And it was great because there was a world where it was like, okay, everyone in El Segundo winds up becoming a podcaster and like, it's like, okay, well, there's actually nothing getting built. And like, you, like you guys really did get like lost in the sauce, but that never happened. It was just like, oh, wow. Another puff piece from the legacy media. And they just, and it was. Great, because that's super high leverage, because you just like show up, you get the thing and then you

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, moving up the stack.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Move up the stack for us.

• 1:25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so on the other end of the range of drone, that I would call that like the CCA Collaborative Combat Aircraft. You know, the Andorl's working on, as well as other startups and primes. That's, I mean, it's an autonomous fighter jet. It's hard to get more exquisite than that in the drone world.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  So Andorl just flew theirs yesterday, the YFQ 44A, and then General Atomic has a similar program in the CCA. Those aren't live in Ukraine yet, right?

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  No, definitely not.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Okay, so then there must be something that's like the next best that's out there, is that right?

• 1:25:47Speaker 03

  Well, there's tons of, there's too many categories to name in drones. So you go up the stack from FPV to a fixed wing that'll go like 50, 100 kilometers. Then you're also looking at a bunch of reconnaissance drones. You have things like DJI Mavic's, you know, small, cheap, but also up to really expensive fixed wings. And those are kind of all like deployable by one or two people. And then you get into the really big stuff. And that's your like Reapers and kind of in between that is the like Shield VBAT. So you can look at all, there's a group one through five classification for drones. And within those, there's tons of different categories.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  And are you firmly in one group and you plan to stay there? Do you want to be in all five groups? Is that even like the right way to think about growing your business? Or are there other business lines that you could expand into that doesn't just mean total dominance of the groups?

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, so true success for Neros means making the West drone industrial base competitive with China. So there's a lot to do in that, right? We're not going to just be doing FPV drones in the future. But we do know that like focus is probably the most important thing for a startup. And the market for FPV drones is massive and only growing. And they are, like, I believe they are the most important type of drone to be working on right now. And until America can produce them in the millions, we are pretty focused on that.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  What is the state of drone racing today? Is it growing in popularity or is it staying niche? Is it, yeah, are you guys hiring out of it?

• 1:27:24Speaker 03

  We are definitely hiring out of it. We have lots of drone racers on the nearest team. Yeah, it's been a great talent pool. I do think that unfortunately it has sort of fallen off in popularity from its peak. But I do think it's going to come back, especially with all of the relevance to military. We're starting to even see military drone racing leagues coming up and that's where like I think that is going to become the the pipeline for drone racing talent in the future.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  The new like sport shooting where on a base, it's like who can who's the fastest, most accurate pilot versus.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Drone on drone would be fun. The other thing that would be interesting, I don't know if anyone's doing this, but autonomous drone racing league. That feels like pretty valuable to build out that skill set. Can you can you write, can you as a team build a software stack that gets you through all of the different obstacles? While they're while you're being jammed or while there's flashing lights going on and off and adding some sort of variability.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the you would have to add a lot of variability because the hardest thing about autonomy is not making a drone go to a known point.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:33Speaker 03

  Or making many drones go to a known point. It's operating when you don't have GPS, when it's dark out, when there's bad weather, when your comms denied. That's why autonomy is I think it's behind where most people think.

• 1:28:45John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  Like most drones in Ukraine are not autonomous at all.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Speaker 03

  And so.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  But that's but that's true of self-driving cars in America.

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Like, there's a lot of teleop going on. There's a lot of stuff like that. And and yeah, we're just still years away from it actually being.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. And we're huge believers in autonomy.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:29:02Speaker 03

  We're scaling our autonomy program and it's going to make drones just so much more effective for soldiers. But the there's been AI drone racing leagues for a long time and like the the University of Zurich has been working on this for for many years. And they have a drone that's beaten like professional pilots around a closed course. But it only works in a closed course and often they have, you know, hundreds of camera angles and they're like tracking the position of the drone from outside the drone.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's where.

• 1:29:30Speaker 03

  And so it's just like, that doesn't actually apply.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  That doesn't count. Exactly. Yeah, you need to narrow it down. Because I imagine that I have this joke, this like joke of a test for AGI, which is like, I want the humanoid robot to get into a manual sports car and do the Nürburgring in seven minutes. Like shifting gears with the G-forces. Like that is extremely difficult and we are clearly decades away from that. And, and I think the same thing is probably true for, for actual drone racing, like how, how long it takes if you don't have all of the extra of perfect information. Like you actually try and simulate what it's like for the human.

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Well, I think the, the lap record on the Nürburgring for a manual sports car is, is, I think it's right above seven minutes. So they'd have to be doing really well.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, a robot, a robot can, a robot can take it to the edge, right? Like you could, a robot could crash like 20 times in order to, to actually, you know, get the lap time. So potentially you could be like, well, on this corner, we can hit it at 180, even though like there's a 51% chance we'll go into the, into the barrier.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Can we do the, the next episode from the Nürburgring? From the passenger seat?

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  For sure. That'd be amazing.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  From the passenger seat. I'd love that.

• 1:30:42Speaker 03

  Up the stakes.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Have you gotten into racing? I know some of the Gundo guys love racing.

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I, I've loved racing sports from, you know, a young age and, and, you know, was focused on drone racing for about 10 years, but I'm, I'm also a huge car guy. And so I follow, follow a lot of it.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we're gonna do a TVP on track day.

• 1:31:03Speaker 03

  That would be incredible.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  You will get the invite.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the, what's the team size like? How big is the company?

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  So we're at 80 people now and we're hiring as fast as we can.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  And, and are you going to stay in El Segundo? Do you have to graduate and leave? Like is?

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  They're already global. He's already an international businessman.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, in terms of HQ, it feels like El Segundo is like this amazing, like proving ground for all these companies. But at a certain point, if you want 20,000 square feet, 200,000 square feet, it just makes sense to like, even just go like one, you know, one city over, but that's like.

• 1:31:34Speaker 03

  We're expanding and we're trying to stay in El Segundo.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  There are big buildings.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, ABL is there, right?

• 1:31:40Speaker 03

  It's, yeah, I mean, you have to kind of be intentional about it and it's not an easy real estate market by any means, but we're trying very hard because I think the city's done a lot for us and we want to stay there.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:53Speaker 03

  And, yeah, we're growing a ton in the headquarters in Los Angeles as well as our other other global locations. And so, really, I would say the biggest limiting factor to our execution is just the the number of great people we can get on board.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  Is there, is there going to be like a separation on like where the factory is at some point, like you'd set up a factory in like a midwestern city or something like that at some point?

• 1:32:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's very likely. At some point, it doesn't make sense to do the scale that we're talking about in California, but you have access to the best engineering talent.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. So for design stuff.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  Design and then you still need a lot of those engineers to be willing to also go out to the factory, wherever it is, because it is critical to have your engineering talent right next to your production.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  What about automation on the production line? Like, get me up to speed on, on how relevant that is versus you're trying to iterate and at a certain point, you might learn something from the battlefield and need to change the entire design, so you don't want to bake everything in, right?

• 1:32:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. Automate is the last step in the formula.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:00Speaker 03

  And so, you can even look at like the iPhone production.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  Where, you know, they make a new version every year and a lot of that is hand assembly done with like simple tooling.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  Tooling is really important and, and being smart about your, your workstations and your work instructions and, and, you know, you want to be making it as easy as possible for the human operator, but a lot of the time, it does not make sense to automate.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  So is the DJI blackout factory fake news?

• 1:33:27Speaker 03

  I think it's real.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  You think it's real?

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's hard to say because the last time they let a camera into a DJI factory was like five years ago, but I think that should tell you something about what they're working on.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, they could be faking it, right? Because they could be like, yeah, because if the iPhone, I think the iPhone pulls in like 2 million migrants.

• 1:33:43Speaker 03

  There's just a bunch of workers in there with night vision goggles on.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, we turn the lights off like we got you owned like tried this Americans you guys suck and it's just like working with night vision. I don't know, but you you think they're pretty advanced.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  But at some point it doesn't.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  You you're like you don't think it breaks the laws of physics or something, so.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Well, it doesn't necessarily matter if they're able to produce at scale at cost. And like which they're already doing. So whether they're doing it with all with robots or all with people. They're already able to do it. So it doesn't it doesn't really matter. We need to figure out how we can do it in America.

• 1:34:20John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. It's funny.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Well, thank you for the update.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  For doing this work.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  And congratulations on the round.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. Great to see you.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  We will. We'll see you at the track.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, track soon. We'll talk to you soon. Thank you so much. Let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Our next guest is already here in the TVP and Ultra Dome looking fantastic. What an outfit. You're gonna have to break that down for us. Thank you so much. Jeff from Andorl. Great to see you.

• 1:34:58Jeff Miller?

  You too, brother.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Every every guy should have like 20 or 30 jackets like this.

• 1:35:04Jeff Miller?

  It's 1992.

• 1:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Build it up over time.

• 1:35:07Jeff Miller?

  For me, babe, did not smell great when I was.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's the that's the problem. That is that's the problem. Great to have you here.

• 1:35:17Jeff Miller?

  Great to be here.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  For those who aren't familiar, please introduce yourself.

• 1:35:20Jeff Miller?

  My name is Jeff Miller. I'm the VP of Marketing at Andorl.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  How'd you wind up there?

• 1:35:24Jeff Miller?

  Long windy story. So I was starting out in advertising. I was inspired by those old Spike Lee commercials. It's gotta be the shoes. I always knew I wanted to work in advertising and marketing, worked on Ogilvy, then went to PepsiCo, where you build great classic brand marketing principles. And then I decided I wanted to go and do something that felt much harder, much, much more foreign to me. So I went to LA. Spent six years here working at Snap and had an incredible experience there, building pre-IPO as they went public and beyond. And I had a global team at one point, but the way I describe it there was like a great formative experience, but it felt a lot like eating potato chips. It was, it was really fun, but it was, you know, tasted good in the second, but didn't leave any sort of meaningful impact on me beyond just

• 1:36:08Jeff Miller?

  the moment. And so I was looking for something more, more impactful. And that's what drew me to Anduril.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about like who you're targeting with Anduril marketing? Because it feels like I've never bought an Anduril product. I love the brand.

• 1:36:22Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Is that relevant?

• 1:36:23Jordi Hays?

  But in an alternate timeline, you would have worked at the company.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So is it recruiting focused? Or are you actually trying to do brand marketing that will hit with like the buyer in DC? Do you think about it that way? Are you at all quantitative? Or is it like way, is it just a way higher level?

• 1:36:38Jeff Miller?

  The way we think about it is that we of course are thinking about the operators with, within that are going to use our actual products and thinking about the Pentagon, people are going to buy it.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:47Jeff Miller?

  But ultimately, we're also thinking about our employee base, our future employees. So how do we be thinking about brand as a talent magnet? But even broader than that, we think about Americans at large.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:58Jeff Miller?

  For us, we believe defense deserves really strong brands. The warfighters deserve strong brands. And I think if you look at the current administration, what they're doing with the Department of War and, and their storytelling, or even, uh, let's give an announcement to the Marines, the 250th anniversary today of the, of the Marines. And you look at the content they put out over the weekend, it just makes you want to enlist. And for us, it's been a historically opaque industry that has really lived in the value of not telling clear stories.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Jeff Miller?

  And we see the complete opposite. We think that this story deserves to be told for our warfighters, for the American taxpayer to understand what we do and why it's so important.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what, what was the historical marketing strategy of, of the primes?

• 1:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Did they, did they do, like, how did, how did they even think about their marketing? Cause I'm, obviously you came in and you're like, hey, let's reinvent marketing in this.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  They are iconic brands. Like, like, there's just no denying that every, if you just walked down the street.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  And the question, the question that I, the question that I have is, I think they're iconic because when you look at some of the products that they've made, specifically like fighter aircraft, certain firearms, et cetera. Like they are iconic products that like make you, uh, you know, people post like the B21 Raider as like a meme.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Jordi Hays?

  Where you're, you know that you're onto something if your product is being turned into a meme. But, uh, I just wonder if, if there was any history of them doing, saying, hey, let's do an out of home campaign.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Jeff Miller?

  Well, I think you're hitting on is a really important point. When we talk about brand here, it starts with the product itself. Product is brand, I think in our category as much as, as any.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:37Jeff Miller?

  Because it's, it has this great ability to speak to national security in a way that will rally the country to really think about what's great about America, about advanced manufacturing, about innovation, about what Americans hard at work can, can achieve. So if you look back at the 50s, 60s, 70s, there's incredible advertising that you would see from Lockheed and, and from the other primes. And that's something that.

• 1:39:01Jordi Hays?

  And were these like Porsche style ads where it's like a lot of text and just like a picture of it? And it's like, you know, the, the F16 is not just a fighter jet.

• 1:39:11Jeff Miller?

  You know what's so great? So I worked at a company named Ogilvy Mather and David Ogilvy is famous for starting that style of ad.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:18Jeff Miller?

  The long lead copy. And I think why that resonates so well in the context of Porsche is because ultimately it's just a really great story about a product that isn't for everyone, but resonates with a specific set of people. And in a lot of ways, those are the principles we use today.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, walk through like how you actually think about a whole campaign. I feel like Andro launches a lot of products and there's a lot of different tools in the tool chest. Like I'm thinking about the eagle eye launch. There was obviously a video. There was also like a Joe Rogan appearance, which is like. Like, is that all in one, like, project brief or deck? Or how do you think about, like, all the different touchpoints? Because there's so many with something like Anduril, where product marketing for a new launch might be a dinner in DC, or it might be a Joe Rogan appearance. There's so much that you can do that's not just like, "Okay, make sure the Facebook ads are turned on."

• 1:40:12Jeff Miller?

  Well, what I think you're seeing, rather than something like Facebook ads, is we're really speaking to capabilities versus selling ads in the way that we think about it. And I want to give a real credit to the team behind here. So Shannon Pryor, our VP of Communications, Jen Bucher, VP of Design, Andrew Lee, who's our Director of Product Marketing. All of these people together are working closely with our division, with our business line, with our founders, on how do we tell one cohesive story? And I think what's important here, it's not a template that we use. Depending what that product launch is, depending on the message that we're trying to communicate, depending on who the core customer is, all of those influence the approach that we take. So those elements that you spoke about for Eagle Eye, all of those were worked in close coordination. What was true, and I think is always true of the products that we launch,

• 1:40:55Jeff Miller?

  is it's always first and foremost about demonstrating real capabilities. And we have a rule, this comes straight from Palmer, the "no render" rule. And what that means is that we're never going to fake our capabilities. We're going to always demonstrate the work that we do in a way that's reflective of the actual capabilities themselves. So what you see on screen here is a real capability of Eagle Eye. It's mission planning. We had another vignette that spoke to our heightened survivability, our lethal capabilities. And what I give a lot of credit to our design team is the way they thought about this was actually showing the real first-person perspective that is a true capability of the product. And then our social team, what we were really clear on is you've got to draw people straight into the action. The way that you're going to get them to buy in

• 1:41:40Jeff Miller?

  is actually showing it and not doing a lot of buildup before you get to the capability.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  You did an out-of-home campaign for "Don't work at Anduril." Are you doing an out of home campaign for Eagle Eye? Is that relevant? How do you decide where to do what?

• 1:41:55Jeff Miller?

  So I personally am the biggest fan of out of home. And I think there's, there's reasons that I, I love it. That translates to things like NASCAR. It's an undervalued asset when you think about it in the context of a marketer. If you really understand how to use a canvas in an intentional way, you can really stand out. So when we think about outdoor, we're thinking about how it's going to show up on social as well. You guys did an amazing job of that as you think about the clips on, on the show. For us, every time we're talking in outdoor, we have one simple rule, say less. And in that, it's like, you have to have, I, it's another old Ogilvy rule. He says seven words or less. I like to say five words or less on, on it. So for Eagle Eye, we had a very simple line, superpowers for superheroes. And we demonstrate the capabilities.

• 1:42:39Jeff Miller?

  Or when we showcase fury, which you guys were talking about with, with Soren, we say, fight unfair. And so you have these lines that have a really clear perspective that should make people immediately think about what you're saying. Whether they understand it in the moment or not, it should stick with them.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think it just, we, we, we've seen, we, we, we review our out of home campaigns all the time on the show. Cause we see them hit the timeline. We talk about them and

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  We love advertising.

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  We love advertising.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  More than anyone else. I'd like to, maybe you like advertising as much as us, but there's not many.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  But, but it is, it is hard when, if you're a new startup and you're selling a piece of software that isn't highly visual and people aren't familiar with your brand, just like as much as you might want to be, ah, I'm David Ogilvy. I got this good tagline. It's just not going to break through as opposed to, okay. If you show me a picture of a plane, even if it's a little bit, look, if it even looks different and the landing gear is a little bit different. I'm going to know that's a drone. That's a plane. I'm, that's a piece of military technology. There's all these cues that you can lean into. Also, Andorol's so big now, like just

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  You must, you must driving, driving, uh, driving on the 101 into SF.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  The disparity in quality of the outdoor.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Tell us about this. Tell us, tell us the story. Tell us the story.

• 1:43:54Jeff Miller?

  All right. So Trey tweets at me at like on Monday at 7:36 a.m. He's, he's going to the office of Founders Fund and he's looking at his 37th terrible enterprise SaaS ad on the, on the 101. And he says, can we please just put a fury on a billboard on the 101? So I have to stop looking at these ads. And he tags at me directly and I, I take this as a personal challenge. So when I worked at Gator, we talked about moving at the, the speed of sport. So for me at this point, it was, the challenge is on. We have to have something live the very next day. So by the next day, we had an ad on the 101 and I tweeted, I didn't even tell him I was doing this, like right back at him. And credit to our team again, moving quickly. It was a giant fury that said, it said, AI for fighter jets, not enterprise SaaS.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Last time, last time, I actually wasn't last trip, but a few trips ago to SF, I saw a billboard. I was so confused by it that I went to the website because I was like, who is, who is running out of home in such a confusing way? I land on the website, still don't know what the product is, what are they doing? So I think that just that, that clarity with out of home is so important where I not only saw the ad, I went, I, I did what they wanted. I imagined, go to the website and I'm still come away from it being like, what, what does this company do? They have enough money to, to buy billboards. But yeah, I still, I mean, I still, we, we work with ad quick. Obviously we're biased, but I still think that out of home is the most undervalued form of advertising.

• 1:45:23Jeff Miller?

  100% and you hit one of the key words on the head. We don't look at marketing as superficial or fluff. Marketing for us brings clarity. And when you apply clarity with, with context, that's when out of home can be great. Or really any medium, but a couple of examples I love are in Dayton Airport. If you fly into there, it's about 10 minute drive to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. So where we have our customer for what you referenced earlier, YFQ 44A is right there outside of Dayton. And for those of you that know the history of Ohio, Dayton was also the, the cradle, the birthplace of aviation. Where the Wright brothers were working on their original Wright Flyer. In fact, if you're in that airport, you will see a replica of the right flyer hanging from the ceiling. Right behind that, you will see a full-scale Fury where it simply says "actual size."

• 1:46:06Jeff Miller?

  And so that context, that ad would only work in the context of that airport. You put that in any other airport in America, it becomes less relevant. So whether it's on the 101 or whether it's in Dayton Airport, we're always thinking about the media placement as much as the message. And you had Coogan asked about the "Don't Work" campaign. That's the one time we intentionally leaned into confusion. Sure. So our campaign there, the brief to Jen and her team was simple. I want an ad campaign. It reminds me of that campaign, if you remember, from Netflix. Netflix is a joke. Yeah. Where when you first see it, you're not sure if it's for Androl or against Androl. Sure. So the creative that came back, which was beautiful and just really thoughtful, was that we would do a corporate campaign that says "Work at Androl," and then, of

• 1:46:50Jeff Miller?

  course, was graffitied, was tagged, and everything that was graffitied was saying "Don't Work" there. And what, I give our team a lot of credit, we'd already bought both URLs. So whether you're going to work at Androl.com or don't work at Androl.com, you're still going to land where we want you to land, but it just became provocative in a way that whether you're Boston, Seattle, or Atlanta, the three markets we were really focused on with our people team to recruit, you were going to see our message and you couldn't miss it. It was undeniable.

• 1:47:16Jordi Hays?

  What did some of your early mood boards look like for Androl? I feel like Androl had effectively first mover advantage in marketing in this new category of like new players in defense. And a lot of the, like, when I think about the visuals surrounding Androl, I think like, this is what a modern defense tech company should look like. Maybe that's because I grew up playing Call of Duty and Androl looks like a lot of the visuals and even the UI and stuff feels like it just fits into those worlds. And I know a lot of, I'm sure a lot of our armed forces feel the same way. But what was like when you were mood boarding, I don't know if that was a process that you

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  went through with Jen or other people on the team early on, like what kind of inspiration were you pulling in?

• 1:48:06Jeff Miller?

  Well, you hit there on a few words that are really important for us. When we think about building this brand, we think about building it in a way that is open, that is modern, that is honest, and we do it in a way that we're really conscious that we're building it for the generation that ultimately is going to be responsible for building national security of the president in the future. So the ability to speak in a language, whether that's our voice, which I'm responsible and our team is responsible for, or our identity that Jen and her team are responsible for, we're always thinking about the way that we can land something that feels really, really unique. And so, full credit in terms of the identity work goes to Jen and her team and Palmer and how they're building. And this extends from everything, from the

• 1:48:48Jeff Miller?

  product identity to our industrial design, environmental, to how we think about the brand identity. And then what I think our team does really well is really establish a clear voice, that whether it's on the identity or on the voice, we talk about it as brutalist, meaning we're not speaking in opaque terms, that is typical of the category. We're talking in really, really simple language that a 14-year-old person can understand. If a 14-year-old can't see that and say, "I get it," then we've missed the mark.

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  No render policy, only anime policy. There's a lot of anime. When do you pull anime off the shelf? Is there going to be an anime video for Eagle Eye? Yes or no? And why or why not?

• 1:49:30Jeff Miller?

  Sure. So we talk a lot about this as the Anduril Cinematic Universe is the way we like to describe it internally. And obviously, it's born out of Palmer's passion for anime early on. But it's something that I'm so proud of in the context of what our team has built, because all of it is, it's not using AI. It's all done like through digital hand brush, and it's like a really powerful tool for us, because now we've created an aesthetic around it that's specific to us.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  And it makes it clear that any, you can look at one frame, and you're not confused. You're like, so you can go into the future, and you can actually tell the story of what Anduril might be doing in 10 years, and you're never confusing, and you don't even get in the comments and debates, "Oh, that's CGI." It's like, of course it came from a computer.

• 1:50:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we, I won't name the company, but John And I were having this debate over a a defense tech, hard tech company that we were we there was a three minute video and we were just going frame by frame and I was convinced that it was that it was like CGI or like AI generated. John was like, ah, like, I kind of want to believe it's real.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  It was both. They were cutting between so bad. So they actually had a thing that would take off and fly.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  This is a company. This is a company that's this is a company that's that's public, right? So they're putting this out.

• 1:50:44Jeff Miller?

  Who is it? Name names?

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  It can. Yeah, yeah. It can do vertical takeoff, but not move or something like that. It was weird. It was bizarre.

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  But yeah, so so for Eagle Eye, like, when when would you use that and why and?

• 1:50:58Jeff Miller?

  Well, I think you're speaking to what's important when we make these choices. It's a creative choice first.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:51:02Jeff Miller?

  And we're thinking about it in the context of where is there really great room for lore and story building? So what I'll tell you is with with Eagle Eye, we had great ability by showing the first person perspective. We thought that was the the most impactful way in. But what I will confirm is that there will be a chapter three to the animated, the Andro cinematic universe. So just be ready. It's coming in 2026.

• 1:51:23John Coogan?

  That's exciting. That's exciting. Talk about sports marketing. Is that also underrated like out of home? What's your been your strategy? Did you dip your toe in with small tests? Now you're doing something big with NASCAR. Walk me through the thesis.

• 1:51:36Jeff Miller?

  That's exactly right. So we dipped our toes with the Chargers, who are a partner of ours. They actually shared property with us. Their old training facility in Costa Mesa, they've now moved to a beautiful facility in El Segundo. But if you're at the game last night, Sunday Night Football, where Aaron Rodgers looked like old man Rodgers, but the Chargers.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  Is that good or bad? I didn't call it.

• 1:51:55Jeff Miller?

  Oh, Steelers got smoked. Luckily, I'm an Eagles fan, so I didn't mind.

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Aaron Rodgers is on the ste-

• 1:52:00Jeff Miller?

  He's on the Steelers. Oh, come on, Jordy.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I seriously, I seriously, we don't know.

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  I thought he was just on the Pat McAfee show.

• 1:52:06Jeff Miller?

  He might be full time after last night.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  I thought he was full time Pat McAfee.

• 1:52:09Jeff Miller?

  So if you were there, though, what I think is super cool about a partnership like that is we dipped our toes. Is we had 16 veterans from Andro.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:52:15Jeff Miller?

  That were there.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:52:16Jeff Miller?

  And the way they got to go to that game is that a colleague from our our office, from our team, nominated them and said why? And it was grounded in their character. Gradated in their service, why they were selected to represent our company. And so if you were there watching on their eighty yard infinity screen, you saw our veterans being recognized there. And also how much it meant to them to be there. So everything when we look at sports marketing, we look at it as a way to to find the ways that we can, yes, find value. But also to stand out in a way that we have the ability to do something unique and that we can honor and and reach the military and defense community. So that's why you see us leaning into things like NFL or of course NASCAR. NASCAR more than any other sport over indexes on that military and defense community.

• 1:53:01Jeff Miller?

  That's about four X the ratings of F1 in America.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:53:05Jeff Miller?

  And so while we see so much over saturation in F1, the amount, the economics of a deal there to be a mid level sponsor on a mid level team.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  I know the disparity in earnings too, from when you look at the, you know, let's say that the twentieth person on the grid is probably making a couple million a year from a salary standpoint. And then some of the, you could be like top twenty in NASCAR too, and you're just, you're earning a good living. And so the opportunities for companies to support a sport that so many Americans love and be able to have, be a meaningful player in that is amazing.

• 1:53:42Jeff Miller?

  And this is a call to great brands in this country, consumer brands who have exited that sport. I mean NASCAR is on the up and up and for us, we have this exceptional opportunity to sponsor a race on a military base. It could not be more of a direct target for us. And what I, what I love so much about our company, this applies to whether you're working in design, video production, marketing, comms, is we have the full trust of our founders to make these calls. We keep them directly in the loop, but they, they trust us to make these big swings. And so next June on that base, we're going to show up in a way that no one else in the sport does. And we have a partnership directly with Hendrick Motorsports. And so that's Jeff Gordon's team.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:21Jeff Miller?

  And we've got William Byron, who won the regular season. Hendrick also has a defense division, like there's all these connected tissues that we can do storytelling year round.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the menu of options for working with NASCAR broadly. It sounds like the 250 it's sponsor of a race there's also team level sponsors individual driver sponsorships I mean I'm sure some brands are out there paying for promoted posts on the some drivers Instagram one off right uh how did you land on where you landed and do you think this will continue to grow and mutate because you know what we've seen with like Red Bull like they have one F1 team there's no there's no Red Bull race in F1 it's just the team and so I'm interested to think about what what's out there on the menu how you landed where you landed

• 1:55:07Jeff Miller?

  sure and I'll talk this about this in the context of NASCAR relative to another big swing of ours with Ohio State

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  sure sure

• 1:55:13Jeff Miller?

  so with NASCAR it was about how do we make a big splash on a major stage especially with America 250 coming up

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  totally

• 1:55:20Jeff Miller?

  I mean it writes itself especially in that first year

• 1:55:22John Coogan?

  sure

• 1:55:22Jeff Miller?

  and with that deal we have the rights to to activate with the specific team there's actually an activation fund built into our deal

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:55:29Jeff Miller?

  to work with the specific team

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  okay

• 1:55:31Jeff Miller?

  we met with eight teams on the grid

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  cool

• 1:55:32Jeff Miller?

  and found the one that really aligned with our buyers and that's how we end up with Hendrick and with Williams specifically as our driver but there's many different ways in for us we see this as a relationship that we fully intend to grow

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  yep

• 1:55:42Jeff Miller?

  we're gonna be with the sport for at least five years I expect that to be much much longer than that as the sport itself is growing and then you look at that in contrast with Ohio State

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  yeah

• 1:55:51Jeff Miller?

  why did we do the deal with Ohio State well we're building Arsenal one

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  of course

• 1:55:55Jeff Miller?

  our 5 million square foot manufacturing facility about 10 minutes away from the heart of Ohio State campus we're bringing 4,000 jobs directly and other 4,000 jobs indirectly through the build of Arsenal one and so for us we know the the best way to win the hearts and minds of of Ohioans is talking to Ohio State and not doing it in a superficial way about just a sports sponsorship but actually thinking about the ways in which we're gonna work together for job placement for STEM programs for community engagement for military community and how we make sure that they have skill bridge and so for us those are examples where we go broad with NASCAR and we go deep with Ohio State

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  it's a great deflection from just the truth which is that Trey's from Ohio and so he's gotta go all in

• 1:56:38Jeff Miller?

  I mean Trey would have a sponsor in the Bengals right now if he could

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  yeah I know I wouldn't be surprised

• 1:56:42Jeff Miller?

  two and seven I don't know

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  he's he's gonna do it he's gonna do it So what else is special about this about this race? Walk me through like what race weekend, what race week looks like? I mean, I imagine a bunch of people from the company are coming out. Like, what are all the different ways that you are getting the lift out of it?

• 1:57:03Jeff Miller?

  Hundred percent. We see already, whether it's from people on the hill.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07Jeff Miller?

  To our investor community. The second we announced that we're doing a race, we were getting calls from everyone.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:15Jeff Miller?

  And I'm really excited because I think this will be a moment that becomes a real focal point for America 250 at large. So we're really hopeful for everyone that you could possibly imagine to show up to this race.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Jeff Miller?

  So as we lead up to it, I think what you'll see is us start to drop content in a way that you typically don't see in sports. So whether it's the scheme, which we just finalized on Friday.

• 1:57:36John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:57:37Jeff Miller?

  When we finally released that, I mean, our design team like knocked out of the park, to the helmet.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  It's a scheme, like delivery essentially?

• 1:57:44Jeff Miller?

  Exactly, delivery, to the fire suit, to the die cast cars. We're going to make every single thing a moment. And then we got space on the base that we could do some really special demonstrations of our product capabilities.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:56Jeff Miller?

  So we're working right now with NASCAR and with the Navy to think about the ways that we can showcase our product on this.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  So in theory, like, yeah, like a.

• 1:58:04Jeff Miller?

  Fury flyover? I mean, sooner or later, that's what I'll say, is that now that we've done last week, as you alluded to earlier, our first flight.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:14Jeff Miller?

  And just a massive shout out to our air dominance division, like for them to accomplish what they did in just over 500 days from clean sheet to first flight. It's unreal. It's unheard of in the industry, all like at the touch of a button.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Jeff Miller?

  It was really cool to be a small part of that and to observe it. But I think it goes from there to first flight to how do we start to think about ways that we can demonstrate this more clearly in public?

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Dive LD demo. You gotta be just like, yeah, it's down there.

• 1:58:39Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, you can't see it.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can't see it.

• 1:58:42Jeff Miller?

  We're gonna put our.

• 1:58:42John Coogan?

  Dive XL, yeah, it's down there.

• 1:58:44Jeff Miller?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Trust us, it's down there.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do a, we gotta do a live show from, from under the sea.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  And we're, and we're showing off our new stealth technology.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Not that there's space in there.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  It's up there.

• 1:58:52Jeff Miller?

  I wanna share some fun facts, uh, from the Don't Work at Anduril camp.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:57Jeff Miller?

  If you can pivot back, uh, there's two stories I'd love to share here. One is how this originated.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:59:02Jeff Miller?

  So, I'm about three months in and friend of the show, Matt Grimm.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07Jeff Miller?

  I get a Slack from him that simply says, "Why do you hate interns?" And I'm trying to distill, like, the context behind this. And I realize it's because I had responded to, uh, to our recruiting team about a week earlier. They had shared a post from, also, uh, redact the name of this company. Their intern post where it's like thirty smiling interns in front of the logo saying,

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  "First day at X company."

• 1:59:33Jeff Miller?

  And they said, "Hey, can we do this?" And I said, "Absolutely not, we're not putting that out there. That's not the ethos of our company."

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:40Jeff Miller?

  And so I said to Grimm, I'm like, "I don't hate interns. I hate shitty X-company-inspired intern posts." I said, "If we're gonna talk about what it's like to work here,"

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:48Jeff Miller?

  "we should tell the people all the reasons they shouldn't."

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:59:51Jeff Miller?

  And so Grimm and I went back and forth and started to outline what ended becoming, uh, the, the working script. And it was largely drawn from Palmer's Own words.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:59Jeff Miller?

  Trey's words.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:01Jeff Miller?

  Lulu's words, early days of saying, "Hey, we're a weapons company."

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:05Jeff Miller?

  And if you don't wanna work on that, if you don't believe in the mission, if you don't understand why we build what we build, if you're not ready to work your butts off here, non-stop, if you don't love America and are proud to say it,

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:16Jeff Miller?

  then don't work here. It's like, no disrespect, but the sooner we understand that about each other, the better. And what I love so much about Grimm, two words, "Ship it."

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Jeff Miller?

  And from there, that's all we needed. And then it was a group of five of us with the, our talented, uh, creative team, Trevor, Alex, Ben, with Jen, in a room.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Was there, was there ever a moment where you felt like if you didn't put that out, you would run the risk of people showing up just because Anduril was like a hot stock? And they would be like, "Wait a minute, like, I actually have, like," 'cause it seems crazy to not.

• 2:00:49Jeff Miller?

  I mean, what we weed out is what I'd call the mercenaries. The people that are just there, like, try to get the annual equity.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:00:55Jeff Miller?

  We're saying, this is extremely hard.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  It's gonna be hard.

• 2:00:57Jeff Miller?

  Guess what? Like, you're not gonna have fun here. If all you care about is cash and trying to get equity.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:02Jeff Miller?

  Do not come here. And, you know, we see it, because I do the orientation every two weeks. And we have 150, 200 new people coming in. And I ask people, I'm like, who saw this before you started? Every single hand goes up. So what you're speaking to is, the greatest measure of success is that it was a filter for the people that were not mission-aligned.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:19Jeff Miller?

  On top of that, you talk about metrics, 30% lift in applications because of that campaign.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. What is the intern cycle like now? Because it feels like there's more and more people dropping out of college early. Is Anduril set up to deal with that? I mean, I feel like there's some people who might start intern and then take a gap semester, and then wind up just hanging out forever.

• 2:01:40Jeff Miller?

  Who are you pointing out, right?

• 2:01:42John Coogan?

  Tyler started as an intern, and then he took a gap semester.

• 2:01:45Jeff Miller?

  Is Tyler required to dress like you every day?

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, we have, like, a, you know, a general, if everyone's wearing-

• 2:01:52Jeff Miller?

  White suits today because the markets are up.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  The market's up, so we wear white.

• 2:01:55Jeff Miller?

  Love it.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  But, uh, but I am interested, like, Palantir has the meritocracy thing going on. There's definitely this idea, I mean, this goes to, back to Peter Thiel and Founder's Fund, and like, a lot of, uh, just the idea that, like, um, is the internship even necessary? Like, what are the roles where the internship makes sense versus just, hey, you're ready, get in, get in the lead?

• 2:02:16Jeff Miller?

  It's, it's a perfect question, especially for right now, because we're talking about this all the way through our executive ranks and with our people team, about what it actually means to, to come here and what matters.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:25Jeff Miller?

  And we, we call it the Anduril Forge Program. But we're working on the campaign right now that will be the, the next sequel, if you will, to, uh, to Don't Work in Anduril.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:34Jeff Miller?

  That won't tell people, well, we aren't. It's gonna speak about what we are.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:38Jeff Miller?

  And what it means to work here, and the importance of, of work.

• 2:02:41John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:02:42Jeff Miller?

  And so, it matters way less to us about your quote-unquote credentials. We don't care. We care about the, the work that you're gonna do, the alignment to the mission, and your ability to add value.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's awesome.

• 2:02:54Jeff Miller?

  By the way, I don't know if you know this even, Jordy, but we started our, our campaign for Don't Work in Anduril with our intern-

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:03Jeff Miller?

  -taking over. So, like, midnight, uh, my buddy Sean and I were- Crushing, I think Coors Lights. And then we posted just simply, "Don't work at Anduril." And we had somebody give us really good counsel, because it was just gonna be that. And this man of mystery that rhymes with Don Hugan said to us, he said, "You gotta go way harder than that."

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  It's such a fertile ground. Like, there's so much Anduril lore. There's so many different elements that you could pull from, from different things. Palmer said Sword Art Online, Pacific Rim Robots.

• 2:03:41Jeff Miller?

  There's about 10 tweets that our intern wrote that actually goes written by Don Hugan.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  I think I sent you like 25, and you picked 10.

• 2:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right, right. I know, I know this.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  I think Dory does now. Yeah, "One day, we need to post the ones that didn't make the cut." Because there might have been some over the line.

• 2:03:58Jeff Miller?

  So good.

• 2:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Do you think that advertising has changed in the last 50 years? Even in the last 100 years? Because when I hear you talk, you're speaking, you know, running the marketing organization of one of the best modern brands, right? People can debate, people can debate on whether they like the brand or not, because it's obviously polarizing. But great brands are polarizing. And when I think about the strategy, it's like ultra-clear communication, strong visuals, leveraging out-of-home strategically, you know, having these sort of layered strategies, thinking about all these different architects.

• 2:04:43Jordi Hays?

  It feels like all the conversations that a strong marketing brand organization would be having 50 years ago. And so it's interesting, I think it's interesting that we have the internet, which is like the best marketing channel in history, and yet the marketing strategy hasn't changed very much at all since the Ogilvy days, you know?

• 2:05:03Jeff Miller?

  Yeah, what you're describing to me is that... What's changed is the medium. What hasn't changed is the desire from an audience for a really clear story. And ultimately, that's what we're doing is we're bringing great craft to our storytelling, which most importantly is highlighting the incredible important work that our engineers and operators are doing for our warfighters. And that's the thing that is consistent with us. And the other thing I think you said is that we understand that it's not for everyone. You know, what was important to us is that we have a really, really clear message that people understand what we stand for, whether you agree with it or not. And that is what I love because I'm so mission aligned to what we're building that I find

• 2:05:47Jeff Miller?

  it a great privilege and responsibility to bring the same type of disruptive approach to marketing that we are bringing to how we approach contracts, how we think about research and development, how we think about engineering or AI or design. And ultimately, there's no other place on earth I'd rather be.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  That's a great place to send it. Well, thank you so much for coming by. I'm so excited for the Anduril 250 next year.

• 2:06:12Jeff Miller?

  Next year.

• 2:06:13John Coogan?

  We'll be there. I want to be there.

• 2:06:14Jeff Miller?

  By the way, here's a final idea for you guys. This is my second time officially on. You guys need like an SNL five timer jacket.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:06:22Jeff Miller?

  When you guys get to that level.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 2:06:24Jeff Miller?

  I want to see you guys break out some new swag.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  For sure. We got you. Oh, yeah. New merch on the way. See you guys. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming by. What else? You got something else in the bag? What do we got? What do we got? Oh, there we go. Oh, very cool. The 24 on the side. There we go. This is hard. Very cool. Thank you so much. Good to see you. See you soon. This is good. Everyone needs a number for sure. There you go. I like that. Linear. Purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. There is a video of an office tour that has been burning up the timeline. I feel like we should play this. Play it. If we can pull it up.

• 2:07:08John Coogan?

  It's going to be about two minutes of the, from Philip Cozera. I spent $1.5 million building our office after raising a seed round. The seed, 1.5 used to be the total seed round. Now, I guess it's a $30 million. There's some, there's some $1.5 million Series As out there. They're off.

• 2:07:29Jordi Hays?

  If you go back like ten, ten, fifteen years.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so let's play this, uh, and I will be back in just a minute.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  We're gonna raise thirty million dollars for this office. Let's go meet the CEO.

• 2:07:44Speaker 06

  What, what is this?

• 2:07:45Speaker 05

  We're here for an office inspection.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm laughing because the camera's tracking John.

• 2:07:48Speaker 05

  Thirty million dollars went.

• 2:07:49Speaker 06

  Alright, but let's be quick, alright? You going surfing? See layer, come on in. This is our new office.

• 2:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's track how many times they talk about surfing.

• 2:07:56Speaker 06

  We got surfboards, we got kite surfing equipment.

• 2:07:58Speaker 05

  Oh, good. They spent it on vibes.

• 2:08:01Speaker 06

  Coming through. This is gonna be the sauna room. We're now more like a sauna closet, but all of our kite surfing equipment is here, and our kayaks are here.

• 2:08:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna count kayaks.

• 2:08:11Speaker 06

  This is Sebastian, he's one of our first investors. He joined the company full time.

• 2:08:14Speaker 05

  From one employee to eighteen in a year. You guys are going fast.

• 2:08:17Speaker 06

  Everyone is doing something, having meetings. A crack engineer's over here. We got Robert. Robert doesn't actually do work. He's actually looking at saunas right now. Our new product is actually called Sauna, because this man actually came up with the idea while saoning.

• 2:08:31Speaker 05

  They look cool. Where are they from?

• 2:08:34Speaker 06

  Hello. Where are you from? Iceland. Matthias?

• 2:08:37Speaker 05

  That guy looks like he's the only one actually working.

• 2:08:39Speaker 06

  Our backend infrastructure engineers do not like to be disturbed. Matthias, where are you from? I'm from Austria. Can you point at the Golden Gate Bridge? It's right over there. Can we zoom in on that? Coming through. Uh, we got...

• 2:08:53Speaker 05

  Any fun stuff here, or is it just nerd gear?

• 2:08:56Speaker 06

  Let me... Alright. This is our movie theater, but how many times did you guys watch a movie here?

• 2:09:03Speaker 06

  Well, I actually tried to, uh, get Nicky to find our PS4, but unfortunately we work too much and we don't have time to do bullshit. One of my favorite things in the office is every room.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  I'm back. I'm back. Okay, I have a take. I have a take. Let's break it down. Um, I don't know what this company does. This, they, they put out this whole video, they went viral, but it's unclear what they actually are selling. Like, it, it...

• 2:09:26Jordi Hays?

  They're selling Nordic vibes.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the vibes are immaculate.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Keeping our European soul.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  And I understand that it's like targeted at hiring, because it's like, hey, you know, we have this beautiful office, you should come work here, you should come build on stuff.

• 2:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the challenge is, unless the company's, like, winning and getting better every single day, the surfboards start to...

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  For sure. Like, there was this quote post about like, hey, like, you know, look at what Jeff Bezos was working on the door desk back in the day. Um... The other thing is like there, there's a little, I think this goes over way differently. If this is done by an external influencer, like there's been so much attention on the Gundo.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  I know what's happening.

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  No, no, oh, wait, wait, really? Okay, it feels like it's, it feels like it's the founder posting.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  He's posting, he's posting it, but it's, it's, I think.

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  Oh, I guess their product's sauna AI. Okay, so they have a.

• 2:10:17Jordi Hays?

  It's building the future of work with sauna. We love saunas, so can't, can't be too. Yeah, I mean.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  Um, I, oh, it's two, you turn your to do's into done. AI powered workspace, it's an AI to do list, something like that. But, but like, like there were people that did this exact video on the Gundo. Like they went to Rainmaker and they were like, um, like, look at the gym stuff. You can, you can lift weights here, like there's people over there working or like, uh, I, I literally went and filmed a video somewhat like this. Uh, at near us, although they were in like a garage and they were, they were clearly grinding, they didn't have any surfboards.

• 2:10:56Jordi Hays?

  I have PTSD because I, I, I knew, uh, I knew a founder back in the day that every, uh, he would always go surfing. Cause he needed to clear his head and I would always be thinking like, okay, like eventually your head's gotta be clear. You've got, you've got to fix the product and you can just fix the product and ship another product and make it work.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Brother, I think if your head's unclearable, like we got a problem.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and, uh, I don't know surfing, sir, as somebody who's, you know, grown up surfing. Basically every, every, at least every week since I've been a, been a kid, I don't find surfing, especially in Northern California, to be compatible with work. And the reason is that.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  Wait, like a full, it takes you out the full day?

• 2:11:43Jordi Hays?

  So, so the challenge is that in Northern California, even if you're wearing a five, four wetsuit, which is like basically this thick.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  Is it five mil?

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Five millimeters on the chest or on the arms.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  What about seven mil web suits?

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  You can get those, but like you, you'd get that for like a trip to Alaska or something like that. And the challenge is you get cold enough surfing in Northern California, even with a five, four. That you spend the entire like next like few hours like your body is.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  I just, I, I'm just laughing that we're like breaking down like, like, like, like if he, if he, if he lived just, just two hours south, it'd be totally fine.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  No, I disagree.

• 2:12:19John Coogan?

  Up there, it's impossible. Just analyzing the wet suit.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Let's roll back the tape and see. What type of wet suit did he have? If he's in a, if he's in a nine millimeter wet suit.

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't matter. You could be in a five, four, four, three, three, two. You could be trunking it. But you get cold enough that your body uses so much energy to reheat.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  And you just become slow.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:42Jordi Hays?

  You just become slow.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:12:43Jordi Hays?

  And I would struggle with this growing up because I'd go surf after school and then I'd be doing homework and I'd be like, I can't think, I, I, I can't like, I, I just be.

• 2:12:51John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, incapable of, of, uh, of, of real productivity. So I'm against surfing in the, in.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  During the work week, basically.

• 2:13:01Jordi Hays?

  During, I, yeah, I basically don't surf during the work week. I'll surf sometimes in the evenings.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  But yeah, once you're done with your day, but they could be doing that. They could, they, they could have, uh, surfboards for after.

• 2:13:11Jordi Hays?

  Surfing or kiteboarding or kite surfing or surfing or kayaking like so many ti- at least five times in, uh.

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ryan says there are many doing dawn patrol in SF every day. I agree there are. I just, I just wouldn't be.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  VP of Vibes, uh.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  VP of Vibe, VP of Vibes Engineering, Customer Vibe Distribution.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  I, I certainly understand why people are, are, uh, saying that this is maybe a little bit too lackadaisical. Uh, it, when you're in the trenches of the startup culture.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  It was also kind of clickbait because he said the effective cost is only 250K.

• 2:13:48John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay. So spent 1.5 million, but.

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  And he got a bunch of like TI, basically.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  Okay, well, that's cool.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyways, uh.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Certainly seems like a nice.

• 2:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Cool environment.

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Hang out and, uh, nothing will matter if you build the business. You could have made, you could have made the same argument about Facebook. Facebook was drinking beers in the office, you know? There's a famous interview, uh, Mark Zuckerberg sitting there chugging a beer out of a solo cup, a red solo cup. And he was, and, and the interviewer was like, are you sure you want to be chugging this beer in this video? And he's like, it's okay.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  It is just funny because.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  But you got to deliver.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  A hyperscaler.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  If Tyler was.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Drinking like this.

• 2:14:25Jordi Hays?

  If Tyler went kayaking.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:27Jordi Hays?

  After the, after the show.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  I would just say to him, like, why don't you just, and then came back and, and kept working? I'd be like, why don't you just do your work and then go kayak?

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  True, true.

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Like, why do we need to, why do we need to combine these?

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. Seems, seems like mostly solvable if they, if the kayaking, kite surfing, surfing marathon happens at the right time of the day.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, put a calendar, put a calendar invite on our calendars for three years from now to check back on word, on this wordware video. We'll revisit it because if they have crazy product market fit, they're gonna look.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  What if the CEO?

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna look like.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  Into being a, a world-class surfer and becomes like the next Kelly Slater? And just actually shreds and just.

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Just rolls the whole, he's like, we're a surfing company now. I'm gonna get on the tour.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  I'm a professional surfer.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  I, we earn revenue when I win contests.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  That would be, that would crush. And then you'd be eating your words, Jordy. You'd be eating your words.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  No, we very well, we very well could be, uh, eating our words in, in just a couple of years.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Of course, like the actual product you work.

• 2:15:32Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, why don't you bring your work to the kayaks?

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  I like that. Uh, I also like numeral, sales tax autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 2:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, I'm gonna apply. Need somewhere to store my boat trailer.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people just start applying, applying because they need, they need a place to store their gear. They're like, this place seems really well.

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  I mean, at the same time, like, like when you're, when, like, like the, when you're in a crowded market, the, the, uh, the taste of virality, like the, the temptation of like, oh, this is good content. We should go viral with this has got to be overwhelming. Cause it's like, it's like, no one's heard of the company yet. It's brand new and you have this opportunity to go do something that can get a lot of attention.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think he, he invited criticism because he started it off with clickbait being like, I spent one and a half million on our office.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Yes, there's a little bit of too far. I also, yeah, I think, I think having someone else do this is, is better. Have, have, have an actual TikToker come by instead of doing it as an in-house thing. It just has a different aesthetic. Like if you get stopped on the street, what do you do for a living? That's different than paying someone to do a what do you do for a living video about you.

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  I would say, right? Snowflake is gonna beat and, and he won.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  That is one of the greatest videos ever. Um, just like fin.ai, one of the greatest, actually the greatest AI agent for customer service. They're number one in performance benchmarks. They're number one in competitive bake offs. They have a number one ranking on G2. Let's go to the Tyler cam again for some reason. What's up with Tyler?

• 2:17:12Speaker 07

  Do you have any, do you wanna, do you think we should have kayaks in the workplace?

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:18Speaker 02

  I also think.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Do you like kayaking?

• 2:17:20Speaker 02

  Uh, probably.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 2:17:23Speaker 02

  I've gone like once or twice.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  Okay, well, um, our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have Kaz from Open Door in the TV panel gym. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:17:35Speaker 07

  Here he is. Welcome. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:17:41Speaker 07

  I want to go on the record as being pro kayak. Okay, but kayaking in the workplace.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  At what point? At what point? Uh, at noon on a Tuesday, you want your whole workforce going into the frigid ice cold sea, uh, with a four millimeter wet suit and coming back cold and spending the rest of the day warming up?

• 2:18:02Speaker 07

  First of all, I grew up in Canada, so we don't wear wet suits. We just go kayaking. I don't know what you guys do.

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:18:09Speaker 07

  What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? What's the biggest fish you've ever caught? I am, I honestly, man, this is like my, my brother in law goes fishing off the coast of British Columbia and catches these massive salmon.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:18:22Speaker 07

  I am a, I'm terrible. Like, I'm objectively the worst guy to go out fishing with.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  That's just bad luck.

• 2:18:29Speaker 07

  I will not catch you anything. I'll be terrible.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:18:32Speaker 07

  I'll fix your wifi. There you go. That's helpful.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Uh, well, you caught a big fish with Open Door. Congratulations on the new gig. Uh, I don't know if you remember, but we've actually, uh, emailed very briefly while you were at Shopify. You saved my entire company in like the, in like the, uh, in the span of like two email exchanges. So I've always been extremely thankful to you and just Shopify general, generally. Uh, but, uh, can you, since this is the first time on the show, can you give us a little bit of backstory on how you wound up at Open Door, what the, uh, what the vision was? Just like, kind of how this all came together, because it's such a fascinating story to me.

• 2:19:10Speaker 07

  I mean, I, I think this story has now been fully leaked. I would not have told it if it just had not been like fully told by other people. But look, I I've been, I I loved my job at Shopify. I genuinely honestly thought it was gonna be my forever job. Um, and I just, I was not planning on leaving, but I became a little obsessed with Open Door, maybe February of this year. Where like I um, as a kid, I grew up, my mom had a corner store and I would grow up. I grew up with like a stopwatch, timing the cashiers. So like, I have this very odd obsession with like. Operationally well-run places. And from the outside, Open Door looked like a great opportunity being poorly run.

• 2:19:56Speaker 07

  So like sometime in February, almost as a joke, that just ought and would just not leave my brain. I texted Keith or Boy saying, hey. I'm thinking of just buying Open Door and taking it private because it just needs to be run better. And then my, my wife, God bless her, just like, thought this was like an interesting hobby for me. To figure out how I could just, I decide on my desk, fix this company that I wasn't running. Um, and I became more and more obsessed with it because there's a very real thing that matters, man. Like, most of us that work in software. Don't get the opportunity to say, hey, the thing we do has a real world impact on actual families, right?

• 2:20:39Speaker 07

  And it's a very real thing that happens if you grow up in a home that your parents owned. Like, uh, your educational outcomes are better. There's less crime in your neighborhood. Like, same, same family, same type of thing. If they own a home, things turn out better. So I became just obsessed with this company whose job it was to make buying and selling a home easier. And like most other things in the world, when you reduce friction, you get more of the thing. So if you think homeownership is good, reducing friction in it will lead to more of it.

• 2:21:12Speaker 07

  But I just kind of like given up on this idea of taking the company private because the company had this significant run and well, I didn't have enough money to take it private anymore.

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  There was a brief window, you were daydreaming about it. That was the time.

• 2:21:28Speaker 07

  Yeah. So and then it was on, it was a Sunday, like in, I want to say mid-August, like late, late, last half of August, my wife and I were on the way to church. I got a call from Paul Deversa, who's an executive director, and I picked up the call and I said, it's a true story. And Paul and I had, Paul had been trying to get me to go, go to a couple of other places. And I picked up the call, I'm like, Paul, I'm on my way to, on my way to church, I don't have time, I appreciate it. Like, I'm not interested in whatever it is you're about to pitch me. Maybe if it's open door, let's talk.

• 2:22:05Speaker 07

  And then he said, it's open door, how soon can you be on a plane?

• 2:22:10Speaker 07

  And we went to church, came back, I got on a plane. And the whole thing, the whole process took maybe two weeks from like that call to me starting.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  How much did you, like, how much did you rely on your network to help you make that decision? Maybe some trusted advisors? Because I imagine there, when, when I, when I saw that you, that you were announced that you took the job, my immediate thought is like, you know, going from Shopify, which is this like beloved, you know, incredibly well-run company that you can have so much impact on because it's, it's like one of the, one of the few platforms in the world that is just like so undeniably pro entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship is so life-changing. And if you care about impact, you know, it's, it's hard to kind of meet your bar. Not to mention that jumping in at open door would go from probably like a relatively

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  calm work environment to one of the most like crazy intensive envi, high-pressure environment where, you know, I'm sure from like a, the amount of inbound messages that you get running open door is probably like a hundred times the messages that, that like a, a company like a hundred times your size gets, you know? And so like, it, it is wildly different kind of life.

• 2:23:30Speaker 07

  I don't know. I mean, look, I think Shopify is a relatively intense place to work for all the good reasons. And you kind of want to work at intense places because you only get one career. Um, but I remember like when I was thinking of leaving Facebook to go to Shopify. Literally everyone I I talked to said, don't do it.

• 2:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 2:23:49Speaker 07

  Like every single person I talked to about leaving Facebook, going to Shopify, said, don't do it. Uh, it's a terrible company. It's among the most shorted companies in history. Like it was obscenely shorted, had a really bad, it was like churny, like I had like, like lots of like. The day I joined Citron, put out like a big research report saying Shopify will go bankrupt in like twelve months.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:11Speaker 07

  So I remember like.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Citron?

• 2:24:14Speaker 07

  So everyone I like talked to back then in twenty nineteen told me, don't join Shopify, terrible idea.

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  And what was, what it, like, what did you, what did you see that that other people missed?

• 2:24:27Speaker 07

  Look, I I thought the mission was a worthwhile mission. And that it was very clear to me that I was the type of person who could help. Like I thought the mission was important, the company had done a lot of good and I could help. I like, I couldn't see myself at a bunch of other companies. But I could see myself helping Shopify. And I like.

• 2:24:49Speaker 07

  I became the merchant services guy at Shopify, right? I ran. The second half of the business. So Shopify has two parts. SaaS and services. I ran services. For nearly my entire time there. And then Toby asked me to become the C O O and I ran a bunch of other things. But I remember when I was um thinking about going to Shopify, like basically the only two things that convinced me to do it. Were I prayed and I thought it was the right decision. And then I sat down with my wife and I said, hey. This is almost certainly a bad idea. Like, we're gonna move to like, we're gonna move, we had a kid who was less than one. Um, and this probably won't work out, but I think this is a worthwhile mission.

• 2:25:33Speaker 07

  And I think I can help. And then she said, look, it's it's our job to spend our marriage doing things. That will make the world a better place. So I'd be called leaving a dent in the world. Uh, so when it came time to the open door one, I didn't, like, I generally, I talked to Keith, because I've known Keith your boy for a while. Um, but it was, I was just, I talked to my wife, I prayed and I'm, and I thought I could like have an outsized impact on the company. Just because the type of thing I tend to be good at is a type of thing that the company seems to need. Uh, I'm not, look, I'm no one's idea of a corporate executive.

• 2:26:12Speaker 07

  I cuss a lot. I grew up as a nerd, like I didn't do all that well in my finance undergrad courses. Like I'm, I'm like, I'm a product manager, right? I'm like, so this is, I don't like, this is how I dress. So I don't like, it's a very real thing. Um, but I'd opened door, it felt like I could do well, given what the company's mission was. And I thought if we could do our job, it just would be good for the world. Um, so.

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  So yeah, what, what, what's the, how, how do you think about the opportunity? How do you think about the shape of the business in, are you thinking in a decade? Are you thinking in thirty year timeframe? Like, how do you think about the long-term uh, strategy? What the opportunity is, what you want to fix in the short-term, medium-term, long-term, how you.

• 2:27:05Speaker 07

  Dude, we, we ship every week, like we ship every week. Fuck, fuck ten years. We ship every single week. Like our job is to ship product every single week to tilt the world in favor of homeowners and people working hard to become homeowners. We ship every week. Something changes every single week. We measure ourselves on a weekly basis. We now have a public dashboard that we use internally. We just publish it to the world. So you can see our internal dashboards externally.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what are the levers that you can pull on a week to week basis? Like, what's an example of something that you can, you can roll out that actually improves the experience?

• 2:27:40Speaker 07

  I mean, I can tell you, I can tell you a product that took us.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Speaker 07

  Almost exactly one week to launch. We launched this thing called peace of mind guarantee.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:48Speaker 07

  Um, so if you ever bought a house.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:50Speaker 07

  I remember the first house I bought.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:52Speaker 07

  And the first night I slept there, after we had closed, I'm like, shit, bought the wrong house. Like the first night, like, that's a very real thing that happens because in a typical real estate transaction, the deck is stacked against buyers and sellers. Like everyone involved has a conflict with the, with the two principles. There's like a real agency problem. So.

• 2:28:17Speaker 07

  If you're buying your first home, like the thing that makes you most nervous is missing something, right? So I think we launched at Open Door is buy a piece of mind guarantee where you can buy a house from Open Door, move in, and if you don't like it in the first seven days, just give the house back. We'll take it back.

• 2:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:28:35Speaker 07

  And like if, I think it's one of those things where like if you buy something on Amazon and you don't like it, you return it. But for some reason, if you're buying something that's hundreds of thousands of dollars, you can get duped and there's no one to return it to.

• 2:28:49Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I think I was, I must have been like somewhat of a younger teenager when I figured out, okay, you make the most important purchase, biggest purchase of your life, buying a first home, and you don't really get like a try, like you don't even get to like try it out for a couple nights. And because I, it's just one of those things, as soon as you actually own something and you occupy it, you start, you start, I know that, you know, I bought a house last year and I, the things I know, I, I missed so many things, like, you know, I ended up getting like lucky, right? It wasn't like I want to return the house, but there were so many just small things that I noticed immediately from moving in that I completely missed. And I was like, wow, thank God I didn't, that that is not that big of a deal.

• 2:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Or it's like a, a nice to have, whatever.

• 2:29:38Speaker 07

  Indeed, there is a word for people who try to make money off you and then dodge town. We call them carnies.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Carnies.

• 2:29:48Speaker 07

  And we have turned like the entire real estate industry essentially into people whose job it is to like kind of hope you don't notice problems. It's very weird. Like, look, we stand by every single home on opendoor.com.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:04Speaker 07

  You buy it from us, you don't like it, that's fine. The first seven days, we'll take it back.

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:30:10Speaker 07

  And I thought this was, this was a good, I didn't think, by the way, you know what happened? From a second, we thought we should do this, because the time was live was about seven days, genuinely. And the reason that was true is because.

• 2:30:27Speaker 07

  There's a bunch of people in the path of doing this, whose job it is at any big company to go, but actually, experts say this.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  There's risk or something.

• 2:30:36Speaker 07

  I don't like, as a buyer, are you more likely to buy a home from opendoor.com if I tell you, if you don't like it, you can return it? Yes or no? Yes? Great. Let's go. Do we stand by our homes?

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  So it's a little bit of an actuarial puzzle that you have to figure out, okay, what is the cost for that and then distribute that over the buyers of that product? That seems like something a technologist, a product manager, somebody who's a little bit more forward thinking, is completely set up for. That makes a ton of sense. What else is changing in the market? I'd love to get your thoughts on the 50-year mortgage that was proposed. Is that good for America? Is that good for opendoor? Is that something we should be supporting?

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people have been comping it to what happened with Japan's market after they introduced 50-year.

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I did see some people say, oh, it might be bad, but what, break it down for me.

• 2:31:26Speaker 07

  Look, let me do the thing that I'm not supposed to do and answer the question honestly. I think that people who compare this to Japan are just deeply misunderstanding a bunch of things about the American economy. Like, let's just be clear. Like, the American and Western economies are just fundamentally different because culture is fundamentally different and the economy is downstream from culture. Like, it's a very real thing. That matters. But secondarily, like, let's go back.

• 2:31:57Speaker 07

  Democracy in America, Tocqueville, in it, he talks about how the main difference between America and every other country is that Americans own the ground they stand on. It has been historically true that Americans have had a higher ownership of the land that they live on than any other nation. And this has been basically the main difference between the American, I own this land, I'm part of this community, than the transient European and Eastern lifestyles, right? If you divide the worlds into people who are from somewhere and people who are from anywhere, America is full of people who are from somewhere. This makes a difference. This makes a real difference to how people are raised, how kids are raised,

• 2:32:41Speaker 07

  the economy, the country overall. Now, why is a 50-year mortgage incredibly important?

• 2:32:48Speaker 07

  You would not have needed a 50-year mortgage 20 years ago. You just wouldn't have needed it. In fact, when the 30-year mortgage came in, in 1931, I want to say, everyone literally said all the things they're saying about the 50-year mortgage. This won't work, it's too long, how can people pay it off? But the thing 50-year mortgage does is this. The 30-year mortgage was designed for a time when people didn't have student debt, where the average life expectancy was about 15 years shorter. The average work time was about 15 years shorter. Like, there's a very real thing where people are buying homes later and later. We just crossed the average homeowner buying their first home at 40,

• 2:33:29Speaker 07

  because student debt is crushing American debt-to-income ratios. What the 50-year mortgage allows you to do is to get into the market, which is the best market Americans have historically gone to. It's the main source of leverage Americans get access to, without being a big company and being a fancy person, right? You get access to that leverage. You can do it while paying down your student debt. And once you pay down your student debt, there's nothing that says you can't refi and pay it down faster. But the 50-year does fix what's called a debt-to-income ratio for folks while they're getting started. And like, I think it is in play. There's another thing that's important, like, the people who are against the 50-year mortgage are coming out, you know, no one's forcing you to take a 50-year mortgage.

• 2:34:14Speaker 07

  You can still take the 30 or the 15.

• 2:34:18Speaker 07

  But what you're saying is, I wouldn't need it, therefore no one can have it. Well, guess what, buddy, not everyone lives in Palo Alto.

• 2:34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting, you know, the, the, one, one thing that came to mind for me was, you know, what you've seen in the automotive industry, where typically a 60-month is maybe like the, I imagine that's the most popular, right? Uh, and then there's 72-month. And if you look on sites like, uh, DuPont Registry, John, you'll appreciate this. They have like, a 200-month, uh, you know,

• 2:34:48Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Auto loan for, for collectible. And it's interesting that, you know, that those have been getting pushed out. But the issue with cars is that they're assets that histor- almost always depreciate massively. And even on faster and faster timeline. Yeah, and even if you look at EVs now, they, they depreciate at, at, you know, levels that you haven't seen with, um, uh, ICE, you know, cars, so.

• 2:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a, I guess, I guess, you know, I think part of the, part of maybe the frustration and the reaction was, you know, this is a way to increase demand, but it doesn't fix the supply side. And so maybe it's focused on kind of the wrong.

• 2:35:31Speaker 07

  We should fix the supply side, too. Look, I think we should take, well, we should understand what the government's saying. And they literally said this. They said, this is one of the things we're doing, not the last thing we're doing. And by the way, in the last four weeks, they've also done a bunch of other things. They just changed the requirement on credit ratings. They just changed the requirement. They just announced that they're gonna have new FICO score in there. They've, look, do I think they should do things to make supply more readily available? Yes. I think they've talked about making one-time assumable mortgages more available. That will also change the supply, obviously. I think we should basically force cities to just stop being so anti-builder. Like, the

• 2:36:13Speaker 07

  builders are desperate to build, let them build. I think there's a bunch of things we should do. Like, this is not, this is a problem that was created over a decade. We're not gonna solve it overnight. But one of the things we must do is fix this massive problems where American governments, at the federal and state levels, started subsidizing student debt to levels where everyone graduates with such a large debt, they could not buy a house if they wanted to, even if they had a down payment.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:47Speaker 07

  Right? So like, we must do something to solve that problem. Otherwise, what's gonna happen is people are never gonna buy a home. And very soon, America's gonna start looking like Portugal. And that's not what we want. Like, this is, this is, like, we know how good homeownership is.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are your thoughts on stock-based comp? There was that Keith Raboy was getting in the fight with somebody years ago about stock-based comp. It feels like for some of these companies that are more mature, maybe you don't need to lean on it as much. But also, there's certain accounting rules that make it maybe more advantageous to use it. Obviously, you know, from the startup world, it makes sense to incentivize your employees with stock-based comp. But how are you thinking about it? Is there anything that, that is changing?

• 2:37:36Speaker 07

  Um, look, my, my salary is a dollar, right?

• 2:37:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:39Speaker 07

  Like, I get paid one dollar.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:40Speaker 07

  My entire comp is stock-based, based on performance measures.

• 2:37:44Jordi Hays?

  You, you hit it, John. We're hitting the size gong for one of the highest salaries we've ever had.

• 2:37:51John Coogan?

  Infinitely more than zero dollar salary.

• 2:37:54Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:37:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm not, I'm not, um, I'm ideological on this issue, which I think for a very long time, uh, corporate executives have gotten rich driving their companies down in valuation and essentially failing their way to becoming millionaires. Right? This is like a very weird world where we've created where you are incentivized to suck at your job and do nothing unless you get noticed. If you don't get noticed, you're not gonna get fired. If you don't get fired, your RSU's vest and you become like rich. Like, this is like the story of like so many great companies.

• 2:38:37Speaker 07

  Um, this is terrible. This is just terrible for capitalism because as the American people rightly recognize, this is scam. A world in which corporate execs get rich, shareholders lose money. That's terrible. Um, I think corporate executives basically should only get paid in options. Now, like, it's actually, it's actually difficult to only get paid in options. I tried.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:38:58Speaker 07

  Um, but there's a very, there's a way, we've essentially, uh, opened door, reconstructed, uh, options as RSUs. So their PSUs, if the stock goes below what it was the day I joined, I'm, I get paid actually zero.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:13Speaker 07

  Like, actually zero, nothing. And then there's like cliffs above that.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  They take away your dollar? Or you get to keep it with a one dollar?

• 2:39:21Speaker 07

  Well, I should, you know what the funny thing is?

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they should be able to claw back the dollars.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  They should claw back the dollars.

• 2:39:26Speaker 07

  I have to pay for benefits.

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 2:39:29Speaker 07

  I have to pay the company for practical benefits.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Actually.

• 2:39:32Speaker 07

  So, so I pay Open Door to work at Open Door.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 2:39:36Speaker 07

  Um, which I think is perfectly fine, by the way.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  Wait, so, so, so this is sort of like, like, do, do you feel like you're, uh, in the, in the lineage of Elon Musk's news, newest pay package? Like, heavily, uh, comp-aligned to market cap? Is that where this is all going?

• 2:39:53Speaker 07

  I mean, I, I, I'm missing a couple of zeros.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, of course, but, uh, but I, yeah, I, I, I can't find a problem with that package. I, I love it. I, I just think it's so, it's so aligned.

• 2:40:04Speaker 07

  I think this is a very real, I think very few traditional executives would take it.

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:40:11Speaker 07

  Like very few traditional executives would take it. But I think what shareholders should want is none of those executives to be in charge of publicly traded companies.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:40:20Speaker 07

  This is like, like this is a very real, I think in the private world, a very good indicator that a startup is going to fail is if the founder pays himself a very large salary.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:31Speaker 07

  Like I'm, I, I do some angel investing.

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:34Speaker 07

  That my wife insists we list under charitable giving on our families.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:39Speaker 07

  But in my experience, if the founders pay themselves a very large salary, the company is going to go to zero relatively quickly.

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:47Speaker 07

  Um, but somehow corporate executives get paid like in cash, like five, $10 million, and RSUs another five, $10 million

• 2:41:01Speaker 07

  to basically be as inoffensive as possible and listen to consultants. Like this is what happens, right? Like you have some. Listening to the experts again.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Trust me.

• 2:41:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is like a real man, like you pay a comp consultant.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Speaker 07

  To come give you advice on compensation. Then you go to a management consultant to give you advice on management.

• 2:41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:22Speaker 07

  Then you go to a financial consultant to give you advice on finances. Then you go to a PR consultant. And before you know it, this is what happened. Like I, I came to Open Door and I um, went through every bill the company had paid for the previous six months, like actually every bill line by line. I'm like, what was this for? What was the outcome? And the company, I paid them millions of dollars, mil, like it was actually, I think, number three under expense. Like we paid more for consultants, we paid for Snowflake, which is like.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  That's it, something, yeah.

• 2:41:53Speaker 07

  Um.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:41:55Speaker 07

  And.

• 2:41:57Speaker 07

  Like for to what end the company was basically going to zero.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:03Speaker 07

  And we but corporate exec but the fancy types who got MBAs from fancy schools. Um, do that to avoid being noticed and getting fired, right? That's the goal. And I think I think corporate executives should get paid only when they make shareholders money.

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Yep, I like that a lot. Uh, this was fantastic. The chat is absolutely loving this. Uh, I wish we could go longer. We'll have to have you back. You're welcome anytime there's news or anything. Uh, Jordan, do you have one last question before?

• 2:42:35Jordi Hays?

  And I have a lot more questions.

• 2:42:36John Coogan?

  I have a lot more questions.

• 2:42:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it a regular thing.

• 2:42:38John Coogan?

  We just have someone in the restream waiting room, but uh, thank you so much for taking the time. I'd love to go deeper. Also, I mean, I just feel like we can talk about like anything really like there's so much here.

• 2:42:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  Uh, we barely, we asked about strategy. We, you know, spent five minutes on one particular product and we could do that probably every single week since you're shipping so.

• 2:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would say as there's more news on on mortgage, you know, mortgages, both the assumable side, the term.

• 2:43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you should come back on.

• 2:43:03John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back.

• 2:43:04Speaker 07

  I think thirty seconds to do something that I promised will be only thirty seconds.

• 2:43:07John Coogan?

  Please, please.

• 2:43:08Speaker 07

  If if you are watching this show and you're a founder type, the odds are you're an odd duck. You're swimming in the wrong sea. Um, find me on X. My DMs are open. We're hiring in offices. This is not a remote company. We're in offices with our colleagues, working incredibly hard for a future that matters. So find me and we'd love to have more folks join the mission.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love that. Everyone's clapping here.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  I love, uh, I love your perspective and how you're approaching this and, uh, I can't wait to see all the progress you and the team make.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, highly recommend it. It's a generational opportunity.

• 2:43:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:43:47Speaker 07

  Cheers.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest is already in the restream waiting room. We got Paul Needham from the Infatuation. Uh, welcome to the show. Look at that background.

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, look at this setup.

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:44:05Speaker 07

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  Fun brand exploration.

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Uh, great to have you on the show, uh, Paul. Uh, I, uh, Chris, uh, your co-founder, uh, is a good buddy. And, uh, and, uh, yeah, it's great to have you here.

• 2:44:22Speaker 08

  Thank you. Yeah, Chris and Andrew started Infatuation now 16 years ago. So we just celebrated our sweet 16. The Selca in New York. Yeah, exactly. Longevity is a good thing. And we're really proud to be carrying the tradition on and to continue to shine a light on all the great restaurants all over the country. And that's what we're out doing this week is talking about our Best New Restaurants campaign.

• 2:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's talk about it. Break it down.

• 2:44:49Speaker 08

  All right. So our team all over the country and in London, we went to over 5,000 restaurants this year.

• 2:44:57Speaker 08

  Spots, bagel places, pizza places, all the way, especially out in LA. You guys have a lot of fine dining, a lot of omakase. Um, and we checked it all out and we crowned some of our favorites. So out in LA, places like Baby Bistro, River, Mustard's Bagels, Beethoven Market and a bunch more. Um, and then all over the country, looking not just at the best restaurants. I really liked Jules in San Francisco this year for pizza. Um, Smithereens is our number one in New York, but also looking at the trends and what are we seeing out there? What are the threads? Um, so obviously marketing needs to continue to.

• 2:45:38Jordi Hays?

  How many people do you need to, to properly evaluate 5,000 restaurants? Like, what does a team look like to pull that off? I'm assuming it's some internal, some external.

• 2:45:49Speaker 08

  Some of it's internal, some of it's freelance. The fun of it is bringing your friends because, you know, you can't go to a restaurant as one person and try everything. And so we do a, and a lot of restaurant critics, The Times and other places do it also. But we bring some folks around, we dine anonymously, we book under fake names, we pay for all the meals ourselves, called as we see it. And yeah, it's a big effort from a lot of people. It's also, we go back and so we want to give places that chance, especially when we're talking about a best new restaurant category. Want to give people the chance to really show their best. And yeah, we have a team, around 50 people who, who work on this for us.

• 2:46:34Speaker 08

  Um, and then yes, some freelancers and other folks as well.

• 2:46:37Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Uh, what is going on? Give us an update on the restaurant industry broadly. That was, you know, uh, I. Obviously, restaurants tend to reflect, end up reflecting the state of the culture and the economy. And there was some reporting last week that we touched on briefly that like McDonald's is seeing a drop in, in, in purchasing from some lower income folks. That was surprising. I think people were pretty bearish about that. Maybe there's a different story there. But we'll talk about kind of the health of the, of restaurants broadly. I'm assuming it's like a, it's a pretty wide disparity.

• 2:47:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, and it's a complicated situation because you've obviously got Chipotle and others who've been out talking recently. But then, you know, the Wall Street Journal, I thought, had a good piece a week or so ago about how in New York, the kind of rich are keeping the party going. I think definitely when you talk to restaurateurs, like, folks in LA have had a tough year, no question. I'm sure you guys hear that a lot. Hopefully, starting to come back and

• 2:47:45Jordi Hays?

  And is that driven by the, is that, is that downstream from like the film industry not doing well? So just people in the creative world, film are just, entertainment are just eating out less?

• 2:47:57Speaker 08

  You need expense accounts, you know, especially if you got a lease in Beverly Hills, or you got a lease in West Hollywood, like you need people to be able to put a corporate card down and, and spend a little more freely. But look, I think it's interesting also, you look at some of those trends, and then you also look at things like $10 pastries and really elaborate matcha drinks, and these small indulgences that people are definitely still treating themselves to. I mean, the cinnamon roll situation in New York had a outrageous year.

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is that, is that the name of the restaurant?

• 2:48:37Speaker 08

  No, it's just, you got one.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  I thought, I thought a restaurant called the cinnamon roll situation. It's like, like, we got a situation down here.

• 2:48:44Speaker 08

  It's a situation that we're monitoring. We're monitoring it. But we

• 2:48:50Speaker 08

  Um, I was on Squawk Box this morning and the Today Show earlier and we brought pastries to all that. And it was like one cinnamon roll just got crazier than the next.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 2:49:00Speaker 08

  And so definitely like, I think the restaurant industry situation is a big, complex narrative across QSR, across fine dining, et cetera. I think the customer indulging themselves, treating themselves is another situation. And then, look, there's no question that people drinking less is a huge factor for restaurateurs. And the folks who we're all, you know, friends with in the industry, like definitely, if you're not selling wine and you're not selling cocktails, that's a mighty headwind.

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  That's your profit margin.

• 2:49:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, but, but look, you see that, you see the $20 mocktail on a lot of menus now. And definitely folks are trying to make the non-alk stuff happen. Um, and trying to make some money off non-alk, but it's definitely a much.

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So from what you're hearing or seeing, like, is it, is it, some people have gone from drinking to no drinking? And then a lot of other, other people have gone from a like heavy drinking to just moderate drinking. And so they're seeing like both, both types of, of, of, uh, of guests just kind of like spending less.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  I recently went from no drinking to heavy drinking. It's been great.

• 2:50:11Speaker 08

  You guys are keeping the, you guys are keeping the industry afloat. Um, look, I think there's a lot of people, obviously wellness is a huge like factor in so much stuff. We also see that in the hour people, the hour people are eating. So like all of a sudden, 5:30 is a really hot time to go to a restaurant where, you know, a few years ago, you were like embarrassed to ask someone to go to dinner at 5:30. Um, I think there's a lot of people.

• 2:50:36Jordi Hays?

  It's like so clearly the problem. I just, I, I like to go to dinner at 5:30, sometimes five. I like to finish, I, I don't like to be digesting food when I'm going to bed.

• 2:50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I don't, I really, I have like one, one drink a month.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Our audience is a lot of tech people. Do you have a recommendation for a restaurant that might be particularly good for planning a coup? If you're planning a boardroom coup, uh, or maybe celebrating a successful boardroom coup? Do you have a recommendation for a restaurant?

• 2:51:05Speaker 08

  And this needs to be in like the South Bay?

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  I mean, ideally San Francisco, but boardroom coups are happening all over, maybe in New York as well.

• 2:51:13Speaker 08

  San Francisco, look, a lot of great places. I mentioned Jules Pizza earlier. That's where I would plot my coup.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Is it quiet?

• 2:51:20Speaker 08

  Right now.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  You're not going to be overheard there?

• 2:51:22Speaker 08

  There's like some corners. You could, we could tuck into a corner. We could tuck into a corner.

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  I like.

• 2:51:27Speaker 08

  The mayor was there recently and was like blowing them up.

• 2:51:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:31Speaker 08

  There, there where the action is.

• 2:51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like, I feel like the, the proper environment to plan a coup is sort of like leather, leather, leather booths.

• 2:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Ideally some mahogany.

• 2:51:42John Coogan?

  Some mahogany, something like very where every little booth is like nestled off to at the side. No one can really see each other too much.

• 2:51:49Speaker 08

  You know, in New York, a New York little interesting development this year that did not get a lot of attention, but Four Charles opened a private dining room.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:51:58Speaker 08

  And so for as hard as it is to get a reservation at Four Charles, the private dining room, if you got like 12 grand for a table of eight.

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:06Speaker 08

  They will have you any night you want and it has exactly.

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  Tens of billions of dollars at stake, so.

• 2:52:11Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:52:11John Coogan?

  What's the point of spending 12K on a steak? Uh, that's no problem. Yeah, I always like Pacific Dining Car in LA. That feels like a good place to plan a coup. I like a mafia movie vibe.

• 2:52:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how, how, uh, is, is, is, is Instagram still having the, like, so, so I don't, uh, I don't identify as a foodie at all. I, I enjoy food. I don't, I don't spend a ton of time like think, seeking it out, but, um, uh, it, there's been a lot of conversation over the last probably decade now around how, uh, Instagram is just driving every city on earth to look the same. So like no matter where you go in the world now, you can get like a matcha and you can get like, New York style pizza from somebody who was maybe in, living in New York like two years ago, whatever.

• 2:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is there anything, like, is there any parts of the US that are kind of like fighting back against that and like really trying to create a more localized food culture and is that even possible anymore?

• 2:53:15Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, I think definitely everything you're saying, you see like the matcha thing get crazier and crazier month by month. I saw Lauren Sherman said over the weekend, like matcha is like kale, like people are just doing things to matcha that shouldn't be done. Um, I think you've got, you know, pizzas everywhere, no question, and really good pizzas everywhere. And to your point, like Mexico City is everywhere now, where like every New York City, like every New York big opening this year is like Mexico City inspired in some way or another. Um, I would say like Nashville, I'd point to Texas, like I, there's definitely

• 2:53:57Speaker 08

  pockets where you're seeing people really do something that's very unique. I think Miami has been an incredible food scene for us in the last few years and definitely Miami, even if it's not cuisine per se, like the personality of a Miami restaurant. Sunny's, which is one of our favorite steakhouses down there, like that restaurant could only be in Miami. And you definitely like feel that you're in Miami when you're there. But look, Beethoven Market, when you're sitting out on that terrace in Mar Vista, like there's stroller parking, it very much feels like, oh, this is the west side of Los Angeles. And Wild Cherry, which just opened in the West Village of New York, which is the A24 restaurant.

• 2:54:39Speaker 08

  Like it very much feels like, oh, we're in a kind of like New York canteen connected with a small theater. So there's definitely still places that are kind of creating that sense of unique personality.

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  This is very cool. Thank you for coming on and giving us the update.

• 2:54:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, I got it.

• 2:54:56Jordi Hays?

  I've, I've held out, by the way, I haven't had a matcha in at least a decade. I tried it a long time ago and, and I haven't, I haven't gone back. It's not for me.

• 2:55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:06Jordi Hays?

  Not for me.

• 2:55:06Speaker 08

  We'll send you, there's some good powdered ones you can make at home. They're really easy and pretty good to check out.

• 2:55:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:55:12Speaker 08

  Thank you guys and congrats. Everyone's watching, man. Everyone's watching.

• 2:55:16John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  Thanks so much, Paul. Thank you for giving us an update on, uh, on the state of the market and, uh, congrats on the, on the lunch.

• 2:55:24John Coogan?

  We'll see you. Have a good one.

• 2:55:25Speaker 08

  Yes, sir. Bye, guys.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing industry yields. They're trusted by millions. We are completely switching gears now from food and beverage to Jordan Nanos at, uh, Semi Analysis, taking us through the latest from Cluster Max. This is Cluster Max 2.0, correct?

• 2:55:45Speaker 09

  That's right. Yeah.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  What are the biggest findings? How do you introduce ClusterMax in the, you know, 140 characters version? I'd love to just get into the actual findings.

• 2:55:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, it's great to be here with two of my technology brothers.

• 2:55:59John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:56:00Speaker 09

  I can definitely, uh, yeah, I can definitely take you through ClusterMax. Basically,

• 2:56:06Speaker 09

  the way we see it, some of the most critical transactions in AI are happening when people are renting GPUs from a provider.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:12Speaker 09

  So this is companies like CoreWeave, Navia, Lambda, FluidStack, Crusoe. They've been coming to market and taking share from, you know, AWS, Azure.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:23Speaker 09

  Uh, GCP, uh, Oracle. And I think a lot of people basically, uh, they think that all GPUs are deployed the same, and that's definitely not the case. So we go through in this article a lot of details about how our hands-on experience and then feedback from customers kind of makes it clear that, um, it really depends which provider you go with when you're making a critical decision, like where to buy your GPUs.

• 2:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you, uh, how do you actually feel like you're getting accurate data? Because if a semi-analysis email shows up and I'm running a NeoCloud, I'm like, yeah, let's put them in the best data center we have, I imagine. Uh, so are you, it feels like blind taste testing. We were just talking to a restaurant reviewer. I feel like you're a data center reviewer. There's, these segments are actually pretty similar.

• 2:57:08Jordi Hays?

  Fake, fake companies, even get them into YC and just sign up.

• 2:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, something's going on. But yeah, uh, talk about the pitfalls of the processor, like how you actually tease out what's actually going on.

• 2:57:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, I don't know if we're really doing a secret shopper thing quite the same. Like, we definitely get CTO on the phone in some cases to walk us through the greatest. But, um, in my research, I talked to 140 different customers of these NeoClouds to get their perspective on exactly what their experience was with reliability and support at scale. And I think it was quite revealing because, um, like I said, yeah, sometimes you get a really good experience in one data center that's quite different from somebody who's running stuff in Iceland or something like that.

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  So what changed this, uh, with this version? I know that the actual graphic has exploded. There's more, there's going to be more.

• 2:57:54Jordi Hays?

  Do we need more, do we need more NeoClouds, by the way? Are there enough? Do you think there's, do we have, do we have enough?

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  But yeah, what else was, what else did you find?

• 2:58:03Speaker 09

  Um, hey, we need more, man. We need more of it all.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for more.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  Thank you for the tireless work indexing the entire market. Yes, but what were the findings?

• 2:58:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, look, I think we probably don't need a lot more Silicon Valley-backed venture startups that are all renting GPUs from another provider and then selling them with a bit of software on top of them. But we're seeing a lot of the like sovereign AI projects just get started and it looks a lot like a telecom buildout where, you know, different regions or countries have their own regulations or, you know, their own sovereign wealth funds that are funding the buildout of a bunch of GPUs.

• 2:58:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:49Speaker 09

  And I think that's just getting getting started. So you're right. The biggest difference is we covered 84 NeoClouds this time as opposed to 26 last time. Our total market view, there's now 213. Learned about four of them since we published last week.

• 2:59:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if you're NeoCloud and you're not on the list, it's probably fair for the investors to send you that and be like, hey, did you see this?

• 2:59:13Speaker 09

  I mean, we're doing our best to get coverage, but they they pop up all the time with different people who are in different phases of actually launching.

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, what what are the biggest movers? What were the biggest surprises? What were the biggest changes? Because it seems like Corey has done well last time, this time. But there's probably some other folks who have taken taken your feedback and and actually made changes.

• 2:59:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think probably the two big ones are that Fluid Stack debuted at gold. Like, we did not rate them last time and they're they're kind of coming out of nowhere with a really interesting offering for taking other, let's say, bronze or worse tier GPUs and making them usable for frontier labs. Like, they have some really, really big customers. I think Google improved a lot. If the market had really shifted to using strictly Blackwell GPUs and wasn't still stuck on using some of their old Hopper GPUs with their older networking, I would see would have seen Google, you know, possibly push to gold. I think they will in the future. They've been really improving.

• 3:00:21Speaker 09

  We've got a lot more work to do with AWS. I think they they're really focused on EFA and the rest of the experience is coming along, but their networking is just... Look, it represents like less than 1% of the cluster TCO by our calculations. And the users tell us it's like more than half of their debugging time is trying to figure out AWS's custom networking on some of these clusters. So we'll see who takes the feedback and who doesn't going forward. We try to be effective and include a lot of stuff from those customers in there as opposed to just, you know, a micro benchmark that we run on the network ourselves.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's super interesting, Jordi.

• 3:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Wanted to get your read on depreciation schedules. I feel like this is a big debate and something that's going to be critical to the health of a lot of these players. And as chips get better, you would hope that the depreciation schedules would expand somewhat. But we're seeing it all over the board in terms of how different companies from hyperscalers to some of these new entrants are actually planning around depreciation. And I would love to kind of hear how you think about it broadly.

• 3:01:30Speaker 09

  Okay. I think broadly speaking, depreciation is a financial metric that's hard for us to measure and varies between the different providers quite substantially, where people take different approaches from three to six or longer years. In terms of the lifespan of the actual technology, like there's two ways to think about this. One is, how long does the thing keep running well before it starts to have a lot of wear out failures, like the GPU in the system? And then the other one is, how long is it useful on a performance per dollar basis? And I think that second one really depends on how good future GPUs are.

• 3:02:13Speaker 09

  So right now, we are seeing providers who are limited on power. They literally have no more floor space in their data center, rip out perfectly good GPUs that are making them plenty of money to replace them with the latest and greatest because they can make even more money.

• 3:02:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:02:29Speaker 09

  And so if that power constraint goes away, or the newest, latest and greatest GPUs don't give you that massive performance increase, then I think people will sweat the assets for longer functionally in the data center. But I think a lot of people on the financial side are playing a guessing game, or they're designing it based on how they want to design the financials of their business and not necessarily taking into account exactly how the GPUs perform or what's coming down the pipe.

• 3:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Is that, is that bad?

• 3:03:04Speaker 09

  I don't know if it's bad. I think it's just pragmatic. Like if you look at a hyperscaler and you see that they have all of these build outs of new data centers coming online and they want to,

• 3:03:16Speaker 09

  look, they want to address the needs of that customer base and things just aren't coming fast enough. Ripping out old GPUs and putting in new ones seems like it's a good play. It seems like it's good for the people who want the best performance. It seems like them, you know, they're going to get more revenue per megawatt with the latest and greatest. I don't think it's necessarily good or bad for anybody.

• 3:03:35Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about, so Satya has talked a lot about wanting a, a diverse GPU fleet, fungibility of, of the fleet, not wanting to just do exactly what like a key customer like OpenAI wants. If OpenAI says, hey, build this data center for this specific training run, he's not immediately saying like, yeah, of course I'll do it. No, no questions asked. He's sort of like, you know, being pragmatic about it. How much do you worry with some of these other Neo clouds about being like too indexed to a specific type of like workload or tech stack, given how fast the, you know, space is evolving and ending up in a situation where they just have a bunch of dead weight?

• 3:04:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think you're segueing into an article that we got coming out later this week and a fun interview that, that some of the guys did. So let me try and not talk about that while still teasing it. Basically, yeah, I think the, the, the concept of fungibility is really important to the hyperscalers. And it seems like in some ways they are exploiting the Neo clouds for better or worse who have, you know, four sites and they're going to take a whole site and have it all one chip. And that's going to be a bet for three to five years and we'll see what happens after that. So

• 3:05:03Speaker 09

  in some ways, investors kind of view this as returning the AI market beta versus getting some alpha on an individual chip or on an individual workload.

• 3:05:15Speaker 09

  And I think it's, look, there's a lot of upside in this and to your point that focus on fungibility or pragmatism may have led to Microsoft Alert losing like $320 billion of RPO to Oracle announced a couple of months ago.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:34Speaker 09

  At reasonable margins. So, you know, I think time will tell on that decision. At something else, generally speaking, you're going to come to us and get a pretty bullish take. We were way ahead of the market on that Oracle print last quarter and.

• 3:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for bullish take.

• 3:05:51Speaker 09

  Patch it, figure it out.

• 3:05:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How does, with fleet fungibility, when you see, you know, on ClusterMax, there is Azure, and then there's also a bunch of NeoClouds that have partnerships with Microsoft, like Nebius. How does that actually work if you're a lab and you go to Azure and you say, I want GPUs from Azure, and then Satya says, oh, I have some over here through Nebius, and then I'm dealing with like, you know, the intrinsic details of this.

• 3:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Part of me, though, is like, who do you think is going to be able to make the better call? Microsoft and Satya or Oracle when it comes to capitalizing on all that demand from OpenAI, right? Who has more information? Who has more experience, you know, working with OpenAI? Who has, you know, handling these, you know, training runs? It's like, I don't want to, I don't, yeah, again, time will tell, right? It could have been like the most brilliant move ever from Oracle, but at the same time, I have to imagine Oracle

• 3:06:58Jordi Hays?

  is like, basically, we had a graph last week on kind of understanding where the AI players sit on this idea of like, how much they need like AGI versus don't need AGI and how much they believe in AGI and how much they don't. And we were putting Larry like way up in the left corner of like, needs AGI but doesn't necessarily believe in it.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Or hasn't issued public statements about it.

• 3:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't issued public statements at least, but I just feel like, very much like a hail Mary from, hail Mary from Oracle. And if they, if the depreciation schedules are quite a bit different than what they're planning. They will, OpenAI will have gotten the much better end of that deal and I think Satya could end up looking pretty smart for not going after it, but who knows?

• 3:07:52Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I tend to agree. I don't think Satya's looked dumb very many times in his career. I think he gives very thoughtful answers when it comes to this stuff. I do think in some respect, it's a matter of timing. Like, if you look at what Microsoft's buildout looks like right now, they're accelerating and that's on the back of OpenAI, but also some of their SaaS products that are using this technology. They have access to all of OpenAI's IP through 2032, so they're certainly exposed to any upside on that side. And yeah, it's a matter of when you want to take your free

• 3:08:33Speaker 09

  cash flow down to zero to do a buildout. And Oracle seems to be the first one to have moved while Microsoft flinched a little bit and then...

• 3:08:41Jordi Hays?

  It's a game of chicken. It's a game of chicken. Hyperscale chicken. What did you think about, feel free to give your personal views, you don't have to share the official point of view of semi-analysis unless you want to, but Backstop Gate last week, I think you guys had probably been privy to conversations or heard, you know, it's not the, not the first time that the idea has been floated around. I mean, we're seeing sovereign AI in other countries. I'm assuming we'll see some version of it here. But what's your, what do you rate the likelihood that we could see a scenario where the government would effectively be

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  guaranteeing loans for AI, you know, data center buildouts?

• 3:09:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, um, I don't know how much uh I have an opinion on that. When I read into it, it seemed like they weren't actually asking for a backstop or a bailout. The

• 3:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I agree. I agree with you there. I'm not I I my our our understanding of it was it wasn't asking for a backstop on OpenAI or or any type of bailout. It was just like the language implied that they would be open to a world where

• 3:10:06Jordi Hays?

  data centers would be treated like some other categories and that around national security like manufacturing, where the government would basically want to encourage the development of of data centers by saying like, we're going to guarantee these loans, which would just encourage lenders to have more confidence to lend against assets that might depreciate faster than people think and and present some risk.

• 3:10:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, and I 100% agree in terms of guarantees. We see this elsewhere in the world quite substantially where there's governments in the Middle East, Norway, um, Canada, to a small extent, Indonesia, Korea, Japan, India, they're all like getting in on building a NeoCloud. And the US government has not gone out and built a NeoCloud, but they certainly build supercomputers for defense, intelligence, research. Um, and they certainly have a vibrant community of companies. So I think there's more that the government can do to um

• 3:11:13Speaker 09

  accelerate the time in which you can build a data center behind the meter, which a lot of places are trying to do right now without interconnect. Semi analysis, we've got a energy model coming soon. That's sort of a companion to our data center model. Got guys on the team working on that who were grid operators in their previous job. And they've got a lot to say about the lead times to get turbines right now, or how much red tape there is to get nuclear, wind, solar online. How you need guarantees from the utility, even if you're behind the meter, uh, as some sort of

• 3:11:50Speaker 09

  You know, future interconnect agreement or some sort of stabilizing power load. Or, I mean, there's, there's just so many creative things that could be done with the grid in the US that I think are kind of fundamental before you can have discussions about financing a lot of stuff because, look, when we get in conversations with investors, I think there's a whole bunch of capital to be unlocked in the private equity space that is just getting started. And it feels like early innings because VCs are the first ones to move and they have in the NeoCloud space, but we haven't seen a lot of like institutional players decide to make a bet on this the way they have with energy, with housing, with commodities. And if GPUs are going to be fundamental and they're going to be a commodity and people

• 3:12:35Speaker 09

  want to bring like an H100 index to the market, you're going to see a lot of like institutional capital try and pour its way in here.

• 3:12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:43Speaker 09

  And like functionally, how does that work? I think it actually comes in terms of like accelerating the existing data center projects as opposed to having the US just start to build something new.

• 3:12:55John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 3:12:55Speaker 09

  So to that extent, like totally agree with everything. I think the market kind of shuddered at those comments because it seemed like they were asking, OpenAI is asking US government to pick a winner when that is clearly not the case. Like there are winners and losers being shaken out in like chat, research, coding, but we're in the early innings of video and image generation, of material science, of drug discovery, of weather prediction, all of these models that are showing incredible early results from transformer-based architectures running on the same GPUs as the chat models that could be the, you know, lion's share of compute in the future if suddenly everybody wants

• 3:13:39Speaker 09

  real-time generated video on their feed or we're making small weather predictions for everybody who's getting ready to go skiing or something like.

• 3:13:48John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 3:13:48Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see more AI on the slopes.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  On the slopes.

• 3:13:54Jordi Hays?

  I like the sound.

• 3:13:54John Coogan?

  Bring it to Vail.

• 3:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Semi Analysis can do a ski trip, invite all the different players in bringing AI to the mountains.

• 3:14:04John Coogan?

  That's fascinating.

• 3:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Please invite us.

• 3:14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, very excited for the energy model.

• 3:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Powder, you can call it Powder Max.

• 3:14:11John Coogan?

  Whoever's working on that, as soon as you launch Energy Max, we want to talk to you guys. We always enjoy talking to everyone at Semi Analysis. Such thorough research, such deep insights. We really appreciate it.

• 3:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Such Chad's.

• 3:14:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:14:25Jordi Hays?

  Chad's. Great to see you, Jordan. Thanks for coming on.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:14:28Isaiah Taylor?

  See you guys too. Yeah, you're welcome to Whistler anytime.

• 3:14:31Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:14:31John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:14:34John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Our next guest is Isaiah Taylor from Valar Atomics. Congratulations, Isaiah.

• 3:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 3:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Look at this setup.

• 3:14:52John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. Congratulations. Second time on the show. Give us, give us the story. What happened today?

• 3:15:00Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, first of all, the eagle screech was fantastic timing there because we have our beautiful nuclear test site out in the back here in the middle of the Utah desert. Fantastic job producers. Yeah, we had a big announcement today.

• 3:15:11John Coogan?

  That's Jordy.

• 3:15:12Isaiah Taylor?

  Oh, Jordy, I'm sorry. I stole the soundboard glory.

• 3:15:16Jordi Hays?

  No, they, they, they generate the sounds and I time them.

• 3:15:20Isaiah Taylor?

  I see.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  I figured you, I figured the eagle.

• 3:15:22Isaiah Taylor?

  So it's even more impressive because the producers were cooking that up in the five seconds from when they saw my background.

• 3:15:28John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 3:15:28Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, then you could hit play.

• 3:15:29Jordi Hays?

  We got so many sounds. We got here. I got, I got sounds for days.

• 3:15:35Isaiah Taylor?

  That's exactly what it sounds like when one of our nuclear reactor starts up. No, it's, we're having a great day. It's, it's an amazing day for Valar Atomics. We announced a $130 million Series A earlier today. Let's go. Nice.

• 3:15:51John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:15:52Isaiah Taylor?

  That is a proper gong.

• 3:15:53John Coogan?

  That's your Series A. Wait, you, I thought, I feel like you had raised a Series A before. Wow.

• 3:15:58Isaiah Taylor?

  No.

• 3:15:58John Coogan?

  What a job. I didn't realize.

• 3:16:00Isaiah Taylor?

  That's right. We announced a nineteen million dollar seed round earlier this year.

• 3:16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:05Isaiah Taylor?

  And, and actually, we built our reactor on a seed round and we didn't turn it on. So now we have enough capital to go turn it on.

• 3:16:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:16:11Isaiah Taylor?

  And this is something I'm super proud of the team for, by the way, because I, I think this is like how venture is supposed to work. You, you hopefully turn something on in the, in the Series A. This is like when you find, you know, product market fit. So I'm super proud of the team. This, this is our goal. Go split the atom with this capital.

• 3:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, the, the whole story here makes so much sense because, um, like you started with like the really, really big vision, like, uh, uh, turning, you know, nuclear power into energy that could be transported, actual like, you were going to synthesize hydrocarbons. And you laid out this big vision, but then that was almost like act three. And then act one was like, can we actually build something that doesn't even turn on, but just shows that we can actually build something? Then let's go turn it on. Let's start generating energy. Then if we have abundance and tons of energy, then let's figure out what next to do. And I think people were always like a little bit thrown by how far you were thinking into the future. And they were like, well, let's see what this guy can do in six months. And then you delivered on the six month project.

• 3:17:10John Coogan?

  And now I think people are, are waking up to what you're building. Is, is that how you've experienced it?

• 3:17:15Isaiah Taylor?

  I think that's, that's an accurate perception and I've certainly learned a little bit about how to pitch the story. We, I, I talk a little bit more about the short term now, but I think about the long term every single day.

• 3:17:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:17:25Isaiah Taylor?

  Um, I mean, this, I think of this as, as my life's work.

• 3:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:28Isaiah Taylor?

  Energy is, is a very interesting thing where there's obviously an enormous amount of demand already, right? There's trillions of dollars worth of energy demand, but it's one of those things where if you make a lot of it and you make it very cheap, it creates its own demand.

• 3:17:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:17:42Isaiah Taylor?

  And I don't think there's really a limit to that. Like the, the more I play this out in my head, if you can make energy cheaper, you open up these new apertures of places where you can sell it and things that you can do with it. Uh, and so that, that really is like the fundamental motivation and the thing that we're trying to do here is that I think energy should be 10 times cheaper than it is right now. And you're right, that's like a really long-term vision, uh, but you have to be able to be super concrete and build stuff right now, six months, 12 months at a time.

• 3:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, the original vision, still very cool. I don't think, it doesn't sound like you're losing sight of it. I don't think you should. But the, I mean, we were just talking to semi analysis about the build out for AI data centers. And it feels like energy is the bottleneck. The question of, we will probably be able to scale up the GPU production. But getting enough energy at the right price is probably going to be the next thing that we're talking about all next year, the year after. And there's going to be this question of like, where's the energy coming from? It's going to be a political issue if it's oil and gas. Maybe there should be oil and gas in the short term, but in the long term, I think most people agree. Nuclear and solar. And so how are you thinking about the broader?

• 3:18:56John Coogan?

  Story here with America's renuclearization. There's a bunch of companies that are working on this. What are the timelines? What are the key things that need to happen? How's that looking?

• 3:19:07Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, I think AI needs power in the next couple of years. That's pretty obvious. And, you know, I was at an event with Tyler Cowen and Sam Altman a couple of weeks ago, and Tyler asks him, you know, what's the only thing holding you back? And he says electrons. And Tyler says, anything else, chips? And he's like, electrons, right? So that's pretty clear. And then the follow up question was, what's the nearest term way to solve that? And Sam says, natural gas. And I would generally agree with that. And I think that's probably true for the next 18 months. We do want to make power for data centers in 2028, though. And the interesting thing about nuclear is that I believe it scales very differently to natural gas. Natural gas is very site specific. You need to go find good gas sources. You're working on routing. There's all these complicated things.

• 3:19:50Isaiah Taylor?

  Nuclear, you can kind of do wherever it makes sense, and you can put a lot of it in one place. The reason for this is uranium is just easy to move around, right? Kind of a year's worth of it fits on a truck. Unlike a natural gas pipeline where you're working on the actual in-ground logistics of moving gas around. So I think once we've gotten that cracked, like the first unit that's making power, we could just make more of them. And you end up seeing these big sites that people are sort of dreaming about today, where you have a one, two, three gigawatt, you know, AI data center. This is very easily deliverable with a nuclear reactor that you just mass produce, right? Because you don't have to worry about these gas logistics.

• 3:20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. But how do you decide like? If we're doing one gigawatt, that means we, I mean, the last thing we talked about was like maybe targeting 10 megawatts. So you need 100 of these things. Like, why 110 megawatts as opposed to 1,001 megawatts or 10, 100 megawatts, right? Like, there's some trade off. How'd you land there?

• 3:20:46Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, so our unit will be a 25-megawatt electric unit, approximately. Yeah, so that's about 40 reactors per gigawatt. And really, the reason here is, I just think that in the West, in the Western world, we're really good at making bus-sized objects. And if you try to make an object bigger than a bus, you have a hard time.

• 3:21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:06Isaiah Taylor?

  We used to be good at this, right? We used to be really good at like, large-scale, like Hoover Dam, big nuclear reactors. Yeah, spatial, this kind of stuff. But if you notice how Elon sort of revolutionized rockets, he actually downsized pretty significantly, right? The Falcon 9 is a smaller rocket than, you know, any of the heavy launch vehicles that took us to the moon. And then he kind of slowly worked his way back up to Starship. And even Starship is like, taking longer than you would have expected. So there's just something about the toolsets that we have, the way that we do engineering, that favors making objects smaller and making lots of them.

• 3:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:40Isaiah Taylor?

  So if I'm...

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  There's a big part of like, you can just put it on a truck. I talked to some early SpaceX people about that, and they were like, you can put the engine on a truck. Once you go any bigger, it's like, get out the crane every single time. You want to do anything.

• 3:21:50Isaiah Taylor?

  Exactly.

• 3:21:51John Coogan?

  And so if you can do just a little less crane work, it just compounds and compounds and compounds.

• 3:21:55Jordi Hays?

  What are the, what are the key risks to the business over the next, like, 24 months that you talk about internally with the team, things that you're trying to prove out? I think somebody, you know, haters could have said, you know, a year or so ago, you can't build a nuclear reactor with $20 million. You, you, you derisked.

• 3:22:16John Coogan?

  You'll need 153.

• 3:22:18Jordi Hays?

  You derisked, you derisked, you know, from a capital, from a capital standpoint, now you're much less capital constrained. And you certainly, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of risk on the demand side, which is like, if you can make cheap energy, will people want this? I think we know the answer there. But what are you, what are you kind of like, focused on internally?

• 3:22:40Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And actually, I think people are massively over focusing on every risk except just the technical execution. And you mentioned like, there's a lot of demand, right? And I think you'll see a lot of companies put out MOUs, they'll sign deals, right? You'll see, you know, this company sent a deal with Google, this one sent a deal with Amazon, this sort of thing. One of my actually biggest Twitter haters, I'm gonna have to shout out unfortunately, because he wrote such a good tweet and somebody sent it to me that I was like,

• 3:23:05John Coogan?

  I saw this.

• 3:23:06Isaiah Taylor?

  It's like, damn it, I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to shout that one out. One of my big Twitter haters, Nick Turan, shout out to you, Nick, said, I'm issuing a universal MOU to all nuclear companies. Me, Nick, I'm saying, I will buy $10 billion of energy from any nuclear company that can actually build a nuclear reactor on time and on budget and at a good price, right? So I think this is actually totally right. Like, there is so much demand and the thing that's missing is capability. The thing that's missing is actually turning reactors on. So the risk is entirely, we have to go build this reactor and turn it on. And this is, I think, essentially what sets Valor apart from basically everybody else in nuclear today is that when we started the company, our, our core conviction was that nuclear has to go back through R and D again.

• 3:23:51Isaiah Taylor?

  We sort of assumed as an industry that because we've built many nuclear reactors in the past, that we still know how to. And I think that's fundamentally wrong. And this was sort of our belief from the beginning that we have to go back through R and D. R and D means starting small, starting low power, building it very quickly, testing it fast. And that will lead us to a commercial unit. But there is just real tech risk along that path, right? You know, pumps don't work like you thought they would, seals don't work like, you know, they don't hold as much pressure as you thought and you iterate through it.

• 3:24:20John Coogan?

  Is the tech risk, I mean, it sounds like the tech risk generally is a little bit overrated because this technology fundamentally, like, it did work eight years ago. It did work, you know, in the sixties. I mean, there were some problems in search.

• 3:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but even going to the moon is somewhat of a lost art.

• 3:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I got it.

• 3:24:39Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, I would put this into the bucket. It's not science risk. It's tech risk, right? Tech is really about engineering and capital. It's about what are your timelines? Yeah, economics, engineering, capital. What are your timelines? How much money do you have and resources to do it in the right timelines? And that's why our focus has been small steps executed extremely quickly. I started this company about two years ago. It's been about two years and two months since we started the company. We built our first nuclear reactor within 14 months of founding the company and we're going to hopefully turn it on before the three year mark. And if you can move at that pace, I think you can sort of iterate your way. You get more shots on goal, right? Moving quickly means you get lots of shots on goal.

• 3:25:18Isaiah Taylor?

  So if the seal doesn't work right exactly the first time you do testing, that's fine because you have some time to go and test it and iterate that seal and that valve.

• 3:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Are you moving the family out to Utah yet? Are we going to see a Valor kind of like planned development with a bunch of?

• 3:25:33John Coogan?

  Oh, that feels very grand.

• 3:25:35Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see a bunch of mid-century homes.

• 3:25:37John Coogan?

  I like that, yeah.

• 3:25:39Isaiah Taylor?

  I will say we do have more RVs than I expected at the site right now and a lot more on order as well. Yeah, the housing out here in the desert is going to be an interesting challenge to solve. We're not just building the reactor building here. We also have a trace of fuel plant that's going up as well. So we're actually going to be making our own trace of fuel. So yeah, we're going to have a really fun operation out here and that's only the beginning.

• 3:26:03John Coogan?

  Very cool, very cool.

• 3:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on the progress in the round. I'm super excited for you and the whole team.

• 3:26:09Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, awesome, awesome group of investors too. I'm, I have to shout out Doug Filippone, who led this round, ran Global Defensive Talents here. For I think 17 years, started Snowpoint, ex-army ranger, JSOC commander. Awesome, awesome guy. Not in this photo, but I actually arrived on our, our site here for the groundbreaking in a Blackhawk helicopter with Doug. Which was, which was fantastic. It's a great time.

• 3:26:35Jordi Hays?

  The suit, the suit in the Blackhawk goes unbelievably hard.

• 3:26:40Isaiah Taylor?

  Goes quite hard. Hadram Sharaf and Richard Blankenship as well from Dream absolutely made the magic happen on this round two. Fantastic guys, really, really grateful for, for all our investors.

• 3:26:51John Coogan?

  And Palmer's in, I remember last time me, you and Palmer were together, you guys were in a fierce debate and you clearly got, you wound up seeing eye to eye because now he's in the round, which is so congratulations on that.

• 3:27:02Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, yeah, I think we were debating about how much uranium we have.

• 3:27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:06Isaiah Taylor?

  There's lots of it, guys.

• 3:27:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:27:07Isaiah Taylor?

  A lot of uranium to, to use.

• 3:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:09Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, I mean, someday, someday we'll get to fusion, but not before we're all living in like O'Neill cylinders with, with more energy than we know what to do with.

• 3:27:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, I'm, I'm very excited for our nuclear future. I'm excited for what you're building and I just want to say massive congrats. I remember we, we filmed a very brief interview in El Segundo, probably around two years ago. You didn't even have an office yet and it's been, what a, what a fantastic run. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 3:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Amazing stuff.

• 3:27:39Isaiah Taylor?

  Thanks, John, Joey.

• 3:27:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, dude.

• 3:27:41John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 3:27:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about eatsleep.com. Get a pot five.

• 3:27:47Jordi Hays?

  I just reached for my phone to check my store.

• 3:27:49John Coogan?

  Warranty, 39 risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  I am unfortunately.

• 3:27:55John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 3:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Away from, I was away from home.

• 3:27:56John Coogan?

  Oh, you're away from home, yes. You're, you're on the road. I got an 86, seven and a half hours. Our next guest is Grant from Gamma. He's in the research room waiting room now, he's in the TV.

• 3:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Now, this is Hayden. Oh, Hayden first.

• 3:28:10John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 3:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show. Uh, squeezing in, uh, super, super excited to have you on the show here. We have, uh, as, as you know, uh, Uniswap alum, uh, working on the team. We're very, very grateful to have him and it's great to meet you.

• 3:28:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, great to meet you both. Um, I actually wasn't planning on doing any, anything today, but now here I am.

• 3:28:35Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 3:28:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, great to be here.

• 3:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Uh, for anybody that has been living under a data center, uh, introduce yourself and, uh, Uniswap.

• 3:28:48Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I'm Hayden. I'm the founder and CEO at Uniswap Labs. Uniswap is the largest decentralized exchange in the world. So for some context, if you annualize the past couple of months of volume, it does about $2 trillion a year in trading. You know, it's when you think about what a decentralized exchange is, it's kind of, you know, you could think of us as like a YouTube to a Coinbase or Binance is Netflix, right? So we have the upload function. And so people can, you know, create their own markets. We introduced this whole system called automated market making, which lets people create liquidity themselves. And so it sort of dramatically lowers the cost to the creation and access of financial markets. And we're sort of the, one of the pioneers of what people call decentralized finance,

• 3:29:32Speaker 11

  which is this area of crypto that is focused on building decentralized, transparent financial infrastructure. And so Uniswap is the leading decentralized exchange in that industry.

• 3:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. So we were live when your post hit the timeline. We have it pulled up now, but it would be awesome for you to kind of run us through kind of the news and break it down for us.

• 3:29:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, and I can try to, you know, set some context here.

• 3:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:57Speaker 11

  So there's kind of a bunch of different things here. So Uniswap launched about eight years ago or seven years ago. And maybe around five years ago, we launched this thing called the UniToken, which was a token that was meant to govern the Uniswap ecosystem. And within that, well, at a high level, what the protocol does is it introduces an economic system for the Uniswap protocol and the UniToken. And then it also basically refocuses Uniswap Labs on building value and building on top of the Uniswap protocol. So, you know, we're kind of in this like moment in time where there's a bunch of different things happening in crypto. And part of what we're seeing is a lot of people almost like move crypto into traditional financial rails. And part of what, you know, they're sort of like almost trying to like IPO crypto companies

• 3:30:42Speaker 11

  or build these treasury companies. And what we're focusing on is doubling and tripling down on the technology itself and the decentralized protocol that we built. And so, you know, the proposal, first it turns on protocol fees. This has been a really big thing in the Uniswap world for a very long time. People have kind of, you know, wondered when this would happen. But here, you know, so the protocol fees will be turned on. And these are fees for trading on the Uniswap protocol as well as there's this chain that we built called UniChain. And those fees are also going to this uniBurn system. There's also a essentially a burn of a large amount of uni from the treasury. And this is basically representing all the fees that could have been. It's almost like symbolic.

• 3:31:25Speaker 11

  There's been sort of a lot of like, you know, speculation around when this would happen. And so I think that, you know, this is kind of like a nod to that. And then I think beyond that, you know, Uniswap. So one thing to kind of like give context here is that we were in this like crazy regulation by enforcement area for crypto. Essentially, you know, Gary Gensler and the SEC sort of sued basically everyone in that who lived in the US who was a crypto founder. And, you know, the kind of incentives that created for the ecosystem, basically, they said, if you do anything that builds value for a community, we're going to sue you. And then actually, and then, you know, within that context, we were extremely like limited in how we could interact with the world.

• 3:32:08Speaker 11

  And then, you know, we basically, and then they sued us anyway. And then we, you know, and then it was ultimately ultimately dropped. But I think so what's happening now is that there's sort of like a very different kind of thing here. And so, you know, Uniswap Labs is really able to kind of lean into the Uniswap protocol and building for it and focusing its full kind of attention to that. Where we spent a lot of the past few years focused on basically building a business around the products that we build on top of the protocol. So there's like this decentralized network, kind of like Bitcoin. And then there's these apps and websites, kind of like, you know, a Bitcoin wallet or an exchange built on top of Bitcoin. And so we've built these products on top of the Uniswap protocol and they have tens of millions of users. And so we've been kind of very focused at Uniswap Labs on building a business around that.

• 3:32:54Speaker 11

  But, you know, with this proposal, I think what we're kind of acknowledging and what we're saying is that the really big opportunity here, much like the, you know, the biggest opportunity of Bitcoin is the Bitcoin network, not each little application on the top. The big opportunity here is the Uniswap protocol. And we want, you know, as the sort of inventors of this protocol and people who've been developing it for a long time, we want to make that our core focus. And so we're like, you know, leaning into that and kind of making that our full attention moving forward.

• 3:33:19Jordi Hays?

  What does this mean for equity holders in Uniswap Labs, the company that raised venture capital? Because I think part of what came out of the Gary Gensler era was you had this kind of like bifurcation of value, where there was equity holders that got access to tokens and so they had upside there. It's all, it felt like not, not the kind of scenario that we'd see, let's say, in 15 years from now when tokenization is, is kind of the norm and this is a standard way to build companies and distribute value. But I'm curious what the, what the proposal means for that kind of setup.

• 3:34:02Speaker 11

  Yeah, and it's a very perverse incentive to say, if you do anything that creates value, that's the bad thing to do versus, and that's sort of how you ended up with this kind of like thing where the only thing that was popular in crypto for a very long time was meme coins. And it was because they were, you know, they were the only thing that you could say, well, no one is trying to build any value. And so that's what became popular in crypto. And that's not really like what is exciting to me, right? What's exciting to me is the idea of these like truly decentralized networks that create value. And I think that for me, you know, what I want to align, you know, my work to doing is what I think creates the most value in the world. And I think for Uniswap Labs, the way that we think we can create the most value in the world is to lean into building this protocol. So part of this proposal does include a kind of a service provider

• 3:34:45Speaker 11

  relationship between us and, and the DAO that sort of aligns our, you know, our, our kind of mutual kind of, or like, that's sort of like aligns our upside. And so, you know, in this proposal, if, if we create a lot of value, then we can kind of, you know, realize some of that. So the goal here is to really like align incentives.

• 3:35:04Jordi Hays?

  And do you think, do you think more crypto companies that raised from traditional financial institutions will try to pursue these more aligned models going forward?

• 3:35:14Speaker 11

  Look, I, I hope so. I think that, you know, everyone was sort of kind of dealing with what was possible. And I think that people have kind of still like evolved and adapted. And, you know, a lot of, you know, I think that, but my hope is that like the crypto native things are what ultimately win. And I think that's kind of where I put my kind of bets. To me, you know, Like the point of the technology is the, like, the point of the industry is the technology. It's like the decentralization. It's the idea that you can create, you know, a financial application that you trust, not because you trust a company, but because the code is transparent and public and auditable and run by multiple independent parties. Or this idea of like decentralized consensus and networks, it can be really powerful.

• 3:35:56Speaker 11

  And so I think that the more that, you know, projects lean into that, the better off we are. There's sort of like this interesting thing that happens. Like, all of the, all of the fee, for example, the fee system that we're sort of proposing as part of this, every aspect of it is transparent and public and auditable and verifiable in real time. And so people don't need, you know, quarterly reports from a company when you can have, you know, real time access to anyone in the world that's like, not just like, public and transparent, but also like cryptographically provable. And so, you know, there's sort of like different ways of accomplishing a lot of the goals that various regulations have when you sort of, kind of like, lean into the unique nature of the technology.

• 3:36:35Jordi Hays?

  That makes a lot of sense. How's the reaction been? We've been, we've been streaming here, so I haven't been able to check the timeline. But this seems like something that both, you know, Uniswap super fans and, and, you know, detractors would appreciate.

• 3:36:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, so it's only been about an hour and a half. You guys were asked to messaging me. But so far, I mean, from what I've seen, it has been extremely positive from a, from a public reaction. Everyone on Twitter seems very happy, which is where most of crypto conversation happens. I guess it's X. I still say Twitter. It's hard.

• 3:37:11Jordi Hays?

  It's hard not to. It still happens to me every now and then. Well, congratulations. Big, big milestone and feels like it's a really positive.

• 3:37:20John Coogan?

  We have one follow-up here. Do you think this is going to be a trend for other companies that are in a similar situation?

• 3:37:28Speaker 11

  Yeah, I hope so. We're doing it because we think it's what's, you know, what's best in the way, you know, we think leaning into, you know, the centralization and the decentralized protocol is what's best.

• 3:37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:37:37Speaker 11

  And so I hope that, you know, other people follow this trend as well. You know, I think that a lot of people have been doing it, but they've mostly been doing it from like outside the US or in all these different ways that, and I think that like ultimately, we really believe that this is like the right thing and that what is sort of best for users and what's best, you know, for the world, which is why we're doing it.

• 3:37:55John Coogan?

  What about on the regulation side? Is there anything to touch on there?

• 3:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I would just be curious with, are maybe the, the version of you that's earlier in their, in their career, are they deciding to set up in the United States? I mean, I know you went through absolute hell for a number of years and, and being, you know, based in New York was, was a big challenge, but are you seeing more younger crypto builders decide, hey, it's actually makes sense for me to set up in, in, you know, a place like New York, one of the financial capitals of the world? Are you still seeing a lot of stuff happening offshore because people don't think it's worth the risk of potentially a new admin taking a different stance on crypto?

• 3:38:39Speaker 11

  Yeah. So I think, you know, for the past four years, it was a lot of people moving outside the US and that was sort of the predominant advice that people got. And then what we've seen in maybe over the past year is people start to come back to the US. And I have various friends who've kind of moved their offices and who run crypto companies who've kind of moved to New York. So we're definitely starting to see a financial hub and a crypto hub form in New York.

• 3:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Brooklyn?

• 3:39:05Speaker 11

  It's actually, it's actually particularly in Soho, I'd say. But there are the Brooklyn hub, but there's kind of a growing Soho hub to crypto. And I personally, I love, I love it here. You know, there's like, I could say that it was because I believed in the technology and that it would sort of, you know, that being on the right side of history would ultimately prevail. But I will also say that I just love it here as well. And I love living in New York, so I definitely hope more people come here. In terms of like the long-term certainty, that's really where like this like market structure bill that's, that's being kind of discussed in, in.

• 3:39:38Speaker 11

  Congress is kind of pretty important, as is the, you know, some of the like, you know, what we expect would be upcoming regulations out of various regulators. And so, you know, the hope is to have like additional clarity and clarity that makes sense with the technology. That's really important, right? I think that was what was challenging before is sort of regulators taking stances that just didn't make sense for the technology. And so, you know, the hope is that the sort of environment kind of like, and we really, you know, the hope is that long-term there isn't this sort of like, it's like not a, doesn't, you know, it doesn't kind of stay a politicized topic long-term. And the hope is that really it's just like, people create sensible regulations that come out of Congress that sort of, again,

• 3:40:20Speaker 11

  like, recognize that the software developers that create decentralized protocols are very different from, you know, a centralized financial institution that custodies funds. All right, those are just like fundamentally different things. And so, the hope is to have that kind of really recognized and acknowledged at a federal scale. And once that happens, I think it will be like even more, you know, of a slam dunk.

• 3:40:41Jordi Hays?

  Soho crypto renaissance era will really, will really begin. Well, great, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on and congratulations on, on all the progress and the proposal. And we'll have to have you back on again soon.

• 3:40:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, excited to come back on sometime.

• 3:40:57John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 3:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang. Cheers.

• 3:41:00John Coogan?

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• 3:41:05Jordi Hays?

  And I am in a wander right now.

• 3:41:07John Coogan?

  It's a vacation home, but better. It's Jordy's current home.

• 3:41:10Jordi Hays?

  So, I, I will share one fun anecdote. They knew I had kids. I didn't communicate with, with the Wander team at all, just booked it. And, and they, they knew I had kids because they asked for that info on the way in. They bought a bunch of toys.

• 3:41:28John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 3:41:29Jordi Hays?

  There was toys when I arrived with the kids. And that made bedtime a challenge because it was like, it looked like Christmas morning out there. But without further ado, we have the CEO of Gamma coming in. Welcome to the show.

• 3:41:44John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Sorry.

• 3:41:45Jordi Hays?

  So sorry to keep you waiting. Crazy day.

• 3:41:47John Coogan?

  Hey, guys.

• 3:41:48Jordi Hays?

  But we're pumped to have you on and talk about the news.

• 3:41:53Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's so great to be here, guys. Excited to share, we just closed the Series B for Mndresen at a $2.1 billion valuation.

• 3:42:03Jordi Hays?

  There's some other info too, you're profitable too.

• 3:42:07John Coogan?

  Whoa!

• 3:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Is that right?

• 3:42:09Speaker 12

  We are profitable, we've been profitable for two years.

• 3:42:12Jordi Hays?

  Two years.

• 3:42:13Speaker 12

  And we passed $100 million in ARR, all with a team of 50.

• 3:42:18John Coogan?

  50, wow, that's incredible.

• 3:42:20Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 3:42:21John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 3:42:21Jordi Hays?

  What makes Gamma, why is it working so well?

• 3:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:42:27Jordi Hays?

  Because we've seen some, you know, this was a category that I think a lot of people were excited about

• 3:42:33Jordi Hays?

  a couple of years ago. We saw a ton of investment going into making, making, making, you know, decks, specifically presentations with generative AI. And not everything is panned out, but it seems to be working incredibly well for you guys. So what's the secret sauce?

• 3:42:52Speaker 12

  I mean, we attribute a lot of it to actually getting started well before sort of this recent AI wave.

• 3:42:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:42:57Speaker 12

  We've been a company for five years now, so the first couple of years, we actually focused a lot on just the, the, the underlying editing experience. So can we create new building blocks that aren't traditional slides, you know, the 16 by 9 format? And allow like the average person, the everyday person that isn't a designer, doesn't have design skills, to create much faster. And so two and a half years ago, we kind of married those building blocks with just re-engineering the entire workflow within Gamma, so that AI can actually really quickly assemble those building blocks fast, give the end user a really seamless experience.

• 3:43:34John Coogan?

  What about on the, how can you talk about the shape of the user? Have you been selling direct to consumers, B2B? Is there some sort of like, you know, Dropbox did like the viral web, the consumer software viral loop where I send it to you, you install, you become a customer, we upsell? Or is it more, you know, SDR-led? How are you thinking about the actual growth engine for the business?

• 3:44:04Speaker 12

  Yeah, definitely. So where we started, we actually started much with, much more of a prosumer base of users. So you can imagine anybody that has to do a lot of external-facing communication, whether you're a freelancer, a solopreneur, a small business owner, someone that needs to create a lot of decks, we made it dead simple for them to get started. For them, the beauty is that, you know, they're not locked into the Microsoft suite, the G suite, so they can, they have the freedom to choose whatever tool's best for the job. And so they're able to pick up our tool, use it. By nature of our category, we're lucky that

• 3:44:35Jordi Hays?

  So viral.

• 3:44:35Speaker 12

  If you like using Gamma, you're sharing and presenting with others, right? There's organic virality baked into the use of the product. So as the product has gone better, more and more people use it, share it, share it in many different ways, and that allows us to, you know, essentially acquire more and more users for extremely cheap.

• 3:44:51Jordi Hays?

  How big is the market for decks? Because, I mean, I feel like it's hard for me to get a sense of like, you know, how big the market is for, like, actual infrastructure for creating decks, software for creating decks. Obviously, the market for decks is in the hundreds of billions, I'm sure, if you add up all the different consulting groups and things like that. But, um, but yeah, how do you look at that market? You're, you're multi-product now, but, um, yeah, do you, do you expect that decks will be something, you know, kind of one of the, the biggest product line in, in five years, 10 years? Or do you guys really want to go wide?

• 3:45:33Speaker 12

  Well, yeah, so even if we just start with the category presentations, to your point, it's massive, right? So Google Slides, 800 million monthly active users, you know, and then you add PowerPoint, we're talking well over a billion monthly active users. And that's just in that one category. And then you think about-

• 3:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait, PowerPoint has a billion monthly active?

• 3:45:53Speaker 12

  Well, you add Google Slides and PowerPoint together, you know, so we're talking about a category where today, and that's with, you know, a product that's still pretty manual and tedious to use. Now imagine Gamma automating a ton. Our API is going to actually make it so that anybody can actually build on top of our platform as well. So if you have a business where content creation is, can be core to your infrastructure, you can now build on top of Gamma. And so no longer even manually creating content, it's, it's going to be a massive market.

• 3:46:23Jordi Hays?

  And so, so that API business is that- You know, another SaaS company that wants to make it easy to generate reports that that users can walk people through the organization.

• 3:46:34John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a good idea.

• 3:46:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, is that kind of a use case? It's like, hey, take your data, we'll turn it into a beautiful presentation automatically that you can run a meeting with?

• 3:46:41Speaker 12

  So there's actually multiple different layers. You know, layer one, I'll call kind of just an extension of our prosumer business today. So imagine if you're already using Zapier, you can combine that with your favorite tools. So granola for notes, for instance. If you're a freelancer, you take all your notes in granola, the moment the meeting's over, you can take that meeting transcript, feed it into Gamma and create a very personalized deck going back to your client saying, hey, these are all the things we discussed, these are deliverables, these are the action items we agreed on. You get a beautiful PDF sent directly to them right after. So that's like a prosumer use case. Then there's like B2B use cases where, you know, in the future, we'll partner with platforms like Glean where Glean is sitting on top of company knowledge.

• 3:47:26Speaker 12

  If anybody internally wants to create a QBR or strategy deck, they can pull that into Gamma, automate the content creation, create a beautiful deck so that you can use that for a meeting or discussion. And then one of the use cases you alluded to is what if other developers can build on top of Gamma? So imagine you have like a real estate app. Your real estate app, you know, you want to build a empower your users anytime they look up a listing or look up, you know, a zip code, they want, you know, a PDF of all the different listings in that zip code. Well, we can power all that content creation, build a beautiful report so that app company focuses on the app itself, not on the content infrastructure. And we can essentially operate in the background, send a beautiful PDF with all the listings for that particular zip code to the end user for that particular app.

• 3:48:10Jordi Hays?

  Are you going to keep the team lean going forward? Are you going to develop some hubris and hire like 400 people? What's the plan?

• 3:48:19John Coogan?

  DocuSign numbers. Get to DocuSign numbers.

• 3:48:21Speaker 12

  Yeah. You know, we've, we've always tried to do things maybe a little bit different. You know, we raise as little as we can. We build a super lean team. We continue, you know, I think we're going to continue to do that no matter what. And so lean is obviously, you know, relative to, you know, we have big ambitions and so the team is going to get bigger. We're definitely hiring, but relative to our traction, I think we're still going to be, you know, pretty small.

• 3:48:44Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever think about raising 67 million?

• 3:48:50Speaker 12

  You know, it's a good question. We felt like we really needed that extra million just in case.

• 3:48:56Jordi Hays?

  Missed opportunity for the meme, meme potential. Somebody else has to do that.

• 3:49:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, awesome. Crazy, crazy, crazy progress. And I love to see, you know, a winner, a winner coming out of this category. You know, everybody has been through the pain of making presentations. And there were so many, you know, I'm thinking of Tome, I think there was, and there was Pitch.com. All these companies that tried to crack this problem and just didn't quite figure it out.

• 3:49:27John Coogan?

  Ed Norton has a, has a company.

• 3:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. You're competing with Ed Norton.

• 3:49:30Speaker 12

  We got competition from everywhere, you know?

• 3:49:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:49:32Speaker 12

  Yeah. It's a tough one to break into.

• 3:49:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something's working. Well, great to meet you. Congratulations. And I'm sure we'll see you on here for, this was, was this series A or B?

• 3:49:44Speaker 12

  Series B.

• 3:49:45Jordi Hays?

  Series B. Okay. We'll see you on here for the C. Looking forward to it.

• 3:49:49Speaker 12

  Sounds great. Thanks. Thanks so much, guys.

• 3:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 3:49:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We'll see you soon. Let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now. Source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 3:50:01John Coogan?

  Buco Capital bloke said, I just don't see a world where corporate budgets for AI will be smaller in 2026 than they were in 2025. I think they will be much bigger. Got room to run, baby.

• 3:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Somebody commented, then you're out of touch with the world and stuck in a home office. Buco says, that doesn't even make sense.

• 3:50:21John Coogan?

  That doesn't make sense, of course, because if you're in the home office, you wouldn't underst- I know. Yeah, I don't get that at all. That's very confusing.

• 3:50:30Jordi Hays?

  Alex Cohen says, if a startup requires you to be in office 12 hours a day, six days a week, you should run the F away like your life depends on it. Apparently, this company, Giga, which has been going viral.

• 3:50:43Jordi Hays?

  What is, are they actually saying that you need to be in the office 12 days a week? Or sorry, 12 hours a day?

• 3:50:49John Coogan?

  Someone, someone said that they got hired in April to lead demand gen for them. They quit after the first day. There were red flags. When we hit 10 million ARR, we're going to spend 100K on blank illegal stuff. We're doing blank in MRR. The dashboards in the headquarters showed 6X less. You know, in office, seven days a week, 12 hours a day. PTO policy is subject to change, blah, blah, blah, blah. You are expected to always be working. Gave an offer letter on Wednesday. So it's sort of like going back and forth.

• 3:51:19Jordi Hays?

  They chopped off a goat's head in India because it brings good luck.

• 3:51:21John Coogan?

  Sounds aggressive. I wonder, I wonder, have they responded? Has Giga like responded to this and said like, this is not real? Cause that would be important, I guess, if they have to. Cause somebody's like making this claim about them. It should be sort of like, you know, debated because we don't know, you know, when someone, when someone makes a claim like this, there's a bunch of different motivations that could be behind it. I don't know. Hopefully, I, I saw Giga did a, did an interview with Harsh Tagar from YC. And they seem to be getting some traction in their market and there seems to be some good stuff. I mean, there's nothing wrong, like each one of these needs to be like kind of evaluated in, in and of itself. There's nothing particularly wrong with working very hard if everyone's in on it

• 3:52:06John Coogan?

  and everyone's happy with it. So we'll, we'll see. Stay tuned for the response from the Giga.

• 3:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Um, Yashon says, my AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers.

• 3:52:21John Coogan?

  Hmm. He's still bearish on the application later. That's interesting. That was a, a take from like a year or two ago that had kind of got out of fashion. What do you think, Tyler?

• 3:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So one thing, so Elon quoted it and says seems to be accurate. But one thing that's kind of interesting here, Sam Altman with Tyler Cowen, they were talking about like an AI native Slack. And a lot of people were saying like requests for startup, like who's building this? And it's like, you have to assume that Sam is gonna, like, he runs his business on Slack.

• 3:52:53John Coogan?

  It's the new Google.

• 3:52:54Jordi Hays?

  He cares a lot about.

• 3:52:55John Coogan?

  The new Gmail.

• 3:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he cares a lot about enterprise. He wants ChatGPT to be an agent that's working in your company 24/7. You think he's just gonna be like, oh yeah, someone else should build that. I don't care about the enterprise. Someone else should build the AI native Slack.

• 3:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 3:53:11Jordi Hays?

  I would just assume that that he's building that.

• 3:53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll see. Uh, what do you think? Is there still value in the, in the application layer? Or are you so AGI pilled that it's, it doesn't matter? Just, just horrid electrons.

• 3:53:25Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, this was like the original, like, um, like rapper was like a slur almost.

• 3:53:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:53:31Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, you're starting a rapper company.

• 3:53:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:53:32Speaker 02

  Like, it's like totally fake thing.

• 3:53:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:34Speaker 02

  Um, but I think that the kind of rapper trade has done very well.

• 3:53:38John Coogan?

  Oh, totally. It's done super well.

• 3:53:40Speaker 02

  So, yeah, time will tell, but it seems to be.

• 3:53:42John Coogan?

  Look at Giga, they're pro, or, or, uh, not Giga, but Gamma, they're, they're profitable. A hundred mil ARR.

• 3:53:49Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I think people massively overestimate how much, like, how many different things that, uh, these foundation model companies could actually do.

• 3:53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53:56Speaker 02

  Like, you just can't allocate that many engineers to like so many different products.

• 3:54:00John Coogan?

  I, I disagree. It's, it's not that, it's, it's the capabilities of the fundamental underlying model. Because there is a world where you go to the, the, just the base weights of GPT-10 and you say, generate me a 10 slide deck that pitches my product to this customer. And it just generates it all and it just does it all. And, and it, the tokens that it is outputting are essentially PPTX files.

• 3:54:29Jordi Hays?

  And it generate UI on the fly that allows you to edit the output?

• 3:54:33John Coogan?

  It should.

• 3:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Even, even the most, even the smartest designers, best designers I've ever worked with, rarely are they just one-shotting a task where I'm like. No more, you know, you want to get in there and like, switch it up yourself, right?

• 3:54:47Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, but like, so look at Claude Code. Claude Code is just, I mean, it's just a base model with some scaffolding, right? You can think of it as like, the actual capabilities of the model aren't incredible, but if you add, uh, basically, you know, essentially a really nice for loop, it gets way better.

• 3:55:03Speaker 02

  That's just like extra engineers that are just like normal software engineers.

• 3:55:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:55:07Speaker 02

  You could see that Anthropic do the same thing where they bring, you know, they, they put a group of ten engineers and they say, "Make this better at building PowerPoints."

• 3:55:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, no, I, I, I agree with that, like, like, but, uh, there was a scenario where, like, Claude Code would be the Claude Code for PowerPoint. Because you can go to Claude Code and tell it, "Hey, iterate on the for loop, generating PowerPoint."

• 3:55:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think that's still not so crazy, like, I mean, you've talked about this thing where you, you use Claude Code to do like a research and made a nice HTML file. That's a PDF, that's, you know, use that.

• 3:55:44John Coogan?

  You could just PDF it at the end of it.

• 3:55:45Speaker 02

  It's a Word doc, you know.

• 3:55:47John Coogan?

  So there is, there is a world where like, yeah, the application layer still, uh, still, you know, faces significant competition from the foundation model labs. Let's read Yishan's, uh, uh, he's also the, uh, former CEO of Reddit, correct?

• 3:56:01Speaker 02

  Read it, I'll be right back.

• 3:56:02John Coogan?

  Uh, so, Yishan says, "My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundational model providers. App functionality will be added to the foundational models offerings, uh, because the big players aren't slow incumbents. It is wrong to apply the analogy of fast startup, slow incumbent here. They are just big for far more, uh, far more so than with any other new, uh, prior new technology. There is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsolesce. Every new app is almost, almost as fast as it can be invented. There's almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startup founders can make money. Make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash.

• 3:56:47John Coogan?

  My estimate is that you have about, uh, 12 to 18 months cash flow generation." Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity. The situation is highly unstable. We don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon, but both scenarios make it very unlikely that any AI application startup will independently become a generational super company. Baseline odds are low to begin with. I sort of agree with that. That makes sense. The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones relating to real atoms, hardware, or world-related data, and not software slash finance. Interesting.

• 3:57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, like, if you're a normal kind of consumer wrapper company, you probably did not like seeing what OpenAI was doing this summer where they had, oh, we have an Expedia plugin and now it's, you can use, you know, Figma, you can use it straight in the, in the, you know.

• 3:57:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.

• 3:57:46Speaker 02

  I think there are still plenty of startups that like are quietly just like dying from better models or just more like productized, you know, features in the actual chat interface or whatever.

• 3:57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I do wonder about the shape of that curve because it's like, it's clear that, like, OpenAI used to just be such a monolith in the sense that it was just like, train bigger transformer, train bigger transformer, that's what OpenAI is. At least that was like the, the view from the outside. And then it became like, okay, ChatGPT, the app, but then also like enterprise stuff, and then also API, and then also Sora, and also Dolly. And, and at one point, do you remember, do you remember the Dolly UI? Do you remember there was like, there was a moment where Dolly was turning into like Photoshop in the browser and you could actually like edit and highlight different regions and you could do like in painting where you could say generate an image here and then generate an image next to it, generate an image,

• 3:58:43John Coogan?

  you could kind of block it all together. And they were like building an application on top of the image model. And I don't know if that disappeared. I, maybe we just don't talk about it anymore. Maybe they're still working on it. But there were a number of different, I, I imagine that they have a video, like a visualization of different SaaS categories that they could potentially go after, just like Google did with, you know, on-prem software. Like what's not in the cloud? Well, email's not in the cloud. Well. PowerPoint's not in the cloud. Well, Google Slides. Uh, you know, spreadsheets aren't in the cloud. Instead of Excel, let's go to Google Sheets. And then, and Google just kind of chopped down that. And so OpenAI could be doing something very similar, uh, looking at like what's not AI-ified, what's not AI-native.

• 3:59:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think, uh, it's definitely wrong to say that this like question of whether rappers are like long-term valuable. I think it's like mu- very much still an open question.

• 3:59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see. Um, there will definitely be some folks who get out early. There's be some folks that figure out ways to, to be durable. It'll probably be a mixed bag.

• 3:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Dagwire Analytics says the strategy Ponzi scheme is blowing up. They have 689 million of interest due in 2026 that they don't have. Sailor is enticing investors by raising yield by 25 basis points to 10 and a half percent on preferred shares to raise capitals, keep running the Ponzi while collateral deflates in value. Uh, so they currently have about 50 million of cash on hand in order to pay that interest. They can raise, uh, more debt at this, you know, relatively high rate, 10 and a half percent. They currently have about eight and a half, 8.2 billion of debt. The market value of their Bitcoin

• 4:00:32Jordi Hays?

  is roughly 65 billion and the company's sitting at a $68 billion market cap. It's down 40% in the past, uh, six months. And so we will see.

• 4:00:46John Coogan?

  Oh, so wait, so it's, so strategy is now trading at book value essentially? Is that right?

• 4:00:50Jordi Hays?

  It's trading at 68 billion, but they have 80 bill- 8 billion of debt.

• 4:00:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So, so, so net of debt, they're still a little bit high, a little bit above where asset value is. Interesting. Um, apparently, so this was in the Wall Street Journal too. I guess, uh, everyone's writing about this right now.

• 4:01:09Jordi Hays?

  But the STEMI check's coming back.

• 4:01:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the tariff dividend.

• 4:01:15John Coogan?

  Someone's excited for their stimulus check.

• 4:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Team are excited about it.

• 4:01:18John Coogan?

  Excited for the stimulus checks. Everyone's pumped. Um, yeah, I mean, the, the original MicroStrategy trade was like, it was hard to buy crypto in, on certain platforms. It was hard to buy, uh, it was hard to buy crypto in your IRA.

• 4:01:34Jordi Hays?

  For institutions.

• 4:01:35John Coogan?

  Institutions.

• 4:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Institutions, yeah.

• 4:01:36John Coogan?

  And MicroStrategy gave folks a way to do that. Um, and it still exists. There is some sort of arbitrage still, but, uh, just purely getting access to Bitcoin is.

• 4:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Guess what day MicroStrategy peaked in, uh, in the dot com bubble?

• 4:01:53John Coogan?

  Wait, what? Oh, doc, oh, they've been around that long. That's right.

• 4:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the criticism of Sailor is that like, he was like, uh, he was a, it was a, a kind of a bub guy.

• 4:02:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:02:03Jordi Hays?

  He's big into that whole world.

• 4:02:05John Coogan?

  And the bull case that he seems relentless. He's still around.

• 4:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Relentless. Uh, he, the, the stock peaked March 10th of 2000.

• 4:02:13John Coogan?

  Wow. Um, there you go. March 10th, 2000. So MicroStrategy was worth about 128 billion at its peak in July. It is now worth about 70 billion. So, uh, I mean, a pretty significant sell off. Uh, and interestingly Bitcoin has not sold off in the same way. It's, it's purely the, the market mood changing around crypto treasury companies, apparently. Very, very fascinating. Um, there's, yeah, there's a lot here. Um, but we can go into it some other time. Uh, anything else in the timeline, Jordy, that we should be looking?

• 4:02:48Jordi Hays?

  We are well, well over.

• 4:02:51John Coogan?

  We're in the fourth hour, baby.

• 4:02:52Jordi Hays?

  We're well, we're in the fifth hour. We're in the fifth hour.

• 4:02:56John Coogan?

  We're in the.

• 4:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Let's go for six.

• 4:02:58John Coogan?

  Let's go for six. In the fourth hour, I start asking our guest the same questions that Jordy asks. I just get so lost.

• 4:03:06Jordi Hays?

  It happens.

• 4:03:07John Coogan?

  He's like a million text messages. Uh, anyway, stimulus checks are back. This is true, apparently, or at least it's like rumored, or it's at least it's truth. It's on, it's not necessarily true yet, but it's on Truth Social. So, uh.

• 4:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Warren Buffett.

• 4:03:22John Coogan?

  We'll be paying a tariff dividend of 2000.

• 4:03:25Jordi Hays?

  A letter that says he's, I'm going quiet.

• 4:03:28John Coogan?

  What? Warren Buffett says he's going quiet?

• 4:03:30Jordi Hays?

  He says in one of, uh, this is in the Times today. He says, "In one of his final missives as a company's leader, Mr. Buffett said he would accelerate his plans to disperse his fortune to his children's foundations. My children are now at their prime in respect to experience and wisdom, but have yet to enter old age." Uh, he's talking about his daughter and two sons who range in age from 67 to 72.

• 4:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, Ken, still sitting on a lot of cash.

• 4:04:03John Coogan?

  He's got a lot of cash. The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree has been delivered. Let's hear it for the Rockefeller. Christmas is officially here in New York City.

• 4:04:11Jordi Hays?

  We need some Christmas. I need some Christmas sound effects on the soundboard. We gotta bring the Christmas spirit to the show. I need some bells.

• 4:04:19John Coogan?

  Oh, bells, jingle bells. Christmas is officially started at TVP N today. I'm calling it. We're Christmas maxing now. Uh, very fun show. Thank you for watching. Tune in tomorrow.

• 4:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we have to read this last post from Andrew Reid. Says, "The top real estate agent in Hillsborough Burlington is this guy named Stanley Lowe." And on his website, he says,

• 4:04:42John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 4:04:43Jordi Hays?

  "The diminutive risk taker speaks with competitiveness, cockiness, and conviction of a salesman who loves the business and rarely doubts his ability to succeed against all comers and all odds. While some will attempt to impugn the Green Banker operation as a high-end real estate machine, those who have transacted with the firm see it for what it is, a successful responsive juggernaut that reflects the personality and determination and discipline of one man, Stanley Lowe, and the perpetual motion of a real estate operation that never slackens in its quest to stay atop the real estate pyramid." What, what a bar. What a bar.

• 4:05:26John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 4:05:27Jordi Hays?

  And look at this guy. He's suited up, looking like an absolute G.

• 4:05:30John Coogan?

  He's actually the top.

• 4:05:31Jordi Hays?

  We gotta work on getting Stanley on this show.

• 4:05:35John Coogan?

  That's not him. That's like a toy of him. Is it?

• 4:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it uh.

• 4:05:40John Coogan?

  I'm confused.

• 4:05:41Jordi Hays?

  I think this is a real picture of him. I think it may be a little bit of Photoshop.

• 4:05:45John Coogan?

  Okay, something weird's going on here. It looks like a, it looks like a, like a toy or something.

• 4:05:51Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then our final, final post.

• 4:05:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we're not going to get to the story. I think it's been light. Maybe we'll get to it tomorrow, but uh, Sam says there's locking in and then there's locking in how this 31 year old made a quarter billion dollars in 30 months. Trading Russian oil when sanctions meant others stopped.

• 4:06:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a great story in the financial.

• 4:06:12Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 4:06:13John Coogan?

  Dig into it. Uh, but stay tuned for more TVPN tomorrow, 11 a.m. Pacific. Uh, tune in.

• 4:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait. Can't wait.

• 4:06:21John Coogan?

  See you then. Until then, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And if you're looking for a shorter version of the show, although if you're in hour five, I doubt you are. But in general, if you're ever missing this show, we have a product called Diet TBPN. We edit down the whole show, bring it to you in 20, 30 minutes, something like that.

• 4:06:43Jordi Hays?

  All the flavor.

• 4:06:44John Coogan?

  All the flavor.

• 4:06:45Jordi Hays?

  And only 30 calories.

• 4:06:46John Coogan?

  Only 30 minutes of your time. And you can listen to it on 2X, I guess, if you want to.

• 4:06:50Jordi Hays?

  We will see you tomorrow.

• 4:06:51John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 4:06:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.