X Article Apocalypse, Hollywood's AI Takes | Jordan Schneider, Eliot Pence, Fil Aronshtein & Matt Grimm

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:11) - X Article Apocalypse (44:42) - Hollywood's AI Takes (01:01:44) - Elon vs. OpenAI Updates (01:05:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:17:54) - Is the American Dream Obsolete? (01:25:25) - Jordan Schneider is the creator of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter, focusing on U. S.-China relations and technology. In the conversation, he discusses his disappointment over the Buffalo Bills' firing of head coach Sean McDermott, analyzes the political strategy of Ro Khanna in positioning himself against Silicon Valley, and critiques the media's role in political discourse, emphasizing the importance of asking challenging questions to guests. (01:59:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:16:21) - Eliot Pence, founder and CEO of Dominion Dynamics, discusses the company's mission to enhance Arctic surveillance by developing distributed mesh networks that integrate commercial off-the-shelf sensors across land, sea, air, and space domains. He highlights the strategic importance of the Arctic, noting Canada's underinvestment in the region and the need for improved situational awareness to secure it. Pence explains that Dominion Dynamics' technology enables Canadian Rangers to capture and transmit data from remote areas lacking communication infrastructure, thereby strengthening Canada's defense capabilities in the Arctic. (02:29:15) - Fil Aronshtein is a technologist and entrepreneur focused on applied AI and software infrastructure. He’s known for building products at the intersection of data, automation, and developer tooling, with an emphasis on shipping fast and scaling systems in production. Matt Grimm is a technology investor and operator with a background in software, startups, and venture capital. He focuses on early-stage companies, platform shifts, and the business mechanics behind emerging technologies. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://cisco.com Okta - https://www.okta.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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Monday, January 19th, 2026. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the temple of technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Ramp, time is money, save both. He's use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Ramp.com. We have a great show for you today, folks. We're talking about the article apocalypse that's happening on X. Will it slop up the timeline? The million dollar slop fight? Will it slop up the timeline? Uh, will the algorithm handle the flood of, of AI-generated content that will be slopped up in the timeline? We will see, we will dig into it, we will discuss it. Uh, we'll also try and understand what is going on with Nikita Beer's strategy? What's the strategy at X? Will this growth, uh, this growth hack work?

• 0:52John Coogan?

  This competition, of course, this all started, uh, with a Nikita Beer post.

• 0:56Jordi Hays?

  Hold up, we got Main Street Summit in the X chat.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Hey.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  What's up, Main Street Summit? Shout out to Brent and the whole team. Love you guys.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Cheers.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  So this all started with Nikita Beer on X. He said, ladies and gentlemen, we are giving $1 million to the top article posted on X. You have two weeks. It's time to write, uh, and very, very different structure.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  They thought, there's already, and there's, there's so much AI-generated essays on X.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Why not make AI-generated essays lottery tickets?

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Lottery.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's turn them into lottery tickets.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  I like it. I, I mean, they're, they're definitely paying out more than a million dollars in creator payments across all the little hundred dollar, thousand dollar checks that go out to folks. You have to imagine, um, but, but running a sweepstakes, I mean, that's time honored. What's not to like about a sweepstakes? It's great. I, I think it's a lot of fun. Um, obviously people are, people are worried that, uh, this will create some, uh, you know, perverse incentive. There was already a perverse incentive for slop on the timeline because if you engagement farmed, you could potentially get a big creator payout. We've seen some people that get, you know, $20,000 randomly sent to them just because they went mega viral. We've seen a bunch of people that have just built up accounts where they're getting a couple thousand dollars every month. There's always been an incentive and that incentive exists on YouTube where you can

• 2:18John Coogan?

  get creator payouts. You can, uh, you, there are plenty of platforms where you can go and, uh, and get, uh, attention and convert that into ad dollars or rev share. Um, you know, but I mean, back in the day, there was a huge incentive to like do listicles and clickbait to get visitors to your website that you would put Google Ads on. Uh, some of it, you know, made a decent amount of money. Some of it didn't stick around. Um, most of the bad stuff eventually went away. Eventually people stopped showing up. Eventually the audience quality got so bad that all the advertisers said, why am I paying to show up on this listicle of like the, the cutest dogs in America or something? I don't know. Maybe that one actually

• 2:58John Coogan?

  rips. Who knows? But, uh, so, uh, Nikita's kind of taking two sides to this. He says, it's time to write, but also he tells everyone else, please bear with Article Armageddon. Uh, my question was, uh, what's the strategy here and what will the outcome be? So before we dive into it, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the AI trust management platform, the leading AI trust management platform. So, um, it's sort of crazy to me how long Twitter went with 140 characters. Yeah. Do you realize Twitter launched in 2006? They held the line on just 140 characters

• 3:38John Coogan?

  for over a decade. It wasn't until 2017 that they doubled it to 280, which now feels still a little tight to get a tweet in under two, 280, but 140 was truly a constraint. You needed to be extremely terse and extremely concise. Um, and, and even that was a relic from the SMS era. Like the default text message that you could send was, uh, 140 characters. And so Twitter was very much built on, hey, uh, if you verify your phone number, you can just send a text in and it will post it on your Twitter account. And so a lot of people in the early days were using it that way, although obviously people were also using it on web. And, you know, it's always been an important watering hole for tech power players.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  The tech elite have always liked hanging out on Twitter. But it's never captured the value that it created. Like, it was very, very hard because people are not in the, they're not in the same frame of mind as when they're scrolling Instagram, scrolling Instagram reels. You're basically shopping when you're on a meta platform. And then you see an ad for a product.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to be clear, meta captures a lot more value, but certainly not all the value it creates. Right? That's the point of a platform.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  A platform, yeah, exactly.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  You create more value than you capture. But in the case of X, it's like, you know.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  They were capturing a very small.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, very tiny percentage.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  And there were lots of stories about people building businesses that basically exported audiences from Twitter, or they went viral there. Ben Thompson talks about LinkedIn actually being a big growth, early growth vector for him. Because links did very well, they would convert to his newsletter, sirtechery.com. And, but people have done this all over the place, where they've been consistently viral with threads, build up an audience, and then they take it somewhere else to monetize it, either with subscriptions or ads. But they don't really do that commercial activity on the platform. And so there's always been a question of like, could X or Twitter capture more value? And a lot of that big turning point happened when Elon made the acquisition.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  So, the Elon taking over felt like, okay, it's an entirely new day. Everything's moving way faster. Now, some of those projects had actually been in the works for months or years before. I think Community Notes was the big one, where the Twitter team had been building that infrastructure for a while, but they were just moving slowly.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  They had 5,000 people working on it for over five years.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Probably something like that. But, so Elon, it's not like he kicked off a lot of the, that many of these projects, but he definitely like greenlit them, shut things down, just sped things up, moved more quickly.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  It was a speed thing.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent, secure our wide-angle camera, because the ultra-dome is secured by Okta. So. Uh, 2023 was a big year for expanding character limits. Uh, they'd also previously acquired this Dutch startup, Review, which was a direct competitor of Substack, but that product was shut down in less than two years, like January to January, they only made it two years, never really got it off the, off the ground. And I think it was because it was sort of counter positioned with Twitter. It was kind of like always, oh, well, if we get people on the review platform, they'll leave or

• 6:56John Coogan?

  they'll take their audience elsewhere. It never really felt.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they don't know that a lot of people had some incredible faith that, hey, I want to build my business on, like a Twitter, uh, like.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  I mean, even pre Elon, there had been companies, startups that had built on the Twitter API, which had gone through a number of version changes. Elon made some more extreme changes to that, but there were plenty of times when people would build businesses like too closely to any platform, really. And then they get steamrolled, whether you're, uh, you know, Zynga building on, uh, building Farmville on Facebook, and then they change the algorithm or they change the integration and all of a sudden your growth engine's just gone. Uh, this happened with Teespring. They were selling custom t-shirts. So they would go and figure out a specific profile, like people who run podcasts with the last name Hayes, and then they would like print a custom, they would generate an image of a shirt.

• 7:46Jordi Hays?

  And it'd be like, yes, my name is, my last name is Hayes. Yes, I'm a podcaster. And I'd be like, I gotta, I gotta buy it. I gotta have it.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  It was like, who is buying this cringey, cringey nonsense? But it really sold a ton of shirts and Teespring was on like an absolute, like meteoric rise. And then they changed the algorithm and they stopped a lot of those advertisements because they felt creepy because it was like, wait a minute, like, why am I seeing an ad with my last name and my job title in the image? Like, it's too much. And so, uh, Facebook put a kibosh on that. And, uh, and the rest is history. But, um, you know, they've been working on, on making. X, a more literate, long-form platform for a while, 2023.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  We need to teach our users the English language. We need them to read more than, you know, 180 characters.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  So they've obviously done a ton in video. They've never really leaned into a video library like YouTube. Like, I used to cross-post my YouTube videos on X. Sometimes there were length limits for a while, then they got rid of those, so I could just actually copy a 25-minute YouTube video, put it on X, and it was cool. People wouldn't watch nearly as much as they did on YouTube, but, and, and there was no catalog value. That was like the really weird thing, was that on YouTube, like, my old videos that I haven't uploaded in over a year, and my old videos are still probably getting like, I don't know, half a million views a month, just because people are, every day, they search, like, what's the history of Andorol, or what's the history of Ramp, or what's the history of Xi Jinping?

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they're evergreen content, so just continuously they get served.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then, once someone watches one of my videos, they watch five more,

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, and part of that, if you want to be a serious video platform, you need to be, like, have, you know, actually incentivizing people to watch on TV, like, so much of YouTube watch hours happen on TV, and X, I think, has a streaming TV app, but it's certainly not, doesn't get a lot of love.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I actually made a whole documentary about El Segundo, went around with Augustus and toured everything, and it just didn't really work for my YouTube channel, so I only put it on X. It got a ton of views, and actually, the response was probably better than anything that I would do on YouTube, because it was very tech insider, a lot of VCs were getting up to speed on what was going on in El Segundo. We're having some of the El Segundo folks on the show later today.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  He's not truly El Segundo, but Phil is like spiritually Gundo. You know that. And, and Andorol, in many ways, is spiritually Gundo. Let's take you through the linear lineup, who we have on the show today. We got Jordan Schneider from China Talk coming on at 12:30, then Dan from T1 Energy, Eliot from Dominion Dynamics. We're in hard tech land kind of all day. I'm very excited for this. And then we have Matt Grimm, the co-founder of Andorol and Phil from Dirac, coming in person at 1:30, together, to break it all down for us. On what's going on in building hardware, building defense.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  I remember T one energy is a company that we talked about in Q four of last year. It was a unique situation. I believe it was a Chinese company. Solar manufacturing plant that was forced to sell. Yeah. And now it has a cool brand and new management and the stock is absolutely ripping.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Very excited to have them on the show.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  It is up four hundred and thirty three percent.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I love that we get to.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  In the last six months.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Just find some random company and then all of a sudden we're talking to CEO. Uh, anyway, of course, if you've forgotten linear, it's the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. You should be too. So, um, continuing with the long post journey that X has been on. Twenty twenty three was a massive year. February took it from two hundred and eighty characters to four thousand characters. That's more than I need for most of my posts. I don't think I've ever posted anything longer than that. April expanded it to ten thousand characters and finally in June they maxed it out at twenty five thousand characters.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  That's longer than most blog posts. That's around four thousand words, maybe a little bit more. And you can still thread these posts together. So I was always wondering like, why does articles exist? If long posts are so long that you can put four thousand words there? In fact, um, I took, you know, that one super viral article that everyone, they're all joking that like, oh, he should have waited a couple of days to post it because then he would have won the million dollars.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  It's like how to change your life in one day.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  And wasn't that effectively inspired? Like, my view is like that post.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  They were like, we should do more of this. Let's incentivize a lot more of this.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, yeah. It seemed like Nikita saw that and was like, okay, articles are creating satisfaction on the platform. People like them. Uh, it does seem like the algorithm is, uh, it seemed like at one point the algorithm was maybe misaligned. Not that it was punishing articles, just that it wasn't really processing the time that people would spend in articles and the way they would engage. Because if there's a viral post, people might be more inclined to like it than a long. Long essay that you read forty five, seventy five percent of, and then you get out of it. You actually spent multiple minutes with it. You really enjoyed it, but you forget to like it because that's way down at the bottom, or you forget to retweet it or whatever, or you're not commenting on it. You're just kind of enjoying it reading, and then you close your phone because you're like, oh, wow, I just spent twenty minutes reading this thing.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  I'm moving on with my life, or I got a phone call. And so they needed to dial the algorithm in, and I think that's what's happened. And now I think that essentially articles are first-class citizens in the algorithm. And there's really no downside to posting articles. But that post, that article, how to change your life in one day or something, is like thirty thousand characters. So it almost would have just fit if you just like edited it a little bit more. It would have just fit into a long post, but it worked as an article. There's something about the, there's something about the title and thumbnail that really works there. Maybe, maybe X should do a deal with our partner Eleven Labs and let you listen to these articles. Eleven Labs, of course, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Zach, Zach Voll had a, had a great idea. He said, Grok, summarize this article in two hundred and eighty characters or less. Don't make any mistakes. Thanks. So if you, if you really yearn for the days, the pre-artikel era, just respond and tag Grok under every post and have it turn it back into just regular old-fashioned Twitter content.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  Hundred and forty characters, or even shorter. I mean, I think somebody did that with How to Change Your Life in One Day, because a lot of it was like from Atomic Habits, I guess, which is a very popular book. But all this like lifestyle stuff is always like recomposed from various previous prior art. It's all just reformatting essentially with, with some new flavor, new, new spice. So when articles launched in March of twenty twenty four, it didn't really hit for me. Like, I was not like, oh, I gotta jump on this. I gotta post. You know, we started doing the newsletter in twenty twenty five. Mid-year, we started crossposting. Articles were available. I think we might have tested one or two as an article. Didn't really see a difference, so just kind of stuck with the long posts.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  But last year, so my pieces are usually around 5,000 characters. They fit fine in a long post. I was doing long posts until I saw Lulu Maservi, friend of the show, posted standing out in 2026 as an X article. Now, she's been viral before for going direct, the Going Direct manifesto, which was a thread of long posts. And I like, I think it was maybe just a really long post, or maybe a thread of long posts, but I really liked that format. And I would actually use that format as sort of a template for if I wanted to communicate something in a few paragraphs, I would sort of look at what she did with the Going Direct post and use that as like the backbone. Obviously not taking specific

• 15:32John Coogan?

  words, more just like, okay, you want, you want an intro paragraph, an opening paragraph, a couple of bullet points, a summary, a takeaway, like. And what's really interesting is that her standing out in 2026, it's an X article. It has a header image of these robots. And it grabs you, so you click on it. And it was dropped January 5th, good timing, kickoff the year. It went super viral, millions of views, thousands of likes. But it's really, really short. It's only 443 words. It's under 3,000 characters. So it easily would have fit in a long post. But she went with article, it worked. And when I saw that, I was thinking, okay, maybe we should do, maybe we should do articles for our pieces. And I've been

• 16:15John Coogan?

  doing that and it's been fine. It hasn't been, honestly, the metrics are exactly the same. So maybe I need to work on the titles and thumbnails or something. But it's not like articles have been some magical cure all, or, or, oh, yeah, we're getting 10x more views now that we're using articles. It's kind of the same thing. But it does seem like an interesting format that maybe they will surface.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a better experience as a reader.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Maybe. I think so. It's hard to tell. I mean, you can definitely, if you take advantage of the formatting, maybe. But, and you're doing bullet points and bolding and italics, like you can write.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Embedding posts.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, embedding posts is cool. And also images in the, I saw one that had like graphics and it read almost like a, like a Stratechery piece. It had embedded images and stuff. It was cool. I don't.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Gabe in the chat had an interesting idea. He said above X should acquire Beehive. Which would be kind of interesting because like Beehive Beehive.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, one of the issues with the review acquisition.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  Is that I seemingly, I didn't know anybody that was like building a business on review.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. It was, it was, it seemed like Twitter had done a couple of these like early stage acquisitions. Like, I mean Vine was very early pre-monetization. They did, I think Periscope, the live streaming video platform. That was maybe pre-revenue, like pretty early. Uh, we talked to one founder who sold his company to Twitter before they even launched. And so the, the, the, the previous Twitter management was very quick on these like smaller acquisitions of like pre-launch but venture funded. They, the team's been building for six months. They go and show the Twitter team and Twitter team says, "Hey, how about we take it for a hundred mil?" Or something like that. And it's a great outcome for the founders. And then, uh, years later, they gripe that they should never sell the company, like, uh, like the Vine.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that era, I feel like taught San Francisco that like some of these smaller scale acquisitions were just relatively straightforward, commonplace. And then in the 2020s, people realized that, uh, that, that era just kind of went away.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. It either turned into like these mega Aqua.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Twitter, Twitter had done approximately 79 individual acquisitions.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a lot.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  They did Telepart, which was digital advertising, was half a billion. Magic Pony, 2016 for around 150 million. Nip, social media data aggregation, 134 million. Tap Commerce, uh, which is mobile ad retargeting for a hundred million. Periscope, if you remember that, Vine, TweetDeck. Um, so a bunch of different deals.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Uh, so strategically, this big article push, it feels like another shot at Substack, Chris Bess's company. I didn't put Substack in my article. Cause I'm, I'm up on the algo speak. I'll say unalived. I'm not afraid of. The real word, I guess. No, I am terrified of the algo and being punished and shadow banned. So, so I said, Chris Best's company. This is best practice if you want to talk about Substack. But I, I, I don't know that anyone's going to be rushing to get off of Substack based on this because

• 19:29John Coogan?

  the value of Substack, the, the value prop is that you own your email list. So you have a direct relationship with your, your audience and you could take that anywhere. You could leave at any time. You can even take your Stripe account with you,

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  which is a crazy thing. It's so creator friendly.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  And Substack's made that their brand and they built a great business around it. And long-term, I think Substack should probably figure out how to build some sort of ads product that can run across all of the different Substacks because that would probably

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  Be a total TBPN victory.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  It would, it would.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  They've been very, very anti-

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Anti ads, anti ads. But I just see, like, what does it take to get Substack into the Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit category, sort of like Dacacorn category? And you imagine that for a lot of these, like, if you're, they're clearly trying to push people into the Substack app, but even just embedding ads here and there, it could be done tastefully. I think it could be done in a way that's not too abrasive. And you're getting a lot for a little. Now, of course, like, you know, we use Substack. We don't charge for our newsletter, tbpn.com, you should go sign up. But, so if they put ads on ours, we'd be like, ah, that's sort of a downgrade. We want to put ads in ours. But, but, but I think just from a business perspective, it would make sense and really open,

• 20:49John Coogan?

  will open them up to some big, big dollars at a certain point because there's a very high val- high value audience.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  You had kind of a rough theory that, that maybe there was some logic to doing this just for having new

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Training data. Yeah. So, so there's this idea that, you know,

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Somebody untitled YouTube chats, the data is worth 10x more than one minute.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  There were a few people that were, that were mentioning this. Before we dig into that, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Talk about a, talk about a company that feels very immune to vibe coding.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Plaid.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  You don't want the, if somebody comes to you and they're like, I got plat, but I'm gonna charge you half as much.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  It's like, oh, I'll take the, I'll take the real one.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  I'll take the banking license.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  For storing and processing my customers' financial information.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:41Jordi Hays?

  Noah in the chat says, I don't want to read Substack without ads. So that's.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  That's advertising's strongest soldier.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  But, so, so the question is like, you, you put out this million dollar bounty, how many people will show up? How many articles will actually get posted? I am seeing a lot of articles in the, in the feed. It's also hilarious when you see like a Fortune 500 CEO post an article. She's like, oh damn, are you really down and you need to mill? Like, what's going on, buddy? And it's like, no, they're just like, they're just posting news and they just need to get something out so they use an article. But it's funny to imagine that they're like, oh man, the million would change everything for me. Yeah, it's what I need, it's what I need. But.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Tim, Tim Cook starts ripping articles.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  He's just like.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I need, I, I need to, I can't be like within the same.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  We're not gonna do a keynote this year for the new iPhone. We're dropping an article. And we're releasing it nine months early. No. The question is, is the data valuable? So, a million dollars, how many people will show up? How many people will play the game? How many people will buy a lottery ticket by writing original articles that go viral? Generating articles? There's already a lot of allegations of AI slop in the articles feed. Every time I see an article, somebody tags that AI detector.

• 22:59Jordi Hays?

  Pangram Lab.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Pangram Labs.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I've been seeing, I've been seeing so many people quoting articles, sharing them and say, you need to read this, it's incredibly well-written.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  And then I tap in and it's just obviously.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Slop.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  Slop.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Some people love slop. I mean, we're, we're gonna get into this with the, with the Hollywood reaction to.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  Can we get a pig sound effect?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  To.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Scott.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  To, to the latest Joe Rogan episode. But some people just, there is more and more content on the internet where I see it, me and you can clock it as AI, but you read in the comments and everyone loves it and they're happy. This is what Sam Altman told us, like, one person's slop is another person's treasure. Like, some people like this stuff. Also, there's the interesting counter dynamic, which is, I don't use AI to write. I don't even, I don't even put the final draft through an LLM to like, reality check it or do anything. I just sort of hammer on the keyboard and type and if there's typos or weird, weird phrases, that's my style. You're just hearing it from my brain. It's like

• 24:02John Coogan?

  a brain dump. But that doesn't stop people from commenting on all my pieces, like, this is AI, or did you use AI, or, you know, how do you write so much, blah, blah, blah. So like, there's a little bit of inevitability.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, we should just livestream you writing.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Every morning.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could see me, you could see me lock in with the actual doc right here. I should livestream the, or at least I should put a time lapse out of my screen while I'm doing this. I mean, obviously I use LLMs to research, like, for, like, for this, for this article, I needed all of the dates of different changes to X's and Twitter's, like, character limits. That's obviously something I'm gonna go to an LLM for. Do the research, pull it together, find the sources for me. It's super powered Google search. It's great. But the question is strategically, doesn't seem like anyone's gonna be bailing on Substack today to move over, but there is just valuable, and then there's also the question of like, so you're probably not gonna get your

• 24:58John Coogan?

  own audience list on X, but will you even be able to monetize with subscriptions? X does have subscriptions, but Substack has a way more, like, built out.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the, I wonder what the monthly revenue is for the person that's utilizing subscriptions the best, right? Who's the highest earning subscription driven creator?

• 25:18John Coogan?

  I have a couple of people that subscribe to me and pay me just because they're like, cool, we like you. And I've never posted just to subscribers, but they're just like, they're just like, shut up, keep doing what you're doing.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Riding with Kugan.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  I, I think it's public, so I can say like Gary Tan has just been ride or die for like, years, just sending me five bugs. I'm like, thanks, Gary.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  This is not an ad to go and do that, by the way.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, you will get nothing. But the interesting thing is that Substack offers more than just a one-time subscription monthly. You can pay annually, get a discount. You can also do like VIP tiers, different tiers, access to discords, access to different things, participate in the live stream, get the chat. And then there's also like business plans, group plans. So they just have a way more mature product catalog when it comes to monetizing a customer list or an email list. And then obviously, you can take them elsewhere. So if you ever don't, if you want to, if you're like, "Look, my newsletter product has grown so much that I have like enterprise level needs. I have to be off Substack." You can go and build something from scratch

• 26:22John Coogan?

  that does exactly what you want and has all the different integrations. And, you know, some companies have done that. Other companies, I mean, Free Press has scaled immensely with Substack. And you go to the Free Press's homepage and it's like, it looks like the New York Times. Like, there's like 25 different articles popping up, little subsections. Like, it is a full-featured CMS for like a newspaper, for like a modern newspaper. Anyway, MongoDB. Choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's Mongo. So.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  How did you conclude? What was your takeaway?

• 26:59John Coogan?

  My question was, so, I don't see anyone who's a writer online, who's on Substack, being like, "Okay, now's the moment. A million dollars is on the table. I'm shutting down my Substack and I'm going over to X exclusively." But, a lot of people cross-post. That's what we do. I think a lot of people, if you have a free, if you have a Substack that's part free, part paid, post the free part on X. Why not? It's all upside. It's just more attention that can actually get you into funnel. I believe that the posting of the articles on X has been additive to our Substack list because at the end of the post, we follow up and say, "Hey, this post is emailed as well. You want to go check it out? Go to tbpn.com." And so, I think this has been net growth. I don't think people have been

• 27:42John Coogan?

  like, "Oh, I'm unsubscribing from TBPN's newsletter because I'm getting it on John's random Twitter feed that may or may not surface to me in the algorithm." But I don't think, so I don't think X needs writers to go all in. I just think that they want more copies of the best writing to make their way to X. And so if you have a great YouTube video, they want you to share it on X as well, so then they can surface that to people. If you have a great piece of writing, put it on X as well. And I think this does that, and I think they'll be successful there. And I think they can.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question, I mean, if you're, if they're really successful and you have like YouTube for long form writing, like the UGC platform for long form writing, it's probably, it's probably a solid business, but it's not going to be a juggernaut like YouTube specifically because it's not going to monetize nearly as well, right? You have, like, they don't put ads in articles today.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  It's such an.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  They could add them in, but you're like locked in reading an article versus like when you're watching something.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Totally. Like.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  If somebody's watching football and.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can put it, you can put a two hour YouTube video on your smart TV and it will just play an ad and you just won't, you don't need to do anything. Whereas if you're scrolling an article and then all of a sudden an ad pops up, like you, that breaks the flow of like what you're doing. It's not, it's not a passive experience, it's an active experience. So.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree with you. I want your take on whether, on the actual article experience. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create, code back prototypes and apps fast. So I was chatting with some folks who are really, really big on Twitter, a little group of folks who are all well over 100K. I've gotten there back in like the thread era. They were like thread guys, basically. And, and they were saying like, I don't think Naval's How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky thread would have worked as an article. That the fact that it was all these bite sized pieces, like that's, that's, that was what was special.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Now, I think personally that meta has sort of died and we haven't seen that work, but what do you think?

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Coming back and just unironically ripping threads?

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  I do miss, you miss threads?

• 30:02John Coogan?

  You mean just like, like.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Like, do you miss that era at all? Is it? Can you remember any iconic threads other than Lulu's and Naval's?

• 30:11John Coogan?

  And apparently Lulu was was just a long post. Someone corrected in the chat. So, uh, no, Naval is the main one that I remember. Uh, I probably scrolled a few threads. I actually did have a thread that like actually blew up my account. Uh, so I was at 10,000 followers.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Is this the Alaska one?

• 30:29John Coogan?

  No, that was not that. That got me unfollows because I posted about, uh, bringing tech. You know, I was early on the let's leave California train. I said, we got to go to Alaska. We're not going to Miami. We're not going to Texas. We're going to Alaska because if you have run away global warming, it's going to be beachfront property up there, baby. It's going to be 72 and sunny every day in Alaska.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  Palm trees.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Alternatively, if we solve global warming, we will have unlimited nuclear power. You will be able to heat air condition, do whatever you need in your Alaska compound because you will have a one megawatt nuclear reactor dropped on your doorstep and you will have unlimited power and you'll be lounging in a beautiful scenic mountain retreat, perfectly temperature controlled.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  And Alaska did not like that.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  They did not like that. I got a lot of DMs from a lot of people showing me their guns, saying, if you come up here, California boy, there will be consequences. And, uh, it was a rough day on the internet. I had to lock my account. It was very funny. But, uh, anyway, I survived that. But the, the post that blew up my account was I, I had written a, uh, so Chris Miller had kind of popularized the idea of, of TSMC and Taiwan as an important geopolitical football in the Chi, in the, uh, in the US-China battle. Um, and I'd read the book, really enjoyed it. I had done a YouTube video all about US-China competition that had done very well on YouTube. But so basically what I did was I recontextualized everything that I'd learned and pieced together for that YouTube video into a thread.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  And, uh, I gave it a very salacious title. I said, uh, because FTX was collapsing at the time. Something else was going on crazy. There were like two major current things happening.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT launching?

• 32:10John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's chat GPT launching, but basically I was like FTX is a distraction. You know, Elon Musk is a distraction. Like you need to be focusing on on US-China policy or whatever. And I and I just sort of like contextualized why Taiwan is important for the semiconductor supply chain and the AI boom. And it wasn't anything revolutionary for anyone who was paying attention, but there were a lot of people who just hadn't really learned what ASML was or TSMC was at the time. And so just having that in a nice digestible feed, it went super viral. And because it was so like authoritative, it took me from 10,000 followers to 20,000 followers in like a week. And it was it was like really, really gross, really, really, it's like the clearest jump in the follower

• 32:52John Coogan?

  graph. And then everything else has just been like slow growth. And we know this from posting like you you post like a viral funny banger, it doesn't like double your account. But if you posted a really, really great thread, people would follow you. And I think that's true for the articles too. The guy who wrote the the how to change your life in one day, he has almost a million followers now. And I imagine that he had way less than that because I'd never seen his account before.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so because he's he's providing like insight.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, people could critique the article or say it's, you know, a lot of these ideas have been talked about before. But for better or worse, he summarized like some key insights, he shared it on how to improve your life. That is value that somebody is like, I want to keep improving my life. I'll follow. Or they didn't read the article, they just saved it and followed him.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  They don't have time to improve their life. I'm busy right now.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  They didn't say which day they were going to use. It could be any day.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  So they'll circle back on that.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Circle back.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Whereas if you just make somebody chuckle.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  And then and then there's also the fact that if you spend an hour with someone or it takes half an hour to read that piece from start to finish. If you spend half an hour with someone, you feel like you know their perspective, you've learned more about them, as opposed to you just see some funny post and you're like, ah, that's funny. They made me chuckle. Okay, I don't need to like be in, I don't really have a relationship with that person. But once you've spent a half an hour sort of cohabiting with them, you're more likely to to hang out. So. So I closed out saying that, you know, uh, maybe there's a, you know, article apocalypse. I'm not really seeing it. I think the algorithm is pretty well equipped to handle stuff like this. People always seem grumpy with X generally, and honestly, Nikita specifically a lot of times.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  But I've always felt like the sloppy algorithm changes that happen, like they sort themselves out really quickly. Like there's plenty of times when we will come in on a Monday and we'll be like, wow, the algorithm was really brutal over the weekend. Like I was just seeing like just junk that didn't feel at all tied to what we're interested in. It just seemed like they made some change and someone hacked it and it's all just like viral videos or some quote tweet meta or some meme form.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  There was an era where you'd get eight Elon posts in a row.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  That happened. So there were like a whole bunch of different, there were just a whole bunch of different like crises where people were like, it's over. And then a week later, the algorithm sort of adjusts and learns that people don't actually like all that slop or they don't like this thing. And then they adjust and it's, and it's fine. And so, um, the other little like quick tip is that if you ever really get sick of the for you page, you can actually disable it by uninstalling the app, bookmarking X.com as like a homepage icon that just opens in Safari. If you're on an iPhone and then you can install this extension called social focus that will allow you to turn off the for you page. So it opens to your following tab by default and you just can't even access the for you page. So you can always do that. I've done that for like a month here, a month there.

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Honestly, it's not that much better and it's one of those things that's, you know, classic stated preference versus revealed preference. Stated preference is, oh, I just want to see who I follow. I don't want to see these random viral posts. And then the revealed preference is like, actually some of these viral posts are pretty good. They're pretty funny and I enjoy them. And the problem with the for you, with the following tab is that you. Is that there are some people that post a ton and there are some people that post very rarely and you want to see some sort of even balance and you don't realize that there are some folks that you follow who post a lot, a lot, a lot. And then it's like, really, I just want to see the cream of the crop. I just want to see their best posts, but then I want to see every post from certain people and it's hard to find, too.

• 36:31John Coogan?

  Long term, I think, you know, we'll get to a point where you can like define your algorithm a little bit more, but for now, you're you're you're subject to the whims of Nikita Beer.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Should we talk about?

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Graphite? Absolutely. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. What should we talk about?

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  We should talk about XAI.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. What's going on with XAI?

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  So, Ty Morse.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Did a podcast with, I'm going to potentially not pronounce his name right.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Suliman.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  Suliman Khan Gori.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Who was previously, at the time when the podcast was done.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  He, of course, was working at XAI. He came in. He talked about WTF is happening at XAI, predicting bottlenecks, bootstrapping off the Tesla network, how Elon deals with fires, what it's like working at XAI, Cybertruck bet with Elon, how they built Colossus, how XAI hired experimentation, how Elon recalibrated his timeline estimates. No one tells me no. That's important.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  It's a wild one.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Why the fuzziness between teams is an advantage, testing human emulators as employees, biggest blunders, what a meeting with Elon is like, how Elon gives feedback, figuring out what is truth for Grokpedia, what happens when Elon sees wrong Grok outputs on X, what it's like operating in XAI's war room, and a number of other things. So.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  Massively viral, by the way. Four million views just on X, 5,000 likes. This is a massive

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, like, I'll start by saying that this is fantastic content.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Beautifully shot.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, that.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Ty Moore's has a fantastic team.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Very well done. And, and great content, right? People are so curious about what's happening at XAI, right? We want to understand, you know, how they're approaching different problems.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  And Elon talks about it in such high level. He's talking about, you know, AI, AGI, super futuristic. And then he'll give little details on like some massive build out that he's working on, but he's not really nitty gritty.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  One small problem is, usually a $200 billion company likes to, likes to control who, who's going to go out and do a tell all about the company.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  And specifically with Elon companies, if you, if you hadn't noticed, there's not a lot of people that work for Elon companies

• 38:56John Coogan?

  No.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  that go and do the podcast circuit, go talk about everything going on.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  No, I mean, at SpaceX, Gwen Shotwell has given a few speeches, mostly at like commencement speeches, like inspirational speeches to colleges and that type of stuff. She's not going on Rogan or different space podcasts or tech podcasts. It's very rare to see content with her. And then Kiko Donchev is their head of launch and he will do engagement with NASA. And if there's a, if there's a real heavy industry focused panel, he might attend, but he's not also, he's also not just hopping on stuff. And then beyond that, you can't really name it.

• 39:36Jordi Hays?

  Generally, he's not trying to create like thousands of superstars, right? He does, he wants you to work for him forever.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw a post in here.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  But when a company, when like, when, when somebody, when someone super talented leaves, it's not like Elon in general is lining up and saying like, let me do your first round. Let me do your first, like, you know, 10 million, 20 million, 50 million bucks. Right? He's actively trying to incentivize people to not develop big brands. He wants people to stay. And he wants to be able to control the messaging.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  And wait, speaking of that, look at this, look at this Sam Sheffer post. He went and found 15 years ago, they did a SpaceX office tour. It is so like, it's just, it's crazy. It just looks like a cubicle office. But in there, Sam Sheffer finds that there's someone who works on propulsion named Matthew McCune. McCune. And he's been on propulsion for 17 years and eight months. Like, that's exactly. That's exactly what Elon wants. A true believer who's riding with him through thick and thin and has probably done extremely well financially, worked on really interesting problems.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Is he going to be a household name? Is he going to be a podcast circuit? No. But does Matthew really want that? Probably not. He wants to, he wants to propel the rockets and that's exactly what he's done for nearly two decades now. So that's the Elon strategy and you should know that going into that environment. Maybe it should be more explained, but it certainly ended in disaster in this.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the funny thing is, I didn't catch all the interview, but they talk about like how like AR, HR in general is like not super formalized at the company. And so you can also imagine that like PR and media, the media relations team is not super active. Maybe nobody in HR said, hey, don't go do it an hour long podcast. You know, if you're anybody but Elon, maybe don't do an hour long podcast telling all. And so of course people, what happened ultimately, Suliman.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  He said he's left. We don't actually know what happened. But it is odd to go do a, to go do an hour long interview and then.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, so I think like good intentions potentially took the concept which he talks about in here. No one tells me no, a little bit too far.

• 41:58Jordi Hays?

  But I posted, I posted earlier, you can't even share the internal secrets of your AI lab on a cinematic podcast in this country anymore.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Brutal. Andrew Curran had some good context here. He said, "The speculation is that this is the result of the interview he gave where he said XAI intends to run 1 million human emulations, a digital version of Optimus for online work, which will be powered by leasing compute from Tesla owners when the car is parked and charging." So, that's an interesting development that we actually haven't heard about before. This idea that you have the, you know, a pretty advanced AI chip doing self-driving in the Teslas, they're just sitting there overnight. Why not do some inference and lease that back to the-

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  Why is it a digital version of Optimus? Is it gonna be sitting there in the corner, like flippy?

• 42:51John Coogan?

  I mean, I think realistically, it's probably just like agentic rollouts. So, if it's for online work, it's like, you know, what are a bunch of tasks that you could, you could like turn Grok loose on? Everything from like, you know, the classic like order DoorDash in a simulation, try and buy something on Amazon in a simulation, all these things that require moving around on a screen, doing computer work, using Excel, building stuff, writing code, all these things that require a lot of heavy inference to roll it out, create a plan, write some code, test it, go back, double check, test it again, blah, blah, blah.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Regoff says, I somewhat remember, but maybe not quite in as much detail, right? I feel like when I remember him talking about this kind of thing, it was like, "Yeah, we have like distributed compute that we can leverage."

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, this might be in more detail, but still, again, if you're at a company, any company, you should probably clear the, the, the public speaking engagements with-

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Solomon didn't just read Lulu's Going Direct. He studied and he sat down.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  And I actually DM with him briefly this morning, and I think he's gonna work on a startup. So, we'll have to have him on at some point when he's ready to talk about it.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  I mean, he certainly has lore now.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, honestly, kind of benefit of like going and working at a Google or Meta is they'll straight up tell you. Don't talk to the media unless you've been explicitly.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, prepped or or or go. I mean, there's different. There's different strategies at different companies. Some companies are totally cool with a bunch of people going out and talking about their business. But yeah, the this seems like one of the more secretive organizations. So a life lesson there. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate seventy percent of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's go over to Ben Affleck.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Ben Affleck. You know, I I had a premonition, a little preview that this was going to happen. He went on Joe Rogan and gave some very good takes on AI. There's some discussion over how good of takes they are. But I ran into somebody that said that they met Ben Affleck. They were like a proper AI researcher, and they said that they met Ben Affleck and he used compute as a noun. And they were like, yeah, that was impressive. Like, he's talking about like, scaling compute. He's actually very, very deep in this, which, you know, he went to Harvard. It's not. It's not shocking. But I think I think there's just a general vibe that like Hollywood is behind or out of the or out of the loop to the point where they wouldn't know the big models. They wouldn't have tested them. It's like, no, this is their business.

• 45:28Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there are some like Joseph Gordon Levitt.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  Pretty tapped in, right?

• 45:32John Coogan?

  I mean, is his wife on that board of opening high back in the day?

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, she was.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  She was. Yeah. How you can't get more tapped in than that.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, hasn't he just been spewing like AI safety nonsense constantly? Yeah, he's a big safety guy.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  He's a doomer or just a safety guy?

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he's a doomer. Doomer. He said, today, we're announcing a new organization called the Creators Coalition on AI.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Well, fortunately, we have the counterpoint to that because Ben Affleck is not a doomer. He's actually pretty whitepilled, and it seemed like a really good interview. Let's play this first clip from Forrest, who says that Ben Affleck has great takes across the board.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  Ryan says, what if he's just acting? You try to get Chat GPT or Claude or Gemini to write you something. It's really shitty. And it's shitty because by its nature, it goes to the mean, to the average. And it's and it's not reliable. And it's, I mean, I just can't even stand to see what it writes. Now, it's a useful tool if you're a writer, and you're going, ah, what's the thing? I'm trying to set something up, or somebody sends someone a letter, but it's delayed two days and gets and it can give you some examples of that. I actually don't think it's very likely that it can, it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful, or, and in particular, that it's gonna be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood, like that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen. I think

• 46:50Speaker 00

  it's not, I think it actually, it turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of presented it. Um, and really what it is, is gonna be

• 46:58John Coogan?

  He's plateau pilled.

• 46:59Speaker 00

  Just like sort of visual effects.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  There was a line in here where, yeah, there was a line in here where I was like, that is a Carpathian line. Like, he definitely heard this from Carpathian. He's listening to our cash for sure.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  For money. I can't. You can sue me, period. It kind of feels to me like, the thing we were talking about earlier, where there's a lot more fear.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  So, the, the, the whole idea of like, these models being mid, that's not quite true. I, I mean, it's hard with like, to develop a reinforcement learning environment with a verified reward for like, a, a great script that will break through, because even the great script writers have flops that are unexpected. Literally, everyone thinks it's great, and then it goes out and it just, uh, is a box office bomb. Um, we, we, we can pause this for a minute. Um, but, uh, later, he actually makes a stronger case, I think, because they're talking about Dwayne The Rock Johnson in the film, The Smashing Machine, and Matt Damon is recalling an interview that he did with Dwayne Johnson about his, you know, one of the most climactic scenes in The Smashing Machine, uh, that's very

• 48:00John Coogan?

  emotional, and they, and they, and he asks Dwayne, you know, how did you pick this, you know, motion? He, he pulls up a sheet, because he's sad, and like, what were you conjuring? What were you drawing on to create that experience as an actor and bring that emotion to the screen? Because Matt Damon's saying like, I love that, I love that scene, I loved your performance. Where'd that come from? Because you're-

• 48:25Jordi Hays?

  Was he thinking about content without ads, in order to draw on this sort of like, deep sad?

• 48:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. That might be what, that does it for you, but, I mean, uh, Dwayne Johnson gave like, a very emotional response about, uh, a, a family member who was diagnosed with cancer, and he was in the room when she got the news, and so, uh, and so, her reaction, he was like, channeling that, it was- Very emotional. And then the other one was, I think, about another family member who had substance abuse issues. And so it was just this very unique blend of human experiences that he was able to bring to bear. And I continue to think that the lore and the storytelling that happens outside of a piece of content is as important as the actual content in many cases. This was the same thing with art and the NFT boom.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  It's not like the scarcity is important, but the storytelling behind the art piece is a lot of it. Like, people like a Van Gogh because they know about him cutting off his ear and all this history. And he's in all the history books and everyone just knows Van Gogh. And yes, you could go.

• 49:29Jordi Hays?

  Even with cars, right? It's a car is worth more if the prior, if the previous owner had, was significant in some way.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. A Steve McQueen is gonna, is gonna sell for more. And, and I think that, that for certain storytelling elements, for certain stories, that lore of like who this person is and their likeness. And then, and then he also makes a really good point that it's like, yes, you can, I mean, you can obviously generate something that looks exactly like a Van Gogh right now. You can paint it with someone who knows exactly how to paint like Van Gogh. It's not gonna have anywhere near the value. And, and when he gets to the idea of just AI generating a Dwayne Johnson movie, it's like, well, he'll sue you immediately. And that's very easy. And you've been able to Photoshop Dwayne Johnson into marketing materials for years.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  And we've had a system for counteracting that. Like, you have to pay licensing fees and that will happen. So he has a good, he has a good balance. We can go into this second clip from Barely AI. I think that's Trung Fans company because it's a little bit long. It's about a four minute piece. So while we pull that up, let me tell you about Labelbox, RL environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Leading AI teams.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  Get in the box. The label box.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  The label box. Uh, let's pull up Ben Affleck diving a little bit deeper and we might have to skip ahead.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've been spending time looking at this. Like, my belief is, it's sort of like, what's gonna happen with electricity?

• 51:00John Coogan?

  So we can skip to like 50 seconds.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  Well, a lot of shit's gonna happen with electricity. And it's, and it's, don't think it's very likely that it can, it's gonna be able to write anything meaningful. Or, and in particular, that it's gonna be making movies like from whole cloth, like Tilly Norwood. Like, that's bullshit. I don't think that's gonna happen.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  So, I think that he, he basically says that like, he doesn't think that like an iconic, amazing movie is gonna be generated by AI. And I sort of agree with that, but I think it's important to consider, like, what are we defining as a movie? Because we don't really watch movies anymore anyway. People watch content. And if you think about it, like, you know, decades ago, people might see one movie a month or one movie a week. And that's like two to eight hours a month of screen time. Well, now people are doing two to eight hours of screen time a day. But, uh, but it, but it's these fragmented pieces.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  And so if, if AI seeps into the cracks of, within the cracks, within the cracks, and you're, and it's, the goal is not to create the experience of a two-hour movie that you show in a theater and you get everyone to come and buy tickets.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  Joe Rogan's really turned into Dwar Kesh for A-listers. Just come on and talk about AI, right? Remember, uh, McConaughey was talking about wanting this like personal LLM?

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Where you can log the data in.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, that one was a little bit rougher than this. Uh, Affleck's gotta die. Let, let's continue with Affleck.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  I think it's, I think it actually, it turns out the technology is not progressing in exactly the same way they sort of

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Rich Sutton.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  presented it. Um, and really what it is, it's gonna be a tool, just like sort of visual effects. And yeah, it needs to have language around it. You need to protect your name and likeness. You can do that. You can watermark it. Your, those laws already exist. You can't, I can't sell your fucking picture for money. I can't. You can sue me, period. I might have the ability to draw you, to make you in a very realistic way, but that's already against the law.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  And the unions are gonna, I think the guilds are gonna manage this where it's like, Okay, look, if this is a tool that actually helps us, for example, we don't have to go to the North Pole, right? We can shoot the scene here in our parkas and, you know, whatever it is. And but then make it appear very realistically as if we're in the North Pole. It'll save us a lot of money, a lot of time. We're going to focus on the performances and not be freezing our ass off out there and running back inside.

• 53:20Jordi Hays?

  Pause for a second.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Just like Spencer Tracy and. What if?

• 53:24John Coogan?

  Before you rebut this, let me tell you about that vibe.co where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. Continue.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  Small chance that AI saves Hollywood as as a place, right?

• 53:42John Coogan?

  You're getting claps.

• 53:42Jordi Hays?

  As a place.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:43Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is one of the issues right now is filming is so expensive in LA. There's so much red tape that people have to go to Atlanta, Canada, Europe, whatever, international. And but all the all the all the talent, the writers, directors, producers, the platforms, they're still here, right? It's very depressing. It's a bad vibe. All the restaurants are shutting down. Everything's cooked. But if you can start to generate the content here, just on your computer, there's a chance that you see a kind of resurgence in in Hollywood, the place, right?

• 54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think that realistically, that is the strategy that that the industry should take because like having this concentration here, there's already so much talent. Keeping it here and actually embracing AI is much more likely to revitalize the city.

• 54:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's there's an incredible quote in here. Hopefully we can get to it. Let's let's skip ahead and play because he has a line that truly is directly out of Andre Kirkpatrick's mouth. Let's play.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Thing we were talking about earlier where there's a lot more fear because we have the sense that existential dread is going to wipe everything out.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Right.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  But that actually runs counter, in my view, to what history seems to show.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Jevon's paradox.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Slow, it's incremental.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Um, I think a lot of that rhetoric comes from people who are trying to justify valuations around companies. We're going to change everything. In two years, it's going to be a more.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  It's literally a Kirkpatrick line.

• 55:10Speaker 00

  The reason they're saying that is because they need to ascribe a valuation for investment that can warrant the cap expense.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  He didn't just watch Kirkpatrick.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Oh, you know.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Then.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  He's sitting there taking notes.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Make the social network three, but it's just about Dwarash and Karpathi hanging out and Ilya. It's just about AI research. It's about, it's about an exciting NERIPS and that's it. App loving profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. People are already having fun with the memes out of this. I like this amend and pretend Ben Affleck on AI software. I suspect many AI native software companies are misrepresenting their growth and quality of revenue. Use of credits, annualizing proof of concept revenue and lack of annual contracts lowers the overall quality of revenue and ultimately the multiple.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's not that, I mean, this is a joke. He didn't actually say that, but he's not that far off from what he's actually saying.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  I hope this meme runs way further because it's so good.

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  I love it. Oh, Forrest also clipped Ben Affleck talking about the GPT four O people. Let's play this because this is interesting. And while we pull it up, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. We are very pleased to be partnered with Cisco. AI's new frontier, the edge. Let's do it.

• 56:40Speaker 00

  Early AI, the line went up very steeply and it's now sort of leveling off. I think it's because, and yes, it'll get better, but it's going to be really expensive to get better. And a lot of people were like, fuck this. We want chat GPT four because it turned out like the vast majority of people who use AI are using it to like, as like companion bots to chat with at night. So there's no work. There's no productivity. There's no value to it. I would argue there's also not a lot of social value to getting people to like focus on an AI friend who's, you know, telling you that you're great and listening to everything you say and being sick of it. That's sort of a side issue.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's just enraged over there.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  What's your rebuttal?

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Let's give Tyler a rebuttal.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  I think most of these takes are like pretty outdated.

• 57:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Like writing is actually AI writing. You can still tell that it's AI, but it's like, it's good.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Speaker 03

  Videos are like, I think.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, sell a screenplay then. Sell a screenplay.

• 57:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, shop a screenplay.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, but why would I sell a screenplay? I could just make the whole movie myself.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  Okay. Just make the movie.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  He has this idea like.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Make the finished movie, call on Netflix and get a million dollar advance for your movie.

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Instead of filming in Antarctica, you can just get in the parkas and film it here, right? You don't need the parkas either because you can just have them be in normal clothes.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  And then it's like, well, you don't actually need the people, right? Because you can just maybe fine tune a model so you get consistent characters.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 58:08Speaker 03

  And then.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I will say, I will say just in the last two weeks, I am getting served AI content. That's pretty good.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Pretty good. There's some pretty good stuff out there. Now, a lot of it's like, a lot of it still has that like creative human element. Like someone will take an iconic movie scene.

• 58:25Jordi Hays?

  Still all about the idea.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  It's about the idea.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  And the idea didn't come from.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  It's about the idea.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  From the model.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  It's a bull market for ideas.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  It'll be good.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, I, I do feel like.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  That does feel like the next breakthrough.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  This idea that, uh, Ben saying, I would, I would push back a little bit on Ben saying like, you're not just gonna be able to generate a film.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  You will, but it won't be a film in the sense that it won't be Titanic. It won't be something that everyone goes to the movie theater, sits down, watches the same film. It will be a lot of films that are for different people. I don't think there'll be anything.

• 58:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm just saying like, people are gonna, people are gonna create like insane fan fiction style, hero's journey, kind of like, like standardized plot. But for a specific sub community, you'll have like one subreddit where everyone has watched it.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  And I mean, there, there is a lot of just slop movie content on streaming platforms right now. You can just go and watch.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Gap year Tyler, put Aflac in the truth zone.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Not, not everything is, yeah, not every movie is, is, you know, is Titanic, is, you know, Sicario. Like a lot of movies.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Look on Netflix.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  There's a lot of stuff that's like, yeah, they spent a million dollars, but.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Every time I, every time I look on Netflix, I'm like, is, these are, these are films?

• 59:39John Coogan?

  I know. There's a lot of slop on there. Uh, anyway.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  So I, I think, um, like in, in Hollywood, at least like I like a lot of movies. Um, like there's certain writers that I like.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you like movies? Wait, you said you like movies?

• 59:53Speaker 03

  Alright.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Name every film.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Name every film on the TVP and chat best film list.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Movie list.

• 1:00:00Speaker 03

  Okay, but you always hear about like certain writers, they have a hard time getting their films made because maybe it's like kind of a weird concept or something like it's it's hard to market. But this is like AI is actually much better for them, right? Because if you have someone who's like actually has some like unique look at the world or they're like very creative or something like AI is like super good for them, but kind of only for them, right? So maybe in the industry, it's not super great. But for the people like if there's a certain director that I like really love, they're gonna be, you know, they're gonna be able to make way more of their movies or whatever, you know, instantiate all their ideas.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  Why are people saying that the Papa Thai is is AI generated? This song's from 2013. Someone saying that there's the most viral song of 20 of the year so far is a is an AI generated song, but it must be based on another. It's an AI cover of a human written song. Okay, yeah, so it's like style transfer on top of it's like a it's like a filter. This still feels like tool level. Not to push back. I mean, that is that is an interesting watershed moment that something that involves AI could be so dominant. But there is a lot of like human work at at play there to build the original song that then was was edited with

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  AI. Anyway, cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Anything else on Hollywood? Or should we move on to the battle between?

• 1:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Chat is calling Tyler based zoomer.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  He's a zoomer. It's good. Good times. Okay, so there's an update to the Elon Musk OpenAI lawsuit, which is sitting at about 60% chance that Elon wins on Kalshi right now on the prediction markets. But Elon Musk is now seeking. So on the day that the Brockman files went out, started going viral, OpenAI put out a a release. They they countered some of the narratives, added some more context, but they also sent out a letter to their investors saying, hey, look, we think it's going to be $34 million or something at worst. We'll have to pay him back for what he donated, but.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, they said, we think, we think this is the most, but it could be more.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  It could be more. And Elon said, yeah, it's going to be more. It's going to be $134 billion in damages is what Elon is seeking. Elon Musk's legal team argues that his early funding and involvement materially contributed to OpenAI's rise, which is now valued at 500 billion, and he wants a slice. The lawsuit says OpenAI has become a for-profit company entitling Musk to compensation tied to the value created from his early contributions. Musk, Musk helped found OpenAI in 2015 and donated approximately 38 million in early funding. When asked about the lawsuit, Elon Musk responded, "I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war."

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  And here's the thing, here's the thing. So, so, great line.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:03Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think this lawsuit is the war.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a battle in a longer war.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  And I think that it, it, it may play a role

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  in how the, and how this sort of like war between XAI and OpenAI or Elon versus Sam evolves. But ultimately, like, this judge is not going to make, you know, the judge and jury are not going to make a decision that just like decides the war, right?

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  It's just, uh, uh, like, the war is going to be won by overwhelming

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  domination in the categories that they compete, which right now, consumer enterprise.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  If he gets that, it's like over 25% of the company, something like that.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  And that's going to be, and that's going to be hard, again, depending, I'm sure it'll come out how much Sam owns exactly in this, in this, in the case.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  But, um, it's going to be hard to justify that he deserves more than Sam, given, given their.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  And also just play out what happens if Elon does get all 134 billion. It's like you're not CEO, you're not, you don't have board control, you don't have super voting shares, but you're a massive shareholder that can just constantly do shareholder lawsuits. And so that's going to be incredibly annoying and very bad. But at the same time, like maybe a distraction, how do you actually get to control if that's what Elon's going for? It's a very, very odd scenario to work through, even though I don't, I don't think it's likely that it lands there. We will, we will see what the judge thinks of the, and where the damages land if he wins, which is still, you know, not guaranteed by any

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  means. It could, it could wind up being a furoc victory for Elon. It could be something where he wins the, he wins the battle, but he loses the war in this, in the sense that like, it's a distraction, there's going to be a ton of discovery, it'll be, you know, ultimately, even if he gets 100 billion, he's worth 700 billion. It's like, you know, drop in the bucket, or, I mean, he's like 10% richer then, okay. Does that really matter? 20% richer? Of course it matters, but it's not

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Abe says, once I churn from ChatGPT, they are screwed.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  [laughing]

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  The straw that broke the

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, a couple of people have been coming out rallying supportive Elon, saying that they're, they're churning, they're out. Seems like Sequoia is, is, is maybe

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Happy to diversify.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Happy to diversify. They're planning a big investment into Anthropic, joining a, a round led by GIC and Co2. They're investing 1.5 each. Anthropic is raising to aim 25 billion. And this is, yeah, Sequoia gets the Financial Times article because it's, it's an exciting, exciting moment to have them pick. So, Financial Times says, Sequoia Capital is lining up a big investment into Anthropic, throwing its weight behind the AI startup for the first time as part of a funding round set to raise tens of billions of dollars. The California Adventure Capital Group is funding a round led by Singaporean sovereign wealth fund GIC and US investor Co2, who are contributing 1.5 billion each, according to multiple people. These people said Anthropic is raising 25 billion in a deal that values

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  the company at 350, more than doubling its 170 billion dollar valuation, just four months ago. We've heard about this round for months now, but these things take a long time. So, we won't be ringing the gong until we get Dario on the show and the, and the deal is closed. So Microsoft and Nvidia have committed to invest up to 15 billion into the company. And VCs and other investors are doing 10 of the 25 that they're raising. Sequoia obviously had the shakeup, roll off both. In charge of Sequoia passed on previous funding rounds for Anthropic, was wary of the concentration of VC investment into a handful of highly valued startups, arguing that venture capital was not an asset class. He said in an interview last year that throwing money into Silicon Valley doesn't yield more great companies.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  He was ousted in November with the firm's partners, electing Pat Grady and Alfred Lin to co-lead the firm instead. Sequoia was an early investor in Google, Apple.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Stewart's.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Stewart's, Google, Apple, Airbnb and Stripe and has backed some of Anthropic's biggest rivals. Sequoia invested in OpenAI's funding round last year and Elon Musk's AI group XAI. So venture capital firms rarely back rival startups in the same field, preferring to pick winners in each category. But the scale of the financial opportunity in AI has changed that approach. And Claude Code is just too much fun. They love it, they can't stop using it. And so they had to get a check in, but.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Got to get a piece.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web servers, apps and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Continuing. Little known fact, Sequoia was an early investor in Ilford Nio, owning 6.3% of the company at its 1997 IPO. I love that the Sequoia team in the early days was like doing pizza joints and restaurants and software. You know, didn't they own Chuck E. Cheese, right?

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  That was a funny one. So yeah, this is from Andrew Reid. Ilford Nio owns and operates 13 full-service, white tablecloth, Italian restaurants, serving creatively-prepared, premium-quality Italian cuisine based on authentic regional recipes. What a fantastic business. And Sequoia Capital got a huge slug, 6.3% at the IPO.

• 1:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so sad news. Ilford Nio, how do you say it?

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Ilford Nio.

• 1:08:30Jordi Hays?

  Ilford Nio, as they're closing their restaurant in the Bay.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Ilford Nio was like the cool spot to go before high school dances when I grew up. It was like the, I think there's one in Pasadena. It's really good. I hope that they can keep it open somehow or someone can.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  This feels like FTX.

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  You know, shutting, you know, shutting down, closing locations.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  So much history.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Sequoia involvement.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Sequoia involvement.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Now, that was obviously years and years ago. Anyway, these, these guys love violating narratives.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  It is so funny to think about Sequoia getting a deck for a restaurant.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  Be like, this is right.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get, we gotta get into this.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  This is right down.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get in, right down the fairway.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Right down the fairway, this is our sweet spot. We've been waiting. We had a market map of restaurants. We, we had Italian, authentic Italian carved out. There was no one there. We, we did a, we did a two axis graph. Italian, authentic. You're in the sweet spot. Well, you got a deal. We're taking 6%.

• 1:09:33Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna believe this. The founder for the, for the partner meeting invited us to the restaurant. The food was fantastic.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  You know, they, they actually did another restaurant later. They did the Melt. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Sequoia, yeah, Sequoia did the Melt, uh, which is a grilled cheese spot. It's still going. It's all around LA. I, I, I enjoy the Melt.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  That is.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Grilled cheese.

• 1:09:52Jordi Hays?

  As if I needed a reason to love Sequoia more.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  I know. Amazing.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're supporting the grilled cheese.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  It's a really funny story because the guy, the founder, I believe was like a amazing physicist, like a genius mathematician or someone like really, really quantitative. And they were like, you're the one that can solve fast casual grilled cheeses. And I think he scaled the business. I think it's done pretty well, but.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Wall Street Journal article from 2014, Sequoia Backs The Melt Moves Beyond Grilled Cheese.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, they have burgers now. They have soups. I, I used to go there.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  They got burger melts, chicken melts, mac and cheese.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Get a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup. It was delicious. It was amazing. Anyway, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So, uh, David Sacks says, narrative violation. And Joe Weisenthal says, these guys love violating narratives. Uh, the narrative violation is that the largest AI data center uses roughly the same amount of water as two burger joints. They are over, there are over 200,000 fast food restaurants in the United States. So this is a tiny amount. This is of course from semi-analysis. They did a whole write-up, a breakdown, uh, comparing various water usage. We were asking, when is the semi-analysis water model coming? Uh, well, it's here.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  And they and they did a whole analysis on how much water these data centers are using. And it's a lot lower than people think. It's in many cases, less than golf courses. It's not nothing, but it certainly seems manageable, which is great news because people have been worried about this. Now we have some hard data to point to when you want to say, hey, the water thing is actually not that big of a deal. Let's focus on the energy thing because that actually is a big deal. Let's build some nuclear power plants. Let's get some solar on the ground and let's let's get some more energy up into the right. So there's another narrative violation. Another narrative violation has hit the timeline.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  David Sacks' narrative violation. According to BlackRock, the U.S. does not have enough workers to meet the surging demand for the construction boom. AI is creating too many jobs. And there's a beautiful picture of a Overnight success. Some sort of construction equipment. And so the BlackRock is now warning that a worker shortage could hurt construction boom. We heard that hilarious story.

• 1:12:13Jordi Hays?

  If I was graduating, you know, high school, college, didn't want to work in an office. I would actually get a plane ticket down to Texas. I'd show up to Abilene with my ID and say, put me to work.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:27Jordi Hays?

  And I bet you could get a job.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  I've told I've told several people to do that, at least like take the trip to some of these like new gold rush towns and see if there's a way to bring your business there as a real estate agent, lawyer, like whatever you're doing. Like actually go and understand like, how much is this going to change the community? Because it certainly has in the past. Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  We were hanging out with some folks at the Singer Drivers Club yesterday. Our friend of the show, Paul, and a number of the coaches who are professional drivers were talking about how much a legend, George, founder of CrowdStrike is. Like he has, he has the respect of like the most elite drivers in the world. It's like this guy is the real deal.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Speaking of driving. We have seen Elon, he's beefing with Sam, he's suing OpenAI. And he wants one hundred and thirty six billion, something like that. He said that he will drop the lawsuit if they change their name to closed AI. And there has to be, there has to be a point where if the judge is about to actually issue one hundred and thirty six billion.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Call up Delaware, hey.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  I got a name change.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  This is, this is not a joke. I mean, like, like, would ChatGPT actually see a decline in user numbers if they change the company's name to closed AI? I don't think so. I think a lot of people just think about this chat, they think about ChatGPT. They maybe know OpenAI, they maybe know Sam Altman's name, they don't know Greg Brockman, like, the average ChatGPT user could probably deal with the name change.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't think Ben, I don't think Ben Affleck would be able to handle it.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  I know, you know, he would be upset, but truly, like, I mean, Facebook rebranded to Meta, it's entirely new name.

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Okay, John, but like, realistically, the lawsuit's not getting dropped because of the name change, a post is not a contract.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  He will abide by the results, okay? He will abide by the results.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's also, he's also asking if we should buy, if he should buy Ryanair, have you seen that?

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen that, but, but, but I have another, I have another way to resolve the lawsuit, okay? So, when, when Elon was beefing with Zuck, do you remember when they were gonna go in the octagon? They were gonna do, they were gonna fight it out, they were gonna do UFC, mixed martial arts battle. Do you remember what they were fighting over?

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:14:53John Coogan?

  Isn't that hilarious? Do you remember what they were fighting over?

• 1:14:55Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  I can't remember, I can only remember the fight. But, I looked it up, and they were fighting because, uh, Mark Zuckerberg was about to launch Threads. And it was, and Elon was in this vulnerable position where he, where he levered up to buy Twitter. And he bought it sort of at the top, and Twitter, and the whole market was down, and he was legally obligated to buy it. And so there was a lot of debt, there was a big question of like, what is he gonna do with Twitter? Is he gonna be able to juice it and get the ad product working, all the advertisers were leaving? He was in a vulnerable position, and that's when Mark Zuckerberg was like, I'm jumping in with my competitor Threads, and I'm leveraging the Instagram network, I'm really piping everyone in, uh, I'm, it's a shot across the bow. And so Elon said, we gotta set.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Connor Hayes, absolute dog, absolute dog.

• 1:15:36John Coogan?

  He played Connor in charge, uh, and, uh, And Elon took it personally and said, we got to settle this in the in the octagon. And but it never happened. They were thinking about doing the Coliseum. Dana White said, I'll officiate. I'll make it happen. I'm down. Like, I'm into this. Never happened. But I was thinking, how can Sam and Elon settle their lawsuit that doesn't require a bunch of jurors in Oakland wasting a bunch of time in the courtroom? They got to settle it on the track.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were going to say pay-per-view as well.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Obviously, they're not getting in the octagon. That's not going to happen.

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Track is good. Tesla Tesla starts their own Formula One team. Sam's got his McLaren F1.

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I want to see Sam in the McLaren F1, Elon in the Tesla Plaid. I want them around the Nürburgring, 24 hours Le Mans style. They got to go for 24 hours. And then and then they got to do they got to do a zero to 60, or they got to do a quarter mile race. They got to do an illegal street race for sure. That's definitely going to happen. They also got to do a drift track. I want to see them both drifting. And they probably got to do a Pike's Peak as well. I want to hear both of them racing up Pike's Peak. And then you do sort of like best of five. Like, you do a 24 hours of Le Mans, see who does best there, average that with whoever's quickest off the line in a quarter mile.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  The drag race, too.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Maybe throw in an Indy 500. I want like a month of Elon and Sam just racing various vehicles against each other.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  And this would satisfy the people that are saying, pause AI.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, the AI pause people would be like, this is great. Okay.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  We'll pause.

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  Yes. And it's a month of live streamed races between Sam and Elon.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  It's like Tour de France.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. They go from one place to another, do every every different circuit.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bobby says, and a cannonball.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  And they definitely have to do a cannonball. Just whoever gets from New York to LA faster, we drop the lawsuit. They win the lawsuit. That would be ideal. Anyway, Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So, Rune posted, do your duty while weeping if you must. There's nothing clean and gentle in the crooked timber of human relations. And Gabriel says, every Rune tweet contains material, non-public information, and it's your job to get it out. And there has been a lot to read into the Ruin Tweets lately. He's been on a tear, but we won't, we won't speculate anymore. What else should we do?

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  In the journal.

• 1:17:59John Coogan?

  In the journal.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Why the tech world thinks the American dream is dying.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Silicon Valley fears this is the last chance to amass generational wealth before AI makes money worthless.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  People are really into the underclass. This got a lot of commentary, a lot of chatter, thousand comments on the WSJ.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a confusing subtitle.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:19Jordi Hays?

  Because why would you, if, if AI makes money, like, the people that think AI is gonna make money worthless are the ones that are just gonna go sit in the park, right? Is that the whole point?

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into it.

• 1:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  Silicon Valley is filled with all sorts of dreams, but one of those wild-eyed ideas, long debated on subreddits and in hacker houses, is becoming a real-life nightmare. Will the AI boom be the last chance to get rich before AI makes money essentially worthless?

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  One note.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Jordi Hays?

  There are some people that love making money so much, they will keep doing it for the love of the game. It's just gonna be like a sport.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  It'll be like going and playing, putting on the cleats and playing a little soccer, right? You're just running up, you just wanna run up the score sometime.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Even if, even if money becomes worthless, you know people are still gonna be looks-maxing. It's gonna be all status games, it's all gonna be height-maxing, various levels of inserts in the shoes, it's gonna be a whole.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, what I've been saying is like, in that scenario, it would actually just be like a video game. Like, yeah, I made a unicorn.

• 1:19:18John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Did it change my life? No. I just wanted to prove that I could do it.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's like somebody that's running a marathon and...

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  Grow a unicorn? Like, like the bio company we talked to? What do you mean make a unicorn?

• 1:19:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, like actually build a company?

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Oh, build a company.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Just purely for the love of the game.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Not like a literal unicorn.

• 1:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Because in this AI abundance era, you could potentially go to Claude Code and say, don't make mistakes, make a unicorn.

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Make a unicorn.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  Genetically modify a horse.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, continuing. The argument is that tech companies and their leaders will become a class unto their own with infinite wealth. No one else will have the means to generate money for themselves because AI will have taken their jobs and opportunities. In other words, the bridge is about to be raised for those chasing the American dream, and everyone is worried about being left on the wrong side. It's the kind of FOMO that, on first blush, seems to require a huge suspension of disbelief, but the idea's mere existence helps explain some of the increasing class worries in California. We're a growing movement to tax billionaires. We're calling this the business elimination tax is the new branding, according to Lulu, is roiling the Democratic Party. Affordable housing is real concern, and the idea of the middle class seems out of reach. Yet,

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  it smacks of sci fi thinking, but in San Francisco, it feels real, and it's made more believable by the exploits of Elon Musk, the rise of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and warnings by Anthropic's Dario about Great Depression like worker displacement. The transition will be bumpy, Musk said on this month on a podcast. We'll have radical change, social unrest, and immense prosperity.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of a roller coaster ride.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  He said universal high income is his term for it. And that's Musk's best case scenario. History is filled with technology booms that create new winners and losers. AI optimists like to point out that a rising tide has tended to lift all boats. What's being talked about now, massive job loss to automation and the need for public safety nets in the form of universal basic income paints a dramatically different future. It's still not clear if there's an appetite for so called UBI, which runs counter to many Americans' bedrock ideals of personal achievement. Quote, "I used to be excited about UBI, but I think people really need agency. They need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go," Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said last

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  year when they asked, when asked by a podcaster about how to create, how people will create wealth in the AI era. Quote, "If you just say, okay, AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets a dividend from that, it's not going to feel good. You got to lock in, you got to grind." He didn't say that part. And I don't think it's what would actually be good for people. If money is out, scarce assets like art could become key. We saw some massive results at a Ferrari auction this weekend. A bunch of Ferraris trading for maybe three over what people thought the market was going to be. Lots of speculation about what's going on there, but people are certainly getting in on luxury goods. If you don't have scarce, a scarcity of resources, it's not clear what purpose money has, he

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  said at a conference last year. More recently, Musk suggested people shouldn't even worry about saving for retirement, predicting AI will provide healthcare and entertainment.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  You like that, Tyler?

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  No, I was just gonna say, I think I've heard at Anthropic, at least, a lot of people don't contribute to their 401K for these reasons.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Interesting. Still, it'll look-

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it also helps that if you've been there a while, your company went from sub $10 billion valuation to 500 in the span of a few years. You're not like, it's like, oh, I better, I'm so worried I haven't added much to my 401K.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Jordi Hays?

  But-

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Well-

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, that's fair.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Maybe you don't want to contribute to your 401K, but if you want to change the world, you gotta raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very pleased to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange, where you can go and change the world by raising capital. Let's finish this out. Weeks later, social media posts on X and LinkedIn and Facebook began claiming Nvidia's Jensen Wong said something similar. The CEO of these breathless posts claimed was warning, quote, "The period from 2025 to 2030 may be the last major chance for everyday people to build wealth through technology." Scary stuff, except Jensen, he didn't say it. Rather, his numerous public appearances in the past few months have been filled with

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  talk about the potential for AI to be more of an equalizing force for technology. Quote, "We're going to have a wealth of resources, things that we think are valuable today that in the future are just not that valuable because it's automated," he told Joe Rogan last month. "It can afford, it can, it can be hard to sort fact from fiction in an era of technology that seems pulled straight from a Ian Banks novel. And backers of AI companies have billions, if not trillions, of reasons to hope their gambles aren't just once in a generation jackpots, but once in a human experience, once in a human existence." Further contributing to the FOMO in San Francisco is the expectation that local AI companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic will soon go public, minting many more millionaires.

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  After the New York Times ran a headline this past week about a wave of mega IPOs expected this year, local real estate agent Rohan Dar posted on X, "May I humbly suggest you buy your house in San Francisco before this." It is interesting. I feel like the the S and F housing market like has really been through some crazy gyrations because it was way down for a little bit. And yes, I mean, I agree. I expect it goes way up. The tech entrepreneur, who was once part of Y Combinator years ago, told me he was drawn to real estate in part because of a belief new AI wealth will fuel a housing boom, or as he predicted last year, the mother of all tech booms is coming. Get some while you can. Well, thank you to Tim.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  One of the comments here is interesting. Somebody, Jason Berger, says, when I graduated college in 1999, I remember those pursuing teaching being mocked for going into an obsolete field. The internet was going to replace teachers. Some thought it would replace educational institutions themselves. Anyways.

• 1:25:14John Coogan?

  Well, we have Jordan Schneider from China Talk in the rest of the room. Before we bring him in, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and optimal storage, fast, ten X cheaper and extremely scalable. Let's bring Jordan Schneider in to the TVP in Amsterdam. Jordan, how are you doing? Good to see you.

• 1:25:34Jordan Schneider?

  I am doing amazing. I'm so glad to be here. I just love listening to your ad reads. They're truly the best ad reads on the planet. I mean.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Thank you. I appreciate it. I love ads. We love ads.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Careful, careful what you say. We might, we, John is really tempted to start doing them during guest interviews. And I'm like, I don't know if we want to.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  We've said like 30 minutes is a lot of time to hang out with Jordan. We might need a break halfway through slipping an ad. Every once in a while I do it. Specifically, if a VC is on and they're pumping their bags and one of the bags that they're pumping happens to be a sponsor, why not slip in an ad read?

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why not be explicit about it?

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Be a little on the nose bit.

• 1:26:12Jordan Schneider?

  John, I give you the pass. I give you the pass. I'm ready for it. I want to see the creativity.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, if there's a lull in the conversation, expect an ad read. But anyway.

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you seem, you seem pretty happy right now. What's going on? You're like in the best mood ever for a TVP appearance.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Do you get a vacation? What's new with you?

• 1:26:28Jordan Schneider?

  I'm actually in a terrible mood because the Bills just fired Sean McDermott, our godhead coach for the past nine years. It's some Game of Thrones shit. The GM is like, you know, knifed him in the back. He's now got a promotion. And I was asking ChatGPT and Claude what the correct tech analogy would be to explain this to the TVP audience. And there was not a good one. So I guess AGI is not.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  And back up for the, for the viewers, who, who are the, who are the Bills?

• 1:27:00Jordan Schneider?

  The Buffalo Bills are an American football team.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:03Jordan Schneider?

  Plays in Western New York. They've had a great run. They have a wonderful quarterback. You get, everyone should root for them.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Jordan Schneider?

  They have a lovable loser reputation.

• 1:27:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:13Jordan Schneider?

  Never won a Super Bowl.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:27:15Jordan Schneider?

  Um, and have been on a generational run. They've been the second most winning team over the past 10 years. Can't seem to get over the hump and we can talk about something else. I know this is not ESPN.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  So, so I just looked, 12 teams have never won a Super Bowl. Is that like, imagine being in the-

• 1:27:31Jordan Schneider?

  A lot of them are new. A lot of them are newer.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Jacksonville Jaguars, for example.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:27:35Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah, so but the Bills, we've been there from the beginning.

• 1:27:38Jordi Hays?

  Chargers, Jaguars, Cardinals. A lot of teams.

• 1:27:42Jordan Schneider?

  I'm, I'm glad we got to do it. You know, it's some, uh, uh, it's a, I, it, it, this is like the debate among, among-

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you, how do you watch football then?

• 1:27:51Jordan Schneider?

  Do you want your kids to suffer?

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:53Jordan Schneider?

  Um, oh, how do I watch football? Okay, that's a transition. YouTube TV now.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  VR headset.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you do the David Senna and like you lean forward and you're just like really focused like this? Or are you kind of like writing the newsletter?

• 1:28:04Jordan Schneider?

  It's a family event and I think the level like our, myself, my brother and my father's levels of intensity of fandom have evolved over the years. I have started to lean back a little bit, but when the playoffs come around, I am screaming and cursing and getting very heated again. So I, I kind of like taper in over the course of the season. Um, until they inevitably rip my heart out, not only with errors on the field, but apparently errors in the, um, management side of things as well. But anyways, we'll see. We can talk about China if you want.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Jordan Schneider?

  I also have some like media criticism of you guys I want to do.

• 1:28:42John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, we can talk about that. I'm just, I'm just glad that you're coming on blackpilled about sports as opposed to geopolitics because-

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm sure he's blackpilled about geopolitics here.

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  But, but at least you didn't lead off with it because if you were, if you came on here and you were like invasion of Taiwan's imminent, it's all-

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, why don't you give us the geopolitical comp for the, whatever the Bills just did? I don't even remember. They like let, you know, let go of the head coach.

• 1:29:08Jordan Schneider?

  It's Operation Paperclip. You know, you know, my analogy, here's, here's my, here's my analogy. Okay, so like, talking about invading Greenland is what Trump wants you to do. I don't think he's going to do it, but like, the thing that gets him jazzed up is people being upset about crazy ideas he has and the pushback. And this, I think the, the fascinating analogy here is the whole Ro Khanna saga that we've had over the past month or two, because like, the amount, like, this is what he wanted to happen. He is not dumb. He under, he is a politician who has a national presence and has ambitions. And what he wants to do is, as the Silicon Valley representative, like, there is a, there is a

• 1:29:53Jordan Schneider?

  risk for him in a potential 2028 Democratic primary of saying, oh, you're just in the bag for these guys. So having, like, being able to sort of manufacture this enemy of all these, like, rich billionaires who, hey, by 2029, when no one has jobs, or 2028, 2027, when no one has jobs anymore, like, and we have two more years of tech bros running the White House, like, the, the Q score of that segment of society may be down. Like, having all these people on the record saying, we're gonna take him down, we wanna run against him, he's gonna take our money, which, by the way, is something a lot of Americans, I don't think would be all that upset about. And like, yes, your, your, your median TVP and listener understands the nuances of, um,

• 1:30:34Jordan Schneider?

  taxing unrealized gains may not be the best thing for innovation, but like, the ease at which this entire ecosystem was baited, I just found

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:44Jordan Schneider?

  to be fascinating.

• 1:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's a kind of the same thing with one- I think, I think that's a good, I think it's generally a good take, because if you actually press, you know, anybody that's actually pressed Roe, like, he has no defense for his politic, you know, policy stance on this. Like, he, he actually cannot-

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Defend it and and stay logically coherent, right? Like, it's like he's running, he really is, it seems like he's running like a bit.

• 1:31:10Jordan Schneider?

  But since, but since when has that mattered in politics? I don't know, like the the Kennedy Nixon debates or something like? Yeah, he is now setting himself up against billionaire capitalist overlords who are apparently on the other side of him and hate him and want to do everything to bring him down. And like, that is a winning play for him. And these, these folks are so scared of their bags and they're so confident that like, oh, like, they say something and then it will happen and no, there won't be second order consequences. That, um, I don't know, it was a fascinating saga to watch from the sideline.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's on a whole, he's on a whole media tour now. He's done a ton of, he's popping up everywhere. Um, and he's definitely taking advantage of the moment. He's done really well.

• 1:31:50Jordan Schneider?

  Because he's got some haters, because he's smart.

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you need, you need.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Playing the heel. He studied, he sat, he sat down and he watched a bunch of WWE game tape. And he's like, okay, I know, I know what I gotta do.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, uh.

• 1:32:03Jordan Schneider?

  All right.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:04Jordan Schneider?

  This, this, this brings me, this brings me to my media criticism.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:08Jordan Schneider?

  Um, and I think, like, look, you guys have gotten a lot better and the show has evolved. And the centrality of it in like, American discourse, um, is really something to behold. And with that comes responsibility.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:24Jordan Schneider?

  And I think you are slowly but surely maturing into that. I mean, the big moment you had a few months ago, making fun of Cluley and everything, um, is an important part of that maturation process. And, you know.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  The rage, are you talking, are you talking about the, the, the case against rage bait?

• 1:32:42Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah, the case against rage bait. And sort of as you're, as you're doing more of this, like, um, you know, pushing yourselves to do like more independent thinking and writing with the, with the essays every day, you're gonna have more, um, politicians on, you're gonna have more, just like, more and more of this is gonna be trending towards that. I'm sure all the, all the presidential candidates are gonna wanna come on. Uh, same with the 2026 candidates. I just think it's really cool. Um, and politics matters to this world, whether we like it. Or not and watching you guys kind of like grow into being having the the stature and comfort to ask harder questions of guests, I think is really cool. So I just want to give you a kudos. And I'm excited to see where all that goes.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to rage bait us into politics.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, I mean, like, so, so, so, so you're 100% right. The, there, there is a weird dynamic where, at least with our viewership, we actually do notice a decline in the metrics when we talk about politics and have politicians on and like some of the chat will just be like, go back to talking about like, you know, space or tech or whatever. But I understand it. It's going to happen. At the same time, I really enjoyed Joe Weisenthal on China Talk and I particularly liked Joe's point that on the hard question issue, people often have this fantasy that if you're, if you're talking to someone, you're like, okay, here's a hard question. Are you a fraud? They'll just be like,

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  you got me. I am a fraud. Like, ask the hard question. Like, I can't say, I can't lie. When, when in fact,

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  We actually did ask some.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  We actually did do that once and it didn't work. And, and ironically, it worked with Joe Weisenthal, too, because on Odd Lots with Matt Levine, they asked SBF, like, how does this work? And SBF was kind of like, it's a Ponzi scheme. And, and, and Matt Levine says, so you're in the Ponzi business and it's a good business? And he says, yeah. And so he kind of confessed. So there is a, there is a way to ask a hard question, but, but, but, but I'm interested in how you.

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Can we talk about B2B SaaS?

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Own. Yes, we can. Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. That's some B2B SaaS for you folks. Also, applicable to China Talk. Maybe we'll get you livestreaming this year. Anyway, so, so, give us, give us how you process the hard questions.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, before that, I think the question, the question I would ask you, because people ask us, like, the topics that you discuss become, you may not be approaching them from a political angle, but they have political implications. Like, it's your duty to talk about them. And my response historically has been, obviously, tech influences politics. Obviously, it's going to be like a large part of the debates in, in 2028 in the midterms and, and. But that being said, I've always seen our role is like, talk with really smart people and get an understanding of the individual players, the teams, the companies, the startups,

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  the public companies, and then get an understanding of the industries. And then there's an opportunity for people to do kind of like meta-political analysis, even based on that understanding, like something that we've, you know, people-

• 1:36:00Jordan Schneider?

  I think defining it, yeah, I think defining it as covering politics is a little too narrow. I think it's more like, there are aspects to all of this, which are bigger than, will this company grow its revenue at this, you know, at this rate and will these guys beat out those guys?

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  That's exactly what I want to talk about, though.

• 1:36:22Jordan Schneider?

  And so like-

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  You have to hold me, hold me back, I don't want to talk about revenue.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so I'll give you, I'll give you another example, so I wrote maybe a week or so ago, like, why would Americans be excited about AI? Like, there's a, there's a video on Instagram, and I'm sure there's hundreds, of Sam Altman saying, AI is probably gonna kill everyone, but it's gonna create some cool companies in the meantime, right? Like, that is like a mainstream, like, video, that millions and millions and millions of people have seen, and they'll use ChatGPT, and they'll use some other AI product, and they're like, this is cool, but I actually like the world, and I don't want, I'd be down to like, pot, like, so, so, part of it, part of it's like, I definitely think it's

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  our responsibility, or worth talking about, questions like that, which is like, you're not giving people a real reason to be, you can't say, like, we're curing cancer, or AI is gonna cure cancer, and then simultaneously say all these other things, and expect people to just broadly say, like, you guys are the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity, like, keep it up, right?

• 1:37:32Jordan Schneider?

  Totally.

• 1:37:35Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah, I mean, I think coming back to a point that John made of like, like, asking the hard questions is not, does not necessarily conflate with being a dick to your guests. I mean, just, just recently, like, I had this thing that went viral. I was having two folks on the China Commission on, and they were talking about, like, the downsides of, you know, China developing. And one of the things they said is like, wouldn't it be really bad if China cured cancer before the US? I was like, really? Like, are you sure about that one?

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Look, I want to save, I want to save humanity, but I don't want anyone to save it harder than me.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:38:15Jordan Schneider?

  But, you know, and kind of getting to that point in the conversation of like, exploring what your views are at the limit, doesn't necessarily mean that you have to say, oh, don't you, you know, you want to kill grandmas or whatever. It's like, you know, viewers aren't stupid. They can kind of, they can kind of read into that what they please, or like, you know, make a decision based on what the guest says. But you do need to like, take the guests there and bring them, as you guys said, to conversations which are a little deeper than, you know, revenue targets and new products.

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  And, and, and I do, I do enjoy those types of conversations with business leaders. I, I just, maybe I'm just new to the talking to a politician, but it feels like it's entirely, it's like an entirely different game. Like, the type of conversation we're having right now is like, we're both podcasters, we're just talking back and forth, it's great. I can get a CEO on, and they're, they're, they're there to talk about a specific launch. And it's halfway, it's some conversation, we might be able to get them to crack up, we ring a gong, we do a bunch of stuff to like, engage them, I know a little bit of lore, there, there's stuff that can get there. But the politicians, at least for right now, like, I don't know the lore, I don't know all their positions, and so, it, it can just be, I just feel like I'm struggling to keep the car on the track. Like, I'm not even,

• 1:39:31John Coogan?

  I'm like, I'm spinning out a lot, I'm spinning my tires a lot.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the cool thing with a CEO, is like, they're playing the game of capitalism, and whatever they're saying, you know at the end of the day, for the most part, that they just want to make their company bigger.

• 1:39:43Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Whereas with a politician like Ro Khanna is talking about, you know, these insane policies that will, you know, make California, you know, descend into, you know, a tourism and agriculture based economy. And I don't want that for California. I've lived here my whole life. My family has been in California for over a hundred years. Like, it's very important to me. But, and I'm not even like, I'm not tapped into this whole Washington thing. And it makes sense when you say like, okay, he's just doing this to like, prove that he stood up to the tech guys and so that he can go on his presidential run. But I have no interest in like, really engaging in that, specifically because there's enough enterprise sass to talk about.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  And there's also, there's also a lot of good media coverage in politics, or at least there's a lot of, there's a lot of media coverage in politics. Like, there's so many huge outlets that do huge numbers. And there's plenty of outlets on the left and the right for all sorts of things. And, and also, it feels like a lot of the politicians are, are crossing over. For like, for a while, there was this criticism that like, there was like, the right podcast echo chamber and the left mainstream media echo chamber. But in the last year, it feels like there's been pretty massive crossover, whether it's like Gavin Newsom having conversations with people on the right, the New York Times platform, a lot of the right.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, the moderates over at the Nelk Boys.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Rogan's had a lot of people on the left. Yeah, the Nelk Boys have platformed everyone, you know.

• 1:41:05Jordan Schneider?

  Where's your Nelk Boys crossover? Where, where are we gonna get them on the show?

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  We got it. We got the Happy Dad Seltzer right over there. We love the Nelk Boys over here. Yeah, we had John Shaheed on the show, live, in person, in the UltraDome. When are you getting to the UltraDome? You gotta come out.

• 1:41:18Jordi Hays?

  The steward of the Nelk Boys.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  Next time you're in LA, you gotta come, you gotta come hang out in person.

• 1:41:21Jordan Schneider?

  TBD.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  It's great. Anyway.

• 1:41:22Jordan Schneider?

  All right, I got more, I got more topics for you guys.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  Please, please, please.

• 1:41:25Jordan Schneider?

  We can talk Nvidia, PR stumbles.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:30Jordan Schneider?

  We got my Claude Code games.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I want to hear about the Nvidia, I want to hear about the Nvidia, the stumbles. Is this Jensen specifically? Walk me through what you're thinking.

• 1:41:40Jordan Schneider?

  No. So, um. I guess it was last week in the House of Representatives, there was an act introduced called the Overwatch AI Overwatch Act, which basically would essentially start to require congressional approval for AI exports, certain AI exports, in the same way that Congress has a role to play when it comes to exporting arms sales abroad. So if you, you know, you sell fighter jets to Israel or Saudi Arabia or Taiwan, Congress has to like give a nod to that.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:12Jordan Schneider?

  And within two days, you saw Laura Lumer, Brad Parscale, and like a long tail of 10 to 15 other right wing influencers, basically all tweet the same thing. A lot of phrases were repeated. House Republicans are being lied to. We need to win the AI race. This is going to strip Trump of his foreign policy powers. But the funniest part was that AI was spelled not A capital I, but a lowercase l across every single one of these tweets.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  So I have a story like this. There was a, the.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  I mean, to be clear, we do need to win the owl race as well. We need as many Alfreds as possible. We need owl in charge. We need total control over owl. I got, we got an owl in at Sequoia, Alfred Lin.

• 1:43:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  There's a couple other Alberts and Alfreds all over America. We need to capitalize on them.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I was once, I once gave some, what ended up being bad advice to a portfolio company. They were like, asking me like, how, how should I, how should I handle like my launch? And I was like, you know, basically you need to prepare your investors that you're going to launch and then, and then encourage them to share it and maybe give them some thought, like starters on like what they could share because they're going to be busy. They're going to be in a meeting.

• 1:43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  And, and so it very clearly was like rewrite in your own words.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Like, these are just examples.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  Everyone just copied the first one, right?

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  Six or seven people just like copy and paste it. It's just like, and then of course.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. There's been a couple of quote tweets that I've seen hit the timeline from people who are clearly very busy where it, where the whole quote tweet starts with a bullet point and you're like, I know what's going on there.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's become its own meme format.

• 1:44:02Jordi Hays?

  This would be a good bit to, we should run this as a bit. We'd get like 20 of us to like all share.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, we should all.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  The same thing about Il Fornaro. What's that Italian restaurant?

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Bullet point, Jordan is a truly masterful interviewer. Parentheses, please feel free to rewrite this in your own voice.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  We gotta do it for the Italian restaurant that's shutting down.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Oh, Il Fornaro?

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  It's like Il Fornaro is one of the most storied institutions, a Sequoia backed company. It is absolutely imperative that it stays operational in San Francisco.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  It needs a taxpayer bailout. Yeah. Need a taxpayer bailout.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Bailout.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  The Treasury should wire a billion dollars right now for 10%. Wait, so tie this to Nvidia. You said Nvidia was involved in this, explain.

• 1:44:47Jordan Schneider?

  Well, I don't know who else is paying Lara and Brad Parscale 50 grand, 100 grand.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  But why doesn't Nvidia want this to happen?

• 1:44:57Jordan Schneider?

  Oh, well, because they want to be able to export to China.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  They want to win the AI race, not the owl race.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so they want to be able to sell internationally as freely as possible with as little oversight and maybe just a rubber stamp from the president gets it done. If it goes to Congress, it's going to be more complicated.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this seems like something a PR team, a PR firm ran where they're like engaged by Nvidia, it sounds like, I'm just speculating.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  It could be engaged by anyone.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Company engages a PR.

• 1:45:30Jordan Schneider?

  Level removed, whatever.

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they're like, we're going to engage key opinion leaders.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  And then, of course.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  As soon as the KOLs get involved, it's all over. Interesting.

• 1:45:40Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:41Jordan Schneider?

  I mean, to be clear, this bill would put these restrictions for exports to Russia, Iran, China and the DPRK. So. I don't know, but look, it's um, it's funny because there's been this real learning arc with Nvidia and Washington. Where, I mean, as of three years ago, there was like one person in DC. It was really not a company that engaged deeply with with DC. And then October 2022, you have these export controls and all of a sudden this firm has to ramp up. And what they've kind of seen or the success that they had over the course of 2025 was basically Jensen doing the job.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:22Jordan Schneider?

  Of convincing the president.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  We were looking earlier this year on like how much they actually spend on lobbying.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  Really low.

• 1:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Super low, like single digit millions, like whenever I checked.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  But travel.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  And I was like that Jensen's gas bill like could very well be higher than how much they're actually spending on like lobbying.

• 1:46:40Jordan Schneider?

  But but to finish the thought, so, you know, okay, they've they've got they've got the White House one over. They've got the president one over, but the problem is this is not the idea of exporting chips to China is not popular in Congress. You've had a number of bipartisan bills be introduced in the Senate and the House, which have basically tried to cramp Trump's style when it comes to how he wants to sell these chips to the PRC. And so, you know, starting to do, starting to play the, and they've been able to actually kill one or two of these bills, but the momentum does seem to be building. So having a flailing response like this is like, yeah, kind of cringe, makes for some good TVPN laughs,

• 1:47:19Jordan Schneider?

  but also is indicative of the fact that like, yeah, they are worried enough about what's happening on the Hill with respect to AI exports that they feel like they need to start to play these sorts of games.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  But but what if we sell a ton of GPUs to North Korea and they cure cancer?

• 1:47:36Jordan Schneider?

  Look.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Would that be so bad?

• 1:47:38Jordan Schneider?

  Kim Jong Un.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  What's what's what's North Korea's AI owl strategy?

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  Their owl strategy is probably all fine tuning on the glorious leader. You're like, he's absolutely right. He does, he he does hit a hole in one every time he golfs. Just hard coding the weights.

• 1:47:57Jordan Schneider?

  Back to media criticism. I love that Vanity Fair piece and like the last, the last paragraph where I forget what it was, but there was some funny tweet and it's like, this is the reason that all these other ones fail is because you guys are talented and you guys are very funny. And like, that is a, it is a Venn diagram of not a lot of people who can like, check all these boxes. So anyways, hats off to you.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, hats off to transistor radio. It's one of the funniest podcasts ever. It's amazing. Every time you guys drop one, I turn it on immediately. It's fantastic. Never quit. It's amazing. Sorry. Did you want to move on to something else? Cause I still want to get the update on, on just broad China, Taiwan. We talked to someone who was particularly blackpilled, seemed like they were very upset with America's capacity to protect Taiwan. And I was wondering if you've seen any movement there. From my perspective, it feels like it's been kind of quiet. All of 2025 was sort of quiet. I don't know if that's just me focusing on US tech and AI race stuff and I'm out of

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  the loop, but would love just sort of your lay of the land on US, China, Taiwan negotiations.

• 1:49:08Jordan Schneider?

  Sure. So I think the big story of, I mean, there were, there was a lot of drama over the course of 2025. Liberation Day, we forgot. There is a whole nother arc, which of course included 150% tariffs on China, which got negotiated down, then got ramped back up. Then you had rare earth controls. And then finally, we've sort of seemed to reach a bit of a equilibrium. Trump's supposed to go there in I think March or April. Nobody really wants to rock the boat too much between now and then.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Specifically on the Taiwan issue, no blockade, no invasion, no like, you know, firing back and forth or drones or conflict that I remember seeing anything like that. And that was sort of like the worst case scenario was that maybe they were going to start with some sort of soft blockade and it wasn't going to be violent, but it was going to really escalate the situation to like, we're repositioning ships.

• 1:50:00Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah, I mean, this is, this has been one of my polymarket trade recommendations over the past few years is no, no, no, no war invasion. I'm not particularly surprised. We've had something crazy. Look, I think she sees a lot of upside in the direction of travel of a lot of things in just China's problems, but like starting World War III. I mean, right now, he has like a pretty good equilibrium with the US and that all of the kind of like, we had a sort of slow but steady creep up in controls over the course of, you know,

• 1:50:39Jordan Schneider?

  really starting and towards the second half of Trump won and that with what she has been able to do by kind of throwing the rare earth thing back in America's face to stop that. And, you know, I think, who's the really old guy who does trade in the White House? But who like had the, says like dumplings are bad or something? I can't remember his name. Anyways.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  This is your world.

• 1:51:05Jordan Schneider?

  Peter Navarro, Peter Navarro.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  You're like, you guys are ready to cover DC. We're like, couldn't tell you who works there.

• 1:51:13Jordi Hays?

  Dumpling man.

• 1:51:14Jordan Schneider?

  Google this dumpling quote while I'm looking at Peter Navarro dumplings.

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  Okay, I have heard of him. I'm sure he's a nice guy.

• 1:51:21Jordan Schneider?

  He said, look, like it's a different chessboard between, from what it was a while ago. And the fact that China both has leverage and is willing to, and more importantly, is willing to use it and understands that using it will get the US to back down, I think is a new dynamic, which we hadn't really seen in the trade, in the trade war arc of Trump one and then in the Biden administration. The one thing that I do want to flag to you guys a little bit is this saga currently going on between Japan and China where the new PM, Prime Minister of Japan, made some not super offhanded remark, basically saying like, a problem that China has with Taiwan is a problem that we have, and it's very

• 1:52:02Jordan Schneider?

  likely that we would be involved in any kind of scenario. And this has basically been the goal of American presidents for decades now to kind of get Japan off of its butt, get it spending more on its military and get it, you know, really.

• 1:52:20Jordan Schneider?

  Part of the equation to dissuade, to like make the balance of military power in the region such that China has no interest in going into Taiwan. And what you sort of saw in response to the Trump administration was kind of nothing. No big statement, no saying, hey, we're here to support you. Basically, Trump called Xi and then Trump called Takeuchi saying, hey, chill out. And look, like, they just had a nice visit. The Defense Minister Koizumi, the son of the old Prime Minister, who like, is like a hot shot 37 or something. You guys should have him on. They had a nice meeting. We say that the alliance is okay. But I did find it a little disappointing that like, we're not kind of cheering them

• 1:53:03Jordan Schneider?

  on when the whole thesis of the Trump administration is like, we want to step back and have our allies do more of the heavy lifting. So.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  You're famous for the Mandate of Heaven tier list amongst AI labs. Has, have you been feeling that China labs have been falling off? It feels like they've certainly been making less sort of like dramatic breakthroughs, like the original DeepSeek, Manis is now an American company. Let's go. Let's hear it for Zuck.

• 1:53:28Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  And the Qwen models are great, but you know, it just doesn't feel like it's, it's in the conversation as like, this is an existential risk to OpenAI or Anthropic or, or Google. Like, the real like, heavy hitters are like, the main labs in America, and then even XAI and MSL are doing exciting things. And so you have like, five significant efforts. And it feels like the open source narrative has sort of like, fallen back. It's still there, but it's not nearly as existential or as, just as embarrassing as it used to be where, when, you know, a hedge fund could spend 10 mil and defeat Mark Zuckerberg.

• 1:54:09Jordan Schneider?

  Yeah. I mean, I think the, the, the big thing that folks need to remember when it comes to the US and China is, on the talent side, yeah, roughly equivalent. Maybe the US has an edge because we can pay higher salaries. On the data side, you know, still probably a wash. But when it comes To compute and the ability to deploy these these models, there's really no contest. As well as capital able to be put behind this whole this whole arc. There's really not a contest between the US and China. I think current numbers are like TSM, like SMIC and Huawei production is like 1/15th.

• 1:54:52Jordan Schneider?

  What Nvidia plus plus TSMC plus all the ASICs can can pump out. And, you know, this matters less in a future where you aren't kind of using all the available compute. But look, people are going to come up with ways to use this stuff. I'm doing so much dumb shit on Claude code every day.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:15Jordan Schneider?

  So is the rest of the economy.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  How optimized is your Claude code setup? I'm sure you spent all weekend.

• 1:55:20Jordan Schneider?

  Not at all. I just use the terminal and like spin up fun apps. But but the fact of the matter is like, I think it is it is. This is why the AI chip exports are so concerning is I really do think like the the ecosystem with the compute and the capital is gonna be able to drive ahead because then you'll you'll have these great kind of reinforcing loops of productivity gains and growth, then leading to kind of, you know, more development, more compute and so on and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that China, even though it has really good engineers that can train good models, is compute constrained when it comes to development and deployment.

• 1:55:58Jordan Schneider?

  We just translated this really interesting panel that happened in China with, I think it was like the CEOs of four of the top labs. So Jirpu, Quan, Minimax, and someone from Tencent. And basically, all of them were like, look, we are so jealous of OpenAI and Anthropic. Like, we have to use all of our compute to deploy stuff just to kind of keep the business going. Like, the amount of, you know, the scale at which they can deploy compute, the amount of data they're getting from their users, and then the ability of these firms to run experiments to kind of put into the next stuff and get to the next breakthrough, really means that in the current paradigm, America and the broader kind of

• 1:56:39Jordan Schneider?

  Western AI ecosystem has a real edge and throwing that away to export a handful of chips to China and the

• 1:56:50Jordan Schneider?

  my in my idea, Pyrrhic vision that we can still hook them on Nvidia seems a little silly, but overall, yeah, it's been a pretty good six months for American AI.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:57:01Jordi Hays?

  One more, one more question. Can you give us a take on Canada's new deal with China? Specifically, the this trade, you get soybeans, I get infinite cheap EVs. What's going on there?

• 1:57:18Jordan Schneider?

  My sense is it's a bit of a bait as well. Perhaps a perhaps a rokana play to get the White House's attention, maybe a little escalate to deescalate. What's interesting is like, I think the amount of EVs they're letting in is pretty low. So I would not be shocked if this was an more of a negotiating tactic to get the USMCA in a place which is more favorable.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Canada, Canada buys around 2 million new vehicles a year. I think the cap is at like 50,000 initially, and then it goes up to 70,000.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, that's not, that's 2%. Yeah, not, not huge. It'll be fun seeing the the Yongwang U9 jumping over potholes in.

• 1:58:06Jordan Schneider?

  Saskatchewan.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  Saskatchewan. That's where they got the pothole. Anyway.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  Only waste, only waste men will drive those.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  For coming on the show, Jordan. I'm glad to hear that your 2026 is off to a great start. Can't wait to have you back on the show.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  And let us know when you're in LA.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  I wish, I wish we had more time. Hey, we're about to have Dan, the founder of T1 Energy, the solar manufacturing company that previously was Chinese owned and it was, they were forced to sell it. I believe I have the history right, so you might enjoy listening into this one because when I saw the T1 Energy had a video go out and it was just showing like this like incredible. Like high-volume advanced manufacturing. I was like, America's back.

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  It was a Chinese plant. Anyway.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  But it's American now.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Going through transformation. Anyway.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

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

• 1:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Go bye. Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Our next guest is Dan from T1 Energy. We're going to bring him in in just a few minutes.

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't think he's ready yet.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  He's not ready yet, so we will tell you. We'll give you some more news. The New York Stock Exchange, our partner today, they're announcing that the development of a platform for trading and on-chain settlement of tokenized securities. The New York Stock Exchange's new digital platform will enable tokenized trading experiences, including 24/7 operations, instant settlement, orders sized in dollar amounts, and stablecoin-based funding. Its design combines the New York Stock Exchange's cutting-edge pillar matching engine with blockchain-based post-trade systems. This is obviously very exciting. We've been talking about 24/7 trading happening a long time. The interesting thing to track is that the volumes, even when you enable overnight trading,

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  the volume is not the same during the day. And the reason is because like a lot of the traders work nine to five in New York hours and they have families and they want to go home and sleep. And so some hedge funds have set up overnight desks, but they basically take less risk during the night because there's less people on staff and you can't escalate, oh, some trade's happening. We think that there's news that's happened at 2 a.m. and we think this might be mispriced, so we should be trading. But we don't have the rest of our risk team here to price it, so we're going to be a little bit more risk-off. So the volume is much lower. So I'm interested to see where this goes and how much the volume ramps up. But obviously, it's a very exciting development for the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  And ultimately, still, this is still going to be subject to regulatory approvals.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  And the bill that's been...

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  We got to have somebody on to talk about because there was some beef going back and forth between Coinbase, not happy with how the market structure bill was coming together.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a phantom card.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Lulu has proposed that we don't call it the billionaire tax, we don't call it the wealth tax, we call it the Billy, the Business Termination Act. And, you know, if-

• 2:01:18Jordi Hays?

  Or Moses says the Job Destruction Act.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  If people are against it, and they're rebranding it against, you know, they're needing anti, the, the people that are pro this act will need to rebrand it as well. And so I think that they should do, like, the, uh, the grind incentive initiative, something like that, to, to reframe it as it's a, you know, it, it, you know, we're not, it's not a billionaire tax, it just incentivizes everyone to grind harder. You're 5% down, now you gotta build yourself out of that hole.

• 2:01:47Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's almost like a prestige in Call of Duty.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah, prestige.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  You gotta start again.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe they should, maybe they should do it-

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  Prestiging for being rich.

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, how many times do you prestige?

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe if you, if you tend, so, so they could call it the 10x tax, where it's a wealth tax, but it only applies to people that are not 10x-ing their net worth annually.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Because, like-

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, yes.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  You really, like, ideally, if you're trying to build wealth, you should 10x it, 10x your portfolio, 10x it again, and then 10x it again.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:18Jordi Hays?

  You'll be in a really good spot.

• 2:02:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  And so we should have, if we're gonna have government regulation-

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  We want it to encourage, you know, people to really-

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  It should ramp up every year, they should, 1%, then 2%, then 3%, eventually everyone has nothing. Um, but the last man standing is kind of like a, you know, a, a, what, what do they call it?

• 2:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Badge of honor?

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  I don't know, uh, I'm, I'm, I lost it. Anyway, let's go to Flo. Flo Crivellio Altimore has been on the show multiple times. He says, "Almost every single founder I know in San Francisco, including me, has reached the same conclusion over the last few weeks, that it's only a matter of time before we have to leave California. I love it here, I truly do want to stay, and until recently intended to be here all my life, but now it's obvious that we won't be possible. Whether that's two, five, or 10 years from now, there's no future for founders in California." But, maybe he'll get a spot in Incline Village, maybe he'll, maybe he'll domicile in Miami or Nevada. There are, there are plenty of ways, and I would be surprised if, uh, if everyone fully relocates.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  I think people will be spending a lot of time in San Francisco, but probably less than 180 days. We'll see. Well, um, while we're-

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I, it, it, it makes, it makes absolutely no sense.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Every, every state in the country-

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  Wants these kind of companies to be created.

• 2:03:38John Coogan?

  We gotta talk about some other, some other better news. How well do you know Preppy? Let's, let's play a quiz. There's a quiz in the, in the Wall Street Journal. How well do you know Preppy? It is in the timeline. You can pull it up and play live, but I'm gonna read this to you. So it's 10 questions on lacrosse, J-Press and more. We're gonna see how you do. So the first question, which is, which of the following is not a Preppy-approved label? Lilly Pulitzer, J-Press, Versace, or L.L. Bean? Tyler, do you know?

• 2:04:07Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go, what is Versace?

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Nailed it. He got it. He got it. What type of shoes are you wearing right now?

• 2:04:14Speaker 03

  Sorry.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  That's a preppy shoe. The term "Preppy" is used as a slur in which canonical prep novel? A, The Catcher in the Rye. B, Love Story. C, A Separate Piece, or D, The Great Gatsby? What do you think it is?

• 2:04:29Speaker 03

  I think I've only read The Great Gatsby. I'm gonna say.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  You ever read Catcher in the Rye?

• 2:04:33Speaker 03

  No, we didn't do that. I don't even, Love Story?

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Yes! You got it. Love Story. Wow. Okay. Name the non-Preppy sport, the least Preppy sport. Volleyball, rugby, lacrosse, or squash?

• 2:04:48Speaker 03

  Volleyball.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Nailed it. Nailed it again. Which New York cool girl collaborated with G.H. Bass on a Weejan design? Eddie Sedgwick, Diane Brille, Chloe Svigny, or Leandra Medine Cohen?

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  The last one.

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  No. Chloe Svigny. Although, I thought she was in L.A., but I guess she's also a New York cool girl. Which shades of pink and green should be combined for optimum Preppiness? Fuchsia and forest green, baby pink and emerald, hot pink and lime green, or cerise and chartreuse?

• 2:05:24Speaker 03

  I'm gonna go baby pink and.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Emerald?

• 2:05:27Speaker 03

  Emerald.

• 2:05:28John Coogan?

  Wrong. Hot pink and lime green. Rookie. I think, I think. I have to flip the whole page over to see the other side. Five is, uh, C, which is, yeah. C is, is hot pink and lime green. Let's see what else we got here. What is the origin of the term "urban hot bourgeoisie"? Henry James's The Portrait of Lady, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, Andy Warhol's The Philosophy of Andy Warhol? These are hard.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Really hard. Have you ever been into dressing, preppy?

• 2:06:08John Coogan?

  I don't know. Not really. I've never had any sort of like lane. I just put on clothes as they're made available to me. Anyway, there's some other good news. DHH is racing again. Shopify LMP2 is back in action for the Daytona Rolex 24. New team, new co-drivers. Still Toby Lookie and DHH at the wheel. Now riding with Rails and Omarkey 2. They got their whole livery. It's amazing. Ruby on Rails base camp on there. The shop app and Shopify on the livery. It's green.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we might have to do, we might have to do, we might have to ride with them. We might have to do the 24 hour watch along livestream.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  This might be the one that we need to do. This is, this is absolutely amazing. And I'm always excited when I see.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Car looks fantastic. The race, let me confirm, is going to be later this month, actually.

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  There's also a post by Toby Lookie. Good testing days. Can't wait for the Rolex 24 next race. This photo is incredible. This is this weekend. So it's 24 hours. They'll be racing. And yeah, Toby Lookie, he needs to do a racing podcast. He should go on Vincenzo Landino's show. He's done shows about, about Starcraft, all about gaming. I've never heard him talk specifically about racing, but, but what a, what a sport, what a sport. Finn.ai, it's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customers' sport, go to Finn.ai.

• 2:07:41Jordi Hays?

  We should pull up some of the new livery that was announced. There was, Gabe was sharing earlier. He said that Zen made it on to Ferrari this year. They're allowing a nicotine sponsorship.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  No, no way.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  And Haas, if you pull up this post, somebody was showing off Haas' new livery from above. I'm in the timeline. You can see it looks almost uncannily like the top of this toilet.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  You see?

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  No. Oh, wait. Yeah. What is that?

• 2:08:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just part of the arrow.

• 2:08:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  On the top part. Anyways, I think that, I think the Haas car looks fantastic.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  It's like that it's a, yeah, it's an American machinery company, right, Haas? And, uh, and yeah, it's just, it's just a cool little, you know, obviously not a car maker. You can't go buy a Haas and drive it around, but still a lot of lineage and logic to it. I mean, Red Bull's been so good that it sort of tracks for me anyway. It doesn't seem jarring or anything that you have a, you have an energy drink car on the grid. But I, I, I feel like I still like the Ferrari. I'm excited that Audi and Cadillac are getting in. I like, I like.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Cadillac's livery looks insane. Have you seen it?

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Go and, uh, get it. I haven't seen the livery. I saw Vincenzo Landino posting some absolutely hilarious, uh, images of, uh, sort of what he thinks the Cadillac should look like. I don't know if we can pull up his, uh, his, um, his post. I know he replies to all this stuff. Where, what, what did he post? He posted some hilarious Cadillac livery that was, uh, an, yeah, an AI image here. Uh, my neighbor sent me this photo of the new Cadillac F1 car. You got to see this, Jerry. It's amazing. It's got the.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Drop it in.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it might be already in there. I think I got it. But if we can pull this out, he said, my neighbor actually did send me this photo that his friend sent him. I have no idea whose credit goes to, if this is yours, let me know. Is this in the bottom of the timeline? Did it go through? Let's see. Yeah, it's here. Look at that. That's incredible. So funny. I, I, it has to be AI or did they actually race something at this at one point? I don't know. I, I, I sort of assume AI at this point.

• 2:09:59John Coogan?

  Who else is in the, who else is in the, in the news? Three teams have now revealed their 2026 Red, uh, liveries. Uh, Red Bull's looks a lot less shiny. When we saw them in Vegas, it was, it felt very perlessent, very like almost pink sparkle to it. Uh, this looks like a little more classic to me.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Well, we should do, we should talk more through, uh, speaking of cars, uh, Porsche has suffered the biggest sales fall since 2009. People are not buying Porsches. The German sports car maker was hit by a lack of petrol variants, uh, for best-selling Macan and weak demand in China. So Porsche sales slumped by a 10th last year. They lost 10% just in a single year as the German sports car maker faced weaker than expected demand for its electric models and struggled in the Chinese market. The company sold about 280,000 vehicles, which is down from 310,000 the year prior. That was the steepest slide

• 2:10:59John Coogan?

  since 2009 in the midst of the global financial crisis when deliveries fell by 13.7%. That makes sense. The economy is not doing well. Uh, people are going to stop buying Porsches, but the economy did well in 2025. So what's going on? We're going to dig into it. The decline undermines, underlines the challenges ahead for the new Porsche chief executive, Michael Letters, who took the reins at the start of the year. The company has embarked on a restructuring program to reduce its production capacity and is taught, is in talks with trade unions in Germany about further savings. Porsche last year was forced into a costly adjustment to its model range, shifting the emphasis back to petrol and hybrid models and shelving plans for new electric vehicles following.

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the market has just completely rejected.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  Do you think they will ever ship the, I can't even remember, what's their new hypercar? The one that is the, uh, it goes Carrera GT 19 Spider? And then it was the Mission E or Mission X?

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Mission X.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  That was supposed to be the electric hypercar from Porsche and it was rumored for years and we saw a lot of the other hypercars. There was a whole idea of like, there's going to be a new Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity, of course, is what? The 1918 Spider, the LaFerrari or the Enzo and the P1. And then you kind of go back and you retcon a Holy Trinity out of the Carrera GT, the F40, like you kind of piece it together with the McLaren F1, even though that wasn't really a trilogy. People sort of put those into like legendary bucket together. Uh, and there was this idea that, okay, maybe McLaren's coming out with a W1. That'll be exciting. You have the F80. That's exciting. And then maybe Porsche

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  will come in with something that's in the lineage of the Carrera GT and the 1918 Spider. And if they'd looked, if they'd read the room around the 1918. Seemed like Carrera GT was way more popular, so maybe go back to that or do something there.

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, Ford's said, hold my beer.

• 2:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're coming in with a new hypercar.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  That's true. Do we have any details? So they did confirm that Ford will be making a hypercar or supercar.

• 2:12:59Jordi Hays?

  In 2027.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  And it's not just a continuation of the Ford GT. It's not a Ford GT V3 because there's been a number of those. We had the good fortune of seeing one on the track over the weekend. Looked beautiful out there, performed very well.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  But back to Porsche, while you look that up, last year's sales slump has been partly due to supply gaps for the 718 and the Macan, its best selling model. So they're not making enough of those. Porsche stopped selling petrol versions of both models in Europe over a failure to comply with EU cybersecurity regulations? What?

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  They didn't, they gotta get on crouch, right?

• 2:13:41John Coogan?

  And decided against developing replacements that would have met new standards. So they're, they're down. It's a rough. They, they, they've had a number of really high growth years. They came roaring back after the 2009 global financial crisis. 2010, they were up 25%. 2011, they were up 20%. They were putting up 20% growth years for five years straight, basically. Then the last decade's been a little bit slower, but not contracting. And now we're, we're, we're way down, way off, way off peak, which is not good. So despite an increase in US tariffs announced in 2025, North America was its best performing region, down only a few hundred units compared

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  with significant declines elsewhere. Sales collapsed by 16% in Germany, Porsche's home market, with a 13% decline for Europe. Do you want to give everyone an update on T1 Energy, Dan Barcello?

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Sorry, everybody. We're gonna reschedule. There was a scheduling, scheduling mix up. It happens. So we'll get Dan back on.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  So the next guest will be Eliot from Dominion Dynamics at 1:25 in about five minutes. So I'm going to continue with this Porsche piece. Continuing with weak demand in China where European carmakers have found it increasingly difficult to sell luxury vehicles amid growing domestic competition, also weighed on the tally. Yeah, in China, I mean, there's a lot of homegrown heroes. You're really excited about your national champion, whether it's Huawei or some phone maker. It seems a little silly, but the cars are cheap. They're great. They have fun, crazy features. They can jump up and down. They can go zero to 60 in two seconds. They look exactly like Porsches. And if you're a local, you're just looking at the dollars and cents and then also you're

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  supporting your buddy who runs the company or builds it online, you know, why not buy local, you know, it's popular over here, it's popular over there.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to figure out.

• 2:15:32John Coogan?

  So Porsche sold 41,000 Porsches in China, which has been down 26% on the previous year and it's under half the total for 2022. So back in 2022, they were selling 80,000 cars. Now they're selling 40,000. That's not good. You want to be up into the right and they are down into the right.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how much of a factor. According to registration data for the full year of 2025, Chinese branded auto manufacturers sold approximately 60,000 to 70,000 vehicles in Germany. That's still only 2.5% of the total German car market, but if that's eating into Porsche's sale of some of these like kind of more entry level EVs, it could definitely be a real factor.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, we, I believe we have Eliot in the restroom waiting room a little bit early. I see no reason not to bring him in as long as he's ready to hop into the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  While we bring him in. How you doing?

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:16:31Speaker 05

  Hey guys, how are you?

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on the show. Would love a quick intro on yourself and the company.

• 2:16:39Speaker 05

  Sure. Nice to meet you guys. Eliot Pence. So founder, CEO of Dominion Dynamics. Dominion is building distributed, attributable mesh networks in the Arctic, amongst other things. That's kind of the wedge in.

• 2:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Very interesting. How, how do you start? What brings you to building something like this?

• 2:17:04Speaker 05

  Look, the Arctic is a huge challenge, as is very clear. Over the last couple of months, it's been kind of at the foreground of geopolitics. Canada has under-invested in securing the Arctic. Awareness is core to securing it, and we're building for that. So we started in June of last year and have built about a dozen products, deployed them a few times, and about to deploy them again just outside of the Northwest Passage. So the highest north up.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. So what does this actually, what does it actually look like in practice? These are hardware, hardware that is being deployed, but, but give me, give me a sense of it more practically.

• 2:17:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's basically, it's us building on top of COTS systems. So we're not building the hardware.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:17:57Speaker 05

  We're using radios that are, you know, from mesh-tastic to persistent systems to GoTenna to Silvus. We build software that sits on top of that RF that allows Rangers, which is Canada's kind of reservist force that exists across the country, but in particular in the Arctic, to capture more information from their environments. Allows them to take videos, to take pictures, to do voice notes. We compress that information down and then manage that across a mesh network. And then we reinflate that data when it gets to a satellite backhaul and push it up into a common operating picture.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Very interesting. So what, give me, give me a sense of how, how the Rangers even approach trying to secure and understand the Arctic. I imagine it's like one Ranger for every, you know, multiple thousand square miles. Like it's not, it's a very large area. Imagine they can't have people everywhere.

• 2:19:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is the Fund of an Ultra Challenge, right? There's 5,500 rangers across the country. Canada has a coastline of 200,000 kilometers. Their principal task is they do a sort of anomaly detection patrols every other week. And on those patrols, they're often out for sort of 48 hours, looking to see if they can find anomalies, whether that's like on roads, whether that's in the water, drones in the sky. But they're radioing that stuff back and they're capturing it in kind of an analog way. What we're building is a way for them to capture all that data, store it, and then to start thinking about, okay, well, what are some predictive processes

• 2:19:47Speaker 05

  that we could build into this, this community of 5,500 reservists?

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Do they, do they, uh, do they roll as kind of like a little squad? Or is it just like one guy out there on a boat?

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  On a horse.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  You just like not...

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Steed.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, yeah, you can, I can just imagine, you know, a, a, a movie of like, you know, Lone Ranger. It's one guy out there just going crazy in the wilderness, thinking that, uh...

• 2:20:12Speaker 05

  They roll deep. It's like 30, 30 per patrol.

• 2:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 2:20:17Speaker 05

  And then, you know, they're doing this all the time.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:20Speaker 05

  So...

• 2:20:20Jordi Hays?

  And what kind of, what, so specifically the anomalies that they're looking for, is that, uh, like foreign intrusion?

• 2:20:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Like surveillance?

• 2:20:30Speaker 05

  Well, it's a mix of, it's a mix of things, right? It's like, you know, is a roadblock that's critical for a community? Um, you know, a few years ago, we had a Chinese balloon that really nobody knew about for a while. There's, uh, indications that there's buoys in, uh, some of the, the channels, uh, up in the Arctic. So it's, it's both strategic and just tactical of like, how do I get to where I need to be going in an emergency?

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  Is the buoy like, uh, like the Chinese weather balloon story, where you just kind of like send it off and, you know, collect whatever data you can, basically?

• 2:21:05Speaker 05

  Uh, uh, effectively, right? I mean, part of what, what we believe is happening just outside of the Arctic is they basically... Basically put buoys in currents that brings it through the Arctic and they're just sucking up information about what is the operating dynamic like? So we want to be ahead of that and we want to

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Is it like, is it like how, how thick the ice is? So if you brought an icebreaker ship, like how big would that ship need to be? How many would you need to get through to bring a warship through or something like that? Just strategic intelligence?

• 2:21:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, honestly, I'm not sure why, but

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  But that's one possible reason if you were in charge, you'd be doing that.

• 2:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, why, why this market? How does this, how does this fit? It's like beautifully niche.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  In that, uh, you know, probably somewhat of a small market initially, but you can probably saturate it and then expand from there. But, uh, but why, yeah, why specifically the, the Rangers?

• 2:22:01Speaker 05

  Well, if you, so the Rangers was, were the sort of least technically advanced group, but they had the hardest problem set. And, you know, for Canada and for the NATO alliance, the Arctic is becoming really quite critical. And so it's sort of niche right now, but it also gives us sort of a, a good user community to build a useful product and have an extreme delta, like an extreme effect on.

• 2:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:22:32Speaker 05

  So we want to build, you know, broader than just that community, but that's a good starting point.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  This is like the iPhone moment for the Rangers.

• 2:22:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Where, where are you building the company? Where are you based? Where's the team based? What's hiring look like?

• 2:22:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's a very Canadian company. It's deliberately Canadian. Uh, company is headquartered in Ottawa. We have offices in Kingston, Toronto and Ottawa.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Speaker 05

  Um, I'll be based in Ottawa. I've been based in the US in DC for, for the past 20 years. It's backed principally by Canadians as well.

• 2:23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw.

• 2:23:09Speaker 05

  But, uh, but yeah.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about hiring? Is Canada caught up to America with the defense tech fervor? The Palmer Lucky podcasts have not reached Canada yet?

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  They get stopped at the border.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, seriously, like, where are you recruiting from? Who, what type of people are you recruiting in? Is there this idea of like serving the national interest, working in government technology? That might be slower, there might be, it might be harder, might be longer hours, might be more technical, but there's some sort of light at the end of the tunnel in terms of impact?

• 2:23:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's no TBPN in Canada yet, but.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, this interview is making me feel like TBPN is the TBPN for Canada.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to ship it off.

• 2:23:57Jordi Hays?

  North America, I know Carney's not making it seem like we're all big, one, one big happy family the last 48 hours, but we're still, in our, in our, in our world, we're still family. We're good.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  We're still family.

• 2:24:10Speaker 05

  So Canada has not caught up on the defense tech sort of surge?

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:14Speaker 05

  That's kind of what we're looking to catalyze. I would say that when we raised our pre-seed, we had, you know, literally hundreds of Canadians that are working at US companies come back up and want to build something for sovereign capability or sovereign capacity. So, you know, and there's an immense amount of talent in Canada.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:35Speaker 05

  Like the Waterloo Quarter is ridiculous.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  Um, talk about the process of actually selling into the government and how it's different. I think most people will be familiar with the American defense tech arc of SBIRs, program of record, how you kind of sell into the US government, the Department of War. What's different? What's similar? How are you thinking about it?

• 2:24:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, the, the thing that's similar is they have a version of SBIRs in Canada. They call it Ideas. I would say it's a little slower, a little less money, a little less diverse.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:09Speaker 05

  But it's still sort of, doesn't get you into a program of record. So you still need to figure out how do you get into those kind of long tail contracts? Um, what's different with Canada, and this is changing right now, is there's no version of an OTA. There's no other transaction authority. So you can't, getting onto a contract is a real challenge. And that's what we're hoping to, to change and catalyze and lobby for. Cause without the ability to get on contract, this market doesn't make sense for anybody.

• 2:25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:38Speaker 05

  Government knows it. Is trying to change it.

• 2:25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's a very Canadian company, but is this just a foothold and then ultimately you'll sell to folks in Alaska, Greenland, maybe the Nordics? Like, where do you see this going over time? Is it like if you can do it in Canada, you can do it anywhere?

• 2:25:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, the basic logic is this is the hardest operating environment on earth. If you can build tech networks in the Arctic, it will be valuable to everybody, the US, Europe, NATO allies.

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:11Speaker 05

  It doesn't matter. I don't want to build just a Canadian company, just focused on Canada.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:16Speaker 05

  This is a Canadian company focused on the world.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does the supply chain look like? I mean, you mentioned that you're you're partnering with like GoTenna and building on top of a lot of things. Does that make it less capital intensive and you you do need to build stuff on top of it, but it looks more like software teams, engineers, and you're maybe able to match it with the money that's coming from the government on the sales side?

• 2:26:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, we're definitely software first. There is a supply chain in Canada. It is pretty extensive. It's actually built pretty, I mean, most of Canada's defense hardware is American, about 80% of it. And so they're integrated into large American platforms.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:56Speaker 05

  But we are a software first company. We're taking a similar approach to a lot of the other neoprimes where you start off with software, you realize you need to do hardware, you vertically integrate, you push platforms, that sort of thing.

• 2:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, what what's exciting on the connectivity side? Obviously, the Starlink story is big. Is that the main driver of of progress there? Are there any other connectivity stories that you've been benefiting from?

• 2:27:22Speaker 05

  Well, one of the challenges is that Starlink isn't. So the polar orbit doesn't have a ton of start set.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that.

• 2:27:29Speaker 05

  Polar orbit sucks, right? Like, there's nobody that really does polar orbit.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:34Speaker 05

  And so that's actually what we're solving for. We're solving for localized connectivity.

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:38Speaker 05

  The Starlink, Iridium, one, there's a Canadian company called Telisat. They're all kind of coming up there, but the connectivity still sucks.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:27:46Speaker 05

  And that like, it's across, like, it affects. Your localization, your PNT.

• 2:27:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:52Speaker 05

  How you move autonomous systems. So connectivity is a real challenge.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you have an idea of how Astronis fits in here? I know that they do geostationary, large satellites for internet. They were putting one over Taiwan and they were putting one over different countries. Is that something that they could track? I mean, obviously we can ask it from them directly, but I'm wondering if you've gone down that rabbit hole.

• 2:28:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, we're going down that rabbit hole now. There's a bunch of new providers and I think the satellite problem will be solved over the next five years. But like five years is a long time.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great news. Well.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  We gotta hit the gong.

• 2:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta hit the gong. Tell us, how much do you raise?

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  What's the biggest seed round in Canadian history?

• 2:28:32Speaker 05

  I think it might be the second biggest Canadian seed round in history. Definitely the biggest in defense.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is going to be the biggest gong hit in Canadian history.

• 2:28:39Speaker 05

  Okay, good.

• 2:28:40Jordi Hays?

  I think so. How much? Twenty-one million dollars?

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on. And yeah, glad, glad you guys are focused on the Arctic, cultivating Arctic power.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Keep us safe up there.

• 2:28:56Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Phil and Matt Grimm in the studio in the TBP and Ultra Dome. Come on, come on down, guys.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come to TBP and Ultra Dome. Great to see you. Good to see you.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Two of the most athletic men in tech, both athletes in their own right. Bench press world champion, bench press high school champion. What was the, what was the stat again?

• 2:29:33Fil Aronshtein?

  At the age of seventeen.

• 2:29:34John Coogan?

  Seventeen.

• 2:29:35Fil Aronshtein?

  Broke a bench state record for New York.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  That's the real news.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  What was the actual amount, the weight?

• 2:29:46Fil Aronshtein?

  Nothing crazy.

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:29:48Speaker 07

  What's the number?

• 2:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Three plates?

• 2:29:50Fil Aronshtein?

  It was 275. At the time, I could do three plates.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:53Fil Aronshtein?

  I overshot it to 355.

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:29:56Fil Aronshtein?

  Didn't actually get to do a 335.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:29:58Fil Aronshtein?

  But it is what it is.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so that was a high school state record?

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:01Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah, for age and weight class. I was 17.

• 2:30:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:30:05Fil Aronshtein?

  I weighed like 190 at the time.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  And what's the latest on the Murph? Is this an annual thing now?

• 2:30:08Speaker 07

  It's an annual thing. We're doing it again this year, rolling it back.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  You think you'll beat your time?

• 2:30:11Speaker 07

  Definitely beating the time this year.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:30:13Speaker 07

  I have one hour goal, so I was an hour and 12 minutes last year.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Okay, you're gonna shave off 12 minutes?

• 2:30:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  That's what, 20% of the time?

• 2:30:19Speaker 07

  A lot of training. Yeah, you gonna come out and do it this year?

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll be there.

• 2:30:22Speaker 07

  Last year, there was a lot of talk and then not a lot of follow-up. So, you know, you're coming out heavy.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  You know, when we started the show, you invited me down and we did a Murph. Or we didn't even do a full Murph. We just did like some training.

• 2:30:34Speaker 07

  About half, yeah.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  And I was completely dead. And I went down and I had like a fever for like a month. It was brutal. I was so sick doing the show. It was absolutely brutal.

• 2:30:42Speaker 07

  But this year, yeah, we're rolling it back. And then, most importantly, we're gonna do a big one in Ohio. It's a part of a partnership with Ohio State.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:30:48Speaker 07

  And then the launching of our Allsona One factory there.

• 2:30:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:30:50Speaker 07

  With everything getting up and moving. By the time the Murph comes around, we'll be just opening for production at the factory there. So it'll be a pretty big day for us.

• 2:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Great timing.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Let's rewind, introduce yourselves, just so we have it on the record. I think everyone knows, since you repeat guests, but kick it off.

• 2:31:04Fil Aronshtein?

  Oh, I mean, I'm Phil. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Dirac.

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:07Fil Aronshtein?

  We are building the first AI-native production orchestration platform, starting with automated work instructions.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:14Speaker 07

  And then I'm Matt Graham, the co-founder and COO of Andro Industries.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Okay. And then why are you two here today, together?

• 2:31:20Fil Aronshtein?

  Ooh, we are very, very fortunate to chat with you guys about an excellent partnership that the folks at Dirac and Andro have come to.

• 2:31:26Speaker 07

  Cool.

• 2:31:27Fil Aronshtein?

  We signed an excellent multi-year agreement to roll out Dirac across all of Andro's manufacturing facilities.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  Okay, so that includes the one in Ohio?

• 2:31:35Speaker 07

  We'll include the one in Ohio, yes. So I first met Phil about two years ago and change. There was a video that they sent around that went kind of viral in manufacturing tech nerd circles. And it was a video of the, an earlier iteration of their Build OS, showing how you could go from a model in CAD, and that the Build OS platform would then take that, break it down, and turn that into instructions for factory floor workers to actually put together and assemble. So I saw the video, reached out and said like, hey, this seems kind of cool. We've got a lot of factories. We're growing, we're building. You know, could we set up a call? So we... Kind of did a couple of calls, did a couple of videos, you know, video zoom screens. And then I brought him in to do a proof of concept and we've been kind of building together

• 2:32:19Speaker 07

  for the last two years, fully integrating the Build OS platform into our existing suite of tools. We call the tools the arsenal OS. That is the combination of our ERP on the backend, then our PLM that our CAD designers use every day to design the software, our MES on the floor that our production workers are interacting with, and then getting D-Rock's Build OS plugged directly into that, which will then reduce the amount of time going from an idea on a whiteboard to a model in CAD, then ultimately to those work instructions that the factory floor workers need to actually assemble the product.

• 2:32:52Fil Aronshtein?

  Got it.

• 2:32:52Speaker 07

  So with Build OS implemented, we've seen pretty wild, wild improvements in the time that it takes to go from that CAD model to that work instruction for the factory floor. Was the number 80 something percent?

• 2:33:03Fil Aronshtein?

  87.5%.

• 2:33:04Speaker 07

  There we go.

• 2:33:04Fil Aronshtein?

  It was 87.5%. It was a 12-hour reduction. It went from 12 hours down to 90 minutes.

• 2:33:10John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:33:11Speaker 07

  Pretty wild.

• 2:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for SAS. Yeah. SAS has been not getting enough love.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  How often are the work instructions changing? Is this just, is this more unique to Anduril because you're developing new products, new CAD designs, and so you need to go from CAD design to work instruction every day, every month, every year, versus someone who's just like, "Look, I make five, five, six rounds. It's the same CAD design, same work instructions for the last decade. I'm just doing the thing that I'm doing." Why is this important for you and how does Dirac plug in?

• 2:33:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's an excellent question. You're not just a pretty talking thing. You know, you know some things. So the challenge for a company like Anduril, as we scale up and we're diversifying across a number of different product lines and a number of different geographies, is then you have engineers with an idea who want to make a tweak or make a change, or sometimes who are responsive to quality issues in the field or something like that. If you want to make a design change... So then every time a design change gets made, the current method for doing work instructions is predominantly manual.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:34:11Speaker 07

  So every time a bracket, or a wiring harness, or a connector, or a circuit board changes, you have to change the work instructions, else on the factory floor, you get an instruction that says like, you know, screw bolt number ABC 123 into this hole tight into this torque, whatever, but it's a different bolt now.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:34:28Speaker 07

  So then the guy on the floor gets an instruction and is like, but it doesn't, it doesn't fit.

• 2:34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:32Speaker 07

  So then for us, as we, as we scale, and we're specifically trying to take a faster iteration, kind of faster mentality, to, to this manufacturing process, reducing that time is absolutely, absolutely clutch and critical. So for us, it is especially paramount. Though, I will say that I think this is a problem that plagues a lot of industries and a lot of our supply chain, a lot of our other partners and vendors. So I'll let Phil speak more to the rest of the market, but it's definitely compelling and working for us.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because you've had success in like automobile manufacturing as well.

• 2:35:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm building.

• 2:35:03Fil Aronshtein?

  We're pretty, we're pretty vertical in oxes. Last time we, last time I came on the show, we talked about a shipbuilding partner.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:35:08Fil Aronshtein?

  Androl makes a ton of things.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:11Fil Aronshtein?

  Planes, ships, all sorts of different things. And what we've seen, at least with Dirac, is that our problem set that we work on, right? Automating the work instruction, it's not just useful for just defense folks, right? Because we end up working with folks in aerospace and defense, automotive, agriculture, construction machinery, maritime, complex industrial machinery, really, anybody that has any sort of complex assembly, you need operators on the shop floor who know exactly what to build and when. And when it takes weeks or months to make a work instruction, a guide for your folks on the shop floor, most of the time, they're operating on outdated information. And when you want to have an industrial base that is agile and robust, you can't have your operators and your technicians operating on outdated information, on outdated context.

• 2:35:54Fil Aronshtein?

  And that, you know, we, we often talk about the work instruction as the core atomic unit of information in the factory.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:01Fil Aronshtein?

  And if that is the core driving force by which your factory builds, you can't let it be manual, can't be PowerPoint, you know, can't be.

• 2:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my only reference here is if you've ever gotten, you know, like, like some baby furniture thing, and then you got the instruction set, and like, if you're actually following it closely and you realize that the instructions are wrong, it's just the most enraging experience ever. And so I imagine even for like, like employee morale, like on the shop floor, if like, you're constantly dealing with just like terrible instructions, why should somebody be like... Yeah, it's great if they're high agency and they're going to try to like fix it and manage up.

• 2:36:37Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 2:36:38Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, a lot of people are just going to be like, you know, just actually become less engaged.

• 2:36:43Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  They're like, I'm not getting the right information and the resources. Why should I even, why should I even try?

• 2:36:48Speaker 07

  Correct. And in your baby furniture example, that is, that is not an electronic product. So you have to think of that exact problem and then layer on all the complexity of electronics and wiring harnesses and power distribution and all those extra components. So like one of the major challenges is that there's a quick iteration of chips. There'll just be a new chip that'll be faster on a different board, kind of new power, new power specs or whatever. So you need to make a slight tweak. The traditional way of doing that is to take all of those changes that you want to make on a very slow cadence, somewhere on the area of annual, sometimes, sometimes biannual, and batch all of those changes up into a single block upgrade that you then do all at once.

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:37:24Speaker 07

  And for a long period of time, you're deploying outdated hardware. So you want to be deploying the best that you possibly can to your customers. But to Phil's point, in order to get the best onto the factory floor and then ultimately into the hands of the customer, you drastically need to reduce the time from idea to work construction to factory floor. And, and then most importantly, keep all of that in sync. Because when you have at our scale with thousands of design engineers and then many thousands of factory floor workers, like keeping them all talking off the same sheet of music becomes a really hard orchestration problem to keep everybody talking together.

• 2:37:57Fil Aronshtein?

  Thousands of design engineers?

• 2:37:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:37:58Fil Aronshtein?

  That's a ton.

• 2:37:59Speaker 07

  We just passed through 7,000 employees.

• 2:38:01Fil Aronshtein?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 2:38:02Speaker 07

  Thank you, thank you.

• 2:38:08Jordi Hays?

  We gotta bring that gong closer for you here, it's too far. How, how are the work instructions actually evolving from a form factor standpoint? Like I imagine historically, you just get like a printed out kind of, I don't know, big stack of papers. I can imagine.

• 2:38:23Speaker 07

  Like a very thick Ikea instruction manual.

• 2:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think like the number of companies have come and gone trying to, you know, basically put work instructions into like, you know, like VR, stuff like that. How far away are we from that? I imagine this is a question that's come up.

• 2:38:36Fil Aronshtein?

  Yes.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  Like with investor pitches.

• 2:38:38Fil Aronshtein?

  VR is an interesting modality for displaying work instructions. Typically what we see nowadays in the shop floor before we come in. Most manufacturing engineers are using PowerPoint or Word. You know, Microsoft, that old beast is still dominating the work instruction market.

• 2:38:53Jordi Hays?

  So they just have a laptop pulled up?

• 2:38:55Fil Aronshtein?

  They're just kind of tapping through it? Oftentimes, so they will draft it into PowerPoint or Word. They'll then print it out and it'll sit in a thick white binder on the assembly station. If they're lucky, they're updating it maybe, you know, once or twice a year, flipping through, say, "Oh, it's this version. No way. Get that binder off the rack over there to make this different model." On the way that we think about it, right, the way that we've seen it, on the design side of things, right, we've seen 15, 20 years of an explosion of excellent software on the design side, and because CAD is so advanced, what we've seen is an explosion in the variants that people are able to design, right? Think about the increasing complexity of the different modular builds, right? You know, a company like Andal, right, has modular products that are from payloads that are reconfigurable.

• 2:39:40Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah. Now, think about that from the design perspective. Great, we can swap out a different, you know, a bunch of different modules. Now, from the manufacturing perspective, that means that you have to have, when you can have thousands of different combinations of things, you now need thousands of different work instructions. Where if one picture is off and one step is off, you have somebody building a completely different thing. And thinking about that from the top-level build perspective, that makes sense, right? Like, that's a ton of different configurations. But when we're looking at all the people who make up the supplier base of the companies that make planes, cars, trains, everything in between, we're talking about companies that make pumps and valves, complex mechanical sub-assemblies, right? Think about how many different variants those guys have to have.

• 2:40:23Fil Aronshtein?

  Now, they're in deep trouble, because when they lose the ability to not only have folks on their shop floor that are, you know, 30-year veterans who just know off the back of their heads, you know, "Okay, this is, I remember how we built this last time. I don't really need instructions." Because all those folks are also retiring, our entire industrial base and our supplier base is also at risk because we haven't codified all of that tribal knowledge. And that is a key mission of ours as well. Not just to be a rubber band around the variants, but to also codify and capture and

• 2:40:52Jordi Hays?

  Basically, like, how did we used to do it? Why did we stop doing it that way?

• 2:40:56Fil Aronshtein?

  Yep.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, making sure that's maintained, so if a guy doesn't retire, you're not calling him up, like, what did you used to do in this situation?

• 2:41:02Fil Aronshtein?

  Exactly. Similar to a McKinsey analyst who put together a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint that was like, you know, 150 slides, they're like, "Hey..." How did you, what macros did you use, what formulas did you use for this thing? That's like another framing to think about it, except that guy retired.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How many products does Andrew have now? Because I think most people know Fury, Roadrunner, Dive, but there's different variants with each product. How do you think about the product footprint?

• 2:41:32Speaker 07

  To Phil's point, there are roundabouts 30 of the core products, but then there are many, many hundreds of individual variants that'll come along with those. So for example, the Australian military might use a slightly different radio than the US military. So then there's just, and it's not a hard change, but it's still a change, a slightly different bracket, a slightly different connector.

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  Because they're not standardized on a specific size.

• 2:41:52Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  So you need different bracket sizes and all that.

• 2:41:55Speaker 07

  Exactly. And then to Phil's point about payloads, so for on the Dive XL, for example, maybe you want to put a very advanced sonar package, or maybe you want to put a mine sweeping package, or something along those lines. So the actual dive is still the same, but then inside you need a slightly different bracket to hold the thing.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  You consider a USBC for testing.

• 2:42:13Speaker 07

  This is, this is, this is, this would be the ideal. I think it's a long ways out though.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  It is, right? Because standards, I mean, it takes so long even just to roll out into the phones. I mean, how long was it before the iPhone and the Android phone had the same charger?

• 2:42:26Speaker 07

  Clearly we need European style regulations to force us into it.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  Seriously, like, do we? Like, does it need to be defined from the government?

• 2:42:34Speaker 07

  So there are a number of standards that exist out there, specifically about, you know, communication protocols and things. And then this is part of why we run these international, multi-military exercises, partly to kind of work through these types of issues.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Especially for comms, I imagine.

• 2:42:47Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  Because if this helicopter can't talk to that plane, you're dead.

• 2:42:50Speaker 07

  It's a huge pain point, yeah. So there is some standardization, but that doesn't quite get down to the chip level.

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:42:56Speaker 07

  Like, inside the seeker head of a Barracuda, there's maybe a slightly different sensor that this customer or that customer wants to use. The body of the Barracuda is the same, the wings are the same, the engine's the same, the power module's the same, all that's the same, but at the front, there's a slightly different module, which then to Phil's point means... Then you need another set of work instructions. You need to train your workers a different way and then that becomes very hard to manage at scale.

• 2:43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:21Speaker 07

  So with Phil's platform, we'll be able to kind of bring that together and shorten that time and ultimately lead to products getting in the field quicker.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Talk about Ohio. Is it, how far along are you with the project? Is Trey vindicated in every, in all of his Ohio?

• 2:43:40Speaker 07

  You know, I don't want to take swings at Trey here, but the Arsenal One project in Columbus, Ohio is running incredibly smoothly. We've got about the first 30 and change Ohioans hired already. We hired them about six months ago and then brought them out to California. So they've been at headquarters where we've been building the first few tails of the Fury line. Then they're coming back to Ohio this month and then we're doing the stand-up and provisioning of the line. So the ultimate Arsenal One campus will be about a dozen buildings, totaling in the neighborhood of about 5 million square feet total. The first building that's about just shy of a million square feet, it's like 800,000 square feet, is fully built. The internal is being constructed now, the inside, and the production line and all the

• 2:44:23Speaker 07

  equipment, all of that, test rigs and all of those things are being provisioned. And we'll start production on Fury this summer.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  You said Fury tails.

• 2:44:30Speaker 07

  Building two is, the walls are vertical, so that's going up. And then building three is immediately thereafter and building four right thereafter. So we'll be rolling out a new building about every year-ish for about the next seven, eight years.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  You said the Fury tails are being built one place. Is this a matter of like building different pieces than bringing them all together? Is there an assembly line? Is it like a manufacturing of a F-150?

• 2:44:50Speaker 07

  Sorry, a term of industry, tail being the full plane.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:44:55Speaker 07

  Like a tail number on the plane.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Got it.

• 2:44:58Speaker 07

  Yes, yes, yes. So the first, the first, the first, the first out of four or five, I'm going to get in trouble for not remembering. The first four or five will be assembled at HQ and then test flown at our test range nearby. And then the next one will be built.

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  Just the tail? Why not the whole thing?

• 2:45:12Speaker 07

  The tail number, the whole plane. But then from there on out, they'll be manufactured.

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  In terms of assembly lines, are we still paying homage to Henry Ford with a plane that moves down and gets things added? Or is it a more integrated process?

• 2:45:24Speaker 07

  For Fury's line, it will resemble something in the neighborhood of

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Okay, kind of moves along.

• 2:45:29Speaker 07

  Yes, that's it. So it'll move from station to station.

• 2:45:30Jordi Hays?

  It's actually more like the Grimm method of

• 2:45:32Speaker 07

  There you go. There you go. There you go. We'll coin that one. We need a gong hit for that. Yeah, perfect.

• 2:45:41Speaker 07

  The line will resemble closer to that where at Station 1 we do the hydraulics, at Station 2 we do the electronics, at Station 3 you do the fuel system, something along those lines. And then it's ultimately, the Fury line will be 22 stations, and then where the Fury line in particular gets complicated is that we have to do a number of very complicated coatings and paintings on it, so that's a little bit tricky and specific. And then, of course, the propulsion element of it is just very, very complicated.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Talk to...

• 2:46:12Fil Aronshtein?

  Testament to how far out Mr. Mac Rim thinks about, has been thinking about Fury. Two years ago, when he initially reached out after seeing our demo of Build OS, his initial outreach was, "Hey, I saw what you guys are working on, can you use it to build robotic fighter jets?" And I said, "Yeah, I mean, depending on how cool they are, of course."

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  And then two years later, here we are.

• 2:46:36Fil Aronshtein?

  Here we are.

• 2:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and what a moment, too. And how validating this is for Dirac. I mean, I feel like part of why you guys are coming out and talking about it together is I imagine you want your supply chain to probably get on Dirac. Is that a part of it, like wanting the whole supply chain to modernize?

• 2:46:52Fil Aronshtein?

  Is it just a quality part that you get at the end of the day?

• 2:46:55Speaker 07

  Good question. So there's a couple of parts, a couple of reasons why I'm here in particular to support the announcement here. First is that Andro is on a mission to save the West. It's kind of the name of the company baked into that, and it is my firm conviction that part of that journey will be re-industrializing the West and re-industrializing America, and part of that is getting the supply chain teams and get manufacturing organizations, production operations to be more tech-forward and be more tech-enabled. And just like accounting software and sort of like traditional kind of big software platforms, a lot of the core technology in that ecosystem is pretty hard to use. It's almost user-hostile. It's just very difficult. So part of the mission here is that, like, yes, of course, we want to adopt it, then we want the supply chain that supports us to adopt it, and then in the long run, we

• 2:47:39Speaker 07

  want more and more and more and more factories operating this way, because if we're going to compete with China and the rest of the world on the large-scale manufacturing, we need to get faster at this. And part of the lag in Western manufacturing is exactly that, to your point about the work instructions of a kid's playset that aren't quite right. What happens on a line, then, is it's like, then the line is stopped at Station 7 because the Station 7 instructions are...

• 2:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just piling out.

• 2:48:06Speaker 07

  So then you just get like, okay, well, then it stopped here, stopped at 6, stopped at 5, stopped at 4. Because that guy is like, I don't know what to do. I can't fit this. So then extrapolate that out across industries and there's just so much wasted time and effort that gets spent on problems like this that I think can be solved with technology.

• 2:48:21Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:22Speaker 07

  It's a perfect application of where AI can be very powerful to help accelerate the development and the shipping process. So that's one point. And then the other point I want to bring up is that we've seen this very fascinating and honestly unpredicted outcome of our work with DROCK is that by talking to our customers, so talking to the Navy, the Air Force, et cetera, about how we are going to scale manufacturing and talking to them about how we go from designs into PDRs and CDRs and MRRs, the whole engineering process to get something designed and fielded. We've been specifically pitching DROCK's solution as part of that ecosystem to help them understand exactly this question about how we get from that idea to that work instructions to the factory floor to help us accelerate.

• 2:49:01Fil Aronshtein?

  Pretty good ahead of sales.

• 2:49:03Speaker 07

  And in a bizarre way, it's been an accelerant for our sales to help our customers see that we're leveraging this new-fangled technology, this AI, because the government customers are like, what is this AI stuff? How am I going to use it? And we come in and say, here's how you're going to use it. We're going to use it on autonomy on your end products. You're going to use it in the manufacturing line. You're going to use it in the back office. And here's how it's going to ultimately get you better products fielded for cheaper.

• 2:49:24Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk to you guys about the labor market in manufacturing.

• 2:49:28Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 2:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, are you guys going, there's so much demand for probably type of talent that could do manufacturing, or they could go work in a data center or development project. Are you guys competing for talent with the data center build out? Is there enough people, enough people excited about entering this workforce?

• 2:49:48Fil Aronshtein?

  So there's actually two pieces to talk about there. Interesting thing to bring up, data centers. Increasingly, rather historically, the way the data centers have been built out, right? It looked a lot more like architecture projects. And so you've seen the tooling that people use to design data centers historically on AutoCAD, Autodesk, which is a little bit more of the architecture, you know, they're doing it in BIM, which is like-

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  You're building a building.

• 2:50:12Fil Aronshtein?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  You're just going to throw a bunch of racks in there.

• 2:50:14Fil Aronshtein?

  Historically, yes. But now, something that we are seeing as a company- Through the companies that we're working with, increasingly more data center companies coming to us and saying, hey, we need to start building at scale, the same way we produce electronic systems at scale. And so, you know, we are seeing a massive migration of data center producers and data center builders away from traditional, architecture-oriented, design and build systems, towards the more manufacturing-oriented, design and build systems. And with that, they're saying, hey, we are going to have to build data center systems all over the world, and we cannot have folks not having the context of what to build. Can Dirac's work instruction software be useful for this? And so, of course, we say yes. Yeah.

• 2:50:58Fil Aronshtein?

  And so, that's one thing about the data centers, just as an interesting anecdote that might be interesting for folks to know about, that we are also trying to build data centers the same way we build cars and planes and everything else. Yeah. And then, on the labor question, another thing that we think about is radically reducing the barrier to entry for net new folks into manufacturing, because, you know, picture's worth a thousand words, but an animation's worth a million, right? Earlier, you were asking about how do we change the modality of the way a person interacts with the work instruction? With our software, it is not just a picture, not just a photo, not just a printed-out thing, it is a 3D, interactive, animated, dynamic work instruction. Yeah. That a operator technician can interact with, right? Picture's worth a thousand words, but animation's worth a million.

• 2:51:41Fil Aronshtein?

  And so, because you were able to have less skilled folks potentially take the roles of operators, and because you're also codifying and aggregating all of that tribal knowledge and context. Yeah. We're seeing that the companies that we work with are actually able to hire less-trained technicians, and so, it's easing that burden and pain for them.

• 2:51:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. On the andro side, I'd add a couple of points there. First is that, on the data center side, in the construction market, it's becoming pretty contentious, just because, you know, big, huge builds need big, huge bulldozers and concrete layers and electricians and et cetera. So, on the construction side, that is...

• 2:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys are basically competing for the same kind of firms, for the time of firms that are getting offers from data centers that maybe have a different economic...

• 2:52:23Speaker 07

  So, on the construction and build kind of side of things, yes, that's certainly getting competitive. On the actual technicians on the factory floor, we haven't seen pressures from data centers, because the dot I would add is that these data centers, while very big, very powerful, tend to employ very few people. There's not that many people engaged in the actual day-to-day running of the place. So for us, like on the technician's side, we don't see much competition from them. And where we are spending a lot of our effort is investing into the local communities, including in Ohio, through partnerships with the local universities and trade schools and community colleges, like that kind of ecosystem to work with them on the types of skills that we want to see new hires have, whether that's additive manufacturing, or welding, or particular CNC programming, or just like electronics assembly, whatever that skill set is, helping

• 2:53:08Speaker 07

  design curriculums that can then produce graduates of those programs that are ready to come get a job at Androel. So for us, it's kind of a long play, because, you know, we invest that time up now and those graduates won't come out for a couple of years, but in the long run, we think will lead to a pretty fertile supply, to say nothing of being good for the communities that we're engaged in.

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  What are you seeing within the armed forces on the self-repair side? There's been a couple of press releases about being able to repair drone or something on the fly. I remember I toured a aircraft carrier, and they had a machine shop, and there was a sailor in the machine shop who was talking about if something breaks on the ship, they will go and mill the bolt right there, they don't go and buy it because, and he was very proud to say, you know, "We're saving the taxpayer, they want to charge us $1,000 for this bolt, I made it for $5." That seems like a really positive thing. Does that play into automated work instructions at some point, some digital solution?

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  And then, just what are you seeing on the overall repairability from the systems that you'll be deploying and are deploying?

• 2:54:13Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah, funny enough, maintenance and repair is a very, very common next question when folks ask us about work instructions, right? Most of the time, when they're saying, "Hey, awesome, you can now automatically generate my work instructions for me, I can now have operators and technicians interact with it in a 3D manner, awesome, now can you do maintenance and repair instructions?" And our answer is, of course, yes, right? MRO is a natural inverse, generally, of actually the initial build of the thing. And so, part of what our roadmap is, part of the things that we're working on with a variety of different folks is... Is automating maintenance and repair instructions. So we're very big proponents of, you were mentioning the right to repair, not just of, you know, tractors, but of drones out in the field. It's a very big thing that we've been talking to a lot of different folks about.

• 2:54:58Fil Aronshtein?

  And it's something that we're a big proponent of because we don't think that these should be two different domains of instruction sets. Context should live on the model, context should live in the hands of folks who are actually designing and building those systems and repairing them. And so you should, at the time of making your first instruction set, have the ability to codify all of that context into one core instruction set. And maintenance and repair instructions should fall naturally out of that. And that's a lot of how we think about things.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:55:27Speaker 07

  From a policy perspective, where I think the lines get a little bit blurred is that we're talking about a bolt or a bracket or a fixture or something that you can carve out of metal makes obvious sense in one area. And then the next area would be somewhere in the middle of, you know, rewiring or reconnecting, you know, an additional battery pack or something like that that's kind of in the middle. And then all the way on the other end is like, all the way down to the chip level.

• 2:55:48John Coogan?

  Chip broke, you're not going to fathom.

• 2:55:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're not laying silicon chips out on an aircraft carrier or something, right? So there is a spectrum there, at which point, at some point on that spectrum, you say like, actually, I do need to call the experts to help me on this. Right, but in my opinion, the default of saying, don't touch it, we'll come repair it, ship it all the way back to our factory, that's just not going to fly at any time of conflict. Because like, we do need our sailors and our airmen and our soldiers in the field to be able to, at minimum, replace the consumables, you know, the brake pads, the tires, et cetera. But then also to do kind of the next level of repair into, you know, replace a fuel pump or something along those lines. When it gets down to the chip level, though, you're like, eh, I'll probably send you a replacement module. And then maybe the work instructions say, take bad module out, put new module in, reconnect

• 2:56:35Speaker 07

  these cables. But in general, yeah, we want to be as friendly as we can be to this forward repair concept because in a time of conflict, you just think like, I need the thing now, I need it. You said brake pads and my, uh, mine went to motorsports because I know Andurall is supporting NASCAR. And then I was curious, are you guys working, has there been any inbound from any racing organizations that, that are make, having to make parts on the fly and are in heavy R and D? And maybe they only make the part, like, maybe they're making different variations of the part, but they're not actually doing it at scale because it's not a manufacturing business. Any, any opportunities there?

• 2:57:15Fil Aronshtein?

  So funny enough, I cannot confirm or deny explicit names, but we are actually in conversation with several motorsports teams who are actively evaluating us for use cases on and off the track.

• 2:57:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably like a very different workflow, but so many learnings and just great for the brand and whatnot.

• 2:57:33Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you reflecting on the DOD or Department of War budget potentially being increased?

• 2:57:41Speaker 07

  I still say DOD too. I'm trying, it's, but it's, you know, years of it.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  The Dow.

• 2:57:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  Um, I mean, the, the, the post saying that we might go to 1.5 trillion, uh, that seems like that was not Andurall's original mission. Andurall was all about, uh, doing more with less. Um, but at the same time, if it accelerates the mission, that could be good. How have you been processing it internally?

• 2:58:05Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, I think any, any time a customer says they want to spend more on the things you make is generally, generally a good, good thing for us. Um, that's set exactly to your point. Like, we would love to see these, um, this increase in funding if it happens, of course, it's got to go through Congress and all the usual, but if it happens, um, be spent smartly and on, um, new technologies, new approaches and not just kind of funding the old way of doing things and the old kind of, um, legacy model that in our opinion hasn't worked for decades. So, um, yeah, of course, you know, customer spending more money is good for us, but, um, we're going to be lobbying pretty heavily to have them spend it on more. AI-powered, you know, weapons of futures, autonomy, that kind of construct. And especially on a different kind of contracting model, more towards the cost-plus type of model.

• 2:58:48Speaker 07

  Sorry, away from the cost-plus type of model to the firm-fixed type of model that

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:51Speaker 07

  that we like to do business with. So, still a lot to digest there, but we're in general pretty excited as part of.

• 2:58:58John Coogan?

  That initial like flipped model of like, you know, like raise venture, take risk capital, build a prototype, build something, then show up to the Department of War

• 2:59:07Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  with a concept or something that's maybe ready to be fielded, and then say, buy it. Has that held as long as you thought it would? Do you think it holds forever? Because at some point, if a customer shows up and says, I'll pay you to do the R and D, what are you gonna do? Turn them away? But at the same time, there's some, you know, there's the financial hazard that the firm was founded around. So, how's your thinking evolved around the whole flipped model and doing R and D on your balance sheet?

• 2:59:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, a couple of thoughts there. First is that we spend an inordinate amount of money on our own internal research and defense, I R A D type research and development rather. Spending just an absolute inordinate amount of money, and we're grateful to have the support of our investors who believe in this business model. So, for us, we haven't not at all seen a like, let's just shift back to that way. It's a lot capital, you know, less risky, capital safer, all of that. So, no, I'm not surprised. Like, this is, to your point, this is exactly the kind of thesis, the mission of what we're trying to do. If anything, we've been very happy to see venture capital funding to the sector increase

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:10Speaker 07

  to fund more companies approaching it this way. Because I think that for us to win a great power conflict, we're not gonna need one and roll, we're gonna need five or eight or 10 of them. So, we're excited to see, you know, new companies get started with this kind of mindset and go out and chip off parts of the ecosystem here.

• 3:00:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:26Speaker 07

  The last point I would say is that to date, something in the neighborhood of 85, 90-ish percent of our revenue has not been from these kind of cost-plus traditional, like customer-funded models. So, like, the vast majority of it comes from

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  The original model.

• 3:00:40Speaker 07

  us selling our product

• 3:00:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:42Speaker 07

  to our customers at a fixed price.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:44Speaker 07

  And then the recurring, bit of recurring revenue tied to that, for kind of think of it like an extended warranty kind of concept, where

• 3:00:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:50Speaker 07

  we are doing the maintenance, we're providing the support, we're doing the security upgrades, the patching, the, all of that, which from our perspective really aligns incentives for us to deliver the best possible product. Because to be blunt, like, we will have a higher margin if we don't have to send repair guys out and keep replacing things, but then also gives the customer a more reliable product, and then importantly, gives the customer predictable pricing, so they know what their total four-year, five-year cost of ownership for a product will be, because they know that within that number, we're responsible for anything that breaks, any sort of problems or maintenance that needs to happen, that aligns everybody, and we're seeing a broader acceptance of that business model within both the DOW and with DHS.

• 3:01:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:27Speaker 07

  So we're pretty excited to see those messages landing.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Give us an update on the secondary wars. Ooh.

• 3:01:33Speaker 07

  Ooh.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Ooh.

• 3:01:35Speaker 07

  Ooh.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Ooh.

• 3:01:37Speaker 07

  Spicy.

• 3:01:38John Coogan?

  Are you the head of investment relations?

• 3:01:39Speaker 07

  I'm not, I'm not, I'm not. Alison Lazarus is our-

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  You're the guy she calls to live smackdown.

• 3:01:47Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, at some point, there's going to be some enterprising young SVB slinger that's like, if I make a really heinous memo, Matt Grimm is going to pump it.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  The Grim Reaper is going to come to town.

• 3:01:59Speaker 07

  So after-

• 3:02:00John Coogan?

  So give us some backstory first.

• 3:02:02Speaker 07

  Okay, so first, I would say that our investor relations is run by this incredibly talented woman named Alison Lazarus. She's great, and she works closely with Trey on managing the cap table and all of the inbound and interested investors and all of that. So, not really my turf anymore. That said, I've had a long-running battle against what I would call the Wildcats in the secondary market, who have absolutely zero respect for any sort of control of the cap table, like who our investors are, information rights, any of that. And they're just out kind of slinging offers at early investors, early employees, at share prices that are completely insane. And those people don't care whatsoever about the impact that has on the company, whether that's around 4.9A valuation, or RSU pricing, or any of those kind of internal dynamics, they don't give a shit.

• 3:02:47Speaker 07

  So they just kind of create headache for us, by then us having to field this inbound. So beyond the headache, the point that I'm really worried about, and I think the SpaceX IPO will be very, very interesting because this is going to be a situation where there are, you know, the tide goes out and there's going to be a lot of people without trunks on. That's just the, the people have been out there slinging, in our case, access to Andorol, or I have limited access to their next round at some insane price that is nowhere close to what the actual price is as set by the market.

• 3:03:17John Coogan?

  And even with the, and that's not even factoring in the fees, which are sometimes like not actually in line.

• 3:03:24Speaker 07

  So there was, there was this one situation of someone slinging an offer around that was an SPV into another SPV that was buying a chunk of an investor's, an early investor's holdings. So there's like layers and layers of fees and carries on top of that at a price per share that was something like 70% above what the last round traded at. So it's just an insane thing where they're pitching access to a deal they don't have. And I know for a fact that there are, there was a recent indictment announced in New York around a case where someone was, was out slinging Andorol SPVs.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:03:57Speaker 07

  That did not have access to Andorol and the guy was just pocketing the cash. And then he was just indicted and arrested at JFK. So like, this is a thing that happens and the reason I bring up SpaceX is not to create more work for them, but that the world of SpaceX SPVs.

• 3:04:12John Coogan?

  Well, it's got to be a one and a half trillion dollar IPO because the legal fees of unwinding all these.

• 3:04:15Speaker 07

  It's wild, right? Because there's, there's just, there's a lot of this nesting and SpaceX is a fantastic company that's been in business for a long time. So there's so many of these nests of who owns what.

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  And for a lot of these types of like mainstream investors, it's totally possible that they're thinking, well, I got into SpaceX at 200 when you didn't. And then it goes out at 1.5 and that's my retirement. And then it goes out and you're like, where are my shares? And the guy skipped out.

• 3:04:38Speaker 07

  The guy skipped out.

• 3:04:39John Coogan?

  And then you're just out whatever you put in. And not only did you lose the, whatever you put in, but you also lost the mental of where you thought you were and what you were planning. You might've been planning a certain lifestyle or your retirement.

• 3:04:49Speaker 07

  Of course, and the opportunity cost of deploying that capital somewhere else too. It's a, it's a, it's a very big problem. And I've used this joke before, but my, my joke is that how many investors in America think they own a chunk of SpaceX when they're actually funding their ex roommate's boyfriend's coke habit in Miami? And it's like it's like a non zero amount, right?

• 3:05:09Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think the solution is? Can the, can the investor community police itself?

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  It seems like, obviously, like you have a legal team that's working on this stuff, but there is an element of like going direct. Like you need to get the word out that this is happening and that's important too.

• 3:05:23Speaker 07

  But Yes, so this is, so this is why I've, we as a company have been more public about this. It's because we're specifically trying to send a message to the market that's like, we see you, we're aware of you. And like secondaries, of course, have their purpose. Of course, there are early investors who need to liquidate funds or fund lifecycle problems. Of course. So it isn't a blanket comment that all secondaries are bad. They're not, they're not. There's a category of these people who just have like really no respect and are basically just fraudsters, hucksters. And what I think needs to happen is two things. One, the investor community needs to be better at policing ourselves around just who these bad actors are and kind of shining a light on them. And then second, sadly, I think it's going to take law enforcement action, whether the SEC or the FBI, you know, thwacking enough of these folks that that community starts

• 3:06:06Speaker 07

  to see like, eh, this isn't good for me. And it just kind of puts a damper on, on that side as well.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Adam Porter Price has been on a tear doing deals, buying companies.

• 3:06:19Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  As COO, what's the, as COO, what is the key to a great post-merger integration?

• 3:06:27Speaker 07

  The, that's a great question and an often overlooked part of doing these deals. The head, the deal makes a headline.

• 3:06:34John Coogan?

  Adam's busy popping champagne and then you gotta get to work.

• 3:06:37Speaker 07

  Adam loves more, more airline miles and more and more iPhone minutes than me, than Brian, than Trey, than anybody. Because he's, because he's constantly out there. The best in the biz doing this. So from a post-merger perspective, there is a ticky tacky piece of it that is important, which is payroll, benefits, equity ownership, you know, all the 401k transitions, the email has to migrate, like

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  But making it sure it happens on day one. There's no, oh yeah, you'll get your paycheck, but it's a delayed a week. That's annoying.

• 3:07:08Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  No one wants that.

• 3:07:08Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  It's that bad taste.

• 3:07:10Speaker 07

  Nothing will burn your trust with a company faster than screwing up their first paycheck. So for us, it's a thing that we try to lean as heavy as we can into that employee education and system transition upfront. It's not possible to transition like ERPs and years of

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:07:23Speaker 07

  design software. That takes usually, you know, six to nine to 12 months on the long end to get those systems fully working, but like the guts have to work first.

• 3:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:31Speaker 07

  And then second is I would say is a cultural alignment. That's just like how we pitch our products, how we price our products, how we plug into the kind of go to market ecosystem and engine like we have to, we have to get that right. And then, then the third piece I would say is trying to get some wins pretty quick. Cause if you're, if you're an acquired company and you get integrated and you're like, ah, who are all these people? This is different. I liked it when we were smaller. Yeah.

• 3:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe they're in scrappy mode and then they're like, hey, I'm in.

• 3:07:58Jordi Hays?

  I saw the campaign, don't work at Andorl. Why would I?

• 3:08:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:08:01John Coogan?

  Well, I had Andorl. I just don't work while I'm here. I just sell my paycheck.

• 3:08:05Speaker 07

  So kind of aligning with the, what are we, what are we trying to build? Why are we building it? What's the goal? What are the deliverables we're trying to hit? Like getting that kind of alignment for folks to see, kind of see the destination, see the lighthouse on the hill and say, that's where we're going and aligning folks to that. And it's, it's those second two that are, that are really hard because that's much more kind of personality based and kind of relationship based. So it takes a lot of investment from the, the leadership team, takes a lot of investment on, on the engineering team especially, you know, how are you designing your products now? What's your release cycle like? How do we get that into Andorl's kind of way of doing business? There's just a, a big transition there, but.

• 3:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. You gotta migrate.

• 3:08:41Jordi Hays?

  It seems.

• 3:08:42John Coogan?

  A lot less.

• 3:08:43Speaker 07

  That's exactly right.

• 3:08:43Jordi Hays?

  There's been this, uh, maybe kind of sentiment or joke, uh, shoot for nicey, even if you miss, you'll land at Andorl. You know, this idea of like, you know, maybe, maybe I don't build a multi-billion dollar company in, as a new like neo-prime, but I have a, you know, maybe like the, the, the, the not, the next outcome is I land at Andorl. Can you reality check that? Because I feel like in practice.

• 3:09:10Speaker 07

  Nonsense.

• 3:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, no. And, and I'm just saying like, I think it's like for founders to understand like, what is the actual bar? Because you guys, every, every company that's built a great product, but maybe the business side isn't like fully working yet. And they're thinking like, okay, like my product's great. Our team's great. I bet we could fit in there. Reality check that.

• 3:09:28Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, uh, the reason I'm pretty dismissive of it is the, um, that implies that Andorl will acquire anything or any company that's struggling or not.

• 3:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because Adam's logging all these miles, but he's not exactly doing it.

• 3:09:39Speaker 07

  No, no, no. We do like two a year on average, if that, right? So he's, he's, he's saying no a lot, a lot. But what we look for in acquisitions is really a sweet spot of two things. One is a very strong engineering team. They have to have something that's very compelling and very unique and very interesting. And then the second is an area where we can add a lot of value or accelerate or fuel to their go-to-market.

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Like how do we, how do we speed up the timeline by like?

• 3:10:07Speaker 07

  Exactly. And you guys talk a lot with defense founders and you've had a lot on and folks will consistently talk about how hard it is for the go-to-market engine. And there's a lot of nuts and bolts around that that get underestimated around what formal government proposals look like, how to do formal government contracting, security clearances, the government relations kind of lobbying side of this to be, to be a player on these bigger deals than relationships within your customer that are, so you're not just pitching, you know, the guy flying the drone out in the field. You're pitching the whole chain and how it fits into their ecosystem, how it fits into the program. There's a whole lot of that infrastructure that, to be blunt, like, we're pretty good at.

• 3:10:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:43Speaker 07

  We've gotten pretty good at this. So when we find a company that has an incredible team, building a really cool product that's like really unique and interesting, but is maybe struggling there, they haven't seen kind of the ramp that they want. And we see that and say, hey, look, we can help with capital, obviously. We can also help with this go-to-market engine. We've built this legal infrastructure, this facilities infrastructure, this government relations infrastructure, all of that, that will then take your product and can help really accelerate and get it deployed, both to the US and to friendly governments around the world.

• 3:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:11Speaker 07

  Like that ends up being the sweet spot. So the reason I would say that, that the base question that you started from is just completely off-base is like, we're not going to go look and try to find a company that like isn't clicking. They don't have a great product. They don't have a strong team. And they haven't sold a lot. And then be like, yeah, let's go get them.

• 3:11:29Jordi Hays?

  My sense is that if you're doing a couple of deals a year, it's like usually like you're going in and being like, we want to buy this company.

• 3:11:35Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 3:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Less like, hey, like, things aren't working that well, we should try to sell.

• 3:11:38Speaker 07

  Yes, exactly, exactly, exactly right. And, and the last point I would make on that is that to date, we've done exactly zero turnarounds. And I think this is a kind of a mental model for us is that like, in general, we don't really want to be in the turnaround business. So take a, take something that's struggling and come in and fix it. Like deploy our team of operators to go fix it. Like there are plenty of PE firms who are very good at doing that. There are plenty of other organizations who are honestly better positioned to do that. For us, we really look for that strong team, strong product, and then where we can really accelerate sales and go make an impact. Very cool.

• 3:12:09John Coogan?

  Do you have a favor? I don't want to put you in hot water.

• 3:12:12Speaker 07

  There's no chance I'll answer that question.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 3:12:15Speaker 07

  I love all of my children equally, yes. Excellent.

• 3:12:18John Coogan?

  Which one did you log the most? I think we know.

• 3:12:22Speaker 07

  There's a great company we acquired in Ireland that was called Class. And they make these absolutely incredible computers and networking.

• 3:12:33Jordi Hays?

  I know, and when I saw that, I was like, I want one of those.

• 3:12:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're great devices, great team, but it's headquartered in Dublin, which is very far. So, a lot of time spent over there. And that acquisition's gone absolutely swimmingly. Couldn't be happier.

• 3:12:49John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:12:51Speaker 07

  Thank you guys for having us. Appreciate you.

• 3:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Hang out for a second.

• 3:12:54John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We will be live tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And thank you. We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:13:05Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow, folks. Have a great MLK day. Thanks for hanging out.

• 3:13:09John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:13:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.