Google Taps Berkshire, Confidential IPO Filings, Putin's Longevity | Jack Doohan, Shreya Murthy, Nate Cavanaugh & Justin Fox, Thomas Mueller, Edward Kim, Brynn Putnam

(00:21) - Google Taps Berkshire (24:37) - Berkshire Bets on Housing (38:54) - History of Confidential IPO Filings (46:33) - Jack Doohan, an Australian racing driver, discusses his journey from karting in Australia to becoming a Formula One driver, including his early move to Europe at 13 and his progression through the racing ranks. He shares the challenges he faced, such as being sidelined six races into his F1 career due to circumstances beyond his control, which led him to explore his interest in AI and technology. This exploration culminated in the founding of Muse, a company aimed at solving data fragmentation issues in the food and beverage industry by unifying various systems into a single, orchestrated platform. (01:07:48) - Nate Cavanaugh, co-founder of Special, discusses the launch of their new holding company aimed at applying AI tools to the $10 trillion Main Street services economy, starting with healthcare. He explains their strategy to acquire independent small businesses, beginning with at-home senior care, and enhance them with AI to improve efficiency and service quality. Cavanaugh emphasizes their commitment to sharing cost savings with workers to attract talent and plans to replicate this model across other labor-intensive, highly regulated industries. (01:15:31) - Thomas Mueller, a renowned aerospace engineer and propulsion expert, is the founder and CEO of Impulse Space, a company specializing in in-space transportation services. In the conversation, Mueller discusses Impulse Space's mission to enhance space mobility by developing technologies that transport payloads from Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to higher orbits like Geostationary Orbit (GEO), the Moon, and Mars. He highlights the company's products, such as the Mira spacecraft for precision maneuvering and the Helios kick stage designed to efficiently move payloads to higher orbits, aiming to make space access more reliable and cost-effective. (01:34:34) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:38:56) - Putin's Longevity (01:46:46) - Edward Kim, co-founder and head of technology at Gusto, introduces Gusto Co-Founder, an AI agent designed to automate small business back-office tasks like payroll, benefits, and HR scheduling. This tool integrates with existing systems such as Notion, QuickBooks, and Google Workspace, allowing users to manage operations via SMS and Slack, thereby streamlining processes and reducing the need for direct platform interaction. Kim emphasizes the importance of creating a seamless, teammate-like experience to enhance efficiency and user satisfaction. (02:02:06) - Shreya Murthy, co-founder and CEO of Partiful, a social event planning platform, discusses the launch of Partiful's new ticketing feature, enabling hosts to sell tickets directly through the platform. This addition addresses a feature gap, enhancing user experience and supporting various events like concerts and fundraisers. Murthy emphasizes the company's commitment to fostering real-world connections and outlines plans for future growth and monetization. (02:17:58) - Brynn Putnam, a former professional ballerina and Harvard graduate, is the founder of Mirror and Board, companies that integrate technology into fitness and gaming experiences. In the conversation, she discusses the unexpected success of Board, noting its adoption by a diverse audience beyond early tech adopters, including families and educators. She highlights the development of Board Studio, a tool enabling users to create custom games, and addresses the challenges of balancing innovation with intellectual property considerations. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today's Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026. We are live from the TVP and the temple of technology. The fortress of finance. The capital of capital. Let me tell you about Rand, baby. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. It feels so good to be back. You know who else is back? Google with a huge fundraiser, an equity fundraiser. Surprising to a lot of people because they haven't raised equity in years and years and years, but they raised a cheeky 80 billion. The Wall Street Journal has a story. Alphabet's mega fundraising shows. Let's be honest, John. The real story is that you got a haircut. I did. I didn't just get a haircut. I got them all cut. I got them all cut.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Hey, we got the team there. There we go. That's a new, that's a new angle. I like that. Well, Alphabet, in AI, money talks, says the Wall Street Journal. The ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant. So let's run through it. 80 billion stock-based fundraising should be taken as a rebuke to those salivating over the forthcoming IPOs of SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. The search giant is showing its competitive advantage in an area that increasingly matters for artificial intelligence access to money. Ben Thompson has a great breakdown, too, of how capital is so important in the age of AI and the war for AI. In AI, money talks.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  The biggest companies are paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to lure top researchers and tens of billions to build data centers while financing losses as they build their AI businesses. The money being funneled into AI is probably already making it harder for non-AI startups to raise capital with 61% of all venture capital last year going to AI. It's really like, I was, I was talking to somebody who is trying to. Deals low.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Like based on, based on, but, but there's a lot of, there was a lot of hard tech.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Well, everything sort of gets wrapped into AI. I was talking to someone about like-

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  That's why it feels like-

• 2:03John Coogan?

  How to have a conversation about AI. And it was like, you can talk about sycophancy. You can talk about data centers and water and energy and, uh, and like being an eyesore. And then you can also talk about enterprise sales and SaaS and you can talk about consumer. And it, it just touches absolutely everything. And so it's, it's almost, it feels like if you're trying to have the AI conversation, rude, rude about the Jared Isaacman years. We love Jared Isaacman.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that's rude.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Our great space leader Jared.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  He's incredibly handsome.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  People like saying that about getting a haircut. I got my ears lowered. That's another dad joke. Got my ears lowered. Anyway, uh, yesterday Alphabet announced a massive $80 billion equity raise, says Brandon Grell in the TBPN newsletter. You can go sign up, tbpn.com. Uh, the raise will be broken up into a few milestones over the course of this year. Berkshire Hathaway, Greg Abel at the helm, Warren Buffett, obviously still at the table.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people, a lot of people were, there was a viral post yesterday. Somebody was saying, uh, Buffett retires and they immediately invest in Google at all time highs.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  What other company did they invest in at all time highs?

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Was that Apple?

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Apple.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Apple.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Apple. And look what they did.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Pretty fantastic. Yeah. Uh, I mean, for a long time, for what 30, 40 years, Warren Buffett was known as like not a tech investor. Couldn't wrap his mind around it. Valuations always too high. Business too, uh, too frothy or too high growth, like-

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think he knew vibe coding was coming.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  And, and he thought, how are you going to, how can I value a software company when the cost of producing software is obviously going to zero? He was saying that back in 2010.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. He wanted to get in on Gen Moji a decade early.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  No, obviously like the business was printing, it fit the Warren Buffett mold. I was actually, uh, doing this, uh, this deep dive on like, where would Warren Buffett find value in the AI supply chain? I was trying to dig into, you know, if you apply that framework, because there's a lot of froth, there's a lot of excitement, there's a lot of high growth opportunities, but-

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Where would Berkshire trade if Warren came out of retirement and just said, I'm coming out of retirement to invest in AI bottlenecks. Not only does Berkshire re-rate, I think everything goes way higher.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  I think so. I think so. Uh, let's see. I wanna, I wanna see, cause I, I, I did look at this and I pulled.

• 4:38Jordi Hays?

  John, they want you to crack another Diet Coke.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  Another Diet Coke. Here you go. Boom. Satisfying. Another one. Uh, the, uh, when I did this analysis, the, the, the name that popped up was.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Buffett saw G stack and knew that the AI revolution was real.

• 4:56John Coogan?

  It is God mode after all. It is.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's in the, in the memo. Well, it's like God mode.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  If you are trying to get in on the action, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So, uh, my, my previous analysis identified Qualcomm has enough AI optionality for the AI investors, but enough business model durability for Buffett and evaluation that does not require heroic assumptions compared with many AI semiconductor names. Uh, most admired but disputed, uh, TSMC. Buffett actually bought this company, but then he sold because he was worried about geopolitical risk. Um, and there were some other options, but he wound up going with Google and we will break it down.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  So, uh, Berkshire is buying 10 billion worth of shares at a roughly 6% discount from Monday's closing price. Another $30 billion will consist of underwritten public offerings. And the last 40 billion will be staggered common stock offerings beginning in Q3 2026. And overall, the dilution is very low. All the shares Alphabet will sell are brand new, meaning the plan is slightly dilutive for existing shareholders. But at their four trillion market cap, where are they right now? They're way, way up. Uh, 80 billion just isn't that much dilution for the shareholders, fortunately. Um, a lot of opinions on the timeline about this deal this morning. Uh, I've seen a number of people or Brandon Correll has seen a number of people theorizing

• 6:23John Coogan?

  that Alphabet is sucking up liquidity, AI demand from investors before they'd be able to buy an Anthropic or OpenAI IPO. Richard Rehard Jark gave a few less conspiratorial explanations.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of people were saying that about SpaceX, but the other. The more simple answer is you should probably raise capital when it's cheap.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, and there's just a lot of demand, there's a lot of capital out there. And so there's a lot of demand for basically all of these names when there's a new trend. And we've seen liquidity pull out of other sectors of the market. And so it has to go somewhere. Certainly makes sense that it would go into the latest and greatest technology. So Alphabet is seeing demand for Gemini go up, and so it's going to invest more in compute and scale. Ben Thompson had, per usual, a solid piece on the race this morning. He wrote, quote, "The first question is why did Google issue equity instead of debt?" So there's some rumors that debt might be coming, and the equity is sort of a precursor to that. But Ben Thompson writes, "Debt is, all things being equal, the preferred instrument for investment.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  The proceeds of the latter pay off better than the former, and existing equity holders reap all of the benefits. Equity, on the other hand, removes the risk of debt, but at the cost of giving up a future share of profits. That leads to why what may be the Occam's razor, Occam's 1D razor, 2D razor? No, a razor is three dimensional, right? So it's a 3D razor, like 4D chess, 3D chess, 4D chess? Anyway, Google is going to start issuing a lot more debt as well. Which is to say that everyone continues to underestimate the amount of demand there is for compute. Of course, that's not far off from a more bearish interpretation. Google is uncertain about the return of investment of all of that capex and would prefer to share the risk along with the upside.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  If there isn't a substantial debt issuance down the road, then this might be the right answer." Yeah, I mean, compute is remarkably expensive. We're looking at, you know, even even within the the cogs or the or the cost of inference for the labs, we're seeing, you know, dollars per task. It's a lot of money, a lot of dollars flowing into these data centers. But when you actually run the numbers on the tasks that they are completing, comp that to other sources to get something done, you're seeing positive ROI. So it's all just a productivity uplift, which is good to good to see.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal continues and says, "Bond investors think the hundreds of billions of dollars of debt being raised by big tech is pushing up the yield and other borrowers have to pay and it's even affecting government bond yields. The hyperscalers of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have become major bond issuers as they ramp up spending, with Alphabet alone raising 85 billion in a series of record-breaking issues around the world in the past year. They might raise more in debt. But the stock market is the obvious place to raise capital, to spend on the exciting bits of AI, where the returns are unknown, technology is rapidly developing, and business models are in flux. Unlike debt, companies don't have to repay their shareholders, and if it takes longer to make money from AI or never makes money, the company can simply wait it out if it was financed by

• 9:36John Coogan?

  stock, though investors would be very unhappy." Alphabet is one of a tiny number of companies capable of raising so much cash without tanking its stock. What did the stock do, Jordi?

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  It's down a couple of points today, but I don't think it's necessarily...

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Thanks to its near-monopoly in online search and credibility with Wall Street in new ventures. That's a really good point. For a long time, tech has been sort of cold on Google's side projects, but they're starting to bear so, so much fruit. You look at the progress with Waymo, and it's very clear that just one win in Waymo will be a power law that will wash out all of the side chat apps that never went anywhere, or little software projects, and April Fool's jokes that they launched. And some of them will become really big businesses as well. They have other stuff.

• 10:25Jordi Hays?

  They have the mosquitoes right now.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  The mosquitoes are crazy. That was a weird, weird headline. I didn't know they were in the mosquito business.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited about releasing billions of genetically-modified mosquitoes into the environment to try to kill all the mosquitoes.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Wait, they're mosquitoes that kill mosquitoes? Is that what they do?

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. They're like infernal or something, basically?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited because there's almost certainly could never possibly be any unexpected downside to disrupting the circle of life.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Who knows? Who knows? People have been saying this for like 20 years, so I'm optimistic.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  It would be, it would be, it's one of those things, like, yeah, one of those things would be amazing if we can just nuke all the mosquitoes off the map. But I got a feeling they're doing something important.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's actually, let's actually try to get to the bottom of this.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  Wait, is the, should we be selling the bug repellent industry short right now? Should we be going turbo short all mosquito repellent companies? They're probably going to go out of business if they get rid of all the mosquitoes, right? This is Finance 101 right here. Anyway, I can keep reading.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Don't, don't give our little retail trader any ideas.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  He's going to go short. While 80 billion is huge, it amounts to less than 2% of the market value of a company trading at $4.5 trillion. The stock was down just 2.6% in pre-market trading. There seems to be an unlimited supply of willing buyers to fund AI. If it turns out there is a limit, Alphabet can only benefit by going first. From a societal standpoint, says the Wall Street Journal, the purpose of the stock market is to funnel money from millions of savers into giant projects, just as in the 19th century railroads. For the past 25 years, that role has been less important as private capital funds grew large enough to finance companies for much longer before they needed to go public. AI's vast consumption of cash is beyond even the capability of private markets, however.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  Sure, there are other reasons to list, such as allowing employees to cash out their stock options. 30 billion, you mentioned this earlier today, 30 billion of Alphabet's stock issuance is earmarked for paying tax on employee stock awards. But the ability to tap stock market capital is important again after a quarter century of being all but irrelevant. As we move into a new era of capital-heavy industries, the stock market stops being merely a way for private investors to exit, but an attractive source of capital. The bear in me worries that all this equity raising is also about taking advantage of record stock prices and could be a sign that the top is near, says the Wall Street Journal. They're almost calling it a top, but they say near.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes, John, mosquitoes do have some environmental value, though most of it is not unique to mosquitoes, which is why people debate how much the world would miss them. They're a food source.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  For spiders?

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Mosquito larvae are eaten by fish, frogs, dragonflies, beetles, birds, bats, and other insects. And adult mosquitoes are eaten by birds, bats. So, so we already have friends in the animal kingdom that are just eating these, eating them alive.

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  So that's good.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  So you'd be.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Pollination.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  You would want more birds and frogs around.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  No, but the argument is that a lot of other animals. Like contribute the same sort of general environmental value.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  So if you took out some of these disease spreaders.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Pro mosquito, he's in the pocket of big mosquito over here. He's like, oh, I love, oh, I have a pet mosquito at home. I love mosquitoes. Not a dog person. I'm a mosquito guy. I like mosquitoes. This is you. You're a mosquito dude. Yeah, wow. That's weird.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  You ever get an eye swollen shot by a mosquito?

• 14:10John Coogan?

  No, never.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  That was me.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  I've gotten a few like bites on my legs. You kind of X them out or try not to scratch them. They say don't scratch them because that spreads the poison a little bit, but it's like a minor, minor nuisance. But I think that they spread a lot of disease and that's the real reason why people are, are so aggressive about.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should do a street. Somebody should do a street interview.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Where they go around asking people.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Would you want to, if you had the chance to eliminate all.

• 14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Mosquitoes in the world with no downsides to the environment.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Or a hundred thousand dollars and dinner with Jay-Z.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  What would you choose?

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  There'd be some interesting answers.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Are they releasing these in America, in California?

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  That's crazy. A private company can just release animals? Like, could, could, could Microsoft just release like a million bears or something like? Like what, what's the limit of this? Can you just release like, hey, yeah, like we're, we're releasing 25,000 bison.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  That was an early idea on this show, right? It was like bear defense companies.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, domesticated bears, just, you know, wild dogs, more coyotes, more deer, maybe. What, what, what, pick your poison, whatever animal you want, just get it out there.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  I think if we put enough Monster Energy drinks out in the environment.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  A million bald eagles. That's their goal. That's the next.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's why the company's so unprofitable.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, they've been buying bald eagles and breeding them continuously.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think one of the reasons mosquitoes bite humans is there's not enough cans of like cracked open Monster Energy.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  So if, I think if you put a bunch of monsters out when you camp, you'd probably be safe.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Mosquitoes would obviously much rather have Monster Energy than blood.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  And does that sterilize them? I think that might, I think that might do the trick.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  It might do the opposite, actually.

• 15:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Jordi Hays?

  It might make them even more powerful.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Here's an idea. Release a hundred thousand bulls charging through Manhattan as a sponsorship opportunity, as a marketing stunt for the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. They have the golden bull. There's the bull. Why not release a ton of, a ton of real life bulls? Who knows? Maybe it has a positive, positive externality on the, on the life cycle of Manhattan. You know, they, they, they wind up finding a home in Central Park and the bulls run through Manhattan.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you think Meta follows suit and does an equity raise like this?

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine Zuck not wanting to do this right now, given where they're trading.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  The stock's down. I was on, I mean, it's not, it's not that down, but it, it isn't like popping like the rest of the AI hyper.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was comparing Meta to Tesla today, according to company's market cap, which, which doesn't seem to be, company's marketcap.com has one job, which is to track the market caps of companies. And I find the data to be somewhat inconsistent.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Meta's like sort of near all time highs. It's not that far off. It's certainly, it's certainly up from the trough of when the, when the stock was a hundred bucks in 2022.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so yeah, I was looking at the two. Meta had 200 billion of 2025 revenue, 164 billion of gross profit, 82% gross margins, growing 22% a year. Tesla had 94 billion, 17 billion of gross profit, actually shrunk 3% year over year. And Tesla is getting close to being worth the same amount as Meta.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  1.3 trillion.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  1.3 versus 1.5.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  I mean, if you look at the mag seven, if you're just doing the, the biggest seven tech companies, it's, it's like completely changed hands in terms of like Samsung, Micron. There's so many, there's so many companies deeper in the supply chain that are absolutely mooning on the AI boom. So maybe, maybe we need a new term. We had Fang for a while. Now we have mag seven. It feels like we're in the dawn of a new one. Uh, we'll see, we'll see. Um, anyway.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, uh, where I was going with that, I can see Zuck feeling like I'm not being property, properly valued right now.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Should buy the stock back if anything.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if anything, although they don't have a lot of, they don't have a lot of.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Cause they're spending a lot on CapEx. Yeah. Uh, anyway, Matt Dratch has some takes on Google on the raise. He says, first, I don't think this has anything to do with their view of equity value. So they don't necessarily think they're overvalued. Larry and Sergey want to spend. Sundar and CFO said, our debt rating though, and so we are here. They don't want to raise more debt. Of the 80 billion, 40 billion is for infrastructure, but I suspect that the equity check for a meta like SPV structure will be levered five to six X. In other words, the spending implications are much greater than the headline. Can't believe it's only Monday. So they're going to take 40 billion, lever that up across their infrastructure efforts and put

• 19:05John Coogan?

  something closer to 200 billion to work over the next year. And that pays for their CapEx bill for probably just next year. Because they'll probably be around there in like the AWS tier, especially on the back of that Google cloud growth. It's growing faster than AWS, growing faster than Azure. So lots of reasons to spend, spend, spend.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  John, they're saying, we need a L'Oréal ad read from John, that new hair.

• 19:28John Coogan?

  Shout out, shout out L'Oréal. I like that company. They're a great, great team. Uh, anyway. Google raising 80 billion in equity, more compute, more AI spend, full send downrange. Jack Rains says, the GigaBrain move by Google sucking up some of the AI demand via equity issuance instead of debt. Before Anthropic and OpenAI go public, we'll see what happens. We'll see how much demand is out there. SpaceX is going out in just a couple of weeks, so we'll see how that goes. But, uh, there's a lot of, there's a lot of money.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Not a couple of weeks, John.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Couple of days.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Next week.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Next week. Um, I mean, there's, yeah, there's a lot of, there's a lot of liquidity across all of the retirement funds that are funneling into these things. There's a whole bunch of different things. Uh, Sergey, uh, Alexchenko has the chart of Google alphabet equity raises. This can't possibly include, oh, their, their venture rounds.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX going out on a Friday.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  That is going to be insane.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  After the market closes.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, obviously it will list.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  But then immediately goes into 48 hours.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, thi- thi- this chart, this chart can't possibly include the venture rounds that happened pre-IPO, right? But I guess they might be so small that they don't even show up on here in 1998 because it's less than 1 billion. I mean, Google famously did not raise a lot of money. It was very profitable when they went out to go public. And top tick crypto has pivoted to the memory trade and says the memory trade can't keep going because the hyperscalers can't spend more than 100% of cash flow. And while Google would like a word because they can spend more than 100% cash flow because they can raise equity and they can raise debt and they can get all sorts of money from all over the place. So what else is Berkshire doing these days?

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Berkshire is investing 10 billion into Google in a private placement as part of the broader 80 billion dollar equity capital raise. Warren Buffett is here watching Greg Abel take 10 billion of money that he painstakingly made over his entire investment lifetime and put it into Google at all time highs. I don't think this is an accurate reaction to Warren Buffett because this play worked with Apple and Google's in a fantastic position to continue doing this.

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson broke this whole, this whole thing down comparing what Warren Buffett had done with Seize Candy to buy a railroad, which is a fascinating example. So they, they bought Seize, Berkshire Hathaway bought Seize Candy for 25 million when sales were 30 million. So less than a 1X revenue multiple. Pretax earnings were less than 5 million. So they paid roughly 5X pretax earnings, so EBITDA. The capital then required to conduct the business was 8 million locked away in Seize Candy. Then they had some seasonal debt, but generally the company was earning 60% pretax on invested

• 22:25John Coogan?

  capital, 5 million out every year, 8 million locked up. So last year, this is from 2007, the shareholder letter. Last year, Sees sales in 2007 or 2006 were $383 million. Pretax profits were $82 million. And the capital to run the business, it was only 40 million. So they'd grown the amount of capital by 4X, 5X. But they'd grown the actual cash flow from that business significantly, from 5 million to 82 million. And so Warren Buffett says, this means we have had to reinvest only 32 million since 1972. 1972 to 2007. He's reinvesting 32 million. Every year, he gets a check for $82 million. That's a fantastic cash flowing business. What did he do with that business?

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Which generated pretax earnings of 1.35 billion or something like that, which was sent to Berkshire? Well, he bought a railroad. So BNSF Railways, the railways require a ton of capital to operate. BNSF consumed 3.8 billion last year. They also make a lot of money. The net income was 5.5 billion on revenue of 23.4 billion. But it requires a lot of business, a lot of revenue, a lot of cash tied up in the business to run that. And so to put that in perspective, the total amount of money that Berkshire has made from Sees Candy is probably less than 3 billion. So less than BNSF made last year. So which is a better business?

• 23:52John Coogan?

  And he goes on to talk about cloud and Google and how they have the search engine that throws off cash. And they can use that to build the railroad of the future, which is all the data centers and AI infrastructure. And so a lot to like. And it's not as much of like, oh, this is wildly outside of the wheelhouse. Berkshire's never seen a business like this. That's not true. That's, this isn't that out of characteristic. It is a wonderful business. And it actually pattern matches to what Berkshire has done with Apple and also with the railroad and Sees Candy before. So don't be that surprised. But what is more surprising is this story. So do you want to take us through it? But first, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  In the Journal today Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive. I realize, John, there's a bunch of soundboard effects that I would only hit when we were doing ads.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  I missed them.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so good.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Feels very nostalgic.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Back. I love it.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Berkshire is convinced the American dream of home ownership will stay alive.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Under its new chief executive Greg Abel Berkshire raises its bet on a market recovery by adding another housing company to its portfolio.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  Berkshire Hathaway $6.8 billion deal to acquire, what are you laughing at?

• 25:14John Coogan?

  I'm just laughing at the fact that like, like, you know, they did two $10 billion deals and one was buying like an entire home builder and the other was buying like 0.01% of Google. And just the scale of these different things like, like the, it's an extremely cool deal. We'll get into it. It's very interesting, but at the same time it's like total peanuts compared to like the AI built app.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  It's like what is that?

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Essentially like a work harder or work smarter, not harder moment. Like we'll see which one of these ends up generating a better return.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  This seems extremely important. I'm extremely excited.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  But this is like, like, like one data center or an entire home builder that is their entire business and probably very storied. We'll get into it.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't know. He might be pivoting it into data.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  That would be the ultimate.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  Black.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Two by fours rack them, you know, Meta's using tents. Maybe the next data center looks like a house. A lot less controversial, you know, than NIMBY. If you just see a nice craftsman home next to you, you're like, ah, whatever. It looks nice, you know? I don't, I don't have a problem with that, you know? Oh, their chimney's smoking.

• 26:15Jordi Hays?

  There are data centers.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  That's the diesel generator.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  There's a data center among us.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  This might be the solution. Tyler, what you got?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  I was gonna say, um, like these two deals are still small compared to like the actual cash that they're holding.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do they have?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  I think most recently it was 397 billion.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  That's so much.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  So even then it's like, oh, wow. You know, he's so white.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  He's turbo long.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Say, but you know, he's still cash Chad right now.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Oh, hopefully inflation doesn't get him. We'll see. Anyway, continue.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  With an all cash agreement Sunday for Taylor Morrison Home Corporation, the Omaha based conglomerate is poised to become a top five US home builder. Adding to its growing portfolio of housing related companies. Berkshire's home builder deal is a sign that a prominent investor thinks the housing slump will eventually pass and it wants to be positioned to take advantage of any market turn. More than 75% of young renters still think they someday will own a home. That is great. Glad that.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  I would have thought it was less than that, given like sentiment online. And so it's great.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  There's been a bunch of weird studies where like when you zoom out, you look at Gen Z homeownership and it's actually pretty high, but that's driven by non-coastal cities because people move to San Francisco. Obviously, house prices are through the roof and a lot of people are like, yeah, I want to rent and go to some local house party. Like, I want to be in the mix. And then at some point, people make the decision. So it's more about like family planning, but of course, there's all sorts of affordability issues.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Chat says, white pill, never doom.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Never doom.

• 27:48Jordi Hays?

  This investment is grounded in a long-term belief in the strength of America's housing market and its underlying fundamentals, which we see as enduring over time. Berkshire is raising its exposure to a housing market in its fourth year of dismal sales. High mortgage rates, job market uncertainty, and the rising cost of living have kept many prospective buyers on the sidelines. Builders have been forced to offer incentives such as paying part of buyers' mortgage costs just to unload their inventory. Builder confidence is low. Single-family home starts declined 9% in April, the steepest drop since August. A third of builders said they had cut their prices last month. Moreover, many Americans now think homeownership is beyond their budget. More people are renting for longer or putting their savings into the stock market rather than investing in a home.

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  But analysts think, analysts say the US housing shortage of more than 4 million homes means new homes need to be built. They expect more buyers will return to the market once mortgage rates, which recently hit a nine-month high, come down and trigger pent-up buyer demand. Berkshire has agreed to pay a 24% premium to Taylor Morrison's closing stock price of $58.58.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  That's an incredible bargain.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  On Friday. Analysts see the price as a good deal for Berkshire because the actual value of the builder's home portfolio bellies its lagging stock price. That is an incredible bargain, says Tony Avila, chief executive of Builder Advisor Group. Taylor Morrison's stock shot up 22% Monday.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  This is a quote by Warren Buffett. This is the first deal for Abel, Greg Abel, the new CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett said, gave a quote to the Journal, "He has launched." "He has launched." I love it. On Monday, then they talk about the Google deal. Taylor Morrison is a safer bet in a precarious home building market. The company tends to focus on the higher end of the market, which has performed better. A significant part of its business is built around buyers looking to upgrade to nicer homes rather than entry level buyers who are struggling the most. In addition, the company is part of a smaller segment of builders that have leaned into so-called build to rent communities of single family homes constructed for the sole purpose of renting. Congress recently threatened build to rent developers with a proposal that would force them to sell their properties within seven years of building them.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  But House lawmakers removed that proposal in an attempt to rescue the burgeoning sector. The Taylor Morrison deal is the latest example of consolidation in the residential construction industry. Last month, Avalon Bay Communities and Equity Residential agreed to merge in the largest multifamily combination on record years after sluggish profits. This puts pressure on others to find a dance partner, says Alan Ratner. Interesting. Well, we'll continue following up on that. Well, they own railroads and you should be on Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app services, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  What do you think, what do you think the odds that the admin does some type of mega project around home building?

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Almost zero. Like I don't see, I don't see the government building homes. I think that the number one lever that any administration has over housing affordability is interest rates.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  And doing something there.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  FHA program?

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but specifically just the like the Fed funds rate. Like if you can do something to bring that.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I just mean, we're at a time, we're at a time with like, at least in modern history, like relatively unprecedented government intervention.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  Involvement, yeah.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  You know, government taking a stake in intel.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  You think they might be build the cube? You know, the cube?

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  What's a cube?

• 31:28John Coogan?

  There's a cube that if you built it in Central Park, one mile by one mile by one mile, it would fit a billion people inside. So housing, housing crisis solved. No windows, but if you build the cube. No more housing issues.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  Wait, uh, not Buffett, but, um,

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  who's the guy that built the, the, the, the?

• 31:51John Coogan?

  James Dolan?

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  No, the dorm at UCSB.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, Charlie Munger. Charlie Munger.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Munger.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  He was building cubes.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  He was, he was early in the cube.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Not a member of the government, not doing a mega project. I would be surprised if there's something that's first party, but Tyler has another take.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say the admin is not supposed to be able to like interfere with interest rates, right?

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Fed is independent.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  But there's a lot of things that you can do where.

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  Interest rates were declining until we got into.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like if you strengthen the economy, pull back from, from geopolitical risks and whatnot, like.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like the fiscal dominance.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  This kind of.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There, there's just, there, there will be things that open up the Fed to cutting rates potentially. But yeah, I don't know. It's a, it, it, it, very clearly it's not within the admin's abilities. What?

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's head over to James Walker.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Okay, what's James Walker up to?

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  He's boarding this morning's flight with an emotional support trout.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Is this AI? Is this real? This is insane.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, I don't think AI could nail this era of Instagram filter.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Bringing a, is the fish alive? This is crazy. Bringing a fish on a plane is hilarious, but that does not feel very humane. It feels like a very uncomfortable situation for a fish, but I guess if you gotta get somewhere, you gotta go, you gotta go in the tube.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Think about it though, John.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Think about the things this fish will have seen that many fish would never see in a lifetime.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  So is it, is it inhumane?

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  Or is it inhumane not to let the fish?

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you got a trout, it's like, I think the earth is flat. I've never seen the curvature. You're like, well, you're going into 747 and I'm showing you out the window. Um, your look out the window, you'll see the curvature of the earth potentially, or maybe it's just the windows. Maybe the windows on the plane are curving it.

• 33:46Jordi Hays?

  This was a good post from Key. He said, this dude is effing Sherlock Holmes.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Somebody says, 100% this ad is sponsored by OpenAI from.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  The OpenAI official account?

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  From the official OpenAI account. It's not even sponsored. This ad is posted by OpenAI.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  It's not even marketing. It's just communications. This is a wild, this is a wild post. It's so funny. Terrence Tao, AI creates more room to experiment, test unexpected paths and discover what might otherwise stay out of touch. Terrence Tao, goat mathematician from UCLA. Very fun to see him talking about his process, where he's still seeing value, how he's using models. He talks about this a lot, a lot of times. It just allows him to flesh out his work, build a chart that he wouldn't otherwise build. Very synergistic, fully in like the centaur, centaur, centaur

• 34:48John Coogan?

  era. I don't know who got paid to say what, but that ad is sponsored by OpenAI. I think it's best to show real results. That's so interesting. This is so funny. Anyway, what else is going on in the timeline? Joe Weisenthal has something. The price of whey is going bananas. It's protein crisis. This is not good. What's going on?

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  So, here's what's a little funny.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Okay, break it down.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  We know why the price of whey is going bananas. We don't need Joe to tell us. It's because Joe is going bananas on his weight consumption.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Oh, you think he's responsible directly?

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  I think he's the problem. He's like, we're all trying to figure out who did this.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  He has been looking bigger.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  Much bigger.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  His traps specifically, they've been eating his head.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And he has those Death Star delts on the cap, on the shoulders. It's really, it's really crazy. And the lats, when he does the lat spread on Odd Lots, it gets, it gets aggressive. It's a little too much. So cool with the way, Joe. But here we have some news. In early May, in early May, a supplier delivered bad news to baking and beverage company Hello Amino. It had run out of whey protein. Canada-based Hello Amino uses the ingredient in all of the 30 high-protein baking mixes it sells. Founder Ali Swift found another supplier, but it means importing whey protein isolate from the US at a price that's 50% higher and due to increase again soon. The new whey protein delivered other

• 36:12John Coogan?

  complications. It dried out the company's baking goods due to the manufacturer's different processing methods. That's true. A lot of different ingredients will change. The, the output not always created equal. Our pancakes came out like sawdust, Swift said. The company plans to reformulate using different combination of proteins. Protein has really leaked into everything. I have not, I have not found, I've been surprised whenever I see the trend pieces about like proteins packed with everything. Everything has protein in it. Because I feel like, I don't know, I haven't like... It hasn't snuck into that many of the things that I eat throughout the day. Like there isn't protein in my diet coke. I don't know. I don't know what else I consume. But this whole trend of like protein packed like cereals and, and you know salads and lunches

• 36:54John Coogan?

  and dinners and protein packed pastas and stuff. I never really, I was kind of stuck with the normal stuff.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the idea that, you know, if you eat one, you know, two to three, you know, solid meals a day, you have some protein that you also need to be snacking on protein in between is just insane. It's completely unnecessary.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  I don't know. Protein shake gets it done.

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, let's check in with one of the nation's largest mortgage lenders.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Because they've launched their, an athleisure clothing line.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  Guaranteed Rate has rolled out Rate Fit, a wellness driven lifestyle brand. They were the seventh largest mortgage lender in the country last year. Colin is baffled. I had to check if this was real.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  And RateFit.com. It is. You can get a, you can get pretty much all the things that you would get over at a Lululemon.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Who launches this?

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Aloe or Boree.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  20% Time Project or something?

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  I bet you, I bet you this was a...

• 37:58John Coogan?

  April Fool's joke?

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I bet you this was, this was just Shopify is just so good at sales. They were doing a little outbound campaign and they're like, sorry, we're a mortgage lender. Like we are, we're not really set up.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a rogue agent. Maybe someone just, you know, at guaranteed rate just said like,

• 38:16Jordi Hays?

  Make money.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  Make my business, make money. And it was just like, I'll set up a Shopify store and contact a distributor and a manufacturer. You're now in the clothing business. Uh, how long until that happens? I don't know. Uh, any, any day now, I'm sure, I'm sure. Uh, the sooner I get a Porsche, the better for my mental health. Good luck, Mason Hughes. Uh, good luck on your, on your Porsche pursuit. Maybe a very depreciated Taycan. Cheaper than you think, right?

• 38:41Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  The fact Eliezer isn't looks-maxing is the ultimate condemnation of rationalism. People have asked about this before. He should get into looks-maxing. Why not? Why not? It's a good time. Well, I had another question come up from a friend of the show about why are companies filing IPOs confidentially? It's an interesting question, and I sort of tug on the thread. Liz Hoffman was talking about this a little bit. So Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the SEC June 1st. That was yesterday. Liz Hoffman said, reminder that the ability to confidentially file an IPO was 2012 rule change

• 39:25John Coogan?

  meant to ease small companies, meaning less than a billion dollars of revenue into the markets. And it was later expanded to what we're...

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was meant to be like a smoker name.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  A smoker name? Let you talk to investors before you get out? Do we change the camera? But I... So she asked the question of like, what are we even doing here? And I was curious, like, what are we doing here? Like, why do all these companies file confidentially? And then the S1 comes out? This is what SpaceX did. It's not like Anthropic's unique in this. This is very much standard practice at this point. But how did we get here? And why? Is this good? Do I like this? I don't know. Let's find out. So first, the basics. Confidential IPO filing. It doesn't mean that you IPO in secret. It means the company submits a draft S1 to the SEC for private staff review SEC employees. It's a smoke grenade, yeah. Great analogy.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Before releasing the prospectus on Edgar, which then every hedge fund can download, anyone can download, it becomes public. So this lets companies run the SEC review process while keeping the sensitive financial details private. And there's a few reasons why you might want to do that. So any regulatory stumbling blocks can be dealt with in advance. And so the final filing is clean and ready to go. SpaceX did the same thing, filing a draft submission confidentially before the public S1 dropped a week or two ago. So. After the 2008 financial crisis, this is where this all starts. There's a lot of regulation that results from the fallout. Sarbanes-Oxley is the main one. And the financial markets slowly built back and started opening up as the economy rebuilt.

• 41:03John Coogan?

  So post Dodd-Frank, post Sarbanes-Oxley, you get a lot of regulation. And then over the next few decades, certain pieces get relitigated, renegotiated, and different paths open up to slightly less regulatory burdens, some pathways in the financial markets. And so before 2012, the S1 became public early in the process, which was great for journalists who wanted to report on IPOs. It wasn't really that beneficial to very many other people, but it raised the stakes for companies because if anything was off, it could result in a botched IPO, which would be damaging for morale. You know, you hear that your company filed publicly and immediately something comes

• 41:48John Coogan?

  up and you can't fix it, so then you have to pull back and it's seen as Weakness. Damaging, seen as weakness. No one wants to be running a company that publicly failed to IPO. And so in 2012, the Jobs Act passed, and they created a new class of company with some relaxed filing requirements. These are called emerging growth companies. It's defined by the SEC. They're called EGCs, and EGCs were defined as any company with less than a billion in revenue. Later, it was inflation adjusted to be 1.235 billion, but that doesn't really matter though because in 2017, staff at the SEC, under Trump I, explained, expanded the confidential filing flow to include all issuers, not just EGCs. So anyone, no matter how much your revenue was, you could go through this process.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  And so the Jobs Act was driven by Republicans but broadly supported, and the 2017 change happened under Trump I, but again, it didn't face strong opposition. So private market investors like IPOs for liquidity. VCs love to come on the show and do a victory lap when they take a company public, and it's great to return capital to LPs. And then on the other side, public market investors like access to more names. So it's sort of win-win. In 2017, this was a huge year for huge, large, growth-stage companies. These Decacorns, you had Uber, Airbnb, DoorDash, Palantir. They were all well past the billion dollar revenue threshold. But there was still a lot of uncertainty about how the market would value these companies because they had sort of new business models.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  There were some questions about different margin profiles, how the market would price these. There weren't direct comps to Uber and Airbnb already in the market. Are you going to just trade Airbnb like it's a hotel chain? Not really. It's asset light. So the market needs to digest that and confidentially filing was beneficial and it was encouraging to these companies to say, yeah, we'll go try the IPO thing because it's less burdensome.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  So. Stripe should file confidentially for IPO, but then never actually go.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  I think that's a Collison brother nightmare. I think they wake up in cold sweats. Yeah. I took the company public. What happened?

• 43:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but it would be kind of funny to like confidentially file.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  But then.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Just pull it back.

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  Let it, just let it just kind of sit there for another decade.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Troll, troll IPO. So the confidential filing rules were expanded again in 2025 under Trump to SEC staff to include other financial offerings. So new issuance of stock, other classes of securities, these things can be reviewed before going out in the market. This allows companies to test the waters on follow on financings, spin offs, other capital markets transactions. You can go and test the waters. So there's no question the companies are staying private longer. Everyone knows this. Private markets are incredibly deep, driven both by mega fundraises from the largest venture capital firms, crossover investors from like hedge funds coming into the market. And then also plenty of activity, plenty of activity from the hyperscalers and strategics who can write a $10 billion check into a private company, no problem.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  So the end result is that the public markets have been, the public markets have been losing companies to private markets for years. Exchanges don't want this. Public markets investors don't want this. And so there's a huge demand to make, make going public less painful. Confidential filings don't fully obscure investor protections because all the traditional data needs to be released before any money changes hands. But it speeds up the time to market and increases coordination between private companies and their future shareholders in public markets. And so that's why. Why companies are allowed to file confidentially and I don't know. After reading that, I don't really have a problem with it, but you let us know. What do you think? Should it be illegal? Should it be straight to jail? If you if you file confidentially? I don't know.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  We can roll it back.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Couple more notes before our first guest.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Joe Weisenthal is reporting that on the eve of the IPO, SpaceX employees are organizing more than 1,000 current and former SpaceX employees have banded together to negotiate with wealth management firms for better pricing.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  And access to sophisticated tax-saving financial products ahead of the IPO.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  I imagine the wealth management firms are thrilled about this. They were joking, of course.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, one more note.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:53Jordi Hays?

  Friday IPOs.

• 45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Alibaba.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Uber.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Ooh, big ones.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  And Meta.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  All on Friday.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Very interesting. I think there's gonna be a lot of fanfare. If the images in the S one were anything to judge, I think that like the actual coverage will be a spectacle. We will see Starbase in full force. It will be a lot of a lot of great entertainment and a pretty wild day, pretty wild day for the for the for financial history. Uh, before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we can bring in Jack Doohan. He is the founder and CEO of Muse. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jack?

• 46:40Speaker 03

  Very well, thanks. How are you guys?

• 46:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to.

• 46:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on. Great to meet you.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Why don't you kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself?

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Certainly. No, thanks. Thanks for having me on, boys. Um, myself, a bit of a whirlwind last 12 months. Sort of my whole life, um, been driving towards uh, being a Formula One driver.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Um, so, you know, in the in in that realm, let's say, and I was always in the mindset of doing one thing properly or two things averagely, right? Um, so I always wanted to wanted to build and wanted to do many things, but that was full focus. Um, ended up getting to Formula One at the end of 2024, um, for the final round of Abu Dhabi, um, signed for for three years, which was, um, you know, obviously a huge, huge thing for for me and from a kid from Australia. And then, uh, yeah, six races into to that season, sort of sidelined for some circumstances, um, outside of my control, let's say. And there was a big, it was a big moment for me of realizing. Not that you're set, right? You're never, you're never set in stone. Nothing's ever guaranteed.

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Um, but I definitely thought with security with the three years and with how things work, um, that uh, that it was a little bit more stable. So, um, it was a big reality check. I said, okay, for what I'm locking into for the next, you know, for, for my life and what I'm carrying, uh, you know, the next ten, twenty years is not going to be from something that, let's say, decided by, by these political circumstances. Um, so then, to be honest, I had an interest in AI since late twenty twenty. I was teaching myself to code since twenty nineteen on a low basis. Definitely not, uh, I'm not engineering behind the, behind Muse at all. So, um, but just on a, from an understanding and then, um, ended up founding Amuse sort of at the end of December, um, doing some small passive tech investments, setting up some SPVs and some opportunities.

• 48:27Speaker 03

  But, uh, yeah, it's crazy the distribution that has been gathered now since being actually in this paddock and, and around as well.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I want to talk about, uh, tech and business, uh, but I have two questions about, uh, racing. First, uh, I'd love to know a little bit more about your early path. Did you go through the typical, uh, kart racing, Formula Three? Like, walk me through the steps to actually get to F1, uh, a little bit of the history there. And then I, I, I would love your, your view on like the future of the sport, where things are now, what's changed, what you've observed as you've been probably not just competing in F1, but also a fan.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, certainly, uh, you know, started from karting, uh, as you mentioned, um, then the, sort of in Australia, there's the other ceiling, you know, like I guess, like any small, like any, not small country, we're a big country, twenty-five, twenty million, million populations compared to the US, um, you know, very, very different. Um, but you always have the goal of, of, of going to the top of what you're doing. And then, uh, even for karting, the main space was Europe. So that's where the World Championships, where the European Championships were. So as a kid, I always wanted to be over here. Um, ended up moving over, um, on my own when I was, uh, thirteen, just before I was fourteen years old, did a year of karting, um, was then picked up by the Red Bull, um, former engine team.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  On your own? That means like you said, see ya to your parents or what did that look like?

• 49:53Speaker 03

  The first seven days was with my father and then I was on my own with like people that that was sort of connected into this, into the, in the European region.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  Still, that's, that's wild.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  That's crazy. It was, it was really, you know, I think when I, when I came, I was wearing shorts and I was in Europe and the guys who were mentoring me would say, I look too, you know, I look too Australian. I remember, I remember I walked in, I was a thirty year old kid, I walked in the go kart track and it was the first time I was in Europe and there was a Scottish guy who was mentoring me and I walked in, I high fived a couple of kids and I sat down into my, into my awning. And he looks at me and he goes, what was that? And I said, what do you mean? And he's like, you know, you're, you're happy, you're high fiving, what was that? I said, oh, they're just my friends. He looks at me and he goes, the only friend you need is me. There's no other friend, you know, like, you know.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  There's no friends out there on the track.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Hon- honestly, I went, I just came from Australia where we're racing, then we come off on our scooters, we're running around, we're, we're having fun, you know, and then, you know, racing and obviously it's, it's fully competitive, but it wasn't to that aspect. So it was a big wake up and, and the, the realm to get there. And then climbed up, um, Formula Four, Formula Three, um, Formula Two, and then was a reserve driver in two thousand twenty-four for the Alpine team and then mid-year, um, July, that's signed for the three years. That's great.

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where, how, how important was, uh, the sim during that time? Did it become more important, you know, throughout that early part of your racing career when you're kind of moving up the ranks? Uh, or was it important the entire time?

• 51:36Speaker 03

  It's, it's important the entire time, I guess, like the simulators we have obviously at home or, or to an extent on a junior level are very obviously on low cali, on, on low caliber. Um, when you're a reserve driver, you're, you're doing the sim overnight on, on your Saturdays. So you're typically at the track on a Friday, you do the first free practice session, the free practice session two, and then you'll fly back to the factory, do the simulator from, let's say. Six P M till three A M. Um. So all of the things they wanted to try throughout Friday that they weren't able to.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Overnight because they have curfews. So they obviously can't then the engineers can't keep working towards you. You're working overnight. And then I would get in, you know, a transfer head straight to the airport and then head back to the track to sort of um, uh, deliver this and and more in a in a driver's perspective rather than just engineering, um, uh, engineering feedback that's been delivered. So. It's very rare.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  That's insane. So you're so you're not flying. You're not flying commercial. In that situation.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately, yeah. Um.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just crazy because it's it seems like a pretty tight window, you know, you're you're going to the factory, getting on the SIM, getting off, headed straight to the airport, but then I imagine you're arriving shortly before the race on Sunday, right?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just means not great, um, or let's say preferable flat times and, uh, and and then options of, um, of of sleep. But, uh, it's it's weird like you dread it and then you get to like, like you're twelve, you're midnight, you're one A M. It's tough. And then you sort of then push through your coffees deep. You're you're also doing some cool things, um, and, uh, and you enjoy it, you know, definitely after a while and, uh, it's not, you know, it doesn't become, you know, you get some bad time zones like when you're doing, you're in the U K, you're doing for Australia, you're in um, well, the SIM is always in the U K, doing Mexico, some weird places where you're having to do some very, um, strange times.

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  Brian Johnson's nightmare.

• 53:37Speaker 03

  So. Literally, no, there's no good life therapy there.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  So, uh, I mean, throughout this whole process, you're also, uh, learning about technology, I'm sure, meeting people, thinking about the company. Uh, what is your, uh, workflow like? What is your free time? It does it track with seasons? Does it track with certain days of the week? Do you have downtime where it just doesn't make sense to put any more time on the tracker in the simulator? And so you do have free time. Like, what is the work life balance like as you're sort of grinding up the ranks? I imagine it's pretty full tilt, but you obviously had a little bit of time to think about what was next.

• 54:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I like to think about it now because I went from that being being my full my full life. Um, and you had very little time off in the sense of every one of your spare days was a marketing day or was a media day or as a partnership day. And then if you did have then a free day, then it was more time on the SIM or doing more correlation and not doing effectively. You'll be going back to maybe a race six six races ago and redoing things with what you have now and how that's changed. And then when you had time off, that was off, right? It was fully just like, you know, you're you're completely done. Um, where now I'm I'm reserved driver for half this year doing ten races.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Um, it's, you know, what'll be what'll be with what might might happen, but I'm very limited on the control that I have on getting back into the car.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  Um, so I'm not, you know, I'm not, they only have X amount of time on the simulator, so I'm not on the SIM. I'm currently not testing. So when I'm here or if I'm off, and as I guess you are when you're in this world, it's never fully off, right? Even if you are on the weekends or away, you're constantly still taking that 2AM call. You're still, you know, working through things. There's still communication going on. So it was quite a difference. You didn't have any flat out commitments of these partnership day, nine to six and here to there.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  Um, but you're still, you know, you're constantly doing something.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Is is part of what attracted you to entrepreneurship is, um, like, I feel like the the challenge in Formula One. Uh, there's only, you know, in entrepreneurship, you're getting like no's all the time and you and you're and you're. Sometimes you get an opportunity, sometimes you don't. Uh, but in Formula One, you're like almost entirely reliant. There's like a set number of teams on the grid. There's a lot of stuff that's out of your control, whereas in entrepreneurship, there's a lot of stuff that's out of control. But if you get a no from one customer or one investor or a hire you want to make, there's always like another one and you can keep working towards. Where I feel like

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Every day.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  As an athlete, it can be very frustrating where you're like, I'm doing everything that I possibly can, and yet I'm reliant on these external parties in order to push my career forward. Does that does that resonate at all?

• 56:16Speaker 03

  Yeah massively, I think even even once you're a Formula One driver and you can be in a you can be in an airtight situation, your your seat is always for sale in in essence, right? Like, you know, maybe not depending, there might not be any buyers that are able to to compete with with the ticket size that you're sitting on. Um. But there's never a certainty, right? At the end of the day, you're an employee, you're you're still contracted and you can be fired. Um. Yes, that can happen in entrepreneur stakes if you're CEO, founder, depends on your structure, how you, you know, what stage things are at. Um. But I would definitely want to be, like I said, more in in control. Um. And I've been through, you know, although I'm young, I'm not I'm not super young anymore anymore.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Um. But still young and being through um quite a lot of of, let's say, networking and navigating different realms, whether it is, you know, whether it's, you know, trying to source a client in a specific region. Um. For instance, the old CEO of the Alpine Formula One team didn't really read the media, didn't watch the news, but he just specifically had a little newspaper for his local town in Italy that he always read each morning. So I ensured that, you know, what I was doing in my testing and my work that was getting correlated was made sure that it was published in our specific newspaper.

• 57:28Speaker 03

  Right. And it's the same thing if you're trying to, you know, target a market um in MENA or in India, the Philippines, um that are overlooked on the west, you know, by by, let's say, Western innovation or other technology. And looking at things from a different perspective, I think these are all like aspects that I've learned to sort of try to target, have a different scope on things that I wouldn't have known at all.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  So, uh, tell us more about Muse and tell me specifically, like, why this company? Like, what was the what was the opportunity discovery moment?

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, um, you know, what I wanted to do was solving like a little bit of the fragmentation issue. Um. But for your, you know, non, let's say, high enterprise institutions that they have, everything aggregated have have these things that are together in order to then implement and optimize AI. Um. So I didn't really know where that was. It was quite horizontal. Of that factor, especially targeting your, like I said, your, let's say, lower served countries, whether it's South America, still, India, Philippines, where things are more fragmented, Indonesia. And our first contract came actually in the food and beverage space with Oakberry,

• 58:45Speaker 03

  which is an aside, aside company. And it was an extreme eye opener of how many systems that they run on, how they go and communicates, how things are just not tracked over three, four days. Because your input is, your tracking sources are seventeen, eighteen year old kids. Whether it's an Oakberry or whether it's a QSR, your employees that you're managing and that you're relying on to track all this reliable data that you end up will be having automated or optimized was done by someone who doesn't really want to be there. Who is checking in at the latest point and is checking out at the earliest point. And things are not being done with, let's say, a couple of accuracy.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  So that's where we wanted to really tie them down and sort of if we're going to try to do many other things, especially in this realm, it's so important to find that trust. And so we really wanted to niche down and capture one vertical properly. And as we could dive into it, you just get further and further into the rabbit hole of finding your niche, right, and getting into the area where you really want to solve. And it went from, okay, supporting on agents for your POS systems, your inventory, your waste, your invoicing. And then finding that none of this can be optimized until these are communicating. Because each QSR system is using between sixteen to eighty different software systems. It can be very, very large, that are all third parties.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  And none of them obviously are coerced, none of them communicates, all this data is fragmented. So no. AI agent, let's say AI is going to be strong on proprietary data unless it has access to all of it at one time. And your big institutions, your Burger King, your restaurant brand international, Donald's are very tech forward, they have their own agents. But they're only accessing many queries, maybe start training. And because in order to aggregate all of that data, it would mean, you know, shutting some part of their system down to do it.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Is it hard to get companies to pay for this? I feel like a lot of the traction in SMB restaurant. It's driven by the POS system, like Toast, because you just take a small cut of the credit card fee. And it's sort of like this invisible cost that then can scale really dynamically. But if you're going in and you're saying, I'm going to sell a solution, like, how are you justifying actually getting someone to open up and put down a credit card or pay for a recurring service, which I imagine is the business model?

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. No, it's it's not easy on the aspect of you think you come in and you're trying to sell something that is, oh, this is better than what you currently have, right? By going to replace X. You get pitched how many tech, you know, tech software has daily emails come through that what we have is better than what you have. Use us and not them. We have a great AI agent for F and B, both, you know. For us, no one's got a good AI agent until it's operating on the data. But what we're trying to operate is it's like headless as default, right? It's an underlying layer that is almost super good. So in essence, AI cloud systems, whether you want to call it a company brain, where it's unifying all their current systems into one aggregated location.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Which then, if they're not optimizing AI, as long as we have at least three months of that data, you know, up towards three years. Then we're able to, you know, really act and create for that. Or if it's your larger companies who have already an agent with Burger King, BK Assistant or others. Then you're feeding this, let's say aggregated and orchestrated data to this agent, which before they're all individual third party softwares. And now they're in one hub, which can be orchestrated, they're all communicating together and you're actually going to get that optimization.

• 1:02:26John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  So it's much easier to sell like that than actually saying this platform is going to replace what you have, let's say.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  How's how's the grid reacting to the Luchae?

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  The Luchè.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  The Ferrari Luchè, the new electric vehicle from Ferrari.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  He's still locked in, he's like, Luchè, what?

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Six hundred and forty thousand dollars US. Uh, it's a steal.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought it was sort of having a dessert for a second, something like that.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  It does, it does sound like that.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Um, no, I think, uh, look, um, I'm a class, um, and we, we have a, you know, a relationship with, we were running a Ferrari engine. So, um, I think it's amazing. It looks terrific.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  It's unbelievable. Um.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't agree more.

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  Um, cannot bless it more. Um, I'm sure we'll chat about that more, Jordy. But guys, um, I'm sure that's my time. So it's great to.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so great to meet you. I, I love, I love, uh, I love the energy and the focus and, uh, uh, let's do it again soon.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Awesome, boys. Have a good one.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you all about 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.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  You heard it from Jack.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Uh, I think our next guest is joining in just a minute, but, uh, in the meantime, we can talk about the AI executive order. This was signed today by the president and Dean Ball has some, uh, some context here. He says, wow, this EO is almost exactly similar to the leaked text from the EO. Uh, the president chose not to sign because it was too regulatory. The only major difference is that the voluntary pre-deployment review process is now only 30 days rather than 90 days. That's a concession, but a very small one compared to what I would have expected based on the president's remarks about the earlier draft. So, uh, if you haven't been following along, uh, AI companies will be able to voluntarily submit their new models to the US government for review.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  Now they will, the government will get back to them in 30 days as opposed to 90 days, evaluate them and make a call or give advice or give some sort of commentary. Every word that comes from the government is a potential lawsuit in the future. And so, or will show up in a potential lawsuit. And so you can expect, uh, a lot of thought and care given to whatever the. Whatever the government responds to, a lot of government applications from the FDA previously, the response would be no comment, and no comment is tacit approval. The FDA, with some products, with a lot of nutritional supplements and food ingredients, they don't necessarily want to say, "This is FDA-approved," because that's a very high

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  bar, there's a lot of regulatory and risk and legal ramifications from approving something. But they can decline to comment, they can decline to not permit the company to move forward, and I would expect that even a small result, like we send them their model, they reviewed it for 30 days, and they didn't say it was bad, will be a good signal for AI labs that submit through this process. But Dean Ball continues, he says, "This is a fairly major win for the safety contingent within the admin, and a significant loss for the Saks-accelerationist wing, and is surprising to me. I continue to think this EO is a mistake.

• 1:06:01John Coogan?

  This is clearly teeing up the infrastructure for a model-licensing regime, and the fact that the administration is classifying the details of how this voluntary system will work is egregious. So everyone wants to know, what are they going to be evaluating? Are they going to be doing, you know, RKGI tests, or some other benchmark, or humanities last exam, or just red- teaming it, or just talking to it? Who knows? It's classified, everyone is interested to know, Dean Ball's certainly interested to know, but we don't know yet, but maybe in the future. The public," he continues, "the public and the employees of the labs have a right to know how this works. It is very frustrating when you're interacting with the federal government, and you don't know their rubric for grading you.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  That is one of the most frustrating pieces of going back and forth with the regulatory body. It's best when there's a very clear test for the DMV, you show up, if you know the answers to the questions, you get a driver's license. If you don't, if they were like, "We test you on a mystery," rubric, that would be very frustrating for anyone looking for a driver's license." He continues, "Most labs..." Staff don't have clearances, but some do. But if the literal regulatory thresholds that trigger pre-deployment review or classified researchers themselves won't know whether they are, what they are training is regulated by this EO, all for the benefit that is barely articulable. What exactly is the intelligence community going to do in 30 days to make the model safer? I don't know, they could, there's a lot of tests you could run in 30 days.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  You know, try and hack this thing, try and design a bioweapon. These are things people are worried about in 30 days. You can certainly get these models to attempt those and see how they respect, see how they respond. So he says it's not a huge mistake, but a small, medium sized one. But I am fairly confident this is a mistake nonetheless. Well, we will dig into it more in the future. But our next guest is here in the waiting room. We have Nate Cavanaugh from Special, he is the co-founder. Welcome to the show, both of you.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  What's going on guys?

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourselves and tell us about the company.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  Hey guys, good to see you, appreciate you having us. Yeah, great to have you on. Yeah, my, my name is Nate Cavanaugh. Justin Fox is my co-founder on the line.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  We, today we are excited to announce Special, which is a new holding company that we really view as an extension of the work we did at Doge. So Justin and I worked together at Department of Government Efficiency for the past year. But we're now building effectively Doge, but for the private sector. And so we're focused on this $10 trillion Main Street services economy, which in many ways is like the federal government. It's massive, it's inefficient. And in a lot of cases is still funded in part at least by the government. And so we announced that today and started a chat with you guys about it.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Do you have a particular industry that you want to focus on? Do you want to be general? I mean, I see this loosely in the bucket of management consulting, de-layering, understanding efficiencies, there's, there's a tried and true track record. I'm interested to hear how you're differentiating from other management consulting firms that might already be doing some of this work for large companies. But then also I'm interested to know where you're focusing, where you see the most opportunity.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, the main point of differentiation is there's two components to special business model. So special is developing a set of AI tools that we can apply to these mainstream industries. We're starting with healthcare and more specifically a bet on the aging population demographic of the US. And so we identified that as our first vertical. And we're actually incubating a new brand to become category leader and we're going out and acquiring these great independent small businesses and applying those AI tools into the businesses that then we will own forever.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Just to guess, are these like Medicare related businesses?

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Hospital or like a primary care or like a urgent care? Like what are we actually talking about in terms of healthcare?

• 1:09:50Speaker 04

  The specific market is at home senior care. So it would be a nurse going to a senior citizen's house, provide them with care in the home. It's the lowest cost way to provide care for senior citizens in the country. And I'm sure you guys have seen there's a lot of fraud in Medicare and Medicaid. We're focused on trying to provide the nurses, the critical workers in these industries with the best AI tools so that they can provide better care for seniors.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  And there's probably a lot of back office work that goes into scheduling and all of those things can be enhanced with AI tools, I imagine.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why a holdco? I'm curious. Like this feels like healthcare is like, you know, multi trillion dollar industry.

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  You guys, it sounds like you have a playbook that you feel like can be applied across

• 1:10:33Jordi Hays?

  different categories, but is healthcare not big enough for you guys?

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  Justin, you want to take this?

• 1:10:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, first of all, it's great to be on with you guys today. Look, I think, you know, with special at the top, parent co and developing these AI tools, I think, you know, to limit sort of the expertise that we've learned from Doge and from prior careers to just healthcare, I think would be narrow. You know, the point of having the parent co with engineering talent is that we can deploy into multiple verticals. And so, I mean, as you can imagine, the mainstream economy is massive. And so if we're just going to address healthcare, I think that's too narrow. And frankly, there's so many independent business owners that we're looking to problem solve for. So Nate alluded to it, but you know, figure is going to be, or figure is our newly incubated strategic brand.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  In healthcare and so that brand is gonna inevitably be carrying the torch for these business owners through development of AI. So we're gonna be working hand in hand in the weeds with these operators to develop the tools that they need to succeed.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  How do you think about the size of a company that you want to acquire and fold in? Obviously, there's some organizations that have already been sort of rolled up. They're large, they're private, there's probably public companies that you could do a take private of at the biggest scale. There's also probably very small businesses with owner operators who might be getting older, looking for liquidity. Like, what is in your strike zone?

• 1:12:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, today, we announced our new financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and a lot of our Dutch teammates, guys like Steve Davis, Antonio Gracias. And we, in that same announcement, announced our first acquisition that's under contract. It's a, it's a business that's doing, we'll say, tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue. They have about 1,500 senior patients that they care for and about 200 nurses on the payroll. So it's a pretty big business based in Texas. And we have a pipeline of others that we plan to do. So I'd say it's a business where it already has some, some management sophisticated sophistication and some real scale, but is not at the scale of doing a public take private.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Out of curiosity, how, like, is there significant, like, how significant is the back office, like, OpEx? Because I imagine, like, you know, seniors want to be cared for by individuals. I imagine they don't want to just, like, jump on a Zoom call and get care that way. So is, is, is this a play that you think you can use AI to grow the business much faster? And you feel like there's significant sort of back office savings? Or like, where do you think you'll get the most return?

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  Justin, go ahead.

• 1:13:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, I, I, I think what we're not, what we're not suggesting is that a robot is going to replace a nurse in, in grandma's home. That, that's not at all the case here.

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  Look, I, I think, you know, when we think about the, the delivery of service, you know, if that takes up about 50% of the costs to pay your nurses, there's something like, you know, 40% of the remaining dollars are getting spent on a lot of administrative tasks that can be solved with AI. And so our view, you know, the way that we think about it at Figure is let's make the jobs of our back office team members easier. And instead of what maybe a traditional PE or a strategic would do, which is pocket those savings and, and market a huge margin accretion, let's share those savings with our workers. So one of the things that's unique about this space is there's a massive shortage of nurses and caregivers. And so to the extent that you can be in a market and be able to pay

• 1:14:09Speaker 05

  your team the most, everybody will flood into your business. And so then you can provide care for this millions of Americans who sometimes don't have access to it. So that's the underlying thesis. I think it's share the pie, grow the pie with everybody. It'll help you grow and deliver better service.

• 1:14:24Speaker 04

  And Jordan, to your, to your point, this is the playbook that we plan to replicate across not just healthcare, but markets like construction, manufacturing, other very labor intensive, highly regulated markets that a lot of the learnings we had from Doge can then get applied back into the private sector.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, more leverage on the key workers that are doing the most important tasks, the things that are actually aligned with the mission and more efficient back offices.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you guys sticking with a five day work week?

• 1:14:49John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  It's been a hot debate. I got a feeling you guys might be putting in a few more hours.

• 1:14:56Speaker 04

  I don't think we're as, um, we're somewhere between five days and, and corgi, uh, I think is a.

• 1:15:02Jordi Hays?

  That feels healthy. That feels sustainable.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Just heard of tattoos, I suppose. Never go full tattoo.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  Exactly. Exactly.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Uh, congratulations and thank you so much for coming.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on, guys. Congrats on, on the, the raise and I'm sure you'll be back on with more news soon.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Appreciate it, guys. Thanks.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Tom Mueller from Impulse Space. He's the founder, CEO and CTO? Two job titles? Three job titles? We're very excited to have Tom Mueller back on the show. Uh, he's been on before, but great to see you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Great to see you guys. First question, Ferrari Luce reactions. What you got?

• 1:15:46Speaker 06

  What I got, what do I have?

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Ferrari Luce reactions, Ferrari Luce, the electric Ferrari.

• 1:15:51Speaker 06

  Oh.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  It's coming out $640,000. Do you think it's underpriced, overpriced? What do you think?

• 1:15:57Speaker 06

  Overpriced for, overpriced for that styling.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  It is, it is, it is an odd, it is an odd positioning, but it got everyone talking. I think the F40 is going to hold value. I don't think it's going to be an F40 disruptor. Not many people trading those in. Anyway, we're not here to talk about Ferrari. We're here to talk about impulse space. Can you reset the table for us? Reintroduce the company, give us the news, tell us what's happening. And then I have a million questions about the space broadly, but let's kick it off with that.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  Impulse space, I started this company five years ago. It's a space mobility.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  Which basically means that we take over where launch is off. So we move things around in space. So starting at Leo, we move things up to Gio, like 22, up to 22,000 miles up. We can, you know, take things to the, to the moon. We can greatly increase the amount of payloads you can take to Mars. We have our Mira spacecraft, three of those are flying right now and a bunch are in build. Those things do precision maneuvering in orbit. They can host payloads, they can deploy payloads, they can do rendezvous. We are, hopefully we'll get onramped onto the, the new lunar cargo program

• 1:17:16Speaker 06

  and do some ton, one ton class lunar landers. It's a lot happening right now.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  I can imagine. So there's been so much excitement about Leo. Starlink, Planet Labs, you put a camera up there, you put a wifi router up there, basically. Not to simplify it too much, but even Varda manufacturing in Leo. Like so much of the attention's been on Leo that I think a lot of people have sort of lost the reference classes for what happens in higher orbits. Can you give us some examples of what's interesting at higher orbits? Whether that's Middle Earth orbit, I think, is that what it's called, MEO?

• 1:17:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, MEO.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Middle Earth is just hilarious because it's a Lord of the Rings reference, but MEO, GEO. I understand geostationary orbits are sometimes useful, but give us the 101 on why someone would be unsatisfied with just YOLO-ing endless satellites into LEO in perpetuity.

• 1:18:16Speaker 06

  Well, the nice thing about GEO, you know, is where really comsat started is that you can cover the whole Earth with just three satellites.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:18:24Speaker 06

  And of course, GEO, GEO-Sacredness means, or geostationary means that it's a 24-hour orbit. So you're always looking at the same point in the sky. Super important, still an important orbit. It's kind of been overshadowed by all of the LEO launches, but there's still, you know, a dozen launches or more that go to that orbit. It's becoming more important of an orbit for the Space Force. There's a lot happening up there that I don't even know about. I don't have the need to know, but there's a lot going on up there. And, you know, but our adversaries, China and Russia, are maneuvering around our satellites up there.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  So we need to, we need to go to have mobility to go up there and defend and find out what's going on and be able to protect our assets.

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  So we have, we have the capability to get to GEO, obviously. There are satellites currently in GEO. You mentioned there's maybe a dozen launches. That sounded annual, like maybe something like that going up there. So we have the capability, like the rockets exist, but it's uneconomical. And so the value prop impulse, just to say it back to you, is get on a rocket that's going to LEO, but end up in GEO and not, and you don't need to pull all of those resources. And so you're sort of unlocking GEO based on all of the LEO capability that we have in spades. Is that right?

• 1:19:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, so what we're talking about here is our Helio product, which is what we call a rocket on a rocket. We add basically a third stage to a Falcon 9. It's got 12 tons of liquid oxygen and liquid methane, very high-performance pump fed stage combustion engine. And it can get you from LEO to GEO in a day. So it basically helps Falcon 9 do what Falcon Heavy does.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  For tens of millions of dollars less.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  Or for, in example of a, you know, commercial guys usually don't fly on Heavy. They'll, they'll fly Falcon 9 and then they'll spend months using electric propulsion to get to, to where they want to get. We'll get you there in a day.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that was an option. That's so interesting. Uh, I'll have to, I'll have to research more of that. I'm fascinated by that. But, uh, talk to me about how Starship changes things for you. Is that an accelerant for you? I mean, you're raising a $500 million Series D. I can imagine, and you worked at SpaceX, obviously, for a very long time. I imagine that that's not a nail in the coffin. That's not a threat, but I imagine it's a benefit. But how is it a benefit? Because, uh, the, the intuitive, you know, uh, the, the layperson might think bigger rocket. That'll get me to GEO easily. That, that, why do I need impulse now? So talk to me about how Starship fits into the future of the space economy.

• 1:21:08Speaker 06

  I mean, Starship is the, you know, is going to be the, the ultimate LEO, um, you know.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Just cargo ship. Yeah, cargo ship.

• 1:21:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, because it, you know, it, it doesn't need to refuel.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:24Speaker 06

  Um, get to LEO. It can get to LEO and be fully reusable, come back and fuel and go again.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 06

  So it's going to greatly reduce the cost of per kilogram or per ton to get, um, to get cargo to, to orbit. And that's, that's why I started the company basically because I worked on Starship the, you know, last six years I was there. Realizing that now we have such an efficient way, like I mentioned at the beginning, launch is solved. Now we need to figure out how to move all that cargo around once it's up in orbit. Of course, Starship can refuel and go to these high-energy orbits, but I think it's going to be more efficient. And if you need Starship there, that's what you need to do. Like, like if you're taking cargo to the moon or humans to the moon or to Mars. That's the right thing, but if I don't know that it's the right thing if you don't actually need the starship up there because you think about a starship to 120 tons of stainless

• 1:22:13Speaker 06

  steel you got to bring up there and then you got to bring it back to get it back. So it comes, we'll see how that how the economics work out.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  How did, how did the space sort of like founder startup community react to Blue Origin? Obviously, you know, massive setback and disappointing, hopefully for all humanity.

• 1:22:37Speaker 06

  I don't think anybody was cheering that on. It's, I mean, it's obviously bad for industry. Launch is, you know, is still constrained, even though SpaceX is flying so often. There's just so many payloads that need to go that we need all of them to be successful. And I think it's been mentioned many times SpaceX is not going to lower their price until they have a true competitor and we need true competitors to come online. It's happening, but you know, these setbacks delay it.

• 1:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what have you heard around how big of a setback it actually is? Is this setting the program back?

• 1:23:11Speaker 06

  Actually, Dave Lemp, the CEO, just, I think last night tweeted that they think they can, it's not as bad as it initially looked and they think they can fly again this year, which is great. It's great news.

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was looking at the aerial photography of the launch pad and the headline was billion dollar launch pad, the only one they have completely destroyed, but some of the buildings looked pretty usable. I was optimistic, so I'm glad to hear that Dave Lemp is, is sharing some optimism there as well. I would love for you to sort of walk me through some of the trade offs and economic considerations about getting to the moon because we just saw with the Artemis launch that a single rocket seemed to be able to just fly right up there, come back. And then when I see the starship plan, I'm like, it's as big or bigger rocket, it should just be able to go straight there.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  But then when I see the actual plans, it's like seven different refueling stages and it seems much more complicated and it seems like you have the ability to potentially get to the moon with certain plans. And so it feels like there's an ensemble approach, there's different trade offs. Like what is the logic as we try and get to the moon more regularly? How will this actually play out?

• 1:24:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think, you know, there's two ways to do it. You use a large, partially reusable, where you basically throw away those upper stages and take a lander to the moon. That's kind of the origin approach. Or there's a fully reusable with multiple refueling to get there and back, which is the SpaceX approach. But what we do with Helios is sort of the former. We're adding this expendable third stage. And now we can 10x the amount of payload on a Falcon 9 to the moon. So imagine that lever, like you basically, for the same cost of the launch vehicle, but a little bit more for the Helios, you're getting 10 times the amount of cargo.

• 1:25:07Speaker 06

  And we've looked at missions to Mars, where we get five times the payload to Mars just by adding a Helios. So it's a huge lever. It's going to be a really compelling product when it starts flying. It's already selling really well. I think once it starts flying, we will be able to make them fast enough.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  So you have the money raised. What are you actually working on in terms of creating reliable manufacturing, your supply chain? Because I imagine that it's not enough to build one prototype, a few prototypes, something hand-built. That might be something you're experimenting with in the early stages, but the name of the game is industrial capacity here. What do the next few years look like in terms of scale?

• 1:25:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, ramping up production. We're hiring more people, and we're hiring a lot of people in the production area, you know, manufacturing engineers, technicians, all kinds of people now. Where earlier, you know, earlier in the company's history, we were mostly hiring, you know, a lot of development engineers. So now we're really getting into production on our products. And we just moved into, or starting to move into, a much larger facility here. So we're filling that out with, you know, production capability. And we're always, the same thing that we did at SpaceX, we're constantly Bringing more things in-house, like becoming even more vertically integrated.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:29Speaker 06

  Vertical integration takes a lot of capital, which is why we've raised a lot. But it, once you're vertically integrated, you have a huge advantage. We see that, we see this with SpaceX. Able to, able to execute very quickly, very efficiently, at low cost. Basically, you can control cost, schedule, and quality if you're vertically integrated.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  And, and take me through the shape of that vertical integration. Are you buying like two bending machines, CNC machines, 3D printers, like what's the shape of vertical integration? Are you building like specific machinery that will just make one product over and over and over again?

• 1:27:07Speaker 06

  I mean, that's the tooling part of it, but certainly, you know, milling machines, lathes, 3D printers, and building out test capability.

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  So like raw materials in and you bring it in-house product eventually?

• 1:27:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, you bring in raw material and spacecraft come out the other end of the factory.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the impact of the SpaceX IPO will be on, you know, the space economy broadly? You know, talking about, you know, maybe people that have been there for a decade, maybe ready to do something new.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  How do you think it'll impact the industry?

• 1:27:47Speaker 06

  Well, certainly, you know, the space economy has been accelerating, you know, since the time that, you know, I've started this company a lot, and I think that's just the, really the general effect of SpaceX and other startups have on the industry. And now with the announcement, it's just supercharged to the space industry. It's, which is great. And I love what Elon's talking about, you know, building, you know, basically, he's talking about building megastructures now in space, you know, millions of AI service in space. And he's already talking about using the resources of the moon in order to build when, you know, when they max out, when they can launch. And this is the theme of my company is like, this is something I've talked about a lot, is you need to use the resources of the moon

• 1:28:29Speaker 06

  to build these megastructures in space, because it's going to be destructive to the Earth, to launch it from Earth, or grab it from Earth, or, or in the, in the case of compute power, to the amount of compute power we're going to need in the next 30 years. As it's growing at 15% annually is is just crushing. So moving that to space is is the obvious thing in the long term. I'm glad to see it's happening sooner.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Seems like you're excited about both the moon and Mars.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Elon was like a Mars maxi for a long time. Now he's interested in the moon. It's been exciting. I'm obviously excited about both, but what is different about these two missions? Obviously, the moon's closer, but like what what's uniquely unlocked by the moon? Why is the moon important? Why do you see Mars as as important as well? Obviously, you should never stop. I hope you wind up going to Alpha Centauri soon, but but but let's just narrow in on moon and Mars. What are the unique opportunities? What are the risks? What are the trade offs?

• 1:29:32Speaker 06

  I've always been more of a moon person myself. I think the more important and in near term, it's it's easier to have a permanent base there. And I think everything we need to build in space is on the moon. The metals, you know, water, you know, oxygen, so everything we need to to be self sufficient of building mega structures in spaces is there. And I would also add near near earth objects. Some of them are easier to get to than the moon. Mars is super important.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  Wait, what's a near earth object that's closer? There's secret planets or is that there you know about and I don't?

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  A near earth asteroid.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:13Speaker 06

  Near earth asteroid.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 06

  The thing about the moon is it still has a gravity well. You know, we talk we talk in kilometers per second. Earth has a gravity well of like nine kilometers per second, and the moon has a gravity well of like two, 2.4. But it still have you still, that's a lot of propulsion to to to break onto the moon at 2.4 and then come back. You're talking five kilometers per second total. That's a lot of delta V.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  And you got to bring that with you.

• 1:30:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, you gotta bring the propellant to do that.

• 1:30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 06

  That's why the moon is is still pretty tough. Whereas a small asteroid is, you know, is is meters per second, maybe or centimeters per second. Because the gravity is so low. So you don't have to um to to use all that uh propellant in order to get there and back. So.

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  And and and those meteors, uh, I'm not trying to quiz you on something that you might not have dug into, but I'm fascinated. Are these like meteors that are just passing by? And the whole point is that they pass by regularly enough that we could go up and back? Or are there actual meteors that are like orbiting the earth right now that I don't know about?

• 1:31:13Speaker 06

  There are. I mean, there are. I think there's one right now, right? That's these things get temporarily captured.

• 1:31:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:31:20Speaker 06

  Orbit and then they eventually around the table, they get thrown out like the moon will throw them out or something.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:26Speaker 06

  But there's, you know, there's most of them are, you know, further than the moon.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Speaker 06

  But once you escape Earth's gravity, it just takes time to get there. But but you don't have a gravity well once you once you get there to get the material to come back. But the moon, the moon is easier in just that you have surface gravity and a, you know, and a nice surface you can land on and build on. So I I think the moon moon is super important also.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, sorry, Drew, do you have something here? Not right now. I I I I can keep going. Um, I I'm interested in, I'm interested in the, in uh both the footprint of the company. You mentioned you're expanding. I know uh the original headquarters is in El Segundo, correct?

• 1:32:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have, I still have that little building over in El Segundo. We started a little seven thousand square foot building.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  But I imagine you've outgrown. So what what is the footprint of the company? What uh what what's the workforce like today? Where do you see that going? What are you hiring for? This feels like a great company to join if you're, you know, uncertain about how AI will change the world. Well, we're going to be shooting rockets for 30 years. As you said, we have a lot of work to do. So this feels like a fantastic opportunity for folks.

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, also, like I mentioned, we started in a 7,000 square foot garage. People call it over over there. We we maxed that out and then we moved into to the um our facility. We had an interim that's about 60,000 square feet. And we just acquired another 240,000 square feet on the same, I say, at the other end of the block that we're just starting to to build out. We've got 500 uh employees right now. We just, we just passed 500 in a few weeks ago. And we've got 200 open job recs. So we're hiring.

• 1:33:08John Coogan?

  That is, that is fantastic. Take me through the shape of the, there we go.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Hiring 200 people, that's serious. Take me through the shape of the, of the, of those job recs. Are you hiring software engineers? Are you using AI everywhere? Are you hiring everything?

• 1:33:26Speaker 06

  Like I mentioned earlier, we're hiring a lot in the production area.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:33:31Speaker 06

  You know, we're, we're hiring software people. Just, I mean, we're a spacecraft company. We, we do, you know, we have to do comms. We have to, you know, we have radios, we have antennas, we have reaction wheels, all kinds of stuff, lots of avionics, lots of propulsion, lots of structures, lots of software to control it. There's, you know, no, no such thing as being a tech company without software to operate your hardware. So all of the above, guidance, navigation and control, orbital mechanics. I'm a rocket scientist. I don't understand most orbital mechanics. That's, that's really tough. Super smart guys that figure out how to get, how to, how to navigate in space. All of the above.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:34:13Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. We have a gong. We'd love to hit it in honor.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Tell us about the fundraiser. You raised $500 million from 137.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  We love Christian, we love server 137. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a fantastic rest of your week.

• 1:34:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great stuff, Thomas. Congrats on the progress.

• 1:34:34Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:34:35John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Thank you so much.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  OpenAI announced that they're breaking ground on Stargate, Michigan, a 1 gigawatt data center utilizing closed loop cooling. And they're getting out ahead of the water, the water FUD. They say it uses water at the rate of a typical office building, creates thousands of union jobs.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Not an office building that I'm in.

• 1:34:57John Coogan?

  No, I know you're drinking a lot of water. You're not drinking tap water. You're bringing in the glass bottled water potentially. Aurora water.

• 1:35:05Jordi Hays?

  Aurora's, you know, getting thousands of gallons a day.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  AI pivot for Aurora, filtering the water that goes into the data center.

• 1:35:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, only filter. Only.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  I'm sure that there's a water filtering system. I'm sure that there is a water filtering system in these, in these data centers.

• 1:35:22Jordi Hays?

  In other OpenAI news, there's now sites in Codex. You can turn work ideas, plans into interactive websites or apps. Your team can explore, use and share. This is very cool. This is what you asked for.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  The first time.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  It was my sort of like benchmark, my hello world test. Like, can I go on my phone into, into any of these AI apps and have it generate me a link to a website that I can share with a friend? Because I can generate a big deep dive text thread and I can share that link with someone. They can go in the app and see what I've been texting back and forth. That's very useful. You can generate an image and then you can save that to your camera or I'll send that around. It's very portable. And when I demoed Meta AI, the latest launch, one of the suggested prompts is like vibe code a video game. And it actually does a really, really great job building a little miniature video game. And it gives you a link, but the link is like trapped within the Meta AI. I'm like, oh, we're so close.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  It's such a minor thing to have a, to have an actual hosting service there. But I think that that's exciting for virality and something.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  It'd be a bull market for simulators.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yes, because you'll be able to, I mean, there are a lot of people who, you know, they, as much as they want the Mac Mini and the MacBook Pro with the lid cranked open at all times, they want to, you know, vibe code something or build something on their phone and then send that to a friend. And if they build something interactive, they want that to be shareable. And this is a, you know, exciting, exciting development.

• 1:36:55Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Meta, they had, I think a pretty insane.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, is this real? I saw this and I was like, this cannot possibly be real, but it is.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  It's certainly real. I've seen, I've seen a number of people that I know that have one word. usernames?

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  That got hacked? Okay, so basically, this is from 404 Media. Hackers simply asked Meta AI to give them access to high-profile Instagram accounts. It worked. I'm sure they're rolling it back. I'm sure they're on top of this. But the exploit shows the extreme risk of offloading technical support to AI. I guess the AI was able to deliver, you know, account recovery information to anyone who asked. And it wasn't segmented. It didn't do the proper validation. Hackers say that they used Meta AI Chatbot to break into a host's high-profile Instagram account.

• 1:37:49Jordi Hays?

  Here's a video of how it worked.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:50Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 1:37:50John Coogan?

  Play that video and we will see how they're.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  404.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  The Obama White House account got hit. Oh, no. People were saying.

• 1:38:01Speaker 07

  Hackers are stealing high-profile Instagram accounts using the easiest possible method. They're just asking Meta's AI Chatbot for access to the accounts. Here's how it worked. Basically, they started a chat with Meta's AI Chatbot and said, hey, I want access to a specific account. Please send a reset code to the hacker's email address.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  What's that panting noise?

• 1:38:22Speaker 07

  And low and behold, Meta's AI Chatbot said.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  That's not our soundboard.

• 1:38:25Speaker 07

  In the last 24 hours, we've seen some really high-profile accounts targeted this way. We saw Barack Obama's White House account get stolen. We saw a Space Force account get stolen.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  So they were only targeting high-profile Instagram accounts? Did they go after yours, Jordy?

• 1:38:38Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not. I'm not in that league.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Oh, they came out of my crazy. They were trying to steal my L. It was insane. I was just getting bombarded because they were like, we got to get this guy's Instagram account.

• 1:38:50Jordi Hays?

  They were probably going for your dog's Instagram account.

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  Maybe. I think he still has more followers than me. Rest in peace, Gustavo. One of the best to ever do it. Anyway, you know who won't be passing away anytime soon? Vladimir Putin, because he is on a $26 billion quest for longevity. Brian Johnson's chiming in.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  It's so.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Go to a rich person's yacht or fly a private plane.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  I think that Russia has invested more in Putin's longevity than AI.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Or close to it.

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:39:23Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to figure out how many GPUs they had inside of Russia.

• 1:39:26John Coogan?

  Well, all the best AI people like left via Yandex and are now running Neo Clouds and yeah, and also ClickHouse. Anyway, from mini pigs to an organ printing to cryotherapy and genetics, Russia's president has turned anti-aging research into a Kremlin priority. And remember, he was caught on that hot mic with Xi Jinping, saying that humans could achieve immortality by replacing their organs. Some dismissed the exchange as eccentric small talk between aging autocrats. In fact, during the conversation at a Beijing military parade last September, Putin appeared to be describing a Kremlin-backed longevity initiative that has become one of Russia's flagship scientific projects.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Like other Silicon Valley billionaires, Putin has been long fascinated with anti-aging research, but in Russia, Putin's quest to stave off declines now a state priority. Last month, Russia's government announced that scientists are developing a gene therapy treatment aimed at slowing cellular aging as part of the $26 billion longevity initiative. The drug represents one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging. Another auspicious avenue, creating human organs in a lab for transplantation. Sounds normal, a very normal thing to do. One of the lifespan-expanding innovations.

• 1:40:45Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't Tyler trying to do something like that?

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  He's been doing that.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  A little bit. We always say, hey, knock it off, Tyler.

• 1:40:51John Coogan?

  Knock it off. Breeding the human organs. All these efforts are part of a national longevity initiative he unveiled in 2024, which promises to save 175,000 lives by the end of the decade. That's great. Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key areas: bioprinting or 3D printing living tissue, and xenotransplantation, or growing human organs inside mini pigs. What if the next, what if the next, you know, longevity hack comes from the mosquito? And we kill them all? And it's like, oh, all you need to do is get a blood transfusion from a mosquito.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  It's the next deal-a-monster.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, the next GLP-1 potentially. You gotta be careful about these knockout effects. Who knows?

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think conspiracy theorists would say that some humans already discovered the mosquito's one simple trick.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Drinking blood.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Weird. Russian scientists are working with government agencies to claim that they claim that they have bioprinted human cartilage tissue. That seems doable, maybe, and a mouse thyroid gland with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. They're trying to grow organs inside pigs. And the Russian Federation work is underway on a whole range of scientific programs in this field. These projects are supported by the state and many scientific and research institutions are taking part of them. It's difficult to discuss immortality, but the ability to repair man will undoubtedly increase, they told the Russian media. Unlike similar research funded by American tech elites, the work promoted

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  by Putin Circle has produced little peer-reviewed research in major international journals. He's keeping it to himself. He's going to live forever and not tell us how he did it. We'll see. Anyway, he's doing a cold plunge, too. So he's doing some of the some of the old stuff, some of the new stuff. The average male life expectancy in Russia is about 68 years, roughly compared to 76 in the United States. So lots of room to catch up. 80 over Western Europe. The Europeans are living to 80 these days, but in Russia, just 68 years. So lots of room to improve health over in Russia. We'll see. We'll see what

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  happens. Maybe they've discovered the next GLP-1. It feels like it is they are behind the ball on AI and it feels like they would be potentially enhanced by having AI tools to help them alongside this. I have been I feel like AI 2027, China wakes up this year. When is Russia waking up?

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  I had Kodak do some quick research. No, no evidence of any anything like, you know, Black Wall level chip, which makes sense. I don't think Nvidia has plenty of demand. It wouldn't be selling them. Over there, they do have likely small numbers to low hundreds of H2 hundreds, potentially.

• 1:43:45Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds to low thousands of H100s.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  And then they have some A100s, but again, and then, and then certainly could have

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  some within the military that they're not talking about, but, but yeah, not. They're trying to get up to 10 supercomputers by 2030 is their stated ambition, each with 10,000.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  That just sounds like not a lot. I think you're gonna.

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  They're calling, they're calling, they're calling everyone else's bluff.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  You absolutely must not dunk on any Russian oligarchs if they talk about their underfunded AI projects.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  I will not, I will not.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  You must abstain because you can have a fun, you can have some fun witty banter with the president of France. The president of France, but I do not want you to draw the ire of the Kremlin at any point.

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  I respect their.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  I respect their supercomputers.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  I respect them. They're doing great. Seems like it's on track. Good job, everyone over there. You're doing great.

• 1:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Really, really good.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  AGI definitely on the same timeline as every other country. We have to pull up this video. We have our next guest in the waiting room. But first we have to play this video from Jensen Wong because the gamers are rising up and Nvidia is delivering a AI chip for laptops, for PCs, supercomputers at home, AI agents at home. It's in section K. He was on stage and he had a very funny quote. I want you to listen to this, Jordy.

• 1:45:20Speaker 08

  The new 007 game. I'm looking forward to playing it. I look a little bit like him.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Look at this. Isn't that hilarious?

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  I look a little bit like him. They're gonna blow out. They're gonna blow out. It's gonna be a blowout.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  That's the funniest bit. He's playing like, he's like this, this laptop has fours on it. The racing game. This, this laptop has double it. The new 007 game. I look like him. It's like, I guess he's wearing a leather jacket or something, but it's just so funny to be like,

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  He's having a great quarter.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  It's amazing. It's such a great bit. And then he, and then he shows some other racks, but uh, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of good stuff from Nvidia. Uh, why Nvidia inside can work in the PC market. The world's only five trillion dollar company can sell the concept that AI computing won't be, won't be confined to data centers. So, uh, he's already getting ahead of the, of the future of on-premise AI compute, local AI inference happening in your house. You get a DGX, you get a big powered PC and it runs your lights, it runs your smart home, it runs whatever you want locally and actually can inference a near frontier model, uh, in the future. So, uh, exciting to see. I like it.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  I like the idea of having powerful AI that's not in the cloud, that's local. I think that that's fun. I've always been a fan of the tiny box and this is in that vein. So.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And actually I bought the property right next to your home.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  And I'm putting a little data center in it.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Perfect. As long as I can, uh, throw an Ethernet cable over there. Well, we have Edward Kim from Gusto. He's the co-founder and head of technology. Welcome to the show, Edward. How are you doing?

• 1:46:53Speaker 09

  I'm great. Thanks for having me.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on and great to meet you.

• 1:46:57Speaker 09

  Yeah. Nice to meet you. I think I'm the third and final co-founder on your ship.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  That's what I was gonna say. So, uh,

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  There must be one more you guys have hidden.

• 1:47:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:04Speaker 09

  No, just us three.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  No, just you three. Okay. Well, uh, anyway, take us through the launch today. Tell us what's happening in Gusto world.

• 1:47:11Speaker 09

  Yeah. So today I'm really excited. I think it's the most important moment for us as a company since the launch of the company almost 14, 15 years ago. Um, and we're launching today Gusto co-founder. Gusto co-founder is really the first, uh, agent that can automate most of what a small business does in their back office. You guys were just talking about, um, personal computers and I have a Mac mini where I set up OpenClaw. It took me eight hours to set up.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:39Speaker 09

  Pain in the ass.

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:40Speaker 09

  Um, and as soon as I got through the entire setup, I didn't really know what to do with it, right? I still kind of like use it as a glorified, uh, search, search engine.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, someone on your, someone on your team was.

• 1:47:53Speaker 09

  In the office. We're in, we're in the office here in Doug Patch. Um, people are still using it still as a glorified search engine.

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:00Speaker 09

  Um, and.

• 1:48:03Speaker 09

  That's kind of the problem that we set out to solve with Gusto Cofounder.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:06Speaker 09

  Instead of starting from the technology and then giving people a blank canvas on something to do with it, what Gusto Cofounder does is we start with all of the problems that we're already helping our customers with payroll, benefits, HR, scheduling time, and then we bring on a lot of the power of AI into it. So at the center of Gusto Cofounder is a concept called automations. And essentially, you tell us what your business processes are, starting with payroll, benefits, all these things that we're already doing for you. And Gusto Cofounder will basically run your business process for you. You communicate with it through SMS and Slack, so you don't really even interface with it through a website.

• 1:48:48Speaker 09

  And then, of course, we'll connect to all of your systems that you're using outside of Gusto as well. So Notion, QuickBooks, Google Workspace, you have a lot of information and data that sits outside of Gusto as well. What Gusto Cofounder does is it brings it all together into one place where it can automate your business processes.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Why SMS and Slack? Why not like a chat in your face and a Gusto app directly? Like, what does that allow you?

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  I think it just, I mean, I'll tell you, it just mimics, I mean, I remember even with how Gusto, how easy to use Gusto was in 2018, when I had my first business, I was still relieved when we hired somebody whose job was just to kind of like handle everything on the payroll side.

• 1:49:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:49:41Jordi Hays?

  And if I needed something done, I would just text them or I would Slack them and say, hey, hey, can you do this thing? Or, hey, we're onboarding this person or this contractor, you know, we need to like make sure they get paid by this day or whatever it was. And so I just think like actually, actually making it feel like a teammate is getting you much closer to the experience of like, people are not waking up every morning, entrepreneurs are not waking up saying like, I want to spend a bunch of time in my payroll platform today, right? Like, you want it to be so seamless that it's just, it's just happening.

• 1:50:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's exactly right. We want it to feel like your teammate. It should be someone that you feel comfortable texting, having run processes for you, so you could have it actually text you when it's run your payroll. It'll tell you the total amount and all you have to do is say, "I approve it," it'll actually run your payroll. So you never even have to like log into Gusto to run your payroll ever again. If you want to do more one-off things, like, "Hey, pay this contractor 500 bucks," you could just text it as well. One of the things I really loved about OpenClaw is just, it just blew my mind. It was such a simple concept that seemed so obvious, the ability to text with it through Telegram.

• 1:50:57Speaker 09

  And that's kind of, I wanted to bring that magical experience into Gusto co-founder. It just really changes the game and it's hard to understate how important that is.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, so is the product development for this sort of like indigenous in the sense that your experience are like informing the product decisions? Or is it you're noticing customers, like you're noticing an uptake? Or I don't even know if you can detect if your customers are interfacing with Gusto's core endpoints or UI with OpenClaw? Like, are you able to see some sort of data to show that there's demand for this? Or is it just like you know you've experienced it and you're launching this?

• 1:51:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, if you just observe some of our customers, like, I'll give one example. There was a massage spa in New York. And what they do every week to run payroll is they typically have

• 1:51:50Speaker 09

  work tracked in some other system. In this case, it was MindBody, right? A lot of like spa, yoga studios, Pilates. They track work of their workers in MindBody. Then every week, what they'll do is they'll export data from there. They'll put it into Google Spreadsheets. They'll run some crazy calculation in there. They'll say, you know, if you worked this many, if you did this many massages and you get paid this much. If you upsold CBD oil or a hot stone massage, you get 15 bucks for each one of those. That goes in as a bonus and commission. And then here's how we do tips. We'll split it across all of our therapists. They do all that calculation. And then, and only then, they go into Gusto, put in all that information to run payroll. That part we see, obviously, right?

• 1:52:35Speaker 09

  And so if you only look at that part, we're like, great, we did a great job. It takes like seconds to run payroll. But if you look at the entire process that they're running, there's this whole, what I call the work before the work that happens. And you really only like, understand that when you observe a customer like end to end, not just using your system, but all the systems that they're using to run their business. And that's why kind of having these connectors in Gusto co-founder was so important to us. We recognize that these businesses are not doing everything within Gusto, at least not yet, and they have multiple systems that they're connecting. And these entrepreneurs are really creative in stringing them together, but there's still a lot of work at the end of the day. And they can just really kind of have those business processes, just tell Gusto co-founder

• 1:53:19Speaker 09

  once that like, hey, go export it from this system, do these calculations on it, then put it into Gusto, run payroll, and then text me the final amount so that I can approve it before you actually run payroll.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Last question for me, I'm very interested in how, like, I don't know, like, a company of Gusto's scale thinks about launching new products within Gusto, like, because you sort of, there are a lot of people that are just like, oh, Gusto works perfectly, I'm not going to think about it. And you have to like, you have to market this new feature, this new product to your existing customers. Obviously, it's a draw for new customers because new capability, better product, but also just you have to tell people, obviously, you can email them. But I'm interested to know, like, because every payroll admin probably has a phone number already, like, authenticated for two factor, like, is there some sort of like,

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  internal go-to-market strategy that's more mature than just throw it in the newsletter, tell everyone that this thing exists? Like, how are you thinking about actually onboarding, measuring churn, making sure there's satisfaction for sort of like, a new product within the Gusto ecosystem?

• 1:54:30Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's really just talking to your customers all the time. I think really understanding what their needs are. There's always going to be more problems that we can solve for them.

• 1:54:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:40Speaker 09

  And then when we solve those problems, you know, we're pretty good at tracking either through, you know, customers we've talked to or through our data, like, how do we reach out to those folks that would specifically benefit from what we just built?

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:54:55Speaker 09

  That way, we're not, you know, kind of spamming every single one of our 500-plus-thousand employers on Gusto for every little thing that we launch. We want to kind of just kind of communicate to them only the most relevant things. And so with Gusto Co-Founder, we've reached out to 500 customers to give early access to this starting today.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:55:14Speaker 09

  And naturally, a little bit more on the tech-forward ones are the ones that we've talked to that, you know, are already using AI to automate parts of their business, but can do a lot more.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cost. How much does it cost you? How much does it cost the customer? Is inference a problem? Like, are you able to use a series of models? Like, how are you thinking about, is it like?

• 1:55:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you gotta worry about people being like, hey, I'm trying to ship this new feature.

• 1:55:41John Coogan?

  Hey, Gusto Co-Founder, like, can you actually just do product development for me too? And it's like, no problem, boss.

• 1:55:47Speaker 09

  I mean, I think the philosophy we took with Gusto Co-Founder is we wanted to un-constrain it as much as possible.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:52Speaker 09

  Because I really want to just learn to see how people use it, right? If you have it, say, hey, text me the weather every morning, especially if it's going to rain today, because my business is a tour business.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that might actually be relevant. Even though that sounds like a wild, like, just random open claw task, like, that actually does make sense in that business context.

• 1:56:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, and then, and then look at my customer list and send them an email saying to bring an umbrella for today's tour.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  To build those automations.

• 1:56:18Speaker 09

  You can do that on Gusto Co-Founder. And we had some conversations, do we really want to let people do this? And I think our bias has always been, why not, right? That's the problem of why people aren't getting the most out of AI is because I think a lot of folks are putting unnecessary constraints on those systems. And obviously, like, at some point, there's certain things that we won't want Gusto Co-Founder to do, we're not going to have it like, you know. Serve as your Claude code or anything like that.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:56:43Speaker 09

  Um, but I think for now, we're more in a learning mode. We want to kind of see how people use it. We want to encourage people to get as creative as possible with it.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Okay, George, you think what I'm thinking? Automatic swear jar. Anytime you swear, docs your gusto payroll automatically.

• 1:56:59Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  Agentically.

• 1:57:00Speaker 09

  You can do that.

• 1:57:02John Coogan?

  Probably, probably.

• 1:57:03Jordi Hays?

  I like that you guys didn't, uh, just pick some quirky, like, human-like name.

• 1:57:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Co-founded.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  It is just like a, just like a very straightforward title.

• 1:57:13Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of how we think about it. It should be literally the person that you are on a texting basis, you feel comfortable reaching out to, um, day or night to take care of something, to help you with running your business.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:57:27Jordi Hays?

  Would you one day allow it to make, uh, calls on behalf of customers? Like, let's say there's some, you know, you, you have a, um...

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  I9 verification.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I was thinking more like, you know, let's say you have an employee in another state and like, you know, the, the, the tax board there or some type of employment agency, like...

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Call them and explain this to them.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I feel like every, every startup, uh, founder is used to getting like some type of letter in the mail from some random state.

• 1:57:58Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  That you pay to contact.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  And you have to call.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  You have to call. Feel like there's probably some stuff there down the line.

• 1:58:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I, I don't see why not. We don't do that today, but you can just certainly tell it to, um, email.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Speaker 09

  On your behalf, right? And so if we're willing to do email, um, then why not calls?

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. Well, uh, thank you so much for coming on and breaking it down for us. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Edward.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the launch.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:58:23Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  Again, section L, we got to pull up the Ferrari Luchè. I think this is the third mention of the Ferrari Luchè of the show.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  This show.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  But, uh, people have been talking about different specs and, uh, this Instagram account showed the Ferrari Luchè 1.9 JTD base spec, and I think it looks fantastic. What do you think? Scroll through some of these. So this is, uh, this is when you get it with a 1.9-liter, uh, turbo diesel. It's like a base model Civic. Uh, a spec like this, it looks fantastic. Just, just minimal, minimal. Scroll through all of them. Here we go. Look at, ah, yeah, the, the, the central console delete and then the stick shift there just.

• 1:59:09Jordi Hays?

  I actually love the way this looks. I do.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  This looks like a 1995 Honda Civic.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  I think this looks.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  The gray.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, the, the rear end looks a little bit rough, but.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Just ultra, ultra discounted.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's compare it to the Spectre.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  EV from Rolls Royce.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, coming out, starting price.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  Two up.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Around half a mil.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  Three hundred and seven mile range.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  Twenty percent cheaper than a Luchia?

• 1:59:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, zero to sixty four point one seconds.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Good. Very slow, very big, very heavy, but that's.

• 1:59:45Jordi Hays?

  Six thousand, six hundred pounds. It's the same as a Cybertruck.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Same as a Cybertruck. That is wild.

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but it looks incredible.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, would you get one of these, one Rolls Royce Spectre Series two or ten Model S Plads used? Model S Plaid goes zero to sixty in two seconds. You can get ten of them. So you can just be launching them off some cliff. Dive out, get in the next one, because you got ten of these things. Zero to sixty in two seconds.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a tough call. It's a tough call when you put it like that.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  At fifty K, the, uh, the, the, the used Tesla Model Plaid is hard to beat. Uh, what do you think?

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the alternative with a Luchia, you could get fifteen Tesla Model S Plads. Or one Luchia.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  The crew just zero to sixty in two seconds. The drag racing would be very, very good. You have your whole, whole bachelor party doing drag races. Uh, what do you think of GMC Hummer X SUV pickup truck concept?

• 2:00:45Jordi Hays?

  This would be good for you.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  I like this. And you know where they launched it? The Pasadena Design Studio. Can you believe that?

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  They brought it to my hometown.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a sign, John.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  It's a sign. I think it looks good. The, the, the, the truck also looks good. I, it's interesting because it looks, it still looks huge, but in a world of 20, 1,250 horsepower Corvettes, ultra-luxury Cadillacs, the GMC Hummer SUV and pickup trucks are no longer the most outrageous new cars in the General Motors family. That does not mean they've been forgotten, though. GM is celebrating the opening of a new design studio in Pasadena, California. Let's go. By reimagining its enormous electric SUV with a pair of outdoorsy concepts, one size smaller than we've seen recently. I think, I think it looks cool. Looks very like, uh, ready to crawl over some rocks. I think it's a fun, fun time. Anyway.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's, uh, let's have Whistlin Diesel put it to the test because he tried to test the Cybertruck and I think it, it stopped. It basically bricked before he could really make a video.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  100%. We gotta, we gotta see the, the, what is it called? Durability test. Whistlin Diesel durability test. Uh, let's see it. Uh, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of their IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And our next guest is in the waiting room. Time to go, Chris. Murphy from Partifull. Welcome back. How you doing?

• 2:02:15Speaker 10

  Hey, guys. It's great to see you. How's it going?

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Good to see you too. Thanks.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  You were, what, what were you dressed as last time? Was it Halloween?

• 2:02:22Speaker 10

  The Wicked Witch of the West.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  That was a wild appearance. That was really, really fun.

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  You said, you said you weren't gonna, you said you weren't gonna dress up this time?

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  But I still am kind of disappointed that you didn't dress up.

• 2:02:34Speaker 10

  I'm disappointed myself.

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, I'm not disappointed with progress in Partifull's world.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, uh, you guys gonna finally make some money? What's going on?

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:47Speaker 10

  Yeah, I know. We literally promised to the world an ironbound agreement that Partifull would never make money with a very literal tweet that was clearly meant entirely seriously and could not possibly be a joke. Uh, and here we are violating our promises to the community. It's kind of a sad day.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's a great day. I think it's a great day.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  We love monetization here.

• 2:03:11Jordi Hays?

  We love monetization.

• 2:03:12Speaker 10

  You love money?

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  I wanted, I wanted, I wanted hyper-targeted ads based on.

• 2:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Partifull, right?

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  In the app.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Where you've been, you know.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  Like, you know, I want it, I want, I want it to feel like Partifull is listening to me.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think that's what you're, I don't think that's what you're gonna do.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  It should let you stand up a B2B MLM on demand. So this person was at this party with this potential customer, enlist that person to sell them ramps, something like that.

• 2:03:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, buy some Tupperware.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Tupperware parties for enterprise SaaS.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  That is what, that, that would have been a good play. It's like, hey, uh, we're, we're, we, we said we weren't gonna make money. Turns out we are. Partifull Tupperware Parties.

• 2:03:55Speaker 10

  I will never say that.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Host a party in your area.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  That'd be good. But actually take us through the real monetization plans because we've riffed enough and I want to hear the real story.

• 2:04:06Speaker 10

  Uh, so yeah, I mean, today Partifull launches ticketing. It's available on app, on web. You can now buy and sell tickets directly on Partifull.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:04:18Speaker 10

  So it's not just us making money, it's hosts making money too, and that's the most important thing.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. Who?

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  I want to know, yeah, is it like walk, crawl, run? What, like, do you imagine that you're going to bring in like a new, like, like, you know, a, like a, you know, a, like a band that's performing at a concert and that's gonna be a new user that, that has been on the fence and not jumped in? Or do you think that there will be a sort of more gradual, uh, evolution from people that are throwing events on Partifull? It's an easy add-on, so the next one in their series of events, they will just, uh, have paid ticketing for because they already have a lot of traction and they're a power user.

• 2:04:59Speaker 10

  Yeah. Little bit of column A, little bit of column B. So the impetus for building it was something that I've been building for quite a while, which is that people were already trying to host paid events on Partifull.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Speaker 10

  Uh, you know, supper clubs, run clubs, uh, you know, community events, concerts, album release parties, fundraisers.

• 2:05:23Speaker 10

  And because we didn't have ticketing, it was not a great user experience. Like hosts were linking out to other platforms. Guests weren't sure, like, does my RSVP count or does my ticket count? Hosts were cross referencing. So that wasn't really upholding our standard of what we want Partifull to be and what Partifull is known for, which is having a super seamless experience, no matter what kind of event you're hosting. And so first and foremost, we saw this as a feature gap. And it was always a question of, well, when do we close this feature gap? And I think the tipping point for us was, starting last year, we launched our Explore feed, which is a tab on the app that you can go to and you can browse events that are happening around you.

• 2:06:07Speaker 10

  They're highly curated, you can see what your Partifull mutuals are going to. And increasingly, people are using that as a place to discover things to do. And so with the launch of Explore, we started to see a proliferation of these events that really needed ticketing because they're marketed to the public, because they're often higher production value. Like, it takes real money to put on a lot of great events. And that funding for hosts has to come from somewhere, and it typically comes from selling tickets. And so all of that really culminated where we were like, first and foremost, we want to create a much better experience for the hosts on Partifull today and the guests on Partifull today to do what they're already doing, but in a seamless way.

• 2:06:51Speaker 10

  And then two, we absolutely know that there are types of events that you can't have on Partifull because we don't have ticketing. And so we're hoping with this that we can grow and actually get even more of those events onto Partifull that weren't on the platform previously.

• 2:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can imagine, like, a lot of even emerging artists that aren't on, like, some insane, you know, tour, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Like, the experience of, like, an artist being able to, like, send a easy text blast and feel like they're communicating and then have, like, social features built in. I feel like that'll be a much, uh, much cooler experience. What trends are you seeing on Partifull? Like, I would, I feel like you guys should, should, maybe you do, and I haven't seen them. But, like, I want to know, like, have run clubs peaked? Have people stopped running from whatever they're running from? Uh, like, what, what, what's kind of maybe more rising?

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  How is the health of the Lookalike meetup? Ecosystem, have we reached peak lookalike meetup? Or are we continuing to boom?

• 2:07:59Speaker 10

  Well, it's funny you mention that because on our very serious Twitter that should be taken literally at all times, we did tweet like, I think a year ago that lookalike contests are dead and that future lookalike contests will be banned on the platform. And actually, a news publication picked it up and said Partifal has canceled lookalike events, but they're still happening. And, you know, honestly, in 2026, many of them are still great. Like, there was a big heated rivalry lookalike contest that was still happening. There was a JFK Junior lookalike contest. And so I think I've come around and I can never say no to a good lookalike contest. There's also these just like mass meetups in Central Park and, you know, Dolores Park to do whatever.

• 2:08:40Speaker 10

  And so I think that's the trend that we're seeing is the rise of these viral events of someone, you know, taking a funny meme and actually bringing it to life in the real world. And it's so much better when that happens. Like, people yearn to touch grass and they yearn for these types of events that feel like easy, low-key, and something that where they can participate in a collective cultural moment and say that they were there. Like, I don't, I think anyone who wants to...

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it has a crazy feedback loop, too, because the meetup itself produces so much viral content that then feeds the meme because it's like, well, that person doesn't look exactly like so-and-so, you know? Sometimes, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.

• 2:09:26Speaker 10

  Yeah, public events are social. Another reason picketing's on Partifal now.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  So have you discovered any, like, lessons from, like, particularly seamless payment processing? I feel like so much of the beauty of Partifal is like how, like, the text message integration, the seamlessness. And I feel like there's demand for Apple Pay or Venmo. There's like a whole bunch of different ways you could solve that. Maybe you just do the hard work to get everyone to put their credit card information in, and then it's all saved nicely. But like, what was the, what were the trade-offs? What was like the best practice that you wound up landing on?

• 2:10:01Speaker 10

  Yeah. So first and foremost, it was like, this should feel ridiculously easy because RSVPing on Partifol is really easy. It shouldn't feel quite as easy as RSVPing because like, you do have to pay money. But if you go through the flow, it still feels like buttery smooth. Like you tap by tickets, you add, you know, you add the number of tickets you want. If you have a promo code, you use that. Like, we have an event for Tech Week tomorrow where tickets are $10,000. But if you have the secret promo code.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  How much is it?

• 2:10:35Speaker 10

  If you have the secret promo code, they're free.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  It's $20,000.

• 2:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  The secret promo code. It's $9,999. Very fun.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  What, like, what's your motivation at this point? Like, what's your, what's your ambition? I feel like, you know, I imagine you guys have had a bunch of acquisition interests this entire time to date while you're not making any money. And you, you know, somebody makes an offer and you're looking at it and you're like, wow, this is, you know, a big number. It's, I feel like, the hardest time to turn down an acquisition is when you're not making money. Once you're making money and you're growing and things like that, like, it can, there's more of like a line of sight to, hey, this is like a really big,

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  real business. But how, how did you, how did you process, like, building a company for this long that's so in the public eye, that's so popular, and not making money and stay focused on the long term?

• 2:11:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a great question. It's a bad day for everyone who wanted to acquire us when we weren't making money.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:11:45Speaker 10

  For sure.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Brutal. They hate, all the acquirers probably love that, oh yeah, Partifol is cute. Like, they're not really monetizing yet, so they'll, they'll take our offer eventually. Nightmare. Nightmare for them.

• 2:12:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, they're down bad today. But I think this is like, this is exactly the next step we wanted to take for our long-term ambitions. Like, we intend for Partifall to be a massive company. And we've already proven in so many ways that we're there from like a growth perspective. And we're continuing to grow. But this just felt like such a natural addition to our ecosystem where it's a win-win. We're closing a feature gap. We're making an experience buttery smooth, which is what we always want to do for everything we're building. We're solving a problem for hosts. We're solving a problem for guests. And yes, this feature happens to be one where we can make money. It's not the only feature that we'll ever build to make money.

• 2:12:43Speaker 10

  There's a lot more to come, but it is the right next step in our journey. And I think what's cool is that it's coming at a time where there's this real cultural moment around gathering in the real world for these fundamentally social experiences. And that's where Partifall plays really well. One thing that's pretty different about us is we're not a ticketing company where social is an afterthought or nonexistent. We're a social product that now has a ticketing component on top of it. And so what does that get us? Like, you mentioned concerts earlier, Jordy. Like, Weezer, for example, threw a ton of pop-ups on Partifall that were just free events that they were doing for their community as part of their tour.

• 2:13:27Speaker 10

  And before, Partifall didn't have ticketing. And so like, all Weezer could do with Partifall was host their free events. But I think they're one of so many, like, artists, cultural institutions, performers, creatives who are really harnessing Partifall to connect with their community and create social experiences with their community. And so that's the ball that our eyes are on, is how do we supercharge this thing that we're seeing in the culture? And what are the features we can build to help accelerate and expand that and make that accessible to more people?

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect there to be an entire class of Partifall entrepreneurs, basically small business owners, where the vast majority of their revenue or almost all their revenue is flowing through Partifall? Does it feel like there's like a line of sight to that?

• 2:14:13Speaker 10

  I think that's going to be a huge and very important subset of our ticketed hosts. But I also think it's equally important for us to be serving the more casual host who needs ticketing for their event for whatever reason, whether that's a frat, whether that's someone putting together like a party bus for their birthday, whether it's like just someone who wants to charge $10 to make sure that people don't flake from their event. Like, there's so many ways that you can use ticketing to get what you need out of your event. And there's so many people where they have a day job, but building community is their passion project. We hear from so many people like that.

• 2:14:57Speaker 10

  And so I really see ticketing as something that very much unlocks what they're able to do, as much as it is something for the person where their lifeblood and their business and their, you know, what they're building for themselves and their lives financially is powered by Partifal.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  What's a country that uses Partifal a lot that people wouldn't expect?

• 2:15:20Speaker 10

  Oh, Italy has a very strong...

• 2:15:25Jordi Hays?

  I would expect that. I would expect that. I have a bunch of Italian friends. They like to get together and do things.

• 2:15:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. The Italians love Partifal. I mean, the UK is really big, but like, so it depends on how you feel about the UK. I've been to some phenomenal parties in London, so it doesn't surprise me, but some people are like, "What?" No, I would say like, the most unexpected thing is the random, most of our users are in the US, like, the random contingents of people that I didn't expect. Like, my mom's friend texted her that Partifal has gone viral in a South Florida over 55 senior living community, and I love that.

• 2:16:04Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Partifal Retirement. What a wonderful way to retire. What's the work culture like at Partifal these days? You guys like work more on the weekend than like a normal company because there's a lot of action? Or is the product robust enough that you guys can, you know, take a couple days off?

• 2:16:28Speaker 10

  Well, it's always, the product's really robust, but it is always stressful to be on call on the weekends because like if something breaks, that is when it's gonna be like a bad time for everyone. So I would say like, the culture is work hard, party hard, which probably doesn't surprise anyone. Like, we can't be 996 because in order for us to do our jobs right, everyone on the team physically needs time to party. Like, it doesn't work without that. But yeah, I would, I would say events that are otherwise totally fun and stress-free for other people, like Halloween, like, that's my, I'm in the Situation Room.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  It's your Super Bowl.

• 2:17:10Speaker 10

  All Halloween, right, two years. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm not partying. But yeah, we, the, the party product research is a very important part of our culture.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress and.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad.

• 2:17:26Speaker 10

  It was great to see you guys.

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great launch. Excited to attend my first ticketed Partifull event, whenever that is.

• 2:17:33John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:17:34Speaker 10

  $10,000 tomorrow. Pay me.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  We'll see you later.

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:17:38Speaker 10

  Bye.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:17:39John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context. Go check it out, Figma.com. And our next guest is returning to the show, one of my favorites, probably the, my number one favorite new consumer electronic device product of the last, I don't know how many years. We have Bryn Putnam from Board, she's the founder and CEO. Welcome back. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. How you doing?

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:18:13Speaker 10

  Thanks so much for having me back, guys.

• 2:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Last time you were on, we both left.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  We both ordered on the show.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  Very easy checkout, thanks to Shopify.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  And, and they arrived, and we have been entertained for hours and really, really enjoyed the product. But tell us how things are going on your side.

• 2:18:32Speaker 11

  It's been a crazy six months. It's been so fun just seeing Board actually out in the wild and seeing people using it and loving it. I think it's really just sort of exceeded our expectations. We have, you know, thousands of households using the product and loving it and people are actually starting to create their own games for Board, which has been the most surprising but exciting development for us.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you three treated us as, as Mark and Teresa and Elliot, as if we were dressed up on Halloween. It was very funny because it's like a

• 2:19:05Jordi Hays?

  Very meta.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  It's a character of a character, but like what does that actually represent? There they are, in real

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Smaller than they looked

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  On the photo.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  In the photo.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  They loom large. They loom large, Gordy. But why would a customer want to print something? Walk me through the thesis. Like, how is this actually playing out?

• 2:19:24Speaker 11

  Yeah, so today, people are, you know, using their favorite AI coding tools to build using our SDK, which really surprised us that your sort of average family was sitting down around this new shared surface trying to create their own experiences. And so we've decided to really lean into that and are creating a product we call Board Studio that really makes it just easier for your average person to start to build. So they'll sit and just prompt and the Board Studio will create the experience for them, including their very own custom miniatures. So very excited to see what people are creating, everything

• 2:20:06Speaker 11

  from educational apps to things for healthcare settings or bars or restaurants. It's really been a diverse range of interactive experiences.

• 2:20:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's the, what's the secret to making a, you know, basically, I'll call it like a vibe-coded game studio? I imagine you want, you don't want to change, is like reskinning the best way to think about this? Because coming up with like original game mechanics and rules and all these things feels like much, much, much more challenging for the average person than just deciding like, I'm going to make this character look like this and I want to change the setting and choices like that.

• 2:20:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I think it's important for us to really create like a batteries included environment. So to give people good project templates, good asset libraries, an easy way to, you know, connect directly to their board so they can kind of automatically build, deploy, and play games and start to test. And to help kind of steer people towards experiences where they really can go from prompt to prototype in an hour. So that's not going to be creating highly complex games with where the technology is today, but it's quite impressive how quickly, you know, people are able to create things that are fun just using sort of a set of prepackaged assets and templates.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Walk me through where the board SDK ends and the vibe coding begins. It feels like there's an SDK that's open source hosted on GitHub or your website, something like that. I download that and then I can kind of use the vibe coding tool of my choice. I could use Codex, Claude Code, whatever I want to sort of build. But then, am I testing the game in a browser? Is it going, am I deploying to the board? Is there the idea of like test flight? Or then, at some point, does it get released to an app store that you review? Because I imagine there's all sorts of, you know, privacy and security, you know, goals that you have in mind as the company.

• 2:22:16Speaker 11

  Yeah, so for Q4, you'll be building on a computer and then directly deploying on your board for use with your own family. I think our learning has been the act of creating a game on board is actually one of the most fun games on board. So I think for many people, the experience is just going to be vibing things that they love and that their kids love, that they want to play in their own homes. And then from there, if they want to share with the broader community, we have a review process. So you submit your game to us, we have content standards and controls, and then we'll release those games in our board store. So the first of the community games goes live next month, and that was something that a member of the community created using the arcade pieces from our arcade suite.

• 2:22:58Speaker 11

  And it's a reimagined game of pinball that we're super excited about, and that will go live in July. And it just went through our review process to ensure that it was fun and accessible for the community.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  I have a game idea. Monopoly-style game where you develop data centers.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:15Speaker 11

  Love it.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was thinking.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Tyler. We'll get Tyler on the team.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Discounted Cash Flow Simulator. It just runs a full spreadsheet, sort of like how Ramp Labs came out with their Ramp Sheets. You know, you just get the kids started early.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  These will be the least popular games on your community forum, but the most, maybe potentially the most popular.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  And my children will be required to play them. Eight hours a day, probably 996 really. To make sure that they understand the discounted cash.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  How did you feel your intuition was around this launch, you know, versus Mirror? I feel like the hardest thing with hardware is you spend like, you know, one, two years, sometimes more time developing something, and then you just have no idea. You have an intuition around how people will react to it. Did you have more confidence going into Board than the last go around? And, and, you know, did, did, obviously the launch has been great, but did it kind of meet your expectations? And how are you kind of adapting your thinking going forward?

• 2:24:20Speaker 11

  I think it surprised me, honestly. You know, I think we thought that we would be talking to kind of early adopter gadget geeks, maybe some hobbyists who wanted to build, you know, interactive D and D campaigns on Board early days. And the audience has been much broader than expected. You know, we have grandma and grandpa who are buying it for when the grandkids come over, along with, you know, teachers and doctors and restaurant owners. So the breadth of the audience, I think, has really surprised us. And it's great, but it's definitely been a challenge the team now has to meet because we have to create games quickly that can satisfy not just deep, passionate gamers, but people who, for whom this is like really their only gaming experience.

• 2:25:05Speaker 11

  It's bringing sort of new people to the table. And so it's been really fun, but the mission of making playing together more accessible and creating together more accessible is all that more important, given the breadth of the audience.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are you thinking about intellectual property in the modern era? Because I can tell my son a bedtime story where Spider-Man meets Superman, which belong to different, different studios. Never the two shall meet on the silver screen. But in the imagination of a five-year-old, anything is possible, including cross IP infringement. And some of the AI models will sort of play friendly with you if you to ask, you know, ChatGPT, hey, tell me a story or flesh this story out where Spider-Man's interacting with Superman. Some of the companies have licensing agreements and they make royalty payments and all sorts of things.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  But there's some sort of interaction there where I can draw Spider-Man and I think that's legal. I think I can just draw an image of Spider-Man and give that to my kid. But if I take a picture of that, upload that to Board, I imagine at some point you'd be partnering with companies. But is there some sort of terms of use that you have to think through? Or guardrails that you put on? Because some of the magic of creation is drawing Mickey Mouse for the first time. But if you're monetizing that and selling that, that's a whole different equation. So how do you think about playing that side? Because I imagine there'll be huge demand for intellectual property-based games. But you need to be careful that you don't run into any trouble with the big studios.

• 2:26:44Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I'd love to get to a point where it's just one big universe where, you know, everyone is playing together in the board sandbox, but we're obviously not there. So I think today, you know, we are making every effort to respect the, respect the IP holders and also respect the sort of safety and privacy concerns of our community. You know, these are families that are using the device and I have a three-year-old and I want to make sure that when the three-year-old sits down to make pieces, that nothing comes out that would be upsetting or surprising, surprising to us. But those are definitely active conversations that we have had since day one with IP holders about how we can move to a future universe where creation isn't really limited.

• 2:27:25Speaker 11

  That people can, can bring Spider-Man and, you know, Miss Piggy to each other into, into an incredible new world.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, when I think of uh, D and D campaigns, I, I start to think about um, uh, almost like internet connectivity within the game. I, I imagine that most of the games are self-contained. It feels like there is a, there's an internal state of, you know, is the, is the cartoon character clean? You have to wash them off. If you save the game, you come back still dirty. Uh, but uh, how are you thinking about making the games? Are you, are you thinking about expanding to something that is more cloud interactive multiplayer at some point? Is any of that on the horizon? Is that interesting? Is there demand for that even?

• 2:28:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's definitely a polarizing topic within our audience. Um, some people would love to be able to start a game on their board and then have grandma play on her board in a different state. Um, which we, we don't do today because the other half of our audience also feels very strongly that board feels safe because it is a closed community. Um, so our tabletop product is the first product that will be networked. You will be able to link to your Foundry VTT account and play your campaigns with people elsewhere. Um, but we felt like that was um, a specific segment of the community that was, that understood the connectivity. And so, uh, otherwise we are keeping it sort of limited to, to your board.

• 2:28:52Speaker 11

  Um, that may, that may evolve over time, but for now I think those are guardrails that are important to keep it really feeling full family for everyone.

• 2:28:59John Coogan?

  Uh, wait, so, uh, sorry, uh, take me through the, the, the product catalog. It sounds like there's, there's, are there, are there multiple uh, products at this point or is it all just one, the one that I have, the, like the big board? I just think of it as the board. The board. But is there a different, is there a different SKU at this point or is there one coming?

• 2:29:17Speaker 11

  So we launched with a Founder's Edition, which had thirteen games included, which is the version that you guys have. And then we unbundled in March. And so we started selling five of the games à la carte, which was really exciting for us. We saw over 60% attach rate on games with most people buying four out of the five games we had available. So that sort of gave us the confidence that more games were needed in the community. So, starting in June, we'll launch another 10 games between now and holiday. And the board table talk product is sort of the most unusual of those. And that is it's specifically for the tabletop community that's currently using BTTs. Otherwise, they're all sort of full family games.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Warhammer, it's coming.

• 2:30:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about the round.

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to hit the gong. How much did you raise?

• 2:30:10Speaker 11

  Already, we've raised $20 million.

• 2:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I know, I could hear you because I had an idea, but who led the round?

• 2:30:22Speaker 11

  Mike McNano at Union Square.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  We love Mike.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  We love Mike.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  I love, I don't know, everything Union Square is doing, this company, everything about this is just delightful and amazing and obviously a good business as well. So it's a royal flush of good news.

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great update.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Have a great rest of the day.

• 2:30:42Speaker 11

  Thank you guys so much.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Uh, we gotta go back to Instagram because in the era of AI, slop videos, the Renault Encore was doing it better than anybody years and years ago. We gotta pull up this video. I want your reaction because this seems like peak cinema. I want your analysis. Break it down.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  Okay, reasonable car, right? Wait until you see the advertisement. Cheap car. You can get 100 of those for the price of a Ferrari Luchette. 100 Renault Encore's. Anyway, it's gonna restart and you're gonna be amazed. Watch this.

• 2:31:28Speaker 12

  If you are what you drive, imagine yourself as a Renault Encore. Expressively sporty in outlook, stylishly European in design.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  We don't know how to make vibe reels like this anymore. Show me the founder transforming into the B2B SaaS that they are launching. Put away the cinematic softbox, take away the soft, shallow depth of field. Show me the founder transforming into the product. I can see myself in a Renault.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Such a good ad.

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  The one to watch. Great ad, right?

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  Such a good ad. Someone...

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  You know what else is a great ad? Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac said, "Get ready to get even more annoyed by your cheapest friends." Because the Germinator is sharing that Apple readies iOS 27 service that will let users split bills for dinners events by taking a photo of a receipt and assigning items to friends. This is annoying superintelligence that I won't be using. This will be part of Apple Wallet and Cash, taking on Venmo and Splitwise.

• 2:32:39John Coogan?

  You gotta do the credit card roulette.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  I love that game.

• 2:32:44John Coogan?

  Or the inverse credit card roulette, where one person, you take out one credit card, they don't pay, so they get the free dinner and everyone else splits the bill. And everyone else pays like 10% more, but someone else got like a free dinner. So they get a great, you know...

• 2:32:57Jordi Hays?

  And everyone got great company.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. But no, every dinner should be a ruthless game theoretic Nash equilibrium of everyone trying to drink exactly the same amount or buy the most expensive steak to one-up each other so that you don't get taken into the cleaners with an even split. You want to get your money's worth. So if you see someone ordering the porterhouse, you say, "I'll have two porterhouses." Give me two porterhouses. We're splitting this evenly, right? Oh, you got three glasses of wine?

• 2:33:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's do another round.

• 2:33:27John Coogan?

  I'll take 10.

• 2:33:28Jordi Hays?

  I'll triple me up.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  And I am having dessert.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm a big dessert guy.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  I'm a big dessert guy, actually. I'll be taking it to go.

• 2:33:34Jordi Hays?

  That's the buzzer. Order lunch for tomorrow.

• 2:33:38John Coogan?

  And I'd like a third porterhouse.

• 2:33:40Jordi Hays?

  For lunch.

• 2:33:40John Coogan?

  For lunch. Tomorrow. Let's split the bill evenly. Don't pull out your Apple intelligence on me. Don't do that.

• 2:33:49John Coogan?

  What's the crime? Having a porterhouse? Having two porterhouses? Having three porterhouses?

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Four.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  You're gonna divide that up with Apple Intelligence?

• 2:33:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you don't want-

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Take a photo of your receipt.

• 2:33:57Jordi Hays?

  You don't want one of your good friends to hit their macros today?

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  What are you trying to do here?

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  There's a whey protein shortage. There's a whey protein shortage and you're saying I shouldn't order my second and third porterhouse?

• 2:34:08John Coogan?

  What is going on?

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  When you know if I go to the store right now, whey is gonna be priced to the-

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  Let me have a porterhouse. Let me have three.

• 2:34:16Jordi Hays?

  That's a good place to end it, folks.

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Let me tell you about Ramp one more time. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, mail pay, accounting and a whole lot more.