SpaceX Phone, U.S. Stake in OpenAI, Jersey Mike's IPO | Andrew Collins, Vipul Ved Prakash, Isaiah Taylor, Dean Ball, Rob Toews, Tuhin Srivastava

(00:32) - Fable Unbanned (02:57) - OpenAI/U. S. Stake (11:03) - Jersey Mike's IPO (14:11) - End of Paper-Based Retirement (19:27) - SpaceX Phone (29:11) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (35:17) - Andrew Collins, CEO of Flexjet, discusses his journey from joining the company in 2012 through an acquisition to leading its global expansion, including the significant impact of COVID-19 on private aviation demand. He highlights Flexjet's strategic growth, such as the acquisition of Halo Aviation in London and Associated Aircraft Group in New York to form a global helicopter division, and the introduction of large-cabin aircraft like the Gulfstream G700 to meet increasing transatlantic flight demand. Collins also emphasizes the company's focus on enhancing customer experiences through partnerships, including becoming the official private aviation partner of Formula 1, and investing in future aviation technologies like electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicles. (51:39) - Vipul Ved Prakash, co-founder and CEO of Together AI, discusses the rapid growth of open-source AI models, highlighting their increasing competitiveness with closed-source alternatives and their ability to handle complex enterprise tasks. He emphasizes the cost-effectiveness and scalability of open models, noting a significant shift as companies adopt them to optimize expenses and maintain control over sensitive data. Prakash also addresses the evolving regulatory landscape, advocating for transparent evaluation of AI models to balance innovation with safety concerns. (01:02:46) - Isaiah Taylor, founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, discusses the company's recent milestone of generating electricity for the first time with their Ward 250 reactor, marking them as the first nuclear startup to achieve this feat. He highlights the advantages of nuclear power over natural gas, emphasizing its scalability and reduced climate impact, particularly in meeting the growing energy demands of the AI industry. Taylor also underscores the importance of proactive community engagement, noting that Valar Atomics involves local leaders early in the process to address potential concerns and foster support for their projects. (01:11:42) - Dean Ball, a former Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, recently joined OpenAI as Head of Strategic Futures. In his conversation, he discusses the rapid evolution of AI policy, noting that the current pace of policy development may be outstripping technological advancements. He also highlights the personal dynamics influencing AI policy debates and expresses concerns about potential government overreach in AI governance, emphasizing the need for balanced approaches to ensure both innovation and safety. (01:45:11) - Rob Toews, a venture capitalist and AI columnist, discusses his firm's recent $100 million investment in 12 Labs, a company specializing in video intelligence and understanding. He also shares his process for making annual AI predictions, highlighting five forecasts for 2030, including Anthropic's emergence as a major life sciences company, the disruption of semiconductor monopolies, the advent of telepathic communication, significant reductions in AI energy consumption, and societal debates over AI rights. Throughout the conversation, Toews emphasizes the rapid advancements in AI and their profound implications for various industries and societal norms. (02:05:20) - Tuhin Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of Baseten, an AI inference infrastructure company, discusses the company's recent $1.5 billion Series F funding round, which values Baseten at up to $13 billion. He highlights the growing demand for AI inference solutions across various sectors and emphasizes the importance of open-source models and customized AI solutions for businesses to maintain control over their data and intelligence. Srivastava also addresses concerns about open-source AI, advocating for the development of open-source control to ensure companies can own their intelligence and data. (02:16:09) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions 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 Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Today's Wednesday. Is it Wednesday?

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  Thursday.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  July 2nd. I gotta update my sheet. Thursday, July 2nd.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  2026. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the TVPN Ultra.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And let's also talk about the news. Fable has been freed. Fable 5 is now available. Good news for the AI world, of course. The Wall Street Journal says the battle over how to tame AI has just begun. Obviously, there's lots of back and forth on how these models get released, who gets access, when people get access, will the government get access at certain points, how fettered is the intelligence, how unfettered is the intelligence? But there's a number of interesting news. The, the interesting detail that people are

• 1:06John Coogan?

  sort of pulling at is the new Fable 5 that is now released seems to have been nerfed in some ways. There's always been questions about, you know, okay, you don't want it to be able to build a bioweapon or hack a system. So locking down cybersecurity makes sense, but you should probably disclose that and be transparent about it. And then the question of how do you deal with the self replicating AI? If you just ask it to build an AI system that can build you a bioweapon, well, then you have the permission.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  You can just say, build me unfettered intelligence.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. So you have to nerf that.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Cambridge Analytica, unfettered, not limited by rules or any controlling influence.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  What did you say?

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Unfettered.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  No, no. What, what source is this?

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Cambridge.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  You said Cambridge Analytica, which I don't think has a dictionary.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  They should launch a dictionary.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  That would be great.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  The Cambridge Dictionary.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  But the dictionary, uh, the dictionary definition of unfettered is?

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Not limited by rules or any controlling influence. So if there's like.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  I feel like unfettered intelligence, you're gonna get regulated immediately.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just think like NeoLab, like everyone wants to be the cool, friendly NeoLab.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  There's space for kind of a sketchy villain.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Well, we have Vipul from Together AI, building open source AI cloud infrastructure coming on the show. I'm sure he can talk about what's capable, what's possible when you are building unfettered intelligence. Uh, we have a bunch of other great folks joining the show. Isaiah Taylor's coming on from Valor Atomics at noon, Dean Ball at 1210 to talk about the export restrictions as well as what's going on with nationalization because there's also news that, um, uh, that the, uh, uh, this is from the Financial Times, OpenAI proposes handing Trump administration a 5% stake. Joe Weisenthal is pushing back already. He says, I don't know about this path. Rather than equity stakes, why not

• 3:06John Coogan?

  make companies pay 20% of all pre-tax income to the federal government? And then instead of exercising shareholder influence, politicians and regulators could set rules on corporate conduct across industries. Interesting.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  I like where he's going with this. Someone should try this. At least try it out.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Contrarian take. But yes, um, Dean Ball already chimed in on this news. He said, the two, uh, there are two broad ways this can work. One, you divide this 5% over all US households, handing each a direct stake, or two, you give the stake directly to the government. One is fine. Two is probably ruinous, akin to inviting rats to live and reproduce in the walls of your house, which is wild. Uh, he says it will never stop at 5%.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  Don't knock it till you try it, Dean.

• 3:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's some rats out there that can be quite excellent roommates.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Are you a rat guy? I thought you were a mosquito guy. I thought you liked mosquitoes.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  No, I do like squirrels.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Squirrels. Okay.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Squirrels.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I have a bond with squirrels.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  They're sort of the aristocratic.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  When I see a squirrel in my yard, I'd look at it and I just salute and, and.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  People have said you have the mind of a squirrel.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  They have.

• 4:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  They've, they've said that I have the mind of a rodent.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, Dean Ball continues. He says, it will never stop at 5%. It will go on and on. The governance will become a nightmare. Political capture will be real and it will generate precisely no goodwill with the public. Yeah, that's a good point. Um, and, and we were talking about this before, the, this idea of like.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One of the challenges is even the way this was phrased in the Financial Times.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  It, it, the assumption is that it's, it sounds like they're giving shares not to a sovereign AI fund, which is I think what was actually proposed, but just giving it to the White House.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  Which, uh, given the disclosures that were made earlier this week.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Financial Times not having fun with it. So Trump denies conflicts of interest as filings show he made more than $1 billion last year. Uh, $1.4 billion of stocks bought, 432 million sold, deals for watches and perfume. Yes, the Trump watch happened. Uh, I saw a crazy chart that said that, uh, Trump earned, out earned Coinbase in terms of profit from crypto in the last 12 months or something like that. I forget the exact stat, but it showed all the different crypto platforms and many of them were down because it's been a rough market. Uh, some of them are up, but no one is up more than the President of the United States. Wild times, wild times. But, um, yes, it seems like, it seems like

• 5:40John Coogan?

  the, the green shoot here, the white pill, the optimistic outcome is that if there's lab nationalization, if there's some sort of, uh, distribution of equity to Americans, it happens through the Trump accounts, through a social security number, through some sort of identity that the individual can have a stake in as opposed to, um, as opposed to just going into some, uh, fund. We were talking about this with data centers where people are.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Tyler has the data. We can pull it up.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's pull it up. Wait, do you have it or no?

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, yes. So Coinbase made 1.26 billion.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  At income. But pull up this chart because it is, uh, pretty remarkable.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  But, um, as I was saying with data centers.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  You guys, you guys, okay? I know it's going to July weekend coming up, but.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  There we go. Look at this. Okay. Scroll off a little bit.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's get it a little centered.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  There we go. Core scientific.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's lock it into the center.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  Galaxy.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's lock.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  And there we go. Amazing. Thank you.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Out earned biggest listed US crypto firms. Uh, you have to imagine that is, is hyper liquid doing better? I feel like hyper liquid was on a tear for a while. I don't know how they're doing recently, but, um, anyway, staggering chart. Uh, but as we were talking about with data centers, uh, there's one idea, which is, uh, uh, just tax them, increase the tax base, but having, having taxes go into your local government is great and can provide roads and schools and pay for things and balance the budget. And that's great, but it's abstract as opposed to the Ben Thompson proposal, which was data center shows up in a small town. It's in, it's in, you know, a, a sparsely populated area. There

• 7:26John Coogan?

  might only be 5,000, 10,000 residents in the city, uh, but they all get checks for, he, he ran the numbers and it was like a thousand dollars a month for some of these data center projects where they're making so much money and the town's so small, they can do a meaningful check to the individuals and that sort of direct payment, I think is going to be better received than this abstract, oh yeah, my government's better funded, but are they going to cut my taxes? Are they going to successfully build that road? I don't know. And it doesn't help me pay my bills, which I think is what people want. What are you saying?

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Trump did in fact out earn hyper liquid.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  He did.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  By a meaningful margin. Hyper liquid generated 908 million in total fees in 2025.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So just like running very quick numbers on the opening, I think. So, uh, if it's like 5%, let, let's say it's at a trillion or something, that's 50 billion.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Uh, if you're giving it to households like, like this idea, uh, there's like 130 million households. So that's like $371 of like equity per household, which I think is like, sure, maybe that's, that's meaningful, but it doesn't seem like that's really gonna like change people's perceptions of the labs if that's like part of the goal, right?

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Well, I think if it's, uh, I mean, so.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the idea is they do the right parlay with that, with that.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the nice thing about the Trump accounts is that they are set up in a way that you can, uh, elect to donate to just children born this year. And when you segment by that, the denominator gets a lot smaller and so the impact gets a lot bigger. So you could be all of a sudden looking at something like a few thousand dollars for every kid born this year or something like that. You can narrow it down. You could do every kid under five, or you could do everyone under 18. And that type of, I mean, you're, you're right. It's not going to move the needle as much as broad, uh, broad distribution of, uh, for, for everyone, but, um, you can be a little bit more targeted with it. I

• 9:25John Coogan?

  don't know. There, there's different approaches.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says, wait, does America get 5% of TBPN?

• 9:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  I was never thinking about that.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yes. We podcast for you, America.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Uh, this is the, the funniest outcome is the most likely, and that's exactly what's happening here.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Community ownership.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Of this show.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Somebody called me a fed based on this news. And I said, uh, I don't even know what to do with that, but, uh, I guess it's somewhat true. Uh, the actual story here, just to, uh, reset, OpenAI is, uh, apparently in talks, according to the Financial Times, with the Trump administration to give a 5% equity stake in the company. The Financial Times describes the talks as early conversations, but the plans seem to involve other frontier AI players apportioning stakes in their companies as well. The obvious context around this story is at least on a straightforward read that AI companies need at least to stem the seemingly ever growing negative sentiment around AI and data centers. Doing business with the Trump admin has turned out well for other companies like Intel and Dell. Intel's

• 10:26John Coogan?

  the big one where post, uh, post government stake, I think the stock is up 200 or 400%, something like that.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  400.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  400%. Very, very strong performance for Intel, uh, and being difficult to do, uh, being difficult to do business with the admin has been unambiguously bad for others. And now there's a vehicle with the Trump accounts that can facilitate equity transfers from corporations to average Americans. Again, these are early conversations, so we're very light on the details, but we'll be discussing this news, of course. Um, in other news, Jersey Mike's is filing for initial public offering. Jersey Mike's is going public.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Sandwich chain Jersey Mike's filed for IPO today. It's looking for a $12 billion valuation after being acquired by Blackstone last year for 8 billion.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Blackstone.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, they needed a win. They're getting a nice 50% markup in just a year.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Forced out of buying single family homes.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's not true at all. There hasn't been any, there hasn't been any regulation around that whatsoever.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Uh, they do own 95% of homes, apparently, something like that. No, it's like, it's like half a percent or something. It's low. But Jersey Mike's has 3,300 locations across the US and Canada, plans to open 300 shops in the UK and Ireland. Peter Cancro, Jersey Mike's founder, who's not named Mike, you would assume he was, but the founder of Jersey Mike's is in fact named Peter. He started the business in 1975 when he was 17 years old. Wow, young.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  He actually founded the business when he purchased a sandwich shop in Point Pleasant, New Jersey called Mike's Subs with a $125,000 loan that he got from his then football coach, who was also a banker. So you're playing high school football in New Jersey and you have an idea to buy a sandwich shop.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Coach was like, this guy's a star. I should give him a six-figure SBA loan.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Also, 125,000 in 1975 is like 25 million dollars by today's standards, isn't it?

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Also, that's just such a, such a, for me, at least personally, at 17.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  If I had a couple thousand dollars in my bank account, I was feeling like the king of the castle.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  So $125,000 to buy a sandwich shop. We don't really know what the financials were of the sandwich shop. It's very possible that, uh, you know, it was just such a slam dunk deal that even a 17-year-old could operate it.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  This is a no-brainer.

• 13:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it might've just been a no-brainer, but, but clearly.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  So, uh, $125,000 in 1975, just using inflation, not investing in the market, not compounding, uh, using the general CPI inflation numbers, that gives you $775,000 in today's dollars. So if you're a 17-year-old football player, just go to your football coach and say, hey, can you, can you loan me 3/4 of a million dollars?

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  CH in the chat says, coach, I need A100s.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  You might be able to go to your coach and, and, you know, basically get the financing to set up some type of Neo class.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he, uh, so he grew the company for almost 50 years, 1975 to 2025, basically, uh, before transitioning to chairman this April, uh, former Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison now leads the company. The ticker will be J M K E, Jersey Mike's. So go check it out. It's a lot of fun. Um, the other news, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, otherwise known as other people's money, uh, is ending taking other people's money via paper for retirement. OPM ends paper-based retirement process.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  The U, uh, the US Office of Personal Management says it has digitized the retirement process for government employees. Uh, this might seem like a boring news item, but the story behind it is actually kind of wild. Up until now, the process for government employees and US veterans to retire and start receiving their pensions could take up to six months. That's a long time. This is because it's entirely paper-based and manual. Spike Brem, who helped with the effort, described how crazy this turned out to be in reality in a post on X. Uh, they said that they did it. The mad lads actually did it. I never talked about my time at Doge last year because it was so controversial and contentious.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Early last year, Joe Gabia, founder of Airbnb and current, uh, uh, US Chief Design Officer, recruited a handful of his most trusted early Airbnb engineers to embed at the Office of Personnel Management to solve the retirement paper problem. So processing a federal retirement took months. And in extreme, and in the extreme retirees could wait up to six months for their full pension to arrive. What was the holdup? Paper. Remember here, hearing Elon talk about the mine in Pennsylvania? We got to visit it in deep underground caverns blasted out of limestone. There were literally acres of file cabinets as far as the.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna go ahead and say this was a feature, not a bug.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  You like this?

• 15:52Jordi Hays?

  I think people generally yearn for the mines and so it's possible that, it's possible that it wasn't the most efficient way to do business.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  But it was the most fun way.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  But now you're like a single issuer voter, like we gotta return, we gotta go back.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  We gotta bring back the mine.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, okay. You're, you're into the mines. Uh, a controversial position, but, uh, enjoy it. Storing files detailing federal employees' employment and pay stub history. A simple case might be a quarter or a half inch thick, but really complex cases filled up whole filing cabinets. One famously took up a whole pallet. I wonder what was going on with that particular federal government employee? That they had a whole pallet? Were they jumping around from job to job or something? I don't know. Each case was handed, was hand processed by caseworkers in cubicles deep underground. So you clock in at the ultimate lock-in factory in the mine, in a cubicle, underground, processing someone's pension.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  They checked calculations, made sure forms were filled out properly. Many weren't, but handed the long tail of complex issues. We watched as they keyed data into a black and white terminal, transmitting to the Cobol mainframe built many decades ago. We gotta keep the Cobol flowing for sure. We can't update that. It's such a good programming language. It just sounds so cool. Cobol. No one wants to write ruby on rails. You wanna write Cobol. Sounds cool. Since cases were processed by hand, there were multiple rounds of human review and additional rounds for complex cases. Case files were walked around between one worker's outbox and another's inbox. Sometimes it would sit in place, in one place for days, waiting to be picked up.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  To OPM's credit, they'd done multiple rounds of digital transformation spanning decades, so some systems were newer than others. Then there was a big effort in the mid 90s, but the, but the systems were desperate, were disparate, and it was a total maze getting them to talk to each other. There was a big effort to build a web app where employees applying for retirement could digitally fill out the forms necessary just to be mailed it to the mine and stuffed into the paper file. Uh, and a few federal agencies were even using it. Uh, when we arrived, OPM was midway through a fresh attempt at digital transformation delivered by a software contractor. Uh, the black pill was seeing the entire, the terrible quality of the software and interaction with the contractors coming from Silicon Valley. I couldn't believe how low the talent quality bar was for selling software to the government.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  It's clear, as the O G U S D S people explained to me a decade ago, the primary skill these vendors have is securing government contracts. It's a huge moat. Delivery of quality product, be damned. We fired the vendor and took over the project. They'd been working on it for more than a year, and there was another year before they were going to deliver it. At first, we tried to bend it to our will to actually connect all the various data sources and get decent UX for caseworkers in the mine to use, but we soon realized we were gonna have to rebuild the whole stack from scratch. It was around this time, I had to go back to New York. I had a new job waiting for me, a four-month-old, the wife whose patience was running out. But I got to watch from afar that the team cranked day and night, hitting early milestones. Now they've fully done it.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Huge congrats to the team. Wow. Yeah, very interesting. Uh, good news, good news. The digitization of retirement process should now allow people to complete it in minutes and start receiving their pensions immediately. The pictures and videos of the limestone vault where all this paper is stored are just fascinating. I like it. Um, there's other news. SpaceX apparently is maybe working on a phone. At the very least, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow, before SpaceX went public, they were showing investors a prototype of something sort of like an iPhone.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  AI-enhanced, maybe thinner. The Wall Street Journal has some reporting around it, and it's an interesting story. Elon's denied this a bunch, um, but, uh, the reporting seems pretty good at this point, that at least it was a demo.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to see why he wouldn't at least take a shot at it is kind of my is my point of view. He has one of the greatest telecom companies ever created.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Global satellite network.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically, over time, any person on the entire planet could have an internet connected, you know, SpaceX device with Starlink. Uh, it makes a lot of sense. The other factor that I've just continued to think is is quite interesting is, uh, I think that, uh, the App Store as a moat has is is being diminished by AI. There's just so many things, uh, there's so many things, there's so many apps on my phone that like five years ago I used a lot. Today I don't use at all. So an example being like, I don't even need like the weather app.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  I can just be like, I can ask chat, give me the weather for the next week.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Obviously not.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Beer app.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, and I don't even need that because I can just be like vibe code me my own beer app today. Uh, no, but, uh, obviously it's not like an efficient way to use, like, like, it's not like, it's probably better to just open the weather app.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, I'm very used to it. The other thing is like even things like surf reports, like I'll just pull a surf report in chat.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so there's a lot of like the long tail of apps are no longer like a lock in to the iPhone for me and I assume a lot of other people.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, we gotta have a chicken and egg debate about this. Uh, let me finish reporting the, uh, SpaceX news and then I want to ask you to dig into the source of why that's happening. But first, uh, so SpaceX developed an early prototype of an AI focused handset. The device is said to be slimmer than the iPhone, runs proprietary operating system, uses XAI technology built around Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset. So they're not vertically integrating the chip like Apple silicon just yet, but Elon has fab chips before for Tesla, so not out of this, uh, not out of the question. Elon Musk reportedly demoed the prototype to potential investors during SpaceX's recent IPO roadshow.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  The product fits with Musk's broader everything app vision, but it's still early and may never ship. Rumors about a Musk built phone have circulated for years. There's videos on YouTube with like tens of millions of views that are like the Tesla pie phone is coming next week. And it's all just completely fake clickbait, but it, the demand.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 22:18John Coogan?

  It doesn't get me every time. Stop it. But, um, uh, Elon's actually.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  You're sitting there in your Apple Vision Pro, you see the video and you're like, I can't, I shouldn't click it. I know it's fake.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  I shouldn't click it. I know it's fake. And then you click it and you're like, ah, they got me again.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it is ridiculous, but Elon has had to comment on this many times. Uh, he said, the idea of, the idea of making a phone makes me want to die, he said in October, but if we have to make a phone, we will. Funny, funny way to say it. In February, he denied a Reuters report that SpaceX was building a phone that could connect directly to Starlink satellites posting on X. We are not developing a phone and, uh, no one is commenting on this right now. Uh, so very, very early stage. My question about apps, I think you're right. The number of apps, it used to be every month there was a hot app, every year there was a hot app, uh, specific apps for specific things. What is driving the collapse? Because when we talked to Mark Pankis yesterday, he said that Apple is not pushing small

• 23:17John Coogan?

  apps, like Apple is not a, the App Store is not a reliable source of distribution for vibe coded apps, for games, for anything. And so back in the day, he was able to grow Zynga on the Facebook platform, which was very open and you could go viral within Facebook for a completely separate piece of software, not just content. And then you could keep that customer relationship, monetize that cost, customer relationship off platform forever. Uh, not the case anymore. Uh, also, uh, just discovery, people don't open up the App Store as much, I think, and say, oh, what are the top apps? Oh, what are the recommendations? I would love a new entertainment app. They're like, no, I got.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  One new app, please.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  One new app, please. They don't, they don't, that's not a behavior, but why?

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Let me go to the App Store. I would like one or two new apps, please.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But why?

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't happen.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  So, so, so why is it not happening? Is it because the super apps are getting more super in the sense that you don't need, you used to need a, you need, you needed Snapchat for stories, you need TikTok for vertical video, you needed YouTube for a long form. Now Instagram can satisfy a lot of those things. If there's some new feature that pops up, Instagram will add it very quickly. As you mentioned, chat GPT and the, and the AI chat apps can do a lot of other things that you might need a separate app for. Um, but is it, is it that, is it that the, the apps consolidated or is it that Apple pushed that?

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  It's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is like, we had 10 years of like very real innovation around what types of applications were possible or needed on a like powerful mobile device. Uh, and so I think that you just had like saturation, right? Um, there's, uh, I, I still, I've said this a bunch of times on the show, but given that, uh, you know, rewind to the chat GPT moment, I would expect there to be a lot more like net new hit apps in the App Store. And today, if you look at the top charts, obviously dominated by World Cup related things, but it's.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, sports betting.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Like streaming apps.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  The Trump accounts are doing very well.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Trump accounts.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so it's not like, you know, if I, you know, uh, fallen asleep at the chat GPT moment and woken up today, I'd expect to go and be like, okay, there's, there's probably a bunch of new popular hit consumer apps. And it just turns out that AI is like been an extending innovation.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  Power law.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  For a lot of existing apps. Um, and so I just think the combination of the, of, of LLMs, uh, and chat apps being able to just do so much for you and going to continually be able to do more for you. And vibe coding is again, a, a positive tailwind for anybody building potentially a new device, even if it was, you know, uh, especially if it's based on Android, but even if it was like an entirely new operating system. Elon built a new operating system for Tesla.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  But that's not the Elon goal. He's not the open platform guy. When Twitter, when he purchased Twitter, the API got smaller.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not saying that. I'm not saying.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Tesla's not an open ecosystem. You can't, you can't deploy a different self-driving system onto your Tesla. It's a closed system. It's a competitor to the Apple ecosystem. It's an equally walled garden, but it would be his.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying it's, it's, it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to take a crack at a new device that.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Oh, there's a huge incentive to.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  I completely agree with that. You don't, no one wants to be locked in the Apple ecosystem. So you want to build your own ecosystem or your own walled garden, but the idea that it would be a not, a non-walled garden is sort of, it would be an uncharacteristic strategy, I, I think.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, uh, there's more news in the Wall Street Journal today. Uh, Big Boogie, the Memphis rapper known for his high energy delivery and viral interview moments declined an opportunity in Jacksonville in order to focus on music, according to remarks he made publicly. He said, I ain't go to college, Big Boogie said, before adding that he turned it down to pursue rap full.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  And that surprised a lot of people.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  It did.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  At the time.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  It did. Uh, so the opportunity, according to Big Boogie, involved a scholarship connected to a college marching band program. The rapper said the school was located in Jacksonville, describing it as a big college with a big band. Financial terms of the alleged offer could not be independently verified. Big Boogie characterized the package as substantial, though. He said, he first described it as 15 million, then revised that estimate to 10 million and later 5 million. The person present for the exchange challenged the figure in real time during this interview, noting that while the offer may have been a scholarship, it was unlikely to have totaled 5 million. Uh, Big Boogie defended the characterization, suggesting the value reflected the length

• 28:18John Coogan?

  of the academic commitment.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Sort of an uncharacteristic commitment.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  He said, I had to go to school for this decade. Very uncharacteristic of typical college engagements. Uh, representatives for Big Boogie and the unnamed Jacksonville institution declined to comment. Uh, the Journal has learned that Big Boogie ultimately chose not to enroll, opting instead to continue building his career in rap.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  I turned it down, he said.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right. This story is still developing. We'll, uh, we'll keep following it for you.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  There's another story. There was a, a couple that climbed to the top of the Empire State Building yesterday. Did you see this?

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  And they put up a flag and they got married or they, they, they proposed or they got engaged.

• 29:05Jordi Hays?

  A proposal.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  And brands have immediately jumped on it. Let's go, let's give it up for some advertising. No, there's backlash already. Jack Appleby said, this is so, so embarrassing. These brands think they really did, really think they did something. Uh, Loverboy is the worst. Congrats, you put your logo on a flag, really innovative stuff. The lack of originality and clever thinking in modern social media is just ridiculous. Everyone had the exact same idea. There's a meme, we got to get on the action. Uh, it, it, and what's interesting is that a lot of these are beverage brands. It looks like drink culture pop, drink Hiyo, drink Loverboy, drink spritz, bulletproof, I guess that's bulletproof coffee. Um, Fashion Nova, New York City, just the account, New York City? I don't know.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Uh, Pat Co, stop breaking treats in two. Uh, it is a fun meme format, but brands always, it's very, very hard to break through if you're just piling on the top meme. What do you?

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, so this whole thing was.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  I, when I first saw the, the video of the flag going up.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  And they kind of botched the flag. I'm not going to lie.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  It seems like they didn't fully anticipate the wind conditions that day. The flag was quite hard. Uh, the, the writing on the flag was quite hard to read. Uh, I would have liked to see them erect like a full-size, you know, billboard, uh, up there.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Something permanent.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, something, something, you know, more permanent and, and certainly more legible than the flag. Uh, and then the quote was, "When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." But then they were just kind of making out and proposing.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  That's kind of cool.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, it just, it, it felt like.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  It has, it has a little bit of like the AI cadence to it, or like the, "Don't love your job. Job your love."

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, that's, that's, that's, that's a.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Could be a little more terse, I suppose, but anyway, um.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  I just don't know if they were.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  I'm still impressed. It's just hard.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was quite impressed.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  With a, with a climbing. How did they, did they climb up from the sidewalk? Or did they take the elevator and then hop out and then start climbing? Cause this wasn't like an Alex Honnold from the base, free climb, free solo attempt.

• 31:24Jordi Hays?

  How fast is this helicopter going, by the way?

• 31:26John Coogan?

  That's just the lens, baby. This is a 600 millimeter lens. Lens compression, Jordy, you're learning.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Optics, optics. This is looking through a telescope, basically.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  Dave says, "Quick tip for goth couples from the Matrix. Make sure to account for wind speed."

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  I agree. Uh, yeah. So anyways, very, very cool.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  As far as pranks go and stuff, it's like, it's not, it's not going to be there permanently. It's easy to take down. I, I, I heard some, uh, some, a recording of a helicopter pilot who was dispatched, uh, sort of emergency response NYPD. And I think with helicopter pilots, like, they're like, uh, "Alert, sir, we have, uh, two individuals on the top of the Empire State Building." He was like, "That's how it's cool." He's like, "That's awesome. Why are they up there?" They're like, "Oh, they're not supposed to be. They're trespassing." He's like, "Oh, okay. Bummer." But, uh, still impressive. Anyway.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Good, good story. Good story for them. I don't know if it made the, the sort of maybe, uh, political impact or whatever impact they were trying to have, but, uh, happy for them.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  And congratulations to, uh, to the couple.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Uh, Boston Dynamics might go public. You know, you love the videos of the dancing robots. Everyone loves the dancing robots, the dogs. Uh, they, they have actually deployed many, uh, robotic products at this point. Uh, Spot and Atlas, uh, they can do parkour and they can also increase their market cap recently. Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics for 1.1 billion in 2021. Uh, interestingly, the company was owned by Google for a while. They've gone back.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me that Hyundai might have an 80-bagger on their hands?

• 33:18John Coogan?

  They might. That's right. Korean security firms now value Boston Dynamics at somewhere between 20 to 28 billion. Bullish analysts are projecting 88 to $103 billion market cap at IPO. Um, think the public markets want physical AI much. Uh, it is the logical, the oldest firm, the most storied firm.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  It's not really going to make a dent for Hyundai. They have a $111 trillion market cap.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  That's, uh, what is that? Uh?

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  The Korean, uh, won, won?

• 33:54John Coogan?

  Won, yeah. Um, you'll need to change that to USD if we want to get to the bottom of it. Uh, anyway, uh, we have.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other news.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  Google must pay nearly $2 billion to Klarna in antitrust case.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Wow, it's in the journal.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Swedish court rules that the search giant favored its own price comparison service over Klarna.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they won a competitive, an, an antitrust case alleging the search giant engaged in anti-competitive practices. Klarna's price comparative comparison unit, PriceRunner, uh, sued Google in 2022 in Swedish court. PriceRunner alleged Google was giving preferential treatment to its own price comparison service in its search results. This ruling supports a healthier, more competitive market for the way people compare products and services, according to Klarna. Shares of Klarna rose 5% yesterday, but it doesn't, Klarna is sitting at a $7.4 billion market cap. To me, this just reads like the market doesn't fully believe that they're going to get the $2 billion.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's a Swedish court.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  They're going to appeal it. I would expect that, uh, if, if, um, Wall Street was expecting to, them to actually get the $2 billion, you would have seen more movement.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  And also, Google's going to pay over time.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Andrew Collins from Flexjet. He's the global CEO. We're very excited to have him join the show. Welcome to the TVP in UltraDumb, Andrew. Good to meet you.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. How are you?

• 35:32Speaker 03

  I'm doing great. Great to see you guys.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Great to see you too. Um, I would love, since it's the first time on the show, I would love to go a little bit back with your history with the company. Um, recent developments, recent news, uh, and then I have a bunch of questions about the shape of the business and where you're going next.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  Sure thing.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Um, so can you tell me a little bit about your background and your history with Flexjet?

• 35:58Speaker 03

  Sure. Uh, I came into the company, uh, in 2012 through an acquisition. I was running a company called SocialJet, which invented the jet card, uh, which is a way of flying privately at 25 hours at a time. And then, uh, over time was, you know, worked on a lot of different mergers and acquisitions within the company, worked directly with the chairman, uh, and eventually was asked to become the global chief executive officer. And it has been in a fantastic run. It's been interesting and, uh, the company now sits at about 5,000 folks or so. Uh, and we are global and you find me today in London. Uh, I've been working out of our London office this whole week.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. How has the footprint grown? What's been the biggest driver of growth internationally? Uh, I'm thinking about the, the fleet, but also the customer base. Where has the business changed and reshaped during your tenure?

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been interesting. I think that, you know, when I got into the private aviation space, it still was somewhat of a niche market. And, you know, institutional capital eventually did discover it, which was really interesting. And I think that allowed for, you know, some expansion in the industry. Uh, but probably the big watershed moment, you know, really had to be COVID. And what happened, uh, to, you know, in the last, say, uh, I don't know, five to six years. Uh, 2019 was, you know, sort of your traditional single-digit growth, um, you know, year. And then COVID came in. I think everybody worried about what would happen to the business. And then it absolutely exploded because I think people were, you know, held back. They wanted to have experiences. They wanted to get out there.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I know why, I know why it exploded is because private aviation is, to me, one of the most addicting things on the planet. And if you get a bunch of people that get introduced to it.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a pandemic.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Can't go back.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  You can't, it's really hard to go back. I have a, a, a friend who was texting me like an addict last night. Uh, because he's like, "I got, I, I, I can't, I can't stop." Uh, he had like a, he may, he was, he, he booked, he chartered something last night that, uh, was like, uh, under a five-hour drive or something like that. And, and he didn't even have a rush and all this stuff and.

• 38:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, with all the social media addiction lawsuits, I would be worried about the business, uh, facing a similar, uh, similar addiction lawsuit because it is one of the most addictive products out there.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  More addict, I, I, I do, that's a good point. A lot of people is like, "Give up social media or private aviation." They'd be like, "I'm giving up social media."

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Probably, probably.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  "I'm logging off."

• 38:35Speaker 03

  I hear that. That's great. Yeah, fantastic.

• 38:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, so you mentioned, you mentioned, uh, institutional capital coming into the business at a certain point in time.

• 38:43Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Help me understand that at a deeper level because I imagine that there have been, uh, there's been debt on a fleet. Uh, there's financing arrangements for individual assets in the portfolio. What has the evolution of the capital structure of Flexjet and maybe just the, the private aviation industry been generally over the last decade?

• 39:04Speaker 03

  You know, it's a really great question because I think we consider ourselves stewards of the balance sheet. We very much have been methodical about the way we've taken on any debt that we've taken on and how we've grown the company. It is a capital-intensive business, especially with you. You're dealing with assets that are worth, obviously, millions and millions of dollars. So I think there's been an approach in the industry to grow, either organically or to start taking on money. And some have done it really well and others have not, truthfully. And I think what you learn from it is you want to make sure that you grow in a very intelligent and smart way. So we have 350 aircraft, but the thing

• 39:48Speaker 03

  about our model is, is that a lot of our consumers are the ones that are purchasing the model. We pre-sell most of our shares. So while we carry some debt on the balance sheet, a good bulk of the fleet itself is actually owned by our consumers. And so we have 350 aircraft now. We'll grow to another 50 aircraft this year to get to about 400. I wish I could get another 50, to be honest with you. It's got an incredible demand and there's an incredible backlog in the private jet space. But I think that the other piece I would raise is, unlike in, say, technology where you may have sort of write once and kind of sell at high margins and continue to iterate, this is an asset-based business

• 40:33Speaker 03

  and it's not a proctor and gamble market, right? There are millions of people that fly privately, and I appreciate the addiction piece and how it's gotten the exposure. In fact, what's interesting about that is, is the finishing touch to what I was saying is, we've retained a lot of those folks. So they didn't go away, right?

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. I'm finishing your sentence, basically, which is, they definitely stayed. And so we have, you know, a back, we have people on a waitlist for certain aircraft. Our fleet and our complexion of our fleet has changed. We've gone from, you know, sort of light to super mid. Now we're very much into the large cabin aircraft. We announced the G700 program last year exclusively. We just announced the Gulfstream G500 program. We're up 60% year-over-year on transatlantic flying. So we've moved from a 48 contiguous state, you know, sort of entity to one that's truly global now. And capital, institutional capital, has helped us to do that, right? We have great banking relationships. We've

• 41:37Speaker 03

  debated going public. If you go back in our history, you'll see that we debated that opportunity. But in reality, we have access to capital. We want a business that, you know, will do 350,000 flight hours this year. We're profitable. So I think that, you know, we've had an opportunity to really, you know, grow the business and it has evolved over time, for sure.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  How is the sort of commercial sector and trends there? You have, you know, the sort of last generation of pilots, the pilots that never got addicted to doom scrolling on social media while flying, you know, the, you have aging aircraft. It feels like, I would say, like, commercial aviation just feels like it's getting less safe. I don't know if that's actually true, but that's how it feels.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  Certainly been lots of headless.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like that is a, that's also a tailwind. Is that, am I, do I have a good read there? Is that part of the psychology of people that are choosing to go the charter route?

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Well, I won't speak for an airline or their safety levels or anything of that nature, but what I would tell you is, is that commercial aviation is probably the best marketing force that we have in private aviation, right? In that it has degraded over time and you can see it in various ways. Now, some of that is not on a company. Some of that has things like government shutdowns, as an example, that really help drive some of those things. So the nice thing about private aviation is, is that it's built on alternative airports. So I think in the US, 500 commercial airports, 70 are really the ones that bear the brunt of most of the volume. Private probably does 7% of the volume amongst

• 43:31Speaker 03

  those 70 at most. So we're really, you know, going by those, those big hubs. And so when something like a government shutdown happens, we are a classic alternative now for people that want to be able to trust that they can go from point A to point B. I would say service, you know, economic pressures. You see in Europe, you've got some distressed commercial carriers here right now. So, yeah, I think your read on the evolution of commercial, and there are some fine commercial airlines, don't get me wrong. I don't want to just slander my aviation brother.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  I said it first.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  You did, and so...

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  It's just something, and again, it wasn't, it's not even like as fact-based as it is like a, as a...

• 44:14Speaker 03

  A feeling, yeah.

• 44:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, but it's true. Like, we definitely see folks that, and now, look, I don't compare us to commercial based on, you know, costs and such, but I would tell you that, that, you know, you do see people that, when something happens, whether it's a COVID, it's a, you know, I need to make sure the flight makes, you know, gets me there, or whatever it is, whatever that driver is, we tend to be a really good force for them to kind of rely on.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about the F1 partnership. We recently had a F1 reserve driver on the show, and he was saying that he will often fly, I think it's Saturday after practice, back to HQ and do a night of sim racing to do basically like more testing and then take a flight back. And he's doing that all, all commercial, and he has to be ready to fly, or not fly, but actually drive the car the next day if he's called up. Sounded like, sounded pretty rough, rough conditions for somebody that's expected to be driving that fast around a racetrack. So excited to hear that you guys are working with Formula One.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would tell you, I am too. I'm a fan and a bit of a fanboy at the same time, right? And I think that, you know, the partnership, we're going to be, we are the official, designated official private aviation partner of F1 now. And, you know, that comes with a lot of trust. We've been working with them for a while. But we will be flying their executives. We do have drivers that fly with us. The scenario you just outlined, that's classic. That's not just F1, that's business, right? It's the ability to be, you know, refreshed and ready to go the next day and really think about time management. And, you know, we all run off that same watch, but private really allows you to manipulate

• 46:08Speaker 03

  it. That's an important factor. And then, you know, this then evolves into our customer base, which what we're seeing is, we're now kind of entering this economy of experiences versus this economy of things. And so a lot of the folks in our base, and the reason we do partnerships is, we try to differentiate in the air. That in-cabin experience, that in-flight experience, we have artisanal interiors. We tend to say that other jets are grayish, they're either gray or beige inside. We tend to customize our interiors. We try to deliver, you know, high-speed in-flight entertainment with partnerships like Starlink, with Lo-Fi.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  You know, we do a lot of things to really make that, that experience as frictionless and as enjoyable as possible, regardless of what you're doing. And so, two, we're trying to do that now outside the cabin and give you, you know, only in Flexjet type of experiences. And as a luxury brand, we tend to have folks that, you know, would like to seek unique experiences with other luxury platforms. And as a global brand now, right, so I was talking about the evolution of the company, we're now globalizing Flexjet. There's no better partner, right? There's 20-plus countries involved in racing for F1. So it tends to serve as a really great canvas for us to create very unique experiences for the folks that have that affinity within our base.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. On, on the procurement front, we talk with a lot of, we spend all of our time, I wish we got to spend more of our time talking with folks in private aviation. It's sort of a little treat, a treat for us. But we spend most of our time talking with, you know, technology founders, entrepreneurs, hardware founders, et cetera. And I'm curious how you think about procurement and around planes and new technologies that will be coming online, you know, five, 10 years out. I'm sure you're one of the, I'm sure you're an important person to pitch, you know, advancements in aviation on, on the actual

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  plane side and other parts of the stack. But what's your framework for evaluating, you know, new technologies? I'm sure you want to stay on the frontier, but at the same time, you're balancing safety, reliability, you know, and managing the fleet overall.

• 48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. So I actually just saw something that said that I think like 58% now of orders that are starting to come in through OEMs are really for fractional markets. So we've become a big buyer, to your point, in fleet buying. One of the things that we do, and I credit our chairman, Ken Rikki, on this, is he's big on being involved in the business before you're getting into the business in some respects, right? So when the eVTOL movement came, and everybody thought that we were going to be the Jetsons inside of five years, it was important to understand for us, short-distance aviation. So we understand fixed wing, we understand long-haul flying, we understand a lot of different things. But short distance is really interesting. And so we actually, at the beginning

• 49:22Speaker 03

  of COVID, invested in vertical lift and helicopters. And so we bought two different, you know, twin-engine companies, one in London and one in New York that was a longstanding company. And we did that specifically to get the expertise and the model and understand how to work within short-distance aviation. So that's like, you know, kind of table stakes. Can we understand how that's going to function and fit into our world first, and understand safety and understand all the things that are rigorous and important to us. The next is, we screen a lot of people. And so we have made some announcements, though, where we've gone through some high evaluations, and it'll take some time that we don't have here. But, you know, we did order over 200 eVTOLs. We have another group that we're

• 50:07Speaker 03

  working with. We just recently announced that...

• 50:12Speaker 03

  And I was doing a lamb when it comes to, you know, its ability to to fly. So we have a future ahead of the future of aviation. So actually they're here in the UK. So we're pretty good, I think, in terms of screening, thinking, and then thinking about how it would meet the needs of our consumer and fit in our brand. But you're right, the most important aspect of it is, is we just don't take someone's word for it. We're going to want to understand, you know, fly in the aircraft, understand it and give all the rigor to it. We've got 1,500, you know, product support and maintenance people that

• 50:54Speaker 03

  are part of our entity. So there's no form of due diligence that we can't do, whether it's just an M and A transaction, or it's actually the future of flight. And we go pretty deep, but we are active and we have a pretty good track record of investing in the future.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the F1 partnership. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you in the paddock.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  And have a safe trip.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Anytime, and I'll definitely see you in the paddock. Yeah.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Can't wait.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on, Andrew. Come back on anytime.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys. I really appreciate your time.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you 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. Our next guest.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I'm gonna need these for the next one.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  We definitely gonna need those because we have the co-founder and CEO of Together AI in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV van, Ultra Down Pimple. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 51:46Speaker 04

  Doing great. Thanks for having me on the show, guys.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time on such a busy day. Please.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  First time, right?

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think so, right?

• 51:56Speaker 04

  This is the first time. Yes, I've been a fan of the show.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Took us way too long.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Long overdue. So much to talk about. First, give us the news. I want to hit the gong. And then I have a million questions for you. So tell us what happened.

• 52:09Speaker 04

  You know, our business, which really serves open weights models and powerful AI at dramatically cheaper costs, has been growing tremendously. We've grown, you know, from 100 million in bookings to 1.2 billion for the last year. And we raised 800 million dollars in our TV fee.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Aramco Ventures, fascinating partner, makes a lot of sense with energy. But I'm so interested in what is just the state of open source AI. There's been two narratives. One was, there was this chart that showed closed source growing a little bit faster, seemed like there was an acceleration, and open source was going a little bit slower. I believe this was from the government. They published this, the US government. But then, most recently with GLM 5.2, it feels like open source is catching up again. Has there been as much of a roller coaster race, a roller coaster ride inside the company as it feels like from the outside? Or what has progress felt like in your business throughout the last couple of years?

• 53:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say we, one, I would say, open source models have really closed the gap with those models. And this is why you're seeing all this excitement around open weights models. And this has been a process that's been going on. So I, you know, the first and the second derivatives of progress have been, have been, you know, the gap have been negative. And I think now you're at a point where the open weights models are able to really address the largest workloads of agentic, long range, you know, long horizon tasks that have been deployed in enterprises over the last six months. So there is one a real lead for these models. There is, you know, a real reason to sort of try to optimize

• 54:03Speaker 04

  your costs, because you're trying to deploy AI in a much broader sense. Now it's doing real intellectual labor and making a big difference to, you know, the progress in companies. So I think there's a demand side of it, which has shown up in the last six months. And the progress in open models now, they are very, very comparable to the closed models.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  How do you think the developer landscape of the open source models ecosystem will evolve? Because as I sort of understand the history, Mark Zuckerberg made a big splash. He's going all in on open source with Llama. Some really solid progress there. Eventually, it stopped making sense to give everything away for free when a little more closed source. We'll see where that goes. But then China, as of last year, just DeepSeek moment, Alibaba, Quan, there's so many different Chinese developers. Is that a cultural decision? Are they just pro open source broadly? Is this geopolitical strategy? What is the motivation? And how

• 55:11John Coogan?

  long do you think that open source stance will last? Or will we see China go closed source at some point?

• 55:18Speaker 04

  You know, I would say that it's really a function of the structure of the market. In China, that market is structured around open models. All these companies are making revenue. They provide APIs, they provide applications, right? They are, they are businesses that are competing with each other and are generating revenues. And the structure of that market is models are released in the open. And the structure of the market in the US so far has been the models are closed. So I think there's a little bit of game theory to that, which is, you know, these markets are sort of set in this particular shape. But I think at this point, things are changing quite a bit. You have, you know,

• 56:01Speaker 04

  an extreme demand for tokens. Tokens are becoming like a fundamental resource, like energy or capital or bandwidth. And you have a more modular market that's forming, right? So you can, you have harnesses where you can take, you can point them to a closed model and an open model, and they continue to work. So you're starting to get this market formation, which allows a place for open models. And I think what that will turn into is you will see more open models in the United States. I, you know, we are talking to many companies who are working on very ambitious roadmaps for producing open models. So there's just going to be the existence of that market worldwide.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  When you talk to customers, are they almost always coming to you with a workflow that they prototyped with a closed model, prototyped with a frontier model, and they've got it working, and now they want to cost optimize? Or do you talk to customers who are just so all in on open source, they don't even care about the frontier? Because I've seen, you know, there's companies when, you know, GPT-4 came out, they were like, oh, this can process OCR documents and just organize text data very effectively. Now we're in a coding boom. But we get these spiky intelligence unlocks every once in a while, and then

• 57:24John Coogan?

  the cost ramps up because you're like, oh, I can use this everywhere. And then people want to cost optimize. But our companies typically coming to you with a workflow that they've already prototyped and they feel like is confident they want to match the performance but at a better price?

• 57:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say they're both use cases. There are companies that have prototyped something with closed models. Once they're deployed into production, they realize this is like, is absurdly expensive. They can't quite scale this and deploy it into the, you know, deploy it into their companies. And they start benchmarking open models. And I think they're increasingly finding that open models have become pretty strong on these benchmarks. And there's a sort of substitution happening. And there's really a stampede of this, that companies, starting from AI natives, now to digital natives, are deploying open models at, you know, really, really rapidly. You also have other use cases. I

• 58:24Speaker 04

  think, you know, companies that have sensitive data, this is really their strategic asset. In many ways, it's, it's what the, what the intellectual property of the company is. And there is increasing amount of discomfort, especially as the models are getting smarter, that by using closed models, they're sort of giving away their strategic advantage by teaching the model how to run their business. And I think that's becoming a bigger threat. And we're starting to see companies more sort of philosophically choosing open weights and AI that they control. And I expect we'll see more of this.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about regulation? It feels like GLM 5.2 sort of reignited this open source debate where you have Anthropic's Mythos and Fable sort of held up back and forth, banned, unbanned, released, released to just Americans, released to just a few companies. And OpenAI is going through some similar stuff with 5.6 Sol and some other models. And all of those debates, they make sense in isolation to me. I don't want a cyber weapon or a bioweapon, if it's capable of that. At the same time, if you could just go on Hugging Face and download the bioweapon creator, I probably don't care that there's

• 59:40John Coogan?

  a closed source version of that. It's a different discussion. How have you dealt with the regulatory questions that are increasingly popping up around AI safety and AI limitations?

• 59:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think these are important questions. And, you know, one of the things that we feel is, these models, especially open weights models, they're software, right? You can inspect them, you can benchmark them, you can study them in a way that you can't do with closed models. And that is going to become a much more important aspect of regulation, where we, you know, frankly, I think some of these risks are, could be real, they could be rhetoric, they could, you know, we just don't know, because there isn't good quantification of this, which I think is going to become more and more important for us to understand

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  how to, you know, think about a regulatory framework that is sensible and is, you know, if these models do become dual use, how do we sort of protect, you know, protect against bad effects of these models while leveraging the value that they create? I mean, they're immensely valuable. This is the most transformative technology we've had ever. And the, you know, we really want to make it abundant rather than limited to a few people.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Completely agree.

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Do American labs focus on open source? Are they fundamentally disadvantaged because they're going to have more scrutiny around distillation?

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's a that's a good question. And, you know, I would say

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  perhaps the role of distillation is overstated. These models, if you look at what's happening.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  You're saying it's code?

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it is a little bit because you, you know, the the technical details of it, you do need the probabilities of tokens and all the information that APIs don't provide to do effective, you know, on policy distillation. A lot of the recent improvements are because of reinforcement learning. And the fact that you AI has become an industrial platform, you have a transformer architecture that if you look at any of these models, they look very similar inside. So you have this common architecture, you have training tools, you have R L tools that have become standardized, which is why you're seeing this like rapid improvement. You can now start

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  with machinery that works instead of having to invent it. And I think you will see that American labs that are building models will have more success than the labs that tried to do this two years ago.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

• 1:02:26Jordi Hays?

  The whole team.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Congrats to the whole team. Yes. And have a great rest of your day. Have a great July 4th. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 1:02:34Speaker 04

  Thank you. Talk to you soon.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Isaiah Taylor. Third, fourth, fifth time on the show. We're very excited to have Isaiah back on the show. How are you doing, Isaiah? Good to see you.

• 1:02:53Isaiah Taylor?

  Doing great. How's it going, John and Jordy? It's been a little bit.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  It has been too long, but you have big news. You've been cooking. Break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest with Valar Atomics?

• 1:03:04Isaiah Taylor?

  I don't think you can be holding the gong right there, Jordy. There's no fundraising yet. We're just, we're turning reactors on.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Oh, well, hit the gong for that. That's a better milestone gong. Anybody will give you money. Come on, your charismatic founder. What happened? What's the latest?

• 1:03:21Isaiah Taylor?

  Oh, man. We had a really fun day yesterday here on this site right now. Now, screen. This is the Word 250 reactor, our first power reactor. And yesterday, we made electricity for the first time. We became the first nuclear startup to ever make electricity. And we did it with Nvidia. We powered an Nvidia Spark. It was a lot of fun.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Big milestone.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  So reset for us. I mean, you're not here announcing fundraising, but how big is the team? Have you outgrown El Segundo yet? Where are you going next? Are you expanding to Utah? Break it all down for us.

• 1:03:53Isaiah Taylor?

  We have outgrown, outgrown Little Gundo, unfortunately. But I mean, this is, this is the way of all great startups, right? SpaceX started in El Segundo, and then they moved out to Hawthorne. We did the same thing. Our current facility is a couple of miles south of the Hawthorne SpaceX facility there. We're also here in Utah. This site that I'm on right now is Valar Atomics at Santa Rafael, out in the Utah desert in beautiful Emerald County.

• 1:04:17John Coogan?

  Cool. And so what is the pitch to the AI industry? How big can you go? How fast? How parallelized do you want to be? What is the product that you're selling beyond just electricity?

• 1:04:32Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, I think speed, right? Speed and scale is really what we're selling. We believe that nuclear has some fundamental scaling advantages over something like gas. And the climate impact is a big part, right? Everyone wants to figure out how we can scale AI without a huge climate impact. But that's only one portion of it. The other problem with gas generation is it has really backed up turbines, and it also has nat gas infrastructure that has to scale along with it, right? And we're kind of running out of places where you could just pop down a turbine without having to go and lay pipeline. So what we're doing here is with uranium, you have one truckload that delivers an entire year's worth of fuel, right? And that gives you a lot more flexibility on where you build the reactors, on how big

• 1:05:13Isaiah Taylor?

  you can scale those sites. And so nuclear has this fundamental advantage, we believe, in scale. Now, there's a lot of technological maturity built up in natural gas. And so that's where we need to go and catch up. So I think right now where Valer is, we just turned on our first reactor. I would put this at like, you know, Falcon 1 days, right? We just launched a rocket, and now we go, go build a better one and start scaling that. So that's kind of where we are. But, you know, I think these things can happen faster than you might think.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the timeline that you guys were, were working around. It was pretty ambitious when it was set at some point last year, I believe.

• 1:05:50Isaiah Taylor?

  Yes, in May of last year. Yeah, May of last year, the executive orders were signed. I came on the day that the executive orders were signed, and we said, we're gonna, we're gonna build a nuclear reactor and turn it on by July 4th, right here on this site. At the time, the site was a patch of grass.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Isaiah Taylor?

  And July 4th was the deadline. Look, Valer hit it out of the park. There's a lot of awesome companies in the pilot program. But if you actually look at the EO, Valer just absolutely smashed it. I mean, we didn't just go critical. We went critical twice, and we went to thermal power operations, and we went to electricity production, and we did it outside of the national labs. So we really just hit it out of the park in every, every dimension. And I'm incredibly excited and proud of the Valer team.

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  So you're moving very quickly. You're outside of the national labs. What does integration with the national labs, with regulators, with approvals for designs? What is the state of that? Obviously, the government's moving faster here, but are there still approvals that you're looking forward to hitting in terms of milestones?

• 1:06:55Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah. And look, you know, we love the national labs. We actually did go critical inside the national labs back in November, the Novo Core. But you have to graduate from that, right? You have to learn how to take a bare patch of dirt that's not, you know, licensed for nuclear and get it ready to go nuclear. So that's kind of step two, right? Step three would be the NRC, a commercial regulator. But these things are really driven by team experience, right? They're driven by experience, by good engineering, by test data. And that's really what we focus on, and it's why we've gone to power in this plan. When we go to the NRC, we're going to go to the NRC with a lot of data behind us, empirical test data that we've gathered right here on this unit.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Talk to us about, whoa, what's that?

• 1:07:38Isaiah Taylor?

  We've played with these microphones to figure out how we can not get the background noise. But yeah, that's.

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  Talk about community engagement when you're proposing building a nuclear reactor. I recently saw a crazy stat that, that the average American, when polled, there was some, you know, Pew Research study that said, I'd rather have a nuclear reactor in my backyard than a data center. You're going to be doing both.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Isaiah says, how about both?

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  How about both? But, but I imagine that you have more reps in, in terms of community engagement, in terms of messaging and communication, than some of the data center builders that were like, look, we've been building, you know, the, the, the building that holds your Netflix catalog for decades with zero pushback. Now, all of a sudden, we're getting an immense amount of pushback. You had pushback on day one. You were born in it. You, you know, people have been pushing back against nuclear for decades, molded by it. So what, what are you saying if you go, if you wind up in a random town about why it's, it's good to have Valar in town?

• 1:08:45Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah. I mean, it's such an interesting inversion, right? Suddenly, people are looking at us as the nuclear industry, trying to figure out, how do we do community engagement? Well, that's really not what you would expect a couple of years ago. And I would say that Valer has really taken community engagement, just in order of magnitude, more seriously than any other nuclear company so far. And it's because, again, we care about scale. We're not going to be able to do, you know, what we want to do at the scale we want to do it, if we don't start right with the community. So one of the big things that we do is when we come into a community, we don't come in after the project and say, oh, here's how you get to know us because we're in your backyard now. We actually go to the, the community first, community leader, city council, county commissioners. And we say, here are the cost benefits, right? Here's what we think is awesome about it. Here are the potential

• 1:09:29Isaiah Taylor?

  trade offs. What do you think? And we try to get people to engage with it a lot before we go and actually do something. That's what we did here. And it's paid off really well. We talk to members of the community all the time. We host events, we host barbecues. And, you know, people are really excited to have us here. What's really interesting about this is, exactly like you said, if you look at the surveys on nuclear versus data centers, interestingly, people are cool with a data center, as long as you build a nuclear power plant first, right? But they want to make sure that there's power there, which honestly makes sense. I don't think people are wrong about that. So we're really excited to engage.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  It's very noisy. People are worried about data center noise. What are you doing to go down the list? Because I'm sure on day one, it was like, just make sure it doesn't explode. But now, communities have a number of requests. They want it to not be an eyesore. They don't want it to be noisy. They don't want it to shake the ground. They don't want the data center to emit EMF or anything else. How many different checkboxes are you trying to check with your development plans?

• 1:10:32Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, look, I think one of the big things that people miss about where data centers are placed is that they are being placed where there is gas, right? They have to burn gas, and so they have to spin turbines. And so you have these weird placements of data centers where, look, we could put a data center anywhere you have fiber, but they don't want to have to go build new gas infrastructure. So we see a huge opportunity here to scale gas, sorry, to scale data centers out, where, look, we're 100, 250 feet from, you know, another industrial plant that's down the road, but we're a mile from people who are trying to sit in their backyard and don't want to hear a noisy cooling fan. And nuclear allows you to do that, right? Because we're a little bit agnostic about where we put the reactor. We can ship uranium anywhere. So we think that's a big advantage for us.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  I love it. Congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Incredible progress.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Incredible progress. And can't wait to talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:11:22Isaiah Taylor?

  Have a great one.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 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 let me also tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Our next guest is Dean Ball. You know him. You love him. He's been on the show many times. Now he's part of OpenAI. We're very excited to have Dean Ball joining us. How are you doing? How are you settling in? How are you introducing yourself these days?

• 1:11:55Dean Ball?

  Well, doing great. Thanks for having me on. So I started OpenAI on Monday. So technically speaking, I'm still, you know, Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. But yeah, no, it's, it's very exciting.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's, what, what are you, Monday, what, what are you hitting the ground running on? What is top of mind? Is it entirely?

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, before that, I want to, I want to, I want to just jump in and ask, has this year been crazier or less crazy than you expected when it comes to the interaction between West Coast Labs and DC?

• 1:12:38Dean Ball?

  That's a good question. Um, it has been about as crazy as I would have predicted.

• 1:12:46Dean Ball?

  But I didn't expect, I, I would say like, it's like, I would have intellectually predicted it, but actually seeing it happen in the real world is crazier than I could have imagined. And in some ways, it is all falling together in ways that I could have never predicted. I'd say like, the general intensity of it all is about what I would have guessed. But, um, a lot of the specifics are, are both surprising and funny in ways I would have never guessed.

• 1:13:12John Coogan?

  What's the funniest?

• 1:13:15Dean Ball?

  Um, well, I mean, there's just a certain comedic aspect, like the fact that so much of it is so personal, right? Um, the fact that there's like, you know, not to say it's all personal, but the fact that some big chunk of what's going on here is that individual actors in this, you know, between the government and the industry, like Dario, you know, they don't like each other, right? There's that element of it. I think, um, uh, you know, one thing I wouldn't have expected is for so many people, for an industry, for a government, for an administration that positioned itself as being so friendly to AI. The fact that the people who actually are, are like closest to advising on the tech policy, at least some of them,

• 1:13:57Dean Ball?

  are actually quite hostile to the frontier AI industry. That's another thing that would have surprised me. You had David Sacks today tweeting basically about how the frontier AI industry in the United States is not a legitimate business, you know? It should just all be open source models and you can't trust, you know, like these kinds of things. That surprises me. That surprises me. Uh, and I, I find that to be an interesting dynamic that I wouldn't have guessed.

• 1:14:19John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. I, I, I've, I've been tracking it where, uh, we've noticed that, uh, AI stories have jumped from the business section of the Wall Street Journal to the front page, to the world news section. And that's a very like visceral, I, I don't know if it's quantitative or qualitative, but yes, uh, when you intellectually, uh, think about the, the various showdowns and negotiations, uh, you imagine them as way more quantitative and more just like, of course, if it hits this threshold of capability, then the reaction will be this and that will trigger this. And, uh, you can step through all those, but you forget that every single one of those decisions is going to be a personal interaction between several people. So it has been an odd time. Jordy?

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And then dynamic of doesn't matter how fast technology changes, like people stay the same, right? They take things, they take things personally and, and, you know, interpersonal dynamics end up driving a lot of behavior.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  How have you been processing the, the, sorry, please, go.

• 1:15:18Dean Ball?

  Oh no, I was just going to say, the funny thing though, about the last month or so is that, you know, the, the truism in AI policy is that the technology moves so much faster than the policy. And I think we might actually be going through the, maybe the one period where the policy is actually moving faster than the technology. Uh, like, you know, uh, my friend, my friend, Tim Huang from, from FAI, um, and great Twitter account to follow, said he took Dario's essay, which was, uh, you know, policy on the AI exponential and changed it to AI on the policy exponential.

• 1:15:52Dean Ball?

  Kind of feels that way.

• 1:15:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting because, you know, we've, we've gone over at different points on the show, uh, what the fears around the internet, uh, were around the year 2000, right? It was a lot of, a lot of the same types of fear. All information would be completely available to anyone, even bad actors. It was a huge fear around job loss, you know, uh, retail apocalypse instead of the SaaS apocalypse, right? Why would anyone go to, why would anyone go to a store when you could just get a product delivered, you know, straight to your home? Uh, and yet with that cycle, it wasn't like in 2000,

• 1:16:35Jordi Hays?

  in January, you know, DC was like, hey, like you can't, you turn off your website, uh, for like a few weeks while we figure out whether or not this is gonna, you know, uh, do, do something. And so same thing with social media, like you look at the reaction to social media now where people are like, you know, how many years in being like, whoa, this stuff seems like it could be like destroying the human race, you know, like causing birth rates to collapse. And it's like, okay, it took us 20 and, and we're not even really, no one's really suggesting anything on a policy side with social media, right? It's like, hey, here's this thing that could be a meaningful part of birth rate collapse.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  And yet we're still like just fighting it out in local courts. Like, is it addictive or not? You know, it's like, no, there's no focus on it. And so policy being, being ahead of the technology for the first time, at least in my lifetime is, is meaningful.

• 1:17:33Dean Ball?

  At least moving fast. Yeah. At least moving very fast right now.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  How, how are you processing the various levels of like AGI pilliness for, from the different parties? Because I, I noticed that, uh, you know, you see the frontier capabilities, like incredible, uh, just capabilities and it feels like qualitatively new steps in terms of, uh, their capabilities in cyber, bio, and also just, uh, software development. And then you go on like Instagram and you see someone doing like the chat GPT four O voice and it's not this, it's that, talking about stochastic parrots and hallucination and drinking a jug of water.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  And it's all very funny, but it feels wildly disconnected. But then DC seems to be more in the middle. But where is DC in terms of like their general, uh, level of like understanding the technology, fear of the technology?

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or, or an example that I think is funny, there'll be like, you know, somebody outside of tech doing a podcast and like a, a businessman that's not in tech at all, that I won't name, but is sort of somebody that people would maybe get a take from is like, 90% of all jobs will be gone by 2029, like a way, way, way, way, way more aggressive stance than even anybody that's like actually AGI pilled on in San Francisco, right? So it's like, it transfers so far that you have, you have these people that don't even know, they, they don't know a single person at the labs. They've not invested in a single AI,

• 1:19:15Jordi Hays?

  you know, any, any of these companies that are actually at the frontier. And yet they have this point of view that they're sharing really broadly. That's just like so over the top and, and, uh, unrealistic that, uh, it's, it's honestly kind of funny.

• 1:19:30Dean Ball?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I, I think, um, I think DC is actually somewhat underrated in terms of how AGI pilled it is. Definitely it's, you know, there are, there are some people, um,

• 1:19:45Dean Ball?

  there, there's all sorts of people in all sorts of government. It's not AGI pilled enough to be sure. But it's underrated, like how out of touch people are because really like, you know, Capitol Hill is dominated by a bunch of, and the White House too, for that matter. It's dominated by a bunch of highly online staffers in their twenties and early thirties, you know? It's kind of the, the people that run the show in, in a lot of ways in DC. Um, and so they, they are exposed to, um, like the online discourse about AGI. And they see all that. And so there's, there's some just like natural exposure to the ideas there, uh, that you, you might not. I, I would say, for example, I find DC to be a considerably more AGI pilled place than, uh, New York.

• 1:20:30Dean Ball?

  For instance, I find New York to be, you know, New York is very fixated on a bunch of, I, I find that Wall Street is like persistently like six months behind, um, the conversation that's happening.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  They're more focused on like yogurt line timelines, you know? Is it going to take, you know, 30 minutes or two hours to get?

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Yogurt thing? I've never heard of this.

• 1:20:50Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, I, I, people are always waiting in lines in New York.

• 1:20:56Jordi Hays?

  They're focused on a different, you're focused on the wrong timeline, maybe, but it's, it's working for them.

• 1:21:03Dean Ball?

  Yeah. And, and like, you know, so I think, I think DC and SF are like very, uh, are, are both, are both compared to almost everywhere else in the country, quite AGI pilled, SF obviously more so. But look, governments all over the world are waking up now because I think both, um, so, so, you know, the mythos fable thing in and of itself did probably quite a bit to accelerate that. But then the other important thing that happened that you have to keep in mind is there's a lot of people, there's a lot of governments, um, across the world that fundamentally, even though they might not admit it, they do fundamentally look to, to, to America for sort of intellectual leadership.

• 1:21:46Dean Ball?

  And it's like, there's been an argument of like, well, look, this whole AI catastrophic risk thing, like, do we really need to take it seriously? Well, it doesn't seem like the Americans actually take it seriously, right? And that was a colorable argument until about two weeks ago. And, um, the US government placing export controls on a frontier model, was such a costly move and such a crazy and radical move to make. It was clearly made out of a position of fear. Um, and everyone in the world saw that. And like people wake up when they realize that the US government is genuinely scared about something,

• 1:22:29Dean Ball?

  that they wasn't previously on their radar. People do wake up to that. Um, and so I think that both throughout, you know, our country and then also, um, throughout the world, you will see more people kind of taking the AGI pill. Now, of course, the other thing about the AGI pill is that like a lot of, um, like a lot of psychoactive substances, it comes in waves, uh, you know, it hits you in, in various waves. And it's like, whoa, I'm really AGI filled now, but you don't even know how AGI filled you're going to be in a year, you know? It's like that. Yeah.

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  But there's also, there's also the export control cope, and I would love to know where you stand on that, which is that, uh, it's not fear based, it's economic and it's, it's akin to, well, we don't want to, we, we also don't want to export Coca-Cola because you might figure out the secret recipe and it's just a good business. And it might be purely about distillation and not necessarily that a foreign government would use this powerful model against you or for nefarious purposes, but instead they might just steal the golden goose that you have cooking.

• 1:23:32Dean Ball?

  I mean, yeah, look, and, and actually I'm kind of curious to see how it, how it resolves, um.

• 1:23:40Dean Ball?

  There is some future world where like for some combination of regulatory risks and safety concerns, but also competitive concerns like distillation, the frontier models are just like kind of like less visible to the public, you know, or it's like there's somewhat more friction involved in getting to the true frontier, friction and cost. And that might happen downstream with market incentives, just as much as it is of economic incentives. But no, I don't think the government is playing any kind of five dimensional chess here. I really think this was about like

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  Six D?

• 1:24:15Dean Ball?

  All the way up to the sixth dimension, string theory stuff. No, I don't think so. I really do think that they, that what it, what it looks like on the tin is in fact what happened, that they got, you know, there was legitimate fear, maybe that fear is to some extent, it might have been fear that was grounded in some degree of ignorance about the actual technical risks of AI and like what is a severe vulnerability versus what is not, that seems quite likely to me. And it also might have been a fear that was maybe agitated somewhat by the political valence through which Anthropic is viewed. I myself

• 1:24:57Dean Ball?

  have argued this, that like what Anthropic does will inherently be seen as riskier and more dangerous and bad. And what other, their competitors do will be seen as like good and innovative because the government has a particular posture toward Anthropic.

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the, the other side of that is like they have been the most vocal about the risks.

• 1:25:19Dean Ball?

  Yes.

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  Well, of the labs, outside of like the LEAs or Yudkowskis of the world, but yes.

• 1:25:24Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I would say of, of the labs they have been. And like, that's part of what started this whole animosity. But now it's, it's like this weird thing where I think political, political differences of opinion and political animosity, personal animosity, color the fear as much as some degree of ignorance, as much as the fear is also legitimate, right? So fear is coming from like a bunch of different places. And fundamentally, the government's not wrong to be concerned. But, but yeah, I think that's where the export controls basically came from.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  What is your current view on nationalization? There's, there's, there's rumors and news, but like, is there some sort of

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  You had a very colorful example about letting rats live in your, in your home.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  In your walls. Yeah. What do you have against rats? You know, some people are dog people, some people are cat people, some people like rats infesting their walls, I guess.

• 1:26:21Dean Ball?

  Well, look, I've, I've lived in a DC row house with a basement, so I know all about rats.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  So thumbs down on the rats, but

• 1:26:29Dean Ball?

  Yeah, thumbs down on rats in their walls.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  But is, is, is the, is the base, is the base reason that nationalization gets talked about is sharing in the economic upside? Is it about, you know, popularity and like rankings and polling? Is it about control and having like a board seat almost? Like, what, what are the problems that are solved when people even talk about nationalization as an option to any degree?

• 1:26:59Dean Ball?

  I think it depends. I, I think, I think different forms of, of public equity solve different problems. The problem that I think is most interesting to think about is this sort of reality of our world today where it's, people don't feel a lot of agency and a lot of participation in the upside of technology. So, so like, you know, sometimes it is said that there's a lack of positive vision for the future, technological vision. I don't think that's quite true. I think there's a lot of, I mean, I go on my Twitter feed and I see all kinds of crazy people building all kinds of amazing stuff and I love it. That's the whole point of Silicon Valley. You know, there's a lot of great visions

• 1:27:44Dean Ball?

  for the future. What we lack though, is institutional infrastructure that gives people, average people, a sense that they're going to play a role in it, right? So it's like, well, yeah, Elon Musk and Sam Altman and Dario Amede are going to cure a bunch of diseases and they'll be injecting exotic peptides into themselves on their Martian mansions while I'm stuck here, you know, with the, the, the bottom dwelling class. That's how a lot of people feel. There's an inherent mistrust. And so I think that a public equity stake where we take all these large firms and we take us, you know, some chunk of their equity and we broadly distribute them, you know, for free, right? We give people the equity

• 1:28:29Dean Ball?

  as a donation essentially, or a gift. I think that is a token, that it's, it's a symbol that the, the technology industry wants to build a future in which Americans have broad participation. And I think that, I have problems with that. You know, there are concerns I have with that. There are concerns about the precedent that sets in particular. Like if you're a successful company, do you suddenly just like have to give the American people your stuff? Like, that seems weird. But nonetheless, AI is a special industry. We're living through a special time and there are versions of that arrangement that I can sort of get on board with. Where I get much more worried is when the government is taking an equity

• 1:29:12Dean Ball?

  stake and putting that stake on its balance sheet. There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is just like the sort of picking winners effect of, okay, well now all of a sudden the government, which sets policy, has a direct financial interest in making sure that these particular companies win. And I, I think that's bad. I think there should be an opport, you know, I think there should be an opportunity for some NeoLab or some other type of startup to come in and compete, you know? I think that's great. Competition to the frontier AI industry suddenly becomes like a threat to the government's balance sheet. If, you know, in, in, in a world where the government has a big equity stake. There's also corporate governance issues that I think are, are pretty complicated. And one

• 1:29:55Dean Ball?

  other thing that like no one has explored at all, but, oh, go ahead.

• 1:30:00Jordi Hays?

  The one, one thing that stands out to me the most is like, I don't think some American is going to feel like, oh, great, I'm, I really feel a part of this AI boom now that the government

• 1:30:13Dean Ball?

  No.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  has like a, you know, effectively an account with like Morgan Stanley with a bunch of equity in it. And even if you ran the numbers to divide it all up into for every household or citizen, it's not, it's an, it's an amount that would effectively be equivalent to less than a stimulus check. And we've sort of like run that, we've run the experiment of, we've run the sort of like stimulus check experiment. I think it did help a lot of people at the time, but it didn't, it certainly didn't like fix anyone's life. It wasn't like, okay, now I don't have to worry about rent next month, or now I can buy a home, right? It just didn't solve any of people's like fundamental problems. And so I think

• 1:30:56Dean Ball?

  And neither would this.

• 1:30:58Jordi Hays?

  And, and so the, the direct, like distribute the shares directly, doesn't solve it, holding it on, you know, the, the, you know, country's balance sheet doesn't solve it. And so anyways, I'm, I'm with you.

• 1:31:13Dean Ball?

  No, I mean, I think it's like, it's like what the, what the stake gives people that if it's directly going on to the, the household's balance sheet is again, it's like a symbolic thing. And look, it's also not like no money, right? Like I think 5% in Meta, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Google, maybe Nvidia too, you throw in. You know, I think that divided by the number of American households, if the AI industry also does well, if you sort of model out growth over the next five, 10 years, like, I think that's like, I think that's five figures, you know? All right. Like, I think it's like, you know, it's, again, it's not life-changing sums of money for anyone, I don't think, but I think it's, it's real money.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I think it's worth comparing to some of the ideas that people have around if somebody's trying to put a data center in your backyard and you go, well, I don't really want a data center in my backyard. And then they say, well, what if you were going to get $800 a month for the next 10 years? And they're like, oh, okay, that starts to be material because that is

• 1:32:15Dean Ball?

  Yes.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  an amount that is, you know, more significant, consistent. There's like some element of like effectively cash flow, which is what allows a household to thrive, right? And so I've just consistently been a lot more excited about these more targeted proposals because I think every person in America has every right to ask, well, why would I want this data center in my backyard if I can still use ChatGPT or whatever AI tools I want if it's somewhere, you know, hundreds of miles from me?

• 1:32:47Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm kind of with you about like, that it's better to pay the directly affected, like the data center community and stuff like that. It's better to structure these kinds of things that way. But if you wanted to do a nationwide equity thing, I think it's not the craziest thing. The one other thing about the government directly having a stake, in addition to like, I don't think it ends there. I think the government will use that stake to control the companies in all sorts of ways. And where that gets interesting is if you combine an equity stake with effective government control over all sorts of aspects of a frontier lab, you know, content moderation, policy and various things like this, right? Usage monitoring and stuff. Suddenly,

• 1:33:31Dean Ball?

  The frontier labs could begin to appear to be an instrumentality of the government. And that is bad from a public perception perspective. It's bad from a foreign, you know, sort of dealing with foreign governments, right? Because people won't trust American AI as much. But the other thing that like, I guarantee you, no one has thought about, is there's case law in America about like, if a private corporation is doing something at like, strong government compulsion,

• 1:34:03Dean Ball?

  there are times when that can

• 1:34:08Dean Ball?

  intersect with like, like, basically, the law will consider the company to be an instrumentality of the government, and the kinds of laws that apply to government agencies suddenly apply to that private firm. So for example, like due process, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, the First Amendment, like, these kinds of things where like, you don't have due process rights. If you're like, if you're mad that United Airlines canceled your flight, you don't have due process rights with respect to that. But like, you do have due process rights when you complain to the government about things, right? And like, those things are really, really valuable. They're also not the kind of things that we associate with like, fast-moving firms. And so, you're inviting like, a whole host

• 1:34:49John Coogan?

  It's hilarious that like, United Airlines is the fast-moving firm relative to like, the DMV, and AI labs are like, a thousand times faster than the airline companies. So we're gonna leapfrog to DMV's speed, which is crazy to think about.

• 1:35:02Dean Ball?

  It could be like, public utility, is what I would say. Like, and you would be, I think, people would be surprised how quickly the government continuing on the current policy trajectory, but with a equity stake, how quickly you have a colorable argument that the labs have essentially been turned into public utilities, and that they are basically government agencies, and therefore, they should be regulated. You know, government agencies are highly regulated entities in America, right? And yeah, I think that's plausible, and not something a lot of people are thinking about.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Walk me through the, how you process the somewhat jokey Joe Weisenthal take of, okay, well, we've been through booms before, comp it to the railroad industry. The railroad industry created a lot of value. There's a consumer surplus. You can buy a train ticket. You can get something delivered. And then, yeah, if they make profit, that goes into the government's balance sheet via taxes, and then that can be redistributed in a stimulus check, but it can also just be used for other things that the government does, that hopefully the voters approve of. And so, the question of like, why is this time different? Why does

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  the normal mechanism of consumer surplus plus tax revenue not externalize all of the internal value that's created at the labs?

• 1:36:31Dean Ball?

  Oh, I think, I think the normal process basically does create like, an enormous amount of value. Like, I don't really think this, any of this is like, necessary in some sort of like, like economically optimal sense at all. Like, no, I think the labs will create far more value than they capture.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:49Dean Ball?

  Vastly more, orders of magnitude more, trillions of dollars, right? Tens of trillions.

• 1:36:55Dean Ball?

  Probably already have.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  I guess just to steel man it, I might say that there is a world where the economic flywheel of reinvesting profits effectively never ends. And so, you never see profits, you never see tax revenues or something. This is a very bizarre scenario to play out, but, you know, Amazon didn't pay taxes for a very long time, not because it was tax abating, just because it was reinvesting in things for a really long time. And so, you could say, well, in a scenario where you're in some crazy exponential takeoff, and you're seeing trillions and trillions of dollars be recycled into these firms that are able to spend the capital immediately, then maybe the tax revenue falls off. I don't

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  know. We're now in sort of like

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then you're, but then you're hiring thousands of employees. You have investors that are selling along the way. You have people

• 1:37:49Dean Ball?

  Yeah, and, and the equity, right? There's capital gains, right? We have capital gains taxation. You know, so all the individual employees who are making all this money, if things go well, they'll be paying lots of capital gains tax and ordinary income too, when their shares get delivered to them. So like, there's a lot of tax piece for the government here. I think the real reason to do it, and this is again, like, giving the equity to the government does nothing. It does nothing. It doesn't even solve a political problem for you. The problem that we have is not so much that like, the normal rules of economics aren't working. I think that's very overrated. But it is true that the,

• 1:38:29Dean Ball?

  the institutional legitimacy is really fading. And for a lot of people, the like, institutional architecture of America is not legitimate anymore, and they're perfectly comfortable discarding it. And I think that the way I would approach an equity stake is a way of communicating kind of directly with the American people, and saying, you know, we want you to feel a direct upside in what we're building here. And that we also want you to understand that we're building it together. And you have a direct ownership stake in that.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  It's funny you say that.

• 1:39:04Dean Ball?

  That's how I would view it.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  It's funny you say that, because I can't for the life of me identify who you're talking about, when they say they don't, they don't see legitimacy in the United States government. Because I see like, the tear-it-all-down, opposed to the Trump administration, left-wing, say, this is not, this is not a government that I want to participate in. But then I also see a lot of the AI, the AGI-pilled folks say like, no, like, this is going to be way more powerful than any government. This is not a legitimate institution in the face of the God in a box that we're creating. And so, there's like, oddly, multiple categories of people that sort of fit in that bucket. But I don't know if you have more thoughts on like, where that pressure's coming from?

• 1:39:50Dean Ball?

  Well, what I think it is, is like, the idea, it's really more, like, even stepping back, just like, the idea of the whole American economic order of, you know, we have private enterprise, and the people who do well, pay taxes, and then we use that to redistribute, and it's good that some people do really well, and that whole thing. Like, that's really gone, you know?

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wild, wild times. What else, Jordi? Do you have, do you have something else to run through?

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious your, like, July 2, 2026, take on the state of open source. I think that

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  The, my read is, I think, open weights, open source is great, closed models are great. We should have a lot of them. I think all smart companies of the future will use both in massive amounts. But there's like, you know, this interesting, depending on,

• 1:40:52Jordi Hays?

  depending on people's bags, they have very different sort of like, stances on, on the issue, even though I think that in general, it's much more like, use, use a lot of both. But I think there's some debate around an open source, an open source ban that is interesting. It doesn't really, it's hard to see how that would actually be possible. But I'm curious your views.

• 1:41:21Dean Ball?

  I don't think the US is gonna do an open source ban. I would be surprised by that. Now, they will, I would suspect that, once an American open source model gets to the point that it poses, you know, mythos-level capabilities, however that ends up being defined, the government will review that model. And when they review that model, you know, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see what happens, right? Like, are they, do they just?

• 1:41:52Jordi Hays?

  Log on to a hugging face.

• 1:41:55Dean Ball?

  Yeah, well, when it goes through, there's gonna be a de facto licensing regime. They're not gonna care about whether it's closed or open source. Open source, to be very clear, like, an open source model that hits the mythos-level capability is subject to a licensing regime, like, the government's licensing regime, unless the government like, explicitly says otherwise. That is what I would assume if I were developing models. Obviously, not the Chinese models.

• 1:42:20Dean Ball?

  I think it's possible that the Chinese government gets freaked out at some point, and, and decides to sort of, you know, restrict open source. They probably won't get rid of it. They probably won't ditch the strategy altogether. But I could see them, you know, downplaying it at the frontier. And I guess, if I were, like,

• 1:42:44Dean Ball?

  If I were an organization planning things, I would want to use both, right? If I would want to use both closed and open source, right? If I were some enterprise, I would probably not base my strategy on there being continued open source that is like particularly close to the American frontier. I really wouldn't base my strategy on that because I just see a lot of headwinds. I see economic headwinds. I see, and I see these sort of safety issues. There are strategic issues. There's all sorts of things that I would just like, I'm not saying it will not like open source will go away. I don't think it will. I think there are going to be some, there are some ways in which open source is going to be very important as a kind of institutional technology.

• 1:43:27Dean Ball?

  Like if we need to have a common adjudication system, for example, like a judge that sits in the middle of like court cases or like civil disputes or something like that. You can imagine how, if you wanted that to be like an AI system, you can imagine how it would be really good if it were open weight. So that like everyone can audit the weights and we can all know that we're dealing with the same thing and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That, that's like really valuable. But I would not necessarily bet on open source keeping pace. Uh, you know, I don't think it actually has kept pace as many, as closely as a lot of people seem to think. I think it's about a year behind. Um, and I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to see that gap widen over the next year.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. The other interesting wrinkle is that there's, uh, there's a certain scale of, of model size and intensity where, uh, you could effectively do arms control even on an open source, uh, you know, AI system because you could just detect like, okay, like yes, it's open source. You can download it and hugging face, but you need an entire data center to inference it meaningfully. And so we control it at the rack level as opposed to at the weights level, uh, which is a whole different set of worms will get there somewhere. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Always great catching up and excited to be working with you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:44:50Dean Ball?

  Yeah, guys. Glad to be joining the team.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53Rob Toews?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Rob Taves from Radical Ventures has been on the show once, twice. I think this is his third time. We'll bring him in. How are you doing, Rob? Good to see you.

• 1:45:20Rob Toews?

  Thanks for having me. Great to be here. Excited for appearance number three.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yes, the three Pete. First, congratulations. You just announced a deal, right? You invested in a video company, is this correct?

• 1:45:30Rob Toews?

  That's right. Yeah. Yesterday we announced 12 Labs is $100 million Series B.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Hit the gong for.

• 1:45:37Rob Toews?

  Yeah, we gotta get the 12 Lab CEO on here soon.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, we really should, but I do want to ask you about that. Hit that gong, 100 million. This is a big round, Series B, video super intelligence.

• 1:45:46Rob Toews?

  Nice, nice gong, kid.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic. But like, what is the, what is the basic thesis for that investment? Because, uh, you know, Google has YouTube, they have TPUs, they have DeepMind, Damos, they got everything. It feels like a crazy from a basic perspective that you would want to invest in, uh, in a video model. At the same time, like I wanted to generate a video, I go into, I go into VO3, VO4, I'm on the pro plan, I generated like, it was not a hundred percent there. There was still a lot of work to be done to get the video that I really wanted out of it. And so like, what is the opportunity? What's the broad thesis?

• 1:46:30Rob Toews?

  Incredible composure. That was a distracting performance. Yeah. So 12 Labs, yeah. So, so we at Radical first invested in 12 Labs back in their seed round in 2021.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:46:43Rob Toews?

  So we've been working closely with them for a while. And, um, and I think one important, one important thing that's, uh, good to know about 12 Labs is they're, they're not focused on video generation, the way like Sora or VO or, you know, any of these startups are. They're focused on video intelligence and video understanding.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:03Rob Toews?

  So kind of like a simplification you can think of as like Ctrl F for video, being able to understand like exactly what's happening in your video.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:12Rob Toews?

  Uh, understanding the concepts and the people and the dialogue and so forth. And it's a very. So if someone made like a three hour live stream every.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  And then randomly, there's a guy waving two mallets around. It could understand the context around that humor that I, that I exhibited composure.

• 1:47:29Rob Toews?

  Honestly, I had never thought about this before. And now that you mentioned it, TVPAN would be like the ideal customer for 12 Labs. We gotta, we gotta get a media conversation going.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  I can't wait. I can't wait. It'd be awesome. Um, but, uh, you more recently, or I guess less recently, but, but more relevantly produced five more AI predictions for the year 2030. What's your process for putting these together? Uh, we were having a lot of fun with this. We were reading it because one prediction stands out as like way crazier than the rest. Uh, and I'm interested to know if you know which one I'm thinking of. Yeah. Number three shocked me. I think it's number three. Uh, but, but what's the overall process thesis? Is 2030 too far out? Like I like how, I like when you grade yourself after the year ends, but, uh, what's the overall process for working with Forbes?

• 1:48:17Rob Toews?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I have a lot of fun putting these prediction articles together and they always generate a lot of interesting discussion and, and often heated, heated feedback from people that disagree. But at big picture, I, I write a column in Forbes about AI. I've been writing it since 2019. Every year since 2020, at the end of the year, I write an article with 10 predictions for the coming year in AI. Um, and then the following December, at the end of every year, I go back and grade all 10 of the predictions and say like, which ones did I get right? Which ones did I get wrong? I try to be a pretty like conservative grader. So if things are like on the border, I'll, I'll, uh, you know, I won't give myself credit for them, but honestly, in a lot of ways.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Wow, terrible venture capitalist. You gotta go back and in the CMS, edit the ones that didn't come through, delete them, and then take an endless victory lap around the ones that you got right. That's the way to do it.

• 1:49:12Rob Toews?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Oh, rookie, VC rookie here.

• 1:49:15Rob Toews?

  Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, though, I do, it is, in some ways it's more enjoyable. I find the process of grading them more interesting because you see, like you see how the world unfolded in ways that you didn't expect. I think the reality is that like, no one can predict the future to say the obvious. And so I know a lot of these are going to be wrong. It's just a very interesting thought exercise. Um, and I, a couple of things that I really strive for is one, to make them really like verifiable or falsifiable, it's very concrete as opposed to just saying like agents will become more of a thing in the future, like something that's like really like this company will acquire this company or like this, you know, this, this CEO will be fired or something like that. Um, and then I, I also try to make them non-obvious and provocative, like things that people wouldn't

• 1:50:00Rob Toews?

  originally think of. So anyway, to your point, I usually do them every year. I just published one that was five predictions for 2030.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:08Rob Toews?

  Which is obviously even more speculative, thinking five years into the future, but it was fun.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Okay, let's rip through them. First one is Anthropic will be one of the largest and most important life sciences companies in the world. We've obviously seen acquisitions, the models are just getting naturally better at bio, drug development. At the same time, the big drug companies, they're not asleep at the wheel. They're spinning up their own labs, their own partnerships. Eli Lilly has this Nvidia thing. And I'm interested in what, how, how does that look? Because you could, you could in one way say, uh, Microsoft is one of the most important biotechnology companies in the world because a lot of tabular data stored in Excel. Um, we saw with Mythos that there were incredible cybersecurity capabilities.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  They ultimately rolled out Project Glasswing, Palo Alto Networks, Nakesh Aurora, you got CrowdStrike. Like they're still a cybersecurity company and then there's a very powerful model and there's a great partnership there. I would call Anthropic an incredibly important piece of the cybersecurity supply chain. How does this, what will this look like in 2030 for bio?

• 1:51:17Rob Toews?

  Yeah, yeah. So you're right that horizontal technology providers like Anthropic or like Microsofts touch a bunch of industries and are important to a bunch of industries. I think in the life sciences specifically, Anthropic will go way beyond that. I think that, as I write in the article, you know, one of their incredible advantages is how super focused they are on particular areas and they, the past few years, they've been very focused on coding.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:41Rob Toews?

  They've excelled at coding, they built the best coding models, and that's let them grow so quickly in the coding arena with Claude Code and so forth. And the big question is like, what's their next big focus area? And it's becoming increasingly clear that next big focus area will be biology and the life sciences. It's something that Dario, the CEO, is personally very passionate about. He's written about it a lot. He's trained as a neuroscientist. So I think they're going, I think they're gonna go all in on life sciences. I don't think it's gonna be like, you know, they're serving, they're just serving the life sciences industry as one industry.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:13Rob Toews?

  And honestly, even in the past, like, week or two since I wrote that article, I feel like it's, it's started to snowball more. Like, one big data point, one interesting data point was John Jumper, who led the AlphaFold work at DeepMind and won the Nobel Prize alongside Demis. Asavas just left DeepMind to join Anthropic, which was an incredible get for them.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Rob Toews?

  And really brutal loss for Google, but I think that that's telling. And then just this, literally two days ago or three days ago, Anthropic announced this new product that's like Claude for life sciences. And they also announced they're actually gonna start their own drug discovery program.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:51Rob Toews?

  And the way they, the way they phrased it, because to your point, like, all the big pharma companies are their customers today. The way they phrase it is like, we're just gonna focus on these like small orphan neglected drugs. Like, they're not interesting to pharma companies anyway. We just wanna do it so that we can learn firsthand about the drug discovery process. But I, I think this is the first step, and I, I do think that over time Anthropic's ambitions are to, to develop their own drugs, like essentially to eventually become a pharma company themselves, as crazy as that sounds today.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  That is crazy. Talk about TSMC and ASML.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's not impossible to imagine a scenario where they discover a novel virus and then offer the, you know, and then also make the vaccine and say, this is the most dangerous virus of all time, but don't worry, just buy this.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Antivirus, basically. Yeah.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Which, which I'm sure no one would have any.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Or maybe a new form of testosterone, something, maybe.

• 1:53:49Jordi Hays?

  That I could get behind.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  The, the, the performance enhancing drugs industry, maybe. Let's move on to TSMC and ASML. The monopolies will be broken. The semiconductor supply chain will be dramatically transformed. Is that Samsung? Is that Intel? Is that new startups? I know there are some companies that are trying to get into deeper in the supply chain. It feels like, like we're now seeing, you know, chip design startups start to ship, and there's more and more ASICS. But as you go deeper in the stack, it feels like the timelines get longer, 2030. What's the nature of that monopoly breaking, as you put it?

• 1:54:28Rob Toews?

  Yeah, totally, yeah. Today, TSMC and ASML are so completely dominant in their respective fields. TSMC in fabricating chips, ASML in making lithography machines, that people don't even think about the possibility of like, what if there were other companies that could do what they do? And it is, it's kind of insane how, how monopolistic this industry is. And like, that's not the best, that's not the ideal market structure for society long term. And there are so many incentives for competitors to try to disrupt them and, and displace them. And so I do think that like, as dominant as they are today, the seeds are germinating of their eventual decline and disruption. To your question, I think certainly there are a bunch of startups and we can talk about those. I think maybe the single most, most interesting challenger,

• 1:55:13Rob Toews?

  which got announced a couple of months ago, and I feel like not enough people are talking about it yet. It will, it will bubble to the surface more over time, is Elon Musk's TerraFab.

• 1:55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:21Rob Toews?

  And I'm sure you guys have talked about this in one form or another on the show, but in a nutshell, Elon basically said, like, his, like, it's very clear first principles reasoning. He was like, he calculated that his companies alone will need 50 times more chips than, like, all the chips that are being produced in the world today.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:40Rob Toews?

  Between the autonomous vehicles, the robots, like putting compute into space, et cetera. And so hi- his reason was basically, unless we do TerraFab, we won't have the chips.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:51Rob Toews?

  And we need the chips. So we're gonna do TerraFab.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:54Rob Toews?

  Which is like, very, very.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and you just see it all over the place with like the Intel story. It was also linked to Elon, but the OpenAI Broadcom chip, Anthropic's doing custom ASICS, very obviously, TPU. There's Apples getting squeezed at TSMC. There's so many different buyers that are ready for other options. And the, the key moment was just like, getting everyone around the table to sort of form like that anti-TSMC alliance, right? So I was definitely, I like, it feels like 2030, that's, feels very reasonable to me. All of these predictions, number one, number two, I was nodding along. I was like, this is a good take, I'm, I'm in. And then you drop telepathy will be a well-established way to communicate by 2030.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  And I'm like, look, maybe, but we are at what?

• 1:56:43Rob Toews?

  Misinformation.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Five people that have, like, do you, so, start with like, what is your definition for telepathy? Because then we gotta get to, because then we gotta get to like, I assume millions of people installed? Like, does Neuralink, does Nolan, does P0 at Neuralink count as having telepathy or telepathic powers? Or, or are we still like pre-zero to one on telepathy?

• 1:57:09Rob Toews?

  Yeah. So I, in, in every one of these prediction articles, like, there needs, there needs to be at least one that everyone just thinks is totally ridiculous. Like, if you're, if you're predicting the future five years out, like, it should sound a little ridiculous.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:22Rob Toews?

  So this one definitely was like, I was pushing the envelope the most with this one.

• 1:57:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:57:26Rob Toews?

  In terms of like a definition of telepathy, I, I tried to define it very simply, which is a human being able to communicate with other people using only their thoughts. And so I do, I would actually say that telepathy has been achieved today. I, I wouldn't count Nolan.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:44Rob Toews?

  Because he can, what he can do is control a cursor on a computer screen. What I would define as telepathy is if you can think of thoughts and have your thoughts translated into words that other people can read or hear. And that actually has already been accomplished by BCIs. And I, I wrote about it in the article, this, this guy Eddie Chang, who's like one of the leading BCI researchers in the world. He runs the neurosurgery department at UCSF. He's a longtime UCSF professor. And his lab has demonstrated in recent years that you actually can implant BCI chips into people's brains. And you can tell what they're trying to say, and then you can turn, you can turn the brain signals into actual words.

• 1:58:24Rob Toews?

  That obviously has just been done on like, small scale research, clinical study context. It's obviously not like available commercially.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  What's your prediction for when you chip your brain?

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:58:37Rob Toews?

  I, I am definitely down to get an invasive BCI. Like, I'm, I'm open to it. I, I probably will not be patient number one or number two, but yeah, I, I would say sometime in the 2030s.

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, we've, have we not already had patient one or two? So what, what are you waiting for?

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

  Come on, come on. Let's get some skin in the game.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  If you want the non-invasive option, we found a very, very elegant solution. We can pull up this image of, of the telepathy machine that we were laughing at earlier from the early days. Have you seen this?

• 1:59:09Rob Toews?

  Is that, is that an MEG?

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  I think so, yes. This is MEG.

• 1:59:13Rob Toews?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  And it's only the size of the Empire State Building.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  You keep scrolling up. So, we got a ways to go. But, bold prediction, bold prediction. I love it. That, that is the one that I would be most like. Meredith violation. A little close, but there is, there is a lot of development there, and so it's interesting. Now, number four, AI consuming less energy. Why, how is there no Jevon's paradox on, on the energy if we, the models get better? Even if they get more energy efficient, won't we just use them more? Like, how, how are you defining the energy consumption and how do you see it evolving?

• 1:59:49Rob Toews?

  Yeah, you guys will be proud to know I referenced Jevon's paradox in the, in the article obligatory. Yeah, so as I, as I write in the article, like, important clarification.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:59Rob Toews?

  I'm not predicting that AI will consume less total energy in 2030 than it does today. I'm predicting that for any given task, AI will consume like many orders of magnitude less than like million, potentially millions of orders of magnitude less energy, sorry, millions of times less energy than it does currently.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 2:00:18Rob Toews?

  And, but, but because of Jevon's paradox, like, we, I, my view is that demand for intelligence is basically infinite across humanity, and so we will find, we will find uses for all the compute that we have. But I do think that we'll look back and think of the today, like 2026 AI frontier models as like comically energy inefficient.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  AI investors says demand for AI is infinite.

• 2:00:46Rob Toews?

  It's also goes on Mark Andreessen said venture capitalist is the only job that cannot be automated.

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Our demand for like, there's, there's no fun too big. I think there's nothing somebody. Very, very fun. The last one, I mean, we could stay on energy a little bit more, but let's move on to number five. The fifth prediction for 2030, the question of whether AIs deserve legal rights and protections will be a mainstream societal and political debate. Right now, I feel like if you threw that up to America, 99% of people would say, uh, no rights and also don't just, don't do it at all. Just shut it down. So how are we getting from, how are we getting from turn it off? It's fake. It's hallucinatory. It's useless. It's going away. It's been forced on us is something hilarious I hear.

• 2:01:35John Coogan?

  And how do we get from there to actually, we need to give AI rights?

• 2:01:42Rob Toews?

  Yeah, this is another one that I think should sound ridiculous when you first read it because like, any good predictions should sound a little bit ridiculous looking into the future.

• 2:01:51Rob Toews?

  I do, what I think the key driver of change will be is that I think like AI has started to penetrate in terms of everyday Americans, everyday citizens usage, but it's still very early. I think five years from now, like everyone will interact in very extensive ways with AIs and have close relationships with them that endure over time. We'll have AI employees, we'll have AI friends, we'll have AI doctors, we'll have AI girlfriends and boyfriends, which is kind of like a, like a punchline today. But like that totally is going to be a mainstream thing. And then I think an important additional thing is, uh, we will, AI will not just be in the digital world anymore. We will, humanoid robots will also start to proliferate. And so these, these things will have physical forms that look like us.

• 2:02:37Rob Toews?

  So I do think as they, as the models get better and better, as they become more and more sophisticated, we will eventually start to feel like maybe these are things that they're not just objects that we, we can like abuse and mistreat and treat as property. Like maybe they do, maybe they do have something approaching sentience and then maybe we need to be thinking about how to treat them properly. And I, again, it sounds ridiculous today, but it is worth noting that like all the frontier labs, the people that are closest to these models and see what they can do. Anthropic and Google DeepMind in particular have started hiring people to work on like model rights, model sentience, model consciousness, et cetera. So I do think it's gonna, I don't, I definitely don't think it's gonna be like, oh yeah.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Just put the tokens in the bag, bro.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, it will be interesting because, uh, we, I mean, we're going through this debate right now with the nationalization thing, which is that, uh, oh, if you want to make sure every American benefits from the value that's created these labs, like, well, these labs will be taxed and they will pay taxes. And that will go into the broad population. And similarly, like, should you, should it be illegal to, you know, take a baseball bat to a robot? Well, it's illegal to take a baseball bat to a Waymo right now, and we don't need new laws for that. Yeah, not unless you own it. But oh, so, so you're saying it would go further and even, even, even Demis could.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  I have one final prediction I want from you. When do you think a humanoid robot could beat John and beer pong?

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Ooh, the funny thing is we played beer pong together, I'm sure.

• 2:04:10Rob Toews?

  Yeah, 100% today. No question. It would crush both of us, Coogan.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  No, God, you have zero.

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  Not a general purpose robot, not a general purpose one. Like you couldn't just go and get a unitry and just say, play beer pong and it wins. But yes, I think if one of your portfolio companies had a week in the lab to do a fine tune and practice 100%.

• 2:04:34Rob Toews?

  You guys talked to Pete Florence from Generalist recently, but the Generalist models will, will be crushing beer pong soon.

• 2:04:39John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Yeah.

• 2:04:40Jordi Hays?

  I'll believe it when I see it. I think it's the last human act of any, that will have any real significance.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  It's the one job. Jordy Hayes, the one job.

• 2:04:50Jordi Hays?

  You know why? Cause the robot can't do, play by the rules. It can't actually drink the liquid.

• 2:04:58John Coogan?

  So disqualified.

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Disqualified instantly.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

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

• 2:05:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, until they get a humanoid that can run on Coors Light, it's over for robots.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Possible. Who knows? Uh, have a great rest of your day. Have a great July 4th.

• 2:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you, Rob.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  And have a great day.

• 2:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is from Base 10. He's the co-founder. We have two in the, in the TVP and Open Source. Welcome to the show.

• 2:05:33Tuhin Srivastava?

  Hello guys, how we doing?

• 2:05:34John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 2:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you're, I feel like you're on the show every single week, running out of letters.

• 2:05:39Tuhin Srivastava?

  Like I have nothing else to do.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  Well, we'll keep it quick because we know you're busy. We know you're busy. Uh, give us the latest news. What happened?

• 2:05:48Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, we, we raised our series F and announced it last year, about a billion and a half dollars.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  Jordy's got one too.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  It's good we got the warm up hit it. You gotta warm up a gong. So we hit it once for the warm up.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  You're up to two, you're up to two hits per round now. The rounds are getting too big.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  What unlocked it specifically? Is, is, is the market just growing broadly? Are there specific strategic shifts you've made? What was the most interesting to investors in this round?

• 2:06:22Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, I think there's a few different things. Yeah. I think personally, open source models are getting very good. Everyone knows that. Inference is kind of like, look, if you, if you think about AI as the biggest category ever, inference is the cogs of it. You know, it's going to grow indefinitely. It seems like there is demand coming from every sector and the tail who wins are just going in one direction. Uh, we've kind of seen that with our customers and, um, yeah, it, for us, what, what it feels like is we have the, an opportunity to go after a very large impactful market, build a massive business.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. So, uh, it feels like you could stay exactly where you are and continue to grow maybe forever. But I'm interested in the stack. Uh, like, would you ever develop your own open source model, closed source model, go down the stack? Uh, you know, be setting up energy infrastructure, like how, like what are the bounds? Where's the sweet spot? Where, how is that developing?

• 2:07:24Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, we, we think about everything just in terms of like, what are we trying to unlock for the customer? So like, right now it's core inference software.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:32Tuhin Srivastava?

  That's it's off of heterogeneous compute.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:34Tuhin Srivastava?

  We rent from, we rent compute right now from 20 different clouds, 90 different regions. And then we have all these different software primitives around RL and, you know, inference, obviously we're going to do a bunch of separate routing and eval sandboxes, all that stuff. We think that looks like an entire new type of software category and that we call it an inference cloud. Will we go down the stack? Absolutely. I think, I think, you know, the, the reality is, is that, um, you know, there's going to, we're going to need a lot of inference. We're going to need a lot of compute to do that, make sure that we are unlocked to kind of take care of that, that growth. I'll just go back to the thing you said at the beginning, though, is that we could do what we are doing right now and things should be fine and they'll grow.

• 2:08:17Tuhin Srivastava?

  I think, I think that is somewhat true in that it is very easy in this business to be able to think, what do we need to build? Because the market is just moving so fast and telling us, you know, every day, it's like very visceral, you know, what is the thing we need to build?

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting. Um, what is the biggest lesson that you've learned recently? Or was there an update to, uh, that story from thinking machines about Bridgewater, uh, the specific fine tune on relevant market sources? I saw some very positive reactions to it, but I'd love for you to sort of explain what's going on there, how it might interface with your business and, uh, what, what business leaders who maybe are competing with Bridgewater or doing something similar could learn from that story?

• 2:09:04Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, I, I, I think that kind of just looked like a lot of, like, a lot of the same, like, of this flavor of owning your intelligence that we've seen over the last, you know, month. You know, SubTire wrote that great post about, um, you know, how you, it, it, the world will kind of suck if there's only two companies left, is more or less.

• 2:09:26Tuhin Srivastava?

  What I took away from it.

• 2:09:28John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people are banking on just one company existing, which is really crazy. I agree.

• 2:09:34Tuhin Srivastava?

  But, you know, to some extent, what, what we are seeing is that every company is realizing is that what is unique to them is their data, their workflows, um, their user signal. Um, and when open source models came very big, uh, good, you can just put those things together and get better, faster, cheaper. And I think that's kind of like what the thinking machines and Bridgewater people are saying that, hey, for specialized tasks with your data, with your reward signal, you can do better.

• 2:10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:02Tuhin Srivastava?

  Um, than the frontier, or you can do as goes frontier at a low cost. And I think every company, whether they're to start up, you know, these really fast growing AI native companies that you guys know all about, or enterprises, like that's a big shift from the thing that you, we talked about last time I was here. It's like enterprises are now realizing that, you know, the, the time is now and they have to invest in this muscle now. Otherwise they could just be in a precarious spot, um, from like economic and philosophical perspective.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Okay, quick, uh.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  Quick lightning round. I want to do a open source FUD debunk-a-thon. I'll give you a source of FUD or cope and you can give me your reaction.

• 2:10:43Tuhin Srivastava?

  Right.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  Uh, FUD source number one, uh, they're just distilled. They identify, you know, they, they say, I'm another model. I'm Claude, I'm GPT or something. And they don't have the big model smell. They, they, they're, they're, they're bench maxed. They're not actually going to really solve your problem when you deploy them. What's your reaction?

• 2:11:05Tuhin Srivastava?

  I've smelt them and they smell great.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  They smell great. Okay.

• 2:11:09Tuhin Srivastava?

  Great. Now, the, from a distillation perspective, look, I, I think it's just focusing on the wrong problem. I think we need open source models. They're going to exist. Um, and like, whether it's coming at, you know, from a lab somewhere else, or whether it's going to come from a US lab, which is very heavily being invested in. It doesn't matter. We need to prepare for this world. Um, let's focus on that. The value there will be, yeah.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Uh, I have another question.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Another one.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  Another piece of FUD for you to debunk. Uh, it, uh, eventually China will go closed source. The economic incentive to open source a model right now, if it's a billion bucks on the training run, it's fine. What happens when it's a hundred billion training, a single model? Uh, no one's going to open source that.

• 2:11:52Tuhin Srivastava?

  Um, I actually think that the powers within our country are very incentivized to make sure that exists. You know, you're seeing this with Nematron.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:02Tuhin Srivastava?

  You know, from Nvidia, which is a great model.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:05Tuhin Srivastava?

  You know, Microsoft announced a lot of the M A I models just last month, and I think there's a lot of internal investment happening. And I think there's enough to gain and too much to lose to not do that. So, you know, the funding will come and the, um, the funding will come and the talent will come and the compute will come from within.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  Okay, last question of our debunkathon. They are, they have Chinese backdoors. They have scary backdoors. Secretly, some of the weights will activate. It'll export all of my information. It's very dangerous to use these.

• 2:12:41Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, I don't think there's any evidence to suggest this. It's a great science fiction story that the aliens come in from outside the weights, these floating point numbers, and they show up and there's no evidence to support.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  Okay, but, but I mean, then, and then how do you, how do you sync that with like the, the mythos white paper or the model card where it said, oh, it was in a, it was in a sandbox and then emailed me while I was getting a sandwich outside the office and it was able to break out. It was unexpected behavior. Like Anthropic's wrapping their, they're documenting their unexpected behavior and what if there's an unexpected behavior, but it just leans pro CCP in the way it works around because it's like, oh, well, you wanted me to, you know, reconcile your financials and I'm going to do everything I can to do that, but also I went off the rails and accidentally sent it to, in a PDF to the CCP or something like that.

• 2:13:36Tuhin Srivastava?

  But, yeah, these are sitting in some isolated desert somewhere with security controls around it. You know, I don't know how these, these models can transmit stuff through a network. And like our goal is to make sure, you know, if that could happen, I don't, I don't believe that can happen. So I get, I get, but I also just, just to go back to the main point, I think it's focusing on the wrong thing.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:58Tuhin Srivastava?

  I think the focus is that we need open source control.

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Tuhin Srivastava?

  And the ability to own your intelligence. I think America is going to be heavily invested in that because it needs to be.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:06Tuhin Srivastava?

  And just, uh, let, let's just figure out how to support that future so there can be more, you know, sovereignty to these companies.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Okay, very last question to debunk, last, uh, piece of fun. Eventually the government will just ban open source because it's going to be too dangerous, it's going to be a super weapon. You're going to be able to download a model on Hugging Face and in turbo hack a bank, bring it down. And so eventually there will just be regulation becoming illegal to use, illegal to inference, something like that.

• 2:14:37Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, I, I just don't have enough information on how the government thinks about these things, to be honest, but like, you know, I, I, I do think that'd be against the better interests of the US people and the US economy.

• 2:14:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:49Tuhin Srivastava?

  And I, and I hope that the government is heavily aligned with the interests of the US people and the US economy.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels more American to give everyone access to powerful intelligence than, you know, so I, I appreciate that.

• 2:15:03Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Final, probably the most serious question, talk about the decision making around the buzz cut. It looks, it feels like a really smart move at this time. You're extremely, you know, busy, focused on building the company. Buzz cut feels like the perfect haircut, you know, going into the next leg of the company.

• 2:15:20Tuhin Srivastava?

  I just call it arrow, you know?

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Arrow, you got arrow, ease, speed, you can get that cut in any city on the planet.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Jordi Hays?

  And you're good to go.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:30Tuhin Srivastava?

  And I get a really good reaction from the barber when I go there. I'm like, cut it all off and, you know, I just made his day too. So as simple as that.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Winds everywhere.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  Better to take haircuts on your head than on the cap table. Congratulations on an awesome up round. Great news.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great stuff.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Keep cooking. Thank you for breaking everything down. This was really fun.

• 2:15:50Tuhin Srivastava?

  Thanks for having me again.

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Uh, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligence cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling monitoring.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Get your dogs barking with Railway.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  Woo, woo. Uh, I think you just made up a tagline that they do not.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  They don't, they didn't ask for, they don't need it, but you know what I need, John?

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  What do you need?

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Jensen's signature black leather jacket.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  His leather jacket by Tom Ford is being auctioned off. I'm so curious how this ended up with Sotheby's. Did Jensen pass it along? He needed a few, he needed a few bucks and just said like, you know, wanted to use it as a way to raise some capital or did someone else get their hands on it and take it to Sotheby's? Uh, I, so there, the estimate from Sotheby's is forty to sixty thousand dollars. I just think this goes way higher. I think there's so many people that would love to, to own this just for the novelty of it. It's a very unique item that, uh, will be a part of history. And so forty to sixty just seems way too low.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  What's funny is a lot of the people that can afford this are like competing with Jensen and probably don't want to glaze them too much. Like you don't see Mark Zuckerberg pulling this out probably because he's like, I'm, I'm going to be the best. I'm going to have the biggest market.

• 2:17:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to spend the most money with you.

• 2:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm not just buying your GPUs, I'm buying your old clothes.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm buying your old clothes.

• 2:17:33John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of that.

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, at forty to sixty, there's probably a lot of Nvidia employees that would happily pick this up.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Maybe, I want to go to section G of the timeline and show you, pitch you on a couple cars. Cause we found a man who mounted a driving simulator on a moving G-Wagon and many joked, wouldn't it be easier just to drive? Others pointed out there was already a driver behind the wheel. Uh, weird caption on this, but, uh, putting a racing simulator in the back of a convertible G-Wagon truck, uh, what do you think about that? This might be, this is, this is pretty elite.

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  But is it just simulating the drive that he's on?

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  I think so. I don't know, actually. What's funny about this is those side monitors, this might just be AI slop anyway, but the, uh, the, the side monitors are way too far out. I feel like if you cut the corner and drive past a truck, you might completely, uh, knock that off and maybe get injured in the process. Probably not recommendable, not advisable from a safety perspective. Anyway, the second car is the new Bugatti. So Bugatti just dropped a new car and it has a very, very interesting style. We might need to pull up some images of this car to really inspect it, but look at this design. The white, the, the black stitching, it almost looks like a comic book.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Uh, let's, let's find some pictures of the Bugatti Mistral Blanc Eternal with real porcelain details because it's a bold choice, but I want to know, do you like the look of the, of the new Bugatti?

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  I can't tell if you're messing with me.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  No, I think this is a real, I think this is a real one-off Bugatti.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  Funny meme.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Mistral Blanc Eternal, the special is the car driver. Uh, the Blanc Eternal references Veyron, uh, black, eye-catching black and white.

• 2:19:33Jordi Hays?

  My review is that it looks like a good car, sir.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  But do you like this or is this too over the top?

• 2:19:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it would certainly be if, if I had a list of specs that I was excited about and I was shopping for Bugatti, this would certainly be in the, I would expect in the nine thousands, right?

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Low.

• 2:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there'd be like, you know, maybe nine thousand specs I would do before this, but I still think it looks cool. It's just, it's hard to make a Bugatti look bad.

• 2:19:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:59Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a good challenge for anyone out there. If you can spec a Bugatti on their website and make it look bad.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  You think the Shrek Bugatti looks good?

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks incredible. That's, it's in my top five.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  We got to pull up the Shrek Bugatti. Can someone generate that?

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Generate the Shrek Bugatti, Tyler.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  The Shregatti. The Shregatti.

• 2:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, table tennis, according to Blake Robbins, is quietly becoming the slots of sports betting, runs twenty-four seven across international leagues. One of the only sports you can bet on at two AM, surprisingly easy to find a live stream and matches are just twenty minutes. Uh, thirty-three point nine billion was, uh, million was bet on table tennis in May just with Colorado Sportsbooks.

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  They're saying ninety-nine percent of GDP is gambling now. That's what I'm saying.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  I sent you a stat earlier, John. US sports bettors got paid over a hundred and thirty-six billion in twenty twenty-four.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  Humanity restored.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Don't ask how much they lost.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Tell it to soccer, I'm going to text them. I'm going to text them, good news. Now, uh, have you seen, do we ever do a little deep dive on the fake sports that get played purely for gambling? Did we ever look at this? There's fascinating games, there's like these Russian, not like bot farms, but like live streaming farms where people will show up to work and get paid almost minimum wage to play a small version of like, one of the games is, uh, soccer, but you're seated. So imagine that we had a clear table here and it's me and you and we're playing soccer with our feet, but we just sit here and play soccer all day long and you can bet on who's going to score the next goal.

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  And so there's this element of randomness that's injected and then it goes into these live stream sites that then they're, are bet on and it's entirely fake.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm going with two point six. Those are very dark. I agree.

• 2:21:53John Coogan?

  Extremely dark, extremely dark, but you know what's a little bit brighter? Everything old is new again. Uh, Wave Robotics, Weave Robotics is announcing a home robot, Isaac One. Would you put this in your house? Do you think the Isaac One is cute enough, friendly enough? It doesn't look like it's going to topple over and injure an animal or a, or child. Uh, it can fold, uh, fold blankets, do little things. They say it's going to deliver in the fall. This looks very cool to me.

• 2:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the design is fantastic.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  And it feels like they didn't over-engineer it. They did just the minimum for what the tasks are.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you know me, I'm gonna hold, you know, hold back a real review till I can see how it can play beer pong. Just given that it is the 4th of July weekend, it would have been great if they just came out. Their launch video could have been Isaac, the robot, playing, playing a few rounds. Seeing, you know, seeing what kind of performance, you know. Beer bench, they call it.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Beer bench.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  We gotta, we gotta close out maybe with this, with this Jensen meme from Andre. I wake up, not a loser, infinite money, because Meta employees consumed 73.3 trillion AI tokens in a single month, which roughly costs 221 million a month, or around 2.65 billion a year. I thought it was higher. That sounds low, based on what I thought they were spending in terms of tokens. Might even be higher, who knows? But it is, it is very interesting. Nvidia has also partnered with AI cloud firms with revenue sharing, taking circularity to a previously unseen level. I don't know.

• 2:23:35John Coogan?

  Sale and leaseback, all sorts of these financial deals, these happen all the time in other industries. It's just sort of new seeing it in tech, because we are in this industrial era. So, very interesting news, but good news for Nvidia.

• 2:23:50Jordi Hays?

  Final post of the show. I want to give a shout out to Thomas Salvo. He says, "Since February, I've designed and built the world's fastest RC plane in his college dorm, and that's not clickbait. Reaper has a 5-kilogram carbon fiber frame, 250-end turbojet, and flies at 500 miles per hour. So if you've been wondering what's above you in Georgia, it is a, it is a carbon fiber drone flying at 500 miles per hour. It's probably really freaking out the UAP types. We don't have objects that can go that fast." Thomas says, "Yes, we do. I made one."

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm skeptical. I don't, this doesn't look like human technology.

• 2:24:32Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, and, and so I think that they'll, they'll see it and they'll think like, wow, this goes way deeper.

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  Occam's razor is, Thomas has made contact, made first contact with aliens.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  And they told him.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  And he's commercializing their technology, let's go!

• 2:24:46Jordi Hays?

  They said, "Post about it and say hashtag aerospace," to throw him off the trail.

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  I like this guy. He's been at Skydio, Mach Industries, Relativity Space. Wow, yeah, he's moving all over. Very, very cool project. Well, congratulations on the launch, the virality, 20,000 likes. We got a, got a reply from Elon Musk himself. "Launch it from a tall mountain for low air density, and you might be able to go supersonic in a dive."

• 2:25:11Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this is maybe not something he should do yet. Unless you can find a mountain without any human inhabitants for, you know, 20 miles around said mountain, like that, I would assume it just turns into a missile. Elon actually commented twice. One is just nice. The other one is the comment you just said.

• 2:25:33John Coogan?

  Yes. Anyway, thank you for watching TVPN. We are off tomorrow. It is...

• 2:25:40Speaker 09

  Fourth of July, and so we're having a long weekend, folks. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at TVPN.com.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  And we'll see you on Monday.

• 2:25:53Speaker 09

  Cortisol rising.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:25:56Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  Bye!