Stripe x PayPal, Codex Micro, Saagar Enjeti Joins | George Kailas, Mukund Jha, Russ Tedrake, Glenn Youngkin

(00:23) - Stripe x PayPal (11:40) - OpenAI's First Device (15:44) - John's Business Ideas (23:15) - Chip: The Robot Car (30:27) - Saagar Enjeti is an American journalist and political commentator, best known as the co-host of the political news series "Breaking Points" alongside Krystal Ball. In the conversation, Enjeti discusses the potential consequences of prediction markets on flight delays, expressing concerns about possible manipulation and ethical issues. He also addresses the growing public opposition to data centers, highlighting the need for tangible benefits to local communities to mitigate backlash. Additionally, Enjeti emphasizes the importance of national permitting reform to address the housing crisis, advocating for streamlined approvals to facilitate the construction of affordable housing. (01:02:35) - George Kailas, founder and CEO of Aon Fund, has a background in value investing and AI, having previously led Prospero AI, a hedge fund-level AI research desk. He discusses launching an AI-powered hedge fund that leverages signal libraries from Prospero, creating thousands of strategies to work across various markets, with plans to launch in August or September. Kailas also highlights the importance of data compression and containerization in managing alternative data sets, aiming to minimize training costs while broadening data exploration. (01:08:28) - Mukund Jha, CEO of Emergent, discusses the company's AI platform that enables non-technical business owners to build and deploy production-grade applications, recently securing a $130 million Series C funding at a $1.5 billion valuation. He highlights that 80% of their users are non-technical, spanning industries from healthcare to manufacturing, and emphasizes the platform's role in helping small and medium businesses digitize operations by creating custom tools like CRMs and inventory management systems. Jha also notes the platform's global reach, with revenue evenly distributed across North America, Europe, and Asia, and mentions the growing excitement for AI adoption in India, while acknowledging potential future shifts in employment trends as AI becomes more powerful. (01:19:49) - Russ Tedrake, co-founder and CEO of Walden Robotics, is a former MIT professor and ex-SVP of Robotics at Toyota Research Institute. He discusses Walden's emergence from stealth with a $300 million seed round, valuing the company at $1.1 billion, and highlights their deployment of general-purpose AI robots in manufacturing, emphasizing partnerships with industry leaders like Toyota, Boeing, and Samsung. Tedrake underscores the importance of integrating physical AI into existing manufacturing processes to enhance efficiency and adaptability. (01:30:56) - Glenn Youngkin, former governor of Virginia and ex-co-CEO of The Carlyle Group, has joined Red Cell Partners as partner and chairman. He discusses Red Cell's innovative approach to venture capital, emphasizing the integration of founders within the firm to scale businesses in healthcare, cyber, and national security sectors. Youngkin highlights the importance of backing visionary leaders and fostering collaboration to drive transformative advancements in these critical industries. 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Wednesday, July 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVP Ultra on the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, but all in one place. Big news in the fintech world, not related to ramp, actually, but Stripe, another founder's fund project. It's founder's fund day. Stripe is offered to buy PayPal. This was rumored and on the timeline on and off over the past year is as PayPal has been a little beat up. We can pull up the five year chart. It's down over 80% since the

• 0:44John Coogan?

  pandemic highs. If you go back further, the 2020 to 2021 era for PayPal was like sort of an anomaly because of the big shift to e-commerce during the pandemic boom, but things have not been looking good for the last five years. And so just a couple, was it a couple of months ago, she'll monot posted in February of 2026, he posted a little, a little question for the timeline. He said, so who's buying PayPal? He says, it has the opportunity of being one of the great distressed value opportunities in fintech history. It's down 85% at the time, still still generating $5.5 billion in free cash flow. This is a

• 1:26John Coogan?

  $50 billion company. We'll go through the PayPal, the Stripe offer, which is at 53 billion, but you know, you're getting a 10% free cash flow yield. I'm unaffected.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm still I'm still working through these, these two.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  We got new ones. But if you think about it, it's like you have a $50 billion company printing 5.5 billion in free cash flow. You can use a lot to finance debt, obviously, which is what's proposed here. 400 million consumer accounts. So lots of consumers have PayPal accounts, have Venmo accounts. Maybe they're not fully active, but they're ready to be engaged. It's a huge footprint and huge distribution mechanism. And they have bank info attached. That's difficult. You can't get that from many other consumer applications. That's sort of the, the white whale of consumer. How deep can you go in the KYC flow in the consumer bank relationship? You really know these customers, which is valuable for, for,

• 2:25John Coogan?

  for a potential buyer like Stripe in this case. So checkout buttons are on millions of merchant sites, although that has been slowing and, and that's part of the reason why a change of ownership might make sense at this point. And they also have this peer to peer brand with Venmo, which was bought by Brian Johnson, Braintree, and then sold to PayPal. Old lore. So shield, the first company he calls out is Stripe. He says they have a lot of desirable assets for Stripe, a consumer facing checkout, bank account details for hundreds of millions of consumers that you could integrate into Stripe's checkout flow. And they have a, and they have a consumer brand in Venmo. Apple would also be a potential buyer, says shield. Good complement to Apple Pay for e-commerce penetration. They never

• 3:06John Coogan?

  got social payments going. Could get Apple back in buy now, pay later. Remember PayPal bought after, did they buy Afterpay? No, that was Block bought Afterpay. Does PayPal have a buy now, pay later?

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  No, they were just building this out themselves.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  They built that up themselves. Okay.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Not very well.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Got it. So she'll says, those are the two logical options from a business value creation perspective, but he identifies the problem. He says, in both cases, Apple and Stripe, the culture fit makes them a nonstarter.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  I take it back. They actually did buy a BNPL platform.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  That I've never heard of called Paddy.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  For 2.7 billion.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Okay. So they, so they do have an asset there that they are hopefully trying to grow.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  But prior to that, they had already built their own.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Got it. So shield calls out that culture fit might be a problem with PayPal integrating into Stripe. PayPal is a quote sprawling legacy fintech with 25,000 employees. That's a huge company. Decades of technical debt, neither Stripe nor Apple would want to absorb that. Although technical debt, you can clean it up. Coding agents, not too bad these days. Maybe less of a problem. Apple also might face big tech antitrust with this type of thing. That's a good call out. And yeah, you do have to, you do have to wonder Stripe incredible on the product side, on the innovation side, on the, on the, just building a fantastic massive $159 billion as of last tender offer business. But are they the, are they the

• 4:36John Coogan?

  team to be the, the ruthless cost cutters? If that's what it takes to turn PayPal around, that might be a different challenge culturally. Same thing for Apple. They don't, they're, they're not this private equity firm that goes in and buys and legacy assets and turns them around. So a little bit of an, of a culture shift that I think she is correct to call out. He also identifies Visa and Mastercard as potential buyers. So they could both afford it and they've been creeping into merchant acquiring and checkout. Also, we talked about that. The, the big banks are now taking a shot across the bow of Visa and Mastercard with their own card network. So there's potential that Visa and Mastercard might want to expand into a different territory, although that's not what's playing out right now. But who knows what other bidders will come out of the woodwork now that Stripe

• 5:19John Coogan?

  has made this offer to buy PayPal for 53 billion. So PayPal's checkout button placement is enormously valuable real estate for either Visa or Mastercard. The networks have been trying to move beyond interchange into direct merchant relationships and PayPal could accelerate that by years. I think they're, they may be burned out on antitrust. Either network acquiring the largest independent online checkout provider would and should face brutal regulatory scrutiny, says shield. He goes on, he says, what about Elon? Elon co-founded PayPal and always wanted it to be called X. So there's some poetry in it coming back under his fold as X. Of course, he is a Stripe shareholder, I believe. I think he was an angel investor. One of his very rare angel investments was Stripe. So, you know, he might be getting a slice of PayPal with this. Not too bad. His bandwidth and spread, his bandwidth is

• 6:03John Coogan?

  spread and possibly thin across Tesla, SpaceX, XAI. This is pre-merger X, politics and replying concerning to post at 3am. Never been a problem for Elon, but he said, but you could have made the case. He was spread too thin before he started to acquire the set last several companies too. Technical debt at PayPal is a big challenge that he knows. I would never count him out. I just don't see it though. And then he says, in his opinion, she'll says, JP Morgan makes the most sense. They've spent heavily on payments and acquisition and an acquisition could get them closer to building a consumer super app alongside Chase. 50 billion would be a huge acquisition even for them, but they could stomach it, assuming they could get regulatory approval. Venmo gives them a P2P brand that they've never been able to build, especially among younger consumers. PayPal's branded checkout button sits on

• 6:48John Coogan?

  millions of merchant sites. Remember, didn't JP Morgan, is it JP Morgan that bought that company that Charlie Javis founded and then she went to jail or was accused of crimes? Because and that pitch for her company was

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Consumer facing.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Consumer facing.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  They had a relationship with alleged, I guess.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  I think she's been convicted.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they positioned it as having a lot of relationships.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  With younger consumers, college students. And so I think the deal came in like north of $100 million. And then it was later alleged or discovered that those accounts were maybe generated programmatically. I think this was the pre-AI era. Now it's even easier if you need to generate a bunch of fake data, but don't do that because it's fraught.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is like Stripe makes so much sense because if, yeah, to be able to pull off an acquisition like this, to be able to get the, the level of debt needed to do this, you need to have so much confidence that they're going to actually be able to, I'm assuming they'll end up reducing headcount pretty dramatically. I'm assuming Stripe looks at this and says, hey, I don't think we need 25,000 people running this business. So who has the, who has the operational strength and know-how to make PayPal run? If you could make PayPal even run half as well as, as Stripe, that's probably worth double what

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  it's currently worth. So yeah, if you're, if you're a lender here, I don't, I don't see or, or a partner, I don't see that you can find a better partner than, than Stripe on a deal like this. Period.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Let me take you through the lenders. First, I'm going to tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password resets. So Stripe is a fun option. I agree with this. It's funny, this teal-backed fintech company buying a teal-founded company, full circle. The first offer is already facing some pushback. Michael Burry, I believe, is a shareholder, and he posted on his Substack about why he's not selling at this current price. He thinks that PayPal can get back to their previous share price from a year ago. But the basic structure of the deal is as follows: $53 billion for all of PayPal, $60.50 per share offered, 28% premium over yesterday's closing price,

• 9:14John Coogan?

  but it's a steep discount to last year's valuation. $50 billion has been committed in bank financing, and the FT is reporting that PayPal has been reluctant to engage with the offer thus far. Stripe is much bigger than PayPal at this point. Also interesting, this offer was apparently sent over to PayPal weeks ago, maybe a full month ago, based on the reporting, and it didn't leak. So whoever's working on this team, good job.

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're taking it public. Enrique, Lores, the CEO over at PayPal, just got the gig. He had been over at HP, and you can't imagine that he's, you know, took the job wanting to just basically be acquired in a short period of time.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  He wants to, I would imagine he wants to get credit for a proper turnaround here. And so I think they're going public with this now, in part to try to put pressure.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of public, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those to take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So Stripe is partnering with private equity firm Advent International for the deal. They have a lot of deal-making experience in fintech specifically, and I think they're going to go 50/50 on the equity portion, but then there's a whole bunch of bank financing coming in. And they will point in their offer to the fact that branded PayPal checkouts are slowing. There's fierce competition from Apple Pay, Shop Pay, Klarna. These are reasons to sell. PayPal will likely fire back, saying, hey, we just brought in a fresh CEO. We have a restructuring plan in place. We're executing against that.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  Once that happens, once we're successful, we will get back to the 70s for our share price, which we traded at just a year ago. So yeah, maybe we're not going to go back to the pandemic highs anytime soon, but this offer is just too low for right now. But we will see. Overall, I mean, Stripe has done an excellent job expanding into many adjacent markets. Atlas is a great example. And they've never cracked consumer, but also they've never really tried, in my opinion. And so I think it'd be really awesome to watch this play out, see what they do with it. But it does seem like it'll take a few more rounds of negotiation before anything fully materializes.

• 11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 11:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So there is news out of OpenAI. The first consumer hardware device will reportedly be an AI companion speaker. According to Bloomberg, the device will be "screenless and movable", designed to serve as a new kind of home computer for the AI era. And I believe Tyler has a mock-up of what we think it would look like. I think I sent it to you. Did that make it into the timeline? Let's pull that up when we have a second. It will be able to answer questions, control smart home devices, play music, and tap into GPT's capabilities. But the bigger goal is for it to become increasingly personalized over time.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  OpenAI envisions it as an AI companion that gets to know its owner, understands their habits, and it can even draw on personal information like email to provide more useful assistance.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  And we have the image here.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Let's pull up what I think it probably looks like, based on this description that it's "screenless, movable, and designed to serve as a new kind of home computer for the AI era." That's what I'm hoping for, sort of a Function 1 concert-level speakers that have wheels and can be wheeled around. It's movable, smart speaker.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  It weighs, it actually weighs one ton.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Because it has onboard battery system. They want it to be mobile. They don't want you to worry about plugging it in.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Exactly. Imagine just wheeling this around and just pumping out tiesto at concert-level volumes throughout your home.

• 13:03Jordi Hays?

  Inside any room in your home.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Any room in your home. Ideally, those wheels would be motorized. It could follow you around and deafen you in any room, sort of Brian Johnson's worst nightmare. Not to call back Brian Johnson. But unlike today's smart speakers, the device is designed to feel more lifelike.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Yes, that is a bit. This is a joke. We have not been, intentionally not been read in on anything in device land because we want to figure out what's happening in real time.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Play the same game to you guys.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  But if you've been using Codex and you are running Codex on, or just the new ChatGPT app, which is fully Codexified, if you've been running it on your computer, it's pretty remarkable when you're on your phone and you're remote into your computer, and you can have it go and just open your actual email. And if you're logged into a news site, it will just use your actual login to go and open the website in your Chrome browser, which is logged in, and get you whatever information you need. So having the full control, I think that people are just with the ChatGPT app on iOS,

• 14:14John Coogan?

  integrating to Codex or ChatGPT app on Mac, people like, we're now crossing the chasm of like the OpenClaw experience for people that weren't ready to set up the OpenClaw whole like agentic workflows and do all of this stuff, jump through all the hoops there. These are just apps that you can install. You never really get hit with a terminal window whatsoever. So like the next wave of consumers are adopting effectively these, I don't even know, they're agents, but it's more like computer use plus agents plus desktop integration that makes it ultimately more usable. So unlike today's smart speakers, the device is designed to feel more lifelike, according to Bloomberg,

• 14:58John Coogan?

  and it will include mechanical elements that move on their own, along with a camera and other sensors to understand the surroundings. Powered by GPT Live, OpenAI's new real-time voice mode, it should be able to hold more natural conversations and recognize when you enter a room. You'll also be able to take it around the house, thanks to its rechargeable battery. Johnny Ive is helping design the product. Bloomberg says OpenAI's hardware team is developing roughly five AI devices, with the speaker expected to be the first, targeting an unveiling this year ahead of a planned 2027 release. We have another example of what we think they should do in the device battle. The new smart device that I want from OpenAI is, of course, the, you've heard Greg Brockman say this, "Taste is a new core skill," right?

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  So what can computers, what are they uniquely bad at doing?

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Taste.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Creating tastes for you, right? There's no real smell-o-vision yet. There's no computer device. There's no smart device that actually puts a taste in your mouth to signal what's going on with your AI agent. So I put together Melt, my pitch for the next AI device from OpenAI.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  A custom-fit oral wearable that turns AI agent status into flavor, so you can feel a ChatGPT Codex run without watching the terminal.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Yes. So you don't need to look at a screen. This is perfect if you're trying to cut back on your screen time. You don't need to hear anything. You can just listen to the beautiful surroundings of wherever you are, and yet you're still tapped in. You still know whether your build is failing or not because you pair it with, you pair with Codex, it maps the signals and it ships by taste. So when your agent is done, a clean sour pulse tells you that it's time to review the work. If something breaks.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Like a good.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of like a Sour Patch Kids. It's a little sweet, but it's sour, you know? It lets you know, hey, it's time to go check on what's happening, review some code, make sure everything's shipping as you hope it is. If something breaks, you get a flash of heat. It gets spicy in your mouth. This pulls your attention. You gotta lock in, so you have some spicy flavor in your mouth. If your API balance hits zero, you get this bitter taste. It's not good. You gotta go refill those credits.

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  A bitter note makes the problem impossible to ignore.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yes, but if everything is green, everything is shipping appropriately, everything's good to go, you get a sweet pop in your mouth that rewards the win. And it's also a Pavlovian feedback loop because you're just on the hunch for the next burst of flavor. And it can also look like an iced-out grill, which might be nice.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  More seriously, we were over here at TVPNHQ. Any, any idea that we have immediately gets turned into a website now.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  We have the laptop detailing company of San Francisco.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  And, and this is a business that we actually think should be built.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  John was cleaning his laptop last week and whatever product you had ordered off of.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  I didn't order it. Team ordered it. It's a, it's a normal like screen wipe, but I didn't realize that you're supposed to use gloves when you use these screen wipes and it gave me a chemical burn all over my hands. Be very careful. Like my whole, all of the skin on my fingers.

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  Screen.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Healing off. It's been terrible.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, so we think that there is a

• 18:19John Coogan?

  It's a real business.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Silly but real business opportunity to make a laptop computer, you know, like a computer detailing service, like a car detailing service.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  For laptops. You sign up a bunch of companies, startups in San Francisco, you know, early stage companies, enterprise, et cetera. You give them a monthly plan to keep all of their employees laptops clean and polished. And yeah, this was, this was one shot and I think it gets the job done. So no, no excuses.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  You should get out there and do it. I think that the only thing I disagree with on the site is the, the pricing.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  The pricing? How much?

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think twenty, twenty-nine, ninety-nine.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Well, you know why this is so subsidized? Because the screen cleaners are looking for trade secrets and then trading off of them. But of course, if you're doing this, you need to have the, the no, no insider trading guarantee, which is featured here. To be extremely clear, our detailers will not photograph, memorize, transcribe, trade upon, tiff off a roommate, or otherwise profit from anything visible on your screen. Hundred percent information is not used. Right?

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's a great.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  You gotta let them know.

• 19:33Jordi Hays?

  That's a great offer.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Yes. We, we clean screens. We do not read them. It's almost like he doth, she doth protest too much. Even if your screen contains an unreleased earnings report, even if the font is very large, even if the ticker symbol is impossible to miss, our detailers will not be trading on your inside information.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think these have to be onsite visits.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Okay. What's another big problem in the world? Big problem is that everyone knows the phrase, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. Well, what if you could? What if you could? What if toothpaste came in a luxurious jar? The company's called Paradox Toothpaste Out of the Tube. It's a refillable frosted glass jar that turns the most ordinary part of your morning into a ritual worth displaying. Do you think this would sell? Paradox? Most toothpaste is designed to be hidden. Paradox is designed to be seen and used with intention twice a day. Scoop one precise pearl. No crusty cap, no guesswork, no wasted squeeze. Brush your teeth, then you can refill it.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  What do you do with the spoon though?

• 20:42John Coogan?

  If you dip it back in the toothpaste, luxurious toothpaste.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  It's over for this idea.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  This is a bad idea?

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  It's funny though.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  It solves the problem. You can't put toothpaste back in the tube. Everyone's been clamoring.

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's been clamoring for this.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  So put the toothpaste back in the tube. Now you can. The last one, first off, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Tyler made one. He has a pitch for, for Kedra.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was another idea I had for an OpenAI device. So basically it's a water bottle with a keyboard wrapped around it.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So if we can pull this up here, you can see like, you know, a lot of times you're typing and then you go to grab water, you're thirsty.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  You want to keep typing.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this also is especially pressing now because of everyone's using Whisper, right? You gotta talk and you can't talk while you're drinking water, right?

• 21:33John Coogan?

  So why not just put a microphone on here instead of a keyboard?

• 21:35Speaker 02

  No, no, that's the whole point. When you're in the act of drinking water, you can't.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Oh, so you gotta switch to typing?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  So you have to start typing.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  It's almost like a flute.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But I think.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  It's gonna be pretty promising.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  I actually think that when, when you showed me this image, I think just aesthetically, it's a cool looking bottle, even if the keyboard isn't functional whatsoever. I think people would just rock this type of bottle because they like the aesthetics of a keyboard. Sort of like that Nvidia purse. You've seen the GPU purse. That's, it's clear plastic and then inside is a A100 or some sort of Nvidia GPU and it just sort of shows you the circuit board and the circuit board is the art, is the design of the purse. I thought it was pretty cool. I, I would pick one of these up if you manufactured one. What do you think?

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Absolutely not. Well, whatever you're designing, use Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  The next great car.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  We have another new car alert.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  New car.

• 22:37Jordi Hays?

  This one, car is called Chip. Chip Motors.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Let's play this.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is funny. It is funny.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yo, I want to see their pitch.

• 22:46Jordi Hays?

  A year ago, you could have been sitting there thinking, why has no one made a cute EV car for getting around your town or your neighborhood?

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Why has no one done it?

• 22:58John Coogan?

  And now there's like seven companies that are doing it.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of companies. Apparently a lot of people had the same idea.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  Jamison from the CEO of Chip Motors says the next great American car is a robot. It talks, parks itself, more customized than your coffee. Eat Chip. You can reserve today.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Let's play this video. I want to see it.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  Yes. Saturday's here. I'm Chip, by the way. Let's get moving.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Hi Chip.

• 23:27Saagar Enjeti?

  Hey Chip.

• 23:28Speaker 03

  Hey, my crew's here.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Ready to roll.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Oh, he's got crazy FOMO.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Bye Chip. Go get them, guys. Have fun. Love you too. And I'm talking to myself. Um, hi. Go park Chip. You got it, boss.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  I like the LED screen on the front. I've seen demos of that in like Chinese cars.

• 24:00Speaker 03

  Chip, I forgot the snacks again. Can you run to the market?

• 24:03Saagar Enjeti?

  On it.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Drives itself? This is bold. This is gonna take some regulatory approval.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. So I love the vision.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  And I think as just the base model in its current design will sell units, right? I.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  I mean, there's like, to channel Doug DiMaro, he'd say it's no, there's no way it's gonna wind up shipping at 15K. There's gonna be a bunch of upgrades. It's gonna be difficult. But yes, like it, at 15K with these features, like 100%, but this is a demo.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  Even at, even at, even at somewhere in the range of, you know, 20 to 30, I think these things sell because I know what these sort of like higher end neighborhood golf carts go for. They're already all in that range. So yes, I, I agree. It's probably.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  But at this point, you said like, yes, I will buy this, this neighborhood golf cart to like seven different golf carts and you're like 400K in the hole on golf carts and you could have just got a Luchet and chopped the top.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Chopped the top on the Luchet.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  You gotta chop the top.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  It's not a bad idea. No, so, so, so it's cool. I think the, the talk, it's interesting because the talking to your car element is not a selling point to me. The, the like screens, et cetera, like to me, those aren't, those aren't like value.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  What is the selling point then?

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just, just a

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Just the aesthetic?

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Functional, a functional neighborhood car. That is a selling point, right?

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Okay. So you like the, the lack of doors, six seats?

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like golf carts, golf carts are mid, right? They're fun to drive, but they, they, there had been a lack of innovation in the, in the space. And so just a better golf cart is a good product, right? But the, but yeah, I don't, yeah, my question is like the, the parking itself, going on trips by, by itself, these kinds of things, especially in those settings. I'd be curious if they actually launch with those features at all or these are things that they're kind of building towards. Because imagine you're, the example I think they used was like a kid's soccer practice. Can you imagine like parking

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  for a kid's soccer practice or a soccer game and being like, yeah, robot that I just bought? Like go park yourself. Like that just sounds like the sketchiest situation.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  This customizer is so cool. You can, you can get livery of like an American flag from the factory. I mean, this is all like very

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  You're sold.

• 26:36John Coogan?

  decals and stuff.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, anyways, I think, I think it's, it's taking a different direction than Amble. Amble is betting that you're gonna want something that has less technology, right? More, more simplicity. They're going very tech forward. Everything from autonomous driving to, you know, screens and AI in the device.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  Different, different bets, different customer bases. I think they can both work. We're, we're in touch now with, with the Chip team. So we'll, we'll look to get them on, on the show at some point soon and hopefully they can just drive this thing. Right, right behind the horse and get on the set.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  I'm excited. I mean, I do really, really hope that the time to market for startup, these weird, like sort of niche vehicles and these new EV makers shortens because we had this moment where it was impossible to start a new car company. Then Elon built Tesla into what it is, the number one selling car in, I think, the US and in China, the Model Y. So huge success. And then there were a number of follow-ons that were like Nikola and a few others that, that either ended very poorly or went bankrupt or didn't really get to breakthrough. And they took, you know, years and years and years and billions of dollars in capital to ship something.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  And they didn't, weren't really able to find their footing in the, in the market because at the time when, for example, like Lucid, Lucid, you know, eventually launched a premium EV SUV or a premium, eventually launched SUV but sedan. And by that time, like the Taycan was out and a few other, and Mercedes had the EQS. And so there were a lot of other major brands that had been able to deliver on a similar promise on a similar timeline. Whereas Tesla's advantage was that they were able to be the first EV and they had like a monopoly on EVs for like a decade, basically. It was the only viable one. It was like that or like the Nissan LEAF. And now there's more competition, but they're, but they're established. I'm interested to see, can this come to market in,

• 28:41John Coogan?

  in a two-year timeframe or three years, something as opposed to, I would be really, I'd be really disappointed. And that might be regulatory failure. That might just be the supply chain. There might be a variety of different things, but based on the speed with which we see China shipping all sorts of vehicles that crab walk and spin around and do jump and all these crazy features, I would certainly hope that startups are able to bring cars like this to the market much faster.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  They have a frunk that pulls up and just gives you an HD TV screen.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Really cool.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so this is cool. We'll work on getting the, the founder on. I can see you getting this to watch movies, maybe when you're out and about.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  If it's self-driving, I should be able to watch.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  Before our next guest comes in.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Please do.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  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.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  And then while we wait for our next guest, Saagar, dear friend of the show, I wanted to head over to the big board.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  Check out.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  So what do we have going on here, Jordy?

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  This is Saagar Bet.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Okay, Saagar Bet 9000.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Yes, the Saagar Bet 9000.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  The market never sleeps.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  And on Saagar Bet, you can track UFOs, you can track mention markets. So this thing Saagar might say.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  So it's sort of like an entire casino built around Saagar and Jetty?

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  If you just want to bet on anything he's doing, this is the product for you.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  In your pocket, wherever you are in the world, there's even topic slots.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  You can bet, is he going to talk about Trump, housing?

• 30:14John Coogan?

  This is huge.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  AI, Joe Rogan, marijuana and AI.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Okay, the Fed, America and housing. Well, let's bring in Saagar and Jetty and, and get the, get the, get the betting starting. Let's bring him in. How are you, how are you doing?

• 30:32Saagar Enjeti?

  I can't even breathe. I can't breathe. Props to your team for creating that. I'm not.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  The website is live. It's all play money and there's a disclosure at the bottom. We can send you the link and you can have some fun on Saagar Bet.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  We're just going to leave this up the whole time while you monologue.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Every single chart is active and live.

• 30:55Saagar Enjeti?

  I am not even going to be able to make it through this. It's so hard. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you for this game on this day. Thank you.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  True, true, true nightmare fuel for Saagar and Jetty. But I wanted, I wanted to talk about housing. Should we talk about prediction markets first? Should we, should we debate the level of, of where the data should be used? Is that a good place to start? Cause we were, we were chatting about that.

• 31:23Saagar Enjeti?

  If you guys want, yeah, go ahead. I mean, I know your, my only request coming into this was I don't want any Calci ads on my site. But Saagar Bet is okay, I guess.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  No, so.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Pure play money.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  So there was news, I guess, in the last 24 hours that I think Calci is exploring being able to trade on potential airport delays, which is interesting. And that was interesting for.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  We're going to get crazy stories where people like intentionally delay the flight to win a bet, right? Is that what you're thinking?

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  That, that's kind of, that's kind of my concern because, because.

• 31:59Saagar Enjeti?

  Basically what's happened already with the weather. I'm sure you, well, no, I'm saying.

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Oh, with the, with the hair dryer, right?

• 32:04Saagar Enjeti?

  Markets, exactly. The hair dryer. I believe they're also, no, this is Polymarket. This is not Calci, which is offering odds on the Odyssey box office, which this is off of a viral tweet. So I could be totally wrong, which I believe, they said is in violation of a specific element of US law. So, you know, that's kind of, that's kind of where things are here in terms of offering commodity markets on box offices.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  I was actually addicted to fantasy movie.

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  Any of my Saagar bets hit, just feel free to just.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Just scream and let Jordy know.

• 32:33Saagar Enjeti?

  I'll mail you the check.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  No, no, I was fully hooked on fantasy movie premieres with a, with a group of friends. So it's like fantasy football, but every week you have to build a, a theoretical theater and you can pick like, I want the Odyssey and then I want obsession and you, and you have a certain budget to allocate. And then based on the box office numbers, you can win or lose. And some people go really deep. There's no money on the line. It was just for fun with friends. And it was, it made me really engaged in what was going on in Hollywood. And I was tracking every movie. And some people build whole like Excel models for it and they go crazy with it. But of course, it's now financialized.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I don't, I don't, I can, I can imagine the argument for why being able to trade your flight being delayed. I can imagine the argument, you know, it's very inconvenient, right? You're going on this vacation. Why not hedge? But at the same time, I don't, I can't imagine how it doesn't end in disaster where you have these sort of global, you have global markets, you could have someone in another country call the, call the local police at a certain place and say like, hey, you know, I'm planning blah, blah, blah. It would just be so easy to create a delay. Not to mention, not to mention all the airport employees that

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  are working these like really, really hard jobs, you know, making probably something close to minimum wage and will just be having the, you know, Saagar Bet in their pocket saying.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, let's see John's steel man this one.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  I gotta steel man this.

• 34:11Saagar Enjeti?

  All right, let's see. Let's do it.

• 34:12John Coogan?

  The, the steel man is, is I don't have good information on, even if I don't want to trade, even if I don't want to participate at all financially. I like the idea of being able to pull up a website that will give me the odds that my flight is delayed and I can make just a rational decision on when I get to the airport. You know, I'm getting there five minutes before, but I could get there 10 minutes after the plane's supposed to leave if there's an expected delay.

• 34:38Saagar Enjeti?

  And why do you need Calci for this exactly? Do you not have the United app?

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  John wants, John wants the largest.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  I feel like the United app lies to me. I feel like it's going to say, oh yeah, it's totally on time. And then I get there and it's going to delay. Whereas.

• 34:51Saagar Enjeti?

  All of this data is public. Like, are you a frequent flyer? Do you not just go on the airport website and look at the departed and the actual time? Like, people have been doing this for a long time, man.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  Does this guy look like a frequent flyer to you?

• 35:03John Coogan?

  I'm not a frequent flyer. But, but I mean, this gets to the, this gets to the, the, the sports betting thing too. Like I, I personally, I personally like to just know who's expected to win the World Cup. And I don't have a problem with that information being pulled into other sources, Google, ChatGPT. I, I like just seeing like a yes or no. I've previously looked up like casino betting lines and it's hard for me to instantly, you know, interpret like, oh, it's plus four or a half. I'm like, I don't know what that means. Just tell me like, what are the odds that the reds, the reds will win the World?

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Bet, everything is just in percentages.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:40Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, that is smart.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat says, what if the, Dan says, what if the pilots and crews got a certain number of shares on no?

• 35:49John Coogan?

  It incentivizes on time performance.

• 35:51Jordi Hays?

  Captain, I don't think we, I don't think we should take off. Like, you know, the, the engine looks like, you know, it's having a little bit of trouble.

• 35:56Saagar Enjeti?

  Is probably just already creating incentivized bonus systems that are already tracked within the airline network. Like, you know, it's like, you don't need Calci or Polymarket to do any of this stuff. You think American Airlines doesn't track all of that and create like incentive based compensation?

• 36:12John Coogan?

  In the future, you won't even buy a ticket. You'll just buy, you'll just buy yes on a contract that someone will fly me from Los Angeles to San Francisco. And so, no, yeah. And then someone will buy the yes, fly me there and then they will collect whatever I deposit.

• 36:29Saagar Enjeti?

  All right, let's, let's zoom back though. Cause the information point is important. And, and you're not wrong. That's actually, that's a genuine utility that I think a lot of casual people have come. I always come back to the systems themselves. So when you talk about sports betting, sure, it's nice necessarily for a casual person like us, but what is that being propped up on? And also what is incentivizing? So first of all, your assumption is that the sports line is indicative of a market. Now, that's not even necessarily true, especially whenever it comes to a sports bet. The line is built in order to hedge what the casino needs plus or minus in terms of the money for how they're going to break even and or profit whenever it comes to that. So remember, it's not the true market for what it is. And the line moves all the time based around the amount of money coming in. Whales

• 37:13Saagar Enjeti?

  can distort the line. So let's just remember that whenever it comes to that. The secondary thing is again, like I don't think that you need Calci, Polymarket, FanDuel or DraftKings to have a general idea of who you think is going to win, especially when all of this is based not just on metrics, but on public opinion, on record. Like for a casual football fan, I could understand the case that you're making. But my, my main point is that, you know, potential benefit does not in any way justify, you know, the immense harm that gambling is doing to the vast majority of Americans. So I get it, you know, whenever it comes to the informational purposes, but sorry, it's just not worth it.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I could in theory go to an AI app of my choice and say, hey, ignore the betting markets. I want to know who's going to win the, the, the World Cup. Go around and just read everything written by every analyst and do your own research and then just come back to me with the summary and put it in a percentage odds for me because that's, I want to know, is it dramatic that France is up right now? And that adds to my experience of watching, even if I have no money on the line. I want to see, I want to know if it's a, if it's a comeback. Interesting.

• 38:27Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. I mean, remember, people watch sports for a long time.

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  So you're advocating, you're advocating to, to leverage advanced artificial intelligence.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  You're saying we need way more data centers.

• 38:38Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, I would not say the president said that today. Did you see it?

• 38:42John Coogan?

  No, I didn't see that. Okay.

• 38:43Saagar Enjeti?

  Oh, yeah, I said it. I texted it to you before I came on. I was like, guys, this is this is bait for for our show. So I can. Can you let me? Can you let me read it to you?

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Please, please. Yeah.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, read it. And feel free to do an impression if you want.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Oh, Trump? He said Trump? He just hit on soccer back?

• 39:01John Coogan?

  We predicted it. Are you gonna share your screen?

• 39:05Saagar Enjeti?

  I wouldn't dare bring any of that to you. Okay, let's see here. So.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  We can have. We can have the team pull it up, too. I just shared it with them, too, so they can pull it up and you can.

• 39:14Saagar Enjeti?

  Sorry, Jess. Sorry. It's the data centers aren't working very well.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  We need more. We need more.

• 39:19Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, yeah. There's plenty in my state. Don't worry.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Politics and poll tracker said President Trump comes out as pro data center and says, New York Governor Kathy Hochul terminated data centers for, quote, political reasons. The quote from Trump in this tweet is, "One of the biggest driving forces in the future of for jobs are data centers. They are big, strong, bold, and money machines capitalized for the state in which they are built." And is there anything else from that post that you think is worth digging into?

• 39:48Saagar Enjeti?

  Well, I thought that the most interesting part of the post is not just his defense of data centers, but is the China piece there at the very end. And that was that's kind of been the more interesting part of the debate that I was curious what you guys thought, because I don't know if you saw that Kevin O'Leary, you know, went on Fox News and he accused the opponents of his data center project in Utah being paid by China. Fox News actually to issue a retraction whenever it came to that claim. And, you know, I've talked a lot here about the populist kind of energy around the anti-data center movement. And and just generally, like, I think this is very obvious that Trump and a lot of the Silicon Valley guys are in his ear with their messaging.

• 40:27Saagar Enjeti?

  They seem to think that this China angle is going to influence, you know, this vast general feeling across the nation of being like, well, hold on a second, you know, there's just enough viral stories around noise, about land use, about, you know, just being really unhappy or like having it shoved down their face. Actually, you know, I was originally going to come here to talk about housing. It's very relevant of whenever it comes to housing because it gets down to locality and state and local control. Some of that's bad, some of that isn't. But, you know, the data center movement is probably like one of the last gasps, really, of like popular NIMBYism. And what I mean by that is, is it's like a popular, you know, most people at this point have turned against NIMBY

• 41:09Saagar Enjeti?

  in terms of the general populace. I think most people would agree we need more housing. It's super complicated when we get down to the local level. But this is one of those last bastions where a large percentage of the public seems really to be against where the president is here on the issue. They don't believe the stuff about the tax revenue. A lot of it comes down to prove it to me. There have been promises. There's a case here, actually, in Virginia, where I live, Data Center Capital of America, where, you know, the data center claimed that they were going to be hooked up to the grid, but then they couldn't for some complicated reason. Their generator whine is creating like an insane decibels around a neighborhood. People there are literally losing it, stapling Plexiglas to their windows so that it's not loud.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've heard a lot of data centers like.

• 41:51Saagar Enjeti?

  It's created a whole crisis.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  Upgrade the energy infrastructure to run more powerful racks. And so the data center that originally got approved might have been at a very reasonable level, but then it gets louder over time. And that's what a lot of people don't like. On the China issue, I think there's a few things. First is that I think I think I agree with you that you can just walk out anywhere into the world and ask a random person on the street, what do you think of data centers? And they're gonna say, I don't like them. And so this is not some like astroturf nonsense. Like, it's very clear that there is a populist movement against data centers. That's very obvious. I believe the polling data. And then also on the on the question of like, will, like, we can't lose the race to China, we need to build them here instead of China, resonate with Americans. Like, I think average Americans like Timu. They like Xi'an. They like cheap stuff from China.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  It's not like people abstractly understand that jobs are important, but they also just are fine with like, yeah, not in my backyard. Like, put it over there.

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think another way to put it is, I would say, ask most everyday people and they would rather lose the AI race to China than lose their own job.

• 42:56Saagar Enjeti?

  Sure, exactly. Thank you. You guys are just taking my words out of my mouth, man. That's exactly the point I was gonna make. They're like, lose the race for what? For me to be unemployed? Yeah. You know, what is interesting, John? Did you see the Journal article?

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm not even. I'm not even saying that. I'm not. I'm not saying that's like the correct view, right?

• 43:13Saagar Enjeti?

  Right.

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  But to be clear, but but I can see exactly why they would totally believe that.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:20Saagar Enjeti?

  Right. And I do think, well, I sent you that Journal article a few weeks back where all these tech CEOs, Sam Altman and others, all of a sudden, they're no longer talking about jobs. Like, Dario and Sam and all that were like, well, we actually really misspoke in terms of the way that we were talking a year ago. You've talked about this too, Jordy, about the the way that this was used as a fundraising mechanism. Whether or not any of that is true, so much of that has now been imbibed by the general public that it is like a rock solid belief. And so, I don't know, I look at the Trump order on the data center, the data center, the Trump truth post on the data center.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  I love how you just assume that since it was on Truth Social, it also was an executive order.

• 44:03Saagar Enjeti?

  I mean, this was an interesting court case. I had to correct myself because I remember years ago, I covered this as a journalist, where Trump said, I am declassifying all documents. And the New York Times used that in court. They're like, well, Trump said it. And the DOJ had to say, well, actually, a tweet does not equal an executive order. So it is not an official presidential announcement, but it is a political judgment. Nonetheless, the China language, whenever it comes to attacking his home state of New York with data centers, it's very obvious to me that somebody like kind of got into his ear here on the issue. And I think it is very compelling. This Trump knows for certain is that the data center capex spent by a lot of these AI companies

• 44:42Saagar Enjeti?

  is literally propping up the entire United States stock market, which they desperately need at a time right now of sky high oil crisis. We're renewing the war with Iran, the oil crisis and all that stuff that's happening. So it is a very interesting marriage. Like, this is one of those marriages where you could see at the beginning with the inauguration of the tech CEOs that flanked Trump, you know, during his swearing in ceremony. But I would not have imagined how, because I knew how much they needed him. What I didn't realize is how much he would need them to save them on tariffs and on oil. Like, if anything, the marriage, like the relationship dynamic has really changed, I think, for Trump with AI recently.

• 45:21John Coogan?

  It felt like they were there for antitrust reasons.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  So one, one thing to jump in on is.

• 45:28Jordi Hays?

  And Tyler and our team just pulled this post up, but he was saying they stopped saying I was gonna AI was gonna take jobs because AI has been creating more jobs. So that is, that is, that is one factor, right? So we know that I like one thing's for sure. We know a lot of big public company CEOs will do a layoff and then say like, we did this because of AI. And we know that they're lying. And then we know that there's a bunch of like new company formation. There's a bunch of new big infrastructure projects happening that are that is because of AI that is creating jobs. So we're like, we know there's a lot of like lying about AI job loss, but there's a lot of truth around AI job creation.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  And so to Sam's credit, he did say like a few days ago, so far at least, I'm pretty sure AI has been net job creating. This was not what I expected, although I was much less pessimistic than others. I thought this level of capability, we'd have seen some impact. It is possible this direction keeps going. So that's like the optimistic.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of these. There's a lot of these soundbites that go out and then either like the reality doesn't match the prediction because the prediction is like 10% chance of a 10% unemployment rate and and and you just hit the 90%. And it's like, oh, like, and then it's like, wait, you lied. And it's like, eh, you were sort of doing this weird prediction that was odd. And then also some of the some of the major quotes that go viral, that the one that I always keep coming back to is that Sam Altman in 2015 said like, AI will lead to the end of the world. And but in the meantime, great companies will get created. So the next sentence in that clip is, and I'm starting a company so that it doesn't go poorly, like, and and and that always.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  Which was OpenAI.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Which is OpenAI. And so, so there are these things where where some of the CEOs will say like, there's a problem and we're identifying it early to work on it. And then when it doesn't happen, people are like, you were, you know, Chicken Little? And it's like, no, I was like Chicken Little, but I also like reinforced the sky along the way. But to some of the job, to some of the job displacement things, like, it is this constant battle of like, is it coming in the future? It's not really showing up yet, but it's a little bit. But here, and there's so many other things going on in the economy, that it's it's very hard to track. But like.

• 47:40Saagar Enjeti?

  I just think it comes down to control. And this is why I always talk about the data center show. I always talk about this here on the show. People feel so out of control in their lives. And, you know, Jordy, whenever you say like, they're lying, it doesn't really matter to the person who lost their job.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  No, I know.

• 47:51Saagar Enjeti?

  It also doesn't matter to their friends, right?

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's, again, to my earlier point, I can, they're just sort of trusting the person that employed them.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  And the things that they're putting out online as a justification for layoffs.

• 48:05Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. And then it gets to the data center issue. It's like, wow, we feel like this is getting plopped down here to do what? So that it could fire me? So I know somebody, my, you know, sister, my cousin or whatever, got fired from this job, and now they just want to build even more of it. And is this stuff really making me happy? Is it making me thriving? Like, that's kind of the interesting point. I think you guys were doing a segment around cars before. I always think about this with technology. You know, I've had two wow moments probably with tech in the last like 20 years. Both were hard tech. First was the iPhone, the iPhone 4. Thank you. The iPhone 4, right? Which is, I will never forget, holding that and just being like, oh, my God, like, this is it.

• 48:45Saagar Enjeti?

  The second was Tesla. It was full self-driving. It was, those are the two, like, holy shit moments that I've had. And I think, you know, look, the Tesla backlash came.

• 48:54Jordi Hays?

  Be honest, you have a bumper sticker on your Tesla that says, I bought this for the autopilot, not because I support Elon Musk.

• 49:02Saagar Enjeti?

  You know, I'm neutral on Elon. I'm just pro.

• 49:04Jordi Hays?

  I support autopilot. I do not support Elon Musk.

• 49:09Saagar Enjeti?

  A lot of my neighbors in Northern Virginia have it. Don't worry. I miss out on it. I do think it's a little different with the Cybertruck. Those people will definitely have to put that one on their bumper sticker around here. But yeah, I mean, those are what I just think about here with the AI is that even to this moment, look, making my job more useful on Excel and all that, cool, I maybe, you know, for some of those spreadsheet jockeys and stuff. But I still think AI is missing that type of product of moment. I know OpenAI wants to come out with the new speaker, the design product. It's kind of interesting. I was looking at it a little bit earlier, but that is part of why with the data centers, with the job loss and the feeling of out of control, especially in the current like modern economy.

• 49:50Saagar Enjeti?

  And John, you know, you've and I've been talking a lot here about housing. I just can't imagine living in San Francisco where the median price is 1.7 million dollars and having been around there for a long time, or even in the general area and be like, what am I getting out of this? Like, it really just feels like so much downward pressure on your ability to, and you just have to claw your way out. It's like these larger forces.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  I do, I do think that I do think in, in, in areas that are not someplace like West Texas that are extremely remote, that have massive amounts of energy that are already super pro business and any areas that aren't like that. I do think the solution is effectively direct payments to local residents because I just don't, I like, people don't believe that, oh, my, you know, my town is going to have more tax revenue. So that's going to benefit me because they're probably already upset with how the town is allocating dollars, right? And I don't believe like a one-time purchase of like a new school bus or a fire truck is like enough, right? It needs to be like, okay, this thing moved into my area and I'm getting a $500 a month, a very tangible benefit. And so.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but top of proposing that.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  I do think there's going to be a lot of these projects that get to a point where they're at kind of a standstill and the developers are going to have to say, hey, like, here's what we're actually going to do. And, and, and a lot of these towns where there's like, not that many people and a data center can generate billions of dollars of, of value. I think that that's like a fair trade.

• 51:21Saagar Enjeti?

  That's an interesting idea. I definitely think it would help because it just solves the tangible question of like, what am I getting out of this? You know what I mean? Currently, I do read some fun stories about like random boomers who live in, you know, areas. I was just reading one today in like Pennsylvania where there are these like 20 people netted like 580 million dollars selling their land.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  A lot of farmland that's underperforming. They sell it.

• 51:43Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, right. Underperforming farmland.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  I'm fascinated by this fact that you didn't, that you don't call out like the passing of the Turing test as a iPhone moment, as a Tesla full self-driving moment.

• 51:55Saagar Enjeti?

  It's done for me.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  It's just fascinating to be able to talk to a computer and have it talk back. It's just interesting, but I do think that you're getting at something, which is that instantiation in the physical world is much more tangible, memorable. You were like, I don't remember where I was the first time I used chat GPT, even though I was impressed by the fact that I could talk.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  What's it done for me? Wow. It's like, it's like you already forget that you were crying laughing. We gave you a belly laugh.

• 52:22Saagar Enjeti?

  That's okay. All right. Thank you.

• 52:23Jordi Hays?

  We built that with one Codex prompt.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  Literally.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  One Codex prompt gave you a belly laugh, right? How many belly laughs? I can count on, I can probably count on, I can probably count on like two hands, how many belly laughs I have a year, right? And we just gave you one and that wouldn't have been possible without.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Universal basic belly laugh is coming soon.

• 52:45Saagar Enjeti?

  All of the, all of the endorphins that you gave me were great, guys, but you didn't drive me 12 hours and that's pretty sweet, you know? I just did a 12-hour road trip. I barely, you know, had to touch the wheel. That's, that is a big fucking deal whenever it comes to, you know, your own life. Same, I mean, I, again, I just come back to the iPhone, like iPhone four, I will literally never forget it. I don't think most people will either. It's part genuinely why it changed the world. So I do think that there's just, there's needs to be that manifestation, like you said, John, in the physical world. What is this doing for me? Jordy, your point about paying people, I actually think is a very good idea, at least because it just shows people like tangibly what I'm getting out of this.

• 53:25Saagar Enjeti?

  It also would make it so that it can prove that it's actually going to make money because that's one of the other, you know, worries, I think, for some of the localities is promised tax revenue is not actual tax revenue in the moment. It's like the stadium thing, right? You're like, wait, I have to shell out X, Y, and Z and give up all this local control and then it's eventually going to come to me in the future, even though there's reams of data, let's say on stadiums and others that doesn't necessarily work out. So you got to put it in the context of these bigger projects in a lot of these localities where people have constantly said, hey, let's do this semi undesirable thing for you and eventually it will work out. I've talked to you guys about the Amazon experience that we had here in Northern Virginia.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  HQ2, right?

• 54:04Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah. They're like, we're going to build it. It's going to be amazing. Dude, the realtors and all that went crazy. They're like, oh, don't worry. Your house is going to be near HQ2. And then HQ2 was like, yeah, no, it's just not happening. And people were like, oh, okay. You know, it's like, that's a very scarring experience, I think, for a lot of people.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. On housing, I want to do a quick tier list of ideas to solve the housing crisis. You can rank them. Tell me how they resonate with you. First would be national permitting reform, fast approvals, much quicker at the national level.

• 54:39Saagar Enjeti?

  Depends what you mean by that. So they kind of just did national permitting reform at the, with the housing bill. It just became law like two days ago. I don't know if you saw that. But that is, I mean, you can actually go and you could plug it into an AI if you want to, and you can even ask, hey, how much is this going to impact national housing? It's like, well, not really, right? Because all it does is it potentially sends more funds to localities, which speed up housing, but not enough to actually make a meaningful difference. For what you're talking about, John, you would need a national permitting reform, which effectively allows, okay, let me explain it this way. You know, police departments where the feds suspect that they're racist, they can come in and just take it over.

• 55:18Saagar Enjeti?

  This is value neutral, it's my judgment. I'm saying it exists, a consent degree. That's basically what you would need. You would need like X amount units were not approved. The Department of, let's say Housing and Urban Development, whatever, can come in, look at your books and be like, yeah, this is not happening because zoning reform at the local level is the single biggest impediment to actually building more housing. And this is where the trust issue comes for me. You have to make it so that it's actually housing people want. Like one of the biggest beefs with YIMBs is a lot of them are childless and they just want to live like in a downtown area for $1,800 a month.

• 55:57Saagar Enjeti?

  And I'm like, yeah, you know, if you have kids, that's not really what you want, right? I've talked to you about Levittown. One of my favorite books of all time, it's the Oxford History of the United States. It's called Great Expectations. It's about 1945 to the 1970s. Man, you got to study the suburbanization of America and the ingenuity for building these Levittowns, these suburban, highly packed together, single-family residences, 1,500, 2,000 square feet. You have sidewalks. They became family hubs, like for being able to walk different places. No garage in some cases. We have carports. Like it was cheap and it was not like McMansion living.

• 56:36Saagar Enjeti?

  That would literally be impossible today, even if you wanted to build it. And you know, what the testament to that is those original Levittowns now go for like 700,000 bucks. Like they are not at starter home levels and you couldn't even buy it because a lot of the way that the localities in the places, even though they were built, the lots and other things are zoned so that you couldn't even build a house that small today.

• 56:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I was looking, I was looking at, um, around where I live, there's a, there's some very lovely trailer parks, right? And I was like, this seemed, and, and I was like, oh, why aren't we building more trailer parks? And so I just, I went to, you know, my favorite AI chat app and I started having a conversation and very quickly figured out that like trying to create a new trailer park anywhere, like close to anywhere you'd actually want to live is just like so incredibly hard.

• 57:31Saagar Enjeti?

  It's impossible.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  And it does feel like that is the way that you get like a two-bedroom, two-bathroom for, you know, how do, how do you make a two-bedroom, two-bathroom that, that, you know, where like the actual up cost to create the unit is like a hundred thousand dollars.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  In a factory.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, you need, you have like some, some small fee that you're paying every month, you know, for amenities or whatever it is. And it just like, that to me feels like, you know, I've seen some of these communities where they're like incredible, they're safe, like families love them. Again, you're, there's trade-offs. You don't have the massive garage and, you know, all the square footage, but like totally livable for a young family. And I know plenty of families that could basically buy any house they want in LA and they spend like half the year living in, you know, a, a trailer park, right? Just because it's like very enjoyable. So I do think that that's the solution and I would hope that there's some way.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  To, you know, 100x the approval rate of even new communities like that.

• 58:34Saagar Enjeti?

  Exactly.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Just to get people into a space so they feel like.

• 58:37Saagar Enjeti?

  Yeah, you're talking about the lowest of the low level, like in terms of entry point. I'm not against that at all. I want to build this stuff everywhere, not just trailer parks. Like, I want to build these Levittown-style houses, but this is the market dynamic, John. I do have to go in a few minutes if that's okay. But John, one thing that I do want to emphasize is this is where the feds guaranteeing some of the fees and other things that the developers have to pay is really important. This is what I learned from that book, is that we were heavily subsidizing a lot of those initial fees, which drive up a lot of the cost, the approval, and it creates the market incentive for the developer. Right now, a lot of the developers, when they do build these new housing units, they need to make profit. So that means they're going to build within the existing zoning structure and for the customer,

• 59:19Saagar Enjeti?

  usually a boomer or a very, very rich person, who can afford to buy at a high and a premium level, which means that the so-called starter home is now part of this very limited amount of housing stock, and that's what prices it. You know, here in Northern Virginia, those 1960s ranchers, which are, I mean, they're not big, 2,500 square feet, something like that, they are going for $1 million. In a good school district, $1 million, right? So $1 million for a 1960s barely renovated rancher. This is the story, I think, across the entire nation.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and with interest rates where they are, you need like $400,000 of combined family income to afford it.

• 59:57Saagar Enjeti?

  Bingo. Yeah, 400 grand income, or you need to have a VA loan or something like that. Otherwise, you're cooked. It's not happening.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, we'll solve it on the next appearance. Thank you so much.

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Here's an idea I want you to sit with, I want you to sit with before you leave. Saagar's razor is the idea that any, any, any sort of positive impact of prediction markets can be delivered with powerful AI.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Saagar's razor.

• 1:00:27Saagar Enjeti?

  Saagar's razor. Seriously, thank you for the bet thing. It made me, I can't wait to show my wife. It's so funny. It is so funny.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  We'll send you the link.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate the time.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Hopefully you don't spend all night staying up playing it. It can be addictive. It can be addictive, these things.

• 1:00:46Saagar Enjeti?

  It is addictive.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised if you get sucked into it.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  All right, we'll see you later.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases, and more. Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Saagar always gets the people going in the chat. But we, we really enjoy these conversations, and I think it's, I think it's super important to have conversations with people that are outside of our little beautiful technology bubble.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Well, we have our next guest joining in just a few minutes. There is, there are a few posts in the timeline that we can run through. A quick news hit, we talked about Paramount yesterday and the potential that David Ellison would be taking Paramount outside of California as a response to Attorney General Rob Bonta potentially blocking the Warner Brothers Discovery and Paramount deal. Now Tennessee is courting Paramount, and the studio is allegedly considering it, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Just wanted to give everyone a quick update there.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Italy's oldest dairy taps new way to borrow against cheese.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  This is huge.

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  An Italian dairy just raised 10 million euros by securitizing wheels of aging cheese through an SPV.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  The cheese SPV is great.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Private credit is reportedly circling the structure next.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  I would love for a cheese bubble. Who knows? Maybe keep it in the fondue.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  I want, I want some exposure.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, get in on it while you can. Well, our next guest is from Athon Fund. George is in the waiting room. Let's bring in the founder and CEO. He's launching an AI-powered hedge fund. George, how you doing?

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  I'm great. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Please introduce yourself for everyone who's watching.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  So I've been in investing for a long time. I started in value investing when I was 17. I actually taught myself accounting to get that, that job. I lost a little faith in, you know, the fundamentals, you know, things like price to earnings ratio as I kind of saw some holes appear, got a lot more interested in AI, and actually was able to parlay a novel mortgage algorithm that I put together, actually in Excel at that time, into an AI company. That was interesting for a while, but in 2019, I started a company called Prospero AI, because I thought that data was going to be a lot more valuable than models in the long term and just, you know, technology overall. And, you know, we kind of had a couple approaches to that.

• 1:03:33Speaker 05

  One is we focused on compression, so basically complexity in the backend, simplicity in the front and the user interface. And then we were pressure testing those, you know, signals, looking at edge cases with the public, which I think is one of the best ways to do that, especially because not a lot of hedge funds get to have that kind of testing. As we evolved that, we also saw some very interesting data, and this is part of our thesis, where the more trust we have from the public, the more, you know, follow-on and kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy gets created. And a lot of that was the thought behind what we started with Athon recently. And we're basically taking these signal libraries from Prospero,

• 1:04:16Speaker 05

  we're expanding into like my R and D backlog that, you know, a startup wasn't able to dip into as much. And then we essentially feed it into, you know, some of the world's best LLMs. We create thousands of strategies with that. And then from those strategies, we figure out intelligent ways to, you know, combine them to work in many different markets, to opportunistically allocate amongst them. That's what Athon is. We have a lot of excitement behind like the risk and reward combination that that creates, and obviously have a big launch for a fund.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  So, so fund is already closed, you're deploying it already, like where, where are you at in the process?

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  So we have an agreement with the, you know, the fund to funds that we're dealing with. We have, you know, some traditional LP capital as well. We expect to actually launch in August, September at the latest.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  What, what data sources are being unlocked this year that were previously either too expensive, too manual? You know, we've heard, everyone tells the story of like the hedge fund that's looking at Walmart parking lots with satellites to determine if they're going to beat earnings. But what are the interesting sources of data that you're seeing pop up around the industry these days?

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, I think a lot of that's exhausted. Like, I've been talking about real-time credit card swipes, camera data, satellite images, you know, for a long time. I mean, I think some of the interesting ones that I'm starting to hear are coming from like the medical field. I think a lot more people are starting to use interesting data sets there. But I, I think most of the interesting things going on are in this, you know, signal compression. Like, one of the smartest guys I know on Wall Street is starting a firm that is focused on like data containerization. And I think that's a really good way to look at basically all of these alternative data sets, mostly established, giving people kind of intelligent access to them

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  that's kind of minimizing their training costs while also getting a broad exploration of the data.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  What, what does data containerization mean exactly?

• 1:06:31Speaker 05

  I believe it's, you know, it's like a new term that, you know, his Carbon Ark is the firm that, you know, I've heard from them, but I happen to think they're very sharp. I've been on a panel with Kirk who runs it, you know, essentially taking, you know, the same concept as, you know, dividing up compute, but basically packaging data sets in these smaller components, not like accessing a huge credit database, accessing it in only the ways that are relevant to the, you know, that current training iteration, for example.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Cool. Where do you want the fund to go? Where do you want the firm to go? Do you imagine adopting multiple strategies, going into other asset classes? How do you see this growing over the next decade?

• 1:07:14Speaker 05

  Certainly, I think we want to go into a lot more asset classes as we grow. You know, the way we kind of look at this is, you know, we will test strategies within our existing signal libraries, then we expand our signal libraries, and some of that will be chasing down, you know, different asset classes, different arbitrage opportunities, you know, even similar asset classes in different countries. Then we kind of feed that into, you know, the broader system and do kind of the data compression thing that we're really good at, and then say, hey, we might start mixing and matching a lot of these different strategies in kind of these larger waterfalls, and then, you know, amongst these different waterfalls, combinations of, you know, strategy, opportunistic strategy allocations,

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  we might then say, hey, divide the capital we have between 10 of them, 20 of them, and just become more and more distributed.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and breaking it down.

• 1:08:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good to meet you.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Have a good one. 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 our next guest is with us from Emergent with a huge, huge Series C. Let's bring in the friend. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

  Hi, John. Hi, Jordy. I'm doing great. How are you?

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Give us a quick introduction, reintroduction to the company, and tell us the news.

• 1:08:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm so excited to be here. So Emergent is an AI platform that allows non-technical business owners build and deploy production-grade applications. And we are increasingly becoming an operating system for small and medium businesses to become more AI-native. We just recently announced $130 million Series C round at 1.5 billion valuation.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Fantastic.

• 1:09:11John Coogan?

  There's right now, I mean, it feels like obviously there's a ton of knowledge retrieval that's happening and with AI in enterprises and businesses. There's also agentic workflows that once they are established, they are running in, they're doing inference, but they're doing that 24/7, even while the workers are asleep. And then there's the different work, which is helping you build new deterministic systems, whether that's vibe coding, agentic engineering, context engineering, all of that. What has been the bigger driver more recently? Has it been coming in, understanding a manual workflow for a company, building a AI-powered

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  system that can do that on repeat forever, and then moving on to the next problem? Or has it just been enabling business users and engineers to constantly work with AI and build new systems iteratively?

• 1:10:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, so for us, like, most of our users are non-technical. Almost 80% of our users are non-technical. And these are business operators, you know, who are running small and medium businesses across the globe. And we are a platform where they can come in and in national language, describe what they want to build, both agents and applications. And we have, you know, people who are building custom CRMs, ERPs, inventory management tools. A lot of the business critical tools that they're building right now is getting deployed, you know, on emergent. And the power is that most of these people understand their business really well. They understand the domain, they understand the problems that they're trying to solve, but haven't had access to technology teams or depth shops, quality depth shops, to sort of really build these software. And because we are able to bring the cost down dramatically for them, like, they're

• 1:10:50Speaker 06

  able to experiment and, you know, really accelerate their business today.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Where are you, where are you finding customers? You're at over 100 million of ARR, 200,000 customers. Where are they all coming from?

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we are actually fairly well distributed right now. One-third of our revenue comes from North America, one-third from Europe, one-third from Asia. And, you know, most of these users are essentially, you know, non-technical business owners right now. And there is a huge variety of, you know, breadth of users coming, you know, from, from people who are running hospitals, to people who are running factories, to, you know, people who are running travel agencies, all of them coming in, building their own, sort of, you know, production-grade software.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Where's the, where's the sweet spot right now for AI adoption in your customer base? Because when I hear, you know, custom CRM system, I'm, I think, small business that is sort of starting for, starting fresh, like, at TBP, and we have, you know, 10 employees, and we have built a whole bunch of custom internal systems, but if we were a 1,000-person company, or a 10,000-person company, it's a much different conversation, even as powerful as the tools are to rip out a sales force. And that's certainly not showing up with the, the lack of the SaaS apocalypse that didn't really materialize in revenue declines for the SaaS companies.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  And so, am I, am I correct in thinking that, like, the smaller, more agile, smaller businesses are potentially more ready to adopt custom tooling that's built from AI agents like your own?

• 1:12:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally, totally. I mean, the users that are coming to our platform are traditionally businesses that have been running on top of emails, WhatsApp, spreadsheets.

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  And now they're trying to digitize themselves. Many of them are actually new entrepreneurs who, you know, understand their domain really well, have a new idea that they want to build. And essentially, a lot of these, you know, small businesses, I mean, I believe that they're gonna just skip the SaaS cycle and move to the AI cycle directly. And that's what we are seeing right now. A lot of these, you know, businesses have a lot of excitement, and they understand their domain really well, and they're able to relate with the problems that they're solving. And, and they come in on the platform, you know, try to build something simple, like a landing page first, and then they sort of go on to building more complex use cases on the platform.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. From your work in Asia, do you have any insight? We, we have always heard this stat that, like, 90% of Americans don't like AI. In China, it's reversed, 90% love AI. Do you have any insight into what the mood, the hot topics of conversation are in India or other, or other parts of Asia, outside of just the US-China dynamic?

• 1:13:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of excitement in India across, you know, on the board for AI. And I think, you know, adoption is increasing at a very, very fast pace right now. And, you know, I think we recently had this AI summit also in India, you know, last year. That brought a lot of excitement. And generally, I think, you know, like, everybody is super excited about, you know, using these tools, you know, and we also have, like, a large developer base. So Codex, Cloud Code, all of those things are really popular, and, you know, people are finding new ways to use AI to sort of accelerate their businesses today.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. What about employment? There was, I remember listening to sort of an AI doomer who was talking about the risk that AI would create mass unemployment internationally, because some of the outsourced BPOs or call center work would be displaced immediately. I've been tracking those employment numbers, and I haven't seen a massive falloff, but do you have any insight into what's happening in the international labor markets?

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  And right now, I think, at least for a short period of time, like, I feel, and that's what we are seeing also, that employment is gonna go up, because, you know, like, you know, especially like in, in domains like software and a bunch of those things, where, you know, as software is becoming cheaper and cheaper to build, I think, you know, like, the demand and the need for software is actually accelerating. So we are seeing, you know, jobs actually increase, but, but, you know, as we get closer and AI has become more powerful, you know, like, trends will change.

• 1:14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are you hearing from your customers on demand for closed-source frontier expensive tokens versus laggard models versus open-source models? Like, how quickly? Do you abstract all of that cost consideration? Or do you have opinionated users that say, "I want to use a 5.6 Soul or a Fable, because I heard something about that abstractly, but I want to use it within your harness and within your product"?

• 1:15:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so typically, we, we actually abstract those things out. And, and, you know, we have a model router which figures out, depending on your request, what is the best model to use. Even during the execution, we would switch to open source or, you know, some of the cheaper models, if you see the task is relatively cheap to do. And, in fact, like, you know, as, you know, all the labs are pushing out on this test time compute.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 06

  The actual cost of building is actually going up, even though token prices are in the same. And, and often time, we see that, you know, like, there is, there is a sweet spot of affordability and, and price and value, right, that we're trying to keep.

• 1:15:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  And increasingly, we're seeing that, you know, like, now that frontier models are getting really, really good.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Speaker 06

  And open source is getting really good. This mixture approach is what, what is working really well for us.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's fascinating, just being in this era where, for the first time in my life, certainly, like, technology has a marginal cost. And we're, we're all talking like, like railroad barons now, or, or manufacturing, you know, it's, it's just so different from the world of zero marginal cost.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is just, just how many companies doing functionally the same thing can all be growing so quickly, right? Like, certainly, you have a lot of competitors from, from, from labs to Lovable, Reblitz, all these companies, and yet you're all, they're all doing really, really well.

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  They're fantastic businesses.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's cool to see.

• 1:16:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there's a huge amount of latent demand in the market right now. Like, as people, you know, really discover the power to build things. And, and eventually, we think that product that is able to deliver, you know, final outcome to the users is eventually gonna win. And, and I, I think that's where we are, we are doing really good.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing. Well, congratulations.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Great update. Congrats to the whole team.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming back to the show.

• 1:17:08Speaker 06

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We also have some amazing breaking news. The all-time record has been hit for a dinosaur sold at auction. Sotheby's just sold Gus, the T-Rex, for $50.1 million.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  Finally. A quarry of dinosaurs. Someone's doing the math. 183 bones going into this T-Rex. That's $273,000 per bone.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  Interesting that the sum is greater than its parts in this case.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  This is truly an incredible example.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  I do wonder.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Imagine having this in the UltraDome.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like many, yes, I agree. I feel like many dinosaur skeletons are often found with some bones missing and so they have to recreate some of those. I wonder, this is probably an extremely complete example, but I wonder how many, how complete it actually is relative to what's possible, like the theoretical max.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  In other news, last year, just 20% of adults accounted for more than 80% of all books read.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  And this account says, wow, 20% accounted for 80%, an unprecedented and unique dynamic.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  I mean, there are people that just churn through books and I mean, if you count the number of books that you read to a small child, it's like four or five books a day, right? You're putting up like five books a day, right?

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  You're right. More like 10, 15, 10, 5.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, something like that?

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Pretty good, pretty good. You add that up, you're probably, do they count parents reading children's books in this stat? Because that changes everything. Because a parent will honestly read thousands of books. Cat in the Hat might get read 100, 200 times in a single year. That's gonna throw off statistics.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  I'll read the same book every night for sometimes weeks straight.

• 1:19:14John Coogan?

  Months. Yes, I know. We've all been there. Anyway, moving on.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news from McGov, Thinking Machines just launched a new model and it's open weight. It's called Inkling.

• 1:19:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Inkling reasons efficiently across text, image and audio modalities. We are making the full weights available.

• 1:19:33John Coogan?

  Fun. On Hugging Face, probably. Well, we'll have to go check it out, see how it benchmarks, see how it reviews, see if it can do our benchmarks, our internal tests, see how it stacks up. But up next, we have Russ Tedrake, co-founder and CEO of Walden Robotics, joining us for the first time with an exciting launch. How are you doing, Russ? Welcome to the show.

• 1:19:57Speaker 07

  I'm well. How are you?

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time on a big day. Please introduce yourself a little bit, the company, and then we can go into the news.

• 1:20:06Speaker 07

  Awesome. Yeah, so I'm Russ. I've been a professor at MIT for about 21 years.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:20:12Speaker 07

  10 years ago, Toyota started a lab right next to MIT and right next to Stanford. So I helped, I was the SVP of Robotics and then Large Behavior Models at TRI. And now I guess I do podcasts right after Gus the T-Rex, you know?

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  You made it.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Tough act to follow, tough act to follow.

• 1:20:33Speaker 07

  So, okay, let me tell you about Walden. So Walden just came out of stealth today. Super excited about it. We're deploying general purpose robots, you know, powered by physical AI. They are, we are super focused on manufacturing, super focused on deployments. I think the next great lessons for physical AI, they happen in the field. You know, we have to deploy these robots, figure out how to mesh them with the manufacturing processes that are already fantastic.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you're out of stealth now, so your competitors are gonna be picking over your launch video and any podcasts that you do, trying to figure out how you're thinking differently. How, how, how do you think differently about these use cases versus maybe some of the other companies in, in the category so far?

• 1:21:20Speaker 07

  There are a lot of robotics companies now, right? I mean, it's actually awesome. It's probably exhausting for you guys, you know, but.

• 1:21:25Jordi Hays?

  We love, we love, any, anything but another CRM, maybe. Not to pick on the CRM founders of which we love.

• 1:21:37Speaker 07

  Okay, but there are a few things that are finite in the world. I think one of them actually is the number of big strategics that can really take this the distance. So one of the things that's just very different about us is that we've got a huge relationship with Toyota. And now we're building new relationships with, if you've seen the announcement, we have, we're working with Boeing, with Samsung, the Logos. We've got an incredible team of that, you know, kind of the, the best you could possibly ask for in terms of advancing manufacturing.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  You know, and then. So, and, and then, and then why, why is a partnership like that so exciting in this category? So using the CRM example, if the founder came on and said like, we're partnered with this big company, and you'd be like, okay, well, like, what's the most they could possibly spend on CRM? And it would be like, maybe it's like $5, $5 million a year, $10 million.

• 1:22:26Speaker 07

  Oh, it's not that.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  But, but for you, I could imagine Toyota spending effectively like billions of dollars a year on robotics over time. Is that why, starting with.

• 1:22:37Speaker 07

  It's not the capital. I mean, the capital's flowing. I mean, you have to be able to move capital to be successful, but that's, that's table stakes, I think. So, robots are hard, right? It's gonna take a long time. And you have to think about not just building the cork technology, you have to think about manufacturing it at scale. You need to think about distribution, you know, marketing, insurance. How do you repair them, you know, in, in locations all over the world? So if you look across like all industries on what kind of a partner would you want for this? I think the automakers are in a really good shape, you know, for, for putting out things of this complexity at scale, you know, having

• 1:23:18Speaker 07

  a dealership in every town. I think there's a lot of reasons to really like the automakers as a, as a real leverage point on this.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Do you have an idea of the scale of robotics deployments currently in the auto industry? Obviously, you're very close to Toyota, but you know, even 20 years ago, we all saw, you know, the, the, you know, the robotic arm putting the windshield on the car, moving the heavy frame. So it's not like there's never been a robot in an auto plant. The question is just, what is the next step? I think there's some companies that are betting on going straight shot to humanoids. I think you're taking a more iterative approach. But what does the walk, crawl, run of building a car with a robot actually look like?

• 1:24:03Speaker 07

  Okay, so it's really important to start by acknowledging that there are a ton of robots in factories already, right? So welding, painting, you know, there's places where big robots have been extremely successful for decades. We're also seeing cobots all over the place, AMRs all over the case, autonomous mobile robots all over the case. This is like really successful. But there are still a bunch of tasks that are fundamentally hard to automate. Sometimes impossible, sometimes just too expensive, right? They're, they're kind of one offs, or we run one robot to do multiple tasks. There is a disruptive technology from physical AI. And the fundamental question is like, how is this gonna change the way we think about manufacturing? And it's not just, here's one job that we couldn't automate

• 1:24:48Speaker 07

  before. This isn't completely gonna change the equation for how we think about production. It's gonna make a data-enabled factory. It's going to change variability in manufacturing process in a way that could like really change the fundamental production systems. So we're trying to introduce this core technology of general purpose robots.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Speaker 07

  And then, I've heard you guys ask before about sort of the special purpose versus the general purpose. I do think there's another future of those robots specializing into more narrow applications and getting, you know, something that's really task-specific. But I think there's a time right now where the generalists will come in and do a lot of the tasks that have been hard to automate. We'll get the data, we'll bring this new capability, and then there'll be a second round of automation where you go in and the tasks that are worth special purpose, you know, they're, they're valuable enough for a special purpose robot, then you'll go in and you'll optimize, you'll make your, you know, your special purpose robot for those tasks.

• 1:25:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, the robot, the general purpose robot would hopefully make a special purpose robot.

• 1:25:51Speaker 07

  That's of course right. You actually, robots are building robots.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was, I'm assuming over the last 20 years, you had a million opportunities, a million VCs that said, hey, why don't you spin out and build a robotics company? What made you maybe pass then and, and do it now?

• 1:26:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I've been watching the, the capabilities mature. We were at Toyota Research, we were actually some of the core innovators on some of the algorithms that really kind of, you know, started this boom in physical AI, watched them get better and better. But a lot of things had to align. So I mean, certainly the capital started flowing, the amount of talent coming into the space is flowing. I think the awareness from the customer's perspective of what is gonna have to happen and just the readiness there. And I've watched a lot of people think about the different business models and sort of explore things. And I took the time to really, really think hard about that. And, you know, what is the business model that I really believe in? That's gonna make the unit economics work,

• 1:26:49Speaker 07

  that's gonna make a durable business. And all of those things have aligned, including backing from, from Toyota and other core strategics. And this is the moment.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Does the business model actually matter that much? Because we've talked to people who are saying, I'm gonna build a robot and sell it. It's gonna be very expensive. Others say, we're going to, you know, finance it, it's gonna be a subscription plan, we're gonna sell the work. At the same time, yes, to a, to a manufacturer who's buying a robot, a million dollar purchase can be expensive, but they have access to debt lines. They can finance these things on their side. And so when you say business model, is this just financial innovation sliding around the payments plan? Or is there more to it than that?

• 1:27:34Speaker 07

  No, no, I think. I mean, the hardware cost is expensive. The AI training costs are expensive when you, until you amortize it across a large fleet.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 07

  So, everything is kind of painful and expensive in the, in the, in the sort of small quantities. That's actually one of the reasons why we focused on manufacturing. I think you want to find tasks that are super high utilization, right? You want the robot to be running three shifts if you can, right?

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:58Speaker 07

  Um, you want to, all, all week long, right? You want to find places where there's a high, um, value of the, of the work that's being done. And there's a really good match for that in manufacturing. And then, as the economics play out, the unit economics become very favorable because you're training a model once and deploying it across a huge fleet and all, all the things sort of improve with scale. The bomb cost of the robot goes down. But, how do you get there from here, right? I think you have to be thoughtful to make a business that can actually make money.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Is the recent story of the, the most recent robotics boom driven more by non-deterministic software, generative AI unlocking the ability to do more with the physical designs that we have? Or, or is there also an acceleration in the power and efficiency and capability of motors and actuators and robotic arms and the actual hardware side of the business? Because it feels like the really unique thing that everyone's like drawn to every moment is the, the software side, the, the generative AI, the ability to deal with, uh, never before seen scenarios.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's, and it's everyday people or people, every person in the tech industry having like a magical moment.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  With an AI model in the workplace and just thinking like, wow, this seems a lot more possible now to do something in the physical world.

• 1:29:21Speaker 07

  I mean, there's no question that the AI was the unlock. And it's, it's not, it's not just like making an MCP and, and entry point for your existing robot API. It's actually that we've dug down deep into the stack and used generative models to, to command robot low-level behaviors in ways that make them much more dexterous. Because that's no question that that is the big thing. But along the way, the hardware has gotten so much better. And it's not just pointing to one actuator. Of course, there, we've had improvements in actuators, uh, and batteries and all the others, but it's the entire supply chain. Like, the whole ecosystem has, has put us in a position where you can start a robotics company. We've got a robot that we've built, you know, we started the company in January.

• 1:30:01Speaker 07

  We've got a brand new robot that was a twinkle in my hardware lead's eye in January and now it's, you know, it's, it's.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Seems like he's walking around behind you.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Rolling around behind you.

• 1:30:11Speaker 07

  We have so many robots running around.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  The frosted glass is a real tease, I gotta say. You gotta get a clear glass next time. Or at least electrochromatic so you can turn it off, uh, when you're on an interview. But it's exciting progress.

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  How much, uh, how much did you raise?

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Tell us.

• 1:30:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, 300 million. And that's the number we wanted, yeah.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:30:30Speaker 07

  I'd get gone for that, awesome.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  And thank you for coming on the show and bringing it down for us.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  So great to meet you.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic rest of your day.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  See you again soon.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the launch and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 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 is former Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who is joining Red Cell Partners as partner and chairman. We're very honored to have him join us today. How are you doing Glenn? Welcome to the show.

• 1:31:05Speaker 08

  I'm doing great, guys. Thanks for having me. Love your show and it's just a thrill to be here. I, I mean, to have a chance to talk about tech as opposed to politics, I'm all in.

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  I, I, it's, it's very funny. I was reading Wikipedia.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Every day is our lucky day.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  And I was like, okay, I gotta skip all this politics stuff, get to the Carlisle era. I want to talk about Carlisle. I want to talk about your, your journey. But first, just get us up to speed on what's happening today. Red Cell Partners, how you met Grant, the story there, what you're hoping to achieve.

• 1:31:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, first of all, I've known, uh, Grant for standing for a while.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:37Speaker 08

  And just admired the work he's doing. Listen, he's built an awesome firm at Red Cell that is really trans, it's, it's, it's really transforming the way venture capital works where the actual founders are part of Red Cell and they bring scaling capital and operating support in order to incubate and then grow businesses internally. Uh, and then they help them find customers and what's really neat is it's kind of a different kind of entrepreneur. I mean, their basic view is that there may be entrepreneurs that think about the best technology, but guess what? Uh, you know, a, a case officer at the CIA has got a problem that he or she's trying to solve. She might actually, or he might be the right CEO and let's bring the right technology

• 1:32:21Speaker 08

  to go solve that problem for him.

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Speaker 08

  And that's the whole approach. And as a result, they have cranked out some awesome companies that are doing crazy neat things. Everything from trace, which is the governance layer that sits on top of your AI platform that really manages your agents, you know, who comes in, who goes out? You get an audit of who's there. So in the healthcare world and the national security world that are heavily regulated, it's the kind of capability that you need. They just closed a, uh, just under 110 million dollar round for that business. It's growing like crazy. They've done some cool hardware, which is really addressing data center power needs. Guess what? Data centers swallow a ton of power.

• 1:33:05Speaker 08

  And if you can find a way, both at the semiconductor level and at the operations level to conserve power, you can absolutely do that. That's what Clarus does. Uh, Hunted Labs is really cool. It actually finds nefarious third parties and open architecture AI applications. And they, they, they find bad Russian guys who are making their way in stuff that they shouldn't have access to. But this is the kind of stuff that Red Cell's doing. And I have to say, you know, coming out of my most recent job as governor where we just grew the state like crazy and we're bringing businesses in.

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Speaker 08

  Uh, to be able to partner with guys who have big ideas and big ambitions, it's really awesome.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Uh, is there, uh, how, how, how, how hard are the edges around the thesis of the fund? Uh, because there's many funds that are, they're heavily thesis driven. Some others are just like the right entrepreneur at the right time, might be going into a weird market, might be going into something that doesn't even seem like that big of a business, but years later you find out that it's, that it becomes a monster. So, uh, how are you thinking about the balance between being thesis driven, value add, and just backing, you know, extraordinary entrepreneurs who maybe have a vision of the future that even you can't quite clearly see?

• 1:34:23Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, one of my big learnings at 25 years at Carlisle is it's all about the leader. It's all about the visionary. And sometimes visionaries want to take you a place that maybe not everybody understands, but listen, you're really happy you got on the train with them when they got there. And so there is a real balance here to make sure that you're not being, you know, overly dogmatic about what you're gonna back and what you're not. In fact, you know, Red Cell's got, uh, a particular, uh, investment right now that they're incubating that's really focused on, on the elderly healthcare market. It's a place that really isn't attracting a lot of attention right now, uh, because folks are worried about it.

• 1:35:04Speaker 08

  But let me tell you, it's gonna be a big hit because that's a giant market. And so oftentimes, you know, running where everybody else is going isn't really the place to be. And what I found during my 25 years at Carlisle, both as an incredibly active investor, but also when I had the great privilege of being co-CEO, is you gotta back people.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 08

  And that's what it's all about. It is, it is great talent. And when you find great talent, oftentimes the right thing to do is to let them run.

• 1:35:34John Coogan?

  Can you actually take us back in time? I believe you joined Carlisle in 1995. What was the core thesis of the firm? How much infrastructure was there? I know you were, uh, you know, incredibly involved in building Carlisle as a business as well as doing deals, but, uh, what was the first day on the job like? What were the first couple of years like? How was the firm evolving in the mid 90s?

• 1:36:00Speaker 08

  Well, you guys have started and grown businesses and so you know that there's always the moment in time where you wish it was further along than it was. When I joined Carlisle, they had already had some real big successes and, and David Rubenstein, Bill Conway and Dan Daniele had already demonstrated that they were extraordinary investors and were building, building a great business. But it was still, you know, very much the entrepreneurial environment. And I'll never forget, the first day I got there, first of all, I didn't have a phone, uh, I didn't have a computer and, and David Rubenstein went running by my office. I've been there for about an hour and he said, don't worry, we're gonna raise some money. It's gonna be okay. And I sat there and I said, wait a minute, wait a minute.

• 1:36:44Speaker 08

  You didn't tell that to me when you were recruiting me. So, you know, this, that's the, that is the awesome part about these fast-growing, uh, energy-filled environments, which are, it's all about getting it done. And, and that pulls people in who want to go 24/7, who want to change the world, who want to do something that hadn't been done before. And it's the exact same energy that Red Cell has now.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Speaker 08

  I mean, literally you sit in their, in their big, big, big conference room and they bring a bunch of their CEOs in and investment professionals and, and a lot of their advisors. And it is, it is just racing at breakneck speed to keep up with the ideas on how to grow. How can they bring a technological solution that's at one of their portfolio companies to aid another one? Or a great technology that sits inside one of the portfolio companies that's not being really commercialized in the right way? And can you spin it out and actually, actually drive capital and opportunity? So, that is so exciting to me. I have to say, when, when I was governor, I had this awesome group of people around me who came to grow Virginia and we had this same environment.

• 1:37:54Speaker 08

  All right, what can we do to actually put a rocket fuel on the back of this great opportunity? And, uh, and that's what I'm hoping we get a chance to do a lot more of at Red Cell.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Can you take me through, uh, the story of the Kinder Morgan transaction? What that was like, what that meant to you in your career at that moment, what it did for Carlisle?

• 1:38:13Speaker 08

  Yeah, so for those of you who don't know, Kinder Morgan was at the time one of, if not the largest take private in business. It was enormous. And it was, for me, an opportunity to lead it for the Carlyle team, kind of a breakout opportunity as a professional. But the coolest thing about it was Rich Kinder, who was the chairman and CEO at the time, and the majority shareholder, was just an extraordinary leader to work with. I mean, I kept a notebook of just great management and leadership lessons from being able to sit at the table with Rich Kinder during that entire transaction about how do you

• 1:38:57Speaker 08

  serve customers, how do you grow talent, how do you think about expanding and opening up brand-new markets where you might not have had a footprint, but there's a real opportunity. And for me, at that stage in my career, it was an absolutely transformative opportunity. By the way, it was a great deal, too. All the investors did it very, very well. And I look back on that, and I will tell you that one of the great, great business builders of all time was Rich Kinder.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  What did you learn from international expansion throughout your career at Carlyle?

• 1:39:30Speaker 08

  Well, it was also, I think, one of the great opportunities for a young guy. When I was 33, I had a chance to go over and run our London office, and I had Middle East, North Africa, Russia. I had some really new territories that I'd never been to before. And at that stage of your career, you've, one, got to make sure you have good mentors to talk to to say, hey, wait a minute, I'm getting ready to go to Moscow for the first time, what should I be aware of? All the way to, listen, we've got this investment opportunity, and I'm not sure I've seen one like this before. Where do I go in order

• 1:40:13Speaker 08

  to get input? But I have to say, one of the things that I loved about Carlyle for every day of the 25 years I was there, which was David, Bill, and Dan believed in growth. And they believed that they could take young people and put them in search situations that they might not have been in before and stretch them. And I got to tell you, that's why I was there for 25 years. I loved every minute of it, and every day was exciting. And international growth is one of those places where, if you do it well, you can have tremendous success. But let me tell you, if you do it poorly, it can really wipe out a great business.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the focus, or like the key unlock? Is it hiring-driven? Is it bringing over the right people from the existing team, educating them, getting them up to speed, hiring from the local market? Take me a click deeper on that.

• 1:41:05Speaker 08

  Well, the answer is all of the above. And you hit it right on the nose. So you first have to have people who are, I'm going to call it geographic experts, but subject matter experts. How do we perform in a new geography, in a new culture, most likely in a place where English is not the primary language, and how do we do really well? Second of all, how do we bring what we do and make sure that we continue to do our business in a way that's consistent with our values, so that it's Carlyle, or whatever company it is, in this new geography? And then finally, and I just think, matching deeply experienced

• 1:41:48Speaker 08

  folks with young talents that wants to run is a great mix. And you look back, Carlyle expanded around the world. I will tell you, our business in Japan, which we were one of the very first movers into Japan, it was an incredibly tough market for a non-Japanese firm. And it became, and has become, one of the biggest markets around. And that was part of the key strategy of hire local, make sure that we have consistent values, but let people run and do what they can do best. And also, by the way, it translates into

• 1:42:25Speaker 08

  new areas. So we got into this area of secondaries, which is liquidity around LP interests. And let me tell you, back when we first got started and bought Alpinvest, that was not a business that people thought much of. And I think Alpinvest, and I just read about it in the newspaper today, because I've been out of Carlyle for six years, but I think they raised $20 billion last year to provide liquidity into the private investment market. It's a huge part of allowing investors to expand their exposure and to bring more capital, which is why I'm excited about what Red Cell's doing. Because they are bringing a new idea into venture capital, and they are raising money. I can't talk much about it, because

• 1:43:10Speaker 08

  they're in the market now. But they have a substantial capital capability to help companies grow, but they're also bringing trusted and brand-name partners, venture partners of other funds in, to help them be the next round of rocket fuel to help these companies grow.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  The chat wants to know about how you processed the Supreme deal. You were co-CEO, right, when Carlyle bought Supreme? I don't know if you were there when they eventually exited it. But at the time, streetwear today is sort of established as like this massive, massive category. But you guys were an early mover in it. I'm curious how you processed it. I can't tell that you're wearing Supreme right now, but how did you process it originally?

• 1:44:03Speaker 08

  I actually think it's in a frame on my wall as one of the great deals ever that Carlyle did.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I imagine like a lot of your peers would have looked at you guys at that time, being like, what are these guys doing?

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like, stick to the energy infrastructure. Do another pipeline deal. Where's the next Kinder Morgan? And you're like, actually, it's Supreme.

• 1:44:25Speaker 08

  Well, Jordy, part of an investment environment is getting creative. And we had a great team that was focused on consumers and consumer trends. And we invested in a lot of consumer product companies, really fashion, at that time. And we're really kind of out in front. Golden Goose was one of our great European deals. And then, of course, Supreme was such a unique idea. And we had this extraordinary group of investors that came and said, we think this is a great idea. Here's how it's going to work. We had good partners in the deal with us, the founders. And before you know it, it just really took off. And what

• 1:45:08Speaker 08

  you see over and over and over again is, by bringing capital and unlocking an opportunity, they're self-fulfilling, right? I mean, without the capital, it might not have grown as fast or as large, because you couldn't have expanded and had inventory and all the things, although they had a really interesting inventory management system, just to go back to that deal. But the net of it is, oftentimes, when you can bring an investor and an entrepreneur and visionary together that actually see where they're both going, then you can take one plus one and turn it into 10.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Please.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Got to talk about data centers. So much in the news this week, obviously, the New York State moratorium. What is Red Cell, how is Red Cell thinking about the category overall? You got to lead the data center capital of the world.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  And we're seeing more and more startups and incubations work up and down the supply chain, whether it's semiconductor design to data center construction. Like, startup is, used to mean you write software, and now you can be shovels in the ground. And we see a lot of successful companies there. But how are you seeing the opportunity, risk, anything else on data centers?

• 1:46:25Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, let's just begin with, aside from anything else, there's trillions of dollars that's going into data centers. And I think this year, it's going to be a $700 billion capex sector. And with that, one, it's driving a big chunk of our economy today. I think out of the GDP contribution, the data center and tech investment world is the lion's share of it right now, driving so much of what we're doing. And so, if you are thinking about big markets, it's hard to think that's not one of them, because, of course, it is. I think, second of all, so much of the opportunity, like what Red

• 1:47:07Speaker 08

  Cell has leaned into with Claros, is how do you address the problems that are really inhibiting data centers and the acceptance into the marketplace? And power consumption is right at the top of the list. And so, if you are thinking about an opportunity to either re-engineer the semiconductor infrastructure, to re-engineer the power draw so that you can power the entire thing without power conversion, and therefore the associated power loss, and Claros does both of these things, then all of a sudden, you can see 20%, 25%,

• 1:47:46Speaker 08

  almost 30% efficiency gains in power utilization. That's a game changer. And that's real value-added. And so, this big supply chain, which has been built up in order to meet this massive industrial investment activity going on around the country, I think has tremendous opportunities just in that supply chain. Not to mention all the opportunities around the technology itself. And that's why Red Cell, I think, has got so many ways that they are playing around this, you know, titanic movement in investment, where, going back to Trace,

• 1:48:26Speaker 08

  if you are the governance layer over top of your AI capabilities, and that governance layer can manage the interactions between agents and information in a way that is restricted when you need it to be, it's secure, it's reportable, it's auditable, then all of a sudden, this is a bit of the Holy Grail about what people are worried about from an information security standpoint, but also from a real dependability, that what's being used to, in fact, drive a large language model is dependable and repeatable. And that's huge.

• 1:49:06Speaker 08

  And so, we're seeing Trace have big applications in the healthcare sector, like they have with Duke, where they now are starting to drive a lot of the patient data at Duke, because they can be compliant with all the healthcare regs. But on top of that, they're seeing big applications, of course, in national security. And that's why, I mean, that's why you see, you know, you see a guy like Grant Forsting, and he's got this really cool idea of what can be done with this governance layer. And now you start seeing lots of markets you can get into. I think the next market for trace is going to be in the fintech world and in the financial

• 1:49:47Speaker 08

  services world, because once again, it provides that governance layer, which provides people with great certainty about security.

• 1:49:54John Coogan?

  Where do you see Red Cell in 25 years? If I was naively pattern matching on your work at Carlyle, I would say, there's going to be more strategies. This is a mega fund. I'm looking to what General Catalyst did, a private equity deal for a healthcare company. There's RIAs now that are trading publics. There's growth fund, there's an incubator. Like, if there's someone you want around the table when you're adding strategies and new markets, it's probably you. But where do you see Red Cell going in 20 years? Is that naive, or is this, is this possible?

• 1:50:28Speaker 08

  Well, I would say, from my standpoint, it's premature for me to answer that question. This is, this is Grant's company. He founded it six years ago. It's been his vision. I totally buy into his vision.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:43Speaker 08

  But I think there's this tremendous room to create great companies.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:48Speaker 08

  And, you know, I think at the heart of a great investment firm, a great venture capital firm, or private equity firm, you're an investment firm. You're, you're, you're a visionary place where entrepreneurs can come and grow great companies that really do address mission-critical concerns for sectors, and in this case, for the country as well.

• 1:51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:11Speaker 08

  And I, and I think by being able to address both mission-critical issues for industries like healthcare, and cyber, and national security, not to mention financial services and fintech, but if you're, but you're also able to bring solutions that address the national issues, then I think we've got big markets, we've got big momentum, and that's going to define Red Cell. And that's why I'm so excited, because that's exactly what Grant's vision was. That's what he's building and has built time and time again. And I got to tell you, there are, there are so many talented folks in America today dreaming up and inventing just amazing things. And I got to tell you, Grant Forsting is one of them.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, we want to hit the gong for you.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Hit the gong. Thank you so much for coming on the show. What a pleasure. Congratulations. Unjoined Red Cell Partner Chairman.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Big move. Look at that, I broke the mallet. We broke the mallet.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Very excited to have you on the show. Have a great rest of your day, have a great rest of your week.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  And hopefully, we can talk to you soon.

• 1:52:13Speaker 08

  Great. I hope we'll get a chance to do it again.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, anytime.

• 1:52:16Speaker 08

  There's a big discussion topic that you guys were on recently, which is, what do we do with, with workers that might be, um, uh,

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Job displacement.

• 1:52:25Speaker 08

  Dislocated because of AI. And that's something I'd love to engage with you guys on in a future day.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang with you. Congrats.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  Mallet broken.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  You broke the mallet.

• 1:52:36Jordi Hays?

  Look at this thing.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  What a mallet.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it basically came off.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, these mallets, uh, we need to mill, we need to mill a mallet out of pure titanium or something, uh, maybe castings. And when we break a mallet, we can merely pour molten steel.

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  Next, they're going to want us to warm up the mallet. Over, over a fire.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Well,

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  That's our show, folks.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for watching. Tune in to TBPN tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Do us a small favor and have the best Wednesday afternoon of your life.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Sign up for newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  It's the least you could do.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  And we'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 1:53:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.