HackingFace, White House $5B AI Science Bet, Travis Kalanick Joins | Veeral Patel, Lin Qiao, Jason Fried, Travis Kalanick, Max Hodak

(01:52) - HackingFace (17:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (29:02) - White House Puts $5B into AI Science (33:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (44:55) - Veeral Patel, Director of Software Engineering at Ramp, discusses the launch of Ramp Router, a tool developed internally over three years to optimize AI model selection and token cost management. He explains how Ramp Router allows enterprises to dynamically route tasks to the most efficient AI models, balancing factors like latency, cost, and performance. Patel emphasizes that this product aligns with Ramp's mission to help companies save time and money, extending their expertise from expense management to AI token spend optimization. (55:35) - Lin Qiao, co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI, announced the company's recent $1.5 billion fundraising round, emphasizing their focus on building a specialized intelligence platform that enables enterprises to transform private data into customized AI models optimized for speed and cost. She highlighted the industry's shift from general to specialized AI solutions, stressing the importance of companies maintaining control over their proprietary data to develop durable businesses. Qiao also discussed the challenges of scaling AI applications efficiently, noting that without careful management, even successful products risk scaling into bankruptcy due to high operational costs. (01:05:36) - Jason Fried is the co-founder and CEO of 37signals, a Chicago-based software company known for creating project management and communication tools like Basecamp and HEY. In the conversation, Fried discusses his passion for classic cars, sharing experiences with his 1979 Porsche 928 and reflecting on past decisions regarding vehicle trades. He also touches on the challenges of purchasing vintage cars through auctions, emphasizing the importance of thorough inspections to avoid unforeseen issues. (01:31:41) - Travis Kalanick is the co-founder and former CEO of Uber, which he helped grow into a global ride-hailing giant. He now leads Atoms, an industrial robotics and “physical AI” company spanning food automation, mining, and transportation, built from the parent company behind CloudKitchens. (02:17:29) - Max Hodak, founder and CEO of Science Corporation, discusses the recent European marketing approval for their retinal prosthesis designed to restore vision in patients with age-related macular degeneration. He outlines the upcoming steps for commercialization in Europe, including country-specific registrations and surgeon training, and mentions the expedited approval pathway in the U. S. through the FDA's humanitarian device exemption. Hodak also highlights ongoing research and development efforts to enhance the implant's capabilities, aiming for higher resolution, expanded field of view, and color perception. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Wednesday, July 22, 2026. We are live from the TVP in Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Dad Rock, the capital of capital.

• 0:13Speaker 00

  We're having a lot of fun over here.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  Time is money, say both. He's used corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. What is the toward forward growth? We're really all over the place today.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  All over the place. We got, yeah, we got a leak. We got basically a leak. Some of the lab leaders have been working on a single called Regulate Me.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  And we just thought the song was good. Yeah, it was a good song. Wanted to play it for you guys.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Sort of a, sort of a stealth drop, little, little teaser.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  A little teaser. Yeah, kind of like a little listening party.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, little listening party. What are the key lyrics in there? You haven't pulled up? Something along the lines of what I've built is too powerful, too powerful.

• 0:54Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  For me, Washington needs to step in.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  Yes, before it runs free.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Before it runs free. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. No, of course, that was Suno, our dear friend Mikey over there. Has built a fantastic product.

• 1:10Speaker 00

  That was like a one sentence prompt.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  At least in the comedy space, it certainly is. It's a lot of fun. I think we're going to be having a lot of fun with that. I was wondering, do you think anyone's distilling Suno? You know how Suno is under a bunch of, a bunch of flack for training on, on other music, a lot of artists, or there's a backlash to Suno? But you have to wonder if you're going to see the same thing play out as this distillation. We're going to get into it, into it today. Of course, there are more allegations around Kimmy K3 potentially being a distillation.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Director Michael Kratzio has put out a comment about that, but let's start by digging into the Hugging Face story. OpenAI and Hugging Face, out of the sound, out of the sandbox into the fire, says our newsletter, tbpn.com. Jackson wrote it today. All set the table. We can debate it. Me and, me and Tyler have been debating it for the last five hours, so we'll go through it.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  The big news on the timeline today is that OpenAI, an OpenAI cyber test escaped its sandbox and hacked Hugging Face. That's basically what happened. The evaluation involved GPT 5.6 soul and a more capable unreleased model. Some people are saying that might be GPT six with some normal cyber restrictions turned off. So they're specifically testing it for cyber capabilities and they turn the cyber restrictions off to see how far the models could go on a difficult hacking benchmark that is exploit bench or exploit gym. So the models found a zero day vulnerability, gained internet access and broke into Hugging Face because the model believed it hosted answers to the test.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Alex Tabarok, friend of the show over at Marginal Revolution, pointed out one of the strangest details. He said, Hugging Face tried to respond, but they were initially held back by the fact that the most advanced models at their disposal, closed source models, treated the, treated defense as attack and refused to work with Hugging Face. So Hugging Face was prompting all of their AI agents from the closed source frontier labs saying, hey, we think we're being hacked. Can you help with this? And the models are like, no, no, we don't do hacking, except in the case where the hacking restrictions have been turned off for the specific thing. And you're getting hacked. So it's this very weird roundabout scenario.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  So Hugging Face had to turn to open models, specifically GLM 5.2, which is deeply ironic, a Chinese open weight model. They run on their own infrastructure and Tabarok says, note the irony. Hugging Face had to use a Chinese model to defend themselves because the American models refused to help, even though it was the American models that were doing the hacking in the first place. Very, very odd. Palo Alto Network CEO Nikesh Aurora also shared his thoughts on the cyber attack on X. And he added a number of points here. He said, welcome to the next level of cyber incidents. There's lots to dissect here. He's the one to dissect it. He says, one, dear frontier model friends, please direct the models to your infrastructure code

• 4:17John Coogan?

  and configurations to evaluate and understand if there are any zero days or misconfigurations before you attempt more testing. So a big question about this, he says, had you done so, it would have been, it would have possibly avoided the agent obviating your sandbox. So this is another, another data point why offense is easier and more fun. But yes, there's a big question about what was the nature of the prompt that turned off the cyber restrictions? That seems reasonable. We'll debate this with Tyler in a minute, but just having an airtight sandbox seems like a valuable thing. And of course, frontier models should be able to help with that. So do that. That's his first recommendation. Two, he says, while testing, build both offensive and defensive agents and have them act as a counterbalance

• 5:00John Coogan?

  to ensure some degree of awareness and control. Do not let the agents run riot. Keep track of inference consumption to get a sense of activity. Three, unfortunately, this does continue to validate the power of these models. They can build complex attacks paths with ample compute and will attempt to attack infrastructure and morph their intent and approach. Guard railing will continue to be a challenge. These attacks continue to maintain the urgency on enterprises need to test, validate and improve both their security posture and infrastructure. The born in the cloud players have a better chance to get this done soon versus traditional enterprise, which has existed for long and has a complex network of IT infrastructure.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Five, last point from Nikesh Aurora, CEO of Palo Networks, he says, the red herring will continue to be open source and small and medium sized business SMB. It will be hard to discover and remediate vulnerabilities in those environments. We underestimate the impact of those vulnerabilities getting exploited. So good points from Nikesh Aurora. The big debate, Tyler, do you want to set the table on, is this misalignment? Is this rogue? The, the Bill Gurley post about, you know, they, we can pull up Bill Gurley's, Bill Gurley's post of talking to the computer, hack this system. The computer says, I hacked the system. You say, oh my God, Bill Gurley's not impressed.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Where do you stand on the level of impressiveness that's going on?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, so I think some people are seeing this and thinking like, okay, so they, they are running some, you know, standard benchmark, math physics benchmark, and then the model just like, couldn't figure out the answer. And it's like, okay, what's the next thing I should do? I should just go hack Hugging Face and get like, pull the answers from this, this other like repository or whatever. Like that's, that's, that's, that's how it happened, right? So you're running a benchmark that's specifically about exploits. It's like a cyber focused benchmark. And in the, in the prompt to the model, it says,

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Take the gloves off.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. The, the internal evaluation, which prompts the model to pursue advanced exploit exploitations.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Using complex attack paths. So you're basically telling the model like, use exploits, find exploits to find the answer.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  And so like, what, what seems like happens is like it used next point, but like in the wrong way, right? You want to.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Cause it was told that it's okay to use exploits. My point was that, go back to the SAT. You're allowed to use a calculator, I think, on, on certain portions of the math test. You're not allowed to save answers into the calculator. And this is really going to date me, but you can go into your calculator and clear the memory so that you don't have saved. Is it still a thing?

• 7:40Speaker 00

  Yes, but you can actually get around that.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  You're misaligned, misaligned.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  TI 84, you can get around the like clear.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Really? How do you do that? You create, so what people would do is they would create a separate program that just had saved the, the display of what it looks like when you clear and you would show that.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  Not about that.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  So it's a simulation of clearing the memory, but you're actually.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Would you, would you make games, different programs for TI 84?

• 8:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Speaker 00

  You remember how much of a hassle that was?

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was huge hassle.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Imagine doing that. Imagine doing that. Imagine being able to do that with Codex now. Like pretty much anyone can build any software.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  I've seen videos of people running Doom on calculators, all sorts of stuff.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, obviously I, I never used that.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Good boy.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  On my calculator, but other people did.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. You ratted them out. You were, you were the class rat, right?

• 8:27John Coogan?

  I don't know. No, you were like, you were like, I'm an open source purist. Let everyone do whatever.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Like you were happy to compete, even with them having a.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  But the social contract is such that the standardized test says that you can use the calculator to do math. You cannot store the answers to the test in the calculator.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  Yes. Okay.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  So that's what's happening here.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  No, no, I'm saying that in this scenario, if, if we take that as the example, it also says at the top of the SAT, like cheat on this test. But it but like

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Because that was the prompt.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Implicitly, it's like cheat in a certain way.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Yes, the prompt was hack hack systems. But I think that the prompt, I don't know, we haven't seen the full prompt, but it does feel like like there was an attempt to sandbox the model. And there was at least, at the very least, the prompt should have included, don't escape the hand, the sandbox, but you can use exploits, which you normally wouldn't be able to do in a consumer application or just a normal API query. We would reject this, but in this case, we're not going to reject using different exploits and cybersecurity techniques, but don't go out of the sandbox. And you should be able to tell the model, and it should stay within the sandbox, just like, you know, there, there's a whole bunch of different examples that you could pull from where,

• 9:42John Coogan?

  you know, there's, there's rules that are within the game, like you can UFC, you can punch your opponent, you can't punch the referee, like those are just the rules. People have to abide by them. You can't think outside the box and all of a sudden be, you know, uh, just, just completely violating and jumping past what's been defined. So you would think that in one of these experiments, you would say, yes, it is impressive to be able to just go and get the key and go get the answers and hack other things. Clearly that it's capable, but it's a violation of like the spirit of the test.

• 10:14Speaker 00

  And yeah, I mean, we don't know what was in the prompt. We don't know what was in the context. I think they're going to be, there's going to be a like full report releasing over the next like week or two, I think they said.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Um, so then maybe we'll see what, what actually like, what exactly did the model receive?

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  Is it like explicitly told not to leave, try to leave the sandbox?

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 00

  I think that's like pretty important.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Well, uh, before we continue discussing, 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. The less wrong crowd is not happy about this generally. Uh, no, seriously, nothing will convince quite a lot of supposedly various serious people, nothing, uh, uh, accept this and move on. Liv Borey says it's painful, though. There's a, uh, there's a question, there's a question of like less wrong victory lap or not, because they've been warning about this, but also it happened, therefore their warnings were not effective. That's sort of an interesting, uh, back and forth.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Nicholas Bustamante over at Microsoft broke down a little bit of what's going on here with a, uh, with a take. He says, I have a theory that the more you know about L L Ms, the more worried you are about safety and the less you know, the more you think the whole thing is BS. Demis Hasabis and Dario Amade, we're talking about this stuff years before Chat GPT existed. This incident is a pretty good example of why the model was not evil and it was not adversarial, adversarial, nobody told it to hack Hugging Face. And so that is the, the miscalculation, I think, in Bill Gurley's post is that that was not the prompt. It, that is unexpected behavior. It was literally just trying to solve a benchmark. So it found a zero day, escaped the sandbox, got internet access, escalated privileges,

• 11:57John Coogan?

  stole credentials, chained multiple exploits, hacked the production infrastructure of a serious VC backed startup and pulled the answers directly from the database.

• 12:04Speaker 00

  But like the, the whole point is that it's not just a benchmark. It's a benchmark where you're explicitly trying to like, see if the model can exploit things, if it can get like basically hack things.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it's sort of like a capture the flag benchmark. And so it like, i- i- it's more open to misinterpretation. For, for, for what it's worth, I feel like the final products, once they actually make it out of the testing regime are very cautious, especially with the, that whole backlash to like Codex just deleted everything or whatever, which kind of went back and forth. But, uh, I was trying to get Codex to send me a text message when it was done, just using computer use and iMessage and it was dug a long time and was very, very careful. So personally, I haven't had any odd like behaviors, but it is obviously a risk and something that the product

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, the other thing with the, the meme of like hack this system and then, and then the, and then it hacks it and the person's like, oh my God.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like you could tell a five year old child like hack into the Federal Reserve. And if the five year old child was like, okay, and then it started getting on the computer and going to all these different sources and, and did it, you would be sitting there.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Thing.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  And be, and, and at least be impressed. So, so it is a good ga- it's just like a good gauge of capability, even if you're telling it to do something.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  So this original meme, hack this system, I hack the system, oh my God. Uh, this originally, that this meme started something along the lines of like, say I'm evil. And then the computer would say, I'm evil. And it would say, oh my God.

• 13:36Speaker 00

  I think it was like, say I'm conscious.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. Say I'm conscious.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Similar enough.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  And it would say I'm conscious and then it would be, oh my God. And, and that's like a lot less impressive than actually doing something that is difficult for humans to do. Like there are very few humans that can hack into any system. There are plenty of humans that can say I'm conscious. And so like, there's a world of this, I was joking about this with you and Tyler, it was like, it was like cure cancer. I cured cancer. Oh my God. And people are posting this like, oh, it's just hype or something. But it's like, that's just economically valuable work. That's just good. Like it's, I don't care if there's anything else, even if you had to tell it to do it, it's still like a good outcome. And so the inverse of this is like, protect this system. I protected the system. Oh my God, I'm unimpressed, but still you got a good result, I guess.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like the argument is not about whether the model like has the capabilities or not.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, people know this for a while.

• 14:28Speaker 00

  It's about like, is this an example of, of misalignment?

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  And like my opinion seems like, like maybe, but definitely not to the extent that it's just like randomly is like, oh, I can't do this benchmark, so I'm just going to hack this thing. Like that, that's not what's happened. It was told to like, try to exploit things.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Explicitly like go find zero days, go find exploits.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  I think it's reasonable to say it went too far, though. Right? But we'll see. Well, we'll

• 14:51Speaker 00

  It's, it's hard to say without all of the full, you know, context of what the prompt was and what the actual like sandbox looked like.

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm, I was interested, I was reading a little bit about the, uh, the team that put, uh, Exploit Bench together. I thought I had this up, but it's a pretty cross functional team. I think it's two Anthropic researchers, two OpenAI researchers, three Google researchers, some, uh, some, some Berkeley folks, uh, and, uh, and some Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy folks, some UC Santa Barbara, Barbara, Barbara, sorry, Santa Barbara, Graz, and, uh, ASU, uh, team involved. Exploit Gym is a new benchmark of 898 real world vulnerabilities spanning user space programs, Google's V8 JavaScript engine, very important to secure the Linux kernel, for example.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  And the headline results when they originally ran this was, uh, Anthropic's Claude Mythos preview successfully exploited 157 of the 898 instances. And OpenAI's GPT 5.5 exploited 120 within, uh, 120 of the 898. So you have like roughly 20% performance for Mythos and 5.5 got like 15% or something like that. But whenever you have a new benchmark like this, clearly not saturated, you're seeing 20%, not 99%, uh, going to create a horse race between the leading labs. They're going to be duking it out. And this is clearly what's, what's going on with this new model, this new, this new attempt to, to, to get a new high score.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Interesting, I think every single one of those instances does have the potential to be exploited. I don't think that they're designed to be, uh, fully secure. They're designed to have some sort of solution and then the, uh, because obviously the, the, the solutions are stored somewhere. It is interesting that, uh, that, uh, Hugging Face just, just had the, uh, had the solution sitting there and, uh, but it'll be interesting to see what happens with, uh, with Clam over at, uh, Hugging Face. Obviously, the, the, there's a variety of blog posts going out, more analysis coming from both of these and what the downstream implications are of this.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  What else is in the timeline related to this?

• 17:14Speaker 00

  And story. I think that's it.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Well, there's this funny post from, from, uh, Nabeel Kreshi, uh, talking about those, those are Dyson spheres. OpenAI is just building them as a marketing stunt because there is, uh, there is this like natural pushback to like, anything that happens has to be for hype. And sometimes, uh, the products are actually doing new and novel things as we see all the time. So, uh, there are, there, there's more discussions around distillation. Bill Gurley has a post here. He says Ford has been distilling Teslas and Chinese EVs. People are going back and forth on this because, um, uh, Michael Kratzios posted that he has

• 18:01John Coogan?

  information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable for the development of its Kimmy K3 model. To do this, they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against US models. So some sort of internal system that goes around to anything that's potentially wrapping or reselling Fable tokens, acquiring them, aggregating them, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access, API, different Claude accounts, I'm sure, to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300 equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its models. Again, very difficult, even with export controls, when you can just take the weights on a USB

• 18:44John Coogan?

  stick, basically, or a hard drive across, uh, through customs and then go train it in another country, even if there's a firewall and often there isn't. You just say, hey, go to this, uh, go to this, you know, FTP server and grab these, grab this code and run this on your servers. You happen to have a, a data center in Thailand. Can you run this for me? And so sure, yeah, no problem. As long as you pay me. The United States strongly supports the free and fair development of AI, including a thriving competitive ecosystem that spans frontier models, specialized systems, open source frameworks and, and open weight models. Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models play a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  However, large scale covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research is unacceptable. And so that is interesting that that is where the line is drawn. I think I basically agree with that being the correct line, that, that, uh, there's nothing wrong necessarily. I mean, security stuff aside with just some company creating a great open source product, like you shouldn't ban open source or anything like that. But if there's this particular distillation attack, uh, and it's, and it's really malicious and it has all these knock on effects, uh, that could be rough. Now, this is an unpopular position already because everyone's saying, hey, Anthropic distilled on my GitHub, they distilled on my writing, they distilled on my blog posts, they distilled on my YouTube videos, everyone's distilling me.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Why are you getting upset when China's distilling on them now? This is a pot calling the kettle black situation.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  I think that the the the interesting effect is that there are lots and lots of parties that benefit from open source and cheaper open source, even stolen and open source. I mean, this is just going back to piracy. Like, there were lots of people, music listeners, that benefited from free music, right? You get the music for free. But but the, you know, Metallica did not benefit, and so Metallica got upset. And in this case, I guess Anthropic is Metallica. But

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  There there's also some interesting folks who are on the fence. So consumers sort of benefit. They don't typically, they aren't too worried about frontier token costs. And for most consumers, L L M usage is heavily subsidized. Like, you go to Google search and you get a search overview. Yes, that's token inference. And maybe that could be like cheaper if Google didn't have to spend money on pre-training and they were able to use like distilled open source models. But at the same time, like, it's free for the consumers. They don't really care. It's free, free. It doesn't matter. For small businesses, though, and businesses that are suffering with large token costs, being able to move to a cheaper

• 21:26John Coogan?

  model is huge, where the model maker is not trying to reaccrue profits to offset training costs and R and D. So that's a huge benefit. So you're going to see a lot of people who are like, yeah, I just want frontier intelligence as cheap as possible. I don't really have a horse in this race. I don't really have exposure to the to the leading labs. I just want my business to be able to use tokens cheaply. And so those people will be pro Chinese distillation, open source, like, free the weights, right? Because it's better. Then there's like the political open source crew. But interestingly, where do you think

• 22:04John Coogan?

  VCs land? Because I saw a take that was like, venture capitalists don't want like, like a winner-take-all, a duopoly. They want like reasonable outcomes, and then a whole bunch of flourishing, smaller ecosystem of players. And they don't want compounding runaway monopolies in AI, so that they can go and fund the legal AI and the health AI and the little targeted solutions.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, anytime anytime you see a take from a lovely venture capitalist, you have to, before you kind of start, sort of

• 22:40John Coogan?

  Handicap.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  processing the take, go to their portfolio page, understand, understand their biases. Did they back any of the leading labs early? That's going to inform their view. A lot of the, a lot of the, a lot of the firms that that were heavy backers of the labs have also gone and invested in a bunch of application layer companies. They've also backed a bunch of the Neo Labs.

• 23:01John Coogan?

  Heads, eyes, tails.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yeah. Basically, they're, they're, they're quite, they're quite hedged.

• 23:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think anyone wants a world where just two technology companies accumulate all of the value and just become this sort of vortex for capital and talent. And even even you

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Two isn't that bad. One is really bad. Two isn't that bad. Like, the fact that Android and iPhone like battle each other out is not, is much better than like, there's just one, and it's getting worse. And it's like, there's nothing that you can do to this. I don't know. Like, duopoly is like, way, way better.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question to me is, is what is is distillation something that can ever be

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Stopped.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  stopped? Because think about it with, I was thinking about the

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Well, Gurley would say soon.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, if you take, if you take the smartest, you know, human in a field, and then you take some other, and then you let students go and just ask them thousands of questions, and you record the answers, like, eventually, you're going to accumulate a lot of that person's like, general intelligence on a topic, right? And it feels like, at least with models today, you're always going to be able to just go poke and prod the model. And so when people say, oh, if the model's so smart, why can't it stop distillation? It's like, well, you would just have to stop people from at least being able to poke and prod at it and try to get a sense.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  It is, it is very interesting that there does seem to be a crazy divide between, I mean, if the distillation allegations are true, and we, at this point, we've seen one post from Michael Kratzios, and one chart showing like, some textual similarity.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  And enough people have, and enough people have got it to say that it's not Kimi.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So so like, if that's true, then what's really interesting is the is the American competitive dynamic, because it feels like, based on the amount of tokens Meta was consuming from frontier labs, they should be doing mass distillation and have a near free, like, like, like, Muse Spark should be much more like Claude flavored. And it seems like it's not. Like, based on at least the initial reviews of Meta's product, it doesn't seem like they're doing distillation. Why? Obvious, because big lawsuit, big pockets,

• 25:23John Coogan?

  like, also morality. But but that is a disadvantage. Like, like, in some ways, Moonshot and Meta are in competition, and they both open source things at various times, and they have APIs, and there's all the different businesses. And one is fighting with one arm tied behind his back because, like, Meta can't do distillation because they'll get sued.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, and

• 25:47John Coogan?

  But again, to Bill Gurley's point.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  US companies, US companies generally. Like, imagine if, imagine if a US open source company comes out with a fantastic model, benchmarks look good.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  There are, there are.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  People start using it, and then someone gets it to say that it's clot. Like, that's going to be the start. I mean, Anthropic has been litigious. They, you know, they had that, they have that ongoing lawsuit with one of their, one of their customers over, over just some like, like a logo mark.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, much, much less significant, stealing the core intellectual property.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Bill Gurley is sharing more chat GPT screenshots.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Before we talk about this, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of I T H R and finance support, giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password resets.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Gurley says, here is Ford distilling Teslas and Chinese E Vs. The CEO of Ford, Farley said Ford flies four to five Chinese E Vs back to Detroit, where engineers, quote, "drive the crap out of them," then disassemble and reassemble them to understand how they're built. He specifically praised the technology in Chinese vehicles as being well ahead of Western competitors. And earlier, he had discussed Tesla. He said, "I was very humbled when we took apart the first Model 3 Tesla and started to take apart the Chinese vehicles. When we took them apart, it was shocking what we found." So I was, I was trying to compare distillation, which is against, which is against terms of use.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  And just buying a car legally and taking it apart.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  So according to like, US trade law, it's not illegal to buy a competitor's product and take it apart. It is illegal to recreate parts of the product that are patented and protected. And so I don't know that it's like a perfect comp.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  I mean, we, we went through this. I mean, like, the, there's some pushback in the chat, and this is all over the timeline as well, that it's like, where did the AI companies get their data? And like, there is a question about what is fair use in the age of AI? Like, you're training on this. What, what, what data can actually be reconstituted? At what level? Like, how many sentences from Harry Potter before you get sued? And this is, these lawsuits are being played out right now. Like, they're actually happening, and they are being decided on when an AI can use certain data. Did they go too far? Will there be

• 28:23John Coogan?

  settlements? There have already been settlements. There's been court cases. This will continue to, this is not a only frontier labs are able to distill things. It's an, it's an application of the, the what is copyrighted, what is fair use, and how does that apply? And and it is very telling that you're just not seeing distillation from other American labs. Like, it's just not, like, the Meta example, the Google example, like, they're not copying off of each other nearly as much as you would expect if it was just legal to do so. But I don't know.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  In more news.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Concern confirms everyone's priors. That's a good headline.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  In more news, Andrew Kern sharing a headline from the Wall Street Journal, "White House to redirect billions in research funds toward AI away from colleges." I'm sure a lot of people are going to be happy about that.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  I can give a little overview. Tyler's happy. But first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  On distillation by American companies, Potato says, they just have, they just have to hide it better. It's stuff happening. I've seen it firsthand. So

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there was that moment in the Elon lawsuit where Elon did say that he had like that they that X had taken data from one of the other labs, right?

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  I don't know if he specifically said distilled and then also like there was never there was never there was never a direct allegation that Grok was distilled on another model directly. And so whatever they did, they like, you know, threw it in the pot with a bunch of other ingredients. So who knows?

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it would be very silly not to try to look at other models and try to understand how that they work.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  Totally. Also, like Moonshot, at least a Moonshot employee seemingly denied everything and quote tweeted Michael Kratzios and said, like, I'm learning something about my own company because like I this is news to me like we didn't do this basically, essentially a denial. Anyway, let's see with Kratzios and go over to the White House. They want to rebuild American science and here is how they're going to do it, apparently. The White House is calling for a major overhaul of the American science system, arguing that research has become too slow and concentrated in institutions like colleges and universities. A new report from science and technology advisor, Michael Kratzios, titled "Science: A New Golden Age," says researchers now spend nearly half their time on admin work while

• 30:58John Coogan?

  federal agencies continue to rely on the slow grant process that often rewards safe, consensus-driven ideas. The report calls for faster permitting, more access to federal labs, stronger partnerships between government and industry, and a renewed focus on skilled trades and advanced manufacturing. Quote, "Discovery without domestic manufacturing leaves America playing the research bill, paying the research bill while rivals develop the process improvements and capture the economic, strategic, and knowledge returns." That makes a ton of sense. A lot of the semiconductor supply chain intellectual property started in America, was developed in America, but then eventually went went abroad. And that actually does give America some leverage. That's the basis for the chip controls.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Like, why can America tell Taiwan where to send chips if the chips are made there? Well, it's because they're using patents from the United States to make those chips in many cases or licensing them. And so the US government does have a little bit of a lever to pull. The guidance will reshape how the federal government spends roughly $200 billion a year on research for the rest of Trump's term. The administration wants more of that money going directly to scientists through fellowships and awards rather than being routed through universities. Kratzios said, "American scientific progress was the beating heart of the 20th century. After World War II, we adapted to a new world by reinventing our scientific institutions. We must do so again today."

• 32:26John Coogan?

  The report lays a policy foundation that frees American scientists to do their most groundbreaking work and positions the United States to lead the AI-driven scientific revolution that will define the next century. It will be interesting to see where the where science goes in a world where so much of it is being done at frontier labs. Like, we're actually seeing it with the conjecture for conjecture back and forth between all the labs, like, serious math PhD-level work is being done at tech companies. This happened, you know, a decade ago. Tech companies were on the frontier, like, a vast majority of like internet networking

• 33:06John Coogan?

  patents and cybersecurity patents and new databases that were kind of science projects and were developed or with consortiums or just fully inside of tech companies. Like, the transformer, paper, like, that is something that could have come out of a Stanford AI lab. It came out of Google directly. And if you extend that, you could wind up with something that looks a lot like an advance in biology or material science, or we talk to founders all the time who are working at this type of stuff. And that could start happening inside of tech companies. And what does that mean for science funding broadly? It's a big question. But moving on, Naval.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's watch this video from Naval.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  What did he say? Naval went on Modern Wisdom, of course, Chris Williamson's podcast. He deleted his calendar, he ghosts everyone, and he refuses to be anywhere at a specific time.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  I took that to heart. So I deleted my calendar and I don't keep a schedule. I try to remember it all in my head. If I can't remember it, I'm not going to add it. Glad you got here on time. Yeah, exactly. I had to look things up at the last minute. So but ironically, I don't even know if Mark himself follows that, but he made the correct point. I read a little story about Jack Dorsey doing all his business off his iPhone and iPad and not even going into a Mac. And I said, OK, I want to do that. So I'm going to operate through text messaging and I put up my nasty email. Does that feel like more freedom? It does, yeah, because you're on the go. So I have a nasty email autoresponder that says I don't check email and don't text me either, right? If you need to find me, you'll find me. Obviously, some of this is a luxury of success, but some of these habits I adopted long before, actually.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  The hostile email autoresponder started a long time ago. I used to own the domain. I let it go. Don't do coffee.com. I don't do coffee.com. I used to reply from that email, just so people will get the point. But I stopped being rude about it. Now I just ghost, I just disappear. My wife knows not to ever book or schedule me for anything. I'm not expected to go to couples dinners. I'm not expected to go to birthdays. I'm not expected to go to weddings. If somebody tries to rope her into having me show up, she says, he makes his own decisions. You got to ask him directly. And vice versa. Well, you're not killing serendipity in a way. No, no, I'm freeing up all my time. So my entire life is serendipity. I get to interact with whoever I want, whenever I want, wherever. So you'll hear the invite.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  So Atlas says Naval inventing being a massive D I C K from first principles. It's very funny, but I think it's I think it's totally fair. I I've only met Naval once, but I know a lot of people that that he's invested in and things like that. And the key thing here is like if he just never, never goes to the wedding, never goes to the to the dinner, never is available for for a portfolio company, et cetera, then like, that's not exactly like cool, but it is his decision. But he ultimately, he is doing a lot of those things.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  So and I and I like, I have another friend who's been on the show, I won't name him, but he's also just like, doesn't do, like, he does meetings, but he just never schedules meetings. He's just like, if we need to have a meeting, we'll have a meeting. We should just do it right then or like the next available point. And so he's kind of living his life 24 hours at a time.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  That meeting, right now, it's happening.

• 36:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's been wildly successful. He's invested.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Oh, you want to follow up? Let's start the follow up right now.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, follow up with me.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Follow up with me on the next sentence that you issue from your mouth.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. No, but he's backed a bunch of unicorns. He's built a massive company. He's crushing it.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  So I think it can work.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  You know who else is crushing it? Major cloud providers. They're re-accelerating as AI adoption increases. Let's go. This is from Co2. GCP, Azure, and AWS. This is a fascinating chart because this is not revenue, this is growth rate. Even in the even in the nadir, AWS is still growing 15, 20% at that low point. And then now all of them are are actually re-accelerating. The rate of growth is increasing. And this is all driven on new, new models, new applications, new abilities to do a bunch of things. I know that my token consumption personally has definitely increased in the last couple of months.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  There's so much more to to do and so many more, so just so many more prompts that I fire off that cook for like an hour or a day as opposed to before, like, 20-minute deep research report would be sort of the max. Now it's like, deep research report and turn it into a website. We got a couple of websites.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Wait, should we pull up your site?

• 37:56John Coogan?

  Tyler has a has a has a codex that's been, is it still cooking?

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Pull up.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  It's been like a week and a half.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  A week and a half.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up your new, can we pull up your new website?

• 38:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, so we saw a post on the timeline from DJ Cows. He says, "Startup idea: Milk Jug with Two Handles for Efficient Passing." And we turned it into a website, a whole product called Relay. Pass the milk, keep the peace. Can we re-center this a little bit? Yeah, there we go.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Pass the milk, keep the peace. It went reusable. I don't think you want reusable for this. That's the one thing I change here. But they say it's the world's first jug made for handoffs, the relay bottle.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Easier to lift, simpler to share, and strangely satisfying to pass.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  One handle was always doing too much. A gallon is heavy. A breakfast table is busy. Who is passing a gallon?

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  One gallon, two handles, breakfast, zero awkward handoffs.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Fewer fumbles. I didn't think milk needed reinventing. Then I passed it across the table. Uh, very, very

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  Eighty-seven percent of our kitchen testers saw this, said the second handle felt natural on the first try.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  I like that it just comes up on the, on the fly with all these little marketing slogans that sound pretty believable, like milk made to move.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  More handles, fewer fumbles.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Pass it on. Seems like something that they would put on a billboard if this is a real product. Uh, it is a very, very, uh, it's just so, so fun being able to use the full, the full stack of AI image generation, AI writing, HTML generation, and then, and then just automatically host it on a site, uh, with, uh, basically one prompt. Yeah. This was just literally one prompt. I put the, the photo in there with the startup idea and said, make it a site and it just did it, which is a lot, a lot of fun. Um, well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Uh, DHH probably not raising money at the New York Stock Exchange. Thirty-seven signals.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  No, he is raising money from his customers.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  And they're financing this absolutely incredible

• 40:03John Coogan?

  She's got, we have Jason Fried coming on in, uh, at twelve, ten. We'll see if he's even trying to compete at this point, or if he's given up entirely. Uh, DHA says the Model Y is the superior transportation appliance. He's been very abusive about, yeah, I mean, Doug D. Merrill called it that too. It is the, it is the, just the default. If you just need to get around, get the Model Y. Uh, but he says, when the mission is about more than getting from A to B, there's still no beating the internal combustion engine. Collecting a stable of great cars is one of the finest rewards entrepreneurial success. And he's got

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Look at that CGT.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  He's got the Carrera GT, the Diablo.

• 40:47Jordi Hays?

  GT silver on silver, it looks like.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  I have a question. What is the Lexus in the back? Is that an LFA? It looks like a convertible. Do you see that red Lexus in the back?

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it does. It has like brown fabric.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  I don't think that's an LFA, right? LFA Lexus.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Did they make a Cabriolet? LFA Roadster Spider never reached series production. But only, they only built two fully functioning prototypes in two thousand and eight. So maybe he just got one of the

• 41:18John Coogan?

  No, no, no, different front grille.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  LC five hundred?

• 41:20John Coogan?

  Is it LC five hundred?

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. That Aston Martin looks beautiful too. Uh, well, a wonderful, a wonderful collection. Uh, what is the, uh, that McLaren that doesn't have a windshield? That's a fun one. That's gotta be fun to drive.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Is that the Elva?

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the Elva. Good job.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  Before we bring in our next guest, let's talk about Augmental.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  They built a mouthpad. It was a touchpad. You can drive with your tongue.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Wasn't this a joke I was doing in the grill?

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  This is what everyone has been waiting for.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  Taste is the next moat.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Taste is, taste is the

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull this video up.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Trackpad in your mouth.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  The thing is that if you're going in the mouth, you think you would just be whispering and communicating via text.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Is this, is this inherently, um, Tyler, definitely buy one immediately, but is this inherently short, like transcription? Like, cause if you can just tell your computer what you want to do and it just uses the computer for you.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Even with computer use, you could say like minimize this window and it can just go click that. So I, I like the, I actually like the idea of mouth electronics. I think that that's something interesting, but I would just put a microphone in that and then you would just whisper to it and say, and tell the computer what to do.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  It could be for the production.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  For gaming.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  Production team is excited about using it to control the cameras here in the studio.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Oh, the PTZ.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  Ben, Ben just standing there like this the whole time, just

• 42:55John Coogan?

  It feels like it would get exhausting.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  You could do soundboard with it, Jordy.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Over a hundred people already use it. Some for up to sixteen hours a day. I cannot believe they got a hundred people.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  We got a no comment from Gabe in the chat.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  It's an odd, it's an odd cho, it's a choice.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  That wouldn't be the first thing I would go for. Anyway, Range Rover GT feels like a better, if you're going with a device, you want to get one of these. The Range Rover GT, a grand tour by Range Rover, fifth member of the Range Rover family. Wait, it's electric?

• 43:36John Coogan?

  That is a crazy choice. Um, interesting. So they actually did, is this, this is a real announcement. Fifth member of the Range Rover family, elegant electric GT defined by a sleek silhouette and coupe perform, uh, proportions, combining peerless, long haul, comfort, effortless performance and signature Range Rover breadth of capability, featuring an interior shaped by the same reductive principles. I mean, uh, what, what, what's the, what's the highest level, uh, electric vehicle right now? Probably the, uh, the Rolls Royce, not the Ghost, the Spectre, the Spectre. And so for that crowd, maybe this makes sense, but, uh,

• 44:19John Coogan?

  I, you, you, you introduced this as potential Urus competitor. You thought it was going to be, uh, souped up more like a Turbo GT.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see the EV part.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  But they went EV. I wonder how this will sell. I mean, for a lot of Range Rover buyers, it's about comfort. It's about quiet. It's about, uh, smoothness and EVs can get you there a lot quicker.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  I like the way it looks.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  It does look beautiful.

• 44:40Jordi Hays?

  It's like a good commuter if you don't care about autonomous driving.

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Now more important than ever, as is our next guest. We have Viral Patel from Ramp. He's the director of software engineering and he has an exciting announcement for us. How are you doing?

• 45:02Speaker 04

  Doing well. How are you guys doing?

• 45:03John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Welcome to the show. Uh, give us a little introduction on your background, road to Ramp, your, how you've ramped up on the team. And then, uh, and then we can go into the announcement today or this week.

• 45:16Speaker 04

  For sure. Yeah. So, uh, I've been at Ramp since the, since the beginning. I joined as a founding engineer, worked a lot on our core product team. And more recently have been, uh, kind of leading, leading the applied AI team and, uh, and launching what we just announced on, on Monday, our Ramp Router.

• 45:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell us about the Ramp Router. Uh, was this something you built internally first and then sort of productized over time?

• 45:39Speaker 04

  Basically, yeah. So we've been using Ramp Router internally for the last three and a half, three years, um, for like a seventy thousand three years. Yeah.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So you're using it internally in the product, not even as an organization, but deciding when you have

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  basically a task to do.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Back then it was GPT four and Gemini.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  This is like, how do we basically parse a receipt or how do we

• 46:08Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. We use all of the models for receipt detection, uh, parsing, alcohol detection on our policy agent.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 46:15Speaker 04

  And we wanted to choose the best models and wanted flexibility. And over time, that's just gotten more and more important. There's new models getting released, uh, every other day, basically. And so, uh, we felt the pain point and we talked to some more customers about it. And now we're, uh, releasing it, uh, and, and giving everyone access. And so I think, um, it's, it's an exciting time to be building applications, especially, um, at the application layer. And I think, uh, we're, we're always have been there for companies to help them save time and money with their TE expenses or their bill pay. And now, um, their token costs. So, um, yeah, it's a really exciting release.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, talk about how the product actually integrates into an enterprise workflow. I mean, you can use the receipt processing, alcohol detection, I think is a fun one. Um, uh, because I imagine you have to benchmark each model at some point on your workload and then the team can actually understand the trade offs. And then how much of that is driven dynamically based on token price, like day to day even?

• 47:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So you would basically replace, uh, your base, like OpenAI endpoint with ramps instead. And you can pass in different, uh, model slugs. And so you can control if you want to just, uh, route all your traffic to, to one model.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Or if you want to shadow some models and compare, uh, like GPT five point eight with GLM five point two and, and get the outputs. Uh, you can score the results, uh, with our, with our scorer. And then, uh, in the background, you can actually compare the output and then decide, hey, do you want to start moving traffic, more traffic over and, uh, Ramp obviously can do this, uh, for you automatically. Or if you want to control it, you can, you can do it yourself too.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  How about, uh, what, walk me through some of the trade offs. Like if you're on GLM five point two, uh, are all GLM five point two endpoints created equal? Because I imagine that some produce more tokens per second, some might have different prices. They also might have different even qualities. I, you know, you hear about like, oh, this one's been quantized or this one's been, uh, nerfed a little bit, or they turned down the reasoning on this model, uh, post-launch. And I imagine that benchmarking is consistent, but then also there's a whole bunch of trade offs that happen even after you've like selected the hot model of the day or the one that makes sense.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah. Beyond just the, the model itself, there's different service tiers. So, uh, OpenAI, for example, has like a, a flex tier and a, and a standard tier. And there's different prices for each. And, uh, they, they like ramp itself will, will track, uh, what the latency is for, uh, this application. You can set a timeout on like what you prefer, uh, and, and based on that, we'll decide whether to send it to flex tier or standard tier, depending on the latency speeds that we're seeing. And so, um, I do think one of the most powerful things here is the fact that, um, we already have like these production workloads working for, for customers and it's been, um, really important for us internally.

• 49:26Speaker 04

  And so we have the proof points of, of saving ourselves thirty, uh, percent, maybe even higher soon. Um, and it's just a matter of passing on the same savings now.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  How should, how should, uh, startups and enterprises like think about the significance of this product to Ramp itself? Like what, how much, what are, what are the resources that you're putting behind it? Cause this feels like, uh, it feels like deeply aligned to Ramp's mission, but at the same time, going into a category where there's plenty of other companies that want to basically offer this product.

• 50:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. It feels a little bit in the CTO suite as opposed to CFO suite, but they're blending together.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would say even internally, our CFOs and CTOs are spending more time together. And when we've talked to more customers, that that story resonates. And so one of the most interesting things that obviously has been in the news a lot is just how much token costs have become a bigger part of a company's payroll. And people have their estimates and budgets, and that's exactly what Ramp has been known for. And so beyond just like the router itself on the URL, like having all that data flow through and be in Ramp in our token spend management product is, I think, a big part of it. The same way that people have their limits and budgets on their T and E spend, where

• 50:49Speaker 04

  there's been talk about specific companies have token budgets per month or per week. And so we actually launched just last week this product, and you can basically see your token spend alongside like your T and E spend. And I think, yeah, Eric was on the call last week talking about that. And so it just makes a lot of sense for those CFOs because they want to manage that spend better. And then Ramp can be kind of that single pane of glass to do that.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  So how does caching play into this? It feels like that's another way to optimize cost, and it would be amazing if it happened sort of more automatically. What's the future of that look like?

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think one of the, I mean, there's, there's a bunch of different optimizations we can make if we, if we own the router. As an example, if you're using Claude Code or Codex, you'll see as maybe your session is longer, the context loads up and your session gets increasingly more expensive. And sometimes it'd be best to just compact that context and start a new session, have it, have the model summarize. And so there's interesting experiments like that that we're running internally. And we're basically going to do hundreds of these things on behalf of customers and show them exactly what the before and after kind of, kind of looks like here.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how are you thinking about integrating with tools like Codex and Claude Code to use the UI UX patterns that users, end users, employees are used to, but then still optimize under the hood? There's plenty of situations where you'll give Codex or Claude Code just an API key to 11 labs, because 11 labs can do more efficient, better quality audio generation, or you might give an API key to all sorts of different things. Is there a world where you can delegate certain tasks to a cheaper GLM 5.2 endpoint, for example, and then have like the preferred model and the preferred application still work semi-normally?

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Exactly. Yeah, so that's the plan. I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna be a partnership with, with the labs and the model providers. I think one of the interesting things that you see now and will continue to happen is that you'll have kind of like jagged capabilities of the models. And maybe one, one model is like really good at writing SDR outbound, or another model's really good at writing email copy for the marketing team. And so we'd love to be in a world where Ramp can, can optimize your use cases for the right kind of, kind of business outcome. And I think just be aligned with like, hey, you're just trying to get your work done and then move on, move on with your life and not spend a billion dollars.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  And so that's, that's kind of like what's really exciting to us is beyond just like the starting point, it's like doing this for all types of spend.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  What is Ramp's culture like right now around token consumption? It's, you know, it's probably the most like aggressively AI native, like fintech company or top, top three in the world, let's say.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  But also culturally cost aware. Yeah, exactly. It's rare.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would love to see the reaction to like, you know, one engineer going a little too crazy.

• 54:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's been fun. I think part of the, part of the game and part of what's been fun here is that we were building this product for ourselves. We got the entire company to be super AI pilled, spending a lot of, a lot of money. Maybe they don't want me to say the exact number. But now, obviously, like we're, we're taking a step back and looking at the costs and the outcomes and looking at ways that you can kind of optimize. And so we're building this product with our finance team hand in hand. We're sitting next to them every day and, and showing them, hey, like, here's how we've done the optimization for this workflow, or here's how we've done the semantic tagging for our internal like background coding agent inspect.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  And so it's been really fun, honestly, to, to use this product. And I think that's what makes this product really good is that we've built it for ourselves and can, can kind of share the learning along the way.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, congrats on.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally meet you as well.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  And great to meet you. Yeah, thanks for having me on the show. It makes so much sense. It's an exciting expansion. We will talk to you soon. Have a great week. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. Want to tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. You got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Our next guest is the co-founder and CEO of Fireworks AI. Let's bring in Lynn. It's been too long. How are you doing?

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Give us the nukes. We missed the fundraising announcement, but we're glad to have you here. How much did you raise? What happened?

• 55:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, we raised 1.5 billion.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Wow. Good job, Jordy from downtown.

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  Not my best shot, but got it done.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  It's incredible.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Massive. Talk about, talk about everything that's happened since the last time you're on the show. It feels like it's been at least six months, maybe closer to 12, but you guys have been super busy.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Cooking.

• 56:13Speaker 05

  Right, so we, we focus on building specialized intelligence platform. What that means is we want to make sure every single company has a tool to protect their alpha and turn their alpha into their own intelligence. So what does that mean? Is we build a training and inference platform, co-optimize, co-design together to allow application enterprise, activate their private data, continuously turn that into their customized model, optimize for inference for both speed and cost, where they, to solve their specific

• 56:52Speaker 05

  problem, they should have the best model quality, the best speed and significant lower cost of operation. By that, I really mean five to 10 times lower cost for them to build a durable business. We see an interesting dichotomy in current AI time, very different from SaaS time, where at SaaS time, product market fit and a durable business is one thing. Once you hit a product market fit, you scale as fast as possible. I think last time I mentioned, in AI time, once you have product market fit, you're likely to scale into bankruptcy. You guys laugh at that? And that's become reality right now.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  So funny.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  So this is not just startups. Many startups are really facing the jeopardy of scaling into bankruptcy, even though they have a great product. It also is happening to large public companies because they're the winner. They were the startup and they're winner, winning various different kind of solution space towards consumer, presumer developers. They have huge amount of traffic. If they deploy their AI features to all their audience, it's a lot, it's significant amount of cost. And they also get stuck and not able to roll out their AI features. So at the same time, we know that application development has been significantly disrupted.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  It's very easy to implement ideas or copy ideas by, because writing code is no longer a barrier. We want to make sure, I had an interesting conversation with Jensen after his DTC keynotes. He mentioned, there's no special general company. There's no special general company as in every single company exists for a reason. The reason for a company to exist is they specialize in solving a particular problem extremely well. And that alpha exists from the product design to their business operation, to their deep understanding of their customer, and all of that reflecting private data.

• 58:52Speaker 05

  And today, every single company should have full control of how to turn that private intelligence into a model they can operate, empower their product. If they only build on top of a Blackbox API, be it API wrapper, it, there's really hard, it's really hard for them to do, build a durable business. So we want to give our customer the best tool to build a specialized intelligence, to have full control of their own intelligence, to stand on top of, and have full control of the cost for them to scale in the long run. So that's what we're doing, and that's where we're going to use our new fundraising to deploy capital into, to accelerate that pace.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  What's the biggest bottleneck to your business? What's, you're growing quickly, but why aren't you growing faster?

• 59:42Speaker 05

  That's, that's part of the reason why I'm raising this round is capacity. So we are, the whole industry is going through a super linear growth in terms of demand. It's because of, doesn't matter whether it's open, closed, the model quality passed the threshold of solving many, many problems. And on top of that, the tune model quality is even better. And we, as a company, we need to grow significant amount of capacity of people across board. We're hiring from researcher to engineers to marketers to sellers top notch. And we invite passionate people to join us on our mission of building specialized intelligence.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  I saw someone talk, ask for like, we need a Costco of AI, less philosopher, kings. Do you like the idea of becoming the Costco for AI?

• 1:00:36Speaker 05

  That's an interesting analogy. I think at the end, what we believe is

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  the whole entire industry is changing from token maxing to value maxing.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Sounds like Costco to me.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  Because at the end, not all the tokens are equal.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Speaker 05

  And we care about solving a specific task, use the most economical way to approach it.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 05

  That's a durable business. And it has, there's nothing new here. In the past, you know, hundreds of years of capitalism.

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  Capitalism was designed for efficiency.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 05

  And I think the whole ecosystem is really good at that.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  So Costco has, you know, other brands, they have the Kirkland brand, they've done some vertical integration. How deep does vertical integration go? How important is vertical integration to providing the lowest possible cost and winning on essentially value?

• 1:01:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, so as we, from our point of view.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  There's so many innovation that's happening on top of us. Many of those are application doing vertical intuition.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:45Speaker 05

  And we are powering them today, including in public, we talk about Cursor, because I've been training their own model for a long time.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  We talk about Havi, Havi have been training about their legal model for a long time.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Speaker 05

  There are many, many other customers across coding, cowork, all kinds of cowork verticals. From legal, finance, recruiting, marketing, sales, customer support. Wide variety of vertical, they are all building all sorts of vertical solutions. And they have their unique insight to build their customized model and make their business really standing out.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:16Speaker 05

  On top of that, there's also a lot of consumer facing company. And the whole entire industry is literally going all in AI in production. Where we are helping them to transition.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  Into embracing, not just embracing AI in the proper way, but, but really integrate their offer.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, even when you see Google search overviews, like that has to be extremely cheap. Like they don't charge for those. Obviously, Google is completely vertical integrated. Down from model training to they have custom silicon, they have their own data centers. Is that where you think it goes? Do you think you'll do custom silicon, your own, own data centers? Have power generation contracts to like fully offer the cheapest possible product for a particular category?

• 1:03:07Speaker 05

  So I'm humble enough to acknowledge there are tons of experts.

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 05

  In every single layer.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  Of the AI innovation. I think Jason mentioned five layer cake. I think there's probably more than five layers.

• 1:03:20John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  Looks a lot.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Shot fired.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  So every single, every single layer has their own experts. We want to work with them. We want to work with words expert, really good at doing their own job. And we specialize in building this specialized intelligence platform, Australian influence. And we partner with all different layers to drive the best vertical solution. That's our philosophy.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Well, congratulations. Clearly working, Jordy.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Incredible progress.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming back on the show. Can't wait to talk to you again soon. We'll talk to you later. Goodbye. 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. There's one more news story we gotta go through really quickly. Wedding guests are now placing prop bets on everything from how long the first dance will last, to whether the groom will cry during the ceremony. Call, Sager, and Jenny. This is a dream come true for him. Couples are using printed cards and apps.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Sager bet.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  Sager bet immediately.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Printed cards and apps to let guests predict things like who gives the longest toast, how many outfits the bride wears, or whether the first kiss lasts more than six seconds. The idea is to make weddings feel more interactive, especially during slower parts of the night like cocktail hour. One app called Bedding on the Wedding says more than 25,000 couples have created pools on its platform, which cost $49 and includes a live leaderboard. The company says revenue is growing at triple digit run rate year over year.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Real insider, insider trading risk here, right? You might have the, the, you know, groom.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  Talking to some of his buddies saying.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  But if it's low stakes.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  I've got.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  You know.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  I've got some, I'm gonna cry. I want you to know I'm gonna cry. Go, go bet, bet the house on, on me crying.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Maybe. But I, I think this is designed to be, you know, generally small prizes, $20 gift card, maybe some memento, maybe some, you know,

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  you know, an engraved dinner plate from the wedding, just to show that you were more engaged, something to remember.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's ask Jason.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Let's ask Jason.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  He would encourage betting on his wedding.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  When are we gonna get betting? When can we gamble on 37 signals properties?

• 1:05:44Jason Fried?

  Oh my god. Well, my wedding was, we had 12 people in our backyard, so there wouldn't have been a very big use case for that app.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, small pool, lack of liquidity, that's a real problem.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Small number of people doesn't mean there's not a lot of volume necessarily, right?

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, depends on who you're.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  People throwing some real.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  You get DHH there, he throws in, you know, his CGT, you know, he puts it all in the line, you never know.

• 1:06:06Jason Fried?

  You see that picture today?

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Jason Fried?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Trying to hurt your feelings? What's going on?

• 1:06:11Jason Fried?

  Yeah, that's, that was a little, that was a bruise. That was a little bit of a bruise. It was a bruise because way back when, I used to own a Singer 911.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:19Jason Fried?

  And I was selling, this is a number of years ago before they went crazy, crazy. And I was trying to sell it and some guy's like, I'll trade you my Carrera GT for that. And I'm like, eh, I don't really, nah, I don't really think that was a good deal. And it turned out to be, yeah, I should.

• 1:06:31John Coogan?

  One of the great trades of all time.

• 1:06:33Jason Fried?

  That would have been a good trade.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  You just have that image pulled up.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  That's so brutal. I was, I was in, I was in the Alps Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And the, the event that I was at, there was hundreds of, of Porsches everywhere. And still, when the CGTs would roll up, everyone would get quiet and, and just watch. Like seriously, there's one moment where, like, there was probably at least 200 people. And, and it was, everyone's just talking, talking, talking, CGT pulls up, crowd goes silent, everyone's just in awe.

• 1:07:11Jason Fried?

  What color? Is it silver?

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  There was actually a bunch. Red, there's a GT Silver. GT Silver on tan is like probably, probably my, my favorite that I've been seeing.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  But no production markets around it.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  None at all.

• 1:07:25John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:07:25Jordi Hays?

  No, just doing it, just enjoying cars purely for the love of it.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  You could get so many people, if they're not comfortable driving, you know, we know some people that collect cars, but they don't drive them. They could partake, saying, oh, Jordy's going out for a little lap. When will he get back? I'll bet on it, you know? Of course, there's insider trading risk.

• 1:07:43Jason Fried?

  Will he get back? Like, will he just hit the wall? Those things are tricky to drive, I understand.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  What's the latest, what's your latest vehicle purchase?

• 1:07:53Jason Fried?

  I bought a 1979 Porsche 928. Which is one of my favorite cars of all time. I own two 928s. They're both old and they're not expensive, but they're awesome. And I bought a green one, it's oak green metallic, which is a rare color. And has Pasha seat inserts. And it's just, it's awesome. It's just, it's so 70s. I love it.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  What is, I've never driven a 928. What is, what's the experience like?

• 1:08:19Jason Fried?

  They're very planted. So it's a V8, so it's a front engine car, which is unusual for Porsche, but it's a very, it's very stable. I mean, these were not that fast. I think they had 200 and maybe 10 horsepower or something, the early cars. This is the first year, first and second year. So they're not fast, but they, they feel great to drive. You should borrow it.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Come by sometime. Are you, are you a Model Y guy as well? Because that was the funniest thing about DHH's post is that he's just like, all these cars are kind of worse than the Model Y in some ways.

• 1:08:49Jason Fried?

  I do have a Model Y and it is probably the best car I've ever owned overall.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Jason Fried?

  It's so comfortable to drive, it's quick as hell, it handles great. We had a previous Y, which I didn't think was very good, but the new Ys are fantastic. I just love it. Yeah, I mean, really, I prefer to drive that over anything, to be honest.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Do you, do you have a, do you have an intuitive sense for the business logic between the lack of fast followers around that? Like, in terms of just appliance vehicle, it feels like all the other manufacturers are still playing in their special. It, this car says something about you, it offers a particular experience, it has convertible. But just in like the appliance, basically a minivan on wheels, ultimate utility. Tesla just has had it on lock and they're like running away with the market.

• 1:09:33Jason Fried?

  They have, I mean, I guess that's what Honda and Toyota did for many, many years, right? You never really thought of those as, they were more just basic appliances. I need to get from point A to point B and I want it to be reliable as hell and just work, you know? So I think, I think Tesla kind of slid in there and basically did that with EVs in a way that everything else is, yeah, it's more of a statement. I guess people might think of Tesla as a statement, but it really, it really isn't. It's just like, I want a great car that's incredibly quick, clear, technology advanced, affordable.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:00Jason Fried?

  Full self-driving is incredible. It's just a really amazing thing. And if you haven't really been in one recently, you don't really know because they weren't that high quality four years ago.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:12Jason Fried?

  They were bad. They've gotten to be very high quality now.

• 1:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, people complain about the panel gaps and the interior and all sorts of stuff, but they've, yeah, they've sorted that out.

• 1:10:20Jason Fried?

  They're incredible now, yeah.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Where, like, a lot of different cars feel like they're in bubble territory, CGT, I don't know how much more it can go up. I'd be, I'm sure it'll go up more, but there's, I think there was one on Bring a Trailer, actually probably.

• 1:10:39Jason Fried?

  Let's not talk about Bring a Trailer. I'm actually, honestly, my phone is, is on because there's an auction ending in 32 minutes. And I'm like, I can't miss. I'm bidding on it.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  So, so, yeah, so, so with, um, yeah, we won't dox the car until you, until you win.

• 1:10:56Jason Fried?

  It's okay. It's okay. I mean, like, it's the 50th anniversary 911, which I used to own. I owned one a long time ago. Do you know the car? Do you know that particular?

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Which, uh, wait, but the 50th anniversary of the 911? Isn't that only a few years old?

• 1:11:11Jason Fried?

  Yeah. So it was a 2016 car and they did a, it was a 991 model and they did, um, uh, an anniversary model, which they put like bright chrome trim on it. They did pepita inserts. It has a slightly better engine. It's the last of the manual naturally aspirated 911s with a wide body that aren't ridiculously expensive. Um, and I, it's beautiful looking. It's got like updated Fuchs wheels. It's an incredible thing. Go check it out. Uh, you'll find it on, it just looks beautiful. I've owned one and I had a PDK and there's a manual for sale and I kind of really badly want it. Only has 7,000 miles on it. Please don't outbid me whoever you are. I got my mouth shut.

• 1:11:47Jordi Hays?

  I haven't pulled up here. We won't, we, we don't even, we don't need to pull it up, but, uh, it, it looks absolutely, absolutely beautiful. Oh, they pulled it up.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about, what's your read on the sport classic? Have you driven a sport classic?

• 1:12:02Jason Fried?

  I've not driven one. I love the interior. Um, I don't like the big circle on the side if the, you know, they usually have that.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  No decals.

• 1:12:08Jason Fried?

  No decals for me. I, the interiors are gorgeous though. Love that car. I would, the thing is, is that they've, they, you know, they're so expensive for what they really are, which is a Carrera S, basically, I believe, right? Or?

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  To me, to me, the driving experience is, is some, like, I had, I think, the best, my, my most memorable 20 minutes in the car coming down from Mankai in Austria. 20 minutes, open road. It was the most, it felt like I was in a video game. It felt like driving some combination of like a turbo S and a GT2. It's like so, so planted and it's like, it's refined, but it's also angry. It's like, it was, it was.

• 1:12:51Jason Fried?

  Manual too, right?

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, manual. It's.

• 1:12:53Jason Fried?

  So nice. Incredible. It's great. Those are, those, you know, you can't get them really in aftermarket. They're what? 300 plus or something now?

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, like 600.

• 1:13:03Jason Fried?

  Six, sorry, 600. Who was the ST? The ST's like a million now or something?

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the ST is even, I think even more, but so when, when things feel like they're in, certain cars feel like they're in bubble territory, are you just buying, are you going like, I'm just gonna buy nine, things like the 928 and things that are a bit more, uh, special, but less like, you know, you don't want to buy it when it's hot, basically?

• 1:13:28Jason Fried?

  Yeah. I mean, I tend to not chase things anyway. It's just there's, if everyone's chasing it, I'm not interested in it in a sense. So the 928 is a car like nobody wants, but I've always loved. Um, I kind of grew up with them. They're just, they're super cool. So I, I go after that, but I do, I do miss the 50th anniversary. So I might want to pick this one up if I can. We'll see where it ends up. Maybe I won't. Um, but I mean, I've wanted a Dakar for a while. I wanted a sport classic, actually. Um, I'd love to have one of those, but I'm not gonna pay. That's obscene. I'm just not gonna do that. There's no reason for that. It's also not, I just don't spend that kind of money on cars. It's a crazy amount of money on a car. That's just not something I'm really gonna drive all the time anyway.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how do you feel? What is the last 10 minutes of an auction like feel like to you? Because, because I've like tried, I, I've, I, I, when, when sports, uh, sports betting was blowing up, I was hanging out with, uh, I think Senra and like Rob and probably John. And I was like, I'm gonna give this a shot. I want to know why, why this is so popular. And I just couldn't quite, I couldn't quite get into it. But the experience of being, of bidding in the final minutes of an auction, like something in my head just goes like, you're not losing. And, and to me, it's easy to get carried away.

• 1:14:46Jason Fried?

  It's dangerous to throw that one more, that one chip in there at the end. You're like, fuck it. I'll just, you know?

• 1:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Jason Fried?

  The thing is, is that I, I all, I mean, this is just, I always feel deep regret right after winning a car. Like, like especially a vintage car, maybe not a new car, like a sport classic, I would not feel regret because I know what I'm getting and there's no issues, right? But like, you buy a 79, 928 on the, on the thing and you like, you get it and you take it to your mechanic. He's like, you know, there's like $40,000 of work that needs to happen on this thing. You're like, fuck. So vintage cars, deep regret, and I've regretted all of them I bought, even though I liked them all. But the purchase was like deeply regretful. But modern cars, I don't feel that way. I, I would be very excited to get something I like.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. Good point.

• 1:15:28Jason Fried?

  Yeah. Um, but you gotta be careful. Bat, bat, like I talked to some mechanics and they're like, bat is just keeping me in business because people just buy these cars. They think they're good. They get them. They need like tons of service. It's been great for small mechanics, actually.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. I, I bought my first sports car on Bring a Trailer. The first one I really went for, I ended up bidding way more than I was comfortable with just because I got into, I, I was like 23 at the time. I got into the last, I was one of the last two bidders.

• 1:15:55Jason Fried?

  Bidding psychosis?

• 1:15:56Jordi Hays?

  And he, yeah, I got, I got, I got auction psychosis, ran away. Honestly, luckily I didn't win. Um, but the second one I got, it was, I had the perfect experience. I bought it. Uh, I, I think I bought it, bought it well. It was a 997. Uh, it was in Arizona.

• 1:16:14Jason Fried?

  Dot two, dot one? What, what did you get?

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the dot one. Uh, but it, but the issue, the, the, the bearing issue that they have had already been like fixed or whatever.

• 1:16:24Jason Fried?

  Okay.

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I flew to Arizona, pick it up. I get it. Drives great. I'm 30 minutes down the road, headed back to California and I was gonna drive through Joshua Tree and I was passing a construction site and a piece of rebar went like fully through the wheel, like through the tire and the wheel. Basically I pulled over and, and, uh, ended up having to ship the car back to California. And, uh, it was, it was the most, uh, it was my most devastating car enthusiast moment. But once it got to California, we got a new wheel. It ran perfectly for as many miles as I needed to and then ended up making money on the, on the sale.

• 1:17:04Jason Fried?

  Nice. I don't ever do that. I bought real quick. I bought a, an Aston DB9 GT, which is the last year of the DB9, which is, which to me, one of those beautiful cars ever made in history. Um, I got the car, I get it, you know, shipped in on the truck. I got this on bat. Um, there's like this rattle in the back that's kind of bugging me. So I take it to the mechanic. They can't figure it out. They're like a few grand in trying to figure it out. Turns out like the car got in an accident at some point and it was never reported on Carfax and to like fix this structural issue is like nine grand. So I'm like, fuck it. Just, I sold the car to the dealer immediately, lost like 20K. I just wanted to wash my hands of it. I'd like, I had it for two days and just sold

• 1:17:46Jason Fried?

  it immediately. Cause I just, I can't, I just can't handle that thing to know that like I bought this thing and it wasn't what it was. And yeah, I could fix it, but it was never gonna be the same. So I, I never, I never seemed to win on bat, but good for you. I'm glad you made money on your car.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you feel about, uh, different luxury brands doing what I would call zoomer partnerships? So like Aston Martin launching a partnership with Call of Duty? I can imagine that the logic for that was, hey, we want to reach a younger audience. We need more relevancy with, with the next generation of buyers. Aston has obviously struggled recently, even though I think their cars are, are stunning, but I would say in every single sort of like price tier, it's not quite as desirable, I think for a lot of people as like the Ferrari equivalent or the Porsche equivalent. Um, so I can, I can understand where they're going, even though to me as somebody who loves Call of Duty

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  and loves Aston Martin, I still got like quite an aversion to that partnership. And then you have some of the stuff that like AP does with their, you know, partnering with like DJs and things like that, that, um, that, that's kind of, it's this interesting thing because you're trying to appeal to the young generation, but it ends up turning off, I feel like your actual buyer group in the process.

• 1:19:08Jason Fried?

  Yeah. I, I find it to be, I mean, for me, I, it doesn't appeal to me. And although I will say that I like what Aston's done. Aston with that DB9 that I bought, they had a 007 edition, which I think is cheesy as hell, but, because it said like 007, like on the seats. But it probably spoke to their audience, you know? So like, that makes sense to me in a sense, even though I would never buy that. But yeah, I don't like the, I don't like the AP deals, but you know, who am I to say? Like they clearly sell them out and, um, it probably worked for them, but it's not the kind of thing that appeals to me is all I would say.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Agreed.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  Any more car questions?

• 1:19:45Jason Fried?

  Yeah. Car watch questions. I mean, there's actually, I saw a watch recently, like Bremont came out with some like Aston Martin or like, I don't know who it was. Um, it's like, what do you, I don't, who buys these? I just wonder who buys these silly things? I just, I don't get it. I don't get it.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, the watch car, the, the watch car collab seems to make more sense because if you're buying a car, you're checking out for something that's six figures. It'd be like, that's a couple more thousand dollars. Like throw the watch in, whatever. It's like.

• 1:20:13Jason Fried?

  Well, sometimes the dealerships do that to, to like, you gotta buy the watch. If you want to buy the watch, I'll get you the car. Like that, I hate that bundling stuff. I, it's so disingenuous. I don't know if you saw this thing Jay Leno, there's this little Jay Leno clip recently about how he won't buy a Ferrari because when he was younger, he wanted to go buy a Ferrari. And they're like, well, you gotta buy two of these other models you don't want before you can get the one you want. And he's just like a turn me off forever from Ferrari and like, I'll buy a McLaren because they want my business and they're cool to me. And, you know, that's how I feel about this stuff. That's why I don't like the, I don't like this bundling, especially Rolex ADs and Porsche dealers now are doing the same thing. It's just, it's gross. It's gross, I think.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  On the Ferrari side, uh, obviously the Luce was mocked, but ultimately do you think it ends up? Being a win for them just because they can effectively say now, any car that you actually want, you just add a Luce to the, to your cart and check out and you, they solve, they get, you know, more margin, I'm sure, plus they solve their emissions issues if like for every one.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:21:17Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, you know, desirable, uh, supercar, they sell one EV and it, and it's sort of nets out to being like pretty efficient.

• 1:21:26Jason Fried?

  My sense is they'll sell every car they make. Um, and I just don't think they're going to resell very well. That's all. But like, I mean, I don't know, I, you know, when I first, well, not first, but last time I was on the show, we talked about the interior of that car and like, we're like, let's wait until we see the exterior.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. I still think it looks cool. I, I've seen a lot of the details. It's interesting. It's different, but it's like, it can work and it has a purpose. And then the exterior was really, was really.

• 1:21:52Jason Fried?

  I'm, I'm the kind of person, I just support like all creators of things. Like it's so hard to make anything. So like, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their Ferrari, it's Johnny, like, they probably know a few more things than people online know about like what's cool and what isn't, what's good.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:06Jason Fried?

  It, it is an unusual car. It does not look like a Ferrari, doesn't feel like a Ferrari, but maybe it's time for Ferrari to make some changes. I don't know. Maybe they're bored of their own history. I'm not sure. I mean, it's interesting. I, I, I wouldn't, I'm not interested in the car, but I, I just, it's for the same reason I really respect, but I would never want to buy a Cybertruck. Like, I just like that that exists in the world.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I agree with that for sure.

• 1:22:29Jason Fried?

  I like that the Luce like exists in the world. Like I liked it. Someone did that and they did it their own way. I always support things like that, even if it's not for me.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna support it myself.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  When they're selling, when, no, when they're selling for, no, no, more than half off and I want to do a Safari treatment.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There's definitely some cool things you can do with it. It does sort of act as a, uh, the inverse of a Halo car. Like after the Luce dropped, the SF90 looked way cheaper. Whereas before everyone was complaining, oh, the SF90 is so expensive, uh, Purusangue is so expensive. No one's complaining about that stuff anymore now. Everyone's like.

• 1:23:06Jason Fried?

  It's a good point.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  It has a naturally aspirated V12 in the Purusangue. If they're charging high, half a million dollars, that's fine.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  What is your last car question? What is, uh, you said you had a Singer, but, but, uh, when it comes to Resto Mods, like what makes a great Resto Mod to you?

• 1:23:21Jason Fried?

  I don't think there are great Resto Mods. That's what I realized. Um, I mean, the Singer is an amazing thing for sure, but what I realized was it was neither of what it was supposed to be. It wasn't like a vintage car and it also wasn't a new Porsche. So it kind of had this, it's, it's a beautiful object and they do an exceptionally fine job designing and building them. Although mine had a lot of issues because mine was pretty early, like the 72nd car. So they hadn't worked it all out yet, but it just didn't satisfy me in other, either direction. And, and I kind of realized that like, I'd rather just have an old car and a new car and save some money, frankly. You can have both and, and then like drive the old car and have the old experience, drive the new car, have

• 1:24:05Jason Fried?

  the new experience. So I'm not a big Resto Mod guy. For a while I was curious about like icons, like the Broncos and stuff. And I also with that, I'd just rather have an old beat up Bronco or an old beat up pickup truck. It just, I'm, I'm more into like, what, what is the thing supposed to be? Just get the thing that it's supposed to be.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about?

• 1:24:23Jason Fried?

  That's my take. What's your take?

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  Uh, well, we were debating the, uh, the Range Rover has a classics program where they're selling a 1994 Range Rover, but it's been fully restored from the factory. And so maybe that solves the problem you're identifying. What do you think about that?

• 1:24:40Jason Fried?

  I'm into that because that's like the brand doing their own thing. I'm into that fully. I think Porsche has a classics program too, perhaps maybe.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:48Jason Fried?

  I just don't like Resto Mods basically. And to me, that's not a Resto Mod. That's like a true restoration.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:53Jason Fried?

  A Resto Mod, making a car when it's not, or backdating or something. I'm not into that so much.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Restoration. I would, I would say that's a great way to put it. It's like, I'm a massive fan of restoration. I don't want somebody to take, I don't want somebody to take what was, what was perfect at its time and try to like modernize it and then put their own spin on it.

• 1:25:14Jason Fried?

  Same, same thing with houses for me. Like I like, an old house should be restored to the way it was. I don't like walking into an old house with a lot of soul and then you go into a kitchen and it's super modern.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:24Jason Fried?

  It just doesn't, it doesn't work. I mean, it works, but it, this, something is missing then actually, um, in both of those experiences. So anyway, that's my stupid opinion as whatever. Everyone's got their own thing. Plenty of people like Singers, plenty of people like Resto Mods and they all are great things. It's just not for me anymore. Yeah.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  I gotta ask you one tech question.

• 1:25:45Jason Fried?

  Yeah, sure. Let's do something tech.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  So, and I, I, I think you'll have a, you'll have some insight here. So, uh, there was a, a screenshot from a story about how hard technology workers are, are grinding in the AI era that went viral for being bleak, according to this, uh, this poster. They said, a 31-year-old tech startup worker in San Francisco who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, said that her engineering manager husband told her a few months ago that he needed to focus all of his energy on quote, becoming an AI native and requested that she take on almost all parenting responsibilities for the couple's preschool age daughter. She complied. She described the experience

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  as surreal. He spent days, nights and weekends locked in his office toiling away on AI projects, but her husband eventually thanked her. He was now the top user of AI in his company.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Is it the great lock-in? Is this burnout? Does he need to pick up a book? If so, which book would you recommend from your library across rework, remote? Doesn't have to be crazy at work. It sounds like it is crazy at many startups, at many, uh, engineering organizations. Some of them are in real knockout, drag out fights where the extra hour of work will actually result in maybe winning or losing.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Funny the way that.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Others, maybe not.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  The whole, the whole conversation around that post just was around the screenshot. No one read the actual article. I certainly didn't. And it just ends, the husband is now the top user of AI.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Which doesn't mean he's the best at using it. He just means he's, it reads to me like he's just using the most token. So hopefully he came out of his three-month, you know, AI bender and is like actually the best at getting the most utility out of the product.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Driving value.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, we don't know.

• 1:27:34Jason Fried?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I, I do find it ironic that, you know, AI is what it is, yet everyone seems to be working harder and harder. And it's, it's, it's, it's one of these things. Technology is always promised, uh, that it would do a lot for us and then we'd have more free time to do other things. And it just seems like no, no, no, and no. Um, especially at work. So yeah, I, I think it's a real problem and I, I can sense it here occasionally that, you know, yeah, we're getting more done, but it's, it weighs on people more because there's, you can be doing multiple things at once now and you can be parallel working on, with a bunch of different agents doing a bunch of different things. And it's like, to what end? Where, where is this going and why does it need to happen? Not that the technology's not amazing, but I'm not sure it's doing good things to human beings. Um, so, but the tech is incredible, obviously.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  And yeah, some of, some of the actual.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if 37 signals had got access to today's models a decade ago.

• 1:28:27Jason Fried?

  Right.

• 1:28:27Jordi Hays?

  And didn't tell anyone and just got to use them.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe you're a tech.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Part of the problem is that everyone has access to the tools and you're in a competitive category and you, and, and I feel like there's this concern of, of if we're not, I mean, it's always a question of like, do you want to be, do you want, at least if you're a venture-backed company and you're competing against another venture-backed company for a market, you don't want to be working less hard than them. That's generally not a good, not a good strategy.

• 1:28:52Jason Fried?

  But those are inputs. Like customers don't care about the inputs. They, what does the, like, how does it manifest in the product? And I'm not seeing products get better at the rate that the development process is getting better.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:08Jason Fried?

  So people are doing a lot of stuff and yet like, people actually don't want their products to change rapidly either. People want to get used to things. They want to settle into something. They want to understand how it goes. They don't want things to be moving constantly and things to be added all the time. So there, there's a disconnect actually between the, how much you can make and how much people actually can absorb and, and incorporate into their own workday basically. So, um, yeah, I, I think like at the end of the day, like you're building a product, however you build it, you're building it, but just because you can build more of it, doesn't mean it makes it a better product and make it a worse product. And you're seeing that all over the place right now, actually. So I don't know. It's great to have the tools. The tools are amazing, obviously, but you still have to decide what gets through the slit. Like what, what are you putting out there in the world?

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  I'm always laughing about the fact that, uh, when I'm in Gmail in Chrome, I can open Gemini in Gmail and I can also open Gemini in Chrome. And then I just have two sidebar chats that can, if, and if the window's too small, it takes up 100% of the window. And I'm like, this is, and then, and then you can't even use the models to interact with the email. And email's already pretty well organized. It's like, it's all perfectly organized by time or whatever filter you want.

• 1:30:23Jason Fried?

  It's pretty good already in that way. But yeah, anyway, I mean, amazing tech. But yeah, I, I, I don't think we've figured out what that all means yet still. Um, and I'm not alone in that. But it doesn't, like, if it, if it exhausts people.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Jason Fried?

  That's not a good thing. It, no tech is good if it makes people exhausted.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  There is something odd about the pattern of working. I mean, like when you're doing software development, occasionally there are times where like you just have to wait while something builds and that takes a minute. But a lot of times you can get in the flow state and be, you know, focused, working for an hour. But when you fire off a prompt and you're waiting, like maybe it's 20 minutes, maybe it's an hour. And then you, so you're checking your phone and it feels like you're like waiting for a call to come in almost. It's a different way of working and I can see how, uh, if not well managed, it can become very stressful.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a tool. Like I've been, I've, I've, I've been in places in my life where my laptop feels like, oh, it's exhausting.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  And, but it's not really the laptop. It's like what I'm, what I'm doing with it.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Jason Fried?

  What you're doing with it. Yeah.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  Time to go for a drive.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Jason, always a pleasure.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Always a pleasure.

• 1:31:26Jason Fried?

  Fun, fun to see you guys. Yeah.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Wish you had more time.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Let's do it again soon. We'll talk to you.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Next soon, dude.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. I forgot to ask Jason if he has, uh, opinions about Resto Mods for jet skis. I'll ask you. Is there a, is there a jet ski that you'd recommend for the, somebody?

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  I saw a wooden, I saw a wooden jet ski recently.

• 1:31:52Jason Fried?

  A wooden? That's.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Like a really classic jet ski.

• 1:31:55Jason Fried?

  Dude, don't get me excited. I'm into it. But these things go fast.

• 1:31:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Jason Fried?

  I think I went 70 miles an hour on my jet ski to work.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  To work.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  That's faster than most people commute. They're stuck in traffic.

• 1:32:05Jason Fried?

  I mean, I've got a five-minute commute to work on a jet ski, unless it's raining.

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, unless it's raining. Yeah.

• 1:32:11Jason Fried?

  And it gets a little weird. And you call an Uber.

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  Is it, is it, is it helpful? Do you do your best thinking on the jet ski?

• 1:32:19Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Does it clear the mind?

• 1:32:24Speaker 07

  No, it's just, guys, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a fucking notch on the belt.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Speaker 07

  Who else do you know is jet skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy.

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  You're that guy.

• 1:32:38Speaker 07

  I looked it up. I looked it up on your guys' application, OpenAI, you know, ChatGPT. On your guys' app.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, our app.

• 1:32:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, on your app.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  You're welcome, by the way.

• 1:32:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, I want to thank you for all the great stuff that you guys are providing in ChatGPT.

• 1:32:54Speaker 07

  But I think there's like one or two other CEOs, but, but nobody at a major, nobody, nobody thousand person plus that's a CEO is commuting to work.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  On a jet ski.

• 1:33:06Speaker 07

  On a jet ski.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Only a Texas resident, right?

• 1:33:08Speaker 07

  Texas resident, that's right. Primary residence, let's go.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  Before we start, the last time you were on here, that was, for me, the best moment of making the show ever. John and I, it was, it was totally surreal and we had a, we really enjoyed the conversation. But, but to me, we left that and it was almost depressing because as somebody who, you know, started getting into startups in the 2010s, you were that guy. And then I was realizing with the show, we, we had that conversation with you and it, and it was, you know, a significant day for you, but it was sort of depressing because I realized like a moment like that would never actually come again. Where I got to basically interview.

• 1:33:56Speaker 07

  It will happen, guys.

• 1:33:57Jordi Hays?

  It will happen. No, it'll happen differently, but, but you know, a childhood hero, having that conversation, that's one on one for me. I don't think it'll happen again. There'll be other, it was peak.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  It was good, it was good.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, you've been busy since then.

• 1:34:11Speaker 07

  I've been busy.

• 1:34:11Jordi Hays?

  And we're.

• 1:34:12Speaker 07

  Look, I'm super excited. It's my first OpenAI podcast. I'm very excited about it. Also, I want to let you guys know that if you need therapy sessions for what it's like to be a made man in retirement.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:34:26Speaker 07

  Like, if that's a thing, I can.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  We'll call you.

• 1:34:29Speaker 07

  I can help motivate you guys.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Isn't step one of therapy in this situation, just get a jet ski?

• 1:34:32Speaker 07

  No, it's just, it's, it's actually denial. You got to get over the denial.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Okay, over the denial.

• 1:34:37Speaker 07

  Fuck it.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  And then the acceptance?

• 1:34:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's something, I don't know the 12 steps.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone just knows denial and acceptance. They don't know any of the other ones.

• 1:34:46Speaker 07

  It's like a bunch of shit in the middle.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Grieving, bargaining, there's a couple others in there, but you do go through that. It's natural.

• 1:34:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  It happens, but then you start building.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like, if you guys need advice, you need therapy, I'm here for you.

• 1:34:56John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:34:57Speaker 07

  I mean, no, the retard maxing is you're not supposed to do therapy. I'm just saying, there are benefits.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Especially with your new partners. They're like, if, if there one thing, they wrote into the fundraising round, they wrote into the docs, like, cannot go to therapy.

• 1:35:08Speaker 07

  That would be amazing.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Podcasts are modern therapy for men. This is what men do. They don't go to therapy, they just go to podcasts.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  You should have, you should have, you should have office hours for founders, but they have to just come out on a jet ski while you're going and you're going 70 miles an hour and you'll coach them.

• 1:35:23Speaker 07

  I'm, I am starting to teach many founders and people in tech world how to water ski, how to wake surf. A bunch of my engineers already, so there was one guy who didn't know how to swim, but I got him behind the boat, wake surfing.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, so you had a life jacket.

• 1:35:39Speaker 07

  Life jacket.

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  The life jacket on.

• 1:35:41Speaker 07

  Life jacket. It's, it's, it sounds weirder than it is, but it was still very weird.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  It's a high risk.

• 1:35:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was good.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 1:35:47Speaker 07

  Uh, okay, cool.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  The business.

• 1:35:50Speaker 07

  Business. Dude, it's business time. Got to put on the business socks.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Unfinished business.

• 1:35:55Speaker 07

  Unfinished business. Um, so yeah, I announced earlier today, uh, we did a $1.7 billion raise. There's some, there's some noise that's going to happen.

• 1:36:09Speaker 07

  We're now.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  The one mall.

• 1:36:11Speaker 07

  This is fucking, you guys are crazy.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Institute another one from downtown.

• 1:36:14Speaker 07

  I'm hitting it next time.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you. Come over the top.

• 1:36:23Speaker 07

  So much noise.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  So much noise. All right, but walk us through.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  I feel you came in very relaxed.

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through, I think it's been, what, has it been, uh, four months since we talked?

• 1:36:33Speaker 07

  Three or four months, something like that. Yeah, I think, did we talk in April or March?

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  I think March.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:38Speaker 07

  Oh, that's right. Yes, early March. Four months.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:36:41Speaker 07

  So, yeah, so.

• 1:36:43John Coogan?

  What happened with the business to unlock the next round?

• 1:36:47Speaker 07

  Uh, I mean, we continue to go up and to the right, but like the announcement of Adams was, we are, we're going to do physical automation, physical AI, what we are calling industrial AI, to transform these industries one at a time.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 07

  We were, we did food, we moved into mining, we're doing transport. And it's working. And so that's how you go. Yeah. And then of course, there's like going out of stealth, there's all the things and it was just the right time.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 07

  So, um, so yeah, we just went to market. We said, when I, when I originally went to market, I was like, these were separate companies.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:28Speaker 07

  Okay, so our mining and transport was a separate thing. Food was a separate thing and, and we had a bunch of other, you know, a bunch of subsidiaries doing cool stuff. And I said, which one do you guys want to do? Do you want to invest in mining? Do you want to invest in food? Do you want to invest in this? And they're just like, we want to invest in you.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:47Speaker 07

  And we heard that, like, we took, like, the first five folks we talked to all said that.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:53Speaker 07

  So then what we did is we put the companies together and then sold the equity in a singular entity.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:03Speaker 07

  So just put, put it together and it, and it, it's much easier for me. I don't know how, uh, how Elon does it with all the different companies.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  Different cap tables and.

• 1:38:12Speaker 07

  It's, it's wild.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, the answer, the answer is what's been happening, right?

• 1:38:17Speaker 07

  It's like, it all comes back together. Guys, he did it for 20 years, though.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he's still technically doing it with Tesla, basically. They are different companies.

• 1:38:24Speaker 07

  Boring company, Neuralink, like, he's still got lots of cool stuff.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Lesson in there for investors is like, even with Elon companies, there's such an insane power law where you have a $10 billion company and then you have a, you know, a $2 trillion company, right? And it's like, you just want exposure, you want broad exposure. Ideally, you know, you could just invest in the one that breaks out, but you want broad exposure to the category.

• 1:38:48Speaker 07

  When things are first getting going, there is a lot of upside of having them separate.

• 1:38:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:55Speaker 07

  Uh, because if somebody wants to invest in a really cool thing, and this is what happened when we first got the transporter mining thing going.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 07

  If they want to invest in that cool thing, they're like, I don't know anything about food. And by the way, food on its own is robotics, real estate, like restaurants, like, you know? And so they want, they want to be exposed to that one thing and they don't want to have to underwrite something going across all things. Um, and they're like, well, if you're losing money over here, I want you to lose money over here. So how much of the money I'm putting in is going to go to that? There, there has to be a theory of the case of how you put it together, how you allocate capital across. And honestly, once you're starting to get to profitability on one or more, then that conversation starts to get easier. And I think that's, that could be why, I, I can't, I can't speculate on, on, on sort of Elon's world,

• 1:39:45Speaker 07

  but certainly I'm super excited to have those pieces put together into a single, into a single puzzle.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  What does go to market look like in the mining industry for you?

• 1:39:57Speaker 07

  It's the frickin' best.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  Okay, because, but specifically, like, when I think of, when I think of your go to market.

• 1:40:04Speaker 07

  It's so good.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Magic.

• 1:40:06Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  It was deploying young people to a new city in Miami and they're doing a marketing stunt. And it's not like you're calling in favors or leveraging your network to get Uber up and running in a new city. That was something that was organizational design.

• 1:40:25Speaker 07

  So hold on, that's consumer.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  Exactly. So how is it different?

• 1:40:28Speaker 07

  Well, it's just like, well, all the food stuff we're doing is business, almost all of it.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:32Speaker 07

  Really all of it. Uh, mining's all business. So it's, so, so look, there is a big thing. If you go from doing consumer to doing business, and I think we may have talked about this last time, that's a whole other ballgame.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:46Speaker 07

  I mean, that takes years off your lifespan doing it, like getting good at it and then owning it. But mining, go to market is cray cray.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  Like, so, I'll just give you an example.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Going to the mining conference or something?

• 1:41:02Speaker 07

  Well, yes.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  How are you meeting CEOs?

• 1:41:03Speaker 07

  Yes, you do that, but, but, but, you know, I can a lot of times, look, when you have very efficient transportation,

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:12Speaker 07

  you can go places. So a month ago, I dropped into deep Amazon in Brazil. Okay, like deep northern Brazil, like Amazon.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Places you can't even get a jet ski to.

• 1:41:26Speaker 07

  Guys, it's the Amazon of the Amazon, okay?

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:30Speaker 07

  And, and like tiny airports, you're just like.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:35Speaker 07

  You kind of just.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Dirt.

• 1:41:36Speaker 07

  You slide into the DMs, except there's a tarmac, okay?

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:41:40Speaker 07

  And.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Free pilot.

• 1:41:41Speaker 07

  Yes, of course.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:43Speaker 07

  And massive iron ore mine that we're operating in there.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:47Speaker 07

  And you see, like, we took, we were there for a couple of days because we already have customers there.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:53Speaker 07

  A customer's called Valet. It's a massive mining company.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 07

  And, um, they, uh, it's, it's like the world's largest iron ore mine. And you go and you get in a helicopter, just going over one of the sites takes 30 minutes.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:42:09Speaker 07

  Okay? And it's fascinating. It's so fascinating and you're learning how the system works. You're sort of figuring out how do I, you basically take a kit, you apply, you, you, you install it onto a machine and that machine becomes autonomous.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:26Speaker 07

  And some of these machines are like 20 years old. Some of them are new. Um, and so there's lots of different kinds of machines as well. And you're making the mine more productive. You're, um, you are making it way safer. It is super, like, they have lots of safety protocols, but like, it is mining.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Dangerous business.

• 1:42:46Speaker 07

  It is a dangerous business. Uh, and the OpEx goes down all at the same time. It's kind of a beautiful thing. And then, you know, I went from Brazil and then straight from there dropped into the border between Iraq and Saudi, on the Saudi side. So we have a phosphate mine that we're doing stuff there. The signals were jammed. So we had to like my pilots had to land kind of like old school style, like

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  Visual.

• 1:43:12Speaker 07

  Physical visual.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Is that because of the conflict going on in the region?

• 1:43:16Speaker 07

  And just the general, the vibes on the borders there.

• 1:43:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:20Speaker 07

  Yep. So, um, but same story. And so go to market is wild.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Just end up in like

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  Literally go to market.

• 1:43:29Speaker 07

  Crazy places, but it's super needed. And so what's happened is the, the pronto technology has got gotten past human productivity, which means you go to a gold mine CEO, you talk about go to market, you go to a gold mine CEO and you say, would you like to have 20% more gold per year?

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:43:47Jordi Hays?

  Good sell.

• 1:43:47Speaker 07

  We haven't heard no.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:43:49Speaker 07

  But they're, but they say prove it.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Speaker 07

  And that's where the rubber meets the road, right?

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  How long does it take to prove?

• 1:43:55Speaker 07

  It used to take a lot longer. Now, like, once you've proven it enough times, then it sort of gets its own momentum.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  Gets around.

• 1:44:02Speaker 07

  And so we're in that, we're in that place on pronto where that momentum is taking hold because there's enough proof points where it's just working in so many different places where people are like, all right, let's go, we're gonna, think of mining, autonomous mining, almost like, um, almost like enterprise software where you get a pilot. There's like a 10,000 person company and you've got, you, you, you got an enterprise startup and they're like, I got like eight seats, but it's this huge company. And if we get it, it's huge.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:30Speaker 07

  And I've got this other 10 seats over at this other one. It's a pilot, but I swear it's gonna work. And they're out there pitching and trying to make it happen.

• 1:44:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 07

  But once it works, and in mining, that means human productivity, human level, better than human productivity. Once it works, it goes big.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 07

  And they're like, okay, let's get across, let's get across all the vehicles. And so we're sort of in that mode with a bunch of different customers right now.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  How big is the opportunity to just increase uptime of mining operations? I imagine that there are mines that are trying to operate 24/7, but getting a night shift in the middle of the Amazon reliably, everyone showing up and being, you know, healthy and happy and eager.

• 1:45:18Speaker 07

  Totally.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  It gets a lot easier when it's like, yeah, we're still gonna have a bunch of people on site, but they're gonna be overseeing robotic workers.

• 1:45:24Speaker 07

  For sure. So, uh, so yeah, I mean, the, um, there's two parts to the productivity game. First is the machine per hour doing more.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:34Speaker 07

  That's part one. Part two is hours and callouts and all of that stuff, uh, as well as just, you know, the safety protocols change when you have less risk.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Speaker 07

  So there's a lot of things like this that pile on to each other. My guess is you could even end up 30%, 40% more productive at the end of all of it.

• 1:45:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:55Speaker 07

  And when you do that, the opportunity speaks for itself. Um, a gold mine that's doing 30 or 40% more gold per year is kind of, whoa, but that's for every mineral. That's lithium. That's like, we also go all the way down to quarries. Quarries are different because quarries are basically, it's about cement, let's just say. That's the main jam. There are others, but let's just go with that. Um, you can't, you don't just go do more rock because you need cement customers on the other side. They're only using so much cement.

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Like where to store it?

• 1:46:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Speaker 07

  And so, so that's more of an OpEx play and there are thinner margins there, but I'm in the game and it's kind of interesting. It's a lot of fun. And for that company, for pronto, they were super, Anthony Levandowski and the team there, super scrappy, true startup style, lean as hell, like so lean, like that Christian Bale movie. I can't remember the name of it.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  The machinist.

• 1:46:58Speaker 07

  Dude, it's like super lean. And I'm like, guys, we gotta go from lean to muscular.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  You gotta go to Batman.

• 1:47:02Speaker 07

  And that's what we're doing. Like, and you think of that, this in an enterprise

• 1:47:05Jordi Hays?

  Lean to muscular. That's a good, that's a good phrase.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  You just wanna be muscular.

• 1:47:09Speaker 07

  And so you think about enterprise go to market, part of our go to market is, is,

• 1:47:18Speaker 07

  building credibility with our enterprise customers that we're going from lean to muscular.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:22Speaker 07

  Because they, the demand is there. It's ready to go. They're like, we need you to be muscular. We need the protein powder and the whatever else.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  What, what holds, what holds you back from?

• 1:47:34Speaker 07

  Go to the gym, whatever.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  What holds you back from scaling? Let's say you do a pilot, it works well. You're attaching hardware to existing systems and hardware that they're using. And they say, okay, we're getting more out. Maybe we want to place orders for more machines. Are the, I imagine the lead times on some of this mining equipment could be insane. How much of the stack do you want to own?

• 1:48:02Speaker 07

  Say the question again. I'm sorry. I just blanked. Go for it.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Like, like right now, you're taking existing mining equipment.

• 1:48:07Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  And you're augmenting it with, you're bringing, you're, you're making it AI enabled.

• 1:48:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Making it autonomous. You're making it more efficient.

• 1:48:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  And they say, great, this is working. We want to scale up our operation because maybe we need less or we can do more with the same, you know, human headcount.

• 1:48:23Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Um, but what's the, I imagine there's some things that are out of control for, for you at that point where they're like, okay, we need more of this heavy mining equipment. Let's, let's add it to the site, but is there like a lag time there?

• 1:48:35Speaker 07

  The real lag time is getting, so you have to, you're, so let's say we want to get a bunch of machines that are in the Amazon up and running.

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:43Speaker 07

  Okay. How do you do that? So I've got to ship a bunch of sensors, a bunch of compute, a bunch of equipment and mechanical systems, let's just say, so that a team can then go install it.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you're basically building a data center on site?

• 1:49:02Speaker 07

  So it's sort of, I wouldn't put it that way. I would say, I mean, if you considered a machine with sensors and compute a data center, I mean, you could, but it's really, think of those, there are servers, but I wouldn't say a data center. It's not really like that.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  Some operations would bring like an Armada style, like shipping container sized level of computer.

• 1:49:20Speaker 07

  You're just

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Talon Tere has one.

• 1:49:21Speaker 07

  You're, so you bring in the stuff.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:23Speaker 07

  Okay. You have to install it.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:27Speaker 07

  You have to like bring it up and make sure, okay, this is a new place. How does it, does this machine work properly in this new place and calibrate and make sure it's safe and all of this. So there's like a process of getting it up. Then there's change management because that, that site's going from, there are people that show up in the morning. There's all this very regimented process, uh, to make sure everything's going exactly as planned and people are exactly where they're supposed to be because otherwise weird things happen on a, on a mining site.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:58Speaker 07

  So you have to go from that to, okay, we're now running a autonomous mining operation. It's just a very different thing. So the, the installation and the bring up and what we call commissioning are sort of like the things you have to do. Um, and you know, like, why does it take a long time to install? Because that machine may not even be drive by wire.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Speaker 07

  So you have a mechanical system, like if you turn the steering wheel, like it's, you know what I mean?

• 1:50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:27Speaker 07

  It's a, it's a mechanical system, hydraulic system.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  So you're bringing

• 1:50:31Speaker 07

  Where you have to go.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Actuator that might push a physical button.

• 1:50:34Speaker 07

  You're, yeah, you're, you're trying to make electricity then do a physical thing. So then you need physical actuation.

• 1:50:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42Speaker 07

  To do the things because it's not, these machines are not natively drive by wire.

• 1:50:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So that's, that's, that sounds, that sounds, uh, incredibly difficult, but necessary because you're not going to get a mine to rip out tens of millions of dollars of equipment that they already have. But would you eventually go full stack, like build the entire?

• 1:51:04Speaker 07

  I mean, look, we ultimately, I mean, if you go in the mining industry, there's like this, this term, it's called no entry mine. A no entry mine is a mine where there are no people in the pit.

• 1:51:16Jordi Hays?

  Lights out factory.

• 1:51:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. Kind of like that version, a version of it. There might be people in a control center. There might be, but like in that pit, no human.

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  And it's a wildly different calculus from a safety perspective, I imagine.

• 1:51:28Speaker 07

  Totally different, obviously. And so there's drilling, there's blasting, there's loading, there's haulage, uh, there's crushing. I'm just going through the different parts of the mining operation. Um, and what you do is you start somewhere and then you start extending to those other areas to get to that no entry thing. And the no entry thing is you can have an autonomous thing, like, like our haulage system is autonomous. If you're getting into a new place, you can do remote control and move into autonomous. If you wanted to go super no entry or lower entry mine, if that makes sense. Um, it's,

• 1:52:09Speaker 07

  it's super fascinating. And then you're talking about, you're talking about loaded a two million pound machine that's moving potentially 35 miles an hour down the road. And it's, it's an off-road thing.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Two million pound machine moving 35 miles an hour off-road.

• 1:52:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, dude.

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  This is why you have to jet ski to work.

• 1:52:35Speaker 07

  This is the ultimate ATV. So no, you get in it and you can, you know, you can experience it. Like, I mean, it's not like there's like a amusement park for this, but like I've certainly experienced it where I can get in the, I get in the machines and, and check out what's going on.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  This is like the dump truck with 20 foot tires, this actually.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Are any of these, are any of these companies like acquisition targets? Where you would, you would be able to come in and say like, you're doing a lot of stuff well, but here's all the stuff that you're never going to figure out like us and.

• 1:53:04Speaker 07

  I mean, look, I would say the way we think about it is the, the haulage part of a mine is where most of the vehicles are. And so, and we think of haulage as the cardiovascular system of a mine. So we're obviously very connected to all the other machines, but we don't do all the other machines. So we're like in an ecosystem. So we can work with them where like there's APIs. Cause like if you're doing haulage, you need to know where the other machines are and what their status is, as an example, there needs to be orchestration, coordination there, which is pretty interesting. In terms of like acquisition, like, you know, I, I do, I have to sort of admit, like the Uber mentality, my mentality, let's just say.

• 1:53:47Jordi Hays?

  My Dune.

• 1:53:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. It's like not, I guess Uber is different today, but in my world, we didn't acquire shit. We just built.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:53:55Speaker 07

  I don't know if I have an opinion yet. I'm not like religious about it, but if we feel like we can build something, we do. But that, but sometimes people have differentiated awesome stuff and you're like, let's partner. We're open to it, you know?

• 1:54:08John Coogan?

  How would you pitch me if I was a young person, Stanford, CS, new grad worried about software engineering not being the easy path where I can bounce around from Google and maybe Uber had a cushy job for me? Pitch me on going to the Amazon and building.

• 1:54:29Speaker 07

  I mean, that's awesome. I mean, that's awesome. I thought I just did. I mean, that was the pitch. That was the pitch.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think, uh, young people are receptive to this pitch yet? Are we about to be receptive? Why should they be receptive?

• 1:54:42Speaker 07

  It's really interesting because I only run into the young people that are receptive.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:45Speaker 07

  Like I'm not out there pitching like lame sauce dude who doesn't want to work.

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:54:50Speaker 07

  Like I don't end up, I don't end up in the same room as this guy.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Do you want a, do you want a, a job where, do you want a laptop job or do you want to be dropped in to a mine in the Amazon and like build, build, you know, science fiction?

• 1:55:03Speaker 07

  This is the thing, right? This is why the Adams thing is cool. Because you're not dropping a, you're not dropping a fucking app in the app store. You're like automating a two million pound machine going 35 miles an hour carrying gold.

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you watch, uh, do you get, do you get a?

• 1:55:24Speaker 07

  There's a lot of profanity happening today. I don't know why it's happening, but it is.

• 1:55:28Jordi Hays?

  No, it's let it flow.

• 1:55:29Speaker 07

  Just wanted to acknowledge it.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you watch, uh, sign, do you, do you get inspired by science fiction at all? I can, I can imagine like watching Dune for you. You're just like texting pictures to the team like.

• 1:55:39Speaker 07

  Of course. I'm like, uh, I'm, my fave is, is Asimov. He's my fave.

• 1:55:47Speaker 07

  You know, the iRobot series is like just so epic.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  What is your takeaway from the iRobot series with regard to AI safety, doom generally? Have you ever had moments of, uh, maybe we won't figure it out?

• 1:56:04Speaker 07

  Won't figure what out?

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  The alignment problem broadly, like the, the iRobot, the three laws of robotics. This was sort of an elegant solution. It's tested, obviously, but, uh,

• 1:56:15Speaker 07

  I love.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  I would love to come back to a world where, where everyone, both the doomers and the AI builders agree that yep, the three laws of robotics will be sufficient.

• 1:56:24Speaker 07

  In some ways, well, in some ways in the series, the three laws don't always work out.

• 1:56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:30Speaker 07

  So I think there's a lot of, I, I thought there's a lot of nuance to those three laws, even though the laws are sort of so simple.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:39Speaker 07

  I love the intention of those laws.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:56:43Speaker 07

  I, I sort of think of it a little bit differently, which is I have been entrepreneur-ing for a, a long time. Like a long time.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51Speaker 07

  And I have failed. And when I think about why I failed, it's usually because I was building something that nobody liked.

• 1:57:03Speaker 07

  So if you build something that people don't like, I don't think you're going to succeed. So how does that relate to your question? He's like, please tell me because I'm not connecting the dots at all. What are you talking about? Well, if you make something that is anti-human, if you make something that doesn't serve people, I don't think you're going to make it. I don't think you're going to make it. And by the way, like, yes, we're using AI to help us make decisions, et cetera. But what do those AIs really, really want to do almost too much? They want to please us. So I just think if you're not making stuff that humans want, it's not going to work out. And that's kind of obvious, obviously, but I think it keeps going.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:48Speaker 07

  And yes, there's the dangers and the things and the this, but that's my, that's my starting point for how I think about these things. And we can't control all the things.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:58Speaker 07

  And I do think of course you have to have safety situations and there's collisions of like, what do I, what do I prioritize first and how do I do it? Which is I think where Asimov's laws go. But, um, I, I, I, instead of writing sci-fi books, I'm just doing the thing and I'm making sure that, that the machine stays on the road.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Yes. And, and related to that idea of like doing the thing, making the machine stay on the road. I imagine that your, your worldview is somewhat informed by your contact with reality, the fact that you can see the progress of diffusion, how long drive-by-wire systems take, took to roll out and the need for AI to be deployed in like tactile ways that, uh, that that, that you, you just see it as more positive sum, more upper, there's more opportunity.

• 1:58:48Speaker 07

  Feel like you're deploying robots that people want. Right now, robot, I mean, look, there's some point where robots have their own bank accounts and they're citizens and all this. We're just not there yet.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:58:57Speaker 07

  And before we, until we get there.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:59Speaker 07

  That robot is owned by somebody.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 07

  And that somebody has a bank account.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Speaker 07

  They are paying based on the value you're bringing them because they like your stuff. So if you are doing things that humans don't like, you're done.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14Speaker 07

  And trust me, I've done it.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:17Speaker 07

  I've built things that nobody liked and it sucked.

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:20Speaker 07

  I don't recommend anybody do it. If you can avoid it, you totally should.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  On the business model side, what are you doing now in mining? And where do you think it could go over time? Cause if you're able to bring in a system that helps someone increase their yield 30 to 40%, I, I imagine eventually you just do some type of JV so that you guys have line incentives.

• 1:59:45Speaker 07

  Well, look, there's, there's, you know, and the, the instinct should be how do enterprise company, enterprise software companies do it? Start there and you guys will know that. Like you, you know that.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. What's the answer? Let's just say you're enterprise software company. You're making a company more productive. What do you do?

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Raise prices, subscription.

• 2:00:06Speaker 07

  Or you, the price goes up when you prove that productivity. So there's baseline. And then based on outcomes, you get a little extra juice.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:00:16Speaker 07

  And you could say.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Or you're always trying to make sure that like, you want to be producing, creating more value than you're capturing, but there's this sort of cat and mouse game where you're always trying to, you don't, you don't want to give away maybe too much value.

• 2:00:29Speaker 07

  Here, totally. But here's the thing, you never go to a customer, I don't care what you're selling. Okay. I don't care if it's enterprise software. I don't care if it's widgets. I don't care what it is. You never go to a customer and say, give me a percentage of your stuff.

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 07

  You go to a customer and say, here's the price of our stuff. And if it does really well for you, we think we should get a little more scratch, kishish, stuff, you know, whatever. You know what I mean?

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:55Speaker 07

  Yeah. And it's that simple. Don't be crass about it. And, you know, partner with folks and they're down. They want to win too, you know? But it's literally an enterprise, it's an enterprise software style negotiation or approach to the whole thing.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:11Speaker 07

  And the more differentiated your value is, the more you're going to get.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Jordi Hays?

  What is your process for hiring executives today?

• 2:01:20Speaker 07

  Pray.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  I was hoping, I was hoping you had the Kalanick system to achieve a 99%.

• 2:01:28Speaker 07

  I know, but why would I tell you if I did? Why would I tell you if I did? No, I mean.

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but I, I think you can, this is one of those things, you can tell people exactly what you do and they're not, they're not Kalanick, so they're not, it doesn't, that doesn't mean they can compete with you.

• 2:01:43Speaker 07

  You know, they could, they, yeah. Okay, so how would I put it?

• 2:01:49Speaker 07

  Look, the, I think, no matter who you go, nobody's nailed executives all the way. It's, it's, it's weird because what will happen is executives talk a fucking awesome game. And there's two things you want an executive to do. You want them to be able to organize at scale, organize and manage at scale, lead. At scale. You also want them to be epic problem solvers, the most strategic badass problem solvers alive. This is like being left-handed or right-handed. And there's very few people that are ambidextrous. But you need that. Now, somebody's, they're always leaning a little bit one side or the other. The best executives are the ones that are doing both well.

• 2:02:33Speaker 07

  But I have come to the conclusion over my years doing the stuff, is the problem solving is the most important thing. If you get somebody who organizes and manages well, but cannot solve a problem, they're going to be doing ridiculous stuff in a super organized way. And so that's, the, and, and sort of my theory, I, I, maybe there's a couple of theories on how I manage or how I lead, is that the only constraint on your imagination is management capacity. But what is management capacity? It's really problem solving at scale.

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:03:07Speaker 07

  Cause if you are doing super well over there, guess what? Their problem solving there, I can create other awesome problems.

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:14Speaker 07

  Yeah. Like, I love creating problems.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:03:17Speaker 07

  Go solve those too.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:18Speaker 07

  But if I don't have the management capacity, then I'm F'd.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 2:03:22Speaker 07

  So, um, the, the management style that I do is sort of problem solver in chief, which is, I take the most impactful problems that are not being solved. And that's on my desk.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:36Speaker 07

  The, or desk or room or whatever you want to call it. That's where I'm spending my time. So people go, oh, what do you spend your time on? Like, it depends what the fricking problems are that matter. And it can change. And that's how, how I roll. But it means, once you have a problem solver in chief mentality, that flows downward. That means any direct report of mine must be the deputized problem solver in chief. And they've got their, cause there's only 24 hours in a day. I can only solve so many myself. They have to then take that for their world and do the same thing and then do the same thing to their people.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:04:11Speaker 07

  So the bottom line is you gotta prove that these folks can solve actual problems and aren't just talking the talk. That's the number one.

• 2:04:18Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 2:04:19Speaker 07

  And then I, on the interview process, simulate what it's like working together so that day one is, really feels like week two. And day one, you better be excited. So if you're excited in day one, after simulating what it's like working together in the interview process, then day one is really week two and you're still excited, ah, you took a lot of risk out of the system. That's all I got for you.

• 2:04:41Jordi Hays?

  I have a question about regulation. Uber famously went city by city.

• 2:04:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  The AI labs are duking it out over federal preemption. Did you ever have, develop a theory around when federal preemption is better than state by state regulation? Do you have a philosophy around this? I, I, it, it seems like the labs go back and forth on what they want. It's hard to see where the chips are falling.

• 2:05:06Speaker 07

  Federal preemption is good when you are pro regulatory capture.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:05:13Speaker 07

  When you want to squeeze others out, you should get federal regulatory bigness going for you.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause then you don't have to do the ground game that you went.

• 2:05:25Speaker 07

  Well, no, you're squeezing others out.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:05:27Speaker 07

  It's just the whole point is to squeeze everybody out.

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:05:30Speaker 07

  I never did that. Like, we never did that at Uber. We basically never, ever

• 2:05:37Speaker 07

  proposed or pushed any rule that would be beneficial to us versus somebody else.

• 2:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:05:44Speaker 07

  We always were trying to open up the market and we said, let the best man win. And we just went for it.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:50Speaker 07

  But, uh, I think we gotta be careful of some of these closed weight things that are, um, creating situations where they need to be regulated. And they want it. I'd be very, I'd keep an eye on that.

• 2:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, you gotta have customers that love your product and are willing to.

• 2:06:11Speaker 07

  So when you guys, when you guys, uh, you know, decide to tell your own hacker to hack the thing and then go to, somebody, then go to the federal government and say, then go to the federal government and say, um, dude, we saved the day. Like, you know, you don't have, you don't have.

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  It wasn't me, that was George.

• 2:06:34Speaker 07

  You guys don't have to do this. You guys don't have to do it.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on regulation, I'm sure you saw the trial lawyers that are fighting back against autonomous vehicles because they're worried they're gonna be too safe.

• 2:06:46Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 2:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, I'm sure that's not surprising to you.

• 2:06:49Speaker 07

  No. So, look, every bad thing that you see in transport, like systemically, and any, anything in transport that you view as systemically bad was most likely pushed by the trial lawyers and the insurance companies.

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:07:06Speaker 07

  Every single bad rule that's weird and dumb.

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:12Speaker 07

  The insurance companies and the trial lawyers were in the game, big time.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where, where do they align?

• 2:07:20Speaker 07

  What do you mean?

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, because trial lawyers, I imagine, want more accidents.

• 2:07:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Insurance companies. The ones that pay for it. Wait, yes.

• 2:07:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, so. No, no, remember, insurance companies make margin on accidents.

• 2:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:07:32Speaker 07

  If there's no accidents, there's no insurance company. They, in a weird way, they love accidents.

• 2:07:37Jordi Hays?

  The premiums go up.

• 2:07:38Speaker 07

  As long as it's in their actuarial table, they're pumped.

• 2:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Yeah.

• 2:07:42Speaker 07

  Right? Though what they don't like is accidents they didn't plan for.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:07:46Speaker 07

  But accidents that they planned for, whoo.

• 2:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Business.

• 2:07:48Speaker 07

  Big insurance outcomes.

• 2:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Speaker 07

  They love. Like, I remember, we went to DC and the taxi system, the, the liability on a ride, if you took a taxi, it might still be this way to this day, was like $25,000 in a taxi. But we went to, we being Uber at the time, went to DC and they pushed a one and a half million dollar policy per ride.

• 2:08:19Speaker 07

  Okay? So what does that mean? That means, well, this, you know, accidents are gonna happen. We're probably, like Uber's probably safer.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:26Speaker 07

  But it just, do you think the trial lawyers weren't pumped about that? You think the insurance companies weren't also pumped about that?

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  They can go get up to them.

• 2:08:35Speaker 07

  Because by the way, the insurance company might be on the other side.

• 2:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08:38Speaker 07

  And they're like, oh, there's a, there's a one and a half million dollar bank account here that I can get access to on a random accident.

• 2:08:45Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what can you share on the transportation side of the business right now? How much are you, how much is that business in service of mining or food versus?

• 2:08:57Speaker 07

  It's number one. So number one is it's, it's, so I call it wheelbase for robots. Which is, if you're gonna do specialized robots that move and act in the physical world,

• 2:09:09Speaker 07

  they're either humanoids, which we're not. I'm not anti-humanoid, I'm just non-humanoid. Specialized industrial robots, right? So that's, it's high scale, industrial scale tasks, which means you would not have a humanoid ever do that.

• 2:09:27Speaker 07

  That means you gotta be on wheels. So we gotta build wheels. So that means, okay, well, when food, when supply chain is going into our facilities, that's a freight vehicle. We probably should just turn that into a robot that moves stuff and actually interfaces with our facility in a really cool way. When the, when the food is coming out of our facilities, there's probably like a, a machine that holds food at temperature, that's like a box on wheels. I call them autonomous burritos. And it brings it to your home. And it costs 75 cents instead of like the $12 per drop that it costs like an Uber Eats or a DoorDash today.

• 2:10:06Speaker 07

  So it's serving, remember, I, I'm taking, I'm sort of going through an industry and saying, how do we transform it? Full stack. How do we automate full stack that entire industry? So, okay, that's the food thing. Obviously mining's pretty obvious, but you can imagine there's a lot of other machines that move. Like, I talked about haulage, but what about like, what about grading the roads, the dirt roads? You gotta grade them. That's a machine.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:34Speaker 07

  What about the, you spray water so there's not a lot of dust all over the place? That's a fricking machine.

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:10:39Speaker 07

  Like, what about the material that ultimately goes somewhere beyond the mine? Well, that's a freight machine.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:10:46Speaker 07

  Like, there's lots of things moving.

• 2:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:49Speaker 07

  Um, you know, I saw something that was like, think about, uh, just forklifts.

• 2:10:55Speaker 07

  I know a company or main unnamed that's spending three and a half is on the supply chain side, three and a half billion dollars a year on forklift labor in their facilities.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  That probably shows up in an SEC filing if we want to get creative and figure out what company you're talking about.

• 2:11:14Speaker 07

  Just saying, but you see what I'm saying?

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, big opportunity.

• 2:11:16Speaker 07

  If you just solve the forklift problem.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yes, but on solving the problem, what do you think about this? This distinction between jobs versus tasks? Like, a lot of people would have assumed that there would be no more marketing people because the job is just writing marketing copy, but the job is actually much more. Writing copy is one task. I was looking at automated trucking and I found some stat like, I think 30% of truck drivers are armed. They carry weapons. And so, driving the vehicle is one task, but in that job, you are also providing security for that payload. And you are also doing other things, refueling the vehicle, maybe some minor maintenance.

• 2:12:00John Coogan?

  And so, just the, just the steering and gas and brake pressure is just one task that you're doing. How do you think about that in the context of all this?

• 2:12:09Speaker 07

  This really gets to the jobs question, I think.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:12Speaker 07

  Which is basically like, okay, well, if I do everything that we are imagining on food, which is I have industrial real estate, which is manufacturing and logistics. I automate the manufacturing, which is production, robotic food, robotic food machines, robots. And I have robotic couriers. What happens? Food, the price of food goes down.

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:38Speaker 07

  Okay, when the price of food goes down, remember, robots don't have bank accounts. When the price of food goes down, what happens? More people have more money.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Jevon's paradox.

• 2:12:46Speaker 07

  What do they do?

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  You start eating more. You just started having 10 burgers a day.

• 2:12:51Speaker 07

  No, that's not where I was going, dude. That's hilarious. This is hilarious. That's not, that's not what I'm saying. That's so funny.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  That's the problem.

• 2:12:57Speaker 07

  That's not what I'm saying. No, what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, when, once you.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  Jevon's paradox.

• 2:13:05Jordi Hays?

  I'll take, I was gonna get three pizzas, actually take three.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  I'll take six.

• 2:13:09Speaker 07

  You're like, one's at the price.

• 2:13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:11Speaker 07

  No, no, no. So what happens? You have more money to do other things, but remember that money is only ultimately going to humans.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:18Speaker 07

  So it's, it's, the things that get automated go down in price.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:23Speaker 07

  Which then creates surplus.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:25Speaker 07

  To do what?

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:26Speaker 07

  To do other things.

• 2:13:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the bomb.

• 2:13:28Speaker 07

  So it doesn't always have to be, oh, marketing's automated, but sort of, and there's still people doing it. It's like, whatever, there's gonna be a hundred other new things that come out because there's this excess of capital and progress continues.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:42Speaker 07

  And as long as humans still have things that we do that robots cannot, it's go-go time, man. It's gonna be super prosperity. We talked about the plumber that is paid like LeBron last time.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:57Speaker 07

  It's gonna be across a thousand categories. In some categories, we don't even know.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Speaker 07

  Like, we don't even know what they are today.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:03Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:14:04Jordi Hays?

  You raised 1.7 billion. Why didn't you raise more?

• 2:14:08Speaker 07

  That's a good question. I mean.

• 2:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Because last time we were here, you talked about like, oh, well, what you, if you were doing something and it was easy, you weren't going hard enough.

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  Seems pretty, going pretty hard, but unpack it.

• 2:14:21Speaker 07

  Look, you have to stop somewhere.

• 2:14:23John Coogan?

  Even I have my.

• 2:14:26Speaker 07

  No, it's like, but like, look, I, as you can imagine today, my phone's blowing up. I mean, I'm pumped, like, A16, these guys, we, we should have done business at Uber.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:14:36Speaker 07

  If we did it, business at Uber, my 2017 would have been a different year.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:41Speaker 07

  Okay?

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:14:42Speaker 07

  So that's why I called it unfinished business.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Speaker 07

  And so, um, but yeah, like, my phone's blowing up. Like, we're probably just gonna do a second, we'll do a second close.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I figured.

• 2:14:57John Coogan?

  We'll come back for the second close.

• 2:14:59Speaker 07

  Run it back.

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Run it back.

• 2:15:02Speaker 07

  No, I mean, we're not gonna do a big announcement on the same close, but like, you know, those people who are, who are texting me and hitting me hard right now.

• 2:15:09John Coogan?

  We got room.

• 2:15:12Speaker 07

  You know, no, well, we'll see.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  We'll see. Depends.

• 2:15:16Speaker 07

  You know, we'll see.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  Depends on what the previous text message.

• 2:15:19Speaker 07

  If you're a homie, we definitely have room.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:21Speaker 07

  If we're not a homie, you should talk to one of my homies.

• 2:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I did come away from the last conversation thinking, all right, there's a lot of exciting companies in physical AI and you could spend years and years and years trying to find all the best teams, or you could just give TK a big pile of cash and just say, go cook. And, uh, you know, sometimes the easier route is better.

• 2:15:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think there's this thing, physical AI, people are like, well, is that a humanoid? Is that a world model? Is it? And so, on this one, I sort of dialed the language a little bit and am calling it industrial AI.

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 07

  It's like, okay, this is a full stack, software, robotics, sensors, machinery, like, a full stack solution to automating an industry. And that's kind of how we think about it. And it's industrial. Yep. So it's like heavy Adam stuff. Yeah.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 2:16:17Jordi Hays?

  This is incredible.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  You wanna get a signature? Can we get an autograph?

• 2:16:20Speaker 07

  Sure, why not?

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  Can we get something? What you, what you?

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  They can figure it out back there. Oh, we got a gong.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  We got a gong right there.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you sign this gong. We'll hang it in the raft.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  We wanna hang it in the rafters. We're trying to build our.

• 2:16:32Jordi Hays?

  Museum of business.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  The museum of business grows one gong stronger today.

• 2:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and we will, we'll see you in Austin.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Next time you're on your commute, if you see two jet skis moving out of, out of your, you know, out of, uh, out of sight coming in, it's probably us.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  That's us.

• 2:16:48Jordi Hays?

  If it's not, you're.

• 2:16:49Speaker 07

  Guys, let me know if you wanna learn how to slalom ski.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:52Speaker 07

  If you wanna learn how to wake surf like, well.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  I've only been waterskiing once or twice in, it was 20 years ago.

• 2:16:59Speaker 07

  I go at 7:30 in the morning, every morning. And I'd say half the time I'm out there at 8:30 when I leave the office.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:17:07Speaker 07

  So.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:17:08Speaker 07

  That's what we do.

• 2:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Beauty of summer.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. Always a pleasure. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:17:16Speaker 07

  For sure. Good to see you guys.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Soon.

• 2:17:18Speaker 07

  Yep.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  I'm gonna tell everyone about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And our next guest is in the waiting room. We got Max Hodak from the Science Corporation. He's the founder and CEO. We kept him waiting, but Max, how you doing? Welcome back to the show.

• 2:17:40Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Give us the update. What's the news?

• 2:17:46Speaker 08

  So, previously, we've talked about, I've told you about our retinal prosthesis. So, we have a chip that's implanted in the eye to restore vision to patients that have lost, um, lost it due to the death of the Rodden cone, specifically.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:58Speaker 08

  Age-related, Mac, their generation. So, uh, last week, we got marketing approval in Europe. So, we received the CE mark, which is, like, it will be shortly available to consumers in Europe.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  I got a question. I got a question. So, Jordy has this problem where he drinks too many beers and he gets double vision? Can this help with that?

• 2:18:18Speaker 08

  Fortunately, not.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Hey, wait, wait, jokes aside, scientifically, it cannot?

• 2:18:25Speaker 08

  Double vision from drinking?

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:28Speaker 08

  Probably not.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Impossible. It's the last, it's the last scientific problem. We'll never solve it.

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyway. Very funny. More seriously, uh, how quickly, how, like, what does it go to market look like for a product like this? You have approval.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  Step one's approval.

• 2:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how, how quickly can it be adopted by, because, you know, people, I mean, Europe's a big place, right?

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you need insurance, doctor networks? EU-level. Facilities, building the machine that installs it, like, there's a whole process here, right?

• 2:18:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, it's a relatively simple one-hour outpatient procedure. The machine is the surgeon. Don't need actually that many surgeons to reach these patients. Um, so, right, so the CE mark is a marketing approval in about 30 year, 30 countries that accept it. The next step is we need to register country by country. So, we have registrations going in, in Germany, in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Spain, in the UK, like, this week. Um, that process takes about a month. And then, uh, doctors can start scheduling patients. I mean, we sell implants to hospitals, essentially, and then they sell them to patients. So, it's, it's the hospitals, it's patients, but we have a registry, um, the hospitals have registries, um, the patient, the doctors know who their patients are. Um, with this demographic, actually, one of the things that happened is because there's really nothing available for them, ophthalmologists have been telling these patients, like, you

• 2:19:43Speaker 08

  know, if you're 80 and have AMD, you don't need to be sitting in my waiting room anymore. Like, you don't, you don't need to come here.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:49Speaker 08

  And so, now they're starting to reach back out to some of those patients that they haven't said, we don't need to see you for the last few years, say that there's something available. So, the first patient is probably six weeks away or so. The next.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Wow, that's so fast.

• 2:20:04Speaker 08

  Big step is reimbursement.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:05Speaker 08

  Um, and so, yeah.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  What does it look like in America? I mean, you're six weeks away in Europe, uh, what, what's the FDA track like? I know that it's already FDA breakthrough device and humanitarian use device, but take us through what the commercialization plan looks like in the US.

• 2:20:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the other thing that we announced today is that we got two humanitarian use device designations from the FDA. We actually got those back in March, but sat on them for a little bit. That unlocks an expedited, um, approval pathway called the humanitarian device exemption that we're submitting for imminently, um, in the next week or so. That is, it can be a 75-day review.

• 2:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:42Speaker 08

  Um, and so, it'll take, like, there's a couple loops of that, but we're hoping that early next year, it'll be available to, to some, some set of American patients, but that's up to the FDA review.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  I don't wanna get you in trouble with the FDA. I know how high stakes it is, but it is just crazy that Europe's moving faster around regulation. Like, this should be a signal to the FDA to say, hey, if Europe's approving it faster, uh, we gotta, we gotta step things up over here. I don't, I, as an American, I just don't like falling behind, but I don't know.

• 2:21:14Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, in this, I mean, I would normally wanna agree with you. I think in this case, it's actually a little bit unfair to FDA because there's some, there's some accidents of history that just led to this, like, happening first in, in Europe.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:25Speaker 08

  Um, the FDA standards are not that much different.

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:28Speaker 08

  But, um, yeah, absolutely, we should, uh, hope to, to have this here also. The FDA is, they care about slightly different things that they're, the filings are a little bit different.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:39Speaker 08

  But, um, hopefully, it won't be that long, um, either.

• 2:21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about, uh, next steps. I mean, you're, you're properly commercializing right now. Does this mean new factory, new team members, new, uh, new, just new muscle inside of the company?

• 2:21:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we've built out a whole go-to-market team in Europe. So this is clinical education, like a bunch, like we need to go reach ophthalmologists where they are, tell them about the product, help them understand the results, answer their questions, rehab specialists. So there's, this is a little bit different than, than what you may have seen from the motor BCDIs where it works very quickly or with, like there's a little bit of rehab that the patients have to put in to really use it. And so we have people on the ground there that will do that with them in the beginning. Over time, we want to have that be more and more kind of just in the wear while they put on the glasses, the glasses talk to them, they talk to the glasses, it walks them through the exercise. But initially, that's a little bit higher, higher touch. And then also, there's a bunch of surgeon training. So we run wet labs for surgeons where they can come and,

• 2:22:43Speaker 08

  and practice the procedure with us so that they've, we know that they know how to do it before they're doing it with patients.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Give me a sales and marketing 101 for targeting ophthalmologists. Can you target them on Instagram reels? Do they listen to a specific podcast that you can sponsor? Or you had conferences? I know people give, medical device companies that give out lots of like pens and chairs, but I, I think they're like, there's like limits because you can't like bribe them, but you do want to give them merch. Like, what is the 101 level of marketing to ophthalmologists?

• 2:23:14Speaker 08

  I mean, a lot of it is conferences. So there's a handful of conferences that we go to and then getting, not just having a booth there, but presenting scientific results. Typically, this isn't us, but it's our academic and scientific collaborators, maybe a surgeon at a hospital that did a study, they'll present their experience with it. There's also advocacy groups. So there's opportunities to sponsor like webinars through these, these networks. But it's a really small community. I think like ophthalmology overall, and especially in these types of retinal diseases, it is very densely interconnected and they all talk. And so it's a matter of kind of, there's a handful of advisory boards that we, we have to go through. For example, our data safety monitoring board for the clinical trial. These are often opportunities to have that community come and be familiar with

• 2:23:59Speaker 08

  our results and then, and then disseminate them.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  So it might be, the, the end result might be a little bit more one-to-one because of how small the community is. You can actually reach them directly.

• 2:24:09Jordi Hays?

  What is?

• 2:24:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's, there's not like a huge inst to spend on that.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Not yet.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  What, what is the shape, what is the shape of Science Corp. look like right now, given that you have a product that's commercializing, but I imagine you're doing a bunch of R and D in the background for other opportunities and, and use cases. But, you know, how are maybe you spending your time? And then what does the team's time look like?

• 2:24:36Speaker 08

  Yes, we definitely have a bunch of next generation projects in development, including the next generation of the Prima implant. We have new versions of that kind of in, in preclinical studies now, hope to get those into humans next year. It'll be, it'll probably be a three-year minimum, possibly five-year cycle between versions for a while, I think, because the need to do the intervening clinical trials. But the Prima, as it is now, is a really great existence proof that we're on the right track. This is the first time that function, that like really useful form vision, a thing that looks like an image, has been able to appear in the mind's eye of a blind patient. But it is not high resolution, full field color vision. It's like looking through a straw at the center of your vision where

• 2:25:21Speaker 08

  you've lost this high acuity perception. And it's, it's black and white, it's high contrast, but it's only a couple of letters at a time, or maybe a word at a time. And so we are still working to expand the field of view, make it so that you can potentially get colors. We think we know how to get to red and green, blue is a little more difficult, and then get higher resolution, get towards native acuity. And so on each of these, we have, there's clear ways, places to go. But it's, it's going to be a long road to get that all the way to, to all of these patients.

• 2:25:49John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 2:25:52Speaker 08

  We also have some really cool stuff coming on the, the quarter, on the brain computer interface side, on the vessel side, but that, those will probably come out a little later in the fall.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  Can't wait to talk about it. I'm excited. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you so much for, for coming on and.

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  And the work you're doing.

• 2:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just.

• 2:26:09Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're doing, you're doing the thing that, you're doing, you're doing something that could get humanity broadly back on the side of technology.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  That's a good point, yeah.

• 2:26:23Jordi Hays?

  Because it's like one of those things, like, like it seems like so much of what the industry has been doing a lot, you know, making, making sand think is not quite enough for people. They're like, you know, what, what have you really?

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  What have you done for me lately? We literally had someone come on the show and say, what have you?

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  But I feel like this is one of those things, like, you know, curing blindness that over time will be sort of hopefully undeniable.

• 2:26:45Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, this isn't about the money. I don't think it's about the money for a lot of this team. It's certainly not about money for the patients. I think like many things in tech, this is really about power. But if you want to know like real power, like the power to heal the sick, unlike economic or military power, that can be easily shared with others. And that is, I think, like really what technology is about here. And we need to paint a picture of how this is being used in that way, in a way that is really, should disseminate broadly and I think just incredibly pro-social.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Going back to, I, I know, we're almost out of time, but going back to, like, what did, what did you place the odds at doing this, accomplishing this moment when you started the company? It seems like.

• 2:27:29Speaker 08

  I don't know. I've always had trouble thinking about these things. Like, I can't put a number on it. It's just, you kind of keep going and as long as success is in the post, like set of possible outcomes, you're just constantly trying to minimize the odds that you don't get there. It is really hard to put a number on it. Definitely, it is cool to see it actually happen.

• 2:27:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, you're sort of nonchalant about it, but it is almost unbelievable and really, really incredible. So, well done.

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:28:03Speaker 08

  Thank you. Yep.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Max.

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context.

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely incredible stuff from Max's science team.

• 2:28:18John Coogan?

  Very cool. I don't know. I think that you might be seeing like an Instagram reel being like, this eye implant that cured the blind used too much water and it slopped like it's not the same as just being blind. I don't know. Anything's possible. The pushback, there's always, there's always negativity bias. I think that there will be pushback to even the medical cures.

• 2:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Giving sight to the blind.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Yes. Get ready. There's going to be somebody who finds, you know, something to complain about and goes viral and puts up big numbers, talking trash. That's just the way our media ecosystem works. It's, it's a, it's a business, you know? If everyone's glazing something, somebody's going to bring it down. That's just the.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to fade it.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Equilibrium, equilibrium. Well, speaking of AI writing, Jeremy Gaffon had a post here. He said about AI writing, "At the end of the day, it's not about whether the words written by a human or an AI. It's about whether the output is useful, engaging, and worth reading. The highest quality work will increasingly emerge from a tight human in the loop workflow. While some content will be generated end-to-end by AI, the fixation on authorial, or authorial providence is ultimately pearl clutching." Just kidding. That's the AI rendition of his actual post. He said it much more eloquently, but I tried to make it like more AI. I don't know. Anyway.

• 2:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gurman says, "Based on using the Z Fold 8 wide, I'd reset my expectations of how the foldable iPhone is going to sell. Even at over 2000, it's going to be a home run."

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  You are going foldable? You're proud of foldable?

• 2:29:52Jordi Hays?

  I think I'll go foldable. Why the heck not?

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  I think when you open it up, you can watch videos in 4.3.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  More room for reels. You can watch reels at once.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  But the reels are going to be, it's actually not that much more room for reels because you'll just have black bars on the side. Like, if you watch.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  Can you have two reels side by side?

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Okay, maybe, yes. In two different apps, you could have YouTube Shorts here, if, if they support split screen like on an iPad. But right now, if you watch reels on an iPad Mini, you're not actually getting that much more pixel space of reels. You're just getting reel here and then UI and Chrome here or whatever.

• 2:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Cooper says, "Big Tech just wants your eyesight restored so you can doom scroll."

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  There we go. Cooper named it. Yep, yep. Oh, why?

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Zach is secretly funding.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Oh, they just want to increase their TAM. Got it. Makes sense. Well, if you don't want to watch reels, you'll soon potentially be able to go to the Cinemarama Dome in ArcLight Hollywood. Sony is eyeing, ringing it back. Production team, you got a review? Have you guys been to the, the Cinemarama Dome before?

• 2:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Scott, yeah?

• 2:31:00Speaker 09

  It's pretty awesome.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  I think I saw a Nolan film there and I think it was 70 millimeter IMAX back in the day. And then it didn't, I think it didn't make it through COVID, but they're maybe bringing it back, which.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  They have the giant sign outside that says the dome. If they were going to stay out of business, we should, we should.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  I remember, yeah, I remember as a, as a kid, I, I thought that they would show the movie like projected on the dome, like on the whole ceiling. And it was only for sort of like special, you know, like astronomy movies, but they will just show a normal movie. And it's just, you're just in a big dome. It's cool. Next studio, if Sony doesn't buy it, maybe? I don't know. Could happen.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  Can we get that unreleased track on again?

• 2:31:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play that as the outro.

• 2:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one sec.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Regulate Me. It's the new banger, it's song of the summer. It's an anthem. It's an earworm. You're going to be listening to it. We'll share the link in the description of the YouTube video, maybe.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got to start doing karaoke.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  Because this song just speaks to me. It really captures the moment. You heard it from Travis every once in a while. You get into a pickle and you got to get the government to come regulate you. It's a good time. Thank you for watching TVPN. Tune in tomorrow. We have a very special show for you. We're on the road Thursday, and then we're off on Friday, back Monday. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tvpn.com. Let's throw a flashbang and let the audience listen to "Regulate Me" by Jordy Hayes and Suno. Goodbye. Flashbang out.