Google DeepMind Reorgs, Rainforest Discoveries, Monkey Prices Surge | Harley Finkelstein, John J. Giamatteo, Jeremy Allaire, Mackenzie Burnett

(00:18) - Google DeepMind Reorgs (21:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (23:40) - Revolut Founder Sued Over Yacht (29:38) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:12) - China Biotech Drives Monkey Prices (38:29) - Rainforest Discoveries (41:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (45:10) - Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, discusses the company’s strong growth and how AI-driven agentic commerce is helping shoppers discover niche products from independent merchants. He also explains how Shopify’s AI tools, including Sidekick and Autopilot, help merchants launch, optimize, and automate their businesses more effectively. (01:04:19) - John J. Giamatteo discusses his leadership as CEO of BlackBerry and the company’s transformation from smartphones to secure embedded software. He highlights BlackBerry’s automotive operating systems, cautious use of AI, partnerships, industrial robotics growth, and enduring focus on security, trust, and innovation. (01:19:50) - Jeremy Allaire, co-founder and CEO of financial technology company Circle, discusses stablecoins’ integration into the traditional financial system, USDC’s growing role in global payments, and blockchain infrastructure’s evolution. He also highlights AI agents as a new form of digital labor, alongside the heightened cybersecurity and regulatory challenges created by powerful AI models. (01:40:03) - Mackenzie Burnett is the co-founder and CEO of Ambrook, a financial management software company built for farms, ranches, and other independent businesses in the real economy. Ambrook helps agricultural operators manage accounting, payments, and financial reporting, with the broader goal of strengthening rural businesses and American industry. (01:51:17) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. Today's Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVBN Altonum, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  What just happened at Google DeepMind? Crazy, crazy morning shakeup, a reorg, stepping down, stepping up, stepping left, stepping right. There's a lot of different terms. We'll break it down. We'll explain the organization before, now what it looks like going forward, what this means, where this goes. So this morning, Demis Hassabis, the legendary AI researcher, the founder of DeepMind.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  A true scientist.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  A true scientist. The subject of Sebastian Malabai's book, The Infinity Machine, the Infinite Machine. He announced that he's stepping down as CEO of Google DeepMind. He's also stepping up into the role of Google DeepMind chairman, and he will also be Alphabet's chief scientist. So is it a promotion? Is it a demotion? Is he quitting? Is he getting fired? Who knows? But the most important thing is that he's still there at Alphabet. He has a different role, and that's what's important. What is the nature of this new role? Google CEO Sundar Pichai also announced that Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean

• 1:24John Coogan?

  will be leaving the company after a 27-year run to start, along with Google senior fellow Sanjay Gembhawat, a public benefit corporation to accelerate discoveries in machine learning, science, and engineering. And if you're not familiar with Jeff Dean, he is the Chuck Norris of of computer engineering and software engineering. There's a whole list of jokes around Jeff Dean jokes.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you read some of them, John?

• 1:50John Coogan?

  What are my favorite Jeff Dean jokes? There's a whole bunch. Any opportunity to repost the Jeff Dean Informatica link. Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean's keyboard, it only has two keys, a one and a zero, because he programs in binary. It's that type of thing. Unsatisfied with constant time, Jeff Dean created the world's first O1 over N algorithm. So he can bend time. There's all these programmer jokes. I don't know. They're a lot of fun. He knows the last digit of pi, that type of thing. But he's been a legend. These were on Quora maybe 15 years ago, maybe more. People were so excited about him, and for good reason. He invented tons of things.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  Jeff Dean doesn't call APIs. APIs call him.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Exactly, that type of thing. Very fun. So the lore around Jeff Dean has been substantial throughout his entire career. He has been very key to so many different Google projects, integral in MapReduce, and actually being able to scale Google Systems.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Does this make any sense? Chuck Norris counted to infinity twice. Jeff Dean did it in parallel.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Ah, okay. Yeah, that's kind of funny. It's a programmer joke, but I don't know. But yeah, it's just funny that he was able to have this level of aura at Google as a non-founder, just a great scientist. And it was so long ago, before there were so much attention on talent below the founding team and below the investing team or whatever, you know.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Truly a living legend.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  Jersey will be going, the Google Jersey will be going in the rafters.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Yes, for sure.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  But he's not done.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  He's not done, and he's starting a new company, which is very exciting because there's a lot of opportunity in machine learning, science, and engineering, obviously. So Google DeepMind CTO and Google's chief AI architect, Corey Chouflou, I can't pronounce that, I'm sorry, is being promoted to SVP and will lead DeepMind. So Corey is now running DeepMind. But interestingly, there's no new CEO of DeepMind, which always seemed to be an odd decision, because DeepMind was not its own reporting unit. Like, when quarterly earnings happening, you get YouTube numbers, you get Google Cloud numbers, and so having a CEO of those divisions made a lot of sense of those organizations.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  But DeepMind was always a unit that sort of cut across everything, because the work that DeepMind does on Gemini and the models made a lot of sense to vend into YouTube. And now there's a little Gemini button when you're on YouTube, and you can just go to a one-hour-long podcast and say, when do they talk about this? And it'll just answer you. And so that was like a feature that was vended into that. Obviously, goes into core Google search. Gemini models help with ads. They help with the actual Gemini products. Like, they get vended everywhere. There's a Gemini button in Chrome. There's also a Gemini button in Google Docs. There's also a Gemini button in Gmail. And so it was never like its own, even though it was its own unit, like, the value that

• 5:02John Coogan?

  it created at Google was very cross-organizational, as opposed to, you know, the YouTube team has a CEO, and they have revenues, and they have ads, and they have a product. And yes, it's integrated into the other things, but it very much is a standalone organization, reports its own financials, and has a CEO. So no CEO for DeepMind, at least in the short term. We'll see where it goes. On X, Demis says the move will, quote, "allow him to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs." He's done a lot of that already, including leaning into his work at Isomorphic to help cure disease. He fleshed this out more on Google's blog.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  He said, "I've decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at GDM, so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come to the best of my ability. In my new role, I will continue to work closely with Sundar on strategic and global AGI matters and to advise Corey, Josh, and the GDM leads from our awesome new London platform, 37 offices. As part of this transition, I will also be leaning into my role at Isomorphic, where we are making extremely rapid and promising progress to accelerate our mission there even faster. As you have heard me say many times, I've always believed the number-one application of AI should be to improve human health."

• 6:29John Coogan?

  That is a great message. Very different from SpaceX S1, the number-one application of AI is enterprise software.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Power of the entire galaxy.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  I mean, there's that, but also just in the actual application, it's like enterprise workflows, which is.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Now, at least.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  And so some type of shakeup has been expected for a long time. The DeepMind organization has made some real contributions to the space, but has been lagging. It's been a point of embarrassment for, I would say, for Google for, I would say, a year plus. They've always felt behind, even though they created so much of the fundamental research that has gone into this entire chapter of the.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Certainly not behind on video. The video stuff's really good.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  VO3.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  But then you get kind of tied up because the Chinese models are like, actually, we will do Mickey Mouse.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but here's the thing. At no point has Google been breaking out their true AI revenue in a way that gets shareholders excited.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  What would, yeah, and there's just been so many, so many question marks. There was a moment, I mean, over a year ago, it felt like Google had some real momentum. And, but that momentum was very much lost. And so there's this question of, you know, when Gnome left, which was about a month ago, that felt, that was like more shocking in some ways than even this. This feels like expected, and then to leave what feels like a hole in the organization is pretty, pretty wild. Stock's down. It was down 5% around the open. It's recovered a little bit, just down 3.5%.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, the big thing is like, they just started, like, Google as a company, I don't think was able to be at least sufficiently AI-pilled, right? They started selling compute. A lot of researchers, I'm sure, were frustrated with that, and that could have led to some of the historical.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Tyler over there thinks Nvidia shouldn't sell the chips if they're really AGI-pilled. The much more extreme version of Google should keep the TPUs for themselves is Nvidia should keep the GPUs for themselves. And yeah, I mean, that was something that was discussed as, okay, if you believe you're in the foothills of the singularity, you will want to scale your compute. If you're seeing traction in the products that you're making, you want to be GPU-rich. You don't want to be selling TPUs to other companies. And so that's got to be, there's got to be some tension. But Google's a big organization. There's multiple organizations within Google, and they all have different KPIs.

• 9:29John Coogan?

  So one team might say, yeah, my mandate is to sell as many of these as possible externally. Other people might say, my job is to keep as many of these internally. And there's a lot of debates there. So we'll see.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and obviously, Google has made a massive bet on Anthropic and is becoming their largest financial backer, especially through some new reporting on some of the lease guarantees that they're doing.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  But anyway, still so surprising. Google, obviously, one of the greatest companies of all time, has every possible advantage in this race, and yet has just consistently struggled. Susan Zhang, who is currently on leave from DeepMind, posted a little, somewhat of a fable. She said, "Backdrop: Kings all asleep slash on vacation while minions slave away. August 2024, first big fail. Fast forward, January 2025, only competent VP bails after one terrorist lead demanding an even bigger slice of pie breaks the camel's back.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Summer 2025, a year ago, second big fail, and king of terrorists climbs the ranks above the slumbering execs."

• 10:48John Coogan?

  This is a crazy subtweet.

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  "Summer 2026, slumbering execs and terrorists who only show up for successful announcements move on, leaving just the king of terrorists behind. Lessons: If you're high enough up there, you can pretty much be a terrorist and hold orgs hostage while continuing to ask for more and more and more until there's absolutely no more aura or gold left to plunder, and then just move on to greener pastures to do it all over again." And we'll leave it up to you.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  This is a crazy, crazy post.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Try to figure out who's who in this story. I don't, doesn't strike me that Susan will be headed back to the company.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  This is a crazy, crazy.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  She says, I've been on leave since January, got pretty burned out by certain people who just say yes to everything to avoid ever making a hard call. And leave it all to the hungry minions to backstab each other until success finds a cursed hole to crawl out.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  I mean, to be fair, I was looking at Tyler's alt account and he talks about us like this all the time. He's always talking, he refers to you as the slumbering Zach and me as the terrorist.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  The terrorist.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  I mean, I believe in free speech. I defend your right to say these things, Tyler. I am offended, but you know. Nobby, nobby. No, it's a wild, wild thing.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  The crazier sub tweets from a big tech.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I don't know. I was never sure that she worked there. It felt like it was maybe like an alt account and it was just like an anon, but it does seem like, I mean, she's saying right here, I've been on leave from this organization. So I don't know. And somebody calls her the homer of our times. Well, it's certainly well written, certainly entertaining. Another interesting like wrinkle here is if you look at what Demis was talking about, writing about just a few weeks ago, it wasn't as much focused on the isometric scientific advancements. I know he's super deep in that and that's what he's, he said he's been focusing on.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  And I love that message. He says, it's time for AI to prove its unequivocal value in the world. And what better way to demonstrate that than to help finally cure diseases like cancer? A hundred percent agree, a hundred percent agree that if you get a new cure for cancer, you save someone's life and they can go and say, yes, I took the new cancer cure and I was cured. AI is doing its job. A lot of people will be very happy about that. Perfect. But that's not what Demis was writing about a couple of weeks ago. The last substantial piece that Demis put out was called the framework for frontier AI and

• 13:32John Coogan?

  the dawning of new age, in which he argues for a frontier AI standards body that evaluates frontier models before they're released for risks associated with superintelligence. It's at the very least not crazy to assume that Demis's new role at Alphabet is maybe related to what he's advocating for in this essay. There's been a lot of back and forth in Washington about the interpretation of that essay. And a lot of AI researchers have stepped up and said like, yeah, we basically agree with this. This framework seems pretty good. It includes open source models in there.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, Demis could be an amazing candidate as, as somebody to lead a new regulatory body.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Lead America as the president. You think he's running?

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Not quite.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  I think we got a better researcher in there. At this point, it'd be great.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, the big, the big question now is, is.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Are you voting, are you voting Dean?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  I'd vote for Jeff Dean.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  No, so big question now. So Jeff Dean is out. Noam Shazer is out. Demis is out. Who is going to fill that void from a leadership standpoint? How are they going to be, how are they going to be able to recruit the best researchers in the world? That's a big question mark, right? And so it does feel like, it sounds like Google's investing in Discovery Loop, Jeff Dean's new company. Very excited to see what they do. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Google just shift into more of an Nvidia style role as like a capital partner to a number of other labs as they, you know, continue to fall.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  It's maybe more of like an Amazon and Microsoft role where you have a great business, you're also great at building infrastructure, you also have a semiconductor team and a chip team, and you can play up and down the stack, but maybe you're not as, as focused on this like full stack, straight shot thing, and you're partnering with other labs on, on different pieces of the puzzle. It'll be interesting to see where everything goes. Discovery Loop, the mission over at Jeff Dean's new company, our mission is straightforward. We are building AI solutions that can automatically solve important problems in machine learning, science, and engineering.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  By advancing the pace at which we conduct engineering and scientific discovery, we can bring the benefits of science and technology to the world much faster. Ultimately, our goal is to build AI.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Systems that act as deeply positive empowering force for humanity, delivering technology solutions that improve people's lives.

• 16:08John Coogan?

  On a global scale. Good, good mission. Fully support it. Excited to see what they launch. Also, fun handle. Discovery Loop? You can follow them on X at Disco Loop AI. Disco Loop.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  I like this. You know, you don't think about disco and discovery having the same root. When I think disco, I think, you know, seventies disco dancing.

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  I think panicking.

• 16:37John Coogan?

  Panicking.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Panic at the disco.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. For sure.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Panikins at the disco.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Disco is shortened and formed of discotheque, a French term that originally meant a library of phonograph records. So that's just etymologically not that related to.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Not that related.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, maybe if you go far back.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay. Well, let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that are, they made 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Tano Brus says, Demis is ousted as Deep MIO and Jeff Dean and Sanjay are leaving Google to start a NeoLab. They're all being very careful to frame these as positive shifts, but there's no way in heck Demis would have accepted this willingly. And there's no way Sundar happily accepted Jeff doing this as a totally independent new public benefit corporation, rather than a bet under Alphabet. Tough to see an interpretation other than Jeff losing confidence in working on AGI under Google.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  We need a Sebastian Malaby sequel. We need a sequel.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Over all.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  I would love for him to write a, a sequel to just, and even zoom out and look at the, the AGI wars generally, like he did in the power law about the early venture capital firms and how they all formed and battled each other. That would be great. Anyway.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Rohan Aneel over at Core Automation says, pour one out for the big G. It's so over.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  We did have a funny, funny moment with Google AI overviews. Yes, a couple of days ago where it said that one of our friends was married to another of our friend's wife.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  And it was quite confident in that.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  It was.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  And I have no idea how, how it even thought of that.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it was because they did a podcast together or something like that. Like they were linked in a blog post together, something like.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  Doing a podcast together.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  She wrote about him or something, or wrote a profile and it just like, put the names together. Very odd. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. You have to wonder what it takes to get AI overviews into like a reasoning mode that can actually do the fact checking so the hallucinations die down because.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and they have to figure out a way to make that process so inexpensive because they're serving it billions, billions and billions of times.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  You know, that, that feels like more of an engineering problem. That feels like very solvable. It feels like they're on the right track there. So, anyway, the excerpt from the Wall Street Journal article published this morning on Jeff Dean's departure. We wanted to build something differently than how things are built at Google right now. Google's infrastructure has very different requirements than the type of infrastructure we want to build for research. Sounds like they want a more flexible kind of infrastructure, kind of like the infrastructure Nvidia provides, Nick Dorsey says over at Midnight Capital. Interesting. I wonder, I wonder what they will do. Of course, I mean, they have to have access to whatever chips they want. They can't be completely locked in. Anyway.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Nathan Lambert says, major restructuring at Gemini will be studied forever as the incumbent with all the advantages not being able to get going.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  They got going. This is, this is not correct. They completely got going.

• 20:01Jordi Hays?

  They got going, but they certainly didn't build real momentum.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  And then he says, PS, OpenAI accomplished their original goal.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  This buyer says, PS of the century.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, backstory is that a lot of the initial energy around OpenAI was a concern that Google would control AGI and a fear from the various early participants around that scenario.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting. Well, yeah. New York Times has some nice photos. Mike Isaac. New York Times has really been on a run with the, with the, with the photo, the photo archive. They did a whole photo shoot with Leopold Ashenbrenner, sat on it, and then the hedge fund blew up and then they were able to trickle these out. It's, it's, it's true, true excellence over there.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's switch over to some more exciting and positive news.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Figma agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  And almost even more positive news, the moment you've all been waiting for, CarPlay is coming to pontoon boats.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Finally, finally, finally, finally.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Have you ever been on a pontoon boat?

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Explain, what context were you on a pontoon boat? What does a pontoon boat even look like? This is a terrible photo.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  It's for cruisin'. It's for cruisin'. Team, pull up a pontoon boat.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  It's not, it's not like a monohole, but it's not a catamaran?

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  It's something between like a cigarette boat and a houseboat.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  Okay, that's a really wide gap.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's right in the middle. No, you just kind of putz around.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Mastercraft Boat Holdings today said it's adding CarPlay to its upcoming crest and Belize Pontoons. The company is working with Savvy Navy to bring CarPlay and on-water navigation to boaters.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  And Mastercraft Boat Holdings, Inc., of course, a public company experiencing a god candle.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Really?

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Up 0.72%, up 18 cents.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  This is cool. This is very cool.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  See? Yeah, this is double decker.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Double decker. See, out in California, we don't, we don't know anything about these pontoon boats because these don't work at the beach, right?

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Correct. But I was sort of correct, somewhere in between a houseboat and...

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Aren't you from the land of a thousand lakes, right? Michigan, isn't that the land of a thousand lakes?

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  No, me, Minnesota.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Oh, you're from, okay. Are you a pontoon boat guy?

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Pontoon boats are huge in Minnesota.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  They're for lakes.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  They're for lakes, basically. How many hours have you spent on pontoon boats in your life?

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  10,000.

• 22:54John Coogan?

  10,000 hours?

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm an expert.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  The man, man put in life's work on the pontoon boat, apparently.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  You're in the wrong job, buddy.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think you got to become a pontoon boat guy.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  It is crazy to think that another life Ben could have been the top pontoon boat salesman in the entire world.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Hey, this one comes with Apple CarPlay. They, don't they need to call it boat play at this point? They gotta come up with something else, CarPlay. But they're doing navigation, on-water navigation. Like this.

• 23:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, moving over to...

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Okay, we got some more.

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  What is the story of the day in technology? This is the story of the day.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  Hit us, John. You know what I'm talking about.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Startup billionaire sued over super yacht broker fee. Everyone's talking about this. This is potentially bigger than what's going on at Google today. In London, the billionaire founder of one of the world's most valuable startups recently bought a super yacht valued at an estimated $400 million.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Continue.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Replete with a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. Do they make, wait, do they make super pontoon boats? Can you get a $400 million pontoon boat? What does that do for you?

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Almost certainly.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Can you imagine just a 300-foot pontoon boat?

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  The world will create infinite ways to make you part with your, your hard-earned money.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  And, and I'm sure we could arrange a, a, almost half a billion dollar pontoon boat.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Okay, team, AI images, I want to see what $400 million gets me if I'm going all in on a pontoon boat. I want to really dominate Lake Michigan. Is Lake Michigan too big for a pontoon boat?

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Because you said lakes, so any lake, it works?

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think the pontoon boat is not for like big waves.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Big waves.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  You can't, it can't be like...

• 25:02John Coogan?

  But there's not big waves on, on, on Lake Michigan? You can't surf or anything? I guess there's no...

• 25:08Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Surf, yeah. Anyway, so, it was a $400 million super yacht. It had a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a helipad. There was just one problem. According to this reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he didn't pay the broker's fee. That is according to a top luxury yacht broker who is now suing Nick Storonsky, a co-founder and chief executive of digital banking giant Revolut, alleging the entrepreneur went behind their back to avoid paying commission on a purchase they had worked on. Cecil Wright and Partners, a luxury yacht broker, filed the legal action in London's

• 25:51John Coogan?

  High Court over Storonsky's acquisition of Nixie, a 335-foot vessel with four terraces. The broker alleged in a court filing that it was negotiating the purchase for Storonsky when his team secretly contacted the yacht's seller directly and agreed to buy the boat, avoiding roughly $20 million in standard commission, the amount the dealer now claims it is owed. In January, Storonsky's team allegedly told Cecil Wright to hold off, let's see, I'm not going to flip through this, to hold off, hold off on contacting the vessel's seller,

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Canadian billionaire and former hockey player Patrick Dovigi, and said they would talk again the following week, according to the filing. The filing claims that by next week, Storonsky's team had already arranged to buy the boat directly from Dovigi, bypassing the broker entirely. It was Cecil Wright that brought the yacht to Storonsky's attention and introduced the Revolut co-founder and the owner.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Matt Young says, unbelievable, taking food off the table of that luxury yacht broker's family.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  A spokesman for the Storonsky family office said, "We are aware of the claim. It is without merit and it will be defended." He says he's not guilty. Nixie features a private wellness spa, indoor and outdoor cinemas, two movie theaters. Now we're talking. As well as a Japanese teppanyaki grill, according to Boat International.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  I love this picture that Tyler just shared. I think this is what Nixie looks like.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's see it. When chartered, it is equipped with a variety of water toys, including a luxury sea bob, water sled, and inflatable blob launchers. Is this the pontoon boat? The luxury pontoon boat?

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sorry, that's, that's the, the $400 million pontoon boat that Tyler just generated.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  That's pretty good. I like it, I like it. That just looks like a normal yacht. That doesn't, that doesn't actually look that crazy to me. I don't know. Storonsky is one of Europe's highest-profile startup founders. Founded in 2015, Revolut is now the region's most valuable startup with a recent share value, share sale valuing the digital bank at $115 billion. Wow, Revolut, what a tear. Originally built around low-fee foreign currency transactions, Revolut is widely used by international travelers and migrants, sending remittances home. The company gained a full UK banking license in March after a lengthy battle. Wow, it took them over a decade to get a banking license. That is crazy. But they did it after a lengthy battle.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Now they're looking to expand into the United States, having recently applied for a national banking charter. It's crazy. It's crazy that they can't go faster. Like, Erebor got a charter so fast, and then there's been other, there's been other companies that have explored like buying a regional bank and then using that charter.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  It's almost certainly part of why Revolut is now such a massive company.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Because they don't have infinite competition in the way that

• 28:56John Coogan?

  True.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  many, many banks and neobanks have here in the US.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Earlier this year, Revolut reported record annual profits and a jump in its customer numbers. At the same time, Revolut said it remained focused on its goal of increasing its customer base to 100 million users by mid-2027 from more than 70 million currently. Well, good luck in the luxury yacht battle. Hopefully everyone gets what they're owed and everyone is compensated fairly. Hate to see people fighting over that. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, services, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. AI's Great Reverse Bank Run. In today's newsletter, Joe Weisenthal wrote about Leopold's basilisk and what makes this

• 29:44John Coogan?

  particular mania feel distinct. People are betting on left-tail outcomes without sacrificing the right tail of financial opportunities. Doomers are getting fabulously wealthy. Let's see what he's saying. Here's the deal. Historically, if you want to cut off your left tail, you also have to cut off your right tail, or to put it more specifically, if you are up big on a stock position and you want to hedge your gains by buying puts, you can do that. But if you want to maintain your puts over time, you spend a lot of money and erase any upside gains that you might otherwise be making. Or you can, or to put it even more generally, suppose you're afraid of the outbreak of war. Well, you can move to a rural farm and grow your own food, but then you miss out on the economic opportunities afforded by living in the city.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  People make these kinds of trade-offs all the time, depending on what's worrying them. Pin that thought for just a second. One of the big questions with AI is whether it's just another technology or whether it somehow will be different this time. It's purchasable intelligence, kind of like purchasable electricity? Or is it something more like a sci-fi novel where humans get replaced or eliminated in some way? As businesses, the big American companies selling AI mostly operating as if AI is just another technology to be developed and solved. But we know that there's deep anxiety within the companies themselves that AI could play out in the way sci-fi novels have expected for decades, and this sometimes is reflected in their governance structures. Here's one stylized fact, though, that might argue for the "it's different" camp.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  If you are one of those people who's been reading AI philosophers and message boards for the last decade, familiar with paperclip maximizers since long before ChatGPT came out, you might have deep existential fears about something bad happening right around the corner. You might also have ended up very, very rich. With AI, there has been no trade-off. The doomers who were early on accumulating GPUs, or better yet, shares in GPU companies, have done extremely well. The put option on humanity has become the call option on the technology. You could bet on the left-tail outcome, not sacrifice anything financially. We've maybe had some shades of this before. For a while Bitcoin was or had characterized as an end-of-the-world hedge, a form of money for when the nation-state

• 31:54John Coogan?

  collapsed, and people made a lot of money on that bet. But a trader wasn't driven by the fear that Bitcoin was a world destroyer, or take gold, betting on gold at certain times protected you against hyperinflation. But the fear that came with the bet did not entail gold being the catalyst for doom. Something else would be the catalyst, but you'd be protected. AI is different. The long-fear catalyst for doom itself has presented an unbelievably profitable trade, at least so far. What's interesting about this is that he's sort of, he's saying like the doomers got rich. There are plenty of AI doomers who did not join AI labs, did not participate financially, worked in nonprofits, just wrote books, worked on research, did not ever join anything that had economic upside. But I

• 32:39John Coogan?

  take his point that in general, if you were early to this, oh, wow, like, things are gonna get weird, you probably were earlier on the train. And a lot of those people that were talking about AI and doom scenarios did wind up working at labs that did very well. So it's a good point, but there are some people that don't fall in this category. Long before we had the transformer architecture of GPT, people have been theorizing about the risks of AI doom. One popular thought experiment is Rocco's basil-esque 2010 thought experiment. Wow. When was the last time we got a new thought experiment? I didn't know they were dropping new ones in 2010. That seems kind of recent. Maybe there's like, I don't know. Someone should come up with a new thought experiment. What's the most

• 33:24John Coogan?

  recent thought experiment that's really taken hold and been thought-provoking?

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever Mode?

• 33:29John Coogan?

  That's not a thought experiment. That's an axiom. That's a lifestyle. A thought experiment is almost like a paradox, something you can wrestle with. We gotta come up with some new-

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  I've been wrestling with Golden Retriever Mode.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  You think it's a thought experiment?

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  I think you can make it one.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't think it falls in the bucket of thought experiment. What do you think, Tom? No? What are you guys laughing at? Are you doing more pontoon boats?

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Crazy texts.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  I'm trying to find the most recently created.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Okay, Jackson, you are correct. Yes. That is the most recent thought experiment. Good stuff. Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. That's very funny. Okay, wait. Quick. We gotta switch gears because the price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. The price of lab monkeys in China is soaring as demand for preclinical testing outpaces supply. Do you think it's time to ape in?

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  To ape strong together?

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Go long the monkey trade. So this is the actual news. We got monkeys up here. There we go. In June-

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  First picture was crazy. It really sad.

• 34:48John Coogan?

  Yep. But it is happening, and it is interesting because it tells you a lot about what's going on in drug testing, animal rights, obviously, and also just the broader economic market. So in June, a Chinese state laboratory paid roughly $26,000 per monkey for a purchase of 40 animals, nearly double what similar animals cost a year earlier. The price has doubled in the last year of monkeys. Biotech executives say the same trend is showing up across the industry, driven by a wave of new biologic medicines and next-generation therapies that require far more primate testing than existing breeding capacity can currently

• 35:30John Coogan?

  support. The shortage could become a bottleneck for China's rapid drug development ecosystem because many experimental medicines must still undergo studies in non-human primates before regulators will allow them to advance. While regulated monkey farms have maintained relatively steady production, demand has accelerated much faster than supply. A similar imbalance emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when vaccine developments sent prices sharply higher. But this time, the pressure reflects Chinese, China's emergence as one of the leading centers for innovative drug discovery. The country now generates a third of the global pipeline of novel medicines and has become a major destination for clinical trials

• 36:13John Coogan?

  and licensing deals with US and European pharmaceutical companies. So monkeys remain essential for making many preclinical studies because their biology closely resembles that of humans. We know the monkey is, has remarkable resemblance to our particular makeup.

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  But broadly-

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Many people have said we have the minds of-

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So if they're working on a brain, typically they would test on a golden retriever, but yes. So this makes them one of the best available models for evaluating a drug's safety, how it moves through the body, its effects on different organs, and the potential for serious toxic side effects before human trials begin. While the shortage may slow some research programs, it's also a sign of an unprecedented surge in investment and innovation aimed at developing new potentially lifesaving treatments.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  Tom in the X chat, how long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one-monkey billion?

• 37:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  That is an important question.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  That's a good thought experiment.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  How long would it take infinite monkeys to make a one-monkey billion-dollar company?

• 37:22John Coogan?

  There is a-

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  That's a new paradox.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  There, so, so there is a, there is a thought experiment related to this. It's the infinite monkey theorem. This is a real thing. It states that a monkey pressing keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite time will almost surely type any given text, deeply relevant to LLMs. Are there any?

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay, get the tinfoil hat.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  What do you think's going on?

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Is it possible that our modern AI systems are monkeys just clacking a bunch of keys? And that's, and that's, this is just an AI bottleneck?

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. You think that when you go to ChatGPT, it's secretly a monkey on the other side?

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. That it's not, it's not a computer?

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. No one really goes in the data centers. Could just be a bunch of monkeys and computers. You don't know.

• 38:09Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of monkeys and bananas.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  You don't know. Okay. Well, there's also news somewhat related. Are there monkeys in the Amazon rainforest? Almost certainly, right? Almost certainly.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Jack in the YouTube chat says, how long until monkeys eat? What about monkey do?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  There's over 50 to 100 species of monkeys in the Amazon-

• 38:30John Coogan?

  In the Amazon rainforest, okay. Well, a new LiDAR survey of the Amazon rainforest has uncovered evidence of a previously unknown civilization that may have supported as many as 3 million people, challenging decades of assumptions about the region's ancient history. So we, I mean, we talked to a friend of the show who, who was doing this, scanning the rainforest with LiDAR, putting new sensor stacks on helicopters, flying them around on planes. But there's new, there's, there's new evidence here. So using laser scanning technology capable of penetrating the dense forest canopy, researchers mapped more than

• 39:08John Coogan?

  4,500 square kilometers of Brazil's Acre State after flying over 4,400 kilometers of rainforest. The survey, which was published in Nature, identified 396 previously unknown geoglyphs, massive geometric earthworks made from deep ditches and raised embankments. The discoveries have provided the clearest picture yet of the Aquary civilization, which is believed to have emerged around 500 BCE and flourished until roughly 850 CE. Rather than serving as permanent settlements, the earthworks appear to have functioned as ceremonial

• 39:52John Coogan?

  and civic centers where people gathered for rituals, political meetings, and other communal events while living in nearby multifamily longhouses and cultivating crops such as corn and squash. Based on the number of earthworks and the labor required to build and maintain them, the researchers estimate that the civilization's population peaked somewhere between 1.25 million and 3 million people. The findings add a growing body of evidence that the ancient Amazon was home to a large interconnected societies with engineered landscapes, not just small isolated villages, as many archaeologists once believed. Even more remarkably, the surveyed area alone contains roughly as many earthworks as earlier estimates suggested existed across the entire Amazon basin. If future LiDAR surveys uncover similar densities

• 40:36John Coogan?

  elsewhere, scientists may have to dramatically revise estimates of how many people once lived in the rainforest. Archaeologists still do not know why the civilization disappeared, though the abandonment of these ceremonial centers between 850 and 950 CE coincides with the decline of several other major societies in the Americas, including the Maya. Very interesting. I wonder where else people can scan with LiDAR, find interesting things? Gotta go to Antarctica or something? I don't know. Well, in other news, Gorn is retiring from writing to start a company. Gorn is the anonymous online writer. Is it gorn.org?

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  Gorn.net.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Gorn.net. Fantastic blog. He's done, I believe, only one podcast in history with Dwar Kesh, where he was anonymous. They used like a 3D rendered version of him, a voice changer to keep him anonymous. This is the website of Gorn Bronwyn. He writes about AI psychology statistics. He also is, I mean, he's written about self-experimentation, Bitcoin, all sorts of different stuff. He wrote an amazing piece about nicotine and all the deep dive there. It was very fascinating, very formative when I was starting my nicotine company. It's very interesting. But he's starting a new company. So let's dig into

• 42:04John Coogan?

  what he wrote. Let's see. Can I pull this up? Where is it? I lost it. Gorn, Gorn, Gorn, Gorn. He has a locked account, so you gotta go request to follow and then-

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Timeline app. Open it back up. Where is it? Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Gorn. Okay. He's retiring from writing to start a company. The company's first product for writing. His goal is to design, is to, uh, his, his design goal is a 100x increase in productivity. What would it take for a GA to make me 100x more productive as a writer or thinker? Why 100x specifically, he says? Because too aiming at, uh, oh, ooms, too, too aiming at ooms is enough to hope to keep up for a while. And this goal will shatter ineffective Band-Aid style, short-term design proposals. But it doesn't require solving the AI alignment problem or value extrapolation. We do not need to be able to oversee millions of super intelligent AIs working autonomously

• 43:17John Coogan?

  versus objective of millennia, which is good because a GA can probably not do that. What would that look like for, for me? Roughly, I think it would look like a GA enabling me to produce one to three worthwhile writings a day, which are 100% written by it without loss of quality. Very interesting.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  I've heard enough. A hundred million.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Give them a billion dollars. Yeah. No, I agree. It is interesting that, uh, you know, we've gone back and forth on, you know, is writing verifiable? I think it's a little less verifiable. Um, but you know, with feedback and different algorithms, you can get there. But it just feels like the progress in mathematics is accelerating faster than the, than the progress in writing.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Yes. And also, I mean, in this scenario, it's like, maybe it's easier to train a model to write like, like one specific person to, to write good generally. Like that's like much more amorphous. What does it mean to like, write well? Versus like, oh, this is in the style of a particular person. This is how they would think.

• 44:20John Coogan?

  It also feels like there needs to be a, uh, sort of like, uh, uh, like a whole agent harness or workflow, because writing is not just the last step of instantiating the rules. It's all the research that goes into it, all the different references, the, the, all the different links and things and the way he will put together arguments, the way he structures these things. Um, all of that is, uh, is part of the writing process. Even just narrowing down, you know, is this an essay or is this a, you know, shorter post, longer post? All of these different decisions, they can probably be built into a system, but it will take time. So that's what he's working on. Um, anyway. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds,

• 45:02John Coogan?

  online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have the perfect guest to talk about Shopify. Because we have Harley Finkelstein, the president of Shopify, here with us in the TV in Ultra Town. Welcome back to the show, Harley. Congratulations. What a quarter. Insane stock chart. Take us through it. What's going on at Shopify?

• 45:26Harley Finkelstein?

  It is, uh, Jordy John, great to be back here.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 45:30Harley Finkelstein?

  I don't know if, I don't know if the, if the ad role and me coming on together was coordinated.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Completely coincidence. Completely coincidence.

• 45:37Harley Finkelstein?

  Brilliant. Uh, well, before the call, I want to let, let me get into this. This was a monster quarter, you doubt. GMV was 116 billion, which is more than like the GDP of half the countries on the planet. Revenue was 2.6 billion, gross profit was 1.7 billion, and free cash flow was just over $650 million. Most importantly, I think, is that, I mean, this, obviously Shopify is at a huge scale and, um, we delivered more than 30% across, across the board this quarter. And I think it's like our fifth straight quarter of 30% or more growth in GMV. So Shopify is doing well, and more importantly, the stores on Shopify, the merchants on Shopify are doing incredibly well and really, really fast.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  People talk about AI victims, and in this situation, I think AI is a victim of Shopify.

• 46:26Harley Finkelstein?

  I mean, you know, we, we can get into that. I, I actually think one of the more interesting parts of, of the call, and we got into a little bit of it, was just around what is happening in Agentic that, I, I think the question I got on the Q1 call was, is this real and is this going to continue? And, um, the, I tried to answer that question clearly, which is, um, yeah, it's, it is early and yes, the volume is small in Agentic Commerce relative to $116 billion. But the, the trend is, is real. I mean, and the growth is real. And, and funny enough, um, or surprisingly enough, I should say, the merchants that seem to be benefiting most from Agentic Commerce are not the big box stores. It is the like long tail of these specialized independent businesses.

• 47:09Harley Finkelstein?

  And just on, on, on Agentic alone, uh, traffic was up 3X, like AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores was up 3X, orders were up 3X, uh, so not just traffic, but the actual orders themselves. And probably the most interesting is like conversion from our catalog, Shopify catalog, was 2X more than sort of general AI scraping. So, one, it is real. Two, it continues to grow. And three, um, it is disproportionately affecting these smaller merchants. So, you know, consumers are searching for like a standing desk for a small apartment or car seats that fit three across the back bench of a sedan. And I think that is a structural advantage for small businesses, which happens to be a big part of our, our merchant base.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So yesterday we had the most feared lawyer in the world on our show, John Quinn. He was talking about a, uh, sort of current lawsuit, uh, between Amazon and perplexity. Amazon sued perplexity because perplexity's bot was going on to amazon.com, finding listings for users, which I think is something that a lot of people, uh, a lot of people want. Uh, but Amazon is not excited about that because they have a big ads business. And if bots are crawling all over, they can't really serve, or they don't have a way to serve ads to bots in an effective way.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it feels, yesterday, I think there was a, a, um, some type of, um, action by the judge. I forget the technical term for it, but, um, the judges, I, I don't think the case is fully decided yet, but the judge is effectively saying like, a, an agent acting on the user's behalf to do something on a website is wildly different than just general, like basically the, the way that we would historically view bots, where like a company could say like, we don't want your bots on our website, but we're entering into this new paradigm. It does feel like Shopify is in a really great position here because you guys aren't trying

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  to monetize eyeballs in the same way, and you're not trying to monetize that demand. You're just trying to get merchants in the position to sell a lot more products. And so how do you see this sort of struggle evolving on a more global level between, uh, consumers which want to use agents to buy products all over the internet? And these sort of big platforms and, and legacy, uh, shopping platforms that want to, you know, control attention on their websites?

• 49:49Harley Finkelstein?

  Look, I, I think, I did a search for myself in June. Uh, Bailey, our, we have a 10-year-old, our 10-year-old daughter, we want to get her, uh, screenless phone to use. And I, I, historically, I would have gone to a search engine and would have typed in screenless phone, and I probably would have seen something like Best Buy pop up. And they'd have like eight different options from some, you know, some big, big, I don't know, big companies, electronics companies. Instead, just using chat on my own, I typed in, looking for a screen phone for, for Bailey. Uh, because it had so much context, because it knows me so well, because of all the conversation we've had over the last, I don't know, two and a half years, it actually pointed me right to the tin can phone.

• 50:34Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. Tin can phone is, it's a Shopify merchant. It took me right to the store.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  I have like five of them. They're amazing.

• 50:39Harley Finkelstein?

  They're amazing.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 50:40Harley Finkelstein?

  I never would have found that. I never would have found that product.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  And this is a, like a can with a string attached to another can?

• 50:45John Coogan?

  That's the metaphor.

• 50:46Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, that's the metaphor, but it's basically, it's wifi-enabled, screenless phone. It's really cool because I don't want my kids on screens.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 50:52Harley Finkelstein?

  It works incredibly well. That is because Agentic Commerce is merit-based. It is not based on who is supplying the most amount of ad dollars.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:02Harley Finkelstein?

  And I think it's still like, it's still, it's, it's really, it, it is a much better shopping experience, and I still think it could get better. In fact, I, I sent you guys, um, some, some graphics here. Can you, can you pull up, did you have those? Can you pull up the first one, which is just the dress?

• 51:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay. So I mentioned earlier, just keep this on for a second. I mentioned earlier that right now, if you look at the conversion of our catalog versus general AI search of scraping, our catalog converts 2X. This is what a scraping might, might actually show, just simply the dress. Go to the next slide.

• 51:38Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay, so this is what we're actually building. This is these taste-driven attributes. Whether these articles, these products, you know, is it formal enough for a wedding? What's the, is the fabric breathable? What's the wrinkle tendency if you're using it to travel? Sneakers, are they suitable for an endurance race? This type of structured values agents can actually read. It means that when someone's saying, I want to buy a dress that's good for a summer wedding or a suit that needs to be formal enough or, you know, judging its formalness. This is where it is going. We announced this at a .dev two weeks ago, but this is what we are building with catalog. We are building these incredibly rich product attributes that will make the shopping experience from a discovery perspective way better.

• 52:23Harley Finkelstein?

  And then what we're seeing is ultimately the journey compression is insane. So buyers arrive, effectively ready to shop. AI referred sessions land on product pages two and a half times more than simply organic search where they just go to the general page and they're perusing and they're browsing. That's not how it works with Agentic. Actually, they're arriving right on the product page and they're using shop pay to checkout. So the adoption, like this is real and it's showing up in our numbers and both in traffic and orders. And I think Agentic is only going to get bigger from here. And I love the fact that these small niche companies like the tin can phone seem to be the ones benefiting more than others.

• 53:02Harley Finkelstein?

  In fact, if you actually just compare 75% of all AI attributed purchases in Q2 on Shopify were from outside our top 100 categories. So it is not your, I want yoga pants. It is, I want, I don't know, reef safe sunscreen that doesn't leave a white cast in my, you know, on my black leather, whatever it is. It's that type of stuff. And I think that means our merchants, I think, will disproportionately benefit from this.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  Because AI is still a little slow, there's a little bit of a cost to going down the Agentic search path. I would expect, I have been expecting that we will see disproportionate Agentic purchases for higher ticket items, more considered purchases. So you're doing research on a car? Yeah, go let 5.6 Pro cook on all your features and figure out everything. But you're ordering just another, you know, soda, you're not going to go and down the Agentic like system for that, at least in the short term. Are you seeing any of that or do you expect that to be a factor?

• 54:13Harley Finkelstein?

  Yes, so for sure. Products that require more deliberate purchasing intent and more research benefit from it too. But I would, I would tell you to expand your, your perspective there. It's not just, it's also products that are very much for, it's a particular product for a particular use case. It is not necessarily, I want to buy a T-shirt. It is, I want to buy a high-end T-shirt with a GSM count that is more than, you know, that keeps me warm, like when I go out at night in New York City, where it knows your location, it knows the weather in your location. And now it actually pulls from your entire conversation history and says, you probably want a James Purse T-shirt, which is my favorite T-shirt.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other, the other thing that, the other thing I've been doing, I'm, I'm, I think you maybe discount consumers' willingness to wait or do things in order to save money, right? This is not, you don't strike me as the kind of guy that ever was doing like credit card point maximization or like chasing coupon codes around the internet. But a lot of people are, and a lot of people like want to buy something and then they're thinking, okay, what, how can I get the best price on this? I saw a pair of sneakers a couple of days ago that I really liked. I found them for sale and I just took a screenshot of the, of the product page and I said, find me this sneaker in my size at the best price.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  And it went and found three different options.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  And so you might land on a Shopify.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  And what was interesting is it actually took me to StockX and it was like, hey, by the way, this is selling for below retail on StockX, so you should just get it here. And I ended up saving whatever, 50 something dollars, right? And so that, even though that was like, probably took, you know, 30 seconds.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Like 30 seconds to save 50 bucks, like a pretty good trade, right?

• 56:09Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. I mean, especially if you have some sort of like reminder, like, hey, these, these are the sneakers I want, they're a little too expensive for me right now. I would love you to let me know if something else comes up. And now it basically runs a query, you know, every couple of days to see whether or not it's being discounted as well. So even though that's not a deep research product, you actually are doing deep research on the pricing of it as well. But the other thing also that came out of the call today, which, which I don't know if it necessarily got, got picked up and it's worth sharing is, we've talked about Sidekick on the show before and I said, ultimately the goal for Sidekick is that it makes merchants more effective, more efficient, helping them reach their early milestones faster or make better decisions, all this, you know, all the things that, you know, when I was selling

• 56:52Harley Finkelstein?

  T-shirts on Shopify or, you know, you were selling nicotine, patcha dirty, like, you know, that, all that stuff, the silly ad spend we made on performance marketing that just didn't convert, that ultimately the goal was to alleviate all that as well. And what we actually talked about today was when you actually look at the onboarding guidance, when you're just setting up a store on Sidekick on Shopify, we actually saw an 8% increase in new merchants reaching their fifth order within 15 days. That may not seem like a big deal, but on a massive base of Shopify, new merchants that are constantly coming on, the fact that they're getting to their, their fifth sale faster is, is remarkable. And so we think not only is, is that going to get better for new merchants, but then

• 57:37Harley Finkelstein?

  as merchants also grow in scale, it's not going to be about setup anymore. They're going to be using Sidekick to become more like, to do more things like analytics or reporting or to find new opportunities. And therefore, all the mistakes that we all made when we were building our own e-commerce businesses 10 years ago, simply go away. And so you'll have more people starting and more people growing faster. And, and as that happens, Sidekick just keeps getting smarter and smarter.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, so like break that down more for someone who's actually running a Shopify store today. How, how close are we to the world where you show up, you have a budget and, and Shopify can sort of agentically for me, take a budget and spread it across Facebook and AppLovin and Google Ads and load balance everything, the stuff that, you know, you wind up hiring an agency for sometimes and then maybe they get a little clocked out, then you hire a person and it becomes a job, like, and a lot of, a lot of small merchants might not have that capacity, but there's, you're picking up pennies off the floor if you're doing it properly.

• 58:38Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, so, so, I mean, so that, that is, it's already happening to some merchants some of the time. We have something called, we announced, called autopilot, which we announced in our last edition, which effectively allows you to give us your, your ad budget and we will go and find the most effective uses for you.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:52Harley Finkelstein?

  But in terms of like, so there's different stages of, of usage on Sidekick. For new merchants, the first job is getting to that first sale and then the next sale. And those, you guys know this, the first few orders, it creates incredible momentum. It gives, it gives you confidence. You become an entrepreneur when you have your fifth sale and it's not your mom or your neighbor, it's like some stranger who found your business. As the business then grows, we've noticed, obviously setup accounts go down, now they're actually using it to do things like reporting analytics. And over time, what we're doing, Sidekick is actually proposing things like bundles, for example, or SEO optimization driven product creation. Then we have something called Pulse that lives inside Sidekick, which is effectively saying, this is what's happening right now on your business.

• 59:34Harley Finkelstein?

  And these are some proactive ideas you should consider, like useful recommendations. You can accept them and if you do, Sidekick will implement them for you. Or it could be something as simple as moving your product page around or moving the buy button, you know, the shop pay button further up the stack a little bit. But this idea is we want to, we want to deliver the best practices across, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of GMV everywhere that goes to Shopify to anyone using the platform and then they can decide on their own if they want it. The reason that this is Pulse is because it understands, unlike any other AI agent, it understands a merchant's products, customers, transactions, history, and that context allows us to give this incredible grounded advice in the reality of a merchant's business.

• 1:00:19Harley Finkelstein?

  And it's an advantage actually that just continues to compound as more people use Sidekick, more merchants are able to get value from it as well. And, and I, I think the path forward is Sidekick will take on more of the work, not just with ads, but also selecting a 3PL or figuring out, you know, doing like line skipping to figure out how to have the best deal on shipping. But this is like really, I mean, it's, it's, it's not just science fiction, like this is really happening where you can put more and more of your business on autopilot.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  It's great. What a great time to start a company.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  In two minutes, I want you to talk about the year 2035. And let's assume that you have a widespread use of robotics that can make anything that you could possibly imagine, spread out all over the world, that can make custom products or one-off products or small batches of products. I have so many different products, like in my camera roll that I just made with ChatGPT images. And I would, I would love to be able to make like just five of them or 10 of them or, or make one for myself and throw up a product listing, right? It could be something like sculptural or a piece of furniture or even something in consumer packaged goods.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  And I personally have a theory that As robotics bring down the cost of making anything, that there's so many people on the planet that have ideas that would create a Shopify store. And if they could make, you know, 10, or 20, or 50, or 100 of products really easily, they would become, you know, basically entrepreneurs overnight, you're just about reducing that friction all the way. So like 30 years ago was quite a bit harder to sell products online. It was, it was, it was possible. But again, it was like clunky. Now it's easy to sell products online. It's still incredibly hard to make high quality products, especially as somebody that's a new entrepreneur that doesn't have a lot of capital. So how are you thinking about the,

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  like, the year 2035, assuming, you know, a takeoff in robotics?

• 1:02:21Harley Finkelstein?

  Can you guys pull up gamers.town? Gamers, like the gamer, like someone who's a gamer. T-O-W-N. Just pull that up for a second. I want to show you something. I just saw this before the call, but this is fascinating.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  This is very cool. Is this on Shopify?

• 1:02:36Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, so I got it. This is so interesting. So can you pull it up here? Okay, okay. So this is an entrepreneur who basically took our catalog API, so a billion products, right? Like ALO is in here, Viori is in here, Mattello is in here, Canada Goose is in here, everything is in here. And, and they also looked at every single store that, obviously, this entrepreneur is a gamer, and said, I want to pick across a billion products, the most relevant, interesting merchandise for all these games like Minecraft. And they effectively, they took the catalog API, like as the access point. And now these developers can effectively just build their own stores with other people's products. So I think, like, and it's beautifully done.

• 1:03:19Harley Finkelstein?

  You can see it's like this great constellation type of, of shopping experience. So the fact that, that even before the year 2035, where maybe robotics help us with manufacturing, I actually think now that allowing anyone with some ambition to take the Shopify catalog and create their own interesting ideas, in this case, it's for gaming, but there's so many other ones as well. I think that is, like, that will happen, not in the next 10 years, I think that'll happen in the next, like, 10 days. This is the first one I found.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  I'm getting a full Counter-Strike costume for sure. This site is amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Always, always fantastic chatting.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Incredible quarter.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Ben, congratulations. What a quarter. Great stuff.

• 1:04:01Harley Finkelstein?

  Thank you, guys. I'll already thank you. You're the best.

• 1:04:02John 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. Our next guest is John G. Matteo from BlackBerry. He is the CEO. And we're very excited to talk to him because BlackBerry has evolved many times. And

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  The company's been on a fantastic run. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself? And I want to sort of set the table on the shape of the business now for anyone who's been living under a data center and doesn't understand the current shape of the business.

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  Hey, thanks for having me on the program, guys. It's an honor to come out and talk a little bit about BlackBerry. Forty-two-year-old, iconic Canadian company.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  A lot of deep roots in technology and a lot of different transformations over, over those 42 years. You know, so many people know us from the, the old smartphone days and, and the devices, but our transformation and pivot into embedded software, and we could talk a lot more about that, the things that we're powering around the world, and secure communications, where we provide mission critical, mission critical communication capabilities. That's really what the new BlackBerry is all about, those two categories in terms of serving the market.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. On, on automotive software, obviously, it's a very high stakes, in some cases, life and death scenario based on the security of that software. At the same time, the theme of 2026 has been cybersecurity with advanced AI models showing really powerful capabilities there. What have automotive leaders been coming to you to solve? How are they thinking about solving the, the problem of keeping automotive software secure in the modern era?

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, great, great question. Especially now is there's so much more technology going into the vehicles than ever before. The need for a rock solid, mission critical, secure operating system. And when you think about BlackBerry and our QNX platform, think of it really as the operating system of the car, the windows of the car, the way windows is to the PCs around the world. The QNX operating system is really the operating system that powers all things that go on in the car, particularly on safety critical types of functionalities, from digital cockpit to ADAS, to body control, all of these different

• 1:06:54Speaker 05

  domains of technology that goes into the car and the CPUs that power them, run on top of a BlackBerry operating system. So we're proud to be powering over 275 million cars around the world today and, and growing millions over the years. And we got a tremendous amount of progress all around the world, in Germany, Japan, Korea, obviously here in North America. China is one of our fastest growing segments. So a lot of exciting things as, as more technology gets introduced to the vehicle.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  How has you, as a CEO, been grappling with this sort of story of token maxing? You get these new models, they're incredibly powerful, you have the opportunity to deploy them across the entire workforce, rewrite every line of code if you want. At the same time, this comes with a cost. You have a serious business to run with a bottom line to manage. How have you been deploying AI internally in a way that's maintains safety and security, but also doesn't balloon cost, but does drive efficiency?

• 1:08:08Speaker 05

  Great, great, great question. And that's a, it's something we think about every, every single day. We are, the way I would describe it, we're pretty pragmatic about AI and how we use it. Because like you said, the, the applications, the car, failure is not an option in a vehicle. So we've got to be really careful about how widely we deploy AI as we build and enhance our existing operating systems and new products. So, you know, one of the things that's in, in our industry, you have to meet the highest levels of certifications.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  And in the car industry, there's a particular certification of ISO 26262, very high standard. You can't even think about being deployed into a vehicle unless you deploy that. For an AI agent and to, to try to meet that type of standard, it's a non-trivial type of exercise. So we are thoughtful about it. We deploy AI to help us maybe test our products. We, we deploy it to, to help service our customers. We deploy it in, in our go-to-market activities. But in the actual, you know, core development, the code that goes in it, we're very thoughtful

• 1:09:29Speaker 05

  and limited about because of those certifications and the importance of it.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  BlackBerry's been on such a fascinating historical journey. What is the area or cultural value or discipline or source, center of excellence that you think has remained the most true throughout all of that? What is the, what is the narrative arc that actually brings coherence to a company that's operated in multiple markets over multiple decades?

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, for a 42-year-old company that has evolved in so many different ways, you know, what I always tell people, BlackBerry has always been about security, trust, and innovation. And even though the, the products and services that we sell to our customers today can't be held in the palm of your hand the way they might have been with a device, that's security, trust, and innovation of everything that we do, from the products that we deploy, to the services that we provide, to the support that we provide governments around the world, to, you know, eight out of the top G10 countries

• 1:10:43Speaker 05

  around the world are still deploying BlackBerry's secure communications capabilities for mission critical types of applications. So if it needs to be safe, secure, and certified, that's really our value proposition. Our, our 2,000-plus employees and contractors around the world, our big hubs in Ottawa and Waterloo, Canada, is where a lot of this technology gets developed. That's the pride of, of what we stand for. And those are the values of what we stand for in terms of security, trust, and innovation.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  So I imagine that although different technological solutions, different products have evolved, there's always been a, a really, really solid operating bar for building trust with customers, go-to-market, sales, actually partnering really deeply with the companies that you work with. How has that informed your M&A strategy going forward? Do you, do you have a particular philosophy of how you can bring a new product or company into the fold successfully?

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, that's one of the things we do now that I don't know, we did it to a degree in the past, but I think we've, we've really doubled down on it over the last few years is we really work very closely with the ecosystem to bring a lot of this capability to the market. So for instance, our biggest partners in the automotive sector, Nvidia, Qualcomm, ARM, Texas Instruments, Intel, big tier one operators like Bosch, take our technology, integrate it into their solution and deliver it to their customer. So whether it's the chip makers, the operating system maker like us, tier one providers,

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  or the end customer like the auto manufacturer, having a comprehensive ecosystem approach has really been the way that we've, we've gone about it. So when we think about M and A, we look at, you know, what, what piece of the puzzle might be missing and we kind of put it through that filter. But I got to be honest with you, it's right now with the organic growth that we're seeing, the, the opportunities in physical AI with robots and medical instrument, there's a lot of organic kind of runway for us to enjoy.

• 1:13:20Speaker 05

  So from an M and A perspective, if it fills a gap, if it helps us accelerate a certain category, I think we'll, we'll absolutely think about it. But right now, you know, the, the runway that we have, we have a $950 million backlog in our QNX operating system that's going to be deployed over the next five, seven years. So these are the types of things we think about when we think about M and A.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  I want you to make a guess for us, considering how embedded BlackBerry is with, you know, automotive manufacturers and, and other suppliers. What, at, at what point do you think that every auto manufacturer in the United States that sells, let's say more than 5,000 cars will have a functioning autopilot out of the box in every single one of their vehicles? What year?

• 1:14:20Speaker 05

  Um, interesting. You know, there's 90, 90 million cars get made a year. 75% of those cars have basic fundamental technology like, like the media type of software that operates. 25% have more advanced technology along the lines of what I talked about. So taking it to the next level around an autopilot and, and, and, you know, autonomous applications and, you know, I think that's well into, you know, the, the next decade of, of the 2030s.

• 1:15:00Speaker 05

  Early innings, there's a lot more technology going on and, and we'll, we'll see more and more of it get deployed. But I do think it's a little bit more of a journey than an instant thing that we're going to see in the next, you know, 18 to 24 months.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, that's what I was, my, my estimate would be 2035.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are you seeing on the industrial automation side, the industrial, either robotics or just industrial equipment side? I mean, we've seen Caterpillar is doing really well and it just feels like America is starting to reindustrialize. There's, there's reshoring, there's also the data center build out, the AI build out, there's just more construction happening, it feels like. Is that showing up in your business? Are you seeing that with your partners? What is the nature of the changing landscape of industrial autonomy?

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  Absolutely. It's, it's the general embedded space for us, which includes things like industrial automation, robotics, medical instrumentation, surgical robotic arms that, that go on in the operating rooms today. These are all, while we've got a great footprint and presence and growth trajectory on the automotive side, these other use cases around robotics. So for instance, AMI, AMR rather, automated mobile robots, things that are, these are robots that are doing pick, pack and ship in big scale manufacturing.

• 1:16:36Speaker 05

  Those are applications that would need a QNX operating system, based on the precision and the safety levels of things required. So it's the fastest growing segment, it's our fastest growing pipeline, and we think it's, it's going to help us fuel that next generation of growth here at BlackBerry.

• 1:16:56John Coogan?

  Last question, and we'll let you get back to your busy day. I'm interested to know how you've processed the, the story of Palantir's forward deployed engineering strategy. This in some ways has always existed, there's always been deep partnerships with enterprise companies where, you know, employees of one company might be embedded in another organization as they're deploying a piece of software. Palantir took it sort of to the extreme. How have you thought about deeply integrating your actual workforce and solutions engineering into the, the companies that you're working with?

• 1:17:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I follow the Palantir, it's obviously working for them, they're just killing it right now. And it helps them, I think, you know, with their cycles and bringing more products and solutions to the market. I think for us, we're probably a little bit slower to adopt something like that, if I'm honest. We're a little bit more, again, back to some of the safety certifications, there's dozens of them all around the world that we have to comply with. We take that really seriously and as a result, we, we try to do as much of that in-house as we possibly can. We got to a point where scale was really affecting our ability to get some of these

• 1:18:19Speaker 05

  solutions out there at a timely manner, I think we'd take a look at it. But at this point in time, it's a little bit more of a, you know, Made in Canada approach.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  I love this, Made in Canada. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the recent success, really impressive and really appreciate the time chatting with you.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  Thanks so much for having me on.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era, unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  We missed an opportunity to, to pitch John on rebranding back to Research in Motion.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Because that is one of the best names in history and it feels even more fitting for the current business.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, but everyone knows BlackBerry.

• 1:19:10Jordi Hays?

  David in the chat was asked, wanted to ask, has BlackBerry thought of renaming their company? It's now B2B, a totally different offering than what people. I do think, I do think the current name probably holds them back.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Really? I think, I think it accelerates them a ton because even though BlackBerry was popular in consumer, in enterprise, it was known as a much deeper solution that you would buy and deploy across like your entire.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I would say that like the, the next generation of enterprise buyers associate the BlackBerry name with just losing.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. Oh, well, well, our next guest is in the waiting room already. We have Jamie Leller from Circle, who's been on the show before and he's back in the TV bin. How are you doing, Jamie?

• 1:19:59Jeremy Allaire?

  Great, great to see you. Absolutely.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Give us the update on Circle, give us the update on, on stable coins broadly. I want to go into sort of the knock on effects, how the AI era is helping, but let's start with the state of the business.

• 1:20:17Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, absolutely. We, we reported our Q2 earnings today. I won't go through like all the numbers, but I think, you know, one of the things I talked about at the beginning of that is like, we're going through a pretty interesting moment right now and, and that's really being driven by the fact that stable coins are now becoming part of the actual dollar financial system. So the Genius Act passed, this, this new law is going into effect. And really the big trend that we're seeing is that, you know, all of the traditional players in the financial system, from the big technology companies to the payment companies to financial infrastructure companies, they're all starting to build on this. And so we're really poised, obviously, for that moment.

• 1:20:58Jeremy Allaire?

  USDC is today like overwhelmingly the most widely used regulated digital dollar in the world. Visa reported at the end of June, 70% of real world stablecoin transactions happening with USDC. We saw record numbers in terms of minting and redemption of USDC. And so it's, it's, you know, it's sort of the backdrop is like stablecoins are working their way into kind of everything. And at the beginning of next year, it's sort of officially part of the financial system. So, you know, that, that's, that's been going on. And I think the other big shift that's been happening, and we talked about this earlier as well, is that we're kind of exiting the, you know, what I like to think of as like the speculative phase of crypto and we're moving into like a more mainstream phase.

• 1:21:42Jeremy Allaire?

  And actually, there's a tipping point, data point that happened last week, which is that close to 75% of the volume traded on hyper liquid was actually real world assets, tokenized stocks, tokenized commodities, other things. And it's no longer people who are like, you know, kind of going leveraged betting on Bitcoin. It's actually this infrastructure being used for traditional assets. And that's obviously, I think, a pretty interesting moment in time as well.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Interesting. How have you been processing the, the moves in the traditional finance rails world? There's this talk of a new payments network that might compete with Visa, a bunch of the banks are working on this. Are they fighting the last war? Is this not a threat to you? Is this irrelevant? Is this maybe beneficial to you?

• 1:22:31Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, like, I think our philosophy, you know, basically for the last 13 years is like, all of the financial system is going to be moving to being run by software on the internet. It's going to run on open networks. It's going to be open source infrastructure. It's going to be machines that are that are running that. And as obviously, we see this convergence with AI, it's actually machines building machines that are running the financial system on the internet. So I think that's looking backward. I think looking forward, this is about programmable money, all on open infrastructure, these new, you know, software created money like stable coins itself is actually software generated money. So I think that's where where the world is going and and where the velocity is going to happen as we go forward.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Oh, what? How are you thinking about the, I mean, software created money? The the AI agents, there's been a whole bunch of different sort of concepts. We were just talking to Harley at Shopify about the like the growth in agentic shopping, but it's mostly research and then it's handed off at Shopify. And I'm wondering, do you have any visibility into where the near term killer use case within a very broad AI world that can do everything from, you know, probably figure out how to mail you a gold bar if you try hard enough to, you know, microtransaction at streaming USDC, right? There's such a broad remit there.

• 1:23:59Jeremy Allaire?

  Totally. I mean, this is a huge focus for us. I know we talked about it in the past, but, you know, right now, you know, there's these agent payment protocols like X402 and MPP machine payments protocol. Right now, like over 99% of the transactions that are happening are happening with USDC, are happening on blockchains. So we're leaning pretty hard into that. And lots of companies from Amazon to CloudFlare to Shopify to, you know, Stripe and others are building on this. And so that's sort of happening. But I think our conceptual model, and I actually talked about this earlier today, we have a whole roadmap we're publishing on this is we actually think that the real opportunity is not necessarily like agents that are out doing shopping. It's actually agents as as actual, you know, units of labor.

• 1:24:42Jeremy Allaire?

  And so really, looking at agents as, you know, cognitive workers and looking at agents that are actually the supply side of the agentic economy, which is essentially agents that you can discover, that other agents can discover, that can provide and conduct work. And and really, that's a whole infrastructure that has to be developed. And that includes things like identity and reputation and marketplaces where these can be discovered. We've launched a bunch of pieces of this. There's over 900 services now that are available. It's across a huge range of things on the internet that you can now do with agents and and agentic payments. And so I think, you know, from from from my perspective, the the agentic economy

• 1:25:23Jeremy Allaire?

  in some respects is about the transformation of cognitive work into agentic execution. And then how all that gets orchestrated, not just inside a firm. There's lots of people talking about agent harnesses and orchestration, but it's like cross firm boundaries. If I'm building a startup and I've got two or three people and I want to employ agents to actually work on my behalf and build things, we need an infrastructure to do that. And so I think it's actually, that's the looking forward model. The looking backward model is like, yeah, there's like research and shopping. The looking forward model is there's work that's executed. It's a labor market for agents that has to be established. That's what we're excited about.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  What does stablecoin adoption actually look like in a large financial institution? Because these institutions are using them in some ways, but there's all these different like flows of money. And I imagine that when you're talking to CEOs or your BD team is talking to management teams or or individuals at these companies, you're probably identifying different flows and saying like, this is a good use case for stablecoins. But I imagine there's a lot of basically payment flows that have been set up and maybe running for like 20 years. And there's a system that works. And so like, are how much of adoption is like net new flows that are being set up,

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  stablecoin native versus like historical, you know, basically payment processes that are getting, you know, turned over to stables?

• 1:26:52Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think we're sort of seeing this like incremental upgrading that's happening. And, you know, you see this with like pretty much every payment company and every neo bank in the world now has some kind of stablecoin strategy. They're integrating it into how they can receive pay-ins or make payouts. You're seeing that with, you know, companies like Meta, who are, you know, like making payouts to creators in far flung places around the world. You're seeing global treasurers who are starting to realize like, wait a minute, I can actually move my capital around all around the world 24/7. I can, you know, make payments into hard to reach places a little bit more efficiently. We're seeing your big ERP systems and treasury management systems adding stablecoin rails as an additional option.

• 1:27:35Jeremy Allaire?

  So I think we're basically seeing the rails get added in all over the place. And a lot of where it's starting is is sort of where it's been hard, you know, internationally, cross border, and where there's demand for dollars, right? I think there's also this sort of shift that's taking place. Digital dollars are very attractive. People want to hold them. And so you see more demand side, you know, people who want to receive funds this way and want to keep it in that as well. And then within like the financial infrastructure, like the financial markets, et cetera. I mean, basically, you know, what we've seen happen is digital asset markets got all the big Wall Street trading firms beginning to, you know, trade crypto. And then they learned about 24/7, 365 collateral and the ability to move and settle stuff instantly

• 1:28:20Jeremy Allaire?

  around the world. Now that's starting to penetrate into traditional markets. And so you're seeing more and more, you know, the DTCC, you know, the big kind of clearing infrastructure for securities, standing up infrastructure where the cash settlement is actually happening with USDC because it's a it's sort of on chain system. So we're seeing it work its way into the core of the financial system. And we're seeing it out at the periphery of the way global payments happen. You know, my view is obviously is like, this is like a superior medium of exchange. It's programmable money and the unit economics are better, the user experience is better. So eventually, we think this will obviously absorb sort of like digital media slowly absorbed and and and became a much, much larger thing compared to non digital media.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  I feel like you're using infrastructure, financial infrastructure in sort of the ephemeral sense, in the metaphorical sense, not in the literal like we need server racks that are running the rails, right? But I'm just interested, even if it isn't the the most crucible moment for the business, what does the physical infrastructure side of the business look like? Is that fairly turnkey at this point? Has most of that engineering been done? Or is there still a work to be done to keep the network even moving faster and even more uptime?

• 1:29:38Jeremy Allaire?

  Oh, it's a great question. So I mean, so so two things. So one is like Circle is a software company, basically, like we're a bunch of people with laptops. We make software, we deploy it in clouds, it runs and it powers like all this stuff. But critically, though, you know, a lot of this money and the and the and the smart contracts, they run on these blockchain network operating systems. So you do have this new layer, which is these blockchain network operating systems. And actually, today, you know, we announced with ARC, which is the new blockchain network operating system that we've been building and launching, that essentially the the actual physical infrastructure is which are, you know, often called the validators. These are the the the firms that run the nodes that actually run the compute, run the transactions, store the data.

• 1:30:20Jeremy Allaire?

  The validators are actually, we had a number of them, around 10 or 11, which included, you know, the largest asset manager in the world, BlackRock, the two largest payment, retail payment systems, Visa and Mastercard, the largest securities clearing and custody firm, DTCC, global banks, a whole bunch of others basically are running that infrastructure alongside us. That is actual infrastructure. These are data centers. These data centers have SLAs, they have uptime requirements, they have information security requirements. And so these new networks, these new network computers, which are these blockchain network operating systems, you have to run that infrastructure. And so we've actually built a model where there's like very high service levels, where actually that infrastructure can kind of withstand the scrutiny of like a central

• 1:31:04Jeremy Allaire?

  bank that's saying, is this real money? Are these real financial market transactions that are happening? And kind of meet the kind of assurance that is required to do that? And that is going to continually continually evolve. Like, we're pumping a lot of transaction volume and stuff through this, but it's going to, you know, with agentic, with money velocity growing much, much larger, like we're going to need to continue to see that scale. But it actually is like there is a physical infrastructure layer to support these new operating systems as well.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  What concerns do you have for the the blockchain and crypto industry broadly with new powerful AI models coming online that have cyber capabilities, open and closed? I imagine that you guys have been super, super on top of this as Circle, but there's so many, you know, small companies and blockchain organizations that have already been the target of various cyber attacks.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  There was some CEO that put a hundred Bitcoin in a wallet and said like, AI labs, co hack me, come get it. And it was like a challenge.

• 1:32:07Jeremy Allaire?

  This is, you know, crypto is cryptography, right? And so at the end of the day, like, the whole concept is in code we trust. I mean, that's literally the motto of crypto is like, we're trusting cryptography, we're we're we're entrusting mathematics. And smart contracts and the execution environments are very, very sensitive types of code because they actually intermediate money. And so it is like high stakes. It is super high stakes. We saw, you know, a hardware wallet that had not actually, you know, had not used the best encryption methodology for its seed phrases actually has been drained. People thought it was in a hardware wallet. It's been drained over the last week, over $100 million of losses. So it's a very serious issue. We're taking it very, very seriously, not just for our own operations,

• 1:32:52Jeremy Allaire?

  but as like we bring ARC online and we put out this new operating system for economic activity, it needs to be hardened in a different way. The attack surface, the attack vectors, the kind of security that say, I'm a startup builder, I'm developing an app that's going to deploy on one of these networks. You know, what do they need to be able to have some level of assurance that the the code that they're deploying on these new types of network operating systems is going to work and be secure in light of these kind of new cyber capabilities? So it's like a whole new problem space. We're very actively working on that. Like, it's it's now like a critical part of our our engineering. And and what we think actually is needed for builders too, like builders, you know, have to kind of take this into account.

• 1:33:35Jeremy Allaire?

  And it's a very different world and that's changed.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I do think that. You know, the the industry's overall problems effectively become your problem as

• 1:33:46Jeremy Allaire?

  A hundred percent.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  As a regulated Bitcoin provider, because it's just, you know, the more hacks that you have, the more trust issues that people have with the technology and

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Even if it's on a completely different architecture.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, completely different chain. It could have even been a social engineering hack.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  It's still really badly on.

• 1:34:04Jeremy Allaire?

  I mean, we've, we've, we've seen, we've seen, you know, a real increase in, in attacks. And even the social engineering attacks are often AI orchestrated now because, you know, it used to be you'd get these shitty emails that like had broken English, but now the emails are actually well-written and they have a better contextual understanding of who they're targeting. And so everything is just, is just a different, a different risk surface. And, and yeah, we, we think about the whole of the ecosystem, not just our own infrastructure, because we, we kind of have this, this broader role that we play.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. If, if I go back to sort of the early Bitcoin days, there were fight the small blockers versus the big blockers. I don't really remember all these details, but the Ethereum wing, you know, all these different people with really, really strong philosophical differences.

• 1:34:52Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53John Coogan?

  Huge economic interests at stake. It feels like over the last 12, 18, 24 months, the crypto community has sort of come together loosely, and there's been some regulation that's been laid out.

• 1:35:08Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  What do you think the AI industry can learn from the journey that the crypto industry has been on from a regulatory perspective?

• 1:35:19Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, monetary infrastructure, financial infrastructure has always been pretty heavily regulated. I think, you know, we've always like tried to walk the line between, you know, open permissionless infrastructure, open source technology, all this stuff is, is built around those, those, those themes and that thesis that's fundamental to the DNA of, of crypto is open networks, open protocols, open source software, all of that, doing things out in the open. And so that's, that's just sort of philosophically there. I actually think it ultimately helps from a regulatory perspective, the more, the sort of more open that you are, the more that everyone can kind of see

• 1:36:02Jeremy Allaire?

  what's going on. I think, you know, you know, so, so I think that's certainly something that can be learned, and that has to do with this sort of open weights discussion vis a vis, you know, kind of, kind of labs and other things like that. But I, you know, I have my own views on, on AI and, and regulation. And I think, you know, you know, very clearly, like, you know, these are, these are foundational utilities for society, and, and they're now cyber weapons, if not other types of weapons. And so the, the regulation, you know, there's going, there's going to have to be regulation and supervision and registration and other stuff, because the stakes are so high for society right now.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned the, the openness being a, like, it, it, it's sort of correlated with like a bigger tent. And we saw that with Jensen from Nvidia, putting out that open letter and getting so many names to sign on in a way that that has not happened with other little regulated ideas of, oh, should this state law or law or federal preemption, all those little things that the labs have been doing. Jensen was able to just come out with something that was very broad. Some people disagreed, some people didn't, but

• 1:37:10Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  A lot of people sort of were like, okay, we're going to band together for this particular vision, which is interesting. Yeah, it does correlate to what you just said. Love it.

• 1:37:18Jeremy Allaire?

  Definitely.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat.

• 1:37:21Jeremy Allaire?

  Of course.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Always great hanging. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:37:25Jeremy Allaire?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:26Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. A couple of quick hits before we bring in our next guest. Google, we missed it with the Demis news. That's obviously steamrolling the timeline, but there's also a story in Business Insider, Google is in talks to buy a coding agent startup called Mechanized for $1.5 billion. Do you know?

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's an RL environment company. So they basically build a bunch of these environments and sell them to labs.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Sean Kai Sai says, the first RL environment major acquisition outcome, Mechanized for $1.5 billion, makes a lot of sense when it's been in the data discourse for a long time, that GDM's synthetic capabilities weren't up to OpenAI and Anthropics. Many of the recent departures from GDM and the other labs cited this. Certainly Mechanized is one of the four players in RL environment markets that I would even consider to have some modicum of good synthetic data scaling. And so, you know, identifying a problem with the, with the organization, with the, with the, with the build out, going and open up the checkbook to the tune of 1.5 billion to potentially solve it. Still in the rumor

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  phase. The other, the other news we didn't really get to yet is Ilya Sutskever's company, Safe Superintelligence, is allegedly rumored to maybe be releasing a model in August. That's this month. And Chubby here says, I took a look at their website. They stated very clearly their only goal, their only mission is to develop superintelligence. That's their sole focus. In that sense, this model release will be far more than just another model release. In some form, they must have achieved superintelligence if we take their statement seriously. So very interesting to see what happens there.

• 1:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Pressure's on.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Or if it's something that's just sort of sits within all the other benchmarks. But we'll, we'll see. Good luck.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, this was like very briefly touched on in the Gavin Baker and wrestling best episode.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  So it's like unclear. You know, we'll, we'll see what actually happens.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not like Ilya came out and said like, we're launching, get ready. They did announce some fundraising news with Nvidia, and he did say that it's time to scale, the, sort of the age of research might be over. And so we're thinking that maybe a product is coming, maybe a demo, maybe some evaluations, maybe some benchmarks. We love benchmarks. Maybe we'll be able to move the goalposts because I want super duper intelligence. I'm not settling for super intelligence.

• 1:40:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's not keep our next guest waiting too long.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yes, let's bring in Mackenzie Burnett from Ambrook, back on the show.

• 1:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Back.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Back to the show. Mackenzie, how are you doing?

• 1:40:12Speaker 07

  Good. How are you guys doing?

• 1:40:14John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Congratulations. Give us the news. What happened?

• 1:40:17Speaker 07

  So excited to announce that we just raised $30 million series B.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Lucky groom.

• 1:40:30Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  Lucky groom. What a great, what a great partner here. Jordy?

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  I think it's been somewhere between six and 12 months since the last time you're on the show. Maybe, maybe on the, on the shorter end. Talk about the progress. What have you, what have you learned about the state of American agriculture, the state of the industry that you're operating in?

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Physical economy. Yeah. Have you narrowed the scope of the, the go-to-market motion? Or has you actually broadened it?

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we, so since we last chatted, we were, when we last chatted, we were last summer around 2,500 businesses using Ambrook. Now we have over 8,000 businesses using Ambrook. And a lot of them are in agriculture, but actually we raised the B in order to start to expand to other verticals in the real economy. Because we started to see a lot of natural adoption with, we have over a thousand truckers on the platform, general contractors, property managers, nonprofits. Ag is super diverse. So a lot of those customers started pulling up into their side businesses or their neighbors' businesses or family members. So that, that's a big part of the focus.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Are customers excited about potentially not needing to work with like some behemoth legacy ERP system that might be less agile in the AI era versus maybe you have a smaller solution now, but if you just look at the growth rate of the technology and your team and your product, they're going to be, you're, you're just going to naturally solve a lot of problems that come up over the next few years for them.

• 1:42:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, I think our customers are already seeing that Ambrook is a lot more tailored to the complexity of their operations. So there's kind of this messy middle that hasn't been venture vacable for a long time, which is if you're a business that's too complex for QuickBooks or spreadsheets, but you don't have the team or resources to onboard to a state or NetSuite.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:24Speaker 07

  You know, I would say probably about, we estimate about 25% to 30% of America, American small businesses kind of fall in that messy middle where they're multi-P and L, they have complex balance sheets, but they don't, you know, I think there's, there's some, talking X about like building for finance teams of one. We're building for finance teams of zero.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:44Speaker 07

  And like, you know, that is bringing AI CFOs to folks who, where we might actually be their first business software. Like 50% of our customers are moving off a pen and paper.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:42:57Speaker 07

  You know, what's need to build and, and help them leverage AI is, is a pretty different way of building than if you're building for a professional desk worker.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So historically, there was fintech companies that would make vertical solutions for things like construction and agriculture and trucking. And I'm sure you're now competing with some of these players. How much is AI allowing you guys as Ambrook to like go into these new verticals and create the specific features or workflows that are more relevant within these sub-industries?

• 1:43:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's making it a lot easier to To come with the right context layer, I think, for what folks need. So you can think of, I think Ambric is not vertical SaaS. We're more vertical go-to-market. So under the hood, we are actually look a lot more like a much more user-friendly, not sweet or stage.

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Speaker 07

  Thirty percent of our customers access Ambric exclusively via our mobile app. We definitely have like the best mobile app in the industry when it comes to accounting software because we had to build for users that were not by their desk most of the time. We kind of call it the taskless economy. And, and so there's a lot of workflows that we had to build for. But you can kind of think of the ERP, which we spent the past couple of years building as that like agentic context layer. Like if you ever had to build agents, you know, the first thing you have to do is actually clean up all the underlying data. That's what we've done really well. And now we're building so that both that whole data layer is both human legible and agent legible. And those agents make it a lot easier to personalize or to otherwise like speak the language of someone's business, even if

• 1:44:38Speaker 07

  the underlying components or primitives are actually quite similar industry to industry, which is why we've been able to expand so quickly without having to like build a lot of custom features for these different verticals.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  What, what is sentiment around AI for your customer? What kind of like, how do they feel about AI generally? I noticed on the website, you guys are not certainly not leading the here's the new hot tool that's going to revolutionize your business with AI, even though you're using it under the hood, I'm sure in a bunch of different ways. But how do they, how do they feel about it? Do they feel like it's a useful tool? Are they generally against it? What's, what's your read?

• 1:45:21Speaker 07

  I think our customers are generally open to it. I think there's just a lot of really healthy skepticism about whether AI is actually useful, which is actually this useful to them as a business owner, which is actually quite similar to the, to the conversation I think is happening on X right now, which is, which is you have some, some folks that have been able to really like understand how to build, but it requires a lot of infrastructure to be able to get there. And our customers don't have teams of engineers to be able to, you know, build all the things that they need in order to actually build their first agents. They are not going to be rolling their own, you know, agents on Eve or something like that. So there's, there's a lot of work that we're doing to kind of meet people where they are. But I actually have been talking to a lot

• 1:46:06Speaker 07

  of our customers, just asking them about general sentiment toward AI. And there is just a broad openness. It is just a little bit.

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more like, show me, show me. Don't tell me.

• 1:46:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And there's a lot of things where I think if you, I, I, I think if you build it right, they will come. But a lot of people don't know how to build it right, I would say.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Parker Conrad, when he launched Rippling, had this idea of the compound startup, this idea that he had to build multiple products and not a single point solution. Do you like the term compound startup? Do you think it applies here? Do you think it's a relevant philosophy for the modern era?

• 1:46:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of learnings in talking to, one, a lot of admiration for like Parker and the way that he thought about building, building that company. I think talking to a lot of friends at Rippling, I think there are some learnings to take from that. And there are other learnings, which is in a compound startup, you end up seeing a lot of duplication of work across like real. So there is actually some inefficiency within the company itself. And so when we've been thinking about Ambric, I've been trying to take the elements of that, that I think make a lot of sense, which is you, you build a platform that can enable sort of an emergent ecosystem on top. And that ecosystem can either be opportunities within the company, or it can be things that our customers are

• 1:47:37Speaker 07

  actually able to build themselves. So one thing we decided to do a lot earlier, I think, than a lot of other players in the space was just to, was just to give our customers access to an external MCP. And so we have customers now that are rolling their own, like with lovable or base 44 or something, rolling their own apps for like hunting bookings for like one of our Texas ranchers, for example. And then they're pulling in context from Ambric into that. And we're, you know, we're, we're now letting people write back, you know, we'll be letting people write back into the self. And I think that's, it allows for a lot more creativity outside the company, not just in the company. But if you think of yourself as a really good platform, then I think you can, you can get some of the benefit, a lot of the benefits of the compound startup.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You said you're vertical in go-to-market. What is the playbook for entering a new market? Like if you're saying, we're going to go after hunting organizations or trucking organizations, are you just dialing in the targeted ads and the messaging? Or are you going to conferences and hiring a whole new sales team?

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  She's booking the hunting trip.

• 1:48:49Speaker 07

  Well, the hunting trip's just for fun.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, you're like, we're here for two days. Let me tell you about Ambric.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Maybe that's it.

• 1:48:57Speaker 07

  Um, yeah, no, there's, uh, so the way that we've been finding this playbook's trying to work and replicate across these different verticals are first, you have to do a lot of brand awareness. That's the push. And that can be Facebook. Facebook is actually super, it still has a lot of art left within on SaaS, non-tech industries. So a little bit of awareness on Facebook. And then what you start to do is once you've got enough of a, a set of customers that are really happy, you start to do case studies and then take those case studies and you start to do build partnerships with local trade associations.

• 1:49:34Speaker 07

  And then you start getting third-party credibility rolling. We also go on a lot of really niche podcasts. This is not the only podcast that I also, you know, go on like the wealthy cowboy or returns or, you know, and that has been really effective. And we also help our customers go on those. And so helps them with brand awareness. And then you start to build it. And then you start to get word of mouth. And then you start to see the regional density kick in. So in the counties where we have more than one to two percent market penetration, our CAC is half of the counties where we have maybe 10 to 25 dips of market penetration.

• 1:50:15Speaker 07

  And so that spread is just social proof and word of mouth. So you have to kickstart the flywheel going.

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  How, wait, how old is the company?

• 1:50:24Speaker 07

  So we started in 2020.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, because it feels very, this feels like very pure operating philosophy, much more than six months in.

• 1:50:33Speaker 07

  But we launched the product in 2024.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:50:35Speaker 07

  So we spent a couple of years, we spent one or two years kind of figuring out what product we wanted to build, keeping the team really lean. And then we spent two years just sitting in a private beta with a couple of dozen of design partners.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting. Very cool. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress.

• 1:50:53Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:50:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good alpha. Yeah, good alpha on go-to-market.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like it. Lots of people taking notes. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  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. Last story that I want to talk about, Jordy, if you've got anything, let me know. But the founder of ByteDance apparently just banned his employees from distilling US frontier models, which begs the question, what were they doing before? But according to this post, fears distilling US models would trigger Washington, that there might be pushback in Washington DC over this. Obviously, a lot of labs, they don't like

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  getting distilled. We've seen all the complaints. And it might put TikTok at risk again. Anthropic has accused DeepSeek, Moonshot, Minimax, ZAI, Alibaba, all of distilling Claude. But they haven't, haven't accused.

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think he's doing a little bit of comms and marketing.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  He said, we, we should be willing to sacrifice some short-term gains for longer-term goals. No distillation allowed, even if we lose. Interesting story. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Maybe, maybe the, the distillation attacks will stop. Maybe they will continue unabated. Maybe superintelligence can, can, can weed it out if you're trying to distill. Jordy, anything else on the timeline?

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  From SpaceX earnings yesterday, Pico Capital says Elon on the SpaceX call, it's probably also worth mentioning that our internal projections for reaching 1 trillion in revenue have moved up from 2031 to 2030. And Ryan Peterson says, F it, we're making our 2031 goals, our 2030 goals now too.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, there's another model that launched Muse Code from Meta, superintelligence, Mark Zuckerberg posting again on X, the everything app. Wait, I gotta follow him. Why am I not following him? Because it's just a new poster now. Releasing Muse Code in beta today. It's a terminal coding agent that takes on complete software engineering tasks powered by Muse Spark 1.2, a coding agent, a coding focused model update. And so I'm sure people will be benchmarking this, seeing where it stacks up, what it, how it, how it prices out, where it's good, where it's bad, all those things. Over in Microsoft

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  land, they're going all in on GPT 5.6 Sol. A Microsoft exec just sent an internal memo that's designed to end token maxing and makes OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol the default model for internal use. So that was line one on the Ed Zitron to-do list for Sam Altman. Make sure Microsoft likes the model. And seems like mission accomplished. Any other news you want to go through today, Jordy? We can talk about the New York Times tomorrow.

• 1:53:58Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you tomorrow, folks.

• 1:53:59John Coogan?

  Have a good day. Have a good Thursday. Is it Wednesday? Have a good Wednesday. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Have the best August 5th of your life.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  Us, five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 1:54:15John Coogan?

  And we love you. Goodbye. Peace.