4 Tech Arguments (Number 3 Will Shock You), Mansion Section, John Arnold Joins | Viswa Colluru, Jake Adler, Adam Korsunsky

(00:54) - 4 Tech Arguments (Number 3 Will Shock You) (24:09) - Has The AI Slop Gone Too Far? (38:53) - Is AI Driving Interest Rates Higher? (50:26) - WSJ Mansion Section (56:00) - John Arnold discusses his career from natural gas trading at Enron to founding his own hedge fund and becoming co-founder and co-chair of Arnold Ventures. He shares insights on risk management, gambling-like financial products, AI infrastructure, energy markets, nuclear power, and the growing disconnect between private and public market valuations. (01:44:12) - Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Invetta, discusses the company’s $311 million fundraising round and its AI-powered technology for identifying biological molecules and their functions. He outlines Invetta’s focus on developing medicines for widespread unmet needs—including asthma, eczema, and long-term weight management—and explains the practical limitations and safety considerations of AI-designed drugs. (01:54:17) - Jake Adler discusses Pilgrim’s $25 million funding round and its mission to become America’s first biological prime contractor. He describes Argus, a portable “Shazam for the air” system designed to autonomously detect, identify, and characterize airborne biological threats in locations such as airports. (02:02:22) - Adam Korsunsky discusses founding Freebean, an advertising company that distributes free, branded coffee as a tangible, targeted, and trackable marketing medium. He explains the company’s rapid growth, conference and campus distribution strategy, and launch of a New York City storefront billed as the world’s first free coffee shop. 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. Today is Friday, September 25th, 2026. We are live from the TVP in Ultra Dome, 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. Be the king in the castle with ramp.com. Uh, we got some debates on the timeline. I identified four debates for you. You, you don't want to call them debates, though. You want to call them arguments, fights?

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  I thought arguments.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Okay, we're throwing down. We're throwing down.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't, wouldn't someone rather listen to an argument than a debate?

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Okay, I don't know.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't want it to be, I don't want it to be a help, a healthy, mature conversation. I want to be, I want to be reaching over.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  No holds bar on a debate fight. Uh, first one, Microsoft, are, is Microsoft about to have their Muse moment? They've launched Copilot. Now they're launching a new product today. Is it going to be a breakout success? Is it going to compete directly with Meta and Muse? Or will it be a different thing entirely because it lives in the enterprise? It lives in the Microsoft ecosystem. Let's go to take him. Says shots fired, pump, pump, pump. Microsoft will go after Meta's Muse from Alex Heath's interview of Satya Nadella. He's doing the rounds. He talked to Deidre Bosa, talked to Alex Heath over on sources.news. They'll cook in, uh, quote from Satya Nadella or from Alex Heath.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  He wants to bring autopilot's AI chief of staff to your personal life, too. It's not staying in Excel. It's not staying in Outlook. It's going to be cooking dinner.

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Big move going from a Copilot to autopilot.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Autopilot, yeah.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  It says a lot about, about their intentions with the product.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is actually sort of the like, uh, you know, is this AGI? Is this not AGI? Like, if you're in the Copilot mode, you're sort of signaling, we're not really in the AGI era. Autopilot feels more like, uh, although it's a term, it's a vague definition. It is significant in the brand term. So, uh, it's a hardened version of Open Claw. The agent gets its own computer, workspace and memory to work continuously. Uh, there was a very funny post from somebody, uh, Meta who was like, uh, you know, a lot of these agents, like the, the, the value prop is that it has its own computer. It has its own virtual machine with some real hardware behind it.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  So you can have a file system as I think eight gigs of storage. So you can say, oh, I need you to download some images, some files, like keep them in your cloud so you can access them at all times. It can obviously build a database, save records, your contact information, your calendar can mirror that. So it doesn't need to be pinging every service all the time, doing everything in the context window, uh, in the Ben, in the Ben Thompson parlance, it can write things down. This is very good. This is what everyone was doing with Open Claw on their Mac minis. This is what people are doing with Codex, Claude Code on their computers. And Codex, of course, has like cloud threads that do something similar. The funny thing is that Meta was like, it's a real computer. This is a real computer. And then, and then, and they're literally using a virtual machine, which is still a real computer, like you have access to hardware, but it is a virtual machine.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Like when you're not using it, it goes dark and someone else uses it. And I think there's still some confusion because people were like, this isn't a computer at all. And it is.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it sounds a little bit too good to be true that, uh.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  They're not just going to rack for you and just let you, if you sign up once and never use it, that's just inefficient compute resources. Uh, but, but it's just funny that we live in such a virtual time that, uh, someone can very seriously and basically correctly be like, it is real. It's a virtual machine. It can't get any more real than that. It's like, yeah, it, it could, but why would you? So no one cares. Uh, anyway, Microsoft's doing the same thing, virtual machine for everybody. Uh, it'll have its own computer, workspace and memory to work continuously. When I ask about Microsoft's consumer strategy, he points to its 100 million plus consumer subscribers, people that subscribe, subscribe to consumer Microsoft services, Call of Duty,

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Microsoft, Xbox Live. These are the consumers now. Uh, Xbox is still like pretty anti-AI. Uh, they've, they've been signaling like, hey, yeah, we're not going to lean in, we're not going to stuff Copilot all over Xbox Live. I'm personally, I hate that because I think.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I want to, I want to, uh, basically like a company built aimbot.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  No, I, I mean, yes, of course, that's funny, but, but no, what I want is I want to be able to text my Xbox and say, hey, uh, like Grand Theft Auto VI is coming out. I want you to preorder it. I want you to get it installed and I want you to open it up and do the little configure. Cause every time you open a game now, it's like downloading an update, accept the terms and conditions, accept the privacy policy, adjust the HDR, adjust where the HUD is on the screen. Do you want any accessibility features? Do you want to do the tutorial? It's going to blow your mind, but if you press forward on the stick, you'll move forward. Lock in, we got to do this tutorial. Here's how to jump. It's going to blow your mind. It's the X button.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  Push it now, push it again. Okay, you ace the tutorial. It's like, I want to be able to jump into the game and I do think an AI agent could help me with that. It can certainly do it on desktop. You just say, hey, go play the whole game for me. Level me up until I'm ready to really get in the fight because this is my first rodeo. But, uh, the Xbox been pushing back on it. Microsoft broadly, they're going all in with autopilot. Autopilot should also go to the consumer side. He sees consumer agents potentially cutting out today's middlemen, making that market more zero sum. Uh, in the enterprise, he thinks agents will make the market bigger than cloud by orders of magnitude. We got room to run. Satya said it himself.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  He's going to 300T, 300 trillion dollar company.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  So, I mean, the, the first thought is that again, everyone is building the exact same thing. So we, we went through this for the last few years where everyone.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Everyone had a chat app.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's building.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  The funny thing is, is, is the lore on GPT-4, that was first available in Bing. Like GPT-4, the thing that like GPT three, three, uh, GPT 3.5 powered, the original chat GPT, GPT-4 was only available through, through Bing. Uh, and then everyone was like, oh, I guess like Microsoft's going to make a play and Bing's going to be doing AI and like, this is going to be a challenger to Google. And then they sort of like pulled back, but.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, and at that time, when, when Microsoft was backing up the Brink's truck or OpenAI, they certainly, I don't think it was, it certainly was non-obvious at that time that they would be creating a company that they would ultimately compete with as much as they are, you know, partners.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, so, uh, Peter Steinberger, the founder of Open Claw chimed in, he said, Microsoft shipped a really compelling product on top of Open Claw today. We worked with them since March to make the code base ready for large scale deployments. And of course there's, there might be some IP sharing agreement, right? Because didn't, oh no, because OpenAI hired Peter, but they didn't acquire Open Claw.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Open Claw is a.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Open source.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:30John Coogan?

  So anyone can build on top of it.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  But what's odd is that I think Nat Friedman stated that they didn't fork Open Claw. They built something from scratch, but there are just conventions. And so you wind up having similar looking .md files. It's just like, you know, if you build a webpage, like you're going to have a product, if you build an ecommerce site, you're going to have a product detail page. You might have a similar site map and, and architecture. It doesn't mean that you forked Shopify to do that or whatever. Uh, let me actually tell you about Shopify right now, since I mentioned it. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  So the, the, the debate point is how big will this be? How, what is the actual impact to Microsoft? Uh, how, like, there, there is the cool macro tech story, which is just that the models have advanced to a point where there is a new use case, like they're useful in a new way, not just knowledge retrieval, not just go and write a bunch of code. They are useful, but that requires a new type of harness, just like when the, when the, uh, models got good at code, the harness became very important. We saw Claude Code and Codex and Cursor and a bunch of other companies, cognition really like defined that era.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Now the models are pretty good with personal agent stuff, sending text messages, talking to people, integrating with Slack, et cetera. So the harness and the integrations and the partnerships matter. So we're talking about Microsoft, uh, partners with Amazon, who's part, who's going to, who's going to be Amazon's dance partner? Who's going to be Walmart's dance partner? Who's going to partner with Shopify? How big is the open ecosystem? Uh, you need a lot of, you need a different harness. You need different integrations and you need a lot of new user education because I think there's a lot of people, I mean, there's people that are still online being like, these things hallucinate, like they have a knowledge cutoff, um, because they're talking to like the voice model.

• 9:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the main thing with this launch is that, uh, I don't think there's anyone on X that's seeing Microsoft launch and, and Open Claw powered agent and thinking, I gotta use that. I'm so excited. I really want it. I, that, that, that's, that's my view and I think it's correct and you're free to steel man it. That being said, they have such incredible distribution, they can still roll this out to a bunch of people who are going to try it and be like, wow, that's really cool and useful and helpful and be the first way that they experience this new paradigm of agents. Right? And so as much as like, I just think there's basically zero excitement from like the core insider agent maximalist, there's going to be just natural excitement from everyday Windows and Microsoft users.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it is uncommon in tech and maybe it's uncommon in X to like run your entire organization, your enterprise on Microsoft. The default tech stack for most startups is Google Enterprise, Gmail. You set up the Gmail account for your employees and then you add Slack. So then you're in the Salesforce ecosystem and Microsoft is there, but usually with like one-off Excel licenses here and there for the finance team. Does that resonate with you in terms of like how these products like fit together? There's usually some Microsoft, but you have to go to a financial company or like a real

• 10:57John Coogan?

  economy company to see like, okay, these guys are all in on Microsoft as a tech stack, like Outlook down to Bing, down to, you know, the databases and like fully integrated in Microsoft. But there are hundreds of millions of people who their life at work is just pure Microsoft and they're like, yeah, I don't use Gmail at work. I don't use Google Calendar. I use Outlook. And for those people, they're like, okay, I get this thing like probably for free added to the subscription. Maybe we already have some Copilot stuff, so this just rolls in and I get, you know, near frontier capabilities, good enough. And there's such an overhang in terms of what I can do that just going from, you know,

• 11:39John Coogan?

  zero to taking advantage of some decent automations is going to be potentially popular. It feels like it could be more successful than the old Copilot and a lot of that's driven just by capabilities. The models are better, the harnesses are better, the integrations are better. And so you can do more things. I think there'll still be a lot of point solutions and a lot of competition. The big question is like, when is Google going to fire back? Because are they going to wait until the next I O? Like, that's a long way away, but they do love releasing on, you know, those annual schedules. And so it's like, we might get a Google, like a crazy Google OpenClaw agent, personal

• 12:21John Coogan?

  agent in mid 2027 and then Apple's close behind in like 2035, something like that. They would launch something.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  I mean, Google does have, there is Gemini Spark, which is like a 24/7 always on agent, but like no one.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Does it have a VM? Does it have a real virtual machine?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it says, even if your phone and laptops are turned off, it'll still keep working. But I've seen like very little, like no one's really talking about this.

• 12:46John Coogan?

  They aren't really pushing that because they are pushing Gemini as like the chat interface, but man, that thing falls short sometimes.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny and frustrating that you have all these companies building personal agents, but none actually has 100% coverage over the services.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Oh, monopoly guy over here. You're going to advocate for monopoly?

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm not advocating it, but it would be helpful right now, right? Because even Google, right? You know, everything around the full Google set of products would be absolutely amazing, but then you don't have like native iOS integration.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  No, this is the irony of monopoly is that it's bad for, you know, pricing in some ways.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  But it's great for user experience.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  It's great for user experience and it's often great for customers. Like, how many times are you advertising on Facebook and you're like, oh, I wish like Ad Manager would just like also run Reddit ads and also run X ads and also do my YouTube ads, like just do it all. And the same thing is true, even when you fire up like a Netflix app, you're like, oh, is the movie I want on Prime or Apple TV or Netflix or Paramount Plus or HBO Max or Peacock? Like there's 25 different things and as a consumer, you're like, I'd love just one, but then they would have pricing power over you. And so you gotta look ahead and know that there'd be dragons if you allow the monopoly to flourish potentially. At the same time, we've been in this odd regime where the monopolies have not actually

• 14:13John Coogan?

  damaged consumers. Like this is how Amazon got out of antitrust again, was like they didn't raise prices perniciously against their consumers. And so the current antitrust law is written such that you have to prove customer harm. It's not enough just to have concentration in a market. You also have to be extracting monopoly rents. You also have to be raising prices, increasing profits and hurting the consumer financially. And so for something like Google has a search monopoly, it's still a free product, so it's very hard to prove consumer harm because you're just like, yeah.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  G suite, G suite, they are steadily hiking prices. But there's viable alternatives.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's much more oligopolistic for the technology suite. Anyway, it'll be, it'll be interesting to see if there's like, you know, a niche community of like, yeah, I'm a, I'm a Microsoft autopilot guy. I mean, the COD integration could change things. It just depends on how you're positioning it. Like if the brand, if you talk to somebody and they're like, oh, you know, are you a Claude guy, are you a Codex guy, a cursor guy? Like all those things say certain things about you aesthetically. You're a muse. Okay, we get it. You like the LaBoo Boo guy. But, but if you, if you come out and you're like, yeah, I'm actually a Microsoft autopilot guy, that could say two things. It could say Excel jockey, king of the financial markets, apex predator, predator of the economy.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Or it could say, you know, dropping a nuke on COD.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  Prestige Max.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Prestige Max.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  He has Diamond Camo.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Diamond Camo? No, it's a dark matter.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Dark matter. Yeah, that's when you get Diamond on Malta.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if it's, if it helps you grind to dark matter, I think they got a winning product there, don't you think?

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  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. Okay, we spent way too long on that. We got three more and our first guest is joining in noon, so we're going to breeze through this.

• 16:15Jordi Hays?

  And we still, we gotta figure out a way to make the tensions go up and actually get an argument going here.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  We were fighting a little bit.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  That was too friendly.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  That was too friendly. Okay, well.

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  You wanted, you wanted to argue that everyone, all the tech insiders were, couldn't wait to get their hands on autopilot. That was your stance, right?

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a tough one. Tough to steel man that. Anyway, Doge designer shared a photo from a dinner that happened at the White House featuring important tech people and none other than Xi Jinping, the Chinese president. So Elon Musk, President Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, China's First Lady, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Apple's Tim Cook got the prime seating right in front of Donald Trump and they were at the prime table together. No translator that I can see in this image, although there is an empty chair, so it's possible that there was a translator at this.

• 17:15Jordi Hays?

  The empty chair would almost certainly be for Donald, right?

• 17:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Okay.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  So we're gonna, we're gonna put the translator just between Xi and Melania.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, because Xi Jinping is, whenever he speaks, he, he gives his speeches even in America in Chinese, but he seems to be able to hang with Tim Cook, Elon, Lisa Su, Jensen, although maybe there's some, maybe, maybe those tech leaders at least know that one important phrase. If you want to really ingratiate yourself with a Chinese speaker, what do you say to them?

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, hun shi wa.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Pijiu, right? That's what you got.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Always worked for me.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  If you're ever seated with Xi Jinping at a dinner at the White House, just throw that down and he'll be like, one of us.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  One of us.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Now it's time to make a deal.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  Notable that Elon and, and Tim, no plus one. They're locked in.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  No time for, no time for, no time for guests for them.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, no John Turnus. I feel like Tim Cook should get the John Turnus plus one. Elon should be able to bring like Nikita Beer along or something. That would be fun. But it was a pretty tight guest list, although some, some people did get plus ones. Jensen brought his wife, Lisa Su brought her husband. What's interesting is that, is that Dario wasn't there. He sparred with the administration before, we've seen this. He's also attended plenty of meetings in DC and Tom Brown, the co-founder of Anthropic, has been on a reset with the administration and even went as far to praise Trump's let data reign post on Truth Social.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  This was September 1st. He said to Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, quote, "I really loved President Trump's post from earlier this week." And so there's clearly olive branches going out, but they haven't been fully received because the, the dinner invite was maybe didn't materialize or maybe he turned it down. We don't actually know. But I was offered 15 plus ones, maybe 10 plus ones, maybe five plus ones. And he decided to lock in and grind for the, grind for the ASI.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know who was there?

• 19:36John Coogan?

  Who was?

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Lynn Martin.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Lynn Martin.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  From the president of the New York Stock Exchange, our friend.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  To see it.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Holding it down.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. There's Lynn. She's been on our show multiple times, dear friend, and also, you know, an important person to get around the table when the, when the capital markets, when the future of the global economy is at stake. So very, very exciting to see her there, as well as many other guests who made the list. The list is, is Wild Signal was really, was really having some serious FOMO. This was hilarious.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  I'll read it.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Would have paid my entire net worth just to be a fly on the wall this gathering. I can only imagine the conversations, the subtext and the tension in that room. Also, where are the venture capitalists?

• 20:26John Coogan?

  It's such a good.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Actually, wait.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  Also, where are the venture capitalists?

• 20:32John Coogan?

  VC congratulating themselves. Won't someone please think of the venture capitalists? Yes.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it really showed that there was levels.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  There's levels. It is, this is like a, is this, is this a copy pasta of the like $15 million or, or Dinner with Drake meme?

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dinner with Jay-Z, 500K or Dinner with Jay-Z.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  500K or Dinner with Jay-Z.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  Or the Grant Cardone, like, yeah, I slept in my car last night to come here and then.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  It is, it is very funny because like there truly are levels and if you, as the humble poster, I obviously have a ton of respect for Signal, but if, if he or I were at this dinner, we would just be seated way in the back and we'd be like, wow, look, it's Jensen. Wow, that's so cool. I wonder what he's talking about. Cool. And then you get to go up to him for two seconds and be like, dude, I love the GB.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, he didn't want to be, he didn't.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Dude, that's so cool.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Johnny, he didn't want to be a guest. He wanted to be a literal fly on the wall.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  That's true. That is different.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  And you can see in that, that original image.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Hope there's no flies around here. We got some flies on the wall today.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  But yeah, it was a stacked stacked list. There's a lot of folks. Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Anna Brockman, Sergey Brin, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai, Cristiano Aman from Qualcomm, our guest this week, made it to the dinner, came back from Hawaii, David Solomon from Goldman Sachs, tons of other folks, ExxonMobil. It was really a who's who of the global economy, son of Bernard Arnault, also Bernard Arnault is there.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are saying Ty Lopez was snubbed.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would have liked to see a Jaco Willink, I would have liked to see a Joe Rogan on this list. Sort of disappointing that they didn't include podcasters, except for David Sachs. He did make it and also.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's a podcaster and a venture capitalist.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Secretary Kennedy is also has a podcast. There's actually a fair amount of podcasts.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Brad Gerson, podcast.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Sam Altman ran the Y Combinator podcast years ago, Startup School, so former podcaster. There's a few other people on here. But lock in, get your, I think with your, if you put your entire net worth into potentially becoming the CEO of a really important company, maybe you do wind up as a fly on the wall. Never doubt yourself, signal, I think you can make the next cut. I believe in you. I also believe in Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to play web app servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. My take on this is that it's, is, the question is like, should, should Dario have been invited? I think even

• 23:13John Coogan?

  though they're having beef with the administration, like, it's such an important company, it's important that he's in the conversation. He's also has like a very, very hard line on China. And I would, I would feel better about his positions on China if he's like, yeah, Majesty Jinping, I really do hate him, or something like that. I don't know. You know, it's informed from like a 30,000 foot view. It's different.

• 23:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, Dario?

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, Dario is like.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  He worked at, at Baidu.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but since then, his positioning has been like, we got to win the race against China. We have to, you know, dismantle authoritarian regimes, et cetera. Maybe he looks, sees Jinping in the eyes and gets a stare and is like, oh, wow, I had you all wrong. You never know.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  But I want to see the sit down happen. I want to hear the down, the downstream. I want to be the fly on the wall. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Has the AI slop gone too far this time? That's our third debate, the third debate that will shock you. So we can pull up this Kalshi ad. It's their latest direct to consumer, direct response.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  For everyone at home, this is a karaoke moment.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Jordi Hays?

  You're sitting in the office.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  This is going to be on the.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Open floor plan. Don't be afraid to start singing.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, add it to the, to the Spotify playlist. So Brian Pampas says, this Kalshi ad is among the most dystopian ones I've seen from any betting app. And you can sort of hear the AI song over the Pixar inspired AI generated video. The lyrics are also odd, not to nitpick, but it says like, he sends his girlfriend money and then he's handing her money every month. I send her money from groceries. So there's a lot of like, it lacks the polish that removes something from slop. Every once in a while, you see a video that is AI generated,

• 25:12John Coogan?

  but you're like, okay, there was enough attention to detail there. This was, let's just rip it. This is actually a popular format of AI slop that's been going very viral. Starts with a really dramatic hook. In this case, the man thinks his partner is having an affair.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  But actually, she's just hedging food prices on Kalshi.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Because she has inside knowledge on the market from working at a bakery in the morning.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. So that even though egg prices are going up, she's able to net out and remain even because she is profiting on trading the egg futures market on Kalshi. I don't know how deep the market is. I don't know how real those markets are. Do they really have egg futures markets on Kalshi now? That's kind of interesting. I don't know if you can actually hedge your groceries. I want to see a version of this ad from the Chicago Board of Trade where she goes a lot further, gets a Bloomberg terminal, establishes a relationship with JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. She's visiting the Chicago Board of Trade regularly, trading in size. She's talking to counterparties, Millennium, Citadel, you know, she's on the

• 26:18John Coogan?

  phone constantly moving huge volumes of, of, of commodity futures at scale, kind of elevating herself past just the prediction market, small ball, getting into the big leagues. That's the future.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Kane says, would you gather your girlfriend insider trick egg futures or cheat on you?

• 26:37John Coogan?

  No. So this is not insider trading. Like you can actually do this. You can be a baker and realize that prices are going up and, and trade the commodities markets. In fact, the commodities markets are designed specifically to give that signal and that, and that, that is the purpose. The purpose is to, is to understand, okay, the weather is bad, people can trade that. Fundamentally, there's, there's no law against insider trading in commodity markets effectively. But there's a question of like, is this a consumer ready product? Like, is this something that someone who is, maybe doesn't have, you know, a whole desk and a research team and a Bloomberg terminal.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  One, one interesting thing is I found egg prices up in September, the market. Right now, there's a 72% chance.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  But there's only $417 of volume.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if you're only buying $20 of eggs, that's enough depth. So it is a viable use case. It's not, it's not fraudulent. I think most people are responding to just like the sloppiness and like the, the clickbaity-ness of like the weird hook. But somebody posted one of these that was done by a much less prestigious brand in, I think like weight loss. It was some sort of weight loss pill, but it starts with like this insane hook about a secret relationship, very soap opera script. And I feel bad, but I actually watched the whole thing because I couldn't look away because it was really the Pandora's box. It

• 28:14John Coogan?

  was, it was infinite jest for about three minutes. And all the comments were like, why did I watch this? And someone had put it on the timeline as like, this is the worst thing I've ever seen.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the funny thing about this, the funny thing about this ad is it seems like there, no one like proofread it because there's a lot of elements of it that just are not, not even phrased properly.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. But sometimes putting in those details gets people to talk about it, gets people to go in the comments, actually amplifies things. It draws your eye in. And so you never know with like, the algorithmic ad generation where all this stuff goes. What about the, the interesting thing is I think the consensus, and we're going to talk to John Arnold about sports betting and prediction markets at noon today. But there is another interesting side of this, which is, is people seem to be coalescing, at least the vibes on the timeline are like, this is not good. Like, like this is like, either, either you should personally stay away from it. Like, I don't advise you to be sports betting. And I think that's

• 29:17John Coogan?

  John Arnold's position. There is a second debate point and question, which is, what about the, the dopamine sites? How do you feel about dopamine sites? So in South Korea, we're calling it the final frontier of consumerism. But continue.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  My current concern about the state of the hyper casino that our world has turned into is that, like, as an adult, I feel like confident in my own decision making ability and the ability to see ads for gambling all the time, everywhere, and still make the call that it's not for me. I'm not interested.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  So you've never lost a dollar?

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  I've tried.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  One weekend.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  John, John got to witness me one weekend. I was like, look, I think I should, I think I should try this gambling thing. It seems super popular. I gotta get to the bottom of it. So I tried it. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm running in the, running in the red.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  And this is, and this is generally true for being adults.

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  But that being said, like, you know.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Stuck in your.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  As, as a 30 year old, I've been, I've been, I've been advertised gambling products for a decade now.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  And my concern is that while adults have the ability to just make the decision, like, hey, this isn't for me. And you have like more.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. If you start young, you're more likely to stick with it for a long.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but, but young people today are going to go through, that are growing up on the internet are going to go through this, just like, they will probably be served like a million gambling ads by the time they're 18.

• 30:51John Coogan?

  It's a lot. Yeah.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess I didn't get served.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  It's so, so normalized. It's so a part of society now. It's instantly accessible. If you're getting advertised stuff like this, that's basically saying like, hey, you're, you're, you're, you're sending this message that like, this is your way out, right? Like, this is.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. The deep irony is like, the way out is to not participate and be one of the people that makes it through without forming the addiction.

• 31:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  But we, maybe we need to rent a slop ad about that. We want to do a slop ad like this where it's the same, same premise. Oh, I think my partner's having an affair and low and behold, they're just watching TBPN for three hours every day, getting informed about technology and business news. What do you think about dopamine sites though? Because dopamine sites, which is where.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  Explain this.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Dopamine sites are, are fake shopping experiences. It's an e-commerce site where you can buy luxury goods, but you don't actually have to pay them and they don't arrive. So this is from an article shared by Adonis on X. The final frontier of consumerism has arrived in South Korea. Quote, this week I placed orders for a $44,860 Patek Philippe hand engraved watch, a $12,500 Hermes bag, a $9,800 Tiffany diamond ring. Ching, ching. Oh, I like, I didn't realize that was the analog one. That's great. And a $7,350 Cartier love bracelet in yellow gold. I don't need any of them. I certainly can't afford them.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Thankfully, they'll never arrive. Instead of Amazon, this individual spent the past week browsing a new breed of website known as dopamine sites, a trend that emerged in South Korea. These sites, these websites like dopamine shop and food never comes recreate the entire ritual of online shopping. You search for products, compare reviews, add items to your cart, enter a shipping address, place an order and even track your delivery. But it's all imaginary. Is this not as bad as sports betting? Is this not bad at all? What is this?

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's sort of strange and sad and a reflection of our society that is so infatuated with uh pure consumption instead of creation.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and it's dystopian, but uh I don't think it's-

• 33:19John Coogan?

  We should do a dopamine site for TVB ad merch because you never sell it. You just work on create a card and check out and never comes.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was thinking you should make like uh dopamine ARR where you log in.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Oh, build a fake startup.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  It looks like a Stripe dashboard and then you just see like, you know.

• 33:33John Coogan?

  There's a game that I played that is basically that it's like a cookie clicker game. What are those mindless games? Uh, I don't know.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Like Adventure Capitalist?

• 33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I played Adventure Capitalist and you just like click a button and it's like open lemonade stand and then by the end you're like farming robots on the moon and you just watch the numbers go up.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we, we made a game. We made a game called Burn the Runway back in the day.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  I put it in the chat. You can, you can pull it up.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  It's still up. Wow. This is pre-vibe coding. You did it the old fashioned way by hand. It's crazy.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this counts as LARPing? Cause it's not, it's actually live action, right? But it's like the spirit of LARPing.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  You will eventually develop like an encyclopedic knowledge of luxury goods if you spend enough time on here. Um, I don't know. It seems like it's uh, it's, it's, it's nowhere near as bad as something where real money's at stake because you are wasting time, but you're not wasting any money and there's no risk of downside. So why would you buy bananas?

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the cheapest item.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Okay, bananas.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Like if you need them for, but you can buy the max amount of bananas and then-

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. So you buy different things for your startup and then you wind up running out of runway at the end?

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Interesting. Came over immediately. Wow.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  To put this into perspective, uh, there were no AI companies even on this list.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Back then it was, it was uh, WeWork, you had early Andro. Andro had only raised, I think a couple hundred million at the time.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Oh, good to get in.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  You had Quibi on there.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  The whole.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Well, um, there's, it's not all bad in AI slop. There's a video that Ate shared by popular demand, his magnum opus.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  No, it is all bad in AI slop.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  You think this one's bad?

• 35:09Jordi Hays?

  Rewind. There's this guy, uh, Henry says, I am so beyond obsessed with this account. For me, this is the moment that I am now very, very, very bullish on AI video.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  There's an account called Jean Philanthrop, who's like a French guy who's a boxer.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it is uh, just in, somebody using, basically making videos and then um-

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Translating this guy with a funny haircut.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he looks very silly.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  And he got 230,000 followers on Instagram.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, million, you know, hundreds-

• 35:40John Coogan?

  Oh, and he launched a coin.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of millions of views and then, and so the new, the new meta, I guess, is, you know, making a, an AI character.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:47Jordi Hays?

  That's silly, strange, run up the views and then, and I think this was one of the top uh tokens a couple, a few days ago.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, sounds like a mess.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, um, over to Ate.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  To what?

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  This is the video you were talking about.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. Uh, by popular demand, his magnum opus, he has repurposed uh the famous scene from American Psycho, the business card scene with pickles and-

• 36:15Speaker 04

  New pickle. What do you think?

• 36:17John Coogan?

  I can't really hear it, so we're doing IEMs now, I guess.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Very nice. Look at that. Picked them up from the deli yesterday. Good coloring. That's dill. And the brine is something called mustard seed. It's very cool, babe, but that's nothing.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  I remember when you had to do this, you had to go into After Effects, track the actual business card, roto out the hand so that the card, whatever you put on the card was underneath and then you needed to blend the new card in. If you wanted to make a joke, it was very time intensive, took hours. Now, you can even change the voices. It's pretty crazy.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  Wait.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  This is a next pickle. There's something funny about a pickle coming out of a-

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Barrel cured. Whole peppercorn. Extra crisp. Impressive. Very nice.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 37:09Speaker 04

  Let's see Paul Allen's pickle.

• 37:12John Coogan?

  See, uh, the, the, there's still like a spark of genius here, you know, uh, mixing pickles with-

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's see Paul Allen's pickle.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  With uh, and the fidelity is remarkable.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  That's some olive coloring. A tasteful thickness of it. Oh my god.

• 37:31Jordi Hays?

  All right, we can move on.

• 37:32John Coogan?

  We can move on. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock real time, seamless experiences and new value with Cisco. Um, anyway, uh, there's, there's a white pill on the slop narrative. So AI video is clearly in the, in the depths of the slopification, but uh, code was there. A year ago, people were saying that uh, the slop code would never get good enough and then if it did, it would destroy everything. DHH is out with a new speech at Rails World 2026. His opening keynote, he says, it's pencils down, people. Writing code by hand is no longer an economically valuable, viable

• 38:17John Coogan?

  skill for most programmers at most companies. Of course, if you're in some highly secure environment, there might make, might make sense to still write it by hand. And so it sounds like a black pill, but then he says, but the future of making software has never been brighter. Don't you dare black pill this beautiful moment. So you can go watch DHH's full presentation.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  Looking like a megachurch preacher.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's, he's having a good time. Uh, so our fourth debate, our fourth and final debate, um, to what degree is the AI build out driving interest rates upwards? People are going back and forth about this. Uh, interest rates are spiking. Specifically, the 10-year yield has jumped 12%. So it's actually, what is that, 1,200 basis points or something? Uh, because you're trying to, you're, you're trying to explain the move in the rates. So it's not that we're at 18%. We're at 5.18%, but we were, you know, down much lower in the fours earlier and uh, it's, it's, it's causing nervousness, you know? Last time interest

• 39:24John Coogan?

  rates went up, the venture capital world collapsed and uh, nobody likes high mortgage rates. Can you afford a home? There's a lot of knock on effects. We've covered this a bunch. The vanilla explanation is just the Iran war was unexpected. It caused an energy crisis that caused inflation, that caused interest rate hikes and expectations for future interest rate hikes and thus interest rates are higher. Uh, AI is important in driving the economy, but may, mainly a sideshow in this, uh, in this story around interest rates specifically. Um, but in tech, in tech, there's a view that the data center debt is simply too good to resist and so the capital markets are flooding over there. Uh, but there's

• 40:09John Coogan?

  a lot of debate around this. So uh, Rune said Iran oil prices is short-term driver, but broadly, this is due to demand pressure from extremely attractive AI capex opportunities that are borrowing at nation scale. They're certainly hoovering up trillions of dollars. I think the total data center capex hyperscaler debt is now almost 20% of what the US government is, is, is buying, something like that.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  No, so it's actually higher. I, I looked this up. So basically, um, hyperscaler and Nvidia like debt issuance as a percentage of like total treasury bond issuance uh, through 2026 has been like 70%.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  So, and I think uh, 2025, it was like around 30.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, and so Astrid Wilde says, this is correct. Global yields will continue to go higher because why would you invest in literally anything other than data centers when they have such a short payback period and you can throw tens of billions at it? I mean, we saw Cluster Max 1, I think, had a few dozen Neo clouds. Cluster Max 3, which we talked to Jordan Nanos about yesterday, had 326 Neo clouds. And they reviewed, I think, or they rated 200 something of them. Um, and uh, and then that's not to mention that there are also data center construction projects from the actual hyperscalers. The labs weren't on there. Uh, and then the chip companies, Jordan called out, he said like

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Cerebrus will have a Neo cloud and uh, Positron and Hatched will have Neo clouds. And so uh, there's going to be a lot more of this. Uh, at the same time, there's, there's the flip side of the argument. Um, Deep Dish Enjoyer says, this is definitely currently not true. Those opportunities are not riskless. And importantly, you can't use private illiquid AI capex as collateral. So if you're a bond investor and you're looking at two different markets, are you really shifting out of government treasuries that are historically the risk-free rate, that they have a monopoly on violence, they have the ability to tax their citizens to pay back the debt? Uh, a Neo cloud that's doing a data center, they go bankrupt, you

• 42:15John Coogan?

  might actually suffer a capital impairment uh, and, and get back 70 cents on the dollar, maybe 90 cents on the dollar. So there, it, it stands to reason that there is more risk associated with the, the AI build out. And so they're not completely apples to apples, but I still think that there's probably some sort of effect here. Uh, so it's true that as real GDP growth increases substantially, rates should rise though, but we aren't there yet. Um-

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  Colin Roche says, lots of scary talk in bonds these days, but it's mostly recency bias. Since 1960, the 10-year is average 5.8%. We're, we're at 5% below average. If you'd fallen asleep 20 years ago and woke up today, you'd think nothing happened in the bond market the entire time. Ignore all the sovereign debt crisis talk. Inflation expectations are adjusting to something more historically normalized. Carry on.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Carry on. So which do you think it is?

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  I'll defer to John Arnold on that, John.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll talk to him about it. I think that the recent spike is 80% Iran war. Because I think that the AI buildout has been going on for a while and has been maybe driving rates upwards broadly, but the AI buildout has not been the thing that's been driving this most recent spike, which we've seen over the last 30 days. And it's not like we've been seeing a flurry of like, oh, wow, like, we didn't know that Oracle was going to back up the truck. We didn't know that Amazon was. So there's no like, the expectations in the last month, like, we've been covering this every day. We haven't

• 44:00John Coogan?

  done that many shows where like, whoa, we didn't realize that this was going to happen. We didn't know that this was going to be a thing. Now, maybe you could say Jensen's securitization of GPUs initiative with all the big banks, maybe that's having knock on effects now. But in general, it hasn't felt like there's acceleration that's a departure from the trend. It's like, yeah, we're going to 3X compute every year. We're on trend. We've been talking about this. Some people don't buy it. Some people are skeptical. But in general, there hasn't been like a massive revision to the upside. It's hard to say like, yeah, rates are spiking because Muse is taking off and personal agents are going to drive token demand, which is going to drive the buildout further. Like, we're not quite there yet. There's a couple million.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is when you look at these large pools of capital, it's not like they're sitting there saying, I was just going to go all in on treasuries, but instead, like, this is still, they're still putting capital at risk, right? And instead of make, there's a number of other investments that they might make outside of AI capex, but it wasn't like it's just binary thing, like one or the other.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you want to do in the age of higher interest rates, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So the Wall Street Journal is sort of putting the higher bond yields in context, saying, "The robust US economy powers through rate hikes and rising bond yields. The US economy keeps powering through inflation, tariffs, and higher borrowing costs, defying a run-up in treasury yields and a Fed rate increase that has the bond market spooked. The usual economic brakes aren't slowing growth, hiring, or an AI investment boom that looks to be unstoppable. To some, AI's

• 45:52John Coogan?

  potential return seems so bright that even steep interest rates won't slow down tech companies' investments." And it does seem like the math on the AI buildout is wildly different. I was talking to somebody who was saying like, he knows a lot of people that are falling in love with the spreadsheet, and so they want to start neoclads and data centers because the payback period is shorter. I also saw an Instagram sort of like course hustler talking about how he bought a bunch of GPUs and is renting them to a data center and saw that as an attractive opportunity, ala like, oh, I bought a multifamily apartment complex.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  You must have watched the Dylan Patel interview, the recent Dorkesh one.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is all related to that, for sure. And also, a lot of the AI buildout, a lot of the AI companies were very much born in the era of higher interest rates. So I do believe that if you're a software company trading at 100x revenue multiple, and you weren't forecasting real earnings for 10 years or something like that, like the traditional SaaS playbook, and interest rates go from 0% to 4%, that's a lot more damaging than, okay, you were already born in the era of higher interest rates, and interest rates go from 4% to 6% or something. It's just not going to move the needle in the DCF that much, because like, you were already discounting

• 47:13John Coogan?

  cash flows in the future, 4%. And so, as opposed to 0, you're basically counting future cash flows as today's dollars. So, anyway, that's the take from the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal also had an interesting article about real estate bargains in a higher interest rate environment. They say, "Looking for real estate bargains? Watch these apartment loans." And it's an interesting article. So, "One pool of multifamily apartment mortgages issued in 2021 is already 53% delinquent." And so, what this means is that whoever bought

• 47:54John Coogan?

  the building had a floating rate interest rate and is now that the interest rate rise has put so much pressure under them that they might have to sell units, they might have to sell the building. And this is public information. So you can actually, I actually went to Kodak's and was like, find a bunch of apartments that could potentially be on the market for way below market rates because there are public filings of the loan delinquency, because those might be interesting things. I found some interesting stuff.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, one indicator of just how brutal the whole multifamily investing world is, is like, five years ago, the multifamily guys were extremely active on X, right? Posting multiple times a day, clearly like incredibly fired up, doing tons of deals. And then most of them have gone completely silent since then. And it's in large part because a lot of their bets are completely underwater. They're, you know, basically, there's been a number of funds that have basically not just lost money, but gone to zero.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, totally. There's also some interesting local knock-on effects. Here in LA, Los Angeles implemented a mansion tax for houses, in theory, houses above 4.5 million, 5 million, something like that. But it applies to commercial properties as well. So apartment buildings that change hands have to pay something like a 4% or 5% tax. And so, that's obviously going to hurt the amount of building, because when you go to sell and transact the building, you're taking this 5% fee off the top. But it's also, yeah, putting pressure on existing housing stock. And sort of is like an odd knock-on effect, because voters obviously go and say like, yeah, if you can afford

• 49:48John Coogan?

  a $10 million house, you can afford a $500,000 transaction fee, go for it. And it was a very popular bill or change to the law, popular tax. A lot of people would be like, wait, my apartment is going to be taxed too? Because I just live in a building that's over $5 million in aggregate? Like, this is maybe not what they wanted. And so, who knows where that goes, but people are disappointed. Anyway, moving on to CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is security. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 50:24Jordi Hays?

  America's newest trophy asset is a country home in the Cotswolds. Cotswolds, can never pronounce that properly. Harry and Meghan's return to the UK has put the region in the spotlight. A bevy of US buyers are looking for homes in the area. Not very American to buy or invest out here. Strange to see that it's becoming a sort of an American investment trend.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Well, everyone saw what Paul Graham did, and they said, I want to be like that, you know?

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  I want to putter.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Are you interested?

• 51:01John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Next story.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  Next story.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  A modern home in Silicon Valley, though, lists for $44 million, sort of the Cotswolds of America.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 51:15John Coogan?

  Silicon Valley, five-bedroom house, which features four distinct courtyards, a pool, and is the most expensive listing in Palo Alto, California. Now, I want to do a little tier list. As I read you the various features, I want you to put them in buckets from F tier to S tier. So I'll read through the article, and I want you to quickly assign each feature of this $44 million Palo Alto home a tier. So, "For years, tech entrepreneur Asher Waldfogel and his wife Helen McLean dreamed of building a modern house in Palo Alto. The couple, however, worried about clashing with the Mediterranean-style architecture typically associated with their neighborhood of old Palo Alto. So they tapped an architect to design a home that paid homage to its surroundings

• 51:58John Coogan?

  with stucco, mahogany, and titanium zinc plating." Where does titanium zinc plating go for you? Kick it off. You like it? A tier?

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  A tier.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  A tier, okay. We're leaving some room for an even better feature. "They spent $20 million over several years building the house, completed in 2005." So, "Now, looking to be closer to their adult daughter on the East Coast, they are putting the five-bedroom home on the market for $44 million. Wogelfold is an angel investor who co-founded Redback Networks, a telecommunications equipment company. McLean previously had a career in fundraising. The couple purchased roughly..."

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Career in fundraising, let's go.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  A generational run in fundraising. So, "The couple purchased the roughly 0.4-acre site. In terms of lot size, where are you putting 0.4 acres? Is that enough?

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  F tier.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  F tier, F tier. Wow, okay, you need at least three acres to really make a splash and earn S tier. "They demolished the circa 1930s Spanish colonial home. The house they built pinwheels around a central staircase." What do you think about houses that pinwheel around central staircases?

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  I like classic California, one-story ranch-style homes.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  You don't want a staircase at all?

• 53:14Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  Because the alternative is two staircases. You have a front staircase, a main entryway, and then a back staircase.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  This is a central staircase, but you're a no staircase guy. So where is pinwheeling around?

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  Once the kids are older, then you introduce the staircase. I could explore it, but for now, I'm putting it, staircases in general, going in D tier.

• 53:35John Coogan?

  D tier, okay. Staircases are out. It has 7,900 square feet of livable space. Where does that go?

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Split across multiple floors, I'm going B tier.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  B tier, okay. Four distinct courtyards. Are you a courtyard guy?

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  Problem with courtyards is like they're they're very cool in theory, but how often are you actually like it's really just like a it's really just it's like a feature that goes unused.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  I feel like the average courtyard gets like five minutes of someone's time annually.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  So I'm hearing like a C tier?

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, D tier.

• 54:16John Coogan?

  D tier, brutal for the four courtyards. What about the pool? It's got a pool. Where are pools for you?

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, pools are still underrated.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Okay, so what?

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Like a lot of people would say pools properly rated. Everyone thinks they're great. I think they're better than than the average person thinks a pool.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  I'm hearing S tier.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  S tier.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Pool is S tier, okay.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  We need to, I want to see what the pool looks like.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, key feature of the home is a cast in place concrete wall or spine. What do you like? Do you like a spine in your house? Concrete wall. Two stories high, 80 feet long. There's a little bit of control.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I like it. Some sort of a continuous theme through the home.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm into it.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  B tier?

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  B tier.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  B tier, okay. Uh, he says his wife, uh, and him are thinking of the next phase of life. They also have a home in Sun Valley, Idaho.

• 55:07Jordi Hays?

  S tier.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Second home in Sun Valley is S tier.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  S tier.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Okay. Right now they're trying to emotionally let go and decide what to do next. Uh, Palo Alto is the center of venture capital and tech startups in Silicon Valley, home to some of the country's biggest tech titans. Sales volumes and prices are rising with a median sale price of 3.5 million dollars for the three months ending in August, up 5.8% year over year.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's tough to get excited about this home in LA. This is like a probably 12 million dollar home, depending on where it's located.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  But over there.

• 55:41Jordi Hays?

  But over there. Like apparently it's S tier.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  Apparently it's S tier.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Well, someone will pick it up and hopefully they enjoy it. Hopefully they're into courtyards, they're into concrete spines in their homes and

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  They they make it a wonderful location.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  I think it's that time.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  It is that time. Let's bring in John Arnold, co-founder, co-chair of Arnold Ventures. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 56:07Speaker 05

  Doing great. Thanks for the invite.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much for having on.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to have you.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Um, I would love to start with just a little overview of your career since, uh, it's been a fantastic journey following it from afar and hearing you describe it. But for, uh, for our audience, um, how do you tell, how do you tell the story these days?

• 56:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, so my first job out of college was at Enron. Um, so going there as a 21-year-old, it was kind of, got there in 1995. Um, if you remember, company went bankrupt in December of 2001. Uh, and I was there to and through bankruptcy and it was kind of was remarkable, uh, ride up and a very educational, um, and sad ride down and probably learned more on the latter than I did on the former. But, um, came out of there, we can talk a little bit more about that if you want to, but came out of there and tried to decide what I wanted to do next. Um, you know, kind of really wanted to run my own division of something. I was running a trading desk at Enron.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  I was, you know, in very, very quick order had become the head trader at Enron, which was the largest natural gas trading firm in the country. Um, so I kind of had that top seat in the industry and, and I wanted to kind of take the next step and run a division of something. And so looked at, you know, should I do this at a bank? Should I do it at an energy company, at another hedge fund? But I got the chance to, um, to start my own hedge fund. There was, got approached by a few people and said, we'll back you if you want to go do your own thing.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, why were you, why were you, why weren't, why wasn't your immediate impulse? Most of the people that come on the show, for better or worse, are like, I couldn't imagine working for anyone but myself. Why, why, why were you more excited initially about running a division at a, at a bigger sort of platform?

• 58:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think the question was, you know, how much of the information flow that I had at Enron that kind of helped create this kind of very profitable desk there, could I replicate on my own? And if you could replicate 95% of the information flow, did that translate into kind of 80 or 90 or 95% of the profitability? Or was that, that last 5% was that all of it, right? Did 95% of the information flow mean that you got 0% of the profitability?

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  What was the information flow at Enron in natural gas in 1995? What, did you know that you were stepping into an organization with, uh, strong footing there? I, I, I know the later years pretty well, but I actually don't know what the, the brand positioning was to attract a 21-year-old at that time.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, so if you look back at the history of the natural gas industry, um, and like many industries in American history, at one point, at one point it was very highly regulated, uh, to the point where, and the United States set the price of natural gas. Um, and you had producers who would go produce it and they would say that, you know, if you produce gas, you get X dollars for it. It was viewed as, you know, as an industry having some monopolistic characteristics. And those characteristics were mostly around the pipelines, right? So there's, you know, not necessarily three pipelines between point A and point B and it's more of a monopoly type of industry.

• 59:43Speaker 05

  Um, and so over the years, kind of that kind of government price setting, as you can imagine, uh, has a lot of downsides. And so sometimes you would end up with shortages, sometimes you would end up with surpluses. And so it's kind of starting in the seventies under Carter and then continuing with Reagan in the eighties, you know, you had a deregulation of a number of sectors, including natural gas. And the way that gas was deregulated was said that the, uh, the production of natural gas is a competitive field. Uh, the end use of natural gas is competitive, but interstate pipelines are kind of monopolistic, um, at times and should be federally regulated. And so kind of that happened. Um, Enron at the time was this integrated natural gas company and all of a sudden, you

• 1:00:27Speaker 05

  know, you have, okay, you have a pipeline division that has Chinese wall between, uh, the production side and the end use side. And kind of much like a bank, now all of a sudden you have to, somebody has to be that intermediary between the two. And so you have a producer producing gas in South Texas, you know, a certain amount wants a certain pricing mechanism over, you know, a certain time period and an end user someplace else who wants kind of different characteristics about how their gas is priced. And somebody had to get in the middle of that. And in fact, uh, Enron's kind of first business coming out of this deregulation was kind of the Enron Gas Bank. Now, again, very similar characteristics to what a bank does.

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  Um, and so this industry was really kind of getting started in the, in the late eighties, early nineties and, you know, when I got started in 95, I had the benefit of, you know, this was not a highly mature industry. In fact, it was still trying to find its legs. And so as a young guy coming in, you know, I wasn't that far behind, um, because everybody else was kind of starting, starting afresh as well.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you process the, the, the famous Enron pitch to commoditize and trade bandwidth? Did that, like, were there other people that were like, ah, they might be too homogeneous of a market, I don't know if it can be commoditized? Or, or was there at least some glimmer of hope there?

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, maybe luckily this was not my area.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  But, but I think there was kind of this notion that, um, by, by kind of pricing and managing risk and connecting the producer of a commodity with the end users that you could create value. And so, you know, it just started for Enron in natural gas, although, you know, the commodity markets, you know, had existed long before that. Oil had been a traded commodity, uh, for a long time. Um, but electricity started to get deregulated and Ron kind of moved horizontally into that. Um, and then it started thinking about what other areas, you know, what about water? What about trucking? What about, uh, bandwidth?

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  Um, and I think many of those, you know, had characteristics where you could tell an argument about how they could be an actively traded, uh, commodity, um, but many of which I think when Enron got into them was a little ahead of their time and, and didn't work out very well.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Sure. Um, can you tell us the story of the, all the options that were open to you post Enron? Uh, there's the famous story of, of, uh, Ken Griffin and Citadel coming in and I'm wondering, like, going back to that pitch of like the, the thing that a platform can offer, the, the, the actual profit pool that's available, like, how was that articulated and how did you make a decision there ultimately?

• 1:03:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, you know, I think around this time, there'd been, I have a number of hedge funds that were doing these arbitrage type strategies. And so like Ken Griffin famously got started with convertible bond arbitrage.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:31Speaker 05

  Um, and there were kind of a number of those strategies, but, uh, you know, they were limited in number. Um, as they were successful, more capital came into them, uh, and they started to get arbed away.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Speaker 05

  Uh, and so the returns for the hedge funds that were doing this were starting to decline and their assets were, were increasing. And I think a number of those hedge funds kind of had realized that they needed to start moving a little bit further out on the risk spectrum. I mean, take more risk rather than doing kind of pure arbitrage type, uh, trades. And, you know, the most aggressive, uh, of that was Citadel. Um, and to the extent where whenever Enron went bankrupt, I think Citadel was already interested in the commodity markets, um, was already, you know, kind of trading some of them, but they viewed, uh, the Enron collapse as a great, um, catalyst in order to get into it.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  And they sent a whole team down to Houston, kind of set up offices in the hotel across the street from the Enron building and just started interviewing almost everybody on the floor. And they were just kind of recreating, you know, what was the edge that Enron had? What was the org chart? Who was doing what? Who were the real kind of value creators of the field? And I could kind of see what was happening. I didn't really want any part of it. And so I kept kind of, the recruiter was calling me, will you come talk to us? And I saw, and people around me were doing that, and I just said, no. And then there was kind of a weekend trip with a kind of industry trip. I was headed to Aspen.

• 1:05:13Speaker 05

  Ken Griffin called me at the airport and says, can I talk to you? I said, I'm actually headed to Colorado right now. He calls back a few minutes later and says, if I come to Colorado tomorrow, will you meet with me? I said, of course. If you're going to put that effort out, then you're serious about it and I'll meet with you. And I had a great conversation with him. I had great respect for him, great respect for the Citadel organization. But kind of by that point, I realized that the economics for me would be better if I did my own thing. And that the real value that they could provide me is capital on day one. And if I could raise that money, then I should do it on my own.

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  How did you think about risk when you were getting your firm? You know, maybe in the first three years of building your own firm, having gone through, been able to experience, at least participate in,

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  be involved with a firm that experienced total collapse. I feel like that probably does something to your psychology. At the same time, you were quickly able to put up the kind of returns that typically would take a manager taking on, you know, extreme levels of risk. But I imagine that was probably priority number one, don't blow up.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that's priority number one for anybody managing money is don't blow up. And, you know, especially if you think you have an edge and then there's real value in getting to come back tomorrow and play again. And so the biggest challenge was, you know, coming from a corporation, using a corporate balance sheet and not really thinking about capital usage. So now all of a sudden, I have just an investment account with X amount of dollars in it and I got to stay under that in terms of capital usage, as well as, you know, thinking about what's the right value at risk that I should be running.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  And these markets, you know, the natural gas market, especially in that time, could be exceptionally volatile. And so there was huge risk in, there was huge tail risk. And that created a lot of the opportunity was that, you know, there were,

• 1:07:41Speaker 05

  there was, you could get paid if you had capital to provide some insurance at times. But to do it smartly, to size it correctly, so that whenever you had to pay out on that, you could, again, show up the next day. But, you know, I think that the biggest challenge for me was this transition from corporate balance sheet to running my own money.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Does, I mean, I think most people have heard the story of how you made your first dollar. I'd love to have you tell it again. But I'm wondering if there's actually like a true lineage between your, you know, trading baseball cards to running arbitrage at Enron in 95? Or are these, are these sort of just coincidences that these two things happen? Or do you think that there is a clear line between like what it takes to make it as a trader, showing up early in your life?

• 1:08:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, I actually think that there were a number of similarities between these two things of kind of trading baseball cards and trading natural gas. And, you know, to some extent, you know, sports cards are a commodity. Maybe a little bit less so today as there's so much specialization. There's the one of one card or one of 10 cards, you know, trying to make them not commodities. But back then, they really did feel like commodities. And, you know, I made money by knowing what every product was worth at every moment.

• 1:09:12Speaker 05

  And so I kind of connected, you know, when I was 15, 14, 15 years old, you know, through this dealer network that was on, you know, an early bulletin board, that kind of connected dealers around the country and into Canada. And I was one of the few guys in Texas. And so there was a lot of kind of geographic arbitrage that I was doing. But also just, you know, that the prices were volatile. They would change week to week. And if you knew what a product was worth in New York that week, you could go around and, you know, buy things cheaper and send them up to New York and make that money.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  And so kind of that notion of know what every part, what every product within the industry is worth at all times, certainly stayed with me and was a skill I used throughout my trading career. And I think the second part was kind of just this entrepreneurial aspect of, you know, that I wanted to do my own thing. And, you know, it kind of took some courage, you know, at age 27 to go out and start my own firm, you know, hire people, I kind of put most of my capital at risk and just say, let's give it a shot. And if it doesn't work out, I'm still young, I can go do other things, but let's give it a shot.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  It feels like there's a sort of fork in the road that's been intentionally designed to potentially take advantage of young people, where you can get into sports, which are fun. I mean, every kid plays sports as a kid, Pee Wee football and Little League and AYSO soccer or whatever. And then you can-

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  And you can get into cards.

• 1:11:00John Coogan?

  You get into cards and then you get into natural gas trading or-

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Not even getting into cards, but the sort of digital representation of cards that, you know, function as slot machines and sort of fully disconnect the, the sort of like passion for the thing from the just sort of like finance, you know, it just becomes purely sort of a financial activity.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  And we were talking earlier on the show how, you know, I feel very lucky to be, you know,

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  You didn't get hit with the gambling bug.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, as a 30-year-old, I, by the time we entered this sort of era of hyper gambling and everything becoming a casino, you know, my prefrontal cortex was, you know, developed and I could say like, you know, maybe that would be fun or maybe, maybe there's some money to be made there or lost, but it's not for me either way. But, but it feels like there was, there was maybe a beautiful moment where you could just be into trading cards and then establish a business, you know, arbitraging. But not go down this crazy road.

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  The industry was much less of the lottery system that I sometimes feel it is today. Right? You, you know, there was a card that was just pulled a couple of months ago that got auctioned today or yesterday for $8 million. It's Cooper flag card, right? And so someone, you know, buys a pack of cards, gets an $8 million lottery ticket in there. And I think it's, there is this kind of lotterization of much of society. You see this in a lot of financial markets today, right? It's not sexy to, and buy the index fund and just sit on it.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  And as the markets have progressed, you've gotten to shorter and shorter timeframe trades that are more in the binary nature of I either lose one or I make 10 and that have a lot of characteristics of a lottery. And so, you know, back 20 years ago, this was day trading. And, you know, there was, you know, there was only so much risk out there. You know, that was more of one for one, you could make one, lose one. But then, you know, financial quote unquote innovation happens and people come up with products that allow you to take a lot of leverage, either through options or through just straight leverage.

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  And so, and if you put a dollar up and try to make 10 or try to make 100, and there's this kind of whole conflation between investing and trading and gambling. And there's always been some gray area across those. But, you know, you open up a Robinhood app today and it's, you know, do you want to, you know, do you want to day trade? Do you want to buy zero day options? Do you want to gamble on the sports game tonight? Or do you want to buy the index fund? And it's kind of all presented as this is all investing. And I think that's a really, really scary message that we're teaching, you know, the 16, 18, 20-year-olds today.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Are you, so I think a ton of agreement there. I'm interested in where this goes forward. Obviously, there are things individually you can do, just like, you know, stay away from the aggressive gambling products. There are things that you can do in your community, encouraging people not to, not to take on unnecessary risk and stay with the safer investments. On a national level, there is a conversation about regulation, restricting, banning more aggressive financial products. There's another side, which is maybe fund more education to teach people about this. Sort of what we did with cigarettes, where there was a lot of regulation for who could buy them,

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  but also a lot of education where pretty much everyone knows that they cause cancer. There's labels on there. And, and I'm wondering if you're, if you're more optimistic that we get out of this with an education strategy or through a regulation strategy? Or is there, is there no hope and it's every man for themselves and they have to resist the temptation individually?

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, education strategies take a long time.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:29Speaker 05

  Um, and you also kind of have some vices that catch on like wildfire and will eventually burn themselves out. And you can look at a lot of illicit drugs will have that type of characteristic.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:47Speaker 05

  And regulation is always going to be slow, but I think it's faster than the education side. I think the scary thing today is that there's a number of products that have

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  kind of been, again, innovated to be of a higher intensity and easier access

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  than what they've ever been in the past. And the challenge is your regulation lags on those. And so you can think about things like marijuana, right? And like the marijuana of 20 years ago is very, very different than it is today. And the access is much more available today. Right? And you can think about pornography, right? The intensity of porn today is very different. The access today is very different. And gambling is the same way, you know? You know, historically, you either had things that were high friction and high speed of play. So think about like a slot machine where you have to go to a casino. Oftentimes that meant getting on a plane and going someplace, right?

• 1:16:53Speaker 05

  And you sit down, you could pull the arm of the the slot machine pretty quickly. In fact, they, it was too slow, so they made it a button. So you could just sit there and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right? But there was friction on high speed of play. Or you had something that was low friction, like I could buy a lottery ticket at the supermarket when I'm you know, buying my meat, but it's low speed of play. I buy my ticket, you know, I wait eight hours or three days or, you know, I find out whether I want or not.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, trading, trading cards now, you can buy a pack of cards, but you don't have to wait for them to arrive with you to know what you got. And you can decide, I don't want any of them. I'll just roll the dice again.

• 1:17:32Speaker 05

  Right. Roll the dice again, yeah. And so what gambling is today, right? With, with the phone, access through the phone and being able to, I don't even want to wait three hours and figure out whether my team won or not. Right? I can bet on the next pitch. I can bet on every play.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's one minute markets now for, do you think Bitcoin will go up or down over the next one minute? And so that is

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is effectively a binary option in one minute, which is fairly, fairly close to just a pure slot machine.

• 1:18:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's flipping a coin, right?

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, flipping a coin. Exactly. Cause no one has information on, on a minute to minute basis. I mean, maybe somebody does, but yeah, certainly not the average gambler.

• 1:18:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so you're mentioning earlier just about, luckily this is happening when we're older, but you know, I have a teenage boy and teenage boys are kind of the most susceptible to these things. And there's, you know, tens of millions of teenage boys out there who are all getting drawn into these products. And I think there's real risk to society. And so the question is, you know, what's the right way to allow access to products? I have libertarian bones in my body. Like I, I think, you know, we need to be careful about banning access to products. But you know, what are the right and smart guardrails to put on them?

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, in some ways,

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  in some ways, multifaceted approach to regulation would, would help a lot of companies that are in positions where the, the, the, the right thing to do for shareholders is actually to make the gambling product. Right? And we've seen this because there's investing apps now that make more money from, you know, gambling products, whatever they want to position them as than stock trading. And we even saw four months ago, there was, there was a series of headlines around how Meta was exploring building, you know, prediction markets, which, you know, I always felt was, was completely at odds with their stated goal and, and mission. But at the same time,

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  you can make the argument as a, as a Meta shareholder that, you know, they have a lot of attention. There's people that are making a bunch of trades based on information they get on Meta and that product should be integrated into the product because it's generally legal. Right? And it, and it just feels like companies in, in many categories will get punished by not rolling out these products because their competitors will, and they will, you know, onboard more users and generate more revenue and be able to spend more money on marketing. And, and it's sort of this like really, really vicious cycle. And so I've gotten to the point where I, I pretty strongly believe that a lot of this stuff needs to be

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  pulled back or, or, or banned. Of course, that sort of human desire and energy to speculate will just naturally flow to other places. Right? You saw in some ways, AI trade over the last year sucked a lot of the wind out of the sails of like crypto. Right? There was like way less appetite for Bitcoin when you can make 10x on some bottleneck trade. I did want to get to as much as I want, as we could spend hours talking about the, our casino world. I did want to get your point of view on, on how you've processed the overall sort of AI super cycle. There's so many different elements of it that I'm sure you've drawn.

• 1:21:09Jordi Hays?

  You have experience in through, you know, the early 2000s in that period, whether it be, obviously, energy markets coming into play in tech for, for the first time in a, in a really meaningful way. Massive, you know, capex and debt cycles and seeing some of, some of these companies that have historically had pristine balance sheets, you know, figure out all these, you know, super complex structures. And then I actually want to get into compute markets as well and how we should be thinking about that from your point of view. But, but maybe start how you've processed the, the sort of the last five years and, and maybe your mental model for where we are today.

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 05

  You know, I, I probably started talking to people in this space around the 2020, 2021 timeframe. And then kind of like everybody in, in 22 was, you know, kind of surrounded by it. It's what I'm amazed at is the number of predictions that came true.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Speaker 05

  And when I heard it as a guy that's kind of outside of the tech world,

• 1:22:19Speaker 05

  that

• 1:22:23Speaker 05

  that it just seemed farcical, the growth that they were projecting, that, that they were saying that things would keep scaling forever.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And tech people have been wrong so many times. VR and flying cars and self-driving and NFTs and all this stuff. And then this was the one where it was like, oh, again with the crazy predictions. And then it's been right on track. Very different.

• 1:22:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that, and that you could keep scaling, right? And that you would never hit that plateau.

• 1:22:52Speaker 05

  And again, like in every other field, you know, you, you hit plateaus, you start getting kind of significant decreasing marginal returns inputs. And, you know, that, that was my expectation of how this would play out. And, and it certainly hasn't. And so I think I've been open to the possibility, but skeptical.

• 1:23:22Speaker 05

  And now, whenever the, whenever the big money was coming into data centers a couple of years ago, and you had kind of the calls for the bubble,

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  I was, you know, I think my view was just because a lot of money is coming in, doesn't make it a bubble. Right?

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Speaker 05

  Now, it is true that, you know, you always say it's different this time. Right? And occasionally it actually is different this time. And the real test for the industry is, can you find useful products and services that people are going to pay for? And if so, it works out great. And if not, it's going to be over investment. I, I do think that every commodity market, you know, goes through these booms and busts. And that's because you have, the producers see the same price signal. Producers and end users see the same price signal at the same time and typically react in the same way. And so that creates, you know, whenever prices are high, people increase investment.

• 1:24:28Speaker 05

  There's a delay before that comes on. Oftentimes the end users have figured out ways to kind of optimize their demand or to find substitutes. And then you get that bust that happens because too much capacity shows up in the future. And I think that's the big risk now with data centers is that kind of every, every megawatt that's been built thus far, like keeps being worth more. Right? And, and it's a kind of a highly backwardated curve where if you can provide a compute tomorrow, that's worth a lot of money. Compute in two years is worth less. Compute in five years is worth a lot less. Right? But everybody is seeing that, that if I can build today and supply today,

• 1:25:13Speaker 05

  I can make a lot of money by even running it out in the short term. And I think the question is, is everybody overbuilding a little bit because they look at the same price signal and say, you know, even if we overbuild, we're okay because we can sell it to somebody else.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or even, or even, you know, You can imagine some of these models saying, well, yeah, you can discount the rate by 60% and we're still, we're still making, you know, we're still going to be making money here. So of course, there's, that should be plenty of margin of safety when in reality, you could see a much larger, you know, drop depending on how, how, how much of an oversupply there is.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Have you, have you been able to tease out the impact of AI on markets from other factors? I mean, we were looking at 10-year, 10-year interest rates are, you know, very high. There's been a big spike over the last 30 days. All the tech people are sort of saying, look, it's evidence that data centers are just too good and so everyone's investing there. At the same time, there's a war in Iran and so that might be a bigger factor. But even in the GDP numbers, it's very hard to actually get to a ground truth of the impact on productivity. The internet famously never really showed up in the productivity statistics.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  An incredible amount of wealth was created. So how do you think about teasing out the different effects? Does it even matter? Or do you have a process? Do you have a view right now on how much growth or, or effect on markets AI is actually driving?

• 1:26:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it's really hard. I think you did a great job kind of setting the stage for, for the difficulties the field is having. You know, I think the financial world and economists are notoriously just very bad at predicting interest rates and inflation. And it's even hard to describe, you know, why have rates spiked so much just in the past month?

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  And part of this is, you know, they probably, you know, there were times when everybody was scratching their head about, you know, why are rates staying so low for so long? And now it's kind of the opposite, that, you know, inflation is manageable at least today, right? Kind of at, you know, the two and a half, 3% levels. You know, having the 10-year, you know, what, 520 or so today? It seems like those real interest rates are at a level that I think people, many economists were doubtful that, that they would see again. And so I think that the question is, this is, how much of this is being driven by the

• 1:28:07Speaker 05

  AI super investment cycle? And is there just too much demand for capital because there is kind of both, all the sovereigns are issuing enormous amounts of debt as well as all, everybody associated with the AI industry is trying to do the same. You know, I think there's, it's always easy to kind of assign causation after the fact. But, you know, trying to predict where this is going in the future, you know, there's, it's ended the careers of many a trader.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the bullwhip effect? One thing that a lot of tech insiders have been pounding the table about is why isn't TSMC building new fabs fast enough? We finally got AI working. It's going to continue to increase and scale, scale, scale forever. Nvidia is ramping up. Everyone's fighting for chips and yet we can't seem to get TSMC to mention AI on an earnings call. They're starting to, but they've been burned before. And I'm wondering if there's parallels in other markets that you've seen? And how do you actually think about the, the, the nature of that bullwhip when it actually comes around?

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think that's exactly it, right? That, you know, if you're a commodity producer, like, you know, the memory chip companies, you know, kind of are, after you've kind of fallen for this, you know, the boom bust, you know, that you expanded capacity at the top of the market and again, like every, all your competitors saw the same price signals and did the same thing. And, you know, you have that bust and that bust just causes so much financial pain that, that at some point, you know, you're like, I'm not doing this unless you, my customers, are going to sign, you know, a three-year, five-year offtake agreement at prices that pay for the whole factory and then some,

• 1:30:06Speaker 05

  such that if we've overbuilt, you know, that's on the customer, that's not on me. And you can certainly understand why a couple of years ago, you know, all the hyperscalers were asking memory companies and the chip companies to increase production, increase capacity. And, you know, because it would be beneficial to the hyperscalers who were buying this stuff. And the producers were just saying, like, we're just much more hesitant to do so. Because again, like, a couple of years ago, AI could have gone a number of different ways. And, you know, it's gone the bull case to date, but, you know, where it goes from now, I don't think these companies want to bet their, their future on it. And

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  you've seen the same thing kind of in the oil markets where the reaction to high prices, the industry's interest and investor interest in funding, kind of recycling all the money back into drilling is much lower than it used to be. And investors are saying, like, we fell for this in the past. Like, whenever you're making the big returns, pay them out to investors.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Can you sort of reality check me on my history around the shale revolution? I'm interested in, could that have happened anywhere other than the United States? How much of it is a technology story? How unpredictable was it? Because right now in tech, everyone's talking about energy. People are talking about nuclear capacity that might come online in 2030, 2035. If it comes, I don't think it will be a surprise to the technologists who have been raising money and, and, you know, proselytizing and evangelizing for nuclear. But from my perspective as like an energy outsider, the shale revolution looked like

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  something that was an unexpected boon to energy in America. But what was it like on the inside?

• 1:32:02Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, you know, the, the shale, shale volumes have really been over the past 20 years. But this is, you know, this industry kind of got started maybe 50 years ago.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  So in the seventies, federal government started investing in the technology through some basic science grants. In the eighties, George Mitchell, who was really the kind of the grandfather of this industry, started investing and doing some, you know, using his, you know, his company's capital to go test wells. It was really in the nineties, whenever George Mitchell kind of came up with this like water fraction, sorry, fracking, that, that you could see wells start to become economic. And the industry kind of had the

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  bonus of the commodity boom that happened in the 2000s, kind of culminating in 2008 when natural gas got to 13 and a half dollars versus the $3 it's at now. Oil got to $147, where a lot of those wells, even though they were expensive to drill, you know, were economic. And that's when, kind of that 2005 to 2008 period was really where kind of the, the shale started to work.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  You know, the, the technological triggers had happened and you had high prices. And then the 2010s, you had kind of the industry really start to figure out how to do this at scale and get all the benefits of coming down the learning curve and the benefits of going from, you know, drilling, you know, a well here and a well there to really kind of turning this much more into a manufacturing process.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  Do you think-

• 1:33:55Speaker 05

  And then 2020 is it's now a mature industry. So, you know, it was 50 years in the making and, you know, I think the question is, on nuke, what happens?

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:34:05Speaker 05

  In many ways-

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:06Speaker 05

  Like, there are, there are aspects in which United States is very conducive to the nuclear industry. Right? We have very robust capital markets. We have a lot of great technologists here. We have a lot of land in the United States, very deep electricity markets. So if you come on with a gigawatt of power-

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  You can place it very easily.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 05

  And you have bipartisan government support for the industry.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:34Speaker 05

  Right? So like, all those things are working for it. And the downside is that the US actually has fairly cheap electricity.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  We have fairly high cost of labor, especially kind of the craft labor. And, and to build a nuclear plant requires a lot of labor, at least today. You know, siting anything is hard in this country. And you have this kind of very bifurcated utility system. We don't have a national utility. It's just kind of state by state. It's utility by utility. And you have, they're investor owned and, you know, does the investor get the benefit of this? They certainly get a lot of the risks. And then last, I think, we just don't have the workforce that's trained on, in this field today.

• 1:35:26Speaker 05

  And so like in some ways, maybe the optimal thing is we develop the technologies here and they get built somewhere else where it's just easier to build and cheaper to build.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've seen that with a couple of nuclear companies that have done their first plants in Southeast Asia and internationally and seen opportunities elsewhere, but I'm certainly hoping for it to hit America. I have one more, but please, Jordi.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  How have you processed the growth of the private markets and the subsequent disconnect between the private markets and the public markets? I've been personally, having made at this point 70 odd private market, you know, early stage investments over the last number of years, I've been really feeling like the inflation, the feeling of inflation in the private markets where you have companies that are a $10 billion company, but only because there are a bunch of venture capitalists with $10 billion, right? And so you just have these prices pushing up, not based on the quality of the underlying

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  asset or the category. And I just, so my head is really thinking about how long can you have this disconnect? Like the disconnect can't sort of continue forever at, with how extreme it is right now. And so I would expect it to correct sometime in the next two years, maybe, you know, who knows? But how are you processing it?

• 1:36:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're certainly seeing that question right now in the energy tech industry, right? Where a year ago, it was kind of probably the peak of, almost exactly a year ago, peak of a lot of the SMR, you know, small modular reactor nuclear companies. And they've kind of been on a steady decline since. And then a few months ago, you had, you know, Furvo go public. That, you know, had a great kind of first day, first couple of weeks, went public at a big number, and that's kind of gradually sold off. And when Furvo went public, you know, a lot of companies in the energy transition space thought that the IPO

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  door was open, right? And everybody called their banker, the bankers call all these companies and say, okay, like, get ready, we're going. And then, you know, everything is kind of sold off from there. And now they're all getting the same message, which is, okay, the door closed really quick. And now what do you do? And, you know, the highs are higher in the public markets, but the lows are lower too.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  So if you have these companies that, you know, still need to raise a lot of capital, kind of going public, you know, if you catch it right, can work out really well. It can also kind of be handcuffs on you. That if your stock trades poorly from the, you know, from the IPO on, and you have to go do secondaries in the market for a stock that's down, you know, 50, 60, 70%, it becomes enormously difficult. And so there's a lot of CEOs of those energy transition companies who are now like trying to decide, do we force this? You know, even take a lower valuation and try to get public? Or do we stay private?

• 1:38:50Speaker 05

  Where we can have a more nuanced conversations, we only have to convince a few investors to come in rather than the whole market?

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll be more stable.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other dynamic that is endlessly entertaining to me is companies repricing based on the category leader in their category. So you saw this with SpaceX, right? Like SpaceX is far, you know, is probably like a thousand times more important than the next space company, right? But every company, right after the IPO, starts to like reprice in the private markets based on, based on that. And, you know, you can see the logic from, from the private market investors, but, but again, there's those disconnects that, that have to be righted in the fullness of time. Like you can't know, it doesn't matter how big your venture fund is, eventually your businesses are going to price based

• 1:39:45Jordi Hays?

  on market realities. Last question I had for you, I know we're over time. How did you process the compute markets ban? We saw, recently, we saw a couple prediction market players try to put up compute markets, and apparently they got a tap on the shoulder from Washington and were asked to shut down, shut down the markets. It seemed somewhat curious, but how would you read into that?

• 1:40:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I haven't followed this too closely. I've always been, you know, somewhat, the big question is, is that compute is not a commodity where, where one data center's providing the same product as another data center, right? And in order to have a, you know, a real tradable market, you either have to deliver into a certain product that needs to have a lot of buyers and a lot of sellers, you know, that are able to take that specific product to create and have an arbitrage free type of ecosystem. Or you

• 1:41:01Speaker 05

  need some type of index that the industry trusts, that might look at across a number of different types of compute and say, you know, compute that has, you know, characteristics in this range, the cost for that for the month of September is X. And so either a robust index or a kind of physical delivery product. And I think both are really challenging in this field of compute. There just aren't that many short-term deals. The transparency

• 1:41:41Speaker 05

  into those is difficult. The distinctions between the chips and the design of the data center and all the specific needs is just different. And so trying to either come up with the physical delivery mechanism or the index that everybody trusts to be right is really hard.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other dynamic is just how much more valuable compute is to a couple companies relative to the broader market, which feels quite different than, than some of these other commodity markets. I did have one, my second final question, and then we'll actually let you go. How, how much have you opened your mind to various sci-fi predictions, given how correct many of them have been in the, let's say from 2020 until, 2015 until 2025? So many of them sounded, you know, crazy at the time and, and almost impossible. Things,

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  things happened that were almost impossible to predict. And given how correct many of them, where it's hard not to place way more weight on them going forward, except that they actually only get more insane from here, right? And so you have to like take another leap of faith.

• 1:43:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I've, I'm a natural skeptic. I've always kind of been a bear trader. I make more money when the markets are going down than when they're going up. I would be a terrible VC because of that. I would tell you all the reasons why this company's going to fail rather than why it's going to work.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:23Speaker 05

  You know, I think, you know, getting to, you know, an entrance into the tech sector that I've had of late has helped kind of open my eyes. And like, you know, rather than being naturally skeptical, I've tried to be kind of naturally open-minded to this. But in terms of specifics, you know, I think the, the next 10 years could be crazy. It could be a normal technology, right? And I think that's, that's this huge question here. And, and I try to keep my mind open to both of those.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're going to find out one day at a time.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, just one day at a time. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 1:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I really enjoyed it.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Really informative conversation.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, it'll be great.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Hope to do it again soon.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to hang with you.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let's move right into our next guest. We have Viswa Kaliru, the founder and CEO of Invetta, with a huge fundraising announcement. Get that gong ready. Viswa, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:44:21Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. Longtime listener, first time caller.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Sorry for the delay. We had to shift things around. I'm so happy that we get to talk to you. Let's kick it off. Jordi's warming up the gong already. Tell us about the most recent fundraising round.

• 1:44:34Speaker 06

  The most recent round was a lot of capital to get a lot of medicines to people.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:44:42Speaker 06

  And what's important is it allows us to build.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  311 million.

• 1:44:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm guessing I'll be back.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  Okay, so yes, what you're building?

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  We're building, the easiest way to describe it is, think of it as a sequencer, but for life's chemical code instead of life's genetic code.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  About 400,000 compounds have been discovered by the collective human endeavor from throughout history to now, and it's expected that there's about 1 to 10 billion. So 99% of what makes up you, a tomato in your garden, or a random sample in the Amazon rainforest is still a mystery to science. And that's because we've never built anything that can take a biological sample and answer two really important questions. What are the molecules and what do they do? So we've built the tech to do just that.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  Talk about the positioning of the company as actually developing drugs going through FDA processes versus selling a software product to existing pharmaceutical companies or versus focusing on more general use artificial intelligence technologies. How did you land where you did? And what are the benefits of that of that approach?

• 1:46:06Speaker 06

  As far as we can tell throughout the history of the industry, there's only been one way to build a big company in this space, and that is to make and own drugs, right? And even the biggest companies in this space are largely underpinned by cash flows from a single blockbuster franchise.

• 1:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Speaker 06

  Something like 70% of Lilly's EV is forward sales multiples of the GLP-1 plus family. 80% of Novo's is the same. And 30% of Sanofi's is half of one, a drug called Dupixent for eczema.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:42Speaker 06

  So if you want to build a large and impactful drug company, the rule is super simple. Make drugs and make drugs that matter.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Give me some timelines. AI is focused on curing cancer, and I feel like we gotta cure peanut allergies before we cure cancer. It just seems easy to me. Am I misinformed? What are your peanut allergy timelines? You know, it's just something that it seems a little bit quicker to test than cancer, which could take, you know, months to actually fight and verify that you're in remission. If you have a GLP-1 for peanut allergies.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  This weekend, John, figure out how to give yourself a peanut allergy.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  I need a million dollars to compute, I think.

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  And then fix it on Sunday.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  But but the more anodyne diseases, are those actually more tractable? Or is it a straight shot to cancer and like the big ones?

• 1:47:31Speaker 06

  I think they're both difficult in different ways. I'll start with the simple fact that cancer isn't one disease.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  And it's thousands of diseases, and we just call all of those diseases cancer for something that grows without control and invades other organs. So I think that's going to have to be disease by disease. And we've made a lot of progress for a lot of these diseases, but it's going to help, I think, for us to be very specific about what cancers have been most recalcitrant and why. And I think I'd love to see AI come up with completely new ways, whether it's molecules or mechanisms, to be able to hit cancers that we struggle the most with.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Speaker 06

  Common diseases are difficult for two reasons. They're complex and multifactorial. So in other words, obesity is something you understand quite simply as excess fat in your body. But we now know that at least two organs, likely more, are involved in obesity. So your fat tissue, your brain, your muscle, your pancreas, all of those coordinate to ultimately give you that. The second reason they're hard is the way each of these factors collude to give you obesity can be massively different across the population. I was just reading something as I was waiting for you guys since you went over, that 10 to 15% of patients don't respond to GLP-1s.

• 1:48:53John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:48:54Speaker 06

  Right? And it has probably something to do with the fact that hormones affect GLP-1 massively. So women tend to respond better. And there's lots of other things that are just beginning to come out from the data. And these are the two things that make common diseases more complex for AI. But I think there's no reason to stage gate. We should absolutely attack all of them at once and continue pushing the frontier for better medicines so each of us can live, you know, a better life on a day to day basis. And that's the test we want each of our molecules to pass.

• 1:49:31John Coogan?

  So yeah, I mean, it seems like you're taking a pretty broad approach, but is there a decision criteria where you're looking at the economic opportunity of a particular drug and treatment versus the total harm caused? Like, obviously, cancer is at the top of the list. Peanut allergies a little bit lower. Or are you more just like, let's generate a bunch of stuff and see what the impacts are? Oh, turns out we cured, you know, we cured cancer one day, and then the next day we cure peanut allergies, and it's sort of a random downstream effect. How much of it is you picking the target versus just seeing what you're capable of?

• 1:50:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm glad you asked. So at Enveda, we haven't started efforts on trying to treat cancer yet.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:15Speaker 06

  We're focused on really large diseases.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:18Speaker 06

  That still have big, big swaths of what we call unmet medical need. For example, if you suffer from asthma, there hasn't been an oral medicine that isn't a steroid that has been approved for over 25 years.

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  Interesting. Wow.

• 1:50:33Speaker 06

  Right? If you are one of the many, many Americans and the world's citizens that has trouble managing your weight, you can get on GLP-1. In one or two years, you're likely going to be off of it for one reason and another. And then you have no idea what to do about your weight.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  So our first two drugs are hitting exactly those problems. We want to make a safe, non-steroidal oral for diseases like atopic dermatitis or eczema and asthma, for which there's millions of people in America alone, and there isn't an ideal solution. And our second molecule discovered a new hormone that's produced after you go for a sprint. So it's essentially the chemistry of exercise. And we did do it what semaglutide did to GLP-1. So we put it in a pill that you can take once daily, and we think it'll allow you to maintain your body weight and metabolic health over the long term, giving 55 million people in America an off-ramp over the next seven years that will have taken a GLP-1 and then not know what to do next.

• 1:51:32John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. A lot of discussion over, should we give superintelligence a wet lab? What is the actual human in the loop? I mean, it feels like you're hiring. It feels like this is a very rigorous process where you're coming up with candidate molecules, taking them through the full FDA process. But how do you make sure that your product is safe? Are you confident in the current system? Or do we need to create new rules or slow down? Or what's your view on the future of actually getting new AI-aided, AI-designed products in the the hands of Americans?

• 1:52:08Speaker 06

  For better or for worse, three quick things. The first one is, Enveda's core AI models allow us to understand what evolution's already made. So they're not optimized for creating new things, either benevolent or malevolent or anywhere in between. And so this allows us to, for example, push forward our frontier very, very quickly without being particularly bottlenecked by the safety question. Second is for people whose models are designed to make molecules. I think that most, the most important aperture or filter that those models have to pass through is the simple fact that most things that a model can design are not something human chemistry can make. So and this doesn't get talked about often

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  at all, but 99% or more of the chemistry that any particular model comes up with is constrained by the physics and energetics of putting it together. So I'd say just because AI can come up with an incredibly powerful toxin, doesn't mean that it'd be produced right away. And that's the bottleneck, even when you're trying to make medicines produced by AI. Third, I think the big bottleneck overall that encompasses issues one and two really is the fact that AI is really bad at moving things in the physical world. And I think a lot of biological surgery, whether it's of cells or genes or assembly,

• 1:53:32Speaker 06

  involves things that require custom workflows. And automating and roboticizing that still is an endeavor that we're not very good at. So unless there's a rogue agent in the loop with the AI, I think it'd be hard. Now, could an rogue agent be significantly more damaging? Yes. But I think it's a more human-centric problem than it gets written about.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Okay, I like that. Well, thank you for breaking it down. Congratulations on the progress.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Wish we had more time, but come back on.

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to have you back on soon. This is really great. Congratulations.

• 1:54:05Speaker 06

  Sign me up. Thank you.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Coming back on the show, we got Jake Adler, founder and CEO of Pilgrim. Jake, how you doing? Sorry for keeping you waiting.

• 1:54:28Speaker 07

  No problem. Good to be back on. Thanks, guys.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  What's the latest in your world? You raised some money? Anything gong-worthy? Anything that's gonna make Jordy stand up and smash that while you're giving us the important details? Deafening us all? What happened?

• 1:54:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we we closed the $25 million round to build America's first privacy firm.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  There you go. It's so funny, like, like, two weeks, two weeks ago, I was, it's been probably a year since you've been on the show, but two weeks ago, I was thinking about you and Pilgrim because of all the biosecurity talk. And I'm like, he's got to be raising a new round, just because it feels like you've been building to sort of meet many of the current and future problems of our world.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you, how are you pitching the company right now? And then the specific products? Because there is sort of a differentiation there between being America's biological prime contractor and Kingswell, the actual product, correct?

• 1:55:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's certainly been a bit of an evolution, but I think the core, the core thesis has remained the same.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 07

  Which is really this idea that we're just trying to deploy biotechnology more efficiently.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:49Speaker 07

  Right? So there's like an abundance of like really compelling technologies that like languish in academia. And the bet at Pilgrim is really on the mechanism to take these like really critical technologies and get them deployed. So, you know, at the core, when I think about, you know, what we're building today with like a system like Argus, so this is one of our early prototypes that we deployed, the idea really is to build up what is a really substantial wedge and can get technologies like this into the hands of the warfighter today. But on the basis of building what is a bio prime, it really does come back to that core mechanism of being able to actually get technology into the hands of warfighters sooner, and ensuring that more, you know, warfighters can go into conflict and actually be able to return home. So it's been a very exciting mission, but

• 1:56:33Speaker 07

  it's all really revolved around just the idea of getting bio into the hands of the people who need it the most.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  The sign behind you says, smallpox, keep out. Is that because there's smallpox in your facility? And you don't want people coming into the facility? Or is that because you don't like smallpox and you want to keep it out of your office?

• 1:56:51Speaker 07

  You know, you'd be shocked, you know, how easy it is to procure some like really gnarly biological agents.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  Black pill.

• 1:57:00Speaker 07

  But, yeah, exactly. But, you know, we don't, we don't have smallpox in the office. We have a bit of monkeypox here, and you'll be able for sure, you know, like a couple of chemical weapons as well. But like, you know, the amount of validation that's required for these things is bewildering. You know, they'll call me up on the phone and be like, like, do you know what you're doing with these things? And I'll be like, yeah, we work with the government. And they're like, that's all we need to hear. Which is, again, is incredibly alarming, you know, considering a lot of the infrastructure we have, like deter, you know, a bioweapon attacker to stop the proliferation.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Speaker 07

  None of this has changed in like 20 years. It's a, it's been a really cool mission, you know, it's a bet that we made nine months ago on Argus. And, you know, candidly, you know, you look to things this year, like, you know, for example, the Pentagon shutting down four months ago due to like a false anthrax alert.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:50Speaker 07

  Like, there are really serious events that are transpiring. And I think that the rate and the incidents around bio have grown dramatically, even to a point now where I think just due to the sheer lack of that infrastructure has just become incredibly alarming.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Okay. That Argus system looks portable. It's on a tripod. Where do you deploy that? I've heard about, in terms of our bio defenses, sometimes airports, wastewater treatment systems. There's a whole bunch of other places to plug in. How did you land on that portable of a system as opposed to tapping into basically like a stream of biological data somewhere else in the, you know, American economy or American industrial system?

• 1:58:32Speaker 07

  I think that the core bet is really on the platform itself. We really want to move beyond what is like the current precedent, which are like these very manual workflows. It's like right now, for example, like if I was to, you know, if I was to pull Jordi in and have him go work the line at TSA, for example, and some guy comes through and I gave you like the best, the most portable sensor in the world, able to, you know, tell you whether or not some person's Ebola. But the question quickly becomes like, what are you going to do with that information? Right? So we definitely knew that the system itself had to be portable, but it had to go just beyond, you know, from a platform standpoint, just doing the detection, to actually enabling identification and characterization of the threat as well. The reason that we opted for this form factor first, was very simple.

• 1:59:16Speaker 07

  It's really on the basis, especially in the airborne environment, that like that is a primary mode of transmission for viruses and for pathogens. Right? So when we're thinking about how these viruses spread between populations, it's very important that we're actually monitoring the air. There's a lot of information that we don't typically see. So we wanted this system to look scary, and really to stand out in an airport environment.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:40Speaker 07

  Because we have to make a statement, you know, to our adversaries, that if they attempt to come into our country and attempt to proliferate, you know, a biological weapon, that we actually have the defenses in place to be able to deter and identify, you know, that proliferation very quickly.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Speaker 07

  So that alone is really what contributed. But the core platform, being able to detect, you know, viruses autonomously, that's just going to be deployed across all of these different types of media, wastewater, clinical, everything.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Last question for me. On the actual sensor fidelity, is this going to be something where I'm going through the airport, I take off my shoes, they take a picture of me, they scan my thumbprint, I give them my ID, I give them my boarding pass, and then I also have to like breathalyze into this thing? Or is this passive? Like, are they taking my saliva? Are they going to take a pint of blood from me? Like, how far does this go?

• 2:00:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, I think if we make the TSA line any longer, people aren't going to be very satisfied. Really, the goal here is simple, is we just want to monitor the environment.

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:36Speaker 07

  A lot of, a lot of tools in the past, like, you would call like contract tracing. And like, even just thinking about like, just how crazy of a time COVID was. I remember my sister like Lysol wiping bananas, you know, and this is sort of like the world that we are living in. It's a lot of the technologies that has been built is, tends to be hyper-personalized. And what we recognize more than anything is like, the current timeline to even detect a threat in the air is like a week. And, you know, that means like, by the time you find out about a pandemic, it's typically in the newspaper, you know, before one of our sensors are even picking up on it. So.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Or like Google search trends for, I lost my sense of taste, or whatever. Yeah.

• 2:01:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, like literally, right? It's like these very small ideas. So we wanted something that'd be quick, it'd monitor the air. And it's like, the joke more recently is like a Shazam for the air, like, how do we just like?

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Shazam for the air. I like that. Any plans to put it on a robotic dog? You got the, you got the drug sniffing dog, the bomb sniffing dog. I like the idea of a pandemic sniffing robotic dog. Could probably carry that payload, maybe, who knows? What are you thinking?

• 2:01:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, it could certainly be interesting. I think that there's also a possibility of putting this thing on drones.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Or wheels, yeah. You can drive around in them.

• 2:01:49Speaker 07

  Shot on wheels, yeah. Just like have it right after people at TSA, just like coming up to them and staring at them.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56Speaker 07

  It would certainly be very interesting.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Well, good luck. Congratulations. I'm glad you have fresh funding to help keep the airways safe.

• 2:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very important work and fantastic progress.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love to see it.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Jake.

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on, Jake. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our final guest of the show is the co-founder of Freebean. We have Adam here with the first appearance. But there's been a little Easter egg this whole show. We have his product here with us in the TBP and UltraDome. On the desk.

• 2:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Cracking open a can of Ramp.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Started the show.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  This was a dream of Jordi's. He had this idea a year ago, two years ago. He wanted this.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  I was searching for more ad inventory. We had, we had more ad inventory than any show on earth, but I wasn't going to settle there. I wanted more ad inventory. And I thought we're drinking, we're not getting paid to drink.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  On the show. How do we fix that?

• 2:02:59Speaker 08

  You're not, but, but now you have some new ad inventory courtesy of Ramp.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Yes, and Freebean. So, yeah, tell us about you, your business, your career. Get us up to speed on all this.

• 2:03:11Speaker 08

  Absolutely. I'm Adam Krasinski. I'm the founder of Freebean. Freebean is a targeted, trackable, and tangible out-of-home advertising medium built on free coffee.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:21Speaker 08

  We started the business while I was in college, a senior at the University of Michigan. And I've never had a full-time job, so.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Oh, very, very, very great story.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, how much do you know about the, the sort of like white space in advertising inventory? I'm obsessed with, you know, app love and finding that people were playing hyper casual mobile games. They went and found this pool that wasn't on Instagram, wasn't on Facebook, and they blew it up to a huge business. At the same time, on the other end, I know someone who did like free napkins and fortune cookies for Chinese restaurants, but put ads on them. And it was pure margin because the napkins are pretty cheap. And so they would go and say, hey, restaurant, do you want some, do you want some ad-supported napkins? And the advertisers would say, yeah, we'd love to put our logo all over that bar. What is the shape of these opportunities? Why did you pick beverage? And then, you

• 2:04:18John Coogan?

  know, how has it actually been going distributing this to various places to get in the hands of consumers?

• 2:04:25Speaker 08

  Distribution has been going incredible. We just crossed the 100,000 can mark

• 2:04:29John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:04:29Speaker 08

  Across a bunch of different channels, accelerators and incubators in partnership with

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:04:34Speaker 08

  Entrepreneurs First, Adler, Techstars, conferences and trade shows are a huge channel for us as well. And then on the consumer facing side, college campuses and things like that.

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:04:44Speaker 08

  The reason for beverage mainly is because it's tangible and consumable. We like to say that this is an ad you sip, not skip when talking advertisers. It's really one of the only formats that's actually consumed. It's, it's super unique.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:59Speaker 08

  And the reason we chose coffee, 66% of US adults drink it every single day.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:05Speaker 08

  It's an extremely popular beverage.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:07Speaker 08

  And it's, it allows us to target virtually any type of demographic, regardless of what brand is on the cans. It could be Ramp or it could be Red Lobster and other customer of ours.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:05:18Speaker 08

  Their customers all drink coffee.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:20Speaker 08

  Or at least two thirds of them do.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:21Speaker 08

  So it allows us to target those people effectively and drive high return for, for advertisers and brands.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the, oh, sorry.

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Fellow Michigan student just texted us and, and, or former student. Didn't graduate, but just texted us if you plan to expand into beers. Is that, is that, is that a potential category?

• 2:05:46Speaker 08

  I have been asked that a lot. Alcohol is tough, so we're, we're sticking with coffee for now. Maybe down the line, we'll expand to beer, but we'll have to, we'll have to.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  I say skip beer, straight shot to the original Four Loko recipe. Bring it back, ramp, wrap it in a brand.

• 2:06:03Speaker 08

  Four Loko might be, might be the move. I know you, the, on YC Demo Day, when the guy had the humanoid and you were like, can you shotgun that Ramp cold brew? And then somebody's like, oh, Four Loko. So maybe.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:06:16Speaker 08

  These are shotgunable though.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Maybe in the future. What, what is the, what is the key to success as a brand partnering with you? Is it, I go to you, I, I buy a bunch of cans. I mean, the brand looks great on, on, on the actual can. But then should I, should I mail these to my, to my customers? Should I have this at my conference? Like, how should I think about actually getting the most out of the, the pallet when it's delivered? Do you handle logistics if I want to send it to my customers to remind them that they should be talking to their sales, to my sales reps, for example? Like, what is the right way to actually get this in the hands of potential customers?

• 2:06:52Speaker 08

  Sure. So when it comes to distribution, if we're looking at gifting, something that Ramp does a lot of actually, there's usually third-party fulfillment partners who will handle the packing of those cans and then shipping them out to, you know, maybe a prospect or something like that. For the right distribution channel for the brand, it's, it's dependent on a couple of factors. Some brands take the approach of, hey, this is a brand campaign, or some look at it as an acquisition channel. And conferences work extremely well. We've been outside some major ones, Figma, Config, with Paper went super viral on Twitter. And they basically called it the highest converting booth at the conference without a booth.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:07:34Speaker 08

  Because Paper was everywhere at their direct competitors' conference. And so, again, you think about like putting something that's tangible in somebody's hands, where traditional advertising formats don't really deliver anything to the consumer. Billboard companies, the consumer just sees a billboard. But when you allow a brand to put something in someone's hands for free, especially something that's expensive and, and increasing in price, you create this reciprocity effect where a person is opting in to seeing an ad. And they're saying, okay, I'm going to take an ad. I'm, I'm going to take a free coffee as well. And it just drives higher return for the brand.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question for me. Talk about what it takes to work with you. Do you have hard minimums? Do you have maximum capacity right now? What's the sweet spot of a brand coming to you? Is it 1,000 cans for a conference, 10,000 cans? What, where, what's a, what's a really down the line pitch for you these days?

• 2:08:36Speaker 08

  For a conference, it's primarily dependent on the size of the conference. If we're talking about Dreamforce.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44Speaker 08

  A brand is going to want a lot more cans. If it's a smaller conference, they'll want a lot less cans. We do have a hard minimum specifically for our storefront, which we just launched our grand opening on Wednesday in New York City between Bryant Park and Grand Central. It is the world's first free coffee shop.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:09:01Speaker 08

  And as you can imagine, the coffee is literally free. You walk in.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  Ad-supported coffee.

• 2:09:07Speaker 08

  You ask for.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wait, so what are the different, yeah, what are the different, what brands can I, can I enjoy free coffee from?

• 2:09:15Speaker 08

  So at our storefront, we have Ramp, Novig, Warp, Outset, Paper and Outset, and, and Bland.

• 2:09:22Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  So good.

• 2:09:23Jordi Hays?

  You can get AI voice-supported coffee, you can get gambling-supported coffee, you can get enterprise payment-supported coffee. It's really like a choose your own adventure kind of thing.

• 2:09:33Speaker 08

  It is. What I think is also really interesting, there's a, a negative sentiment around AI advertising, more so New York than San Francisco, of course, but people don't seem to care. And as I alluded to, where you provide value to the consumer.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:50Speaker 08

  They're like, hey, I'm, I'm opting in to get this advertisement. And yeah, it's okay if, you know, a, a voice AI company is saying, hey, call this phone number to learn how.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:01Speaker 08

  Customer calls can help.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, nobody's vandalizing these.

• 2:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Any plans, any plans to add a speaker to the, to the can? The bottom of the can sip and chirp out, you know? While you're enjoying the sip, you know, you, you might be interested in learning that, you know, Ramp customers save an average of 5% on their expenses.

• 2:10:19Speaker 08

  Probably, probably no speaker, but we are exploring thermochromic ink, similar like a Coors can where if it's cold, it displays something different than when it warms up a little bit.

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I love, I love your clarity of, of, of thought on, on this opportunity. It's, uh.

• 2:10:36Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 2:10:36Jordi Hays?

  It's clearly very sharp and, uh, yeah, I'm excited for you to scale to billions of cans annually.

• 2:10:44Speaker 08

  Thank you, guys. Thank you, guys. I appreciate it.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  Come back on the show soon.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's do it. And, and we have a bunch more advertisers, so let's, uh, let's get them all on board.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  We got more cans. We need more cans.

• 2:10:54Speaker 08

  Let's, we, we have a, a solid amount of crossover, more than you'd think.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  Mongo DB, yeah, fantastic. Ramp, obviously. We'd love to do more. Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Adam.

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

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

• 2:11:05Speaker 08

  Sounds great.

• 2:11:06John Coogan?

  Goodbye. That's our show, folks. We'll be back on Monday at 11:00 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Spotify.

• 2:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Lot of excitement heading into the weekend.

• 2:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  From people. I mean, you can just, it's, you can feel the energy in the UltraDome.

• 2:11:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  People are, we're hanging out.

• 2:11:24Jordi Hays?

  You got three more sleeps till Monday.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:26Jordi Hays?

  People are counting it down.

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  Counting it down.

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Counting.

• 2:11:28John Coogan?

  Have people been counting down the days to Christmas? I feel like we missed the road to Christmas today.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  What is it? I think we're at 90 days, a nice round number. That's a huge deal. We got 90 days until Christmas, so start shopping, start shopping, start planning, start thinking about it.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And again, this is the weekend to get on it, get your tree, get it set up.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:50Jordi Hays?

  And get after it.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  It's also only 455 days until the next Christmas. So you could start thinking about that as well, but, uh, you know, you want to focus on the next 90 days.

• 2:12:02Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you Monday, folks.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  See ya. Goodbye.