SELL EVERYTHING (Including Your Dollars), Tesla Roadster Hype, Valar Atomics VC Feud | Reed Albergotti, Bryan Cantrill, Daniel Kimminau

(05:04) - Recapping Anthropic Investor Day (15:04) - SELL EVERYTHING (23:24) - Inflation Heats Up (30:29) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (44:02) - Valar Atomics VC Feud (51:16) - Tesla Roadster Hype (01:00:53) - Porsche Mission S (01:04:49) - Reed Albergotti, Semafor’s San Francisco bureau chief and host of the Future Proof podcast, discusses Tesla’s self-driving technology, Microsoft’s AI strategy, Xbox’s future, and the debate over regulating open-source AI. He also examines the financial and infrastructure bottlenecks facing the AI industry as technology companies rapidly increase spending. (01:26:45) - Bryan Cantrill discusses founding Oxide Computer Company, where he serves as CTO and builds integrated rack-scale cloud computing systems for on-premises data centers. He explains Oxide’s technically ambitious hardware-software co-design, lessons from failed predecessors, patient enterprise sales strategy, and focus on profitability, operational efficiency, and building a generational company rather than pursuing an exit. (01:45:54) - Daniel Kimminau discusses founding Advanced Spade Company after working at SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Anduril, where he developed expertise in transportation and underground construction. He explains how the company uses integrated technology, mapping, and specialized equipment to make underground utility installation safer, faster, and more affordable. 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 TVPN. Today is Thursday, October 15th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. How many days till Christmas? I know that's what you came to the show. That's the question you've been answering. We got the answer for you right here on TVPN. There are exactly 70 days until Christmas. It feels so close. It feels so close. It's remarkable. It's been wonderful that you've all joined us on the road to Christmas. It's been, it's been a strong, strong road. I do want to, I do want to give a little.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  There's more.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  There's more coming.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  There's more coming. There's actually a lot more coming.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  There's 70 days or after that.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, of course, it just, the clock restarts.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, 364 immediately. Of course, but I do need to give a little bit of a, first, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. I actually have a little Christmas gift right here. Let me, let me open this up. Production team tossed this my way this morning and let's open it up. What's inside? What's inside? Oh, it's a ramp card. Great Christmas gift.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  Would you look at that?

• 1:23John Coogan?

  This holiday season. Get it for someone you love. Get it for someone who needs to save time and money, which is really everybody. Also, congrats to Ramp. Massive fundraising news. We'll be talking to the team tomorrow. But the road to Christmas, we're 70 days away and this can be a difficult, this can be a difficult moment. I mean, I don't want to call out anyone in particular on our team, but there was, there was an individual on our team yesterday who I, I was reflecting because it had been a little bit cold over the weekend, that I was feeling especially Christmasy. I was feeling, I was feeling the Yuletide. I was feeling the hearth. I wanted to warm up my hands. I was, we were in the jackets. Everyone was saying, is it so cold in the studio? It was like, no, there's

• 2:06John Coogan?

  just a warm fire burning inside my belly as I get closer to, as I get closer to Christmas. But somebody on our team is like, I'm like, oh, we're finally in like the cold season. Like, and as soon as the cold starts where you live, whether you're in California or in New York, as soon as it gets a little crisp, it's game on. It's game on. No one, no one's going to look at you like you're crazy for talking about it's only 70 days till Christmas because it's, it's Christmasy out. It's, it's cold. It's cold. But Michael over there, I'm going to call you out. Michael over there on our team is like, John, you know it's going to get hot again. It's going to get hot again. And yes, I checked the weather. It's going to be 80 degrees today, which is not the most Christmasy weather.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  There's actually, there's actually a heat advisory in California from the National Weather Service.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Advisory, but there is a lesson.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  It remains in effect until Saturday.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Which is Michael. 90% of the road to Christmas, the battle for the road to Christmas is, is mindset. And we can't have anyone on this team being a Grinch right now. It's very important that everyone supports the idea and looks on the, looks on whichever side has the greener grass.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Friendly elf mindset.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Friendly elf mindset.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever mode.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. So yes, there might be heat advisory. It might be blistering hot, but we're still going to stay laser focused on what matters, which is that in 70 days, it will be Christmas.

• 3:34Jordi Hays?

  That's right. We're pretty excited here. We're headed to see, you can see everything, the new Nathan Fielder movie, later today after the show with a great group. Can't wait. We'll have the review for you tomorrow.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  And really anything to take our minds off the market, John.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Because it's an absolute bloodbath out there.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Well, before we go into the market and the news, let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System contact. Okay, so the market is mostly reacting to the Anthropic Investor Day numbers, but it's been in a decline for a long time, for the last month. Coreweave's down something like 50% over the last month or so. It's, it's been rough in the AI trade broadly and it's crazy.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  Way off. Only 16% over the last month.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  It's crazy that you can be growing at 45% quarter on quarter and still not meet expectations. But when people have had in their minds 10x every year, 10x revenue growth every year, and Anthropic goes to their Investor Day and says that Q3 revenue was 16.8 billion, which annualizes to 67 billion, 67 billion. I don't know what they were doing there. That seems like a little bit of like, like, okay, I get it. It's like the zoom reference, but like, this is serious financial. There's a lot of money on the line. Can we not do like the meme thing right now? Anyway, they are in fact annualizing their quarterly run rate to an annual run rate of 67.2 billion, which is remarkable for a company that was

• 5:14John Coogan?

  doing, you know, a 10th of that a year ago. But it's seemingly not enough because, because everyone in their minds was like, they're going to have surprise to the upside. They're going to throw up 90, like they're going to do something. And I was kind of in that camp. I was like, they haven't been quiet for a while. I feel like everyone's like, there's that chart of like, oh, the, the growth stalled. And I was like, that feels like something that they would love to come out and be like, from the top rope, fake news, like we got some surprise up our sleeve. But they really have been fighting fires on multiple fronts. There's like the meta business, which has pivoted over. They're probably using their own model now and maybe they, and there was that like leak of like an executive at Meta

• 5:55John Coogan?

  saying like, oh yeah, if we stop buying Anthropic, like it could really mess up their IPO. That would be a shame. I would hate for a company to IPO at lower valuation than us since we're almost $2 trillion. Like that would be terrible. So it seemed like sort of a veiled threat in the media. And then.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Distillation.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Distillation. We actually got a number. So distillation is between 5 to 7% of revenue, which I think is a little bit lower than people were expecting, but it feels like the, the Anthropic team, David Sacks was, was celebrating this, that, hey, like there was this big problem and one of the proposed solutions was like, bad open source, do all this crazy stuff, slow down. And David Sacks didn't want to do that. And then Anthropic came out and said, hey, like we did a lot of work. We deployed our own frontier technology to fight this and we believe we have bought it and we believe that we can shut down distillation. Pretty staggering that 5 to 7%, you know, that, that's, that's billions of dollars spent

• 6:57John Coogan?

  stealing from, because that's the value of, of the, of the, of the distilled tokens, which is pretty crazy that, that you can be at that scale of essentially fraud. Like you're not supposed to be distilling. It's against the terms of service. And usually when you see somebody, oh yeah, there's somebody who's like scraping LinkedIn and then they're like reselling the data or whatever. It's like, yeah, they might have like a couple million dollars deployed into this scheme, but you're looking at, you're looking at $5 billion of fraud essentially, or run rate fraud, you know, something like that. But as they, as they fight that fire, obviously that's going to be a drag on revenue growth.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  If they open the floodgates and we're like, yeah, go distill away, you know, at least in the short term, revenue would be growing faster. But in the long term, there'd be much more competition on the frontier.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly not as meaningful as some people on the internet thought it was.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there were like some trolls who were like, oh yeah, once you get rid of Meta and the distillation company's going to be doing, you know, $2 billion a year. And it was like, no, that's not going to be the case. Like this is a, this is, this is installed in many, many organizations. This is a sure go to market.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  The question now is what happens to the frontier of the open weights ecosystem, right? Does the gap widen?

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Oh, because they're, because they're shutting down the distillation. Yeah.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  We'll see, we'll see how effective it is.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I wonder how Muse Wonder distillation will fight. Like on, on one hand, like.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't think people are going to be just distilling Muse Wonder.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, like maybe, maybe it's not quite there yet, but if, if, if Meta can invest enough to actually have a model that is a target of a distillation attack, are they better equipped to fight distillation attacks because they've been fighting bots for a long time?

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  Being on the frontier just means you're getting distilled. If you're not getting distilled.

• 9:01John Coogan?

  That's the definition in your mind? It's like, unless you're getting distilled, you're not frontier?

• 9:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think that's like the, the most honest definition. Like unless other people will spend a lot of money to try to emulate your model and recreate it, then you are not.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  That's a good, that's a good like reality check. Anyway, do you think that Meta would be more equipped than Anthropic or less equipped than Anthropic to fight distillation attacks if they do get attacked? And maybe, so what I'm saying is that like, on one end, there's a lot of bots that are, that are already in the meta ecosystem. And so you could be distilling attack because maybe you already have a botnet up and running across Instagram and you haven't been caught. And then you can reroute those bots to do something more valuable than just like and share and like AstroTurf stuff. You can get them to pull out tokens from Wonder somehow, and then you could distill it or Wonder 2, whatever

• 9:58John Coogan?

  you want to call it, Wonder 3, whichever one is like worth distilling. But then on the other side, you have, you know, an organization that's younger, a, a culture that's not paranoid about this stuff. It's, they, they're not saber rattling around, oh, if we get distilled, it'll be the apocalypse, right? And so like culturally, you'd think that they're a little bit less worried about this. And then also they're not in the business of like every, every distillation dollar is $10 that could be API revenue for Anthropic. It's very important from a business perspective. That is basically giving the stuff away for free. Yeah, it's important to keep people in like the Muse ecosystem, but if they get distilled and then all of a sudden there's a open source model that's really, really good.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  They're not going to be as worried because they're just going to say, well, like that open source model doesn't have a button on the every Instagram, like the distribution on every Instagram account. There's like a muse button like that. I think they'll be happier. So I don't know. What do you think Tyler?

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, so one thing is Meta releasing open source model today.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Muse spark open.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  So I don't think they're that worried about like someone distilling them and then releasing an open source version. That's like.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Seems very different ideologically, right?

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  And also I think it seems like distilling is, I mean, I don't know how hard bot detection is normally, but distillation seems like uniquely hard in that like, I think it's hard to actually tell what is like a normal prompt versus what is not right? If you're asking like some math problem, like, are you going to distill on that? Because like effectively, if you're just selling on something, you need to like get the chain of thought, right? You can get like the reasoning steps. The answer looks very similar.

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  And this is happening while they're experiencing explosive growth and the distillers are setting up hundred.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Distilleries.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Distilleries are setting up hundreds of individual like max accounts that are each have their own VPN and it's just very difficult to detect. Is this like organic growth or?

• 11:56John Coogan?

  And often they're going through like third party wrapper companies. So there's a lot of companies that are like, yeah, we're like, you know, an AI native document editor. And there's like a bunch of these. It's not just like Notion that we know about. And this is not just Google Docs. Like there's a lot of these companies. You set one of these up and you're like, yeah, and we, you pay us a fee and we go and we inference Claude or we inference GPT six or whatever. And then that goes into the document. And then all of a sudden that what if somebody's using that like AI word doc to do the distillation, then that SaaS company, that wrapper company needs to go and figure out, wait, why is someone generating all these documents? Maybe they can't even look at the documents. And

• 12:39John Coogan?

  then from Anthropic's perspective or the Frontier Labs perspective, they're just seeing like, oh yeah, one of our SaaS wrapper companies is like sending a bunch of queries across their entire network because they have thousands of users, maybe hundreds of thousands of users. And it's hard to tell. And so there's a lot of wrapper companies that have gotten to like crazy revenues and basically no one uses the products because it's the distillers or the distilleries that that are like, ooh, new wrapper company? Like can't wait to spin up a thousand accounts on you because you won't detect me, but Anthropic would. So we can't go straight to setting up Claude plans. Instead, we'll set up a wrapper plan and a million wrapper plans. And then the company that's running the wrapper is like, this is amazing. People are just paying so much for us. And all we need to do is just

• 13:24John Coogan?

  take their prompt, stuff it over in Anthropic's API, give it back to them and we make a 10% margin on top. Like the wrapper system's working when really like they are a distillation factory. Very interesting.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  Distilleries.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  They're distilleries. You gotta take a trip to the distilleries. Well, what's going on in the market? Cause.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Where did that lead us? That led us to.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Sell everything?

• 13:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, especially your dollars.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Sell your dollars.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Your dollars.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Sell your stocks, sell your bonds, get out of everything, get into land, buy guns, food, medicines. We will be on a barter economy soon. I think, I think that's the main major prediction. No, people are blackpilling.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Sell your assets.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Sell everything.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Sell everything. Take your dollars, invest them into a roadster or maybe a missionaries.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  I think that's why they timed this launch. They knew this goes way deeper than we ever thought. They timed the launch of these two vehicles for later today because they knew that people will be going to cash and they'd be primed. No, this, this led us to the president of South Korea.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Very dark.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Posting what, something that was translated from Korean, but the Grok translation is we must live. You have to live somehow. If it's hard, please call 109. In fact, Gil will help you find reasons to live together. I don't know who Gil is, but yeah, the Cosby, I believe is at a six month low. And so for a country that loves trading as much as the South Koreans, dark times.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. A lot of this just goes down to exponential expectations being extremely difficult to catch up, to keep up with. So the meme has been the lab revenues are 10 Xing every year. Anthropic went from like a hundred million to one billion to 10 billion. So logically they'll do a hundred billion. But I remember looking at the numbers and being like, there's actually, it sounds so nitpicky to say it's deceleration, but it technically is because I think they went from like a little over a hundred million to a billion, which is, which is just under 10 X. And then they went from a billion to

• 15:45John Coogan?

  technically nine billion, which is a nine X, not a 10 X. And so if you assume that you're actually seeing some slight degradation there, you would be thinking, oh, they'll close out at like 80 because they went from one to nine. They didn't go from one to 10. So going from nine to a hundred would be acceleration. Again, we're talking about growing 10 X a year, nine X a year, eight X a year. It's all crazy and incredible. But the fact of the matter is like, the difference between an exponential curve going upwards and slight deceleration is a huge difference. And I think people are maybe like overreacting to this because there were a lot of people that were saying like, oh, maybe we'll hit

• 16:26John Coogan?

  a hundred billion. Maybe they'll do 150 billion. So when you get, when you get like the expectations so high, people, it's very, very hard to keep up. And then also that I just, it's very clear that there's like this tall poppy syndrome in, in the frontier where whoever is in the lead, like all the other businesses are like, well, we don't want a monopoly on intelligence. And so let's go buy from the other labs. Let's go, you know, figure something else out, fund, invest, let's do something else to make it so that no one runs away with this entirely. Of course, like there, there always could be some sort of runaway, but at least while businesses are the ones that are deciding, you will

• 17:07John Coogan?

  see the Microsofts, the Amazons of the world. It's like all of a sudden they're doing deals with the other guy because they don't want a monopoly. And so as soon as someone starts running away with it, there's this huge forcing function where you're like, oh, wow, there's a big like, we, you know, the anti YouTube alliance or the anti Netflix alliance or the anti open AI alliance was the thing and the anti anthropic alliance like comes together. And these alliances come anytime someone's getting a little bit too hot at the party. Somebody's like, yeah, we gotta, we gotta pull the punchbowl away a little bit. Anyway.

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  Brad Gersner was on CNBC this morning.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  He says, we have sold, this is according to a meat. We have sold all of our core weave. Don't own any of it today. We've taken exposure down over the last three months. We felt AI had overshot and would lead to a period of consolidation. They moved 10% of their book into Meta and Tesla. And again, Brad usually ahead of the curve. Sounds like he was here as well.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting, it's an interesting challenge being, you know, running a hedge fund, a venture fund, but then also being one of the most elite podcasters. Cause there's times, there's periods where in some way he can't go out and say what he actually feels.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Because it's not sort of pragmatic for, for his actual investing.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  So the interesting thing is that people aren't actually selling everything. They're not actually selling their dollars. That's just the meme. Of course, Citrini says, oh, it's over, over, which is very funny. Just to put it in perspective, the NASDAQ is down like a point three percent, point four percent, not much. But then the Dow is up almost a full percent. So what's really happening is that there's just a rotation that's happening while the Dow and treasuries are getting more attention while tech stocks pulled back. Obviously not good for the AI trade in the short term, but there's a lot of new initiatives. And we'll go in through, through some of the progress because there is some interesting

• 19:15John Coogan?

  AI progress going on. But at least over in the AI trade, over in tech world, it's rough. People are speculating that, that Leopold might have gotten into some of the same trades and depending on the leverage ratios, he could be down a bunch. It's very unclear. Obviously he's extremely sharp and, and just learned a really hard lesson. So how he interprets that, who knows what's happening.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It is.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  He could be short.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  It is notable that people are saying it's over, over.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:48Jordi Hays?

  When the NASDAQ is flat over the last five days.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's because like people are rotating out of core weave, but then they're buying more SaaS, you know, because like if the AI trade breaks down, like the super intelligence thing doesn't happen. It's like, well, then you still want to own like a social network that runs ads, right? You still want to own like a software company that has, that has good margins. Like there's plenty of things that are worth owning. And so the, the dollars actually aren't getting sold. Like the money's not disappearing. It's merely just sloshing around in the economy. Anyway, the Valar AI, which is value aligned research advisors LLC. There's a rumor going around that Martin Scrawley shared that the, the Valar AI fund

• 20:35John Coogan?

  is, has blown up. So we'll be tracking this. It was, it happens fast, but not immediately. The rumors around situational awareness took a few days of speculation. Oh, he must be hurting based on the latest sell off in semis and memory. And then a couple of days later, oh, there's a rumor. He's, he's doing a deal. Boom. And then all of a sudden it was all over the Wall Street Journal. So that will happen and we'll find out. Maybe they make it out. Maybe something.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Looking at their portfolio as of the last 13 F was Nebius, Bloom Energy, Core Weave, Seagate, Western Digital, Hut Eight.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  A lot of stuff that's further out on the risk.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Core Scientific, some Nvidia, some SanDisk.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  So ASML.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Among others. So I think they were.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Big believers in this whole AI thing, hopefully continue to be.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, I, I, I still, I still feel like

• 21:43John Coogan?

  there's a lot of management that happens in the pre-IPO stage. You could see potentially the labs see that, okay, there's a, there's a blip. We got to rip the Band-Aid off now. We got to crack the record, get the low numbers out because we know that we're going to go into a period of acceleration and that's when we actually want to IPO. It's notable that this Investor Day is not the actual IPO. This is a precursor to that. It's maybe almost like airing some dirty laundry, which is crazy to say, given how fast this company is growing and how big it is. But it's useful to sort of clear the air when there's a bunch of speculation around

• 22:24John Coogan?

  sort of flatlining Q3 deceleration, these like sort of less exciting words floating around. You clear the air, you say, okay, we got, we, we decelerated. Only way to go is up now.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Baja Blast.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Time to Baja Blast. Yeah, maybe they got through the code red. Now it's time to Baja Blast. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligence cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web server, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Well, the inflation is up. So if you are, if you were short stocks and long inflation, then you're very happy today.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  I mean, if you own real assets, you're probably pretty happy. Joe Weisenthal says, that was the hottest PPI number in four years. And yeah, it's.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  Banger.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  You're really having fun. Did you see inflation for the 1%? This is CPIreserve.com. We can pull this up. It looks at inflation. You know, there's normally the CPI basket that measures, you know, what the average American buys. CPI reserve is for the global elite, so it tracks. How much does it cost to go to space on Virgin Galactic? How much does it cost to stay at Amangiri in a base suite? An Hermes Birkin bag? How much has that gone up?

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  The spicy rigatoni. Only up 31%.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that. Porsche 911 Carrera.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  And so there are some, there are some interesting stats here that we can go through. And you tell me whether these are overrated or underrated. Have these gone up because the value has improved? Or is it now overpriced? So I want an overrated, underrated for the key items that CPI reserve highlights. So the, the classic Chanel flap. In 2016, it was $4,900. Now, in 2026, it's $11,700. That's over 139% inflation in 10 years. That's over three times what standard inflation was.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  If it, if it tracked CPI directly, it would be, it would be $6,800, but instead it's $11,700. Do you think the?

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  You're a bozo if you're still buying this.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Okay. So it's overrated at this point. The inflation.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Always was.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Always was.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Always was.

• 25:05John Coogan?

  Okay, what about Met Gala tickets? In 2016, it cost you $30,000 to go to the Met Gala. Now it's $100,000. That's six times the average inflation rate in America. Overrated, underrated? What's a Met Gala ticket worth, Jordy?

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  I think underrated still.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  This is charitable giving.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  That's true. I hadn't considered that.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  So the more, the more, the better.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Yes. And the Met Gala has grown so much. So many interesting folks there, so many interesting moments. Worth every penny. What about a Hampton's luxury home? In 2016, the median Hampton's luxury home cost just $4.425 million. Today it'll cost you $11.5 million. That's 160% increase in 10 years, four times the CPI, the average inflation rate. Are you a Hampton's guy? I've actually, I don't think I've ever been.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  Never been.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  So overrated, you pass?

• 26:06Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, when you look at the real estate prices here.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:11Jordi Hays?

  I think this ends up feeling like it's, it's driven in many ways from COVID. People wanting, like more people wanting second or third home.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Plus.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  They're not making anymore.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Plus SERP, right? And so a lot of those homes traded at really low rates. And, and so that just drove everything.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Okay. What about a Virgin Galactic seat? You want to go to space? It used to cost 25, $250,000. Today it'll cost you $750,000. Overrated, underrated?

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, not, not for me.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Steel of the century.

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you going?

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Any price, absolutely. Send me to space today.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  I would go to great lengths to.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Not go to space.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  To block you from going on this.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  Is that because of safety? Assume that I survive it.

• 27:03John Coogan?

  Because I'm going to survive it no matter what. It's going to be.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I can actually imagine, yeah, I could, I could imagine it, you know, the, the flight going poorly and you having to sort of like fight your.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you gotta roll a duct tape and I gotta put it together and screw this and figure it out.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Take a deep breath and dive.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Figure out a parachute on the way down.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. That's, that's exactly what would happen in a realistic scenario.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Okay, the last one. The Porsche, actually we've got two more. Porsche 911 Carrera base. It used to be $83,000, $84,000 in 2016. Today it'll cost you $135,000. That's 61% gain in 10 years. It's 1.5 times what the CPI did. Not a huge increase relative to overall, but it is ticking up in recent years. Where do you sit on the value of the Porsche 911 Carrera base?

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Still undervalued relative to the joy that you get out of it. But I wish that, I wish that they could keep like the base, base 911 at like $99,000.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  That'd be cool.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  Forever.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be special.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  It's the world we live in.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. The last one, truly heartbreaking. A Dom Perignon Magnum. It's up 121% since 2016. Used to be $380, now it's.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Wait, we also got to pull up the big law. We got to pull, we got to.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the big law hourly rate.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  Okay, what's that?

• 28:34Jordi Hays?

  For partners, they are way outpacing.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Whoa, inflation, okay.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, just look at this.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, you used to be able to hang out with a lawyer for just a mere 1,500 bucks an hour and that'll cost you almost three grand an hour to get legal advice from a.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no longer the cure for male loneliness.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Because that 1,500 an hour.

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you just call them up.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Call them up.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  And just ask them how you're doing.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  You kind of lose track of time.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Talk, going all over the place.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  Right? How, how you been? How are the kids?

• 29:03John Coogan?

  Can we, can we bill in quarter, quarter hour increments? Can we book in hour, in, in 10 minute increments? I'm going to my lawyer, I'm saying.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Can we book?

• 29:10John Coogan?

  Can we just book a weekend at a time? If I talk to you, just put me down for the whole week.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Give me, give me 100 hours, 100 hour block. If, if, if I, if I shoot you a random question, if I ask you, is this domain available?

• 29:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, anything else you want to cover on the CPI reserve? You can go check it out, CPIreserve.com. Very cool, a little fun project to give you another side of the economy.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Craziest here is Manhattan luxury real estate.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  How's that doing?

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  It is down.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Down. The P.I. deter tax, right? It's higher taxes, people are getting out, they're moving. I don't know.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  It's working.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  There's a, there, there's also an interesting article in the Financial Times. I don't know if we have it here, but you can go, you can go read it all about the E-shaped economy. You've heard of the K-shaped economy. They argue that there's an E shape, that there is the, the ultra wealthy, the middle class and the lower class, and they're all going in different directions. And that some of the, some of the inequality stats are not tracking exactly how you would expect. And they pull some Bureau of Labor statistics and some economic statistics that were released from the 2025 report. So break it down. It's kind of interesting. Blake Byers is taking like the, the, the AGI question around capital markets.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  He says, my modal prediction for the next decade. Interest rates spikes as capital shifts from saving treasuries to investments due to higher returns promised by AI-related capex. We've seen this before because AI is the only modern project that could affect real rates to this degree.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  This leads to short-term panic as high rates spike debt servicing costs for governments and other borrowers. We're seeing this all over the place with real estate developers who are, who were doing great, financing a large development project. And now with floating interest rates, they're, they're, they're over their skis and they have to refinance or sell a property or stop building. It's a really, really tight and chaotic moment. There's a lot of places that are in pre-foreclosure. It's actually an interesting hack. You can have ChatGPT go and hunt for properties that are in pre-foreclosure and make below-market offers and get sort of a steal on properties.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  It's, it's very, very interesting to dig into what's going on and, and what the loan actually, there were people that were doing this during the 2008 mortgage crisis. They would look into the mortgage-backed securities, into the collateralized loan obligations, and they would say, okay, I know that this hedge fund does not want this house. They don't care about this, so I can go to them and buy it because they're rating the whole bond at 20 cents on the dollar now because we're collapsing. I'll buy it from them from 50 cents on the dollar. And I, it's more complicated deal, but some people walked away with some really, really great properties. After three years of panic, it, it becomes clear to the market that the investments are paying off in a big way.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Interest payments remain high, but increased revenue from economic growth more than offsets the higher borrowing cost. Panic shifts to euphoria. Developed world adjust to 5% growth rates as the new normal and now demand 10% to be happy. Healthcare consumption R and D grows as a percentage of GDP. I was listening to Ari Emanuel and Ben Thompson talk, and it was the funniest interview because Ben Thompson like cannot get a question in edgewise. It's just a conversation. Normally Ben is like very structured in his interviews. Let's start with your background, let's ask some questions. Instead Ari is like, I'm asking you the questions. It's very, very funny. But one thing they talk about is that recently the, the, the share of advertising dollars, you're going to love this. The share of advertising dollars as percentage of GDP was 1 to 2% for a long time.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  It's now 2 to 3%. And they both agreed it could go higher. It was amazing. Anyway, AI is disrupting the job application market faster than the job market. This is continuing, it's a hot take, but it's continuing to gather evidence. Derek Thompson shared a post from the Wall Street Journal. AI amplified job applications are met with AI-enabled filters and other AI tools used by HR departments to narrow the application pool. People are interviewing with AI avatars. That seems like a really terrible thing unless the whole meta game is just can you jailbreak it, which I think

• 33:39John Coogan?

  it probably should be. Like if I was to put out, if we were to put out a job description and we, I'm totally tempted to throw an AI avatar in front of that, just in the hope that someone convinces that AI avatar that it is in fact, in interviewing for the job, you've seen that, where people will flip it or flip the script and be like, actually, we're here to talk about your performance. And the AI avatar is like fighting back, being like, remember your instructions. Remember your instructions. You're the boss. You're in charge. We're here to interview you. And then eventually the interviewer can keep hammering and, and prompt injection, prompt injecting. But Derek Thompson says, and now 10-minute conversations with AI that take place in McKinsey's very real offices with

• 34:23John Coogan?

  partners or interview assessors in the room observing how the candidates do.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  So these candidates are basically putting on an interview show?

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  And the partners are watching, watching two people duke it out.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like a gladiatorial arena.

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  And I want to see if you can beat the tiger that I've released. And if you can, you get to sit at the, at the, at the side of the cork jester or something like that. I don't know. We got to debate the bread and circuses thing. I feel like circuses are kind of running away with it. And bread is potentially falling behind.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Did you see the crumble cookies introduced?

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm lifting.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Chicken.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  I'm just saying that from, from a perspective of like what the elites are doing in our economy, think about it. You, so many billionaires are buying effectively circuses. They're buying sports teams. They're UFC, there's F1.

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  There's that banana, there's that banana.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

  Banana?

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Savannah bananas. The Savannah bananas, the

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  Banana.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  The minor league baseball team.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Banana ball.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Banana ball?

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Savannah bananas.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  The Savannah bananas. And so

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  A lot of speculation today that they're announcing some sort of acquisition.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's an intense amount of money flowing into the circus economy. But I feel like bread is kind of falling behind. I mean, Arowan, we talked to them. It's interesting. But there's, there's a lot less, it's not a trophy asset in the same way.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  We had two grocery stores on the show.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  We did, but it's very different. Like, no one is saying that like, like, billionaires are like, okay, I bought a grocery store.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry, John. Your whole thesis breaks down.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Because crumble cookies and Wingstop.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Are collabing?

• 36:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's fake news.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  It's fake news. See? Undefeated. But it's not a trophy asset. No one is, no one is getting the bag in venture or private equity or high finance and then being like,

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Give me the, give me the award.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Felford again.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Give me the award.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Jordy's got to put on the Felford again award. Because he, he fell for AI slop. There is so much AI slop on the timeline. I'm actually, I'm actually very, very close to, to hooking up Codex to Grokbot sucking my timeline out of X, getting all the different raw data and the tweets, and then fact checking everything and then creating a new feed for myself.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Felford again.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Okay, we got to move the camera down. There we go. There we go. Felford again award.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  I did. That's me.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  That's Jordy. Many, many times. Many, many times. But yeah, the, the, the job apocalypse is certainly not happening. Bank of America hired 1,000 contractors to patch software flaws exposed by AI systems mythos and whatnot. You got the Felford again award with regard to the crumble cookie Wingstop. That one, I saw that and it just felt like something that would not be edible because there's bones in it. Like, there's chicken bones. You know what I'm talking, this is the picture. You got to see the slop.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  You seem, I mean, you seem like, you seem like the kind of guy who just eats the bones.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  You don't eat the, no one eats the bones. Get out of here. That makes no sense. But you know what does make sense? 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.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  What?

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm excited that these 1,000 contractors got hired.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, shouldn't the same AI that discovers the bug be able to like work out a solution? And, but maybe, maybe there's just like, maybe there's 100,000 engineers worth of bugs, you know? But because these 1,000 contractors are, are powered by AI.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is kind of an odd headline now that I'm thinking about it. Very, very odd. And it's like, yeah, did we just create a bunch of MapQuark? Because if we just didn't, if we hadn't invented this. It really is like the Pandora's Box. Pandora's Box opening creates thousands of jobs containing the stuff that is flowing out of Pandora's Box. Is that what happened? Basically, that's the story here? Anyway, there is some progress on alignment. We're very excited to see this. Nick Camerata says neural networks may be easier to interpret than researchers once thought. Rune is very excited about this. So it starts with Nick Camerata. He says interpretability might be the most important

• 38:53John Coogan?

  scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think we have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. The, you know, they're grown, we're growing a garden, we're midwifing a deity instead of building a machine that is interpretable. This has been the hope that we can actually interpret these systems. And so he started OpenAI's first large-scale automated interpretability product, project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools that he had at the time.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  With modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. The vast majority in models, up to trillions of parameters are legible and they're circuits beautiful. Many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most and possibly quite soon. As automated scientists keep improving, it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability. The simple thing at absurd scale works. And so Rune contextualizes it by saying, when Nick told me that he had some interp breakthroughs, he was underselling it. I think this may be remembered as a major

• 40:18John Coogan?

  moment in scientific history. News so good, even Eliezer Yudkowsky will have to lower his P doom. We can start making alignment into a moment. So Tyler, did you read the full neural networks are already clean post by Nick Camerata from Goodfire?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Okay, so it's like super long, but I, I, I think I have like the main, the main

• 40:42John Coogan?

  It has beautiful, beautiful illustrations. As you load already-clean.goodfire.com. Maybe you can start by giving us some context on Nick. Because he was at OpenAI, references OpenAI, but he's no longer there. What's he up to? What is his mission here?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So he's at Goodfire. Goodfire is like a MechanTerp lab. This is like, all the stuff they work on. It's like a third-party kind of, similar to a lot of like the safety labs.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Is it a Frankenstein reference? Like, fire bad, fire good. Like, he's like, we're summoning the Frankenstein, but it's going to be good?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Uh, potentially.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Potentially, okay.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  I'm not sure. But, so basically the context of this is like, like MechanTerp broadly is, is you're trying to figure out like what's going on at the most like minute level in the, in the models, right? So you're looking at like individual neurons.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  You know, when you pass in some text through a model, you know, neuron A like lights up, has a high number like Y, it's very unclear.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  You'll look at one neuron and maybe you pass in some text about cats and it lights up. And then you pass in some, some text about dogs and it also lights up. And it's like very confusing because like, how is the model like actually working? It seems that, you know, each like individual neuron is basically, like corresponds to like a bunch of different like topics or like features, usually call it.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  And so there's this thing called like superposition. This was the previous theory.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  This is the thing you were doing where like, didn't you make like a 1776?

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that used something called a sparse autoencoder.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Which is basically, like, the, the theory is that these models are basically compressed forms of like bigger models essentially, where you can imagine like a much bigger model where every single neuron corresponds to one specific feature, right? So like one neuron is the cat neuron. And so if you're talking about cats, that one will definitely like

• 42:36Speaker 02

  And if you're talking about something else.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  We always talk about cats on the show.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  If you're talking about something else, it won't light up, right? And then basically you can take, you know, your small model and you can basically expand it out. It's called a sparse autoencoder.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I'm interested to see how he integrates with the labs. Obviously, he has ties to both Anthropic and OpenAI through Chris Ola. But Goodfire is independent, probably doing a lot of work on open source models. But it feels like, I don't know if he can have a product that he sells into the labs or if he can just be one of those like third-party auditors that gets brought in and basically says like, I will do Mac and Terp for your lab and help you there. That's, it'll be exciting to see where this goes and how people sort of like interpret this.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, but basically that outcome is like, we no longer need these sparse autoencoders and you can actually look at the neurons themselves and figure out what's going on there.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  So it's very useful for safety, but also for capabilities, right? Because if you can figure out like, you know, if you're trying to make some capability better within the model, like whatever math on some new subject, you can figure out exactly how it's working right now and then kind of optimize on that. So it's very applicable. Yeah, great news.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Great summary.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, white pill. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Needed that.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Faith in artificial intelligence with school. The timeline is in turmoil and has been over the weekend over Valar Atomics, Isaiah's company, and Day One, because they're beefing over Day One's pro-rata rights. And so this happened back in October 9th, but we didn't get a chance to go through it. But Isaiah Taylor, the founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, posted a long blog post on October 9th saying that he had gotten all of the investors to agree to waive pro-rata

• 44:34John Coogan?

  except for one venture capital firm, Day One Ventures, and that they were fighting tooth and nail, that Day One had retained a law firm and was fighting a lawsuit against them, and it was getting messy. So Isaiah decided to bring it to the public square on X and have the open debate. Lots of people coming out and supporting Isaiah. Some VCs coming out and supporting pro-rata rights. Obviously, this is a more complicated situation because Day One has a bunch of complicated and controversial connections to international organizations and stuff like, and Isaiah's like going and doing more and more government work.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  And so like, there is this extra layer of nuance there, I think, that's getting missed. But the core debate that the VCs are having is that there's a, there's like a don't throw the baby out with the bathwater pitch happening that I'm seeing, like Delian was talking about this.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  And you're saying their baby is pro-rata?

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. Like, the bathwater might, so like, it might be like, okay, Isaiah, like, we support you in this one case, you should be able to sort of force an investor who has this like very controversial background to be diluted down below the major investor threshold in this case. But just know that, like, founders don't get the idea that pro-rata rights are squishy. Like, they're negotiated for, for a reason. They're gonna stick around. Don't think that you can pull this move without a huge amount of pushback. Because a lot of, a lot of founders, I think, read this just as like, oh, yeah, like, I

• 46:20John Coogan?

  should override my investors' pro-rata, because it can be a hassle to deal with. Like, you're going out and doing a round, but you've already sold 40% of the company. You're raising $20 million or $200 million or a billion dollars, and some fund comes in and says like, yeah, you're raising that much? I want the full amount. I want to jump straight to 20% ownership in this company. But all the previous investors say, hey, we want to keep our 40%. And so then you're faced with the question of, are you doing a 30% dilution?

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  My view is, I don't even know if it's worth having the pro-rata debate, because this isn't about pro-rata at all.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of a proxy debate over the fact that it seems like Isaiah doesn't want to work with Day One anymore.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  And there are other vectors to work with. I think there's, isn't there like an FBI investigation or some sort of letter from the government investigating this? And like, like, there is, there are other forms. I think there's something else going on, but it is tricky. Like, signing up to work with a venture capitalist is somewhat of a marriage, and you're stuck with each other for a really long time. And it's hard if they don't want to sell their shares, if they don't want to go the other way. It's typically very difficult. There are some scenarios where VCs have just given the equity back and stuff, like, and then there have been other scenarios where founders have basically been like, we're not converting the convertible notes. And so like, you don't get any equity ever.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  But once it's papered and the pro-rata is in the contract, it's very hard to keep, to dilute them down, because that's the design, is that if, as long as I keep showing up with the money, me as an investor with a pro-rata right, I can have 5% of this company forever.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  And there's nothing.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big, I mean, the question is, just how much is having Masha involved with the company in a meaningful way, right? It's a meaningful stake, hurt the company.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Are they losing, are they losing, you know, contracts over it? Is it just something that competitors can, can sort of use to poke at Valar? I, you know, based on what Isaiah was saying, there's no information rights, like technical information rights that, that come along with that. And so I do think that it's probably completely possible for, for them to just sort of keep, keep the fund at an arm's length.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. But financial information rights are valuable.

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Like, even internationally. Like, I mean, we just saw that with the OpenAI spy. Like, there is, there is value to knowing if, if a business, even if you don't know how it works, if you know that it's profitable and you know that it works, that can underwrite your own investing into, into competitive technologies. You're like, yes, let's grind down this path. Like, you, you think about it in the semiconductor space, like, why is China subsidizing the indigenous semiconductor supply chain so aggressively? Well, they know semiconductors are super profitable. They can see Nvidia.

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is, like, I just, the way that Isaiah runs a company, you have to assume that that momentum is going to become very obvious just through like public communications.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we, we got, you know, XYZ contract.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you never know. Because if you have information rights, you know actually what's happening with the cash flow, actually what's real. There's always a lot of like, you know, gesturing and context and rumors above, and you have an advantage if you actually have the real numbers on the inside. It's only a slight advantage. I agree with you. I agree with you generally. But, but I don't think it's a, it's a huge, I, I do think it's valuable, information. And it's why investors negotiate for it. They want information rights.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  And they want to not be diluted down. So, interesting. Yeah, hopefully, if you're a founder and you're, and you're doing a VC deal, don't give the pro-rata right away, the pro-rata right lightly. Like, think about it as a serious deal point. What is the value of that? It's gonna be a headache potentially for a long time. Could be really awesome. Sometimes it's great to have people, investors with pro-rata, because every new round, you're like, oh, I got 40% of my round filled. Some, some, some founders love having a bunch of, a bunch of VCs who are like, oh, yeah, every round, like, you can count on me for the first half of that round, I'll fill it first, and I'm continuing to add on. And so then when you're raising like that next big round, you, yeah, you do still need

• 50:56John Coogan?

  to go find an anchor, but you don't need to necessarily fill it all, which can be hard if you're not the hottest company in the world sometimes. So it cuts both ways. But I don't think it's going anywhere. There is, yeah, I mean, the, the state of Delaware, you know, is firmly entrenched in Silicon Valley. And for that reason, like, we will abide by these things. Anyway, big car day today. Two car launches, the Tesla Roadster, tonight, 7:55 PM Central Time?

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so 5:55 Pacific.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  5:55 Pacific.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  8:55 Eastern.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Okay, so 7:55, people are rumoring, are, are, are suggesting that 7:55 might be the quarter-mile time? Is that what they're saying?

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  I've seen a bunch of different speculation. What would be really crazy is if it was a 5:55 quarter-mile and it was the Pacific time. That would be amazing. But I put down a deposit yesterday for a Roadster, and I'm fully ready to put that pin on. The Fell For It Again Award is ready to go. We have a big version, Tyler's a big version.

• 52:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's cut over to Tyler.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  And, and I need to, I mean, I need to, I need to create some stakes for this game, because like, what would be?

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Hey, but, but, but. Break down your strategy.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Putting down the deposit.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  So my strategy is.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  You sold me on it.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  You're right.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  I ended up.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  Oh, you did it?

• 52:29Jordi Hays?

  I did it.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  You did it? Okay. So it's five grand on a credit card and it's and you have to wire 45,000 within 10 days, but I'm going to know whether or not it's a good car by tonight. And so I do so that I can I can cancel it if I don't like it and jump out of line. But if it's amazing, I mean, Elon saying it's like, it'll be the most amazing product demo ever. If it's amazing, then I will be able to hold my position in the line before everyone floods in post-launch.

• 52:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  And so it felt like the right risk of you're tying up five grand for two days, even at 6% interest rates, you're talking about like $5 of opportunity cost. It's nothing.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's a pretty good trade.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  It's a pretty good trade for potentially being at the front of the line for something that could be really cool that actually flies. But if it's like, oh, it's going to be shipping in 2035 and it's, you know, it's not going to be anything special and the, you know, none of the, like, none of the features appeal to me, or, oh, we couldn't get self-driving working on it and it's not actually that.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  So here's the thing. Here's what everyone, let's speculate a little.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  So I think that ramps will be involved.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  I think that ramps will be involved.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  So, so because our original bet was it will leave the ground on flat ground. And I think you had like half a foot. I think you had one foot.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Did he say flat ground?

• 53:50John Coogan?

  No, he just said, he just gestured towards it flying.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, and so to me, what's the easiest way to get a car in the air?

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Shoot it off of a ramp, drive it off of a ramp. I think we're going to be seeing multiple types of ramps. I think we're going to be seeing.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  That'd be awesome. I love it. I'm taking a different direction, a different bet. My bet is that off of flat ground, it will go, I think I said more than six feet in the air, but I think definitely more than three feet in the air. I think it will go high, not 10,000 feet, which is what they got cleared to.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  You know those demos? You know the demo, the Chinese car?

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Yangwang.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Goes or no, the one that sort of like drives.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, through the tunnel.

• 54:30Jordi Hays?

  So what I think is that there's going to be sort of a looped ramp that will send it through the air in a rotation.

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  And land.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  So like stunt driver, basically?

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  But maybe it could do it.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Which is still incredibly impressive. You don't see car manufacturers demo their cars by sending them off ramps.

• 54:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  But there's the other thing.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  If there's ramps involved, Jordy wins. If it jumps off the ground, off of flat ground, I win. That's the bet?

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Here's the other thing. Do you remember?

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  There's videos, there's some street in LA.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Yes, where they film all the car commercials. I know it. It's like Figaro and First, something like that.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm talking about.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Talking about something else?

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's like basically a very specific road where it's very steep up and then it flattens out for a second and then it goes.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen people jump off that.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  And so I think that, I think Elon saw that.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  Was like, that, we should just demo the next car that way.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So you think jump? I think, I think rocket engines or thrusters or fans that will lift up.

• 55:32Jordi Hays?

  Pull this up. Pull this up immediately.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Okay. But let's pull this up. You know, what's going on here? Is this a famous YouTuber too?

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  So David Dobrik.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  David Dobrik.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  I've seen a bunch of videos of people.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Okay. That is so crazy.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  So I'm, I'm.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  And that's a Tesla, right?

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  My call is this, but the ramp spins it.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. Okay. So you think jump? I think flat. Now, the question is, is what is?

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Play that back. There we go.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  That is insane. Here's the criteria, Jordy. The people that fell for the Tesla Roadster the first time, they put down the full amount in 2017 and they waited a decade and they didn't get anything. Nothing shipped, right? They fell for it. They didn't fall for it again because Tesla has always shipped their vehicles. They did the Cybertruck. They shipped that. There's one outside. Like, they, they're real. You may like it, you may not, but they shipped it. But they didn't with the original Roadster. And so there were a lot of people that feel like they fell for the Roadster promo scheme because they put down the money and then they waited a decade and they didn't get anything. So in order to fall for it again,

• 56:51John Coogan?

  you need to put down the money and wait another decade, but we don't want to wait a decade. And so the question is, is on what time scale would you be disappointed? And to what feature set would you be disappointed?

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, I did have one theory that, that again, this was clearly a car that didn't want to get made.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  And it sort of was forced into it by taking deposits and all this stuff. And it doesn't really make sense in the Tesla lineup of sort of appliance style cars in many ways, right? You're shaving off.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:26Jordi Hays?

  All these other cars, the Model X, et cetera. You don't have an SUV, all these, all these things. And so I thought it'd be funny to demo the car in such an insane way that it just instantly like federal regulators come in and say like, you cannot, under any circumstances, do this.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  And then he's like, ah.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  And then he's like, yeah, sorry. I, I made the product.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  I just can't ship it. We're going back to.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  Model Y. We're only going to make the Model Y now.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. But if he says that, the obvious next step would be it's track only, which is a huge selling point for me. It'd be amazing. I would, I would be, I would definitely stay in line.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do we think, do we think it'll have a roll cage built in?

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Given that, given that it may be taking flight?

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Hopefully it's a roll cage, but like all of the bars are like slightly misaligned.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Sebastian says Elon wouldn't hype it this much to drive a car off a ramp. Come on.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  It is a good point. I do think that, I'm, I do think it'll have rocket thrusters of some sort, but I still think, I still think ramp. I think that's part of it. Like, we're launching.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  What if it does both? If it does both, we both win.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. It's using the rocket.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  What I'm saying is that what if there are two demos? One is just, it's sitting there on flat ground and then it goes hover up and everyone's like, wow, it's flying. And then it goes down and it lands, but it goes up five feet in the air. And we're like, wow, it can go so high. That's crazy. I've never seen a car do that. And then separately, they're like, now to the stunt portion. And then they go off a ramp. Like.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  That's what I, that's what I think. That's, that's what I expect to happen.

• 59:03John Coogan?

  Both?

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm thinking both. I think this is like a Nitro Circus style demo. Like, I think, I think it's, I think there's cars launching everywhere.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Okay, then, then.

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Spinning around, flipping around.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  The only thing I disagree with you on is that I don't think there will be any ramps. So I would go, you're gonna, you're gonna see the car leave the ground, but there will be no ramps involved at any point in the demonstration.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  You're going no ramp?

• 59:24John Coogan?

  That's our bet now.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  That's our bet. But back to the fell for it again award, what does it take for you to put that on?

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  The demo's amazing. You do the full deposit. So you go from 5K.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  At the 45K. And then it doesn't ship for 10.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, so.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  So we have to keep these around.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  So it's going to be withered and old by the time we put it on? No, I would say, I would say one year. I, it's got to be one year. If it takes more than one year to ship this thing, then you fell for it again. Right? Because like, you've had 10 years. Like, you don't get another 10. You get another launch and then you get another, okay, ship it. Right?

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  That's fair.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  What else? What else would, like, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna be at nine years like, oh, yeah, didn't fall for it this time. I got my Roadster just 19 years after they announced it the first time and only nine years after they announced it the second time. No way, dude. You're going to be in year six being like, I fell for it again. Right?

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  How much was the original Roadster deposit?

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  I thought it was the full amount. I thought it was like a quarter mil. I don't know. You can look that up, but. Mission S is coming out. I think they will ship it. I think that the Mission S is probably a safer, a safer bet. You won't be.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  So this video leaked.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Late last night.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull it up.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  First, I'm going to tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Okay, what are they doing? They're peeling back a cover and they're showing off the car. And you had a very good take on this. What do you like about this design? What do you like about the Mission S? What sticks out to you about this?

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  So I'll start by saying I feel like a kid who like accidentally saw their Christmas present.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  And it's exciting.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Christmas records.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  It's exciting because you're getting what you want, but also it just like kills all the suspense.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  I've been looking forward to this launch more than any other car launch in my entire life.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  And now it's ruined. But.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you want to see the great video.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's start with the positive. This, this car is way, way more aggressive than I was anticipating.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:53Jordi Hays?

  It feels like, it really does feel like it's over for every other manufacturer in the, in the sort of like mid-range supercar category.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Because this.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  The McLarens, the Lamborghinis, the, the.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  The Ferraris.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Like, it is gonna be rough. Like, this becomes the most.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  When I heard flat eight, I thought, okay, we're gonna see.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  It's got a roof scoop.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  I know, I know.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  We're scooping. I mean, this is the perfect car for an S-tier journalist to just rip around SF.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  With the roof scoop.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  For sure. Oh, the scoop. The scoop. Yeah, so I, I definitely thought it was gonna be like Cayman, 911, and then this. And this would feel as far away from a 911 as a Cayman does. And a Cayman does not feel very far away from a 911.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  No, it feels way farther.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  This, this feels way farther. Like, if a Cayman is a seven and a 911 is a, is a nine, this is like a 15, right? It's like further along. And it's much closer to Carrera GT, 918 Spider aesthetically. We'll see about the performance. We'll see about how they position it. I know that they're not gonna do as, as, as much of a restriction on the production numbers. But at least from like an emotional feeling, it's giving me 918 successor. And I know that they might say, oh, it's not, it's a different thing. It, it's gonna be a high production or whatever. It doesn't matter. Emotionally, I'm feeling Carrera GT. I'm feeling 918.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  And this just immediately becomes by far the most desirable car in the 500 to a million dollar price range, in my opinion.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Like, day one.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Compared to Revuelto, compared to SF90, compared to 750 LP or whatever McLaren's working with these days.

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  C12.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Although, uh, where, where's the MCL 6 GT? Remember the MC, like McLaren's doing like a manual one? Is that gonna be sub a million now?

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  That'll probably be two million.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Oh, it'll be like one of their seven things. Okay, yeah.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  That's the thing. That's the thing. So many of the cars that have become.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  We looked at that Alfa Romero and it was like a million bucks. And it's like, okay, a, a million dollars for an Alfa Romero that.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so many of these situations where, uh, they, they got the market potentially in like a headlock right now. I would love to keep following the story.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  The one thing is.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  The car is somewhat antisocial, right?

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  How so?

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Looking at the, uh, amount of rocks that the back tires is gonna be thrown up.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  If you wanna take this out on a Sunday drive with some buddies, you're gonna need some mud flaps.

• 1:04:24John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:04:25Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, good luck if you're sitting behind this thing. But, uh, overall, can't wait for the event. It's in less than 90 minutes.

• 1:04:32John Coogan?

  90 minutes, okay.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  Will be the actual reveal.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  We might have to stay.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what a fantastic looking car. Nailed right at the intersection of the 959 and the GT1.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Stunning.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we have our first guest of the show. Reed from Semaphore is here. He's the San Francisco Bureau Chief. You know him, you love him. He's got scoops. The new Porsche's got scoops. It's scoop Thursday.

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  I swear they made this car for the lone werewolf journalist that's scooping around, scooping around SF.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  That.

• 1:05:04Speaker 03

  I, I don't know how many journalists you guys know, but you know, if you buy a supercar, you can no longer be in journalism. You have to leave. That's like.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  We're changing the world. Overturn.

• 1:05:14Speaker 03

  It'd be a journalist. Fuck the trend. Fuck the trend.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, you need to be driving like a, I don't know, like an Oldsmobile, something broken down or something, or.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  A very old one.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Something that you can pull up, pull out, you know, pull up outside of a, of a technology company office and smoke a cigarette.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Just act sort of mysterious.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Even like a 19, even like a 1998 S-Class, that has some weight to it, but it's gonna be depreciated. You can pull up and have some authority there.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Can we get, can we, I don't know if you've been.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Car, you, you know, even owning a car is probably, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't know if you've been, uh, following, but, uh, any predictions for the Tesla Roadster later? We've been debating, are there gonna be ramps evolved? Are there gonna be, is it just rocket thrusters?

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  That is a really good question.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Is it gonna be able to kickflip? Things like that.

• 1:06:08Speaker 03

  You guys are, you guys are in a very different place with cars than I am. And my, like, I, I have a Model Y and I'm just like, I just need a bigger car. That's all I care about. I just need more space for the kids and the gear, you know, and all that stuff. Like, a Roadster, I'm just not, that's not where my head is at right now. But.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  What do you think of the, the Model Y L? The long wheelbase version gives you an extra 20 inches or something?

• 1:06:31Speaker 03

  I was super excited. I wanna go, uh, when my lease is up, I'm gonna for sure go check that out.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, seems like.

• 1:06:37Speaker 03

  Just make it bigger. That's my, that's my ask.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  I have one on order and they pushed me back because they can't make them fast enough. I was supposed to get it in November and now it's January.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, my theory is that Tesla's like starting this crazy inflection where enough people have had the magical experience of self-driving.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  I've heard it from so many people.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  And what, what I'm actually fascinated by is like, I, it doesn't feel like Elon ha, is actually giving it enough attention. And I think in part that's because he wants to merge Tesla and SpaceX. And he owns more of SpaceX, right? So he wants Tesla to be at a lower valuation.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  When that happens. But we've both, we've both like put, you know, we've both like, I bought a Tesla a few weeks ago. John has been trying to buy a Tesla. Both of them were delayed by months and months for like basic models. And so I think that inflection's happening and I, but I don't think you're gonna get the like.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Every single, every single person I know now is having that like magical moment.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  I'll tell you, I have a broken shoulder right now from playing ice hockey and I activated my FSD. It's kind of amazing. You just sit there with your broken shoulder and have the car drive you around.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  How hard, how hard are you going?

• 1:07:54Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Elite athlete.

• 1:07:56Speaker 03

  It's not, it's not, it's not how hard I'm going. It's like how hard my old man body went to the ground when I was brutally tripped in Oakland. But my point is, advertise at the ice skating rinks.

• 1:08:08Jordi Hays?

  Was it too broken to throw hands after, after you got taken out?

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Way too, way too broken. Way too broken. It's just me sadly skating off the ice, thinking this is probably the last time I lace them up, but, you know.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  We should have been there. We should have been there. We would not have let that, let that, let that go.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  This is the second time FSD has helped me with a, with an old man hockey injury. So I gotta say, it's, you know, there's some marketing opportunities there.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  No, no, the, the FSD is, is like overpoweringly good to the point where, uh, people who don't like electric cars because they wanna hear an engine are like, but I still had to get one as a second car, like for whatever reason. And then the political thing, people are like, look, the midterms are coming, like Elon's gonna be out. I like, I, I, I don't like him, but I'm doing it anyway. And I've heard that from a lot of people too. So people are begrudgingly buying them just because.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  Everyone said they would never buy a Tesla. And I, every day at school drop off, there's a new Tesla, you know, that's, that's post. You can tell it's post Elon because it's got the new, or post Doge because it's got the new headlights, you know.

• 1:09:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm getting the bumper sticker that's, uh, I bought this after FSD became so undeniable that I felt it was the safest option for my family and others on the road. Bumper sticker.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Right, yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Well, my bumper sticker just says morally superior. That's all. That's all it says.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  That's good. Yes, yes, yes. That's, that's ideal. And then they can apply it to whatever the topic du jour of the day is, like.

• 1:09:34Speaker 03

  Whatever it is.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Whatever it is, you know, you're prepared.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  My other car is the moral high ground.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Speaker 03

  Right, there you go.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Uh, well, yeah, what, what, what else are you, what else are you tracking? Are you, uh, I mean, we were at the start of the show, absorbed by the anthropic numbers. Obviously historically massive, but still not beating expectations. And so, yeah, what, what, what are you tracking today, this week, uh, in general? What, what's captured your fascination?

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  I think, okay, so, so shameless plug, I've got, uh, Satya Nadella on my new podcast that, which that'll air next week. So I was in, um, I love, I love the music. Um, so that's gonna air next week. Um, but a little teaser for that is, you know, I asked him this question. You'll have to watch it to see his answer. But, you know, Microsoft's doing great. Wall Street loves Microsoft. But like, look at the growth of all these companies. Nvidia is now out earning them per quarter. You got the hyperscalers, you've got SpaceX AI coming into the fold. Like, is there a world in which Microsoft is still a great business like a few years from now, but they're not in the Mag 7?

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  And, um, I heard a little gasp from the, uh, the Microsoft comms team when I asked the question. So you'll, you'll have to wa. But I I think this is

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  I'll just say Satya, Satya is my

• 1:10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, those comms people can get aggressive. Are you sure somebody didn't chime in and say, are you sure you don't want to talk about something politically controversial instead? Anything but the

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  But I'll I'll just say like Satya is my favorite communicator. Like he's like in in the Mag Seven, like he he's the one that I think is generally like the most candid.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  And actually pick up on on how he feels about different things in a way that the other CEOs. Like he does it in a way that's just, again, I I think he's just very candid.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Jordi Hays?

  I think he's very fair.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  He's not stiff, he's not performative.

• 1:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. And it doesn't, it never feels, it never feels like he's just on some set of talking points and just always looping back to that. He's like, actually like, oh, let me answer this question. So I'm excited.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  And if he does have a talking point, it's like he had, it's like he's written a blog post on exactly the question that you're asking him. And he's got like the perfect, he's thought it all out.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  And, um, yeah, I mean, this, this was up and they've got this CISO summoned up there.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:52Speaker 03

  He's been thinking about security. I think the way he, it was actually really interesting to hear him talking to these, um, CISOs because he was saying, he's like, he's been sort of, it's almost like a let down. He's like let down by these models. He's like, I don't think the alignment is working. He doesn't think we're going to get to mechanistic interpretability. So you have to put all these guardrails around this stuff. And that was, that was fascinating to me. It's like a little bit, there's like a sliver of defeat there, but also like, we're just going to figure out how to make this work. Like, we're going to put security, you know, deterministic software around it and, you know, we'll use it that way.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Uh, what is your read on Xbox Labs? We talked about it yesterday and I I love the the decompiled mashup games. I think they're super fun, uh, as like memes. I don't necessarily actually think that they're blockbuster games, but I I thought it was interesting that Xbox was leaning in. But what's your interpretation of that story right now?

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I totally agree. I was talking with someone, I I think someone at Xbox about that, you know, earlier in the week. I think Asha is probably the right CEO for Xbox right now. So I think she's like, you know, she's a little more forward thinking. She's flexible. Um, and I think they're like, yeah, I mean, if you can't beat them, join them. Like, there's nothing you can do. If some kid wants to like mash up, like decompile a game in their, you know, in their home using Claude, like, there's not much you can do about that from an IP perspective. So like, I think they have to, the video game industry is going to have to rethink everything. I think it's probably going to accelerate cloud gaming is my guess, like in new, new ways. And I'm excited by that. And Gen Z loves it.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Super, it feels like they're in such a good place as effectively a private company because they're owned by Microsoft. So they can, they they can kind of like hang out in the sub balance sheet and completely upend the business model. Whereas if you're an independent video game company, you you have a business model that relies on you earning a certain amount from microtransactions and selling a certain number of discs and having this particular business model. And you're going to miss your quarterly earnings if you upend everything. But they're kind of in a situation where it's never been a big driver for Microsoft. It's been awesome for culture. It's been really cool to work at Microsoft and be like, oh, yeah, we got the gears of war over there.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  But financially, there's a lot more flexibility. Do you agree with that?

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  I totally agree. Yeah. I mean, they they still, I mean, the console business is no joke. Like, it's a, it's like a great business.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  And I think they have that, but they will, I think they realize like they probably have to start disrupting themselves a little and they can do that. I agree. They have the luxury.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like it's just good to be in hardware too, because like we saw the Mac Mini was not ever built as like the, an AI device. Like, it's very much the opposite thesis from Nvidia, the graphics cards, right? Which got used for for all sorts of AI stuff and eventually developed server chips. But the Mac Mini's blew off the shelf and you could see people sort of decompiling or hacking Xboxes and being like, yeah, it's just a good bargain. It's a good product, it's reliable and I can run anything on it or I can install an agent on it or I can, you know, actually hack and vibe code and do all these different things. And so they start flying off the shelf and actually becoming like differentiated.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  And they're just going to sell a lot because even if they're not, even if they don't have that huge margin of IP on top, it's still just a great product to be selling.

• 1:15:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I also love the, I love this concept of just like hacking old hardware. So like you can actually do that now. It's like,

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Speaker 03

  Why not? I mean, the stuff is so expensive. I'm like going through my drawers now, like looking for old hard drives. Cause like, I don't want to buy a new hard drive.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Storage is

• 1:15:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's like, why not? Like, just try to, just try stuff. It's, it's an exciting, exciting time.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how are you, how are you thinking about, uh, the open source, uh, alliance? Like all the things that Nvidia is doing, the different groups there, uh, OpenAI has been kind of like one foot and the other. Like, we don't want to ban it, but we also aren't really open sourcing stuff. Meta is like open sourcing stuff, but, you know, really has something very close source that's working now. Anthropic's still very strong against, but what is the shape of the open source alliance these days?

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, first of all, the, I think the hyperscalers would love to ban it. I mean, I was talking to like our, our DC people, like the, you know, the, the open Phil funded groups are having dinners, talking about like, you know, open source is going to be banned. I have no idea how that's even possible. I mean, that just seems so draconian and and really ultimately just like a fool's errand that, yeah, I mean, I think this stuff is going to, is going to total, it is taking off, right? Like, open source is

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  I I want to fight you on that because, uh, I I think it actually might be very easy to ban open source in in the sense that like we banned, uh, we banned files, file sharing. Like, uh,

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  And and it's like, yeah, obviously like torrents still exist and you can go and find an offshore website that has a torrent. But you will get a letter from HBO if you download the latest season of True Detective illegally. They will find your IP, so you got to be using a VPN and then it just becomes cumbersome. And you can't have a big data center hosting files like Mega Upload, that whole saga went, came and went. And so it needs to be distributed like weights that are, you know, on this like dark web torrent network that's kind of cumbersome. And then the really dangerous stuff is always like a million dollars of compute.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  And I don't think you're going to be able to run anything as an attacker on a Mac Mini that can do anything but bounce off, you know, CrowdStrike plus Mythos plus GPT Cyber plus Palate. Like, these organizations are going to be running like every

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  It's sort of be, so to be clear, you're not, you're not advocating for it.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  No, I'm not advocating. I'm just saying, I'm just saying that like

• 1:17:48Jordi Hays?

  In practice, it's not, yeah, it's like banning, banning serving.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Serving it is is quite, is quite different. But and the other

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  I I think that you're, oh, go ahead. Yeah.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just going to say that the, like the zero day that Expo found

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Chrome was, that affects, would have affected a billion people.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Was like $40,000.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  So

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Okay, but you're assuming that it, that you you actually get it banned, right? Like, I think, I think you're right. Like, if this gets fully banned, like there are technical ways they can just make it a total headache to

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Download open, open, they could just like kill that industry.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  So like, is it, the legal framework for just saying, like, any kind of open source AI model is is banned is going to be so difficult, right?

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  What are, what is the theory there?

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so like as a practical, uh, like as a practical matter of how things get done in Washington. Uh, that is more intractable than the technical question of like, how do you find out that a data center is serving an open source model and send them a sternly worded letter? Hey, stop serving this because we banned it. But yes, uh, so so I agree with you. It's harder to actually ban than enforce a ban that that happens potentially.

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Interesting. Uh, I've always, what do you think? I mean, from talking to the DC folks, what do you think of this idea of like, you can sort of chart the path of technology regulation by just summing up the market caps of various, uh, open letters? Like, when the open source letter happened, I was like, oh, this is like very rough for, to be the anthropic position of like, let's ban it. Because I was just looking at, it's like Nvidia, five trillion. And then you have another company that's like, you know, a couple trillion. And I'm just, I'm just adding up the market caps. And I think it was like $25 trillion of market cap was saying like, we support this thing.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  And whether or not DC is coin operated, it's just a fact of the matter that when you have that much economic weight behind it and that many people's pensions and all the different things that like, that might dictate the actual outcome.

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I mean, let's face it, like DC is somewhat coin operated, like it's not, you know, it's oversimplifying it and I'm out here in the Bay Area, easy for me to say, I don't have to go to dinner with these people every night.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:08Speaker 03

  But, I mean, yeah, I think you totally can, but I also think it's like who, it's like, there's not some law that's being violated by this already, like you have, you would have to create a whole new idea, a whole new legal framework, it makes it, it makes it really difficult. And then like, the other, the other thing I think with, like, name a, name a tech regulation that was actually good, or didn't have some major blowback, like even section 230, which is almost like unregulating rather than regulating, is like hugely debated today. The DMCA that, that governed all the downloads and torrenting and everything, that's a huge mess, like that would just created headaches for years, still is creating all these issues with doing like, security research, right? Like, you don't, you can't let, you have to be very careful about how you

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:52Speaker 03

  research bugs and software because of that. So, like, I don't know, but it just, to me, it doesn't make, it doesn't make much sense. It makes a lot more sense, like, it's like, you have the money behind it, and also just like, the logic behind it.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  Like, there's, it makes logical sense, like, let's have open weights, let's have open source harnesses and sandboxes, like, I wrote, I had a little scoop today on perplexity, open sourcing their sandboxing technology. I mean, like, let's, let's like, have, let's crowdsource, like, figuring out how to keep this stuff in, you know, in silos and make sure it's safe, like, that makes a lot more sense than like, let's have two, two labs or labs companies in Silicon Valley, like, figuring this out, all out for us, like, that, that never works.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:38Speaker 03

  I'm preaching to the choir, I realize that.

• 1:21:41John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, it's interesting, I'm, I'm thinking about like, the, like, AI is maybe like, the least frustrating it will ever be, I'm just imagining, like, like, do we get the AI utopia, or do we get the doom scenario, where like, the median case is like, probably like, we get cookie pop-ups, and we get some like, annoying thing that happens, that like, is like, constant, and like, and it's just, the cookie pop-ups development, and like, the way that like, that's how the internet played out, is just so depressing, every time I have to click that button, I'm just like, how did, how was this the outcome? But, I don't know, that's beside the point.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  That was a consumer thing, right? And like, I, I think there's actually, like, my theory right now is like, the reason there isn't more consumer stuff happening in AI, is that there's just not enough compute, like, we don't have, you just don't have enough data centers to run like, the frontier models for consumer applications.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Speaker 03

  And, and I think, open weights is probably the way that happens, like, first, before you get to, I don't know, like, the web 2.0 of AI, where it's like, all in the cloud, you're probably gonna have some sort of like, the Netscape of AI first.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Which is, like, it runs on your computer, and it's, you know, it's not why, it's not like, everyone uses it, but it's sort of like, early adopters get into it.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Speaker 03

  And we're like, not even there yet, I mean, it's

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, you see it with like, you know, Muse is having like, a crazy moment, OpenAI responds with DOT, but

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Dave's Hot Chicken responds.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Dave's Hot Chicken responds.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Apparently working with Nikita.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, apparently, but like, DOT, I think is like, still rolling out through the paid tiers, because it's like, it's actually difficult, they were like, opening the floodgates and being like, yeah, a billion people can just run this constantly, like, that's a lot of compute, and so, it is tricky. Where, where are you thinking the bottleneck goes next? Like, is it money? Are we gonna run out of money? Is that the real problem?

• 1:23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, that's actually, I was talking about that this morning, actually, with our, our finance team, because they're like, obsessed with the fact that these companies are borrowing money.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 03

  I'm like, I'm on the other side of this, I'm like, this is not, like, you know, this isn't like, the financial crisis, or like, 2000 again, like, this is a very different thing.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  But, like, the banks are, are getting to the point where they're like, yeah, we just can't lend out this much money, and so I think, the, the borrowing has been opportunistic by these tech companies, it's like, why not borrow that money, like, investors like it, but if the banks are like, yeah, we're just, we're hitting our limit here,

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Speaker 03

  then yeah, I think money does become another bottleneck. The hyperscalers, you know, the, the mag seven, they have enough cash, they can, they can find other ways to fund this, but, I mean, yeah, I, I'm actually probably gonna write about this for tomorrow in the newsletter, how this is not a, this is a bottleneck economy.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it flipped so fast, I mean, I remember, Peter Thiel

• 1:24:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, cash is the next bottleneck, I'm gonna invest, I'm gonna invest in cash.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get some of that.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  But I, I remember it, there was a Wired Tech Conference, maybe 2012-ish, 2015-ish, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, who was then the CEO of Google, debating uses of cash at Google, and, and Thiel's point was, Google has $50 billion of cash on the balance sheet, you don't have anywhere to spend it, you're out of ideas, we're stagnating, go do something with it, and he's saying, oh, well, like, we're spending a billion dollars on this self-driving car thing, and we're gonna work on cancer research, it was all the same promises, but it was just a decade too early, where there wasn't actually real ways to deploy the capital, and, and this was the, this was true across, you know, all the hyperscalers, where Zuck

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  would go off and spend $10 billion on something that wasn't really working, and now, the opportunity is here, and we've switched from like, oh, you don't, you're not, you're not spending your cash, that's an

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Also, Google did invent the transformer.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, they did.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  And they did make

• 1:25:36Speaker 03

  They did.

• 1:25:37Jordi Hays?

  Self-driving cars.

• 1:25:38John Coogan?

  But now, now we're in the, okay, go spend the cash, because there is an opportunity that can actually consume that cash, and you still get criticized, but I don't know.

• 1:25:46Speaker 03

  No, I know, and it's like, everyone's like, you know, everyone's talking out of both sides of their mouths, right?

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  It's like, oh, they don't want big tech to become so powerful, and it's like, well, they're actually being forced to like, spend all their cash right now, like, that is a good, right? That means there's, there's like, competition and disruption, and

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  You know, I guess if it doesn't work, then they'll go back to just having, you know, the most profitable cash cow businesses in history, but, you know.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, I mean, we saw that today, with like, there's a rotating out of the NASDAQ, but it goes straight into the Dow, and, and, you know, it's like, oh, if, if the AI trade's blowing up, like, get back into SaaS, get back into the social, ad tech, like, like, this stuff, this money just like, flows around, people hunting for the, for the, anyway.

• 1:26:27Speaker 03

  They're pretty well hedged.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, re- well, excited for the Satya episode.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Yes, go down, go to, go listen

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  Thank you, yeah, download Futureproof.

• 1:26:36John Coogan?

  Futureproof.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  I gotta play it, yeah.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Other world podcasts are available, thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, cheers, Rej.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  See ya.

• 1:26:42John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Brian Cantrill from Oxide, co-founder and CTO, let's get this gong warmed up, it's time.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  Nice little warm-up hit, right out of the gate.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's get another.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  Oh, man. How much did you raise?

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, love it. How much did you raise? We gotta know.

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  Okay, well, so, hey, guys, I don't know, is that a, is that a gong about how much we raised, or about the fact that we're profitable?

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  It's a different gong for that.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  How, we did the warm-up hit.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  The Mad Lads did it.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  We did the profitability hit. Now, we gotta hit it for how much they raised.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  Uh, we raised 4.45.

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  And finally, the best hit of all, for the secondary, no, I'm kidding, no, no. No, we're not gonna go there. We're not gonna go there, we're having too much fun, amazing to have you on, thank you for matching, or exceeding our energy.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Good day.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Introduce yourself and the company, what's going on?

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  Oh, man, it's good to be, first of all, I just, I love the gong, I gotta tell you, the gong, so, my co-founder and I had, there was a gong, we were at a cloud computing pioneer joint, and

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  That's actually really loud, if you play it there.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  We got the baby gong.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Baby gong.

• 1:28:10Speaker 04

  So, the, the founding CEO had this gong that was very awkward, and, because like, the problem with a gong is that like, then the gong isn't rung very much, and like, now the gong is just kinda like, sitting there, kind of like, foreboding.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  That's crazy, that would never happen.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  And, ended up, a couple office moves later, ended up on Steve's desk, and there's just kind of this inert gong there, and remember, as we were contemplating Oxide, I looked at the gong, I'm like, Steve, at some point, we are gonna have, we're gonna build this company, we're gonna have our first customer, and we are gonna ring a gong, and it's gonna feel so good, but that gong never made the move, so we don't actually have a gong at Oxide.

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:28:48Speaker 04

  So, the first gong that we have had at Oxide is the gong that you guys just read.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, well, I recommend, I, we recommend a gong hit for every single dollar of revenue that comes in, so that basically means you need somebody dedicated to the, to the craft, you know, and they're pretty much just tapping away all day, once you're at, you know, a certain run rate, but, anyways, I still have no idea what you do, and I'm so curious, so.

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, we are a computer company, so it's right on the tin, Oxide Computer Company, so we make rack-scale machines, hardware and software co-designed, and our big observation, Steve and I were together at a cloud computing pioneer joint, prior to that, I spent 14 years at Sun Microsystems, do I have to explain?

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  There you go, there you go.

• 1:29:31Speaker 04

  Exactly, the OG there, and we, at, at Joint, we were building a cloud on top of commodity hardware, on top of Dell HP Super Micro.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 1:29:42Speaker 04

  And when Joint was bought by Samsung in 2016, we went out to this explosive new scale, and everything broke, and the stuff that broke in our software, we could fix, but there was so much that broke at that hardware-software interface that was unresolvable, and, I, I mean, the number of times you heard from Dell, it's like, you're the only customer seeing this problem, and you're like, how the hell is that possible?

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  That's strange.

• 1:30:05Speaker 04

  If everyone else is at much greater scale than we are, then you realize like, oh, wait a minute. Google and Amazon and Facebook are not Dell customers. And so you Dell are kind of speaking your own truth at some level. Because once someone gets to this kind of scale, they actually can't be a Dell customer anymore. And so as we were beginning to contemplate what was next, we wanted to go, we realized that the hyperscalers had built for themselves their own machines, rack scale machines with hardware software co-designed. And the enterprise, anyone else didn't have that. You could rent it in the public cloud, but you could not buy it and run your own data center. And our big belief, we are very pro-cloud, but we believe that cloud should be available wherever you want to run your business, and that includes on-prem.

• 1:30:48Speaker 04

  So the, the, the, the big and iconoclastic belief that we had in 2019 was that cloud computing is going to endure and persist and thrive if that's going to happen on-prem. And it necessitates this rack scale hardware software co-design. And I, you know, I have to tell you how in 2019, it was all SaaS all the time. And it was very iconoclastic to, but part of the reason it is Oxide Computer Company in the name is to make clear to any 2019 VCs that there would be no pivots to pure software, that we are

• 1:31:22Jordi Hays?

  No pivots.

• 1:31:23Speaker 04

  This company, no pivots, please.

• 1:31:24Jordi Hays?

  We just make computers, sir.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  Just make computers. And, and you know, actually, I did, just because you guys are scholars of history, Digital Equipment Corporation, back in the day, one of the, if not the first venture capital-backed company, wanted to make computers straight out of the chute. And they were told by their VC, which is one of the, George D'Orio, basically a proto VC in Massachusetts, it's like, eh, you can't call yourself a computer company because IBM is going to be the only computer company in 1957. So they call themselves Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC. Isn't that amazing?

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  So he thought there was going to be a fast, a fast takeoff in IBM, sort of an IBM singularity.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  That's exactly right, right, totally. And as it, as it turns out, we, and again, you know, many, many, many decades later in 2019, we believed strongly in hardware software co-design and actually delivering, because that's the only way you can really deliver this elastic infrastructure.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  All right, give us the big milestones in the business leading up into this point. You started the company in 2019.

• 1:32:30Speaker 04

  Gong's ready, wow, okay. Well, so honestly, the, I mean, the first big milestone was just raising our seed, so.

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  All right, what happened next? What happened next?

• 1:32:44Speaker 04

  Well, so we raised, when we were raising the seed, we raised 20 million out of the chute, which is a very big seed. We had a good rationale for that, and we feel, as we were talking to VCs in 2019, and only finding these SaaS folks, and having to explain that actually the most important products that we have represent hardware software co-design. So just finding, and we feel very blessed to have found Eclipse and sat at Eclipse, having, being big believers and immediate believers in hardware software co-design. And they're, and they saw that like, actually, the biggest companies ever built are, are. So finding them, finding the right investors, raising the right amount of money.

• 1:33:28Speaker 04

  And we didn't want to raise like, three on 12, right? Or, or whatever, but that would have been easy, but it would have been.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, it would have been beneath you.

• 1:33:36Speaker 04

  It would have been a recipe for death, because you would, you can't do any of this with three.

• 1:33:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. Well, the funny thing is, the funny thing is that the, the $20 million seed became, at least now is very much standard, and companies are now, can be capital intensive enough to justify that. It's not just sort of like a, you know, supply and demand equation. But back in 2019, most of the companies that were getting started, like, didn't really need, you know, they, they were three on 12, but it would have been more than enough money to like, at least get to the next round.

• 1:34:13Speaker 04

  That's right. And so we, and we knew we needed to raise that much to be able to get, to get the team, get the team hired. I think, you know, I, in many ways, the most terrifying moment for me in the lifetime of the company was when we got our first term sheet, we got that term sheet from Eclipse.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:29Speaker 04

  Because they was like, oh shit, I gotta go build this thing. And we don't have the team, like, I can't go, this is so technically hard. There's so much technical risk in this. One of the things that we heard that drove us bananas in 2019 is like, look, technically, we know you can do this. And I'm like, am I, you want to stop a VC and be like, no, no, sorry, let me stop you right there. Technically, I don't know I can do this, like, I'm sorry. Like, technically, this scares the shit out of me. There's so much technical risk. We did our own compute slide, we did our own switch. We, we eliminated the UEFI bias, so we did our first instruction on the X86. We, we've done all our own software, lowest levels of firmware, all the way up to the control plane, distributed system, distributed storage.

• 1:35:12Speaker 04

  I mean, we are nine startups in one, unbounded technical risk.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. By the way, Eclipse was actually, was absolutely cooking in, in the 2010s. Like, they, they have so many bangers that like, were just non-obvious, or like, most people just were not that interested in, that now look just like genius in hindsight.

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  Well, and so they had the advantage of, of investing in this sector when everyone else was ignoring it. And so as a result, like, if you were starting, starting Oxide in 2019, starting Cerebras a couple of years prior, like, you are so contrarian that you almost have to be good. You know what I mean? Like, those companies are good companies because they were almost tautologically contrarian. And so Eclipse had the luxury of, and what we found, we're kind of, we found that we're VC homewreckers, because we would find that like, a single partner, yeah, is that the homewrecker, Gong?

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  We actually called them pelts on the wall, because.

• 1:36:18Speaker 04

  We, well, because, here's what would happen. You, you get a, what I learned very quickly is that Oxide is very, very contrarian. And obviously, like, everybody loves contrarian.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

  But no one actually wants a zero, right? And I think that the, the outcomes for Oxide were very bifurcated. It felt like, wow, generational company or zero? And, you know, VCs are kind of in this quantum superposition of fear and greed. And they would constantly be oscillating in their minds between like, oh my god. In fact, we had a VC being like, I love that this is N of one, or this is N of one. It's like they were scared that we didn't have competition.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Wait, help me understand how this would be a zero, because it feels like, like, even if there's no AI boom, it's like, you can still like, buy parts, assemble racks, maybe there's not a ton of innovation, but you just become like, a mid-market reseller of equipment and like, you're within margins, maybe, oh, okay, okay, so.

• 1:37:18Speaker 04

  No, no, no, that isn't zero, because first of all, that's not differentiated.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  I know it's not differentiated, but. Okay, it just like, it just peters out or something?

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  It, it peters out because the.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  But, but when I think big VC zero, I think like, you, you spent $100 million on like, software engineering for a social network that never gets product market fit? And it's actually like, you ran out of money, as opposed to like, the downside risk with, with the sector that you're in feels like you become like, a small like, micro-center, almost like, just a place that like, assembles, okay, no?

• 1:37:53Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no, no, the, the, no, the downside risk is a zero, because we're, we're not reselling things out of the back of a catalog. We are actually engineering a system. And there are companies that tried to do what Oxide did. You haven't heard of them because they're all zeros. And some of them are like, pretty prominent zeros.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:38:14Speaker 04

  And we actually, one of the things that, you know, benefit of, of starting a company, you know, later in life, and, and with a lot of wisdom, and Steve and I both started the company in our 40s, we were real scholars of how these companies had failed. And wanted to understand how every single one of these companies had failed. And of course, like, any founder will tell you, well, I failed because I ran out of money. It's like, yeah, yeah, yes, you ran out of money, but also like, why else? And the, one of the things that we saw over and over again is, if you have something that is kind of half-built, it is very, very hard to get that funding, that, that funding round, to get to that, that real customer. And getting that first customer is really, really hard. And then getting that first customer to, to expand is even harder, because you need

• 1:38:57Speaker 04

  to land this thing, and that there was a company Nebula that is pretty similar to Oxide's vision. If you guys remember, these are, this is one of the, this is during the great OpenStack boom, which maybe you haven't heard of for a reason, right? But so Nebula, and Nebula's vision looks like Oxide's vision, almost scarily so. And in, and I'm like, I gotta understand every single thing about this company. Best seven bucks I ever spent my life is on the Stanford Graduate School of Business, did a case study on Nebula as Nebula is dying.

• 1:39:32John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:39:33Speaker 04

  So Nebula is like, gonna go bankrupt. By the way, Nebula shut down on April 1st. So April 1st, 2015, Nebula shuts down. And I was in the office with my CEO at the time, and he and I are looking at this like, goodbye cruel world kind of announcement. And we're like, is this like, the darkest, most fucked up April Fool's joke ever? Or is this company literally so incompetent that they can't even go out of business on the right day? Like, go out of business on March 31st or April 2nd. April 1st, I'm sorry, is.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  No, we, we, we announced, we announced our acquisition on April 2nd. We had the opportunity, it was ready to go on April 1st.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  I wanted it to be on the 1st, but it would have been so much more chaotic than it already was.

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  Exactly. They're excellent. Strong. Good job overruining.

• 1:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Wait, but this company, but this company, this company, uh, they had raised a lot of money. It was like hot at one point. This is sort of, I think, like predates my technology consciousness.

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  A hot, uh, Kleiner had backed up the truck. Um, Kleiner had put a ton of money into it. Um, and it, I was absolutely a zero. And they, now, the, the, the case study was extraordinary because they failed at everything. They failed at the tech. They, they, they failed in terms of manufacturing, in terms of supply chain. They failed in terms of software. They failed in terms of, of their approach to market. They were trying to get to market too quickly with something. It was kind of that lean idea of like, well, let's just ship garbage. It's like, no, no, you can't ship garbage. You have to actually get something that fully works. And in particular, one of the go to market things that they screwed up was they had this idea that someone will buy one rack and they'll buy one rack and then like a month later they'll buy thirty.

• 1:41:14Speaker 04

  It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Have you ever been an enterprise buyer? Sorry. You're gonna buy one rack and you are gonna kick the shit out of that rack for like eighteen months. If you are, if you are a bank or you are a pharma company, or you, you, you are gonna spend a long time understanding. Because when you do that thirty rack buy, you are betting your career on it.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Thirty racks?

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  And the hell are you gonna bet your career?

• 1:41:37Jordi Hays?

  What about thirty racks?

• 1:41:39Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  What about thirty?

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  What about thirty racks?

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I, we know, we know a lot about thirty rack buys, but not on this. So I got a little switched up there.

• 1:41:52John Coogan?

  We're just buzzing around.

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  Thank you. This is really good history.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, I hope they don't watch this, like the team, you know? Cause you're like, not only did they have the perfect vision, they had the worst execution across every possible dimension of the business.

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  That's not a state secret. It's in the Stanford Graduate School of Business case study. I mean, it's like.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  But it's behind the paywall. It's behind the paywall. You're breaking open the paywall.

• 1:42:19Speaker 04

  I'm breaking open the paywall. Yeah. But it was, it was super helpful to learn from that because you realize that like in your go to market motion, you have to rely on the fact, you have to know that that, that single rack is gonna be at that single customer. That customer could be a one hundred rack customer, but they're not gonna be a one hundred rack customer until they are running in production on a smaller deployment for an extended period of time. And that changes the way you gear the business from, it changes the way you raise. It changes the way you kind of set expectations, the way you build the product, the way you set expectations with your own employees, with your customers. Because you are, what we are focused on is the, are, are those very large deployments. And what's exciting, and this is where it can definitely ring the gong, is that's what we arrived at in the last eighteen months is we got those.

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  We're both pretty fiscally conservative and, you know, these, these companies that like celebrate employee number, milestones, like number of employees. I'm like, no, we are never doing that. Because number of employees, that, that shouldn't be a cause of celebration. Those are all like, it, it, you should be celebrating revenue and so on.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Profitability.

• 1:43:32Speaker 04

  Profitability. And like, can we celebrate when we have more, more racks shipped than, than employees? I'm like, yes, that we can celebrate. And that was a big, a, a, a big gong banger was when we shipped our, more racks than we have employees. So, um, our, our vision from the beginning was how do we run in a, we, we have the belief that if you have an extraordinary team, you can run an efficient business, a totally iconoclastic belief, along with the iconoclastic belief. We, you know, we're, we're, we're real renegades over here.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Really out there on the, on the fringe.

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing stuff.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What a, what a milestone. This was super fun. You're welcome anytime. This was, uh, this was a joy.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:44:16Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, congratulations to the team on, uh, yeah, how many, how many racks are you trying to get? What's the new, what's the new ratio that you're going for?

• 1:44:24Speaker 04

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  A hundred, a hundred to one, like how, how?

• 1:44:28Speaker 04

  Would love that. Exactly. I'm very, again, old school. It's like, what is your revenue per employee? And like, let's get revenue per employee in the many millions of dollars place.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  That's, I love it.

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  That, that's the objective and big, healthy generational business. We're not, not looking to, not looking to flip. We're looking to, to actually go build generational business that Steve and I want to work at for the rest of our careers. Which apparently is also iconoclastic. I thought that was the point of certain companies is that we build generational ones, but guess not. I guess everyone else is geared for an exit. So, um, but we're, um.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Big talk, big talk until you get offered a hundred times revenue and then.

• 1:45:05Speaker 04

  Nope. No, dude, this is like, this is not like a negotiation tactic. Like this is like honestly hand on heart. Like that's not what we're interested in because.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  It's gotta be two hundred times revenue.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, bigger number.

• 1:45:24Speaker 04

  No, I mean, we, we are wanting to kick our debt in the universe. So that's what we're doing here, Doc.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Dent the gong.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Dent the gong and then dent the universe.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Brian.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you.

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to the team.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Go bye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate seventy percent of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. Our next guest is Daniel Kimino from The Advanced Spade Company. Welcome to the show. The founder and CEO.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? What do you got in your hand there?

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  I'm going subterranean, I think. What's going on?

• 1:46:07Jordi Hays?

  Look at that microphone.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Oh, look at that mic. Look at what he's got. There we go. Jordy, you got that?

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  Check, check, check, check.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  I got the same flavor, but in a different form factor. But thanks.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  All right. So what's, what's going on here?

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  What's going on?

• 1:46:21Jordi Hays?

  What's going on here?

• 1:46:22Speaker 05

  Uh, this is our media debut. Uh, we, we've like famously under the radar and so we wanted to show off all the, uh, cool stuff. We get to play with a bunch of fun things.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 1:46:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, well, yeah. So, so introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  And give us background. Have you worked at anywhere relevant to the current mission?

• 1:46:40Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I've probably only worked at relevant, uh, relevant places.

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  Name them off.

• 1:46:46Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I mean, uh, way, way, way back when, um, I was a student and did the, the Hyperloop competition when it was just like designed for college students and, uh, our team did really well. It got me in the door at SpaceX. And, uh, I think I was like the only person that worked at SpaceX and I was like, didn't care about rockets. I just wanted to build transportation. And, uh, yeah, and from there we like, uh, built, built the Hyperloop track and like ran that competition and like, right before we were, we were kind of like showing it off, Elon was like, oh, we're gonna do it. We gotta be serious. Let's go like dig a hole in the parking lot. And that's kind of where Boring Company started.

• 1:47:25Speaker 05

  And so then I got to, got to help start that and like do that for quite a while. And it like, there's some like wildly fascinating, uh, technical problems when you start looking at underground construction. And so kind of like occupied my whole brain for a while. Then we went, uh, was in, was in Austin building, uh, building for a couple Elon companies, doing just like a lot more site development. And there's like crazy construction coordination of, in like underground utilities. Like it, it is wild how difficult it is to know what's there and, uh, not hit it. And so, yeah.

• 1:48:03Jordi Hays?

  Had a couple accidents along the way, you know?

• 1:48:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  To say the least.

• 1:48:10Speaker 05

  There's a couple of water lines in Austin that like, I know where every inch of that line is, uh, personally. So, um, yeah, like, but these, these kind of like, it's, it was so wild working at, at SpaceX and seeing like, do we know where like satellites are to millimeter grade? And then underground construction, it like looks upside down because of, uh, these like technical problems and, and just like an integration of data. And so this, uh, I ruined a lot of parties. I just kept thinking and talking about this constantly. And then, uh, yeah, I got to, I got to spend like two years at Andro, which was, was awesome. And, uh, it like finally met kind of some smart people. They tipped me in the right direction.

• 1:48:53Speaker 05

  And then, yeah, it was really fixated on like, okay, there's a couple of technical things you can go build. They're like, they're hard to build, but you go build those. And then this would make you really good at building underground. And if you're gonna build underground, the really, really useful thing to do is go build underground utilities. And so that is, uh, you know, twenty twenty four, we started, uh, Advanced Spade Company. I think I was running around telling everyone like, dude, power lines, you should care, put them underground. And everyone was like, yeah, yeah. And like, we're in my garage and then like LA started burning down around us. And then all of a sudden, everyone was calling. We had like big wigs coming to just my garage and seeing like, what can we possibly do to get power lines underground?

• 1:49:35Speaker 05

  And, uh, yeah, we've been going, yeah, we've gone for two years now and, uh, having a ball, digging holes, burying utilities in those holes. It's great business.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  So glad you're doing this. Like where, where I live, uh, I live in Malibu and like there's, all the power lines should be underground. I think the power is getting shut off for at least some parts of the city, um, this, this week, just because there's like, there's high winds and, and the utility knows they need to do it, but it just seems like it's really hard and expensive. And so everyone just keeps kicking the can down the road. And, um, and so, yeah, it seems like super, super important work. How do you, how do you even go about like? What is, what is, what is revenue even look like in this business? Like, are you like, who, who's actually getting the, the contract? These are like massive infrastructure projects.

• 1:50:30Jordi Hays?

  I imagine you guys are like part of that, or are you guys like the, are you guys like the, the primary partner that's like bidding on, on these like kind of opportunities?

• 1:50:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, I mean, it's a very hard thing to figure out early on, but we, we've kind of a early days of mastering it, but we're getting quite good at this sort of like, find the essentially like the cheapest, shittiest work that nobody wants and that nobody is good at and start there. And then you go start doing it. And then you have like a room full of engineers building way better tools, like integrating the data, just like make that work supercharged. And then as your reputation gets good, you'll start getting on bigger and bigger projects and getting bigger and bigger scope. And you just keep sort of clawing the next thing forward. So we started in private utility locating.

• 1:51:26Speaker 05

  Uh, we were really good at making maps. And so then these general contractors who are typically the ones that like hold the contract from the utility, they would say like, hey, like we keep hitting stuff. The drillers are struggling. You guys make a really good map. Can you come drill for us? And we're like, yes, that, you know, secret plan the whole time. And then we go start drilling and like, we already come in with a bit of an edge because we have like really good data sets, really good maps. And then we just like keep going forward, right? Like apply the better tech there. You go build it better there and you start on like really small shots. You're kind of like a sub and you get called in last second and it's, it's very like, it is ground game and it is reputation based.

• 1:52:11Speaker 05

  And, uh, you just like keep building those and the tech lets us like speed run the normal like construction growth curve.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  So you're basically just expanding the scope of what you're doing. And then eventually people are going to realize like, hey, this GC is actually just a very thin wrapper around the advanced paid company. And then you guys eventually will, will bid for the, for then, for the project yourself?

• 1:52:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's, um, there's like a, I mean, yeah. Uh, there's, there's a bit of a mix. Like there are days where being a subcontractor is really nice because it's just like a lot less that we have to deal with, but then you also wind up like you have no control over your own destiny.

• 1:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:52Speaker 05

  And so the way we see it is kind of like our service team, I mean, feels very big for us, but like is, is quite small. And we sort of just keep moving up in terms of technical difficulty. And then as we move up, we want to sort of like leave the lower end market to where it's like, we, we don't want to be a monopoly of all things utility construction. That's like a really tough game to be in. So what we do is we take the tools that we've developed to get really good in that market. And then we turn around and sell them to the like mom and pop shops. So private locating is one where like, we're kind of phasing out of it, you know, like we

• 1:53:33Speaker 05

  can do like these really high quality maps on like really like customers who care a lot about the data. So a lot of the like field work, uh, for just like marking and pre-construction stuff. It's, it's just like, we aren't the best person to go do it, but now we can sell them a locator that we're like, hey, we spent years perfecting this and making it so that like, uh, we can move crazy fast. It does all the things that you want. And that's, uh, there's this theory in, in construction of kind of like golden shovels. Everyone wants to sell you, say like, hey, guy, like contractor who lives on 3% margin, pay me a ton of money, buy this golden shovel and like, I, I promise you that it's going to make you a bunch of money in the end.

• 1:54:18Speaker 05

  And that's, it's like a brutal business, like most people fail when they, when they try to do that. Whereas if we say like, hey, we've eaten your lunch. We've taken every contract you've had for the last year and now we don't want to do it anymore. Uh, here's the tool that like let us go beat you. Now it's an easy sell, like everyone, everyone wants that tool.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  How important is reliability? Like, uh, how much, how much opportunity is there in like innovation, robotics, the really sexy advanced stuff, entirely new equipment versus like just taking a design that works and simplifying it, removing complexity and just getting away different economic equation like a reusable rocket at SpaceX, for example?

• 1:55:05Speaker 05

  It's, um, there, there are a bunch of cool things that are like, no one's ever done this and it's going to count on like material advancements in, in tech. Um, we, I can't wait to come tell you about those in like five years. Uh, the reality is right now it is that like tech, uh, you can kind of look anywhere in the industry and everyone like hates each other. Everyone thinks that the other part is like underserving them.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:30Speaker 05

  Um, there is a, a stack of like tech that can solve pretty much any of the problems, but you're paying like 18 different people. So one, one customer that was like, oh, you guys are really just like a slick integrator of all these things. I'm like, yeah, that's a way to say it. I mean, we also have like, we have zero SaaS cost. We don't pay like four added layers, like we can go make those things. So like some challenges are mostly just integrate. I mean, like, construction workers love having details sent to their phone. It's like the easiest way to make them happy.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:06Speaker 05

  And it's like, not hard to do.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:08Speaker 05

  Uh, making a new locator is like quite hard to do. It's a like, yeah, so there's, there's a mix. Um, some days it feels like, uh, if you just take good notes and then go ahead and look at those notes, you're like a notch above. You're, you're doing really well. Yeah.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Uh, can you walk us through what's behind you? What, it feels like I'm looking at maybe three different vehicles, but what's your product? What's modified? What, what's the purpose of all this?

• 1:56:39Speaker 05

  Um, everything here is like, uh, our config of something that you buy. So we've got a directional drill. Um, so this is like a super common, uh, drill that you'll see, like you guys will see it on the street. They're all over LA, every, everywhere. And, um, these are, these are kind of like the big, uh, this is the, this is the thing where, you know, like these tools really proved their value basically. Everyone wants underground grid investment has like, in the last 10 years, it's tripled. Reliability is worse by every single metric. Uh, and every, like the problem, problem is overhead. You, you keep putting stuff overhead, it keeps failing. Everyone wants to go underground.

• 1:57:24Speaker 05

  There's no like secret there. It just costs too much. And, uh, really when fiber started rolling out super aggressively and then directional drills, you had this problem where you're like crossing a rural road. How do you do it? And it's like, what do you, you can't dig a trench and like stop a two lane country road.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:41Speaker 05

  So directional drills became like ubiquitous. They were everywhere because you can just pop a shot under the road. Then they proved their worth, this whole idea of being trenchless and being like less intrusive, less invasive in rural places. Now the fiber companies are trying to do it in cities. And it's like, I mean, uh, look at the news, right? Like New York airport just got shut down because of people like operating, uh, and there's fiber in the ground and you like hit it and it's, uh, like the tool set and the tech set is just not there to be able to like be trenchless or safely work in cities. And so that's kind of where we started.

• 1:58:21Speaker 05

  And, uh, yeah, like data center boom has pushed things forward, but, um, it's, it's reduced the barrier to cost a lot. Then we just have, uh, big trucks.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:33Speaker 05

  Uh, we've got a mud truck. So like drilling is a very fluids game. Yeah.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Very cool.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  I love the, I love the, the, your design. Like it's so cool. Like it feels like, uh, it feels like it could just be like an everyday like construction, like general contracting, like logo. It has that feeling, but, but, um, it's very cool.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  How big, how big's the team today?

• 1:59:00Speaker 05

  Uh, we're like fifty, fifty-five, something like that.

• 1:59:04John Coogan?

  Hiring more, I assume?

• 1:59:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, always.

• 1:59:09Jordi Hays?

  To say the least.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  Lot of digging to do.

• 1:59:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm on a, I'm a public awareness. I mean, we're based in Long Beach, so we're surrounded by space companies and I am a, on a public awareness campaign of like, space doesn't matter. No one, don't look up. Kind of dig holes.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Doesn't matter. I was taking it from somebody who worked at SpaceX. That's great.

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Look down.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Well, thank you.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  Down at your feet.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  Coming on the show.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to meet you, Daniel. Fascinating company, fascinating journey. Uh, come back on soon.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, please, please land some contracts in my backyard.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  ASAP.

• 1:59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love it.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  Coming to your streets, baby.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:59:45Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 1:59:46John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:59:46Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, dude. Cheers.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We gotta pull up this video of a Seto Corsa with mods, running DLSS five, which is Nvidia's AI uprezing. And I was looking at this with Jordy yesterday. We were like, oh, we should pull this up on the show. This is really cool. I can't believe they, they took a video game and they added, uh, some mods to make it look more realistic and they added some AI uprezing and it looks like a YouTube video. It looks real. Uh, and we were like, ah, but it might just be a video. So maybe this is someone trying to trick us into thinking it's fake AI.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  Cause this is happening. There's a lot of video games that are rebranding as like, oh, we vibe coded this game. And in fact, they've been working on it for a couple of years. It's not actually vibe coded. Um, and, uh, and I was like, ah, this might be fake in that it's real video, but it turns out it's not fake. This is a video game, I believe. I've done a bunch of research and tried to debunk the idea that this was a Seto Corsa. I believe it is a Seto Corsa, but I cannot tell it from real video. Like it's fully passed the touring test at this point. This is like maybe the first video that I've been able to watch the full thing and firmly say like, we are cooked in them, in terms of video. Like this is, this passes the touring test. We were both confused by it.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Um, I don't know if you have any other takeaways. The, the interesting thing is that you-

• 2:01:20Jordi Hays?

  My takeaway is I gotta shave more seconds off my lap time. It's baw.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  You gotta shave some time off your, uh, off your time, but, uh, do you want this? Because there was some debate over, uh, I don't want my video games to look real. I want them to look like a game. Uh, part of what makes this look real is that there's some camera shake in your, the camera position is behind the driver's head. As someone who spends a lot of time in a racing simulator, would you want this filter on? Would you want this feature? Is this appealing or is this just a cool viral novelty?

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't really care that much about graphics.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:57Jordi Hays?

  But I would certainly take it for a spin.

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you should. It, it seems pretty cool. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, Misk, risk management, money movements and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. Um, there are-

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Gibril says, please stop cutting off the intro countdown music on your live stream final cuts. I enjoy the intro song. Please look in.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Really? That's interesting.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  It's just so long.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  But people know to skip to five minutes, maybe? I don't know. That's, that's something I'd never considered. We thought we were doing such a favor, saving you from having to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap or scroll forward. We thought we were going the extra mile, takes us a little bit of time, saves you-

• 2:02:42Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a little treat for showing up live.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Music's a little treat.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:02:47Jordi Hays?

  For being with us live.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  If you want to enjoy the intro music.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  The real ones.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Show up live.

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Show up live.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  Okay, otherwise it's gonna be cut off. It's an, it's a live exclusive.

• 2:02:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a live exclusive. Sorry.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Sorry to you in the chat.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Jeb.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  We're not, we're not giving you what you want. We're not listening to the customers. The customers don't know what they want. They'd ask for a faster horse. Um, there, well, there is a lot of, uh, a lot of fake news on the internet. There's this, uh, idea of single flight life insurance from Jetstar. I was able to debunk this. It's a really ridiculous concept. Eight dollars in three million if your flight crashes. Um, for a single flight, of course, Jetstar does actually sell insurance, but not this way. Uh, very funny post though, but be careful out there because I'm sure a lot of people saw this and thought, hey, maybe that's real. Uh, I like this take on jet lag. Jet lag is kind of holy to me. I'm tired because I flew. I flew too fast, too far.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  My body misses a different sun.

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  I haven't been getting jet lag lately. I've been doing pretty well. I don't know. Maybe it's just because I've just been doing East Coast for a couple of days in and out.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  I think RVs are gonna have a huge comeback and you never have to worry about jet lag.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Get ready.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  RV lag is not a thing.

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  Get ready. Yeah.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Four wheels or the-

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  Who do you think is actually gonna buy the, the Banana Ball team? You think Disney or TKO and-

• 2:04:13Jordi Hays?

  I've never watched.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  The, the-

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Second of it.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  The Nano Bananas. Maybe Google will buy them. Who knows?

• 2:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, an AI, an AI company should buy them. Just to like get, try to help with the popularity.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Training data for hallucinated AI video. They already do it in real life. Uh, get it in the data set. Uh, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move project forward from start to finish. Uh, the other story that is worth, uh, sharing is that Reese Witherspoon is buying her company back. Hello sunshine. Uh, it was valued at nine hundred million dollars in 2021, but potentially she's gonna get it back for just ninety-four percent of what that headline valuation was. I think you were saying that's around seven million dollars or something for this production company?

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  So Candle Media bet on Witherspoon's celebrity brand and book club, but it fell short as growth in direct to consumer subscriptions lagged. But always fun rooting for a founder getting back in the full ownership seat. So, uh, a lot of silver lining there, although I'm sure there was some money that was wagered and lost. Who knows? Who knows where it goes next, but, uh, very exciting to see her maybe back at the helm and getting another bite of the apple. I am personally, uh, I'm personally rooting for it. Also, do you think this is a recession indicator? The fact that, uh, startup launches are starting to do paid partnerships with all the hottest anonymous accounts? Robert Sterling, Wall Street Bets, Greg and-

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is just the, the biggest anti-signal. Like if you do this, I just assume that I shouldn't, that no one should care about your company. So just don't do it.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Don't do it, folks.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Be interesting.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Do something-

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Original.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  That is original, that will break through.

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think there's enough people that will just, your brand will just be like, yo, you're the AstroTurf brand. You're the brand that had to buy, you know, quote tweets. Um, but there is, I, I believe that there's a industrial complex around this now. Like there is a-

• 2:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's multiple companies that do this.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so it's, I, it's probably something that's pretty turnkey.

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Sheil was saying like, if you pay for X premium, it should just block the paid partnership.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  Interesting. That would be interesting. Yeah. Maybe, maybe that would be something to do. It is, it is cool that the disclosure came because, uh, for, there, there was a while there on X where there was a lot of stuff that was paid and was not disclosed and, uh, this feels like a, uh, a step forward in terms of transparency. Makes the platform better, honestly. I'm, I'm enjoying it. Um, and I don't see that many of these paid partnerships and sometimes they're funny. Anyway.

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning into TBPN. Leave us five stars on-

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  We're just twenty-three minutes away from the Mission S reveal. And we're just hours away from us seeing-

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  The new Nathan Fielder movie.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  We're very excited. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Get ready for Christmas. It's only seventy days away. And sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM.

• 2:07:26Jordi Hays?

  We love you.