David Senra, Delian Asparouhov, Brendan Foody, Jake Adler, Apple Makes Moves, Hims & Hers

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:00) - Happy Day! (01:00) - Apple Shuffles Executives (16:40) - Apple's $1B Streaming Loss (38:24) - Metallica on Vision Pro (48:09) - Ozempic Knockoffs Ends (01:00:50) - Brendan Foody (01:17:45) - David Senra (01:48:01) - Delta V (Delian Asparouhov) (02:07:02) - Jake Adler (02:27:50) - The Timeline

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 TPN live. We got a happy day today. It's Thursday, March 20th, 2025.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  Sound Jordy? What's that sound?

• 0:15John Coogan?

  This is the energy we're bringing to the show today. Get ready.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Technology needed a Greek weather show.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  Just to be clear, we've been blasting this all morning. I don't even know where you got this.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We're live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. Folks, Apple is firing people. They're shuffling.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  You're normally good with transitions, John, but that was a little rough. We went from the craziest high to a very low moment.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Well, we'll find out.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  Efficiency is good. Business efficiency.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  The headline says shuffle.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  Shuffle.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Should could be shuffling out of the organization, could be shuffling into the organization. We're going to find out because Mark Gurman has the exclusive. Apple shuffles AI executive ranks in bid to turn around Siri. Obviously, we've talked about this a lot. No one likes Siri right now, but they have a complete monopoly over the Siri button on your iPhone. And no one's leaving iPhones, so they got to get it together and figure out what product to build. Apple is undergoing a rare shakeup in its executive ranks, aiming to get its artificial intelligence efforts back on track after months of delays and stumbles.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, I like to track name popularity.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  States.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Give it to me.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And in 2024,

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  let's see, in.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Oh, Siri. You're thinking Siri?

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the name Siri in 1973, 15 babies per million were named Siri. And that peaked in 2008, actually, at 74. So more than quadruple.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  And and now it is back in the in the depths back to

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Well, it makes sense to start using the name again because if you're bearish on Siri the product, you think that that white space is now available for baby names.

• 2:16Jordi Hays?

  It's a good time to go long.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Exactly. Expect that it'll be replaced. They'll come up with a different brand name. They'll have to refresh.

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it'll just be fair.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  It'll be

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  A greenfield, blue ocean opportunity in in naming.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Well, CEO Tim Cook has lost confidence in the ability of AI head John Giandrea to execute on product development. So he's moving over another top executive to help Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell. A little controversial.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Why are you laughing, Jordy?

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I gotta put

• 2:49John Coogan?

  He's taking risks.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  I I want to I want Tim to take some responsibility here.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  He's in the arena. These guys are in the arena.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  These guys are in the arena. They're making they're making products. They're making products.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  We love Apple. We want to be clear.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we want, uh, if Apple's training their intelligence on this show, just know that we love you.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we just want you to, uh, you know, reach your full potential.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I just laughed briefly because moving over the guy that the Vision Pro has not been a fantastic, you know, at least hasn't hasn't had a lot of commercial success. It's probably a better product than Apple Intelligence.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  It is a magical product, but in terms of the software, the execution has been

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  It does make sense. It's like, hey, this guy built a magic magical product.

• 3:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the tech isn't ready yet. Let's take our

• 3:37John Coogan?

  And just some fresh blood.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Just someone to come in, rethink things, try and

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Take an MVP.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  Swap them.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  I mean, the Vision, the Vision Pro, it was, it was just, it executed in a very different way. Took a lot of risks.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Some of those paid off, some of those didn't.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  There was a world where we would have been doing the show in Vision Pro.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  I thought about it, actually. I I was specing out a, an interview show that was going to be filmed in Apple immersive vision. Um, and I was going to interview, start with like the history of VR and interview all the VR legends, the John Garmax, the Palmer's and stuff, and and have it be only available in Vision Pro, but then I did want an audience of more than five people, so I had to pivot to X, the everything app. Anyway, Vision Pro creator Mike Rockwell, he's in in the new role. He'll be in charge of Siri virtual assistant. And Rockwell had reported to chiefs, so software chief Craig Federighi, removing Siri completely from Giandrea's command. Apple is poised to announce.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Has there been an Italian takeover at Apple? It sounds like the Ferrari executives.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Is that what's going on?

• 4:46Jordi Hays?

  I think you have a certain confidence around doing bad Italian accents.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Terrible, awful.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  Because we have some Italian roots.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Yes, of course.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  But but seems like there's been an Italian takeover over at Apple.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Maybe. Apple is poised to announce to announce the changes to employees this week, but it's leaking on Bloomberg now. Somebody told, somebody told German, the iPhone.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  Brent and Ben, you guys are swapping roles tomorrow.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Lock in.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  We were gonna tell you, but we just leaked it.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  We just leaked it to Bloomberg instead. The iPhone maker's senior leaders, known as the group, known, a group known as the top 100, just met at a secretive annual offsite gathering to discuss the future of the company. I think that's a project that Steve Jobs kicked off.

• 5:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Take the top 100 performers, they all get to go to this awesome offsite hangout.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you just know you're in the kind of 95 to 105 territory, just like the waiting around to figure out, did I get the invite, did I not?

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Trying to understand.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  AI efforts were a key talking point at the summit. Moves underscore the plight facing Apple. Its AI technology is severely lagging industry rivals, and the company has shown little sign of catching up. The A, the Apple intelligence platform was late to arrive and largely a flop despite being the main selling point for iPhone 16.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting point. Does it lag Android, or does it just lag the foundation model providers?

• 6:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is interesting. You don't really hear about, about Android being like leaps and bounds ahead on the integrated AI stuff. Certainly.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Especially because it's a.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Green bubble situation?

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just that it's not exact, it's not exactly true that Google's had a fantastic.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, Google hasn't been executing that well either. I have seen some side by side comparisons of, okay, let's just zoom in on very, very micro features within the Apple intelligence ecosystem. One of those is object removal in images. So, you know, you take a picture of this desk. You want to remove this Celsius can, you circle it. How well does Apple do that? How well does Google do that? It's a very, very narrow feature. And at least in the one post that I saw kind of comparing the two, it seemed like Apple was doing okay and Google was doing very well. And that's kind of been the case for most of these. But still, probably not enough to actually get people shift over.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, a little bit of background on Rockwell. He's currently the vice president in charge of the Vision Products Group, the division that developed Apple's headset. As part of the changes, he'll be leaving that team and handing the reins to Paul Mead, an executive who has run hardware engineering for the Vision Pro under Rockwell, which is kind of interesting. It's like, do they, are they pivoting here from metaverse to AI? Which is obviously the most, the biggest tectonic shift in tech over the last few years.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  They, Mark Gurman should consult with Deal on how to not get spies caught. Because clearly this guy's got bugs in, in the top 100 to be figuring this stuff out before they're willing to even talk about it.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. The need to rescue Siri is especially urgent. The company has struggled to release new features that were announced last June, including the ability to tap into a user's data to fulfill queries. Despite the technology not being ready, Apple advertised the enhancements for months on TV in order to sell the iPhone 16. The Apple manager who led, who has led Siri until now told his team in a recent meeting that the delays were ugly and that staffers may be angry and embarrassed. The executive Robbie Walker also said he was unsure when the features would actually arrive due to competing development priorities. Apple has publicly stated that the features will be ready sometime in the coming year. Apple shares have declined 14% this year, part of a broader retreat in tech stocks. They fell less than 1% on Thursday. By tapping Rockwell, Apple is betting on an executive

• 8:30John Coogan?

  with proven technical experience. He has demonstrated the ability to ship new products and run an organization, an engineering organization with thousands of people. Rockwell

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute dog, John.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Has a knack for solving problems and often takes the role of evangelist for futuristic technology. It's interesting, like

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  This sounds like an amazing LinkedIn description. I am a technology evangelist and problem solver.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  That's what it takes.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  But I wonder if, so everyone's reading into this and seeing, okay, it seems like Apple is really feeling the heat from the Mark Gurman coverage from the Daring Fireball piece. They are now taking it seriously. They're making some leadership changes to try and address Apple Intelligence, Siri, make it better, make it great, which I think everyone believes it can.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  It is clearly, everybody at this point is saying, I enjoy the comedic relief from Apple Intelligence, but that doesn't make it any less embarrassing for Apple.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Who's, who does things highly intentionally with specific goals and they haven't been hitting those today.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  My question is, by moving Rockwell over, is this a sign that Apple is pulling back and less, less excited about vision?

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's been obvious.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Because there is a world where, I mean, Zuck and Meta, they released headsets and some of the headsets didn't sell super well or had high churn and they still haven't broken through, but Zuck has just said, look, we're on this release cadence, we're keeping it going, we're continuing to invest.

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, the shareholders are gonna have to deal with, what, 20 billion in CapEx on Reality Labs or something like that. And, you know, I own this company, I'm in founder mode and I'm gonna make this happen because, and I think everyone agrees, you know, anyone who's read sci-fi or like what Cyan Banister was talking about yesterday with Snow Crash, like, it makes sense that at some point VR is going to be a thing.

• 10:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Like, it will be solved, it's just a physics problem, it's an engineering problem, things will get there.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and Mark is Zuckerberg that is, is committed to, he knows how important it is, how much bigger a business Meta can be if they own the underlying platform.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  And so he's just saying, I will spend tens of billions of dollars, where Apple doesn't seem to have that same, they have a willingness to spend, but less of a willingness to fail.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  Yep, yep. Yeah, it will be, it will be interesting. I, the other, the other interesting thing is, I would love to take a peek at what's happening in the VR space over in China.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Because we've seen, not quite leapfrogging, but certainly a sprint to the cutting edge, especially in the hardware sector for, you know, drones, we've seen this with EVs, we've seen this with phones. Where is China on the adoption curve with VR? Is there anything special going on there? Or are they just kind of copying our products and not seeing the same churn numbers? Anyway, Rockwell has been one of the few Apple executives to take a major hardware device from zero to one. He joined Apple's hardware engineering group in 2015 and the company released Vision Pro in February of last year. Giandrea has a different background, a former Google star. He was hired in 2018 to run Apple's AI work.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  He's been one of Alphabet Inc.'s most senior executives overseeing the search and AI divisions. Rockwell, in contrast, doesn't have prior experience as an AI leader or clout with the burgeoning machine learning community.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  And to be honest, I think that's fine because Apple is not trying to innovate at the model layer right now. And they just need to deliver great consumer products. Like they need a chat GPT moment in order to regain their respect. It's not, hey, you need to be innovating and pushing the boundaries. And nobody's expecting them to set up their own sort of XAI Memphis data center and just like go all in on training foundation models. Nobody cares about that. It's like you, we're all running our lives on your devices. You should be able to unlock the power of these technologies in a more meaningful way.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  I mean, I know that they want to, they maintain control over Siri and over the Siri button and the ecosystem. But if you look at so much of Apple's software, they were fine letting there be competition for a while. And then eventually coming in with a really polished product. You think about the iPhone launched with Google Maps as a default app. And then over time, they launched Apple Maps. Now Apple Maps is the default, but you can still pick your map provider. I would love to see that in the virtual assistant Siri button. I could.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Makes so much sense. You could swap.

• 12:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you can even.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  And they still gain that leverage where they could go in five years and say, actually, if you want to, we're going to sort of limit your abilities here. You remember with Maps, there was a long period of time where, maybe it's still the case, but if you were using Google Maps, it wouldn't preview on your, on when you just had your phone sort of not unlocked.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, Apple clearly had like more APIs.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was just very frustrating to use Google Maps because you had to open your phone every time you wanted to understand where you were. And so I just actually defaulted back to Apple Maps, even though it wasn't as good.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  And so they're always going to have that leverage.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:32Jordi Hays?

  And I think that it would potentially take some heat off if they were letting people be more innovative on the platform.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, uh, yeah, I mean, I could definitely see a situation like, like what happened with Maps. I mean, I tried to go all in on Apple Maps and just be like, I'm not even going to use it. But then for searching for certain businesses, like Apple, Google Maps is still better. And then if you want to take a really, really crazy route home and get home like two minutes earlier, but like potentially go on a dirt road, Waze is just the best for that. You know that for a while.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Waze in LA is so unhinged.

• 14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, just go on and off the on-ramps forever.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  So you're going to get home two minutes faster, but only if you drive 60 miles an hour through this residential neighborhood. This is why in LA, you have to be very careful around which neighborhood, if you're going to live in the actual city.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  You could be on the most quaint, nice street.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And then the Waze decides.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  It's like, this is the new route. And then it's just like people barreling down.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  A lot of neighborhoods would lobby Waze. They would like write letters and say, hey, please like hard code, like do not take like the full traffic through our town.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  How's that work?

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Probably not very well.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Grease in the wheels. Anyway, Siri, the AI division's main consumer product has had a number of bosses over the years. When Apple first launched the voice assistant in 2011, uh, it was overseen by Scott Forstall. Then it was given to Services Chief, Chief Eddie Q in 2012 and transferred to Federighi in 2017. Giandrea took it over a year later. Now it'll be led by Rockwell with oversight returning again to Federighi. Giandrea will remain at the company. A little bit of fake news with the firings, not happening, at least not yet.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Just a mix up.

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Just a mix up, but certainly shuffling, that's the term, the corporate shuffle. Even with Rockwell taking over Siri, an abrupt departure would signal publicly that the AI efforts have been tumultuous, something Apple is reluctant to acknowledge. Giandrea's other responsibilities include oversight of research, testing and technologies related to AI. The company has also, has a team reporting, investigating robotics, they're working on robotics. Federighi, Rockwell's new manager, is the company's senior vice president. He oversees development of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, operating systems, as well as development tools. Along with Giandrea, he was a key figure in the development of Apple Intelligence. And so, uh, that's a little bit about the shakeup at Apple, but we'll see. Anyway.

• 15:51John Coogan?

  Whether you think this is good for Apple or bad for Apple, you gotta get on public.com. It's investing for those who take it seriously.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com to sign up.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  The absolute best.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Stocks are low-key a prediction market for the financial, the future financial performance of the most fantastic companies in the world.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  You know, we had Joe on, he said treasuries are basically their own prediction market.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Prediction market for the discounted, for the present value of all future cash flows, right?

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, something like that.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  That's what we need.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of Apple, Apple streaming is losing over a billion dollars a year. Apple TV is the only money loser in Apple's broad portfolio of services, which is why its executives have started taking a closer look at its costs. I wonder if they're on ramp yet. If they're not, that would just be silly.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  You know that's the sponsor I had lined up, I'm pretty sure. Something like that. Anyway.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so last year, Apple CEO Tim Cook had questions about several pricey movie deals executives of Apple TV Plus. The company's video streaming service had been striking, including for Argyle, a spy action comedy starring Henry, is this Cavill?

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Henry Cavill.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  In Dua Lipa. Quite the star-studded lineup. The movie, which cost $200 million to produce, hadn't found much of an audience or generated more subscribers for the service. Cook told his colleagues, according to a former Apple TV Plus employee. He's like, what kind of value are we getting here? He's probably a big Dua Lipa fan. But, but not enough of a fan clearly to just be down to burn $200 million for not a lot of impact. I didn't even know this movie released.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  There was a rumor, yeah, I did, and I saw some news about it. I think there was a rumor that like Taylor Swift wrote it or something like that.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  It's funny that they don't send you a push notification to your phone marketing these films that they spend $200 million on.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  It's crazy. They're not more annoying. That would be terrible.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  No, it would, but you remember when they just put the YouTube album?

• 18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You should just open your phone. It just starts playing the movie.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  I guess people didn't, people didn't like that.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  It should just know, it should just know that, hey, you're bored right now. Stop, stop scrolling TikTok and just flip over to this movie. You got it installed. It is, I, I feel like, I wonder, I wonder if Cook is actually into Argyle and liked it and then he greenlit it. Because we've seen examples of that, like Bezos is always like greenlighting these cool sci-fi things and I love it. I'm like, this is awesome. He bought The Expanse from SyFy Network and The Expanse was amazing show, amazing book series. You should definitely go check it out. But it was like pretty underfunded at SyFy Network and he just put like Game of Thrones money behind it, basically. And then it got canceled after like six seasons because it was like too niche and weird, but it's a fantastic show.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we saw.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  And he did that with Three Body Problem.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Was it Amazon that did the Melania Trump?

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was a little bit different.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Forty million dollars.

• 18:57John Coogan?

  I don't think that was because he thought it was like a great foundational piece of cinema, but.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  You never know.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  We didn't get the pitch.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, yeah, it, you know, Netflix has the stomach to burn cash.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  On these kinds of things.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  And again, this is, Apple's not focused on innovation and risk right now.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 19:24John Coogan?

  So they have 70, they have 45 million subscribers for Apple TV plus. Also terrible naming convention.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  You're probably subscribed right now, even if you don't, you don't. That's just every, every now and then they just charge your card. Every few days they just hit you with like a $10 or $15 charge.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like, ah, they're not gonna.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Cause there's the Apple TV, the device. There's the Apple TV app on Apple TV devices. And then there's Apple TV plus, which is a subscription service that you access through the app on the device.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  That's right. But then you can also get them through, there's then the dedicated Samsung.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  You can watch Apple TV Plus on Samsung stuff?

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Okay, that's weird. Anyway, Apple shows no sign that it's getting cold feet about the streaming media business.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can. You can watch Apple TV on Samsung smart TVs.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  By some measures, the company has found success with Apple TV Plus. The service currently has one of the buzziest shows in television, Severance, and in 2022, it won a Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards for Code.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Tim's got to understand to get a Severance, you got to have a couple of dogs, you know?

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  You got to treat this. He needs to act like a growth stage VC where, yeah, you're going to have some misses.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  But you just need those, you know, you need at least one Severance a year and you're pretty good.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a couple of years ago, I was talking to Christopher Nolan's brother, Jonah Nolan, who did Westworld and had worked very closely with HBO. And he was saying that one of the things that Apple might run into with Apple TV was this idea that Apple has such a premier brand, everything has to be so polished. We've seen this with like the ads that they run and the apps that they put out. That they, that Hollywood is more random. There's just a lot more risk that you need to take. And you're going to get flops and to run a high performing movie studio, it's almost like a venture portfolio.

• 21:19Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Where you're going to have a huge Power Law winner that's the next Star Wars, but you're going to have a lot of dogs that get forgotten. And that doesn't matter. But if you're Apple and you think that the dogs are going to tarnish your brand, you're going to be much less risk on and you're going to be much more like heads will roll when something like Argyle doesn't rip.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  When, when really that's part of the game if you're in Hollywood. And so he was highlighting this like culture, this cultural problem. Meanwhile, HBO is going crazy.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  The comp to true growth equity is so real.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 21:55Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is just you're investing basically with a deck and a team.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  So it's like a, it's a pre-seed. You know, sort of traction.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Growth stage investment. That means you're going to have these huge outliers and you're going to have some real misses. And you got to build a model that that works through that.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Let's talk about the audience, give some people some background here. The Apple TV audience remains relatively small. Media measurement firm Nielsen regularly reports that Apple TV Plus comprises less than 1% of total viewing each month of streaming services on connected televisions in the US. By contrast, Netflix and Amazon represented 8.2 and 3.5% of total viewing. Amazon, Netflix up at 8.2%, eight times the size of Apple TV Plus. They only offer a fraction of the content available.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  So what is, I wonder if this data tracks YouTube because I imagine that.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  There was probably a lot of like, like linear TV too, you know, just.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this says streaming services for connected televisions. So that, would that count ESPN on a?

• 22:59John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah. Yeah. Peacock, I don't know. I mean, there is a huge value for free content. Like, you, you forget that like a huge selection, huge swath of the, of the populace is just so price sensitive that even a few dollars a month is just, ah, I'll just watch the free version with ads. And, and that's why a lot of these streaming services have been offering easier ways to get in at lower prices. That's what Netflix did with their ads plan. That's what Amazon has done by bundling it with Prime. But Apple TV Plus, they give you these benefits. They give you these little handouts when you buy a new phone. Hey, get three months free, but it's not quite the same as, hey, you can get into this ecosystem regardless of what hardware you have for $5 a month with its ad supported.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Because again, that erodes the brand. It feels weird to be watching some prestigious severance level Academy Award nominated film on Apple TV Plus and then just see an ad for beer or something. I don't know.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  It's funny watching, do you get ads before White Lotus?

• 24:01John Coogan?

  No.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm on the, I must have at some point signed up for the HBO Max plan.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  So you're like really down in the market right now.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Premium, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This tech sell off, I was gig along, Apple sold off by 14% this year.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you took a bath on it.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  I decided to downgrade my subscription by $5 a month.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm somehow on the premium, whatever plan is like, you know, this is ad free content after this message.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Well, I do see, I often will see, it's like an ad for another show on Apple TV. They throw one of those in, but I find those actually pretty valuable.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  This is an ad for Founders Podcast.

• 24:45John Coogan?

  Before you, before you tune into TBPN, check out Founders Podcast. We're actually having David set around the show today, so stay tuned.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Our number one brother.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Let's, let's continue here. Apple has a reputation of being a disruptor with its hardware and App Store, but I didn't see the core value here, says Horace DDU, founder of a market analysis firm, Simco. Picking winners and losers is not what the company is known for, is what we were getting at. Apple's overall corporate profits are so vast, it reported 93.7 billion in net income in its last fiscal year, that it can easily absorb the losses from its streaming service. And I think it should, you were joking about them buying an F1 team. I think, I think they should be investing in this really great content.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  It's more, how do you get even more aggressive and just eat Netflix alive?

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 25:32Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't that be the strategy?

• 25:33John Coogan?

  I think.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  If you wanted, if you wanted just, you know, there's a lot of money sloshing around the system, right? You don't, you can't go and overpay by 2X for every piece of content, probably.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  But you could maybe do that for long enough to get people to start churning from other services and, you know, who knows? Or, or we're just, or it'd be interesting to think about Apple being the final boss and trying to pursue a bundling strategy and just say like, hey, we are actually going to just tax this like we tax everything else.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  Yep. So I think there's two lenses to analyze this through. One is like, what I think would be cool, which is, I think it'd be cool if a company that's throwing off $100 billion just poured billions of dollars into creating the most beautiful and cinematic and powerful stories in the world and just like. Kind of we're just a patron of the arts. I think that that's really cool. And I think that when you think about the, the, the mega billionaires of previous eras, they gave us museums, they gave us libraries, they gave us art. And, and I think that there's something awesome about that. Now flip it around and think about like as a shareholder, maybe the optimal thing is truly just, hey, you're not good at this. This isn't your core business.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Get out of it, tax everything out, else figure out how to take, you know, a dollar for every 10.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or to me, to me, the and I'm sure there's a reason for this, but the inspired strategy is to build the best television and then tax every single streaming service that runs on it and just take, you know, a bunch of revenue and pursue a bundle. I, I always was shocked that they didn't, that they, that they went with like the smart TV device that makes your TV an Apple TV. Versus just making the most beautiful TV, because I think that there's, everybody that owns an Apple computer would buy that.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Even a lot of people that are, are ThinkPad, Chad's would, would, you know, still opt for the Apple TV in their home. One of the most frustrating things for me with modern TVs is just the software, the hardware. It feels like slop. I happen to have like Samsung TVs all over my house and the software is so buggy and so slow. And I just don't even end up wanting to turn on the TV because it's just like, okay, I've got to like click around and.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  My whole hack was I'd get a TV that was as dumb as possible, but had this technology called HDMI CEC, which is like, it controls the TV through the HDMI. And so if you hook up an Apple TV to that, you can just use the Apple TV remote. You push it on the TV, it actually turns on the TV and controls the TV. And then you can use the Apple TV remote as the volume button as well, because the Apple TV remote is.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just crazy to think that.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Apple could easily have a TV business that was significantly bigger than than AirPods.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  I agree. I asked Ben Thompson this and I was unsatisfied with the answer.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  What was it?

• 28:27John Coogan?

  I asked him like, why don't like, they make, they make a $5,000 display, the Apple Pro Display XDR.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  Make me a 10,000.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Pay for that. They love it. Yeah.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  We have, we have multiple of them here. I have it at home.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  And I think, I think there were a few things that, that went in there where, you know, the, like, the market is moving so quickly that the, like, the install rate is, is odd. And there's something about like, the, the, the, like, the, the price per inch of TVs in HD is like declining so, so quickly.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  But Apple is a luxury brand.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  I know. I know. And having an Apple TV on the wall would be iconic and I think it would sell very well. I, I would love it. And, and the integration would be fantastic. And you could imagine it working very, very well. But you know, we gotta stay focused at some point.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's probably a startup opportunity to just build the most beautiful TV. If Pebble, if Pebble's saying, you know, we're gonna make a, a smartwatch again.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can go build.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  I would certainly hope so.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is like the most deeply competitive market and a lot of the buyers are just like purely fixated on price to value and don't care about design.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  The other thing is that I think if they're really, really looking forward to the future. You put on the app.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  It's VR.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  And you put on the Apple Vision Pro and there's a lot of apps that don't work and the dinosaur thing is like two minutes long and like talking to your friends, all that stuff is like crazy future. But just putting on the Apple Vision Pro and watching a movie is a fantastic experience and it feels like having a private movie theater. And if they just make it lighter and a little bit more comfortable, the visuals were there, the pixel density was there. The price point doesn't matter, I think, for, for the Apple consumer. I think, I think five grand for something that's actually light and comfortable and you can put on every night to wear, to watch a fantastic movie in a movie theater. And you can have someone for your whole family. Like, I, I think that will sell very well if they really focus the, the, the software and the strategy on that.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  And I mean, that was one of the best parts about the Apple Vision Pro was that the app that was in the top left corner, like the one that they want you to click on the most was just the. The Apple TV like store where you could just buy movies and you could go there and immediately with a couple clicks, pay a couple bucks and be watching Avatar in 3D in a theater and it was a magical experience. It was great. Just a lot of other problems with that with that thing, but I think that that's where they're gonna bet and that's where they're gonna invest and they're just gonna skip over the the wall mounted TV entirely.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, if you don't want to watch Apple TV, maybe you should buy a watch on Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. They have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  One thing they don't have on Bezel.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  What?

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Apple watches.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  They don't.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Um, they just don't.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Make a statement. Let people know that you care about craftsmanship.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  I guess they, I think they have, um, they have a ca- case for a certain app. No, no, they don't. They have some watches.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely no watches on the platform, but uh, if you're listening to this, you owe yourself a little treat and uh, go get yourself a watch on Bezel. You can always find a reason.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  There's always a bull market somewhere.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  There's always a bull market somewhere. Uh, let's stay with the Vision Pro. Uh, Apple released a new piece of immersive content, uh, a Metallica concert, and it was absolutely panned by Ben Thompson, uh, a scathing review and he makes a very clear argument.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Before we, before we drag this through the mud, I just want to go out and say that Metallica is awesome and it's, it was a core part of my childhood.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  That's, it's so funny. I love metal, never really got into Metallica.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  What were you into?

• 32:14John Coogan?

  More like Slipknot, you know, the really hardcore stuff, I guess.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I was never a Slipknot guy. I was never big into that world.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, even like Iron Maiden, better for me than than Metallica. I don't know why. I think, I think, you know what it was? I think I got turned off because uh, I grew up in the Napster era and Metallica was very hostile to uh, piracy. And a lot of, you know, my generation was very into, you know, the Napster, the Kazaa, downloading stuff illegally, the precursors to Spotify. And Metallica left a bad taste in everyone's mouth by being so prosecut- prosecutorial.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Doing lawfare really against us, us hackers on the internet. And so I, I was just like, you know what? I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give you a chance, Metallica. But they're back and they're partnering with Apple. And they launched a new immersive concert experience. It's coming to Apple Vision Pro this Friday. Filmed in Mexico City during a sold out second year finale of the band's world tour. It features full performances of three longtime staples. Whiplash one and Enter Sandman. And it was captured exclusively in Apple immersive video. The remarkable storytelling format that's only possible with Apple Vision Pro. And so Ben Thompson kind of hated this.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  And the reason is that it is not immersive because they cut it like a documentary and they keep cutting from one camera to the next. And every time they cut, it feels like, okay, I'm not just sitting there.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  You would almost want a drone.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  That's just flying around the event.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Even flying around is going to be a little bit jarring. Really, all you need, this is Ben Thompson's thing is like, just take the immersive rig, put it courtside at the Laker game or the basketball game or whatever that UFC thing you keep talking about is.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  It would be so, yeah, the octagon.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  You put it there.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  It is so funny.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  And then you just look around. And if you want to look at the scoreboard, you look up at the scoreboard. And if you want to look at the one team you look at and you turn your head.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Think about if Apple, I love that from a go to market just strategy. Hey, we're going to create this Apple like orb thing that just goes and we're going to put it in prominent. We're going to put it at the US Open. We're going to put it at the Super Bowl. We're going to put it all these places. We're going to get, we're going to get the partnerships that allow us to do that. We're going to put you, you know, right next to the ring in UFC.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to put you on the track at F1.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  And I think people would buy the Apple Vision Pro just to be able to teleport into these crazy cool locations.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  And then, yeah, if you want to do the cut down version, you can do that. That's just repurposing. This is just like your short form thing, but give the fans the full experience as they want it.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  If WorldCoin can scan millions of eyeballs all over the world.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  You can drop immersive video rigs.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  At the Lakers game.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  At the Lakers game. And they clearly have the money to go pay for those rights and, and it's super complimentary. And you could even upsell them like, I would imagine that, you know, you could, you could charge someone. I mean, $100 for, you know, like a fully immersive livestream. It's like pay-per-view, but just in VR. But for some reason, they're not doing it. It's very unclear and Ben Thompson doesn't like it at all. They also did this with soccer. So when they first demoed the Vision Pro, they brought in all the reporters. Ben Thompson was among them. And they said, put on the headset and we're going to show you this, this like reel of all the things that you'll be able to do with this headset.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  And one of them was a basketball game and Ben Thompson's a huge basketball fan. And he's just sitting there courtside for like a couple of seconds. And he, and he was like, this was my like epiphany moment where I realized that I would watch an entire game here because you don't need any graphical overlays. The production's actually easier because you can just hear the sound in the stadium. If you want to look at the scoreboard, you just look up at the scoreboard. It's a fantastic experience.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you could get the audio, the, you don't need the actual comment commentator track. You just need the what's happening. You need the feeling of being in the stadium.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  People pay for courtside seats and they don't need anything else. They're not saying like, oh, like I want to be over there right now.

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  I would want to Apple VR to that Greek weather report and just get immersed in the moment.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so he, he breaks down another Apple immersive video that they released, the ML season in review. And so instead of just saying, hey, the season's over, you can go watch the full game. They do, they, they, they released a five-minute video with 54 distinct shots. It's a, it's one cut every six seconds. There's not that much gameplay, only two minutes and 32 seconds of gameplay. Worse, some of the cuts happen in the same highlight. There was one play where there was a sideline view of the ball being passed up the field and then it switched to a behind the goal view, view for the goal. I actually missed the goal the first time because I was so discombobulated that it took a few seconds to even figure out where the ball was. And this is like a classic problem in VR. When you're teleporting around, it's really jarring.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Even if you don't get motion sick, it's just, you have to reestablish yourself because you're so immersed.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  Wyatt, Wyatt in the chat right now just had a good idea. Imagine being in Apple VR and watching Tracy Morgan throw up on the court.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  And you could be at, you could have the perspective of the court and just watch.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, or you look over and hey, it's Bill Gurley right there. Hey.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Gurley.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Bill Gurley.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  Gurley.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  That's something you'd pay a paper review fee for.

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  Who was, uh, somebody was messaging me on X. Uh, Will Quist over at Slow says, by the way, the dude Gurley was sitting with was Bob Kegel, one of the benchmark founders who was on the eBay board.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  Which is a top 25 legendary venture deal. And he's a Warriors co-owner. So we, we, we gave Gurley all the credit.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think Gurley replied to that post and was like, I was actually, the owner was right there. Like, you probably should have clocked him, you idiots.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  It was a lot of fun. Um, well, Ben Thompson goes back in time and talks about, uh, Ping. Do you remember Ping at all? This is kind of interesting.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't think I was born.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  This was in 2010? Yeah, you weren't, you weren't born yet, but maybe, I thought you might've seen it in like your, you know, your tech history book in middle school or something.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, one of those textbooks probably had it.

• 38:21John Coogan?

  Uh, so, uh, this launched in 2010 and the idea was, uh, Ping lets you follow your favorite artists such as Lady Gaga, Coldplay, U2, Jack, Jack, Jack Johnson, Yo-Yo Ma and more to find out what they're up to. Check out photos and videos they've posted, see their tour dates and read comments about other artists and albums that they're listening to. Spotify has since integrated all of this. You go to an artist's page, you can see their tour dates, you can see their bios, all this stuff. But Apple thought that this would be big for iTunes.

• 38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and they just released a new feature, I think today, uh, Daniel.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  I'll post about it around, specifically around this.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Well, Ben Thompson says, Ping is an old standby when it comes to making jokes about past Apple failures, but that last paragraph actually helps explain why Ping never had a chance. Uh, and in the press release, uh, the, it closes with this very boilerplate PR thing. Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with iOS X, uh, OS X, uh, OS 10, iLife, iWork and professional software, blah, blah, blah, blah. When you think of Apple, you think about their jewel-like devices, about the integration of hardware and software, Jonny Ive in a, uh, Johnny Ive in a white room, et cetera. Indeed, you think about the magic of putting on the Apple Vision Pro and having your eyes seamlessly tracked as you touch your fingers together to enter your passcode. All of this is basically the exact opposite of the reality of social media and user-generated content.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  I wrote this about Quibi's failures, the same thing. So it all, it, it all relates. It's the same thing with, um, These like when things get messy and user generated and AI generated and hallucinatory, Apple struggles.

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  But when it's a super, super tightly integrated, polished product of aluminum and steel and titanium, Apple wins.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  And so the, the, the thing that we want is stick to.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of stainless steel.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, Aurora, go to Aurora, check it out.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  I mean, the thing that we want is Apple to do what they're really good at and let other companies that are better do what they're best at. But that's not the nature of monopoly. Like they have control. And so if they can get 10 times as much value with a product that's half as good, that's a trade they take all day. I was listening to a, a, a film critic talk about, kind of gripe about the fact that films are no longer released in theaters. And he was saying like, I think that there should be a rule that if you release a film, you have to have it in theaters for six weeks. And because a lot of Netflix and Apple, like they're no longer even doing theatrical runs. It's on streaming the next week, or it just goes straight to streaming. And the filmmakers sometimes get upset about this and the fans sometimes get upset about this.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  But I was thinking about it, I was like, I was like, that's kind of like an authoritarian thing, like that might not be what's best for shareholders. Like, sure, you can want that, but if the market doesn't want that, you're kind of just saying like, I want to force you to do something that's uneconomical. It's just like a tax, basically.

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  And it's kind of the same thing here where, you know, I want Apple to open up Siri, or I want Apple to invest billions of dollars in amazing films that probably lose the money, or, or I want them to, you know, ditch their current Apple Vision Pro strategy, but.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  The F1 team.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, just, and just broadcast F1, buy an F1 team and just put, let me just sit in the paddock all, all race long.

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  They could genuinely buy an F1 team and let you be in the car for the entire race via Apple Vision Pro exclusively.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  Yes, they could, but. Is that in their business plan? Who knows? Is that what profit maximizes for them? I don't know.

• 41:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  And so that's

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's just, it is so funny to think we're going to do this concert. We're going to do, we're going to make this big deal about a Metallica concert, a band that I hadn't heard about in five years, even though when Apple was at its best, I was into, I was like, listening to Metallica as a kid. Uh, and so it's just not the music partnership that you would do if you were building for the next generation.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  One, one of the things I did love about the Apple Vision Pro was, was using it in bed right before I'd go to sleep. I'd be able to put it on and then there would be no light. If you turn on TV, it's going to disturb your wife or whoever is in the bed with you. Uh, but if you have an Apple Vision Pro on, you can actually just lay back and watch amazing, you know, IMAX quality film. Uh, the problem was is that the software was so bad that it would freak out and say, I can't track because I, the lights aren't on. So then I had to use it with the lights on, which we had no sense. And it was just very janky. So I returned it. But if you're looking to upgrade your bed, you got to go to 8sleep.com, nights of fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  The Apple of smart beds.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Many people have said that.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  So go to 8sleep.com slash TVPN and

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Get $350 off your pod.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic product.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  I put up a hundred last night.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  You put up a hundred?

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  You didn't tell me.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're I, I took it very seriously when I got the worst night's sleep.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  How'd I do?

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Of the last year on Monday.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Eighty-four, not enough, six hours and 38 minutes. I need to step it up. Routine was a little bit rough too. Anyway.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  I got over two hours of deep sleep. Who's doing that?

• 43:30John Coogan?

  You know, who's sleeping pretty well these days?

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Masayoshi Son.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Of course, SoftBank bought chip designer Ampere computing for $6.5 billion. Ampere will remain, retain its name and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank. And so, uh, this is an interesting deal. They just inked the deal. This just broke recently. Uh, it's a series of investments to advance its artificial intelligence initiatives. And this is one of those deals that you don't hear about as much because it doesn't have the crazy PowerPoint. It's not this high flying thing, but this is like, you know, when, when Masay went and bought ARM, you know, it was kind of. It was kind of a boring deal. And so people weren't like, oh, top on ARM. And of course ARM

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Early and right.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Early and right.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  This is kind of where I disagree with Sam in the lesson a little bit is like, like, yes, he does get over his skis a lot. But also he does go back to this. Skiing is awesome, Sam. Yeah. The Japanese technology investment company's purchase of Ampere will help improve its AI capabilities. The deal comes as SoftBank is starting a giant data center project in the US.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  How much is SoftBank spending on OpenAI agents this year? They want to spend $3 billion this year just on OpenAI? Which is amazing.

• 44:45John Coogan?

  And so Ampere designs-

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  They're saying it's one of the best SaaS deals of all time.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  It's really remarkable. I wonder if agents had anything to do with this deal. Maybe they used Hebea to get in the data room, crunch some numbers.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Maybe they use deep research. We'll have to get Masa on and ask him about how he's using agents to speed up his multi-billion dollar acquisition process. But in this case, Ampere designs energy efficient processors for cloud and AI computing and has about 1,000 skilled chip engineers. Ampere's expertise in developing chips can complement the design strengths of ARM Holdings. So they're kind of like creating this Kretzsch, which we love.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  We love.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Love a Kretzsch. Buoyed by a rush of AI chip buying, ARM in February reported record quarterly sales for the three months ended in the

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  We should help facilitate a Gundo Kretzsch.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  They really should. We're already doing it between all of our sponsors.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Diamonds investing in all the different companies.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Some of our sponsors, all of our sponsors are now on ramp. All the founders are wearing watches from Bezel, sleeping on eight sleeps. They're running ads on Adquick. It's great. Their personal portfolios are on public. It's great.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  It's beautiful.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  You know, if you join the, if you join the TBN sponsorship, Kretzsch.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's gonna be-

• 45:58John Coogan?

  Everyone benefits.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Masayoshi Son said that realizing AI, realizing AI that surpasses human capabilities requires breakthrough in, a breakthrough in computing power. Ampere's expertise in semiconductors and high performance computing will help accelerate this vision and deepens our commitment to AI and innovation in the US.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  I really just want to know how this deal got done. I imagine it was Masa writing on a napkin. He probably has specially designed napkins that have, you know, space for two different sick blocks and signatures and it's like, like a mini Excel model.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  I think it might have been maybe a little bit more boring. I mean, look at who was, who owned Ampere at the time. It was Carlyle Group and Oracle. Carlyle owned 60%.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy because

• 46:47John Coogan?

  32%.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  The VCs typically when SoftBank invests would love to be able to sell.

• 46:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Usually doesn't, not really able to, to exit.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  It's PE that benefits this time around. SoftBank is borrowing from Mizuho Bank to finance the deal. Over the past few years, Ampere posted operating losses as its revenue dropped and its liabilities exceeded its assets. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the later half of the year, subject to customary closing considerations.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  I love Masa, levering up to buy an asset that's losing money.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Well, it doesn't have to lose money because I was thinking about this, like the real bull case is that Ampere gets on ramp. Because time is money and they could say both. Exactly. So you think about the Ampere team. If they had easy use corporate cards, great bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. That could really drive the accretion of that deal.

• 47:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very possible that Masa is running a ramp oriented M and A strategy where he just looks at all these businesses. Hey, I know you're losing $2 billion a year.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:53Jordi Hays?

  Like I have a great fix.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  I think we're going to see more of this, like, you know, you see a lot of

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Amex even.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  We do a roll up and we drop AI on top. We do a roll up and we drop ramp on top. It's the same idea. Yeah. Anyway, go to ramp.com.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Sprinkle a little bit of ramp in your next acquisition.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  We got big news in the, in the world of Ozempic. Sale of Ozempic knockoffs is supposed to end soon. Telek health companies aren't happy. We've covered this on the show before. Fascinating industry.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Obviously, the creators of Ozempic are printing, but also the telehealth companies that have been selling Ozempic and compounded versions of Ozempic, which are manufactured independently, have also been doing quite well. And so pharmaceutical giants are squaring off against telehealth companies and pharmacies selling custom-made versions of the hot medicines. Today was supposed to mark the beginning of the end for a chapter, knockoff versions of hot weight loss drugs. The FDA wants bulk production of the copycats to stop, starting Wednesday for pharmacy-prepared versions of Zepbound, and later in the spring for knockoffs of Ozempic and Wegovy. But telehealth companies and pharmacies have fueled wide use of copycats. They have other plans. Telehealth platform Hims and Hers Health says it will

• 49:05John Coogan?

  keep offering pharmacy-made or compounded versions of Ozempic and Wegovy tweaked to individual prescriptions. And some of the pharmacies making GLP-1 drug copycats will continue, according to people familiar with the industry. The firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special, individualized versions of the drugs that aren't available commercially. And so what happened here was that Ozempic became so popular in America that they could not supply the market. And for most things, like when the iPhone dropped, the iPhone was extremely popular, and it would sell out, there would be lines out the door. And so for years, Apple hit their

• 49:45John Coogan?

  earnings perfectly. And it was amazing. It was an amazing stock, because they knew, we're going to sell every iPhone we make. And so, how many iPhones can we make?

• 49:55Jordi Hays?

  How many can we make?

• 49:55John Coogan?

  If we can make 5 million iPhones, we're going to sell 5 million iPhones. And so they hit their earnings every single quarter, and it was great. Then, now, we're in the era of abundance of iPhones, essentially. And now, it's much harder to predict how many Apple Vision Pros will sell, how many new iPhones will sell, because the demand is much more sticky or loose. And iPhone production is essentially unlimited at this point. Drugs are different. Drugs, you know, you can say whatever you want about Ozempic, but abstracted away to the classic, like, cancer drug, insulin. These drugs, when they're approved, the FDA is saying like, these are important. These help people solve health problems.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  And so it is critical that these, if doctors are prescribing them, they need to be available. And yes, we respect your intellectual property. We are granting you a monopoly on your patent for a certain amount of years. But if you can't supply the market, we are going to invalidate your IP temporarily, while you're out of stock and say, hey, there's a supply shortage. Anyone can make these, including the compounding pharmacies. But as soon as the big companies-

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Great side hustle last year.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  If you were in high school, buy the compounds online, compound them in your garage.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  Go door to door.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  Pay for your college.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  And so Ozempic and Wegovy are a little bit different, but you know, the general scientific consensus is that obesity causes tons of diseases and losing weight causes you to live a lot longer. So these are important medicines. And so if Novo Nordisk couldn't supply the market, then it was okay for compounding pharmacies to, to make their own and sell them. And of course, Hims and Hers, large telehealth public company, was able to use that compounding pharmacy. I don't even know if you'd call it a loophole. It's more just like a rule by the FDA. They were able to use that to sell a lot of this product and it really benefited the stock. But of course, Novo was eventually going to catch up and that's exactly what happened.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  And at the beginning of this year, Hims and Hers Health went on a generational run.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  They did.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  They had really struggled after they went public. I think it was a couple of years ago at this point. Many, many people were writing them off completely.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  It was a SPAC, I believe. And then, and then they dropped like most SPACs, but never went down 99% or anything like that.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And people have critiqued their business for a bunch of different reasons, but ultimately consumers like to be able to buy their medicine easily and directly.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Online. And so they peaked on February 18th, just about a month ago at 15 billion. And then they've dropped almost 50% since then.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  So it was seven and a half now.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's kind of a question about like, what's the next act? They clearly have a lot of customers. They have a lot of people on their platform. I think even a lot of subscriptions and they still sell a lot of hair care drugs and ED medications.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  They're basically saying, we are going to keep selling these drugs.

• 52:54John Coogan?

  But they want to find, they want to find-

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  Because it's this interesting balance, right? Because-

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  It is this sort of tough position to be in where they're saying we can make hundreds of millions or potentially billions of dollars in revenue from selling these drugs. Even if we're very clearly proven to be in the wrong, the settlement to Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk would probably be in the nine figures, but maybe not.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  Maybe it's worth it.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  You know, it's worth it potentially. These are high margin products.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, just legally, you know, no one's ever done compounding pharmacies at this scale. The law might not be written in a way that makes this illegal. Like, it's, it's, it's an open question. There are lots of pundits and people that have been saying, hey, this can't last or this can't happen. But you don't really know until you run through the legal process fully and look at what all the judges and what all the presidents say.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, him, him's and hers and these other players can go to Washington. They are doing this. They, they, they have two different lobbying firms that they just hired in January. I'm sure they had others historically. And they can say, hey, obesity is the biggest health problem in America. The best way to help Americans is introduce a massive amount of competition. We're not trying to lobby to say we, you know, we're not going to let, you know. It's just saying consumers should have choice. They should be able to buy these, but it, it will set a crazy precedent around just IP laws in America. And, uh, which is the biggest pharmaceutical market in the world, right? Don't we spend more, um, the people will fact check me if I'm incorrect there, but

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  I believe we spend more money on pharmaceuticals than any other country.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure, yeah. Uh, the firms are seeking to take advantage of current law, which allows compounding pharmacies to make special individualized versions of drugs that aren't available commercially. Telehealth firms and pharmacies.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  We, we account for nearly half of global pharmaceutical spending.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Let's go. And what was, uh, Jensen Wong was saying, we need 100x that, or he was talking about AI production.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Spend.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  But maybe.

• 55:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Maybe we got Andrew Duhon and he says the same thing.

• 55:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, Andrew from him saying, we need 100x per capita spending on, on my compounded.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  I mean, the crazy thing is that like, you know, everyone was projecting like, I mean, like runaway takeoff of these drugs and like, obesity rates do seem to be coming down, but it's not like, you know, it's not this fast takeoff like we hear in AI. These drugs take a long time to work through the system. They're expensive. They really are. And a lot of people are skeptical about them and they want, they don't want to be the first person to take them. They want to say, okay, yeah, sure, the FDA has approved them, but maybe I'll wait a couple of years, even if I am obese, I'll wait a couple of years and see where does this shake out? Are there some unknown complications? What are the bro scientists saying about it?

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we really got to wait till Joe Rogan chimes in here to really-

• 55:55John Coogan?

  You got to trust the bro science on this one, for sure.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  The brother scientists.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  For sure. The FDA deadlines come after the agency declared the official end of obesity drug shortages that allowed compounding pharmacies to make copies of the drugs in bulk. The shortages have led to a fierce fight in the courts on airwaves and around Washington with the pharmaceutical heavyweights Eli Livy and Novo Nordisk that sell branded drugs. And there was actually a Super Bowl ad from him that was framing them as a challenger to the entrenched incumbents, the large pharmaceutical companies that are raising prices, decreasing demand, monopolizing these important drugs in their, in their, in their view. Telehealth companies often sold the compounded drugs at a hundred dollars to three hundred dollars a month, well below the one thousand dollar a month price tags of the branded medicines.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I mean, for a lot of Americans, even if they're obese, a thousand bucks is a lot. And, and even though, you know, you could say that the benefit of not being obese is very high, a thousand bucks is a thousand bucks and not everyone has that, unfortunately. Anyway, let's move on to Wander?

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  I was really thinking, how do, how do we get a Coogan transition into this next sponsor? And I, and I tried to do the work for you, couldn't come up with anything, but we do have a good way to transition and that is- Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge services, vacation home, but better, folks. Go to wander.com, go to wander.com/tbpn. Use code TBPN and.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  I was really excited. So Kyle, who's the CMO over at Wander, he posted this incredible house.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  And it happens to be like a quarter mile from my house in Malibu. So I hit him up and I said, hey.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Can we get some early access to that spot?

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  So we're working on that. Very excited.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Can't wait.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, can't wait to get over there.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's move on to, oh, we only have four minutes. Let's just do some timeline, folks. We gotta do some timeline.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Let's go to Zabi Elmgren. She says, we'll lead your Series A if you can hang.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  I just, I saw this earlier. I thought it was fantastic.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Iconic.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  I would like to make this the new, kind of like Y Combinator. Basically, Zabi takes you down the most aggressive, gnarly run.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  And then afterward, there's like VCs at the bottom that you can pitch to.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of like, Keith Roy says, like, you shouldn't hire anyone over 30 VC. You shouldn't fund anyone if they're skiing less than 30-degree inclines.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Something like that.

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, something about skiing, when you take a picture of a cliff like this, it doesn't necessarily look super significant.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  But that is a serious drop.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  And she really is going full send. Next time Zabi posts a video, I would love to see the entire, the entire run. Let's go to the next post.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Let's go to Kristen Green over at Forerunner. She says, today we're sharing our annual consumer trend report. Our primary research and analysis on where consumers are at and what trends are driving new needs, priorities, and business opportunities. We focus on three key forces: health and wellness, generative AI, and personal security. Interesting. So you want to have her on the show?

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had a friend reach out to her this morning about coming on the show. I think it'd be awesome. I always love these trend reports. They put them out pretty frequently. And I'm trying to find it. I can't find it on forerunner.com.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Well, she says this past year was marked by contradictions, yo-yoing in consumer sentiment and markets, explosive new tech and out of pocket healthcare spending, a strikingly resilient jobs market, and mounting fear about career, financial and personal safety. Our full report here.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Interesting stat here. Yeah, I want to have her break it down, but just some interesting stats. Forerunner's historically been heavily consumer focused. You know, they'll do a B2B company here or there from what I know, but they're, and the reason for this, a lot of people sort of write off consumer because it's really hard. It's really hard to get right, but many of the biggest outcomes ever have been in consumer.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  And interesting stat here, two thirds of US GDP is from consumer activity. And so that's why the outcomes end up being so massive.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also interesting just to hear her talk about these brands because they're, they're just so much more tangible business cases than the B2B stuff that's harder to dig into. It's more spreadsheet based. You need to really understand what's going on in the, these like niche submarkets. Everyone can have opinion on Liquid Death.

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Or Dollar Shave Club. You can kind of understand that. It's very tractable. Anyway, we have our first guest.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the Temple of Technology, Brendan from Merckor. How you doing?

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:00:58Brendan Foody?

  I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me, guys. I'm excited to be on the most profitable podcast.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, you're live. Can you introduce yourself, break down a little bit about your history, your story and what you're building, what your company does?

• 1:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, usually when somebody gets to your stage, they've been in market for five, six years. So people have more of an opportunity to get to know you. So yeah, we'd love to, we'd love the full intro.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in the Bay Area, met my co-founders Adarsh and Surya when we were 14 in high school. And so we were all in the speech and debate team together. They were the winningest speech and debate team of all time in high school debate. But I was always building companies in one form or another, so I didn't want to go to college. My parents insisted that I had to. And so I went to Georgetown for two years, where Surya was my roommate there, and Adarsh was at Harvard. And we started at McCord when we were 19, to train models that predict how well someone will perform on a job better than a human can. Similar to how a human would review a resume, conduct an interview,

• 1:02:02Brendan Foody?

  and decide who to hire. We automate all of those with LLMs. And then, fast forward two years, we scaled from 1 to 100 million in revenue in 11 months. And so we're only 21, and running this really exciting company that's working with most of the most prominent companies in Silicon Valley.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  It's more of a line than a curve over there. It's not really just a hockey stick.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, so you're very smiley right now. You look like you're having fun, but your LinkedIn profile is dead serious. Do you, do you, do you, you know, like, I'm sure internally as a team, you guys are focused on not letting the hype and the crazy initial traction get to your head. How do you think about running the team when the team has only experienced sort of massive, sort of immediate success?

• 1:02:54Brendan Foody?

  Totally. And I think one thing that compounds this is that so much of our team is like college dropouts and new grads, right? Because it was the extension of our initial network at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, et cetera. And so a lot of them haven't seen what normal companies look like. This is all that they're used to. And it's easy to get caught up and lost in so much that's happening. But I think the most important thing to stay grounded is just focusing everyone on the numbers that matter long term, right? The network effects of the business. How do we build up the marketplace? How do we learn from all the performance reviews that we're getting to build our usage data flywheel, rather than focusing on a lot of the lagging indicators like revenue, or, you know, or more of the customer signals?

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Can you talk about some of the jobs that you're actually placing? Like you go to Merck or you get placed, are you placing people in white collar jobs, blue collar jobs, everything, any specific niches?

• 1:03:54Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, so when we started out, it was that we were very amazed with the caliber of talent in India. And so we would hire these software engineers in India and use LLMs to assess them, hire them for our friends. But what we realized was that there was this really large shift happening in the human data market where large AI labs are hiring thousands of people to train the next generation of LLMs. And it used to be this crowdsourcing problem, though super low skilled, right? Of how do you get a bunch of people writing barely grammatically correct sentences for the early versions of ChatGPT? That was moving towards this vetting problem of how do we find the most exceptional people in

• 1:04:35Brendan Foody?

  the world in high volumes that want to work exactly, work directly with researchers to push the frontier of model capabilities. And so to your question, we now hire roles across almost all domains, or the vast majority of popular domains, ranging from software engineers to consultants, people in finance, medicine, law, et cetera.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Podcasters.

• 1:04:58Brendan Foody?

  Both help more traditional customers as well as these AI labs.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, what about robotics? I mean, obviously, there's this question of like a data wall in robotics. Google had that famous like arm farm where they were trying to generate reinforcement learning data with like 17 robotic arms just working on grasping. Are we going to see a future where people are getting placed into jobs, kind of wearing motion tracking suits to generate robotics data? How do we solve that problem?

• 1:05:31Brendan Foody?

  That's a phenomenal question. I'm not sure I think so. There is a lot of questions around like what kind of data production are most efficient robotics? And I will say, we don't provide people to create robotics data as much yet, but it's certainly something that's top of mind as these companies start to mature and really scale up the kind of data that they're interested in.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  What about like revenue volatility? I feel like a lot of these, like if you're, if you're placing individuals into, you know, you know, some big foundation model company or some big hyperscaler is doing a massive training run. They need to really nail down math and they're going to bring in a ton of mathematicians, generate a ton of training data. And then they're like, hey, we're actually good. We're moving on to the next thing. That can kind of create a massive oscillation in your revenue. How are you thinking about like scaling out and making sure that the growth curve is smooth? Cause obviously it's very fast, but you know, the, the iron law of the universe is like, what goes up quickly comes down quickly, but then maybe there's a second act and you go back up again.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  And over time it looks smooth, but it can be very jostling in the, in the next few years.

• 1:06:45Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I think the most important thing to think about is the leading indicators in fast-moving markets. Right? And that if you look at the most sophisticated labs and what they're really investing in, it's this super high caliber expert data that is like far beyond the model frontier of capabilities. And so, so long as we focus on like the leading indicators, the things that, you know, all the big tech budgets are starting to move towards, that positions us really well. And obviously like the leading indicators evolve over time and we need to position ourselves there. I think where companies get themselves into trouble in these fast-changing markets is when they aren't looking at the leading indicators and they're sort of sitting with the large incumbents that are doing a lot of the legacy systems that get phased out.

• 1:07:29Brendan Foody?

  And so that's how I think about it, but my broader take on the human data market is that it's going to grow dramatically because so we're getting to the point where RL is so effective that you can create almost any eval and it will be able to solve that eval. And so the barrier to applying AI throughout the entire economy is just creating evals for everything. Right? Which is a process that inherently requires humans in the loop. And so I'm very excited about building that world.

• 1:07:59Jordi Hays?

  What are some customers that you can talk about or maybe allude to that have been kind of surprising? We talked about yesterday Yum Brands, which is like a $44 billion public company that owns a bunch of fast casual restaurants. They're partnering with Nvidia and like buying chips and like actually building, effectively building their own AI in-house. Has there been any sort of, you're obviously working with all the big sort of foundation labs, or I would say most of them would be my guess, but has there been any customers that you're working with that you've been surprised by?

• 1:08:32Brendan Foody?

  Not too surprising yet. Like, most of our customer base, we work with all of the top five labs in the US. And we're starting to see, maybe actually one interesting thing is we're starting to see a lot more customization at the application layer. And I think a big reason for this is that it's now much more data efficient to customize models with RL environments and a lot of this like new kind of data versus fine tuning data that people would do historically. And so it's now becoming, you know, this like gold rush for all these application layer companies. Without too much CapEx, they're able to get these incredible results. And so we're seeing some of that, but at least for the most part, the like

• 1:09:16Brendan Foody?

  legacy Fortune 500s haven't really caught on to this yet. And I imagine that that might take a year or two.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, that'll be a nice rush of revenue once, once they realize what's happening.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  I have a question.

• 1:09:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, I mean, we've been talking a lot about agents and kind of wondering, obviously, agents are breaking through in the enterprise and the coding sector, but we've just been kind of tracking against like, when can you actually use an agent to just book a flight reliably? And I'm wondering if we're in this weird thing where you see a foundation model company do a press release and it's like, we're working on, you know, fundamental math innovation, or we're going to solve, you know, I forget that, that like really, really hard problem in math. And it seems like maybe there's a gap in the, the human RL training loop just around like a really good executive assistant. Is that the gap? Is it, we need

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  more data there to actually break through? Or is that just a product issue? Like, why can't Siri reliably book me a flight?

• 1:10:19Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, so I think there is two challenges. One is the interest of researchers has historically been in these like super hard reasoning problems. Right? They're interested in GPQA of how do we solve PhD level reasoning? They're interested in IMO level math of how do we have models that are beating all of these incredible mathematicians? And have historically just been less interested in like, how do we automate a McKinsey consultant or an executive assistant? And I think that shift is starting to happen. And so that's like a big part of it. And that ties into the data that they create because of course, if you want to automate a McKinsey consultant, you need evals for everything a McKinsey consultant does. If you want to automate an EA, you need evals for everything that an EA does.

• 1:11:05Brendan Foody?

  I think the other part of it is the models are just starting to get really good at tool use. Tool use is still relatively immature relative to all the reasoning capabilities. And so I think as that starts to happen, I would really expect that this year you're able to use operator or whatever the equivalent agent is to start booking flights and doing a lot of these more mundane tasks.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever been approached by any of the labs around, help us make our models funny? Like, is there a world, is there a world where you guys are, you show up to the Comedy Store here in LA? And you're trying to, you know, grab some like media and say, hey, hey, come on, come on, Merckor.

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

  Tell me a joke.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  We're going to test how funny you are. We got, we got some opportunities for you.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  If you can, if you can.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  The Joe Rogan mothership, we just pull them right off stage, you know, the Kill Tony bucket pulls. Hey, you did, you got the joke book. Come on.

• 1:12:01Jordi Hays?

  But it seems like that's like when, when every model's like pretty good at some of these sort of like foundational like problems and thinking, then the way to differentiate is, is can a model be more entertaining for consumers? Can, and there's value in that itself.

• 1:12:16Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, a lot of our customers at the frontier, as you've seen in recent releases, are starting to think a lot more about humor and these exciting things. We have been hiring a bunch of people out of like the Harvard Lampoon and equivalent places that have these comedic skills to help teach models how to get there. And so it's really like every capability you want, you need evals for.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  We, John has been doing like the Coogan eval, which is just he asks, you know, various models to tell a joke. And then they end up just taking you on this winding thing that sounds like a joke, but it's not actually, it doesn't actually have a punchline.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  I mean, it's hard because there's not, there's not a quantitative eval for humor. It's so subjective and so qualitative.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Another question just related just broadly to the future and how these labs, so you know, the labs are your customers. The critique of the labs broadly in the model companies as they raise tens of billions of dollars has been, you know, if the models are commoditizing and intelligence just becomes too cheap to meter, where does the value come from? John's point of view has been, there are many commodities in the world that have a ton of value. And there's a bunch of great businesses that, you know, drill and, you know, produce oil and then sell it, right? Even though oil is like a commodity that just sort of trades on the open market. How do you, how do you see the, the, the model market long-term?

• 1:13:43Jordi Hays?

  And do you see a world where there's constantly new companies being spun up to create these sort of bespoke specialized models for different use cases?

• 1:13:52Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I think the value will accrue to the product layer. Like I don't think about OpenAI as much as an API business. And it seems like most people are really placing a bet on the product side of things, which will start to get very exciting, especially, and spread out across many companies, considering that customizing models is so much more affordable than it used to be.

• 1:14:15Brendan Foody?

  So that's sort of how I see it playing out. I think one of the things that a lot of investors don't quite realize when they're not like in the code of building these products is how low the switching costs are for API, right? Like it's a line of code to switch back and forth and like see how new models are doing. And so it's, it's hard to build a business when, when that's the switching cost. And I think it's really going to be in the, in the product layer.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, given that, do you have a view on why every single ex OpenAI employee seems to start the exact same foundation model company instead of doing something else? I was really hoping for like a supplements company from Ilya, or, you know, like a hair loss, or something fun, something different, T-shirt company. But everyone just seems to be, hey, I'm gonna do what I know. I've been building the foundation models, I'm gonna stick with it.

• 1:15:05Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it's a good question. I think a lot of it ties to just like the ideology around AGI, right? This is the most important problem in the world, and so how do we all race as fast as possible to get there, rather than a lot of the, you know, unit economics and competitive dynamics that investors would be thinking about?

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Yes, they're basically just disregarding the fact that the, like, sure, the value might accrue to the application level, uh, layer for 10 years, and then it's completely irrelevant once ASI arrives.

• 1:15:38Brendan Foody?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting strategy. If value in the short term, short to medium term accrues to the product layer, but then if you actually can build artificial superintelligence, then none of it actually potentially matters in the end. So it's an interesting strategy. Uh, last question for you, I know we have a minute left. Uh, this is the most champagne problem that founders ever have, and when you were fundraising, you probably couldn't even drink champagne. But do you have any funny stories? I'm sure you raised a series of like very competitive rounds. Any funny stories of like offers investors made to just like try to get you? You know, the classic is like-

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Didn't you go in a helicopter?

• 1:16:18Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, Benchmark was a helicopter. We used a private jet to Vegas to race Ferraris.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  I knew there was gonna be something. You're like, I don't know, I'd never actually got my driver's license. They're like, it's fine, it's a private track.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Are those effective? Did they win you over? It sounds like you went with Benchmark after the helicopter thing, so maybe it's effective.

• 1:16:39Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, no, they could, they could be very tempting, because we never, actually for our Series A and our Series B, we didn't create a slide deck, because we weren't, uh, both times, like, people asked for it, and we were like, just, no, not, not really willing to create one, but, uh, the, the sales processes could be a lot of fun. It's sort of like Christmas, where you're getting all of these like gifts and fun experiences, uh, but also trying to balance that with it not being too much of a distraction from building the company.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Well, that's fantastic. Congrats to you, good luck, and we'll have to check in soon when you have new fundraising news.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. Every week, every other week.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Every other week.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's get it on a schedule.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Same time next week for the Series F.

• 1:17:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll make it happen, John. There we go. All right. Give our best to the team. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. See you, guys.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  This is great. It's a fun one.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, to be 21 again.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. 21, getting flown out to Vegas to fly Ferraris or fly helicopters and race Ferraris. That's very TB-coded. Well, we got David Sutter coming on the show. Going to ask him about Nvidia. Going to ask him about Jensen Wong. Going to ask him about great founders. Going to ask him how he's doing today. How are you doing?

• 1:17:47David Senra?

  What's going on, brothers?

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Looking fantastic.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Look at this. Look at this.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Professorial, if I might say so myself.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  99% of the time that I see Sutter, he's got the black founders tee on. It's good to see you. It's good to see you in a jacket.

• 1:18:02David Senra?

  I know. People say I shouldn't wear my own merch, and I completely disagree.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what?

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  It's the greatest merch in the world. It is. It is honestly like one of the most comfortable t-shirts.

• 1:18:12David Senra?

  To work, to work out in. If, think about how important that random, me and Jordy ran into each other after not talking for like six months.

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  True, yeah.

• 1:18:21David Senra?

  At, at Jim in Malibu. And I don't know if he would have recognized me if I didn't have the, without the founder shirt on, so.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Well, now that you're doing video, you know, you're a lot more recognizable. You're going to get stopped on the street all the time.

• 1:18:33David Senra?

  Let's hope not.

• 1:18:34John Coogan?

  Dream that you've been waiting for.

• 1:18:35David Senra?

  No, let's hope not. Please don't.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He only wants to get recognized in the Aman.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  That's the most commonplace that it happens, I'm sure.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:18:45David Senra?

  Our friend, Justin Mares, told me he's opening the new factory for Kell and Fire, and he texted me last night. And he texted me where it is. I was like, is there Aman in that city?

• 1:18:56David Senra?

  It's like Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  Aman Lancaster. Aman Castor.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  One of the most historic locations.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  The Castor.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  The Castor. That's great. Uh, what was the last, what was the last episode you dropped?

• 1:19:11David Senra?

  Oh my God. Um, it's, the, the episode's actually going kind of crazy. Uh, most people like it. Some people are very upset. Uh, it's Todd Graves, the, the founder of Raising Canes.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:19:22David Senra?

  So Raising Canes, this guy's been running his business for 30 years. He owns over 90% of it. Uh, it's worth at least $10 billion and he truly believes that God put him on earth to be great at chicken fingers, making chicken fingers. So he can help other people.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Life's work.

• 1:19:36David Senra?

  And people, so a lot of people love his approach. He's essentially what I, what I would describe is I did this episode on the founder of In-N-Out. A long time ago, Harry Snyder. It's essentially like Harry Snyder's reincarnated, but instead of making hamburgers, he's making chicken fingers. They have like the very same philosophy, but people are like really upset that he feels this is his mission, but he like does a ton of good for the community, like gives to charity, like, let the guy make his fucking chicken fingers.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 1:20:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Didn't, so he, he basically just was building the company while he was still in college, right? I, I.

• 1:20:09David Senra?

  No, so there, there's a funny, there's an interesting, um, thing that reoccurs at the history of entrepreneurship is like these, these founders write a business plan and business school about their idea and they get terrible grades. So like Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, a C minus.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25David Senra?

  Todd Graves, lowest grade in the class. Uh, Phil Knight for Nike, same thing, bad grade, uh, completely disinterested.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  The professors don't know. The professors don't know. I, I remember in college, I wrote a bull case on Twitter at like one billion and they got like a B minus. And they're like, just because he like disagreed with me on the valuation. And it's like, I was completely right. Yeah. I was completely correct.

• 1:20:47David Senra?

  A hundred percent. But the crazy thing about Todd Graves isn't like, no one would give him money. So, uh, he never raised again. Um, and so he raised from, uh, he actually to, to save money or to make money, he worked as a boiler maker. And so they do these fucking crazy things where you have to work like five or six weeks because you're fixing a refinery. And every day the refinery is down. It's like very detrimental to the health of the company. So they pay you a ton of money where you just have to work like a dog for like a hundred hour weeks, six weeks straight. So he meets a bunch of boil makers, then he risks his life doing commercial fishing. Do you remember this show like Deadliest Catch?

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Deadliest Catch, yeah.

• 1:21:19David Senra?

  That's what he did. He did that when he was like 23. And then he goes and he borrows money from his bookie and then a boilermaker named Wild Bill. So he never talks about this anymore, but I know, I just, I love the idea like there's some boil, there's some boilermaker named Wild Bill there that has like a couple hundred million dollars with a racing cane stock or his bookie made like a hundred or 200 million dollars. Just because this kid wouldn't shut up. His 23 year old kid wouldn't shut up about wanting to live a chicken finger dream. That's what he repeats over and over again. Chicken finger dream. Chicken finger dream.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  And those guys have the 10% of racing canes?

• 1:21:52David Senra?

  No, he never says the percentages. Who has the rest of the, he says over 90%. But you know, he said he rolled them into the, um, he rolled them into the main company because they just, they just invested in the first, uh, racing canes. Another thing that's interesting, he had a co-founder who quit after the second store.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Ooh, miss.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  No conviction.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  There's always a story like that with like all these power law companies.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  No, it's interesting. It's, it's funny. Restaurants and CPG are so tangible that it attracts people that, that have, uh, dreams, but not necessarily extreme conviction. They can see the idea in their head and, um, there's a, there's a sandwich shop in LA and I've, and I've sat down, I'm blanking on the name right now, but they've got probably 20, 30 locations around the west coast now. And he was just telling me how the first year he had been a successful restaurateur. He had multiple locations. He'd done nightclubs and all this stuff. And then the first year of his business, he went into massive debt. He was working 14 hours a day. He, he went into this business like knowing food and beverage really, really well.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  And it was just the most devastating, like a couple of years where it didn't matter that they were making a good product. And people liked it. He was getting. You know, he was having high schoolers sort of like talk smack to him, you know, saying like, make my sandwich faster, you know, like getting angry at him. And so it just like, we, you know, it weeds out the people that don't have that like ridiculous, you know, didn't have, maybe the co-founder didn't have the chicken finger dreams.

• 1:23:25David Senra?

  Listen, I would, I think the episode's like an hour long. So if you listen to it on 1.5x speed, you can get it in 40 minutes.

• 1:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:23:32David Senra?

  It's exactly that. He almost lost. So he was like heavily geographically concentrated in Louisiana. And he almost lost everything in, during Hurricane Katrina, because it knocked out 21 of his 28 restaurants. And it was all personal debt. So no one would lend him money. So he'd have to go find like an angel investor. He had a very interesting way to, to finance each individual store. He was like, hey, invest like 200 grand in this. He would take that, he called it an angel investment, but it was really an angel investment. He's like, give me 200 grand. I will fill out a one-page contract. I will guarantee you personally that I will pay you back your money and 15 with 15% interest. He would take that contract to the bank. The bank would loan him like a million dollars to give him the startup money. And he did that all the way up until the first 20 restaurants. And he was like, we're rolling. We have so much cash flow. Nothing's going to go wrong as long as

• 1:24:17David Senra?

  I don't lose out on any day sales. And then Hurricane Katrina comes and knocks out, you know, 21 out of 28 restaurants. And so he talks about, he says this over and over again. He's just like, don't do the things I did because they were wildly reckless. They just happened to work out for me, which I thought was also really funny.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Now, he's still alive. Are you planning on doing one of those episodes where you go sit down with him, have dinner, eat some chicken fingers, break it down?

• 1:24:39David Senra?

  So I said on the episode, if anybody knows him.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43David Senra?

  Uh, please, I would like to meet him because I'm upset, you know, like you guys know this because we talk all the time. Like I'm obsessed with people that do one thing. The only thing I'm really interested in is like, I'm not interested in your stupid fucking startup or your latest company. I'm interested in your last company. Like the thing that you were going to do until that you thought you were put here on the earth to do and the thing that you're going to do until you die. And so, yeah, I'm fascinated by talking to people like that. Most of the most interesting, like unknown founders that I've met recently, the most impressive ones are all in like their 70s and they've been building their company for, you know, 40 or 50 years. You just talk to them. It's like the, the level of detail they know about the world they've built is like on, it's one of the most unique experiences you could have in your life because that, that compounded knowledge, there's things that they know that they can't even really explain.

• 1:25:27David Senra?

  Why they believe what they believe, but it's just like a very like deep intuition, sense of intuition. Jensen is the same, I would imagine the same way.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34David Senra?

  Like, I think he's the longest running tech CEO, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  My question is, do you think that these founders who wind up running their companies for 40 years, know it's their life's work in the first month, in the first decade even?

• 1:25:50David Senra?

  No.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Do they fall into it? And because I feel like a lot of it's just luck, like no one ever made them an offer they couldn't refuse. They never wound up big, like being in a situation where they had to, you know, pay some bill and they wanted to cash out or something.

• 1:26:05David Senra?

  So I don't think they know it that early.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:08David Senra?

  That is separate from like, so like Todd Graves, right? It was like, he's been offered billions of dollars.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12David Senra?

  And he's like, I never thought of it for a second. What I also love about him is he talks about the need, we need more founders and we need more entrepreneurs to not sell their company.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:22David Senra?

  And so he's like, I'm competing. The reason he's like running through the QSR industry right now is because like, he's competing against these very old corporate run businesses. There's no founders competing against him. And like, he's just like, we need more diversity of thought. We need more ideas. You need more innovation. You need people to actually care.

• 1:26:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:39David Senra?

  And so people, if somebody asked him, like, you've been offered billions of dollars. What was the, the offer that was the most tempting? He's like, none of them. Not, nothing was ever tempting. He's like, this is going to be a multi-generational business. I'm going to give it to my kids. So let me, let me give you another hilarious story about this.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:26:53David Senra?

  And I'm going to paraphrase this, but, uh, so James Dyson, who still owns a hundred percent of Dyson, which I've done four episodes on, right? Well, my, my number one autobiography recommendation out of, you know, the almost 400 biographies of entrepreneurs I've read so far, is James Dyson's first autobiography, which is called Against the Odds. Like a few weeks ago, so he still owns a hundred percent of the company. Uh, the numbers you see thrown out there, they say, oh, it's worth 10 billion. It's worth 20. I've heard he's pulling out five billion a year, more than five billion a year dividends personally. From what I hear. Okay.

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:27:22David Senra?

  So I was at this like super fancy invite only.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  What does he do with it? Where's he investing? Does he have a family office or something like that?

• 1:27:27David Senra?

  So, so that's how, yeah, so. There'll be hints because like you, if you're, he's been pulling out a ton of money.

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  Turns out he owns 5% of Apple now because he's been building position for a decade.

• 1:27:37David Senra?

  No, way better than that, way better than that. He owns, he's like owns more, owns most, the most sheep than anybody in the world.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  I love it, guys. You gotta be sheep maxing. You have to be sheep maxing.

• 1:27:48David Senra?

  You run out of things to invest in. So he's like, he's the largest green pea producer in Europe.

• 1:27:51John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:27:53David Senra?

  So this, there's a funny story about this there. So I'm at this like super fancy invite only investor conference. There's like 15 people there and all of them like controlling massive amounts of capital. And one guy was telling a story like he, the more assets under management, the like they're trying to buy private businesses. And you know, you start out buying, you know, $500 million businesses, then a billion dollar businesses. Now he's like, he's got to shoot really, really fucking high.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:16David Senra?

  And so I'm going to paraphrase this. This is why I love people like James Dyson, like Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg, like Todd Graves. Steve Jobs is obviously is similar though, even though it's a public company. They go to, they approach Dyson to see, would you be interested in selling? And the response, I'm paraphrasing was, fuck you. This is a family heirloom.

• 1:28:43David Senra?

  I'm not selling for any price. So there's actually, there's actually a really important idea here to, and I think another way to answer your question, John, is I, I realize the, I remember exactly where I was. You guys have both met my wife. I was supposed to be on a date with her at Harry's Pizzeria on the design district of Miami, right? And I'm not even paying attention to what we're talking about. I'm thinking about founders. And I remember like it just where it was, it like the epiphany I had was like, oh, people say if like you love what you do, like you would do it for free.

• 1:29:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14David Senra?

  And I was like, no, no, no, there's a different level. If you, there's a, there's a, there's, you can have such a deep love for what you're doing that people couldn't pay you to stop. So it's like, the idea has like, how much would you have to help? How much would you have to pay Steve Jobs to not build, to not work on Apple or build products? There's no money, you couldn't, you couldn't give him $2 trillion, it didn't even matter.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  This was the story of the Zuck, the Zuck acquisition attempt. They said, hey, here's a billion dollars, you're 23 or something, and he's like, but I would just start another social network, this is what I want to work on, like, what am I gonna do? I like this one, amazing.

• 1:29:50David Senra?

  That is the perfect example, because there's a bunch, there's a bunch of young kids that, you know, have, sell their companies, have a bunch of money. But like, look at the difference of his life, no one would know his name, no, who knows what would happen? It's like, now he's like, working, you know, the best, you know, the best 40-year-old public company CEO in the world, by far, working in the most interesting time, having access to like, build some of the most interesting products, and then essentially unlimited at, uh, resources.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Question, Todd Graves, I'm sure has like, an extreme loyalty to his team and employees at the corporate level and the individual restaurant level. There's sort of a broader playing, trend playing out in restaurants, people have been attacking the sort of like, one of the biggest cost centers for restaurants is, or probably the biggest, is labor. And so, you have, we covered yesterday, Yum! Brands, which is like a $44 billion public company, they own KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut. They're trying to integrate sort of robotics on both sides, both on the ordering process, they're partnering with Nvidia to like, do like, voice models and process, you know, you're driving through the drive-through, or calling, or texting, or whatever.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  And then they also are trying to integrate robotics on, you know, within the actual kitchens, just to produce food more cheaply. How do you think Todd Graves, I haven't found any commentary from him online about robotics, but how do you think he would think about that in a world where, I'm sure he has a deep loyalty to his team, and loves that it's sort of this human experience, going to a Raising Canes, but at the same time, his competitors are just gonna be like, trying to drive costs down as low as possible?

• 1:31:26David Senra?

  Yeah, that's a good question. I'd love to ask him that. Based on what he says, like, he's pretty anti-making decisions just based on financial reasons. Like, he talks a lot of shit in his interviews about, like, PE people, what, like, he's just not a big, he's not a fan at all.

• 1:31:41John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, we love private equity here on this show, okay? Let's not slander the good folks over at BlackRock.

• 1:31:47David Senra?

  Dude, some of my, one of my, two of my closest friends, who I love all the, and I talk to all the time, they are literally, might be the most successful PE people rolling up QSRs. Patrick just did an interview with Matt and Alex. So I love them too. Um, but, but Todd Graves does not. He is very anti-PE in QSRs.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Timeline and turmoil if they start chirping each other. I have a question about your point about founder control over the long-term, never selling, owning 100%. Do you think that there's a need for some sort of maybe cultural shift, or even a shift in the way startups are financed in Silicon Valley?

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  It's just so, like, the standard YC playbook, for example, is like, you get three co-founders, you split it equally, then immediately, YC takes 10%, then it's like, back-to-back-to-back 20% rounds, you're diluted down to a few percent, maybe you get some super voting, but you're not paying yourself a good salary. And so, you know, Jordy's kind of talked about, maybe, we need to normalize some sort of secondary sale so that the founders can take a little cash out of the business, and then actually go in it for the really long-term.

• 1:32:51John Coogan?

  Maybe we just need, hey, it's okay to pay yourself a really, like, reasonable salary. A lot of founders are out there kind of like starving, even after they've raised $20 million. What do you think about the structure of Silicon Valley? Like, is the Silicon Valley playbook setting us up for, to create the next James Dyson, or the next, or the next Todd Graves?

• 1:33:10David Senra?

  So when you say, what do I think about that? I don't think about it. So, it's really bizarre to me. Again, like I have an unfair advantage because essentially I just talk to dead people all day. I have one sided conversations with history's greatest founders, right? So like for like the first four or five hours of my day, I'm usually just reading biographies. And then I usually have lunch and then in the afternoon, I like reread highlights of the stuff I read over the last like eight years while building the podcast. And one of the main lessons from all that is just like they do like the people that usually get to the top of their profession are the best at what they do. They do what's best for them regardless of what works for other people. And so the weird thing that I have is like when I open up Twitter and people are arguing about like you should raise from this person or you shouldn't raise at all, or you should do this.

• 1:33:54David Senra?

  It's just like, you should do whatever's best, whatever is best for like whatever mission you happen to be on. So I don't have like an opinion of like how other people should do it, other than like, what do you actually want to do? And then figure out what's the best way to go about doing that. And then this is, this, this is my issue was like, remember when Paul Graham released like found the founder mode episode or essay? So many people sent it to me and, and like asked me what I thought of it. It's just like, I, it just was a bizarre reading and I'm a huge fan of his essays in general, but I just think like it missed, which something that he obviously knows is just like, it just depends on who the founder is as a person. Like one of my favorite lines, it was this random book on Steve Jobs, you know, I've done like, I don't know 10 or 12 episodes on Steve. And it said that Apple is just Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives.

• 1:34:39David Senra?

  And I think like the, the good news, like one of the best benefits of being a founder is like you get to create your own world from scratch. You get to choose like what you work on, who's around you, how you go about doing everything. And so I would start with like, what do you actually want to do in the world? And then work backwards from that. So like I am tech, I am like obsessed with control. So you, you know, us three talk basically every day and especially about what's going on with like TPBN. I told you what's going to fucking happen because it's happened to me. It's like you guys are blowing up. Your podcast is going to get a ton of attention. All the people in your audience want to do deals, they're investors, they're entrepreneurs. They're going to come to you with all this crazy shit because they did the same thing. And for me, it's like, I had an insane amount of investment opportunity, uh, people offering to invest in the podcast and or I would acquire it. And like,

• 1:35:23David Senra?

  I said no to all of them because the most important thing to me is like control for long term. I believe this is my life's work, just like Todd Graves on a chicken finger dream. I believe I was put here to do this. I think I'm the right person at the right place with the right set of skills at the right time. And like I was watching, um, yesterday, I was watching, uh, my, my son turned five and he's obsessed with dinosaurs, right? And so I was like, oh, it's a good idea. Let's watch Jurassic Park. I didn't fucking realize how scary that movie is for a five.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was so scary.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  I tried to do that once too. I was like, oh, Jurassic Park, dinosaurs, my son loves dinosaurs. It's dinosaur time. And then I'm like, oh, pop the brakes.

• 1:35:56David Senra?

  Yeah. But I had the thought, cause like you see the computers and like everything else. I'm like, wait a minute, this, this movie came out in 93.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:03David Senra?

  And like, i- if I wanted to do what I'm doing now, 20 years ago, and you guys too, what would you have to do? You couldn't, you'd have to go knock, you have to go to a physical building and be like, please put me on the air.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:14David Senra?

  It's just so important that like, we're doing this at the right time. So again, for me, it didn't matter. Like the, the, the money was not what I'm optimizing for. It was the control and the long-term control. Cause I want to do this until I die. Um, and so for me, it's like, control is way more important than, than money.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think the question maybe you were getting at is at a high level is, are we losing the like true generational founders because they do four back-to-back rounds and then they own 10% of their company and they've got a big board and they, and they did, and, and somebody comes and says, hey, you're experiencing all this like, you know, craziness. We'll just buy the company. You'll do an earn out and then you're going to be like worth a hundred million dollars.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  A hundred million, you get the path.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  But the question that, that when you, when you look at, you know, the, the Mark Zuckerberg example, it's somebody who maintained extreme control despite doing a bunch of venture rounds. And I feel like many founders aspired to that path over the last 20 years, 15 years, whatever.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  I know a guy with eight board seats.

• 1:37:13John Coogan?

  Not, don't, wouldn't recommend it, but it is a path to control.

• 1:37:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's one path.

• 1:37:19David Senra?

  No, I think like the, the, the, the main thing is like you find something you want to do like, again, I don't think you could pay Zach to not work at Meta, right? He's got all the money. Um, you know, I, I have just admired people that do things for a very long time. Some of these people, I talked to a lot of PE people, they, one of my friends has the funniest lines. I think that's just like, he says, VC gets all the attention, PE gets all the money. And his whole point was just like, VC is so loud, most of like, all the media is, is obsessed with like fundraising and everything else. So to, to a founder, it looks like this is everything that's going on. I have a weird, uh, like vantage point in the founder ecosystem because like, yeah, a lot of tech people listen to the podcast, but a lot of people like, they have billion, billion, like multi-billion dollar family companies listen to the podcast.

• 1:38:02David Senra?

  So like, there's just a ton of businesses out there. Some of them raise money, some of them don't. I, I don't think you're losing anything. I just think they're just, it's, there's a, uh, it's, you're, there's like a, what's the word I'm looking for? It's like, there's just a lot of noise that don't, that doesn't exactly represent like everything that's going on.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the next Todd Graves or the next, uh, you know, James Dyson might be quietly building out there, some behemoth that we're just not even hearing about because there's no VCs chattering about it.

• 1:38:28David Senra?

  So I just, I just tweeted this out, uh, where it's just like, I had, um,

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  Midjourney is kind of like that, you know, no, no outside capital. People know about it, but Midjourney could become some behemoth that David Holes just owns.

• 1:38:39David Senra?

  If you're not raising, like, there's a reason that you have to be loud if you're constantly having to raise money. Like, so I, I just did this tweet. It was like, I had dinner with one of the wealthiest people in the world and, uh, his family has commissioned two biographies. It's for the family use only, right? Yeah. And I was like, dude, and we got along, like, we had a fucking fantastic dinner. I thought he was charismatic, smart, great storyteller. I'm going to hang out with him again, again in the seventies. And I was like, dude, dude, let me get those biographies. Like, I would do such a good job. He's like, absolutely not. I have no interest in educating my competitors. I've met a ton of founders like this, where I get to go to their company offsite. I've met, I've, or their warehouses, gone to their company.

• 1:39:21David Senra?

  And, and they're usually all family owned businesses. And I'm always like, you're so fucking talented. Why don't you write an autobiography? Why don't you write about, do something? And they're absolutely not. They're just very, very quiet because there's no reason to make noise. There's also, uh, it's also dangerous where this is something Charlie Monger said that was fascinating, where he thought it was very, it was against human nature for him and Warren to be so wealthy and so loved. And his point was that most, you know, there's that greed doesn't run the world. Charlie has a great line. He says greed doesn't run the world, envy does.

• 1:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:51David Senra?

  And so when you're really wealthy, there's a lot of envy. And so it's like, she's smart to not advertise that.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes no sense.

• 1:39:57David Senra?

  Yeah, so it, again, I think it's just.

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  Can we flip it over to Jensen? I want to know, I mean, obviously he's in the news. He put on the Super Bowl of artificial intelligence, made a bunch of announcements at Nvidia GTC. And I wanted to know, where do you see gaps between Jensen's archetype as a founder from maybe the other magnificent seven founders? The Steve Jobs of the world, the Zuck of the world, whoever else you've, you've studied, where are the similarities and differences?

• 1:40:23David Senra?

  I think they're more similar to each other than they are to like, obviously they're more similar to each other than they are to like the general population. I don't feel like, I don't think there's a single founder that I've covered that is like the only one. Like, he's got a lot of interesting ideas, like they're all usually, you know, uh, what would be considered like micromanagers, they're obsessed with the details. Like Todd Graves' example, right? He's got 50,000 employees, uh, 800 stores, he's opening like a hundred stores every, every year. And before he does the interview, like he interrupts the interview so he can approve the Instagram reel that's going out.

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:40:57David Senra?

  Same thing with, Steve Jobs did the same thing where like, there's a great book, uh, called insanely simple, which talks about this. And it didn't matter if it was like a billboard in Missouri or a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. Steve Jobs would approve every single ad before it came out and then he'd be calling up. So the guy that wrote this book called insanely simple was the guy that was actually running Steve Jobs ads. And he says, Steve would call me at fucking midnight and we'd be debating for an hour over a single word. So.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  Doesn't feel like that's happening anymore at Apple.

• 1:41:25David Senra?

  No.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  It's been a little messy lately.

• 1:41:28David Senra?

  No, no, no. So I think Jensen's the same way. What I thought was most interesting about him, he is definitely one of the more extreme, like he is. Every single person I cover on founders is hardcore and extreme. He is, you know, and he's a, he's unusual, he's uncommon amongst uncommon people. One of my favorite things that he said was that um, he likes to torture people to greatness. I thought that was like a really interesting line. And his whole point was like, you know, people kind of like clip through people and fire people uh really fast. If he felt somebody had potential, they're just fucking up. Like, he's just gonna torture them into greatness. He's going to make them great. And what you realize is the longer you read this book, there's a book called Nvidia Way by Take Him, which is the one I did the episode on. What you realize is, he does that to himself.

• 1:42:14David Senra?

  He tortured, he's tortured himself to greatness where they just had, there's a great story in the book where they had one, a blowout quarter, they absolutely fucking killed it. And he comes in and he tells his team, he's like, every morning I wake up, look in the mirror and I say, you suck.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  I love that.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  The anti manifestation or visualization.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Something odd. How do you, how do you square his micromanagement with his uh? He's stated that he doesn't have one-on-one meetings very often. He is a very like, kind of scattered organization. It's an interesting thing. It's like, kind of like, you just dive into a specific thing. How do you think about it?

• 1:42:52David Senra?

  Yeah, he's got 60 direct reports, I think, in the book. I think when they start writing the book, it's like 30 and I think it goes up to 60 because the book just came out. It's like, it covers stuff up until like the recent last few months.

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03David Senra?

  He actually has a great way to describe this, that is most interesting. Where people are saying like, how are we going to handle all these agents? When they're smarter than we are. And he's like, I'm already doing that. He goes, my 60 direct reports are agents. They're all smarter at what they're in charge of than I am, and yet I'm able to direct them. There's a great line, let me see if I can find it. He has this line where he says something about um, the company has to be like an F1.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Pit crew, probably.

• 1:43:33David Senra?

  Well, he's describing the way like he organizes it and essentially like nobody, he designs, he believes the founder or the leader should design the company not for like what's necessarily best, like after they leave, but literally what's best for what they're doing now. He says ultimately my e-staff, which is his direct ports, ultimately my e-staff is something that I have to know how to work with. The company's organization is like a race car. It has to be a machine that the CEO knows how to drive. And so if you think about it, it's like he made an F1 organization that is tailor suited to him and may not be, it's obviously not going to be tailor suited to the person that takes over after him.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  I have a totally separate but somewhat related question in that certain high-profile investors sold a huge stake in Nvidia in 2019 that would be worth $160 billion as of last year. That person is Masa, Masayoshi Son. You haven't done an episode on Masa?

• 1:44:32David Senra?

  No, I won't. I fucking won't. So this, uh, I, I, sometimes I get sad because I feel like the great thing about podcasting is like you actually know the person, like when people meet you and you guys and me, they're like, well, I feel like I know you. It's like you've heard me talk for a hundred fucking hours. You do know me, right?

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48David Senra?

  Um, and so I had so many people that listened to the podcast, like there's this new, uh, first English biography of Masa called The Gambler. You have to do it. It's gonna be a great episode. I started reading it. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. He's kind of like nutty. And then, uh, this happened this week. This was supposed to be the next episode of Founders. And no, listen, rule number two in the Samba family is mind your own business. So like, I don't, I, I don't care what other people do for a living. I don't care how they do it. It really doesn't bother me. I wind up fucking hating this guy halfway through the book. Like I, I found it, I found it disgusting. Like, and it's, it's like, so we have a bunch of mutual friends. We've spent a lot of time together. We're like legit friends off camera, right? We talk all the time.

• 1:45:31David Senra?

  I'd be very concerned if I like ran into people and like Kugan's a fucking liar. He's fucked me over. The entire book, the first half of the book is all these people that Masa did business with. That is like, that guy lies all the time. He screwed me over. So then I, then I fast forward and I read the last chapter. And it's like, he's super depressed. He's like, I wasted my life. I have an, he says I have an ugly face, which is kind of weird. Uh, and he's just like, and would you realize like, he never, he was just so obsessed with, he is a legit gambler. And it's like a sad existence. He didn't build a product that made somebody else's life better. He didn't do any of that. And so I was like, I don't give a fuck about weight sunk cost of spending half a week. I, if I'm going to make an episode on this guy, that means I have to live inside his world for like another 40 hours.

• 1:46:14David Senra?

  And I'm just not willing to do that. So I just threw the book across the side of the room. I was like, I'm not doing this.

• 1:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Wow. Well, let's, uh, I mean, I'm glad that you have a beautiful face. Uh, and it's always great to have you on the show. Thanks. We'll have to have you back soon. This is fantastic.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  It's great seeing you in a jacket. I'll say it again. Uh, now that you set the bar, make sure, hey, this summer, when we're doing this live in person.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, seriously, we still, we still have to do the goat debate, the greatest entrepreneur of all time. We have a bunch of, we've been debating it in a chat room for a while.

• 1:46:47David Senra?

  Let's do that in person.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  We have to.

• 1:46:50David Senra?

  In tuxedos. If it's the goat debate, we have to take it one step above.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  A bottle of Dom pairing on, hopefully. I would love that.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for stopping by, David. This is fantastic.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Always great chat.

• 1:47:00David Senra?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:47:01Jordi Hays?

  Bye. Love you.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:47:03David Senra?

  Love you too.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  I told David last time we talked, he ended the call. He's like, love you guys. And I was like, if you're just tuning into the show for the first time and you're a Senra fan and it's, uh, it's, uh, it's great. It's crazy about Masa. It makes sense. Um.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  We'll have to get Delian's take on Masa.

• 1:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm sure that.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  I think, I think David changes, changes his tune. If Masa comes in and says, hey, look, we're going to lever you up. We're going to take Founder's Podcast. We're going to put, uh, 20 billion in at a hundred billion pre. And we're really going to take this to the next level. I think David all of a sudden says, well, yeah, that's enough to live in an Aman for the rest of my life. And so he does it.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  No, there's no, there's no price.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  You can't buy him out.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  There's no price. He, Masa could get us on his side if he took PETA into for profit.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  That would be a fantastic move. I would love that. Anyway, I think we got Delian in the temple of technology. Welcome to the show, Delian. How you doing?

• 1:47:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:48:00Delian Asparouhov?

  What's up, boys? Thanks for having me on again. Excited to catch up.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Appreciate it. We're calling this Delta V with Delian, our little space update. We're still workshop at the name, but we gotta come on, we gotta come up with a catchy, pithy phrase for, for all the regular guests, but very excited to have you here. Can you give us an update? Let's start with the rescued astronauts. You got community noted. You know, the ex-army really came out for you. How'd you process the landing? Break it down for us.

• 1:48:31Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, I already have enough of an ego that I don't need to like, you know, overly, you know, sort of praise myself even more. But all I'm gonna say is, you know, they go up, I forget the exact timing, but like, you know, beginning of June last year, I sent out this tweet that's like, end of June, where I was just like, losing my mind. Cause I was like, how is nobody talking about this? Like, these guys are like, totally stuck up there. It's clear that like, you know, Boeing and NASA clearly are panicking and realize that like, they can't take these guys down on Starliner. And nobody's even begun a plan for how to bring these guys down. And so I tweet with you like, hey, why is nobody talking about the fact that there's like, two American astronauts, like, stranded in orbit? And like, look, if it were like, Apollo days, or like, space shuttle days, and like, you know, they were stuck up there for an extended period of time, people would 100% be using like, the word stranded. And so I was just like, so confused as to why, like,

• 1:49:13Delian Asparouhov?

  this just was getting no attention. And then I literally just felt like I was being fucking lied to, and I get community noted, and it's like, oh, like, they're totally fine. They're doing some, like, final checkouts on Starliner. I'm like, has anybody like, read the comms that NASA and Boeing are putting out? Like, this thing's clearly in like, a very bad state. Definitely in no way that they actually like, decide to bring astronauts, you know, sort of down on it. And the word stranded had not yet been used a single time in any like, NASA comms, in anybody's like, comms about the entire mission. Within 24 hours of my tweet going viral, NASA put out a press release explicitly saying, "The astronauts are not stranded." And like, then the word stranded became like, totally in the lexicon around the mission. I'd like to think that it had something to do with that, you know, sort of viral tweet. Maybe there were other people that, you know, sort of influenced it. And then got even like, literally, you know, the White House's communications this past week said,

• 1:49:58Delian Asparouhov?

  you know, "We brought back the stranded astronauts." So I'm gonna claim credit on stranded being the case. The entire thing to me was, you know, sort of crazy, you know, not to give, you know, there's a lot of history that we could give here. But like, when commercial crew was Originally getting started, the original plan by NASA was to only, you know, do it as a sole source award just to Boeing. SpaceX was seen as a bunch of, you know, you know, cowboys, hoo-hahs that had no chance of actually being able to be trusted with, you know, some human astronauts on board. They actually had to delay the announcement because in like the final hours, they basically decided to do it as a split award. Where they gave Boeing, by the way, it's crazy, like they literally just gave Boeing twice the price per seat. So it's just like Boeing, it's like, hey, the price is like $10 for SpaceX and for Boeing it's $20 and like, we're just gonna pay them more, why? Because, you know, it's because Boeing has a 200 person lobbying team.

• 1:50:43Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and so there was like a very near world where like, we only had Boeing as the only option. It was only like in the final hour hours of that program that like SpaceX was, you know, sort of given an alternative. And like, thank God, otherwise like, we would have been begging the Russians to bring our astronauts back. And, you know, it's a little tricky to do when you're also like, you know, providing, you know, weapons to their, you know, enemies, so, you know.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Was this? Was this? A lot of people, you know, would say this was pol- like, political? Was it, uh, do you think these astronauts are coming back like deeply radicalized? Like, are they, you're like, you're up in space a long time, you got a lot of time to think. Uh, I don't know how the internet connection is up there, if there, if there even is one, you know, they don't have necessarily the bandwidth to doom scroll. Uh, are they coming back sort of like deeply, uh, you know, are, are they gonna be like kept off camera? Like, you know, you guys gotta kind of stay off the mics for a while while you cool off or, you know, what, what do you think their reaction is to the whole thing?

• 1:51:40Delian Asparouhov?

  Well, now that it's the Trump administration, I don't think that Trump will, you know, sort of limit them from the mics. But I think what's incredibly clear is SpaceX offered to bring the astronauts back sooner. And because it was in the midst of the election cycle and because Musk was campaigning for Trump, the Biden administration turned down that offer. There's a whole lot of fucking, you know, jackos and wahoos that will try and convince you otherwise, hey, this is the pre-existing ISS schedule. This is when Dragon was scheduled to go up, etc. So they had to stay up there for, no way. If somebody had gone to Elon and said, yes, like according to the standard NASA budgetary process, this was supposed to fly then. But like, one of the astronauts has like, you know, bone density issues and is having health problems up there. We want to bring her down like this week because it was planned to be like a three week long mission, not a nine month long mission. They 100% could have done that.

• 1:52:25Delian Asparouhov?

  The Biden administration very much so tried to challenge those, you know, sort of facts and deny that. Um, Dems today even have tried to deny that. Crazy is like typically NASA astronauts, at least in like, you know, you know. Past 20 years have not ever really made even the slightest inklings of political statements. Butch and Sunni like basically confirmed these facts. Like they basically made it clear, hey, we could have been brought back earlier and we were like denied the opportunity to be brought back earlier. And if I were them, I'd be pretty pissed because like, you know, Sunni, I believe, like did suffer bone density issues and was not supposed to be up there, you know, sort of for, you know, for that long. And so I wouldn't be surprised if you, you've already seen them push the fold on what they've been willing to say behind the mic. I wouldn't be surprised if they like do that even more now that they're on the ground and you're in a Trump administration.

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you think that NASA has a talent crisis? You could imagine that Boeing is finding it difficult to compete on, you know, getting the best talent when there's SpaceX and Varda and all these other players that are sort of competing for the, the best and brightest in the world. I imagine NASA is very prestigious, but at the same time, you're going to work in this government organization and there's a bureaucracy and, you know, if, if you're 22 years old right now and your, your, your hero is Elon Musk and Elon Musk is beefing on the timeline with NASA, like where are you, where are you going to go, right?

• 1:53:44Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I do think they have a real challenge. They also have a bit of an identity crisis where they are turning more and more to buyers of commercial off the shelf hardware versus like developers of it. And so what does that transition look like? But then if you only have people internally that are just buyers and don't have an engineering background, how do you know that they're buying the best stuff? At the same time, look, like, you know, um, NASA also like flew a helicopter on fucking Mars. That's insane. Like that's like a crazy capability. Nobody else would be capable of doing that. Yes, they worked with Aero Environment as like the contractor for that, but they like such a heavy hand in that they're now talking about like flying a helicopter on Mars. They did like the, you know, sort of six minutes of, uh, what is it called? Like when the Curiosity Rover came down, like the six minutes of, you know, hell or whatever it is.

• 1:54:29Delian Asparouhov?

  They're like, you know, literally using like retro boosters to like sky crane down a, you know, you know, um, uh, a rover. So like, there's a lot that NASA does that is like. Requires crazy talent, but I think what they need to, you know, sort of go through, and I think like, you know, Trump administration is likely aligned with this, Jared Isaacman, the likely incoming administrator, is NASA needs to basically just focus on two core parts. One, the core of space capabilities, they just become buyers of, and they just buy things off the shelf. And then where they're developing technologies directly themselves, it should only be the really radical, super far out things, right? Like, there's just not commercial space companies that are like, talking about like, we're gonna build like, off the shelf Mars helicopters.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this, we talked about this last time, like asteroid deflection is something that NASA should work on because it's not that commercial, right? It's like, we maybe need to do it once every 50 years, hopefully not, and then NASA, you can be the hero.

• 1:55:18Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Can we move on to the continuing resolution? Can you break that down for us?

• 1:55:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it kind of relates to some of the NASA stuff too, where, you know, it's been interesting to see, you know, this quarter feels like it's been the most active in, you know, sort of defense tech aerospace investing in a long time, some of which feels rational, some of which feels sort of crazy over the top. And it's just interesting to have this like massive flow of capital, you know, from, you know, venture investors going into this field, while at the same time, the flow of capital from DC literally has been halted, right? So, you know, for the, you know, sort of less informed, you know, viewers, ultimately, defense tech and aerospace companies that are selling to the government, yes, there's commercial, you know, sort of use cases for these technologies, those aren't related to government budgets, but are ultimately, you know, a lot of these

• 1:56:06Delian Asparouhov?

  reliant on government budgets. You know, about 10 days ago, the House and Senate agreed upon a year-long continuing resolution. And so what that basically means is, both the House and the Senate had previously passed budgetary bills that increased basically defense spending, had various NASA spending, et cetera, couldn't come to an alignment on that, couldn't come to an alignment with the presidents. And so the ultimate, you know, sort of call by all parties was, we're actually just gonna freeze to whatever fiscal year 24 levels, you know, basically are. Now, in that CR, they did give the DOD, hey, we know that you guys are thinking about like, you know, sort of reprogramming. And so as you're shifting budgets around, make sure that it reflects whatever like, you know, House

• 1:56:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Appropriators, you know, and you know, Senate appropriators basically had in those budgets that they basically put out, you know, sort of end of February. But in the grand scheme of things, this mostly means a freezing of new ads, any new programs. And as you can imagine, who's the biggest, you know, sort of beneficiary of that? Well, incumbents have their programs continuing to be funded, right? And so the, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, et cetera, Northrop, you know, might not be experiencing as much growth as usual, but you know, they're, you know, they're generally, you know, uh, continuing to be funded, uh, versus all of the net new entrants while are experiencing massive inflows of venture capital dollars have literally been told by the US government, like, expect zero starts. And so it's just a little odd to me that that's not a thing that is being talked about by all these people that are talking about like the Gundo dynamism, this, that, it's like.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, who talks the most on X? It's, it's founders and investors and neither have an incentive to really say like, hey, by the way, none of us are making anything back anytime soon.

• 1:57:42Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know, it's like a paranoid founder, I like to talk about this stuff because, you know, I want to make sure that like the thing that I'm working on, you know, survives for a very long time and is like sustainable. But like, to be clear, what this means practically is like, you know, basically this year's budget, you know, was basically end September 31st is completely frozen. Now it's being, you know, begun to be worked on is like the fiscal year, you know, so 26 vehicle. That's gonna, you know, first have to come from like, you know, sort of the president, you know, putting forth, you know, sort of a plan that you'd expect to make it over to, you know, sort of the House and Senate in like roughly the May period. That means it's gonna make it onto the floor in like, you know, sort of June, July. Hopefully gets passed by like September, October. Realistically though, we basically have not hit that September 31st deadline for the past, I don't even know what it is, like 10 plus years.

• 1:58:25Delian Asparouhov?

  And so that continuing resolution is probably going to extend for at least another 30, potentially 60 days. So, you know, potentially until the end of the year. That means that like new budget actually doesn't start until, you know, basically January of next year. And so all these companies that are raising all this capital for all these things that they would like to start. Yes, there's gonna be reprogramming, yes, like the president is, you know, doing shipbuilding and CIA, et cetera. But like a lot of this stuff is very much so frozen and, you know, what people don't realize is let's say, you know, you have, you know, sort of CAA, or CCA, sorry. Um, and, you know, sort of shipbuilding. Those five-year plans that the DOD put together where they were like, look, in order to do the early R and D in 2024, we need 100 million in 25, we need 200 million in 26, we need 300 million. Well, because we're now frozen at 24 levels, that means it's only 124 and 125.

• 1:59:09Delian Asparouhov?

  So now when you're looking at 26, it's like, are you making up for the fact that 25, you know, sort of was, you know, low and you're trying to scale all the way to 26? You're like in a real budgetary hole. So like new programs are also in a way worse state because it's typically the new programs that are the ones that grow, that are growing. And so if it's flat, you're both trying to figure out, do you make up for last year and how do you keep up with like what the program needs? Or are you like really pushing on milestones? But if you're pushing on milestones, now is it relevant to Taiwan? If people are thinking about that needing to be ready in 2027, 2028? And so does that now make the DOD just want to keep shifting budget to incumbent programs that can deliver by 27, 28, even if they're not as capable? Right? So there's just like a lot of things where it's just like, you know, I'm a, you know, yeah, obviously mega bull on like the team at Andro.

• 1:59:50Delian Asparouhov?

  Cause like they have the like bench, the capability, the, you know, set of different products, we, different programs going like they will navigate this. But like, I don't know, there's going to be like five Androles and I think VCs are investing like there's going to be, you know, sort of five Androles right now. But without even understanding like the basics of like the budgetary, you know, sort of process on the hill. They're just, you know, sort of slinging checks, you know, based off of, you know, the, you know, zip code of where somebody's office is.

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  If you're a, if you're a, yeah, if you're a, an American dynamism, defense tech investor, are you looking at, you know, are you, are you seeing more pitches in Europe right now? If the Androle of Androle is Androle here in the US, but then Europe, uh, Europe is like re-militarizing, uh, at least Western Europe. You know, are you seeing pitches come in? Uh, would people just kind of divert dollars over there because there's potentially a lot more willingness to spend?

• 2:00:41Delian Asparouhov?

  I think you're starting to see that happen. Obviously both the Overton window has changed there that like, you know, sort of budget, you know, sort of growth there is insane. And if you think that like US incumbents are like stodgy, old school, et cetera. EU incumbents are like, you know, sort of that, you know, jacked up to the nines. And so I do think there's a real opportunity there. There aren't a ton of like, super competent players. And so, you know, I wouldn't say that like, the quality of what we get, you know, sort of inbound, at least at Founders Fund is, you know, something, you know, super high in Europe. The thing that I will say, though, is at least the biggest check that I've ever, you know, sort of led is like a net new, you know, portfolio company investment. So not just like follow-ons, obviously, we like, we've deployed mega checks in a ramp, but that was after doing seed in Series A. But we're investing about $36 million into basically a European aerospace defense, you know, sort of type player.

• 2:01:25Delian Asparouhov?

  And that's our first check into the company. Now, part of it is that the company was already performing very well irrespective of the EU tailwinds. And then now with reindustrialization, et cetera, we're like even more bullish, you know, sort of on the, you know, company. But we're also getting to do it at a price that is like highly differentiated relative to like the, you know,

• 2:01:46Delian Asparouhov?

  94129, you know, sort of, uh, sorry, shoot, that's the SF, you know, sort of.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:51Delian Asparouhov?

  456, you know, sort of zip code.

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  With all this turmoil of the DOD and with the budget and the continuing resolution, is it more important than ever that these companies figure out commercial applications? We talked to a company, Albedo, they're a satellite company yesterday. It seemed like even if the government doesn't want to buy the ISR capabilities, there are hedge funds and oil and gas providers that want, you know, high resolution images from VLEO. And so is that something that you should, I mean, you've thought about this at Varda with the pharma and DOD contracts. How do you think about that? And is that more important going forward?

• 2:02:25Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, but I think it's like one of these things that's like very, you know, sort of hard to pivot to depending on how you've set up your business, right? So, you know, um, take a business and say like Sironic. I'm not sure there's that many commercial use cases for, you know, sort of small scale autonomous surface vessels. Or take a company, you know, like Apex that is, you know, mostly selling, you know, sort of commercial satellites. Now, some of them are to like, you know, various defense groups, but they also have a bunch of commercial sales, right? So I think it's one of these things that it's really hard to like. Pivot from one approach to the other. Maybe somebody like Talon here has clearly shown it where they were super DoD focused for a long time and now have a massive commercial business. But that felt like it happened at like the very, very late stages of the company. I think your ability to like pivot from, you know, either being dual use from the get go or being defense from the get go.

• 2:03:10Delian Asparouhov?

  You kind of have to choose one and we've obviously chosen the like, you know, sort of dual use from the get go. Does that give us some cons when it comes to like defense programs? Yeah, because like we're not as willing to like change around our architecture to totally match defense needs. But the pros is also in a continuing resolution year. I also have a lot of commercial work that I can continue to go pursue. There's pros and cons, I think, to either both approaches.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  The DoD.

• 2:03:31Delian Asparouhov?

  But I don't think you're going to see that much shifting. It's just too hard to shift.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Well, if the DoD isn't buying kamikaze drones, I'm happy to buy them personally for my next hunting trip. Uh, give me the C4. Let's lift the ITAR control rules. Get me the suicide drone. I want to go hunting for some big game.

• 2:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Wild boars.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Uh, thank you, Delian, for coming on. Do you have a last question?

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, last, last. Yeah, we, we got another guest coming on, but a quick question. Do you think that the deal, without commenting on real, uh, Rippling and Deal, do you think that was a wake up call for the defense industry around, hey, if this is happening in HR tech, like we gotta take everything way more seriously, right? Because obviously, you know, people probably, anybody that would be competing with Varda knows who else is like bidding on the contract. It's like common knowledge. It's not the same type of information advantage, but if people are willing to like break the law to steal customer data, CRM data for HR tech, you know, it, it to me should just be this massive wake up call around if you're doing anything that's critical to national

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  security, you need to take your, your, your own security at your company 10 times more seriously.

• 2:04:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I mean, I think if you look at the, you know, sort of SpaceX, the Andals, the Vardas, the Hadriens, et cetera, on down, the per capita number of like IT security people you basically need on staff because you're just like ITAR compliance, et cetera, means these companies are thinking about it all the time. Now, at the same time, are there like Chinese spies and, you know, foreign spies sniffing around all these almost certainly? Are there other corporate spies sniffing around this all the time? Absolutely. But I do think you see this stuff a bit less in terms of, you know, uh, actually having these like, you know, sort of totally negative effects. Partially because like, you know, with Rippling and Deal, it's like there, it's like, okay, let's pull like which software features, et cetera. When it comes to something like Varda, man, it's like, what would you even pull from our servers to figure out how to do what we do?

• 2:05:18Delian Asparouhov?

  It's like, you could get this CAD file, this thing, but it's like, you need the supply chain, you need to cut the metal, you got to integrate it, you got to know how to test it, etc. It's like, even if you gave me access to our full server base, you gave me a team of like 30 engineers, and you tell me, go replicate Varda, it would still be like a really hard problem. Like, if you look at the, you know, sort of Chinese rockets, they look a hell of a lot like the Falcon 9s, and they're still not landing, right? And so, you know, I think it's clear that like, the Chinese definitely ripped a lot of stuff from SpaceX at some point or another. It's really hard to, you know, sort of prevent that from happening, you know, sort of can't blame, you know, anybody for having that happen to their company. But also, the Chinese still aren't landing rockets. Now, their solution has just been, let's build as many rockets as possible, and screw it, you know, rather than purposely landing them on barges, we're just going to ditch them over Chinese villages and like, you know, dump propellant on like our, you know, some poor villagers.

• 2:06:01Delian Asparouhov?

  But like, whatever, we're going to set up, you know, the first Chinese lunar base before the Americans, because like, we're just willing to murder citizens nonstop on the way to a goal. And, you know, unfortunately for America, you know, we don't, you know, murder our citizens, we only murder our presidents.

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  JFK files, good deep cut.

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  Hey, well, at least we didn't land on the dolphins yesterday.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good. The dolphins seemed like they were good. Let's end on a high note.

• 2:06:23Delian Asparouhov?

  Look, maybe the dolphins work for Mossad, though. That's all I'll say.

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:06:28Jordi Hays?

  You never know.

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  As soon as you get off, the dolphin asks you.

• 2:06:30Jordi Hays?

  There's some crazy.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  What happened on the ISS?

• 2:06:32Jordi Hays?

  No, there's some crazy NASA lore around dolphins. Don't Google it.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Don't Google it.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, well, thank you, Delia. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great one.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Always a good time.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  I think we got Jake Adler coming in, the Temple of Technology, in just a few minutes. He is building military medicine biotech for the next generation soldier.

• 2:06:52Jordi Hays?

  And we got to see if there's some dual-use applications for that, because we podcast pretty hard.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Harder than anyone else we know.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  We're still going live, so let's talk to Jake about it. I believe he's here. Welcome. Come on down. Ooh, the big Celsius. I got the small Celsius mog.

• 2:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:07:08John Coogan?

  Cheers. Cheers, Jake. How you doing? I'm good. How you guys doing? Doing fantastic. Uh, can you give us the update? What did you announce? What are you doing? What are you building? What's behind you?

• 2:07:19Speaker 05

  Oh, so behind me is our lab is the BSL two, so biosafety level two facility. So it's the biosafety cabinet. So we're handling any like pathogens, like any anthrax or botulinum. We're going to be doing it in there. Uh, just for for protection of the operator. Um, but, but yeah, so, you know, we just announced a three and a quarter million dollar round.

• 2:07:39Speaker 05

  Led by Peter Thiel, Cantos and Refactor Capital to, uh, to transform, uh, really the battlefield with, with advanced biotechnology. And really, if we, if we consider like the state of affairs today, you know, military medicine hasn't really changed much since Vietnam. Um, you know, we've seen a little bit of improvement in tactical combat casualty care. Uh, but we very much still have warfighters who are going on the front lines and dying in combat. So, you know, what we're trying to build here is, is really advanced and novel biotechnology that we can really equip warfighters with, uh, to make them more, you know, more lethal, more resilient and more ready in combat environments. So initially, applications of that look like, uh, you know, a nano composite for rapid wound healing,

• 2:08:19Speaker 05

  uh, along with something we're exploring, uh, with more intelligence partners, which is a, uh, a novel, um, like biosurveillance, um, network that would effectively be able to monitor, uh, for, for biological and, uh, chemical threats.

• 2:08:31John Coogan?

  I remember reading about QuickClot back in the day. Uh, can you talk to me about the evolution in just wound healing on the battlefield? Kind of the different eras and where you see it going with your company?

• 2:08:43Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, so QuickClot is a really, really interesting example. It was started by a guy named Frank Hersey, um, and, and they basically, uh, you know, this guy would cut himself when he was shaving. And he realized that this mineral called zeolite, he would pour it on his skin, um, and it would stop the bleeding. Uh, the challenge with QuickClot, at least its initial formulation was that it used to burn warfighters. So it actually would cause like second or third degree burns. So it would, it would effectively stop the hemorrhage, but it would, it would also burn them in the process of doing that. Um, and they've now transitioned the technology, but, but really the, the issue with the traditional QuickClot idea and the concept is that it's, it might've supported, uh, warfare in, in, in a more traditional context where we can medevac that troop. But military is heading towards like the military doctrine is heading towards this environment where, you know, troops are going to be deployed in combat for an extended.

• 2:09:28Speaker 05

  A period of time and military medics, we won't, we won't even be able to retract them for maybe upwards of two weeks. So, you know, the, the almost in many ways that the definition of what a casualty is, is changing. It's not somebody who's just been shot and it's completely, uh, uh, you know, completely gone. It's now somebody who can't even pull the trigger. So what we're trying to explore with King's foil is, is moving beyond just that initial hemorrhage control and that hemostatic agent. And building a product that would actually enable the warfighter to heal faster. So reducing that convalescent period and having them return to duty sooner.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk, uh, as much as you can about, uh, sort of broad, uh, I would, I would call it almost like drug use in the military. I've heard stories of fighter pilots, you know, the, the funny thing is, uh, from what I know, when F-35 pilots are deploying to the Middle East, they just sort of like take off in the US and they just fly there. And you can imagine it's a pretty long flight. Anybody that's been on a, you know, 16 hour flight to the Middle East, doing a little fundraising. Uh, it's, uh, you usually want to fall asleep at some point. You know, Adderall and some of these sort of like.

• 2:10:30John Coogan?

  Medafinil.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Medafinil, those types of drugs are obvious. Uh, World War II has some crazy examples. Would love to hear the history of like, kind of drug use in the military, super abbreviated, everything from like stimulants to stuff more like, um, quick clot.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, you know, the, the medications you, you guys mentioned are typically categorized as no and no go. So your, your, your stimulants, and then you'll have like your Z pills or your benzodiazepines to help with drowsiness. And, um, and look, it's, it's really interesting. Um, the, the military is, is relatively constrained for, for what they can actually provide to warfighters. I've heard some crazy stories. I, I think I heard the story about a, an air force, uh, a pilot who, uh, he, uh, he, he basically took a bunch of benzos. Uh, he was like unable to fall, unable to fall asleep. So he started taking more and ended up like, uh, trying to like go use the bathroom and started like completely pissing himself. So they don't have like a lot of, um, control over, and, and they don't really, um, I, I would say they didn't really advise, um, how to use them so well. But Medafinil is definitely.

• 2:11:29Speaker 05

  A big one for vigilance and awareness. Obviously, your benzodiazepine class is pretty big as well, although the military is trying to move away from those. So there's quite a broad history here. But really, I think I don't think pharmacological is necessarily the right or immediate approach. I think in many ways, we should be targeting the more of the root causes. So, for example, one of the early technologies we were exploring was a device called New Sleep, which is a closed-loop brain-computer interface that would effectively shock you to sleep. And this has been a really big point of interest for the military is can we build neuromodulation or brain stimulation devices that can control sleep architecture and make it so when warfighters sleep three hours, they really feel like they're sleeping five hours, right? So we're trying to find alternatives that are not addictive

• 2:12:12Speaker 05

  or habit-forming and don't really carry the secondary or next-day effects that many benzodiazepines would.

• 2:12:19Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about sort of like dual-use applications of sort of stuff on your roadmap, right? I imagine there's some things that you're developing that are going to be so powerful that eventually we'll want to get, consumers will be like, hey, we want some of that, too, right? And there's a long history of the sort of military.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Aren't you a consumer of this stuff? I see pictures of you testing yourself.

• 2:12:42Speaker 05

  So whatever we're thinking about a new initiative, my brain immediately goes to the dual-use implication. And that's sort of one of the beautiful things we get to do at this intersection of biotech and defense. You know, a lot of the companies today that are getting funded are building like cruise missiles, and you can't really sell that to the consumer or civilian population, right?

• 2:13:00Jordi Hays?

  John wants some kamikaze drones.

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  I'm really into big-game hunting, and I want to take it to the next level, move past the sniper rifles and the long guns and go into the kamikaze drones and the cruise missiles. That's my goal for this year. But I take your point. Yeah, so continue, sorry.

• 2:13:19Speaker 05

  But, but yeah, so we're consistently thinking about that dual-use implication. And really, in many ways, I see that the OD and our work with federal partners as a launchpad, right? We kind of get the offload of all of this initial experimental and financial risk kind of deployed into this first customer market and be able to eventually leverage that market for really. Extreme validation in the most austere conditions and then bring it back to the civilian market. So practically, everything we're building has a dual use implication.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:47Speaker 05

  And I think another interesting implication as well is that, you know, a lot of technology we're building is potentially maybe too early for the civilian market. So we kind of get that initial footing with a partner who can actually help us build out the technology, you know, provide us with the necessary revenue to grow as a company and really, you know, grow as an organization and grow out our product portfolio and eventually bring it back to the market when it's the right time for civilians.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  How do you, we were just talking to Delian about kind of the continuing resolution and the fact that the DOD isn't adding a lot of new programs. You're obviously still in the early stages here, kind of seed round level. Are you thinking about, hey, let's just go heads down for a couple of years, R and D, and then sprint towards program of record? Or are you, are you seeing there's, there's pockets of money that you can be responsive to and little programs that you can build up very quickly?

• 2:14:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're pretty aggressive with our approach. You know, one of the last conferences we went to to present our technology, we got like removed by armed security. Present to the PMs on garbage bins outside the conference center. So we're definitely in the mode of, of, of trying to get our technology in the warfighter's hands. Sort of the chasm we're trying to cross here is that if you look at the state of things today, you know, academia rules military medicine. And they do a horrible, like totally shitty job of taking technology from the benchtop to the battlefield. So the way we've been approaching things is thinking like, how can I build something in four months? That we can then present to a federal partner, get it in the hands of the warfighter and deploy this rapidly.

• 2:15:16Speaker 05

  So QuickClot, which is an example you brought up, got cleared in nine months with no human trials, right? So, so there's kind of this really interesting opportunity for us to leverage the, the DOD and FDA memorandums, which enable expedited approval and clearance. And notably like big companies right now, with big startups like Neuralink and Synchro, like these big brain computer interface companies, you know, which have breakthrough designation, which was, you know, prized as like the fastest, most expedited pathway in the FDA. If you work with the DOD, you can move faster, right? So there's this, this really interesting opportunity for us to build technology and actually get it in the hands of the warfighter and, and make sure that the troops we're putting in the most austere conditions aren't just surviving, but they're thriving, right? It's really hard to, to ask a 20-year-old to go into combat without the tools that they need to survive.

• 2:16:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm curious how much of what you're developing is based on, you know, sort of studies that have existed for a long time that just nobody cared about, right? Like, I imagine, I imagine that you can, there's just this treasure trove of like information and research that people just never acted on. And now that you're sort of this high agency, you have this like kind of core thesis for the company. I imagine there's a lot of basically like off balance sheet R and D work that you can just kind of absorb and sort of run with.

• 2:16:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, so the first thing I'll mention, I, you know, I think Palmer actually said this, which is that, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't really invented anything new because a lot of these concepts are already in sci fi. And, you know, growing up being a big sci fi reader, you know, a lot of the ideas I have are coming directly out of science fiction. So, you know, rapid wound healing, you know, artificial synthetic blood, biosurveillance and biodefense. So, yeah, a lot of these are deeply tied to fiction because of the limited constraints on the reality. But in terms of existing literature, you know, we really do stand on the shoulders of giants. I think my primary skill set has been, how do I take really compelling literature from this one field that has no real practical application and combine it with something else, right?

• 2:17:19Speaker 05

  And kind of find these really interesting points of convergence between different ideas and turn that into a practical product, right? So in many ways, we do a really good job at taking, you know, this cutting edge research and perfecting it. And I owe a lot to academia for that. And that's really, in my view, what the role academia should be serving, right? Academia should be that foundational, doing that breakthrough science without very much thinking about the translational ability. But then you do need that partner to cross that bridge and actually build technology that can translate and get in the hands of the warfighter. And that's what we're trying to do at Pilgrim.

• 2:17:50Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. The Biological Weapons Convention in 1972.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  Said the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling and use of biological and toxins are effectively prohibited. So bioweapons are illegal, but that doesn't mean they're not going to be used, right? Do you think the DOD, like if I'm a, if I'm a soldier being deployed to some, you know, far off land to fight some enemy that I don't know what their sort of ethics are, I don't know if they're going to follow the sort of like laws, right, against these things, maybe they get super desperate. Do you think that the DOD generally takes these sort of threats seriously enough? And I imagine, you know, a lot of the stuff you're thinking about is reactionary to, you know, a certain situation on the battlefield. How do you make sure that you're keeping our warfighters safe in a sort of unpredictable environment?

• 2:18:42Speaker 05

  Totally. So first off, you know, the, the DOD has a very kinetic frame of reference. So when they're thinking about things and threats, they're thinking about big shiny explosions. And I always joke with our team that I wish there was more explosions in bio, but there just really isn't. I can't just do like an off drill demo of an Altius or Fury just like crashing into something. It just doesn't really work that way. So, so to your point, the DOD's response has been largely reactive. You know, you, you look at COVID-19, it spread across the globe in nine months, killed like 1.2 million Americans and wiped out 16 trillion in our GDP. It also took, took off like a, for 10 weeks, we had an operational gap in the Pacific due to the USS Theodore Roosevelt. So it's very reactionary. So, so, you know, in terms of the biological weapons convention, we, we should not be at the mercy and trust of other states.

• 2:19:27Speaker 05

  The US has a somewhat of a grandstanding policy around this, which is that we will not build bioweapons. And the best offense is really stronger defense. The problem is that we have no defense, you know, so, so we're, we're kind of in this, in this really precarious position right now where we are very vulnerable to, to a biological weapon attack. And we've seen that, we've seen that with COVID, we saw that very briefly with H5N1, but that didn't really have a much spillover risk. So even if it's manmade or, or, or natural, it's, it's still a threat. So the, the reality is that, you know, most of our foreign adversaries are, are building out these laboratories, they're building out these weapons. You know, in many ways, these systems are, tend to be referred to as like poor man noobs, because they're a lot cheaper and also don't really respect borders. So they can proliferate a lot faster and don't really require that direct confrontation.

• 2:20:12Speaker 05

  So it, it really underscores a frightening reality where, where these, these weapons can be used in, in really novel ways to really. Really take down and break down the resilience of our military and also the critical infrastructure around the US. So even with the biological weapons convention, there still is an outlasting and really real threat that's impeding with these systems.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  How do you think about the legacy of Theranos? I'm sure if you're successful, people are going to be like, oh, this dropout, you know, raising all this money, building this stuff. It's tough in bio because obviously there's so many real drugs that make it to market and quietly make billions or trillions of dollars. Novo Nordisk is bigger than the entire GDP of Denmark. But at the same time, it's harder for someone just to like, download the app and verify that it's a real thing like they can with a cursor, for example. What's your take on the legacy of Theranos?

• 2:21:05Speaker 05

  So Theranos is obviously a very concerning, or was a very concerning situation. You know, Elizabeth Holmes had basically this ability to keep the FDA out and prevent them, you know, proper inspectors from coming in and checking out their work. And this is actually something I'm seeing again with non-invasive neuromodulation today. A lot of the companies in the space are building brain-computer interfaces and trying to circumvent the Food and Drug Administration by trying to fall into this general wellness category. I've seen like dozens of companies do this. And right now, like, they're going to be fine, right? Like, they don't get away with it for the time being, but if they hit a billion dollar vow, you know, they're going to get a horrible enforcement action. Like, you know, at that point, it's fraud, right? So you can even be seeing jail time, and you can be seeing massive fines. So it isn't like this cycle has gone away since Theranos.

• 2:21:49Speaker 05

  It's still very prominent. One thing that we do at Pilgrim, which is something I've been very adamant about since day one, is that we do that preliminary validation. So if we don't see the results on our benchtop, we don't even bring it to the US government. And the belief there is that we're trying to not only save taxpayer dollars, but also save our time. Like, I don't have any interest in working on tech that doesn't work. So I want to see it work for myself. And clearly, you know, if it wasn't clear with the demo I did on myself, I have a pretty high conviction to get to results, right? So on limited time, I had to cut holes in my legs on camera to demonstrate the rapid healing abilities of one of our composites. So, you know, that's sort of the approach we've taken. But in terms of Theranos' legacy, it obviously has scarred the biotech industry. I'm pretty bearish on biotech as a whole. Which is a pretty hard thing to say being in the industry itself.

• 2:22:31Speaker 05

  But I just don't think many companies here are actually thinking about the practical and commercial implications of their work. Many people come in, they'll raise a couple of million and buy like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment and, and you know, run with that idea, but not actually think about how they're going to make it to the market. And I think that's a really concerning reality when we're thinking about startups, even on that 10 to 15 year timeline.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Have you had any luck finding the, you have a role up here called Pathfinder. It says, as a Pathfinder, you're the stormtrooper who stares down critical, near impossible challenges. You'll take on missions that break lesser souls, problems with no playbook. Trekking into combat zones to deliver our tech, restoring a nineties scanning electron microscope without a manual. Crashing a DARPA event with a fake badge to snag intel from top brass. Tasks so wild they'll call you insane. Has it been challenging to find the right person for that?

• 2:23:21Speaker 05

  That's barely know. We've gotten a lot of really compelling submissions for that. One thing, one thing I was very smart, smart to do ahead of the, the announcement of the company was put like the, the question as part of the job post. So we've gotten some really interesting information out of people. So when people are, instead of just like submitting a bullshit application, they actually have to spend the time and write something compelling. But, um, but we, we found some really cool people. Like I said, our, our approach is very much based in guerrilla warfare, right? So, so we do what it really takes to get the meetings that we need to get. And thus far, you know, it's, it's worked very well in our favor. I think in many ways, we're, we're kind of battling a lot of entrenched interests. I somewhat compare, you know, with, with limited, limited perspective on, on precisely what it would look like.

• 2:24:02Speaker 05

  But I somewhat compare our experience to O5 Palantir, you know, going up against the government, going up against these primes. And really trying to, to make a name, positioning ourselves and our company. So the Pathfinder role is, is one that I was really excited by. It really even like fired me up writing it. And I, we really wanted a. A stormtrooper who could go on the front lines, that could put them into combat environments and they would just kill it. You know, if we need to get a meeting with SecDef, if we need them to break into a DARPA conference, if they need to go, you know, beyond enemy lines, whatever it may be, we just needed somebody who who would basically take the task, you know, and sign off and get it done.

• 2:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Needed an absolute dog. Well, I

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  I have one more question.

• 2:24:39Jordi Hays?

  One more question, then I'll cap it off.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. You talked about brain-computer interfaces. We've talked about this in the past. You know the industry very well. I don't know if you saw this, but a couple weeks ago, someone burned something close to like a couple million dollars of Ethereum to encode a message in the blockchain that alleged that China had developed brain-computer interface technology that was being used to control workers like ants. And it was very scary sounding sci-fi. If it's happening, it's terrifying. Why would someone spend so much money? Is this a some sort of false flag, just try and freak out the Americans by spending this money? Is it even possible? What's your timeline for that type of thing?

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  The the enders game of BCI, you know, controlling all the all the soldiers on the battlefield? Give us the most sci-fi take you have.

• 2:25:33Speaker 05

  So notably, first I'll address the China thing. China is beating out the US in patents around neural interfaces. They've been doing that, I think, for a few years now. So they've really taken the lead. China also thrives on this belief of military-civil fusion. So basically, any any civilian corporation has basically has a direct in-line to the government for military applications. So, you know, it's realistic in many ways that China is going to get there. And also, like I mentioned before, the US maintains a somewhat of a grandstanding approach to bio. So, you know, we've been pretty anti-modification or genetic enhancement of our warfighters for good reasons. But notably, that's going to inhibit our timeline to get to potentially the same outcomes that China might eventually

• 2:26:13Speaker 05

  move towards. So in terms of neural interfaces that can control warfighters, it's something I've looked into and something that I've explored. And there's a couple of interesting modalities that are still semi or non-invasive. The biggest challenge with neural interfaces is spatial. And temporal resolution. So most of the the solutions today that rely on like EEG, you you have really um high temporal resolution. So you see the signal really, really quickly. But you're basically looking at a a like a a a bowl of soup, you know, it could be with millions of different things mixed in. Uh, you don't know precisely where that signal is coming from. Um, and we've been leveraging AI like there's been researchers who've been using AI to like isolated a little bit more, but

• 2:26:52Speaker 05

  um, non-invasive modalities are still pretty unclear, but in terms of a timeline, um, or or really approach to build technology that would, you know, be able to um, control the warfighter. Um, it's it's a lot sooner than than you would imagine.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Terrifying.

• 2:27:05Jordi Hays?

  Terrifying, amazing. Uh, well, I'm I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. Uh, last thing I just want to leave you with. If you're working on anything that would help us do this show 24 hours a day for for weeks in a row.

• 2:27:15John Coogan?

  If you can just eliminate sleep entirely, that'd be great.

• 2:27:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just just get it over here.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  We have Celsius, but we're looking for something stronger. Make it happen, Jake. We appreciate you stopping by.

• 2:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're here. We appreciate you dog fooding your product. We'll step up. We're confident.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  You can test the craziest stuff, pre FDA. We we'll we'll get ITAR compliant. We'll get regulated as a DOD effort if we if you need uh to test stuff on it, to test stuff on us.

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for doing what you do. It's great having you on.

• 2:27:37John Coogan?

  Appreciate you, Jake. Thanks for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  What an absolute dog.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  Wild. Uh, should we move on to the timeline? Close it out?

• 2:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have a post here. Uh, that's breaking news.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  This was sent uh right when we started going live. This is from Barrett Ames. He says, yo, at TBPN, Ramp just sent us cookies. Talk about customer service. I reached out to them because if you also keep shilling, it's working.

• 2:28:03John Coogan?

  Thank you. It's here.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  And so we love to, we love to see it. Nice work, Barrett. Nice work, Ramp. On Sunday, these look like some fantastic cookies. Ramp, when you hear this, I we like cookies too.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Yes, I know some cookies. Just make sure it has no carbs and it's all protein. It's actually made of filet mignon.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, well said.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we move on to Will Manias?

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Obscure hobbyist of the year, if you're following our award show last year. He said, "The end result of vibe coding, $100 million in 30 days and all this software prosperity, gospel junk, isn't hundreds of venture scale AI companies. It's just junk food. It's a return to artisanal software, software that fits right in the hand, distribution passed down over generations."

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  What a wordsmith. What a wordsmith.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Will's one of those people, again, right? He's sort of in that rune category of, uh, he should be writing great, you know, novels and texts, but instead he's just ripping, you know, bangers.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been seeing that there's this whole trend of the levels I O, I just vibe coded a flight simulator. And now a lot of developers are realizing that they can take work that they've already done and spent a lot of time on and been like, "I just vibe coded this in a day." And so I saw someone post a website that they designed, and it was like a beautiful website that was so pixel perfect and like you'd scroll down and you'd go on this crazy 3JS thing, and it was like so complicated and everyone in the comments was just like, "You didn't vibe code this. There's no way. Like, show us the prompt search now." I gotta hide the secret sauce. Like, my prompt is so good, I, you know, I was able to build this thing.

• 2:29:37Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy's, Jeremy's comment on that, "I long to pay $59.99 for a one-time downloaded of a, uh, download of a handcrafted German to-do app."

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  Absolutely. I'm totally on that.

• 2:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I could see a return to the one-time purchase model. Like, everything comes in cycles, right?

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. I'd like that. Uh, well, should we, should we move on to a ramp employee? Jeff Charles?

• 2:30:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a great post. Uh, he's, has a screenshot of Gemini. Says, "Make a presentation that summarizes these trends, highlighting key statistics and takeaways. I'm still learning how to create multiple slides at once. Can you describe one slide you want me to create?" Okay.

• 2:30:17John Coogan?

  Create one slide with main takeaways.

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm still learning how to create multiple, oh, I'm sorry. I can't help with creating slides yet, but I'm still learning.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Gemini.

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, rough.

• 2:30:29John Coogan?

  You have to pay for this stuff. You have to pay for this.

• 2:30:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they charge for this product.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this is like 20 bucks a month. And then it just annoys you in every app you're in, like, hey, wanted to use Gemini? And then it doesn't deliver.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Clippy would never do this to you.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  It would never make it sound like it could do something that it couldn't.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Exactly. Clippy was just there with like fun little positive messages, like, hey, I'll help you out. Here, have you heard of Ctrl V, Ctrl C? We got it all here in Microsoft Word 95. Anyway, should we move on to Joe Weisenthal? Oh, the post was deleted. Anyway, uh, he was just giving a shout out to, uh, bros. He says they love using bros as an epithet. That's sad. I only have warm feelings toward my bros. And this is because, uh, there is a new phrase on the timeline, the abundance bros. This is popularized by Ezra Klein, saying that we need to focus on a, on a, on a, basically a democratic platform around abundance and building a pro builder, uh, a political party.

• 2:31:26John Coogan?

  And, uh, and a lot of people are trying to take him down, calling him abundance bros. Bernie bros was the same thing. Whenever someone wants to take down something, you know, it's just SaaS bros, tech bros, business bros, finance bros. Uh, they throw bros around.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  I saw another post from, that was relevant to this, uh, from someone named Grace Freud. Uh, she says, hi, I'm Ezra Klein. I've spent the past two weeks or so thinking about how to fix the world, and I think I have the answer. What if things were good?

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but no, I'm pro abundance.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  I mean, I.

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  It's easy to rally around.

• 2:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, I mean, we don't really talk about politics here, but like, uh, Ezra Klein is, uh, is on the vanguard of a significant shift politically. Uh, where if you listen, if you read his book or you listen to his, his YouTube video breaking it down, uh, it sounds very, very different from anything we've heard from his camp over the last few years. Uh, so I don't know, check it out if you're into politics, but there's other podcasts for that, so.

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  There certainly are.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Unsubscribe from us if you want to listen to that.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  From Patio 11, AKA Patrick McKenzie, he says, so Atlantic came out with this, uh, new article that said there are two kinds of credit cards. Yet another way the poor are subsidizing the rich. The credit card market is quietly transformed into two credit card markets. One offering generous benefits to wealthy Americans and the other offering expensive debt to the poor with the latter subsidizing the former. And so this is, so he's.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  Hit piece on credit cards.

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Patrick says, uh, the thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money from poor to rich. I do not subscribe to this thesis. So he's, let me see.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Put him in the truth zone.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you gotta put this one in the truth zone. I mean, uh, credit cards take fees from payment processors when they swipe a card.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Because they're taking on some amount of risk related to that transaction. And.

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  I would love to hear his.

• 2:33:22Jordi Hays?

  The credit card companies pass some of that back to.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  The people that pay them off.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  People that pay them off. And if you really want the best rewards, just constantly switch credit cards and debit cards and just always use the latest neo bank that's offering you 5% cash back or 10% Bitcoin match, whatever it is.

• 2:33:38John Coogan?

  We should have him on the show because I want to hear his thesis because I've talked to consultants and, and kind of investors who have looked at, uh, consumer credit card products and they've basically said that, you know, that is the business model. Like, like revolvers are the way, like revolvers, people that revolve the debt and actually they collect interest on. And then there's a whole cohort, there's a whole cohort that they never make any money on, and that's kind of always been the business model.

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:02John Coogan?

  And so I wonder.

• 2:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can still make money on the people just from the spread between the interchange fee and what gets passed.

• 2:34:11John Coogan?

  And I guess there, yeah.

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  The rewards.

• 2:34:13John Coogan?

  I, I, I guess it's not redistributive in the sense that like the rich person is still generating a lot of money for the credit card companies. It's like.

• 2:34:19Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  The credit card companies making a lot of money on everyone and probably more money on the rich person.

• 2:34:23Jordi Hays?

  Turns out.

• 2:34:24John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:34:24Jordi Hays?

  It's a good business.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Uh, this was an interesting post by Tyler Huggie, Huggie. I'm not exactly sure how to pronounce that, but he says the, the venture capital Mount Rushmore, ready? Arthur Rock, Don Valentine, John Doerr, and for many years.

• 2:34:36Jordi Hays?

  Arthur Rock, the anonymous poster.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  I'm just kidding.

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  Don Valentine, the creator of Valentine's Day?

• 2:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. By the way, you made that joke in like 10.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Flopped.

• 2:34:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know if 10 people got it.

• 2:34:49John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Know if anybody got the joke.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  I don't think he's that iconic of an image.

• 2:34:52Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was funny.

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we scheduled that one like months ahead and it went out and it was a complete flop. Anyway, and for many years, he couldn't pick a fourth. Today, he's calling it Doug Leoni. And then a lot of people in the comments are saying Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Kosla, Thiel, Moritz are all interesting. I wanted to go back and look through who, who wrote the seed checks into the hyperscalers, the mag seven. I thought this was an interesting thing and I wanted to go through it really quickly. Apple had Mark, Mike Marcula, who did not become a large venture capital firm. So he kind of doesn't count as a generational VC, even though obviously he invested $92,000 plus the secured credit line, made a huge amount of money.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  And interestingly, he was introduced to Apple through Don Valentine and Arthur Rock. So like literally every major company went through them. Microsoft had David Marquette of Technology Venture Investors, got 1 million for a 5% stake. And when you talk to David Center, he's, oh, Microsoft didn't raise venture capital because they didn't really do more than that. They only did one VC round and of course, TVI did not go on to become like a big generational firm. Amazon, Jeff Bezos's family came in, but they had other angel investors and later Kleiner Perkins came in, Andy Beckdahl Scheim at Google. There's, there's a lot of folks that like the early rounds of these mag seven were just kind of like random people that never fully scaled up.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Like you even look at Meta.

• 2:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Became post economic too fast.

• 2:36:23John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 2:36:24Jordi Hays?

  They lost, they lost the, the dog in them.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  Of course, with, with Google, Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins eventually came in very, very early and got huge stakes. Meta, formerly Facebook, Thiel put in 500K on a convertible note, which converted to 10% equity stake, and then he turned it into Founder's Fund. Tesla, Elon Musk, you can kind of think of the first investor, but then Sequoia and Kleiner came in, of course.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  And then, oh, yeah, Tesla with Elon Musk and then Nvidia, Sequoia Capital again, so.

• 2:36:55John Coogan?

  Just some generational firms putting up big numbers, the holy trinity for a reason. It's crazy to think about, you know, investing in Apple or Microsoft and then just being like, "Yeah, I'm not going to raise a massive growth fund."

• 2:37:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  Like, it's a different era. Now, you know, the LPs would be beating down your door.

• 2:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  If you had 10% of a trillion dollar company. But, anyway, should we move on to this, to this robot? Do we have this video pulled up? Can we play this?

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Boston Dynamics wants to do another demo.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Oh, no.

• 2:37:29Jordi Hays?

  The demo, Brett. Okay.

• 2:37:31John Coogan?

  Let's do Mads posting first while Ben tries to pull that up. Mads posting, "Science Girl Says What Massively Improved Your Mental Health," and Mads is sharing a picture of a book. Caller, I'd like to, I'd like to know how you handle your stress. Trump, "I try and tell myself it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. If you tell yourself it doesn't matter, like you do shows, you do this, you do that, and then you have earthquakes in India where 400,000 people get killed. Honestly, it doesn't matter." What a bizarre quote.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  And it just sounds like a ramble. I don't even get it.

• 2:38:05Jordi Hays?

  I think there's some more context here. I remember when this was first shared, it was during the height of the drama and the election and everything like that. And I think this is good, a good and bad philosophy.

• 2:38:19John Coogan?

  It's very nihilistic.

• 2:38:20Jordi Hays?

  If you're dealing with problems, yeah, you want to sort of detach from them and understand, like, you know, "Okay, this is frustrating, or I'm not happy with the situation. I need to resolve it." But you can sort of detach and look at it from a different perspective and say, "You know, I still have, there's still a lot of good things in life, and this one thing doesn't make everything else bad."

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  And...

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  Is he a "nothing ever happens" guy? This feels very "nothing ever happens" coded.

• 2:38:47Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. We should ask him when he comes on the show.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  Yes. Only if he's talking about his business.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying after...

• 2:38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, after he gets done with all this politics side quest, goes back to just building social networking and crypto technology.

• 2:38:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Ben, do we have a video?

• 2:39:03John Coogan?

  Hey, we got it.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Looks like a normal Boston Dynamics demo.

• 2:39:09Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's see it do a kickflip.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  Oh, it's running, okay. Hmm, pretty impressive. Kneeling, okay.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Crawling.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Not bad. This is pretty good. I'm excited. I still don't understand what's going on with Boston Dynamics because, you know, unitry is getting all the attention now. Wow, okay. That's pretty good.

• 2:39:33Jordi Hays?

  I like that. Anytime you're going vertical, doing flips.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Whoa. Okay, breakdancing. That's pretty good.

• 2:39:40Jordi Hays?

  So there's a human in the suit, right?

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, honestly, the robots look so crazy. It's so easy to think like, this is CGI, this is AI-generated, but wow, okay. Doing some breakdancing. That's pretty solid.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  Interesting to start with a very unimpressive.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  Okay, that's getting really, really good. Wow. Very interesting. I'm really wondering when is Boston Dynamics going to get more aggressive about the commercialization? Like, they're not in the conversation at all.

• 2:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you called this, "The best marketing strategy for any robotics company is to figure out a way to make 10,000 of them and just march them across a field."

• 2:40:14John Coogan?

  Yep. That would be very intimidating to anyone and there'd probably be a program of record the next day.

• 2:40:19Jordi Hays?

  I would try to lead their round.

• 2:40:21John Coogan?

  Yes. And I recently said, there's a lot of companies working on counter UAS technology. You're invested in a company, Allen Control Systems, gun on a truck, right?

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:30John Coogan?

  And they can demolish DJI drones if they were coming to attack. And those drone light shows, we now have counter to that. We have Anduril's Anvil. We have, you know, electronics.

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Neurones. Drones are good for counter drones.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  Drones against drones. There's, I've even seen eagles being used to capture drones' nets, all sorts of stuff, shotguns.

• 2:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Beagles, hunting dogs?

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  But I have yet to see a company build counter humanoid technology. I think it's just a gun, but I want to see it in a demo. I want to see a Gundo defense tech company just showing, you know, a minigun just spitting out a thousand rounds at a horde of unitries.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  There's this thing, I don't think you've ever seen it, but where two guys get in an octagon and they fight.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:41:14Jordi Hays?

  And you could imagine a world where we take some of our best MMA athletes.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  That's the United, the United Fisticuffs Championship, right?

• 2:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the, it's not mixed martial arts, it's muscle man attack.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Muscle man attack.

• 2:41:27Jordi Hays?

  You called it.

• 2:41:27John Coogan?

  Muscle man attacks.

• 2:41:29Jordi Hays?

  And you could imagine a world where we just take our UFC champions and face them off against the humanoids.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  And the Boston Dynamics.

• 2:41:36Jordi Hays?

  And that's the final, the final boss.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  The final boss. Anyway.

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  And you, could a humanoid take, take out a, you know, John Jones in his prime, you know, bow nickel today?

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  I think bow nickel makes short work of that Boston Dynamics robot. No problem.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Rear naked choke.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  Rear naked choke on that. I don't know. I mean, that, that robot seemed like it could just flip around and just grab him.

• 2:41:56Jordi Hays?

  The hard thing is you can't.

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  I think it's more like a strike to the head, a foot to the head really does it in. Kick it over.

• 2:42:02Jordi Hays?

  Maybe. It's kind of crazy. How do you submit a robot, you can break their arm and the rest of them are still?

• 2:42:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be tricky.

• 2:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, our producer Ben is a former, almost champion of a, of a jujitsu tournament recently. Uh, go for number one, Ben.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to chat.

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, chat.

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  No cap capital?

• 2:42:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, so this is a good one. I've heard this before. I just wanted to highlight it again as a word. Uh, if you're running a city, don't do this. Just learned about how Chicago sold the rights to all of its parking meter revenue to the UAE for 1.1 billion in 2008. The city is currently collecting 150 million a year and growing in parking meter fees and sends it straight to Dubai until 2083.

• 2:42:45John Coogan?

  Not a good inflation hedge, but maybe they put that 1.1 billion in some high growth asset and it's now sitting at 20 billion, you know? They could be outpacing the inflation. We don't know what they did with the money. Probably just did nothing with it though. Let's be honest. Anyway, uh, Sam Rudikoff says, Rudy Koff says, my dad uses these speakers to watch MSNBC. And this is what we expect our future to be. When you're enjoying TVP on live, uh, you know, throw it on a TV, but get some nice speakers. Get some bass in there. We, we record with nice microphones for a reason.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  The ideal way to listen is, is through sort of handcrafted European.

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:43:24Jordi Hays?

  Very artisanal speakers where the maker makes one of, one or two of them a year.

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:43:29Jordi Hays?

  And it's sort of like a 30 year waiting list. So get on the waiting list.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. And get a nice recliner to sit there and watch, watch us.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  What else should we cover before we wrap up? What's interesting to you? Do you want to do Carp Madness? Palantir? This is kind of an interesting one. Eliano Yunus over at Palantir has created a March Madness bracket for the greatest Dr. Carp moments. The infamous sound bites, cockroach holders, steak dinners, self-pleasuring, rusty crusty, don't play golf, fake religion, Coke short sellers, AI revolution. And he posts all the different video clips and you can go and vote on this post and have a lot of fun picking the best carp soundbite, the most electric carp soundbite, the player

• 2:44:22John Coogan?

  haters, the PowerPoint, the Motel 6. They're all great clips and Eliano has done the great job of collecting them. So go and figure it out.

• 2:44:30Jordi Hays?

  I have one more post from Steven Schwartz over at WAP. So Arferrock posted 24 hours ago, WAP just crossed $90 million run rate and closed an unannounced Series B at $800 million from Bain Capital. Congrats. And then Steven quotes it and says, this is nearly one year old news. Sorry, we hadn't told anybody yet. WAP has grown significantly since then and we have enormous plans for the rest of the year. So totally sleeper company.

• 2:45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:03Jordi Hays?

  We should have them on. I mean, I don't fully understand. They run sort of a, a Substack-esque platform that helps people sell like information products.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  They call it the make money app.

• 2:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Great name. And yeah, we should have the founders on to talk about it. I remember they reached out to about PMF or Die when we got started. But very cool. They have like live streaming functionality, like a bunch of, a bunch of stuff. So sleeper company. Excited to have them on at some point.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  And congrats to Steven Schwartz on the round. You gotta announce the next one with us. Come on the show.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Don't let Arthur Rock leak stuff. Leak it here.

• 2:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Give us a scoop. If we love scoops.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  We love scoops.

• 2:45:50Jordi Hays?

  As much as John loves scooping his protein powder, we like scoops. And.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  We don't like leaks. It's very disrespectful. Stop leaking numbers, folks.

• 2:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Never leak. We will never leak your fundraise.

• 2:46:03John Coogan?

  We will never leak.

• 2:46:03Jordi Hays?

  What we will do, though, is say thank you to Ramp, Public, AdQuick, Eight Sleep, Wander, and Bezel for their support of the show. Uh, thank you all for the support of the show.

• 2:46:13John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:46:13Jordi Hays?

  For supporting the show. We love doing this and, uh, I can't wait for tomorrow.

• 2:46:18John Coogan?

  I can't wait for the next one. I was gonna say the same thing. It's 21 hours away and you gotta

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if we could commission Jake over at Pilgrim to develop just like the, the sort of pod, call it like podcast alpha, you know, that Joe Rogan had alpha brain.

• 2:46:33John Coogan?

  Brain, yeah.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  If we could develop like our own proprietary drug and then not release it to the world just so that we have another edge.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Drug that just as soon as the camera stopped rolling, it just puts me to sleep in hibernation and then I just wake up 24 hours later. Welcome to TBP online. That would be ideal. So I don't have to spend a minute away from the show.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Guys, we're moving to a new studio soon and we're actually just gonna set up our mics on our eight sleeps right here. So the second the camera goes off, we just kinda go back.

• 2:46:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you for watching. Thank you for listening.

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  We will see you tomorrow. Go leave us five stars on Apple and Spotify. We've been, we've been climbing up the charts, by the way.

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Charts. Thank you to everyone. Seriously, if you've subscribed, if you've, if you've listened on any of those platforms, it's really cool and really awesome to see. We really appreciate it.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  The score takes care of itself.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Truly.

• 2:47:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but thank you all for being a part of this and we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Thank you. Bye.