Dwarkesh Patel, Nadia Asparouhova, Augustus Doricko, Casey Handmer, Ishan Mukherjee, Mike Knoop, Trump Pardons Milton, Coreweave IPO Winners

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 (02:30) - Trump Pardons Trevor Milton (15:26) - Coreweave IPO Winners and VCs (30:55) - Dwarkesh Patel (01:07:40) - Casey Handmer (01:31:55) - Nadia Asparouhova (01:47:21) - Ishan Mukherjee (02:00:59) - Augustus Doricko (02:30:02) - Mike Knoop

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. It is Friday, March 28th, 2025. We are 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 today. We have a whole bunch of guests. Arkesh is joining. We got his book here. He sent me the PDF. I printed it out.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Out of respect.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Out of respect. But if he doesn't, if he doesn't come on the show.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  It's basically a manuscript.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  If he bails on us, you heard it here first, I'm going to tweet out the link to the PDF. Piracy's back, folks. Napster's being sold for 200 million and I, it's a threat.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, you could just upload it to ChatGPT. It's easier. People can just query it.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic book. I highly recommend going and picking it up. Stripe Press never misses. The folks over at Stripe are fantastic. We have another Stripe Press author coming on the show. We have a bunch of incredible thinkers and founders and investors lined up. A little bit of an AI focused day, a little bit of focus on geoengineering today. Casey Handmer and Augusto Rico will be coming in, talking about solar and also cloud seeding.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Augustus has been accused of being a part of the deep state.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  He's breaking his silence.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  And he's breaking his silence.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Yes, with us.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  On TPN.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  So we should have some fun with that, obviously, but it is kind of getting to a serious point with his, with his drama where like, I think that the, the tone needs to shift and hopefully we can be a part of that. But first, let's start with a great post by Delian advocating that Trump should unpardon Trevor Milton because of how bad his video is.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, nothing else. It's just the video.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Was just so bad.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  And so we're going to go through, Trevor Milton is the founder of Nicola, a electric vehicle company that zero emissions trucks, went to prison over a fraud case and we'll break it all down. Delian says, my God, can you be more narcissistic? Maybe take some responsibility for your fraudulent behavior.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not a good signal if Trump pardons you, but doesn't post about it.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Because if he was going to get positive attention from doing it, you'd think he would, you know, even if he knew he was going to get some negative attention, but I don't think anybody. It's hard for me to see, you know, prison is a sad thing.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17Jordi Hays?

  But it's hard for me to see sort of whatever the argument is around freeing Trevor, given what seems to be.

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Pretty clear cut.

• 2:27Jordi Hays?

  Pretty clear cut.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Totally. But let's read the Wall Street Journal article on it and get some facts and then we'll make, and then we'll give you our take. So Trump pardoned Nikola founder Trevor Milton. Milton was convicted of fraud in 2022 for statements about zero emission trucks.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Milton said in a video posted to social media Thursday that he received a call from Trump, who spoke about how much of an injustice this all was done by the same offices that harassed and prosecuted him. The greatest comeback story in America is about to happen, added Milton. The White House on Friday confirmed that the pardon had been granted. A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Milton in 2022 on one count of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud, which is kind of always the framework for these, anything that, anything that goes wrong in business, it's all either securities fraud or wire fraud, because you're making statements that lead to someone buying or selling a security that are false. During the trial, prosecutors portrayed Milton as a con man who duped investors,

• 3:29John Coogan?

  including in podcasts and on social media about the company's sales and the capabilities of its vehicles. In one instance, prosecutors said he created a video of what appeared to be a truck driving normally.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  The infamous video.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  This is the famous video of the truck going down the hill. But really, it was an inoperable prototype rolling down a hill. And that, that video always got me because I just feel like such a skill issue there. Like, can't you just build one prototype truck? Can't you retrofit a truck?

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Even if it was a flat road.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  I mean, there are kids that are like engine swapping Miata's right now. And you can't like engine swap a truck and put an electric powertrain in there. Like, it doesn't seem that hard to get something functional. The hard part is actually the scaled manufacturing. Like, that's what Tesla is good at, and that's why Tesla's so impressive. Like, the first Tesla was impressive too, they kind of, but even with the first Tesla, it was built on the Lotus Elise, and they just chopped it up and extended it and stuff. It was like, it was very much like, the criticism was like, that's just a Lotus Elise with an electric powertrain. And it was impressive, and it's great for all the investors that saw that. But it was never misrepresented. Elon was never like, oh yeah, this design, like, you might, you might think it looks like a Lotus Elise, but really, we designed it. No, he just said like, yeah, we used the body from a Lotus Elise, we paid them. They're happy, we're happy, and that's why the Tesla Roadster, the first one, looks like a Lotus

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Lees.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  It's fine. And that's not fraud. That's just actually doing the important parts of your business and outsourcing the ones that aren't important.

• 4:52Jordi Hays?

  Calder in the chat says, put him back in jail and don't let him out until he's built the truck.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Yes, this is our thesis.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yes, I want to see, I want to see breakthrough biology. Writing from Elizabeth Holmes. I want to, I want to see a truly trustless, ZK-proof network hacked together by SBF in prison. He's moving prisons, by the way. Not a full story, but just an interesting fact. His morning routine now includes getting woken up at 3 a.m.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the real.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  By the guards.

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  The real sort of, you know, crypto protocol is one that you could build and launch from within jail.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:30Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's just pure code.

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:32Jordi Hays?

  Get it on to one of the library computers and then it's just out in the world.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  I mean, SBF was telling that story of like, I'm the Jane Street guy. I'm this genius. I'm this like amazing, like, you know, hacker. And it's like, okay, show us. Show us. Build, build the chain. Build, build something better. Build a chain. Write some code. What's the, what's the code Rust that they all use or something? I forget. I don't know. It's a hard programming language. Like, programming for crypto is not easy. And so if you could drop some, some amazing, some amazing code, some decentralized network or something, he would win a lot of fans back instead of just being like, ah, I was, you know, always, it's all talk.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And here's something. Campaign finance records show that Milton and his wife donated more than 1.8 million to a Trump fundraising committee in October.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Wait, like from prison? You can do anything from prison. That's what we've learned. Going to prison, you can do podcasts, you can tweet, apparently. You can make political donations. Like, what can't you do in prison?

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you would think that from within prison.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  There should be some guardrails around sort of this type of thing, but.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, I mean, also Milton's lawyer is Brad Bondi, who's the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi. And so clearly cozied up to the Trump administration as things got worse for him. Unclear if he was connected to the Trump administration before all of this happened. But if you're running a fraud, probably pays to, you know, start making some friends in Washington. You know, also, if you're not running a fraud, probably need a lobbying group anyway.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  The lesson is have friends in Washington.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess, no matter what.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  And so Milton maintained his innocence and he said he acted in good faith accusing prosecutors of cherry picking his public statements to build their case. And of course, there is an argument that this company could have been successful and was just kind of faking it till you make it. But there's always this question of like, when is to fake, when are you faking it too much? And there's always this like, fine line. I think, I think it's a decent amount of faking is actually acceptable. Like, it's fine to put up a CGI render of what you want to build and just say, hey, this is my goal. It's not here today.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  But it's so, it's so different for it to be CGI, or even a hype video versus a demo.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Demos, faked demos are wrong.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  But even Google has gotten in trouble for fake demos.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  And this is why there's any time you see these, uh, hard tech companies that won't be named on X, creating what they, they sort of blur the line between hype video and demo.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  And I believe that that is wrong, right?

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 8:14Jordi Hays?

  You gotta kind of like draw the line around, is this an advertising for a future state? Or is this the current state?

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is if you're putting something out that you're sort of positioning as a demo, but it's not real, and then you're using that to raise money, that's wrong.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I do, it is interesting, like, Google had an AI demo where you could just take a, use your camera to kind of communicate with Gemini and use voice. And it was a very cool demo, but people dug into it and found out that part of it was sped up. And so they had done some light editing, so it wasn't a completely unedited video. And they hadn't disclosed that, but they hadn't said that it wasn't edited. And so it was, it was more just like a bad day in PR world. But you could imagine that if the stock had sold off a lot, there could be a security fraud case, but we'd still be like 25 steps away from. The founder, CEO is in jail. The Nicola case is like much more, you know,

• 9:13John Coogan?

  like just way, way more red flags. And so Milton is 42 years old. He founded Nicola in his basement in 2015. He took it public in 2020 at a valuation of 3.3 billion. He resigned from the company later that year after a short seller's report alleged he made misrepresentations about the status of the company's vehicles and the production of hydrogen fuel needed to run them. So it wasn't even an electric vehicle. It was hydrogen, I remember. Nicola, whose market value briefly eclipsed that of automaker Ford before the fraud case against Milton filed for bankruptcy last month.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Everybody, everybody has, they put Ford squarely in their targets, right? Adcock clearly wanted to raise at a bigger valuation to Ford. Otherwise, why would you price around, you know, exactly

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Just right about the market cap.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  A hundred million dollars above it or whatever.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  But Ford is Lindy. I think, I think we're going to be driving Ford GTs in the year 3000. They're just not, they're not going away. Yeah. It's, it's too great of a company.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  Henry low key goaded.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. I was about to say.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  Many people said, why don't you just attach a motor to the horse?

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Robotic, why don't you make robotic horses?

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Teleoperated horses.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  He said, we have to wait a while till, you know, robotics can get there, but for now we're going to make cars.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  But hopefully the horse makes a comeback. Hopefully, you know, all this humanoid buzz with, with Figure and Tesla Optimus. We know we want the robotic horse first. And I want to be galloping to work the self-driving horse. The horses are self-driving. You can literally train a horse to, hey, go home and you can just be, kick him on the butt and he'll just take you home.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Who needs a Waymo?

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Who needs a Waymo?

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Let's, let's bring horses back.

• 10:55John Coogan?

  Milton had sold roughly $400 million of stock in Nicola. Wow, that's a lot of secondary.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  D-listed his shares from the NASDAQ a few days ago. Two weeks ago, federal prosecutors asked the judge for Milton's criminal case to order him to pay back nearly 661 million to shareholders. The SEC sued Milton in federal court in July of 2021 alleging he committed civil securities fraud. That case, which was on hold during the criminal proceedings, remains active. Court records show. The SEC declined to comment. So this is interesting. Like, he got 400 million. They're going to ask him to pay back 661 million. But in the meantime, he's spending that money and making campaign donations. What happens? I mean, he will just be personally bankrupt, right? So he can, so basically, his 400 million that he can just spend.

• 11:48John Coogan?

  And he can just give away. And if there's no way to claw it back, like if he buys a house, and then he goes into bankruptcy, they'll force him to sell the house, and then the house will go to the shareholders or the proceeds from the house. But if he donates it.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  He's out now. He's also, he's, he's, he's probably got another 30 years of his career in hard tech. I could easily see him running something back.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Comeback.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 12:10John Coogan?

  I mean, I'd love to see it. I, we've always maintained that it's always sad when people go to jail, and we always believe in restorative justice. And we certainly hope that he gets back on the mechanical horse.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the video, to Delian's point, it just makes it feel like, you know, maybe he doesn't, maybe he doesn't actually feel bad at all.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 12:31John Coogan?

  It's odd.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Odd.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Anyway, Trump issued a raft of pardons since taking office and has pledged to crack down on what he has described as the weaponization of the justice system. Trump was twice indicted by the Justice Department after his first term and separately convicted of falsifying records in the State Court of New York. Both federal cases have been dismissed, and Trump is appealing the state conviction. Earlier this week, Trump also pardoned Devin Archer, the former Hunter Biden business partner who gave congressional testimony about their business dealings. Milton Archer and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whom Trump also pardoned, were all prosecuted by the, the US Attorney's Office in Manhattan. The Justice Department has also asked a judge to drop a bribery case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. So oddly, like, you know, a couple of Democrats getting pardoned, a couple of Republicans

• 13:18John Coogan?

  getting pardoned, a couple of. Seems like a political people who have maybe just, you know, asked politely. Any pardon? I think the future, if stuff gets really, really political will just be your, when you get sentenced, you're in prison when your party's out of the office and then so you get, you get pardoned as soon as your guy gets into the White House and then you get unpardoned on day one of the new administration and you're just in and out of prison every four years.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think that's the future.

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you're just donating to your, to your team while you're in, you know, while the person's in prison to try to make sure like your team wins. Otherwise it could be an eight year stint.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  Schrodinger's prisoner, both in and out of the clink.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  Dark.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  But, uh, you know, a lot of people made money. A lot of people lost money on Nicola. If you were buying puts, probably did pretty well.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, those short sellers.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  The short sellers. Yeah. Yeah. They probably did really well.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  We should actually have them on.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  I wonder, do you think it was, uh, Hindenburg that did it? I wonder who did the actual Nicola short seller report? But anyway, if you're interested in going long, going short, you gotta do it on public investing. For those who take it seriously, multi asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions, folks. Go to public.com, sign up.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  The best in the business. Thank you to public.

• 14:33John Coogan?

  A new stock that you can trade on public.

• 14:36Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before that, uh,

• 14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Nicola in 2020

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Had, uh, a, some coverage from Hindenburg Research, not the firm that you want to get coverage from.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  How to parlay an ocean of lies into a partnership with the largest auto OEM in America.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  That doesn't sound good.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  So, um, anyways.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Sounds a little rough, actually.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Hindenburg's kind of retired now.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  Out of the game.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Out of the game.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  But maybe there'll be a new viral short seller that emerges soon.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it's Skrally.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's doing it.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  He's been doing pretty well on that. Yeah.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  He's like, he actually realized you don't need to, uh, do a report.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  You just need to post.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, just post.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Just post.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  But yeah, he's been, he's been good. Um, anyway, new stock coming to the market. Everyone's talking about Coreweave's IPO and we're going to go through the informations report on the winners. In the CoreWeave IPO and why VCs missed out. We had Tane on the show and he had a great quote. He said, "CoreWeave is the web three to AI pivot done right." So it was originally a crypto mining company and now it's an AI data center.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Potentially the best to ever do it.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  The best to ever do it. Truly, truly. And it looks like it's going to be a fantastic outcome. It looks like it's going to price right around 40, up from five cents a share in 2019. Not too bad. And so we'll take you through who invested, when they invested and how much money they made. Let's kick it off with the information reporting from Corey Weinberg. He says, "CoreWeave's IPO, which started trading today, had a rocky path to the market, but delivered a windfall to Magnetar Capital. The investor bet big on the AI data center startup, but presciently protected itself from the risk of big losses. And if you want to pull up what CoreWeave is doing on public, I'd love to know like, how is it trading right now? Because this is the IPO day."

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  Today's the IPO day?

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Today is the IPO.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even see.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Boom! We got IPO news, folks.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  I'm pulling it up right now.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  And I'm going to need some soundboard from you. I'm going to need some public.com data from you. I'm going to need a lot of stuff.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy. I didn't actually realize.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's always this trickle of like the S1 comes out and then there's gossip articles. Will they go out? Will they not go out? Will they scrap it? Well, they went out. It started trading today. It had a rocky path to market, but delivered a windfall to Magnetar Capital. The investor bet big on the AI data center startup. So, but they also protected themselves from big risk of big losses. It seems like they sold at a certain point in the secondary market. So Magnetar invested when in CoreWeave, when others wouldn't touch it. And that helped it get favorable terms that turned 850 million in equity into 4.3 billion, folks. Let's hear it based on the $40 per share IPO price. That's a good return. And they weren't exposed to significant risk.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Magnetar is the biggest of a handful of winners in the offering, which priced Thursday night at a lower price than expected. So CoreWeave has been, long been controversial. It borrowed billions to build data centers that serve the huge demands of artificial intelligence. That debt really scared off Silicon Valley's big venture firms and none of them will be celebrating one of the biggest tech listings in recent years. A lot of VCs have a blind spot, said Nick Carter, former guest of the show, a venture capitalist focused on crypto startups. And he made an early investment personally in CoreWeave. We had him on to talk about that. We'll have to reshare that clip today. The conventional wisdom as a VC is you don't want to invest in capital intensive businesses. This is something that we've seen again and again. They're harder to underwrite.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  And they did quite the party round.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  If you look at some of the friends and family.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  There's a Russian poker player.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  An Italian music producer.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  A New York based plastic surgeon and a Sesame Street voice actor.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  That's exactly what you want to see.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Which is kind of what you want to optimize for in the early stages. You never know, one day you might need some, as a founder.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Founder might need some plastic surgery. The next day you need a voice actor.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yep. People talk about this, it's diversity of thought.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  You want diversity of thought around the table.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The next day you might say, you might be down to your last 100 grand. Need to take it to Vegas.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Multiply it. You got your Russian poker player.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Poker player is going to help you there.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  If you can get them into the country, that's helpful.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  You need to make a jingle.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the jingle. The Italian music producer.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  The big one, the big one that's surprising.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Do you want to sing a CoreWeave jingle in Italian?

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  What's, what's their tagline?

• 19:03John Coogan?

  CoreWeave, big data centers, highly leveraged.

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know if this is accurate, but their debt to equity ratio right now is 800 over 811X.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  That doesn't seem, that doesn't seem possible.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  I don't know if it's right, but when CoreWeave started, investors were betting on more of the caniness of its founders, Michael Entrator, Brian Venturo, Brandon McB, than on their business plan. The first business of CoreWeave, Ethereum mining, became worthless after Ethereum holders essentially cut miners out of the process in the fall of 2020. That of course was the merge when Ethereum went to proof of stake as opposed to proof of work. I had mentally written off the investment, Carter said. I thought they were going out of business. Instead, the founders repurposed chips and computing equipment they used to mine Ethereum into other uses like graphics rendering and AI. And of course, Crusoe Energy also did something similar. They were using peaker plants and oil and gas extraction,

• 20:02John Coogan?

  just the extra energy that's sitting stranded on the grid. You can't use it to power homes. You drop a bunch of server farm right where the energy is super cheap, or maybe even free, and you start mining crypto. And then over time, you start training AI models. So let's go into Magnetar Capital.

• 20:17Jordi Hays?

  Magnetar, which turned a $50 million loan to CoreWeave four years ago

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  into a multi-billion dollar stake, is set to be the largest beneficiary from the IPO. So it sounds like, it sounds like they were

• 20:30John Coogan?

  They know what they're doing.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they knew. I mean, absolutely insane. Former Citadel traders.

• 20:37John Coogan?

  Founded in 2005.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Magnetar is CoreWeave's largest investor and has continued to back the company through its most recent private fundraising.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Its name is mentioned 157 times in the company's IPO prospectus, more than twice as often as the CEO.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  I mean, you look at this chart, it's like

• 20:53Jordi Hays?

  So this is the goal.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  They came in with a convertible note in 2020 at $2 a share. They did the Series B at $5.5 a share, $5.58 a share. And then they also came in the Series C, $38.95 a share. And then they did a tender offer at 47 a share. And so they have, they have done just again and again and again, been involved in this business.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So this was cool. So the managing partner of Magnetar, David Snyderman, says, "Sometimes the stars just align. I think we were the first firm to get comfortable lending against that asset called high-performance compute."

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  She's referring to CoreWeave's inventory of high-end chips produced by Nvidia

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  to power AI products.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Some of Magnetar's investments came in the form of loans that turned into equity. This is the convertible note facility.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if it was a convertible note, it's sort of, it's not, it's sort of confusing to just say this was.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  I think they did all of the above.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  I think they did. They did do just straight up.

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  They're getting warrants.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  With warrants on top and then they converted those because it went well. It went well. It also vacuumed up shares from executives selling privately in secondary offerings, but it forged an agreement preventing founders from selling more than 20% of their shares in the year following the company's IPO. Remember, Tane was telling us that there was a lot of secondary action by the founding team. I think they had sold hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  And so they've created this agreement that, hey, the founders won't sell more than 20% of their stakes, but because the company's so big, it's still like a huge amount of money and a huge amount of liquidity in, you know, a frothy AI market. Like, this is an important IPO because if it does well and it becomes a really strong business, it's incredibly bullish for the entire industry, but at the same time, like, there is a lot of debt. It's an early-stage company. Like, they've only been in business for a couple of years.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so. I just hope that the angel investor, that's the Sesame Street voice actor, was able to get some liquidity.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  I think they probably did fantastically. I mean, Nick Carter did great, so why would the Sesame Street actor not do well?

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if they were able to prevent a lot of dilution just by being able to fund a lot of this growth through the debt offerings.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like it was kind of 50/50 because they did take a lot of dilution from the penny warrants, right? And that's why Magnitars is mentioned so many times in the IPO prospectus, but, you know, probably less than if they were just trying to, hey, we need $50 million to buy a bunch of chips and build a data center and we have no revenue, and so it's a $10 million pre-money and we're going to give up 80% of the business or something. Like, what is the alternative if you're not doing debt at this scale? As Corey grew, Magnitars lent another $730 million, collateralized against Magnitars. Oops, where am I?

• 23:40John Coogan?

  Magnetar Capital collateralized against CoreWeave's contracts to sell computing power to Microsoft and Nvidia. CoreWeave has paid $66 million in interest so far on those loans, so less than 10%, and these mature by the end of the decade. Magnetar was the second biggest investor in CoreWeave's fundraising last year, putting in another 350 million, documents show. Magnetar and tech investment firm Co2 were able to hedge their bets. They got a put, which allowed them to sell back their stakes to CoreWeave if the stock fell two years after the IPO. That could become an important investment term because investors in the round paid $38.95 a share, meaning they stand to lose money on the deal if CoreWeave's stock goes down much after the $40 a share IPO. Of

• 24:24John Coogan?

  course, they might not exercise that immediately. They might wait it out, but see where the stock is in a year or two, but they do have that put option for a while. If investors were to exercise the right, it would mostly, it would be very costly for CoreWeave, the company said in its filing. Spokesperson for Co2 and Magnetar declined to comment. They're not talking because they're in a quiet period, of course. Several funds are underwater on their investments. CoreWeave, in CoreWeave at the IPO price, investment firms Jane Street, Fidelity, Macquarie, BlackRock, Newbringer, Berman, and others bought $650 million in stock last November from early investors.

• 25:00Mike Knoop?

  Moment of silence for the folks who are in debt.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by public.com. They bought at 47 a share, 15% above the IPO price. Magnetar, best known for winning bets on dodgy mortgage loans before the financial crisis, these are former Citadel guys after all, they know what they're doing, is now deep in the AI investing frenzy. It's expected to write one of the largest checks to OpenAI, also a CoreWeave customer, in OpenAI's $10 billion funding round this month, Bloomberg reported. Magnetar launched a VC arm to leverage its relationship with CoreWeave by investing in new AI startups in exchange for access to the Nvidia chips CoreWeave owns. And CoreWeave put 50 million in that. And we've talked about these like VC funds attached to startups before. You said, you know, maybe it doesn't

• 25:45John Coogan?

  make sense for perplexity, but in CoreWeave's case, it's like they have the underlying data center. You know, they have something that's like very complimentary to an AI company, an AI app, an application layer company. And so maybe it makes a little bit more sense in this case. And if you're building an AI application company and training or inference is one of your most, most large, like expense line items, maybe it's great to actually have that relationship really tight and take some equity.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  I think it makes, you know, once you're maybe past the $10 billion stage.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Or at least a billion dollars of revenue, do your VC fund.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it seems like CoreWeave has product market fit, right? It's a pretty basic business. It's, they build a, they build a data center and then they sell access to that data center.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  And they're, they're doing great. And interestingly, Dylan Patel just put out semi, on semi-analysis, the GPU cloud cluster max rating system, how to rent GPUs in the US. I'm going to try and refresh this, but I believe.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  The cluster max.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  I believe he gave CoreWeave a very, a very strong rating. It actually rated a few, let me see if I can go to semi-analysis. No, you want to keep reading?

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  The article's mostly over. I can cover a little bit from video.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so semi-analysis rated every single NeoCloud, CoreWeave, Crusoe, Together AI, Oracle, Azure, AWS, Lambda, Google Cloud. And interestingly, CoreWeave got the highest ranking. They are the only semi-analysis, they're the only one that won the semi-analysis platinum tier. In the gold tier was Crusoe, Together AI, Nebius, Lepton AI, Oracle and Azure. But AWS got silver and Google Cloud got bronze, which is something that most people wouldn't expect from a hyperscaler. But, you know, we've seen with Google Cloud, they

• 27:56John Coogan?

  just had to buy, they had to shell out $32 billion for upping their security. And, you know, even though they are known as the greatest, you know, hyperscaler in many ways, there's a little bit of like. Maybe they were behind the ball on on specifically running AI workloads in the cloud for for other companies, whereas CoreWeave built their cloud specifically with AI in mind for the last few years, kind of had a fresh start, maybe a greenfield project and did very well and earning high marks from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis. Anyway, there's there's another interesting line in here about Les Wexner. He's he's in here. He owns 3% of CoreWeave.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  He invested $1 million through a trust and that's worth something like $800 million now. Of course, Les Wexner is

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  A controversial figure. He's been linked to Jeffrey Epstein and he also in here, he used to, he used to own Victoria's Secret. And so, again, not your traditional AI data center investor, but someone who got on the cap table early and rode that stake

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it was roughly 700x. So.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Banger.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Banger. Never thought we'd be hitting the size gong for

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Size is size.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Size is size, though.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Size is size. Nvidia is also in the deal, probably Silicon Valley's biggest winner from the offering.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's good to see them get a win, to be honest.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Finally, finally. Yeah, Jensen needed it.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  They've been sitting on the sidelines.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Been a rough, yeah, they really did need like an AI narrative for them. They needed like a, something to really pump the stock. So they're, of course, the dominant chipmaker. They have made a crucial supporting role as one of CoreWeave's largest investors. It owns about 3% of the company, fully diluted after having bought about $100 million worth of shares in the Series B in early 2023, which was, you know, that ChatGPT moment was just taking off and scaling laws were just kind of becoming popularly known.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  It's so strange that Nvidia and Lex Wexner have the same ownership

• 30:07John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  in CoreWeave.

• 30:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  So Nvidia owns about $700 million of the IPO price.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  The Victoria's Secret Jeffrey Epstein guy.

• 30:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, has the same ownership levels.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  As Nvidia.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  One of the greatest companies of all time.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  In CoreWeave.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  In CoreWeave.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  One of the highest profile.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  I mean, it really is like just a bizarre company. Like they're, they're doing amazing stuff. You can see from Dylan Patel's analysis, like the product that they've created is clearly top notch.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  I believe that Dylan Patel is very objective in his analysis and, and he's not, because of the nature of his business, he, you know.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  There are some lists in this industry that you can more or less pay to get on.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Yes, but I don't think this one is.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Patel's is.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, well.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  It's 11:30.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  Oh, it is.

• 30:51Jordi Hays?

  And we have a special guest.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  We do.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  And I believe they are in the waiting room.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in.

• 30:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  What's up, guys?

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing?

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  There he is. What's going on?

• 30:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  Good to see you, guys.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Good to see you. I heard you've been doing, uh, space repetition to practice, uh, for interviews. So I, I, I've been doing it. It says, uh, your name is Dwarkesh Patel. You have a podcast and you interviewed somebody named Mark who owns a website called Facebook.com. Can you tell me about that?

• 31:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. In fact, I, um, I made an entire Anki deck just for you guys.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Really?

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  No way. We're, we're honored.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  How, how's the book launch been going? How's the press tour? How are you doing today?

• 31:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's been going good. Um, the people have all kinds of, I have a book called The Scaling Era, and it compiles the interviews I've been doing about AI. And, um, you know, people like, as you mentioned, Mark and Demis and Dario, the heads of the AI labs, but also researchers and engineers and philosophers and economists about, uh, and it, it's been really interesting because AI is one of those topics where there's so many fractal questions you could ask about what is its impact going to be? How are we going to train it? How do you even think about a super intelligence? So, um, been dealing with a lot of different kinds of questions, uh, which has made it interesting.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how contentious was the, was the sort of book process? Did you know you wanted to go with, with Stripe? I imagine you could have had your pick of the litter in terms of like legacy publishers that promised you all sorts of things, but you happen to own, you know, sort of your own distribution. So maybe it was just about picking the right sort of underlying partner for it.

• 32:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  It honestly was never a matter of picking a publisher. The main question was whether I should do a book in the first place. And so some folks at Stripe Press reached out. And if I was going to do a book, it would be with them because, as you know, their reputation precedes them. And so then it was just like deciding, do I want to do the book or not? And I think retrospect was the right call. I think I'm really delighted with how it turned out.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  I want to talk about acceleration. Are you feeling the acceleration? Like mathematically, we are not accelerating GDP yet. Although technically we are today. I think GDP ticked up just a little bit, which means we're technically accelerating.

• 33:01Dwarkesh Patel?

  It must be your podcast.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Yes, hopefully, yeah. Hopefully, we're responsible. But, you know, energy use is not accelerating. Even some of the benchmarks are kind of saturating. We're not seeing acceleration curves. We're seeing solid growth. But at the same time, it feels like we're on the precipice of acceleration. But what does it mean to feel the acceleration for you?

• 33:24Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think it's a really good question because we have these models which we think are smart. And as you say, we haven't seen them even automate the things which we like. When we're having a conversation, we'll be like, oh, the call center workers, they should be really worried. And they still have got their jobs, right? So what's going on? There's, as you know, people have been talking about what we need to make the models cheaper. When DeepSea came out, they were like, oh, it's going to be Jevon's paradox. And we'll be using them way more now that they're cheaper. I think the real bottleneck is just we got to make them smarter. I don't like, they're already so cheap. It's like two cents per million tokens or something ridiculous. I think the real bottleneck for me using them more is not their price, but them being more useful, being able to take over more parts of the economy.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that intelligence is all we need?

• 34:12John Coogan?

  Andre Karpathy was talking about the importance of agency. I talked to other people about maybe it's all like what makes humans effective. It's not just intelligence. It's also agency. It's also coordination, friendliness, networking. Tyler Cowen's talked about like, do we even need to map the different parts of like the skill tree that humans have like charisma, wisdom? Like underrated is like these, like the AIs are getting more intelligent, but they're already like maxed out on wisdom, right? But do we need to think about a different taxonomy here? Or do we just need to max out intelligence and everything else will come?

• 34:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  No, I think you're absolutely right. I think you need a lot more skills. There has been this trend in AI where whenever there's a big breakthrough, we think we've automated a large part of what intelligence is. And in fact, in retrospect, it's clear that it was only a beginning. So the big example here is when Deep Blue came out and beat Kasparov at chess.

• 35:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  People thought that this was like a big breakthrough in intelligence in general because we thought that what chess required was the general intelligence. And you might have heard this concept of AI complete problems where if you solve this problem, then you've solved intelligence. So people said that about self-driving, the Turing test was supposed to be AI-complete. We've gone through all of these subcomponents of intelligence and afterwards we realized there's actually still more left to it. The thing that's sort of underrated is not even agency per se, although that's a part of it. I think the thing that's underrated is we humans have this global hive mind where the reason we can make iPhones and we can make buildings and whatever is not just intelligence and also not just agency.

• 35:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  It's the fact that there's so much specialization, there's so much capital deepening. People are just like doing things, trying different ideas.

• 36:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  AIs need to be smarter in order to do that and they need to have more agency in order to do that. But once they can, if you have millions of AIs running around trying different things, that's when we get the real acceleration and you'll feel it in your blood.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  When you say like millions of AIs, you've said that you think there will be billions of AIs running around. Like, what does that actually mean? Like, how can we quantify? Are we just talking like chat GPT DAUs? Are we talking about individual threads? Because you can inference multiple threads on a single chip. How are you thinking when you think? It sounds more concrete when you say there will be billions of AIs. But is that really just like there will be a hive mind that is equivalent to billions of people? Are we talking about like one or maybe each model is like one entity, but then there's sub-threads? How do you think about like that concept of like billions of AIs?

• 36:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  Honestly, I don't think anybody knows. I think it'll just like depend on how the tech tree shapes out.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:54Dwarkesh Patel?

  I have heard like these wild ideas in some of these interviews where one person, Ajay Khurthi, mentioned this idea of the blob. And the blob is, right now, you know, it's really hard for, if you have an institution or organization, company, it's really hard for the person at the center to have that much awareness of what's happening in the company, to control it to any great extent. Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain as any other Chinese person, or any other person in general.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  And in the future, you can imagine that, look, the thing at the center just has way more compute, and it's not clear whether they think about it as like more copies of AI Xi Jinping, or AI Sundar Pichai, or something. But you could just have this like huge blob that's constantly, it's like learning more things, it's like writing every single press release the company releases, it's reading every single pull request, it's answering every single customer response. That, I don't know if that at all helped answer the question.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's a very weird question of like how this will actually play out. Will, like, do we need to recreate the concept of like an individual

• 38:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  brain and then copy paste it a billion times? Or do we just need one really big brain? It's unclear to me. I don't know. Jordy, what do you got?

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  How did you feel on Wednesday, this sort of like Ghibli moment? A lot of people were saying, oh, I can't even go on X, it's just all slop. And my takeaway was, this is not slop, this is beautiful. This is like actually the most beautiful the timeline has ever looked. And the most powerful thing about that moment, it was the first time that you, like, I felt that the entire world could get consistently perfect outputs without any sort of like prompt engineering and basically just one-shotting these outputs in this sort of very scaled way. Are you, are you, so to me, I get very excited about it, because it's like having any human be able to create beautiful images out of text is fantastic.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  And I think we should be excited about that. But how, how did you kind of react to some people saying like, You know, oh, this is bad, or like, I'm gonna log off forever, right? You saw people that were just like, okay, like, I'm gonna delete my account and just leave X now. It's over.

• 39:07Dwarkesh Patel?

  How many times have those people said that?

• 39:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think that's a very, some people were saying things like, oh, you're like eating up the, like this, you know, fossil fuel, which is like our affection for Ghibli somehow by making these things. I think it's just a very zero sum view of the world where there can be a limited amount of beauty. There can be a limited amount of joy. I just don't think that. And can I be honest? Like, the thing I was really feeling when all these Ghibli images were coming out, I became more of, I became more convinced of our glorious transhumanist future. Where like, look, you're getting a glimpse just from these like early images of how cool and beautiful the things AI makes or helps us make will be.

• 39:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  Just imagine this scaled up like 100x, 1000x, integrated into all our senses, maybe even into our minds, integrated into the way we relate with the people we care about and so forth. Yeah, I'm just like, the future could be really beautiful.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm wearing like a VR goggles and it's making everyone beautiful. It's really rose colored glasses, right?

• 40:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah. To begin with.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  How do you feel so, Manus AI is apparently doing like a roadshow in the United States right now, sort of raising for American VCs potentially. I saw some people pushing back on the timeline, saying like, you know, bad luck to any American VC that does that. How do you feel, you know, and the criticism would be like, you know, we're in this sort of AI, you know, Cold War, American, you know, venture capital dollars shouldn't be sort of funding companies that are potentially competing with US AI labs or application layer companies. What's your sort of broad take on this sort of like cross border investment in AI?

• 40:56Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, it's, I was in China a few months earlier and it was really striking to me how dismayed the venture capital system there felt and the tech ecosystem generally. Because after the 2021 crackdowns, people are just like, really pulled back. And it sounds like after the deep sea moment, that's sort of changed, at least in the AI, at least in AI, because now the state, you know, the city funds and whatever are more willing to pitch in.

• 41:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, and how should people react to this? I'm of two minds, because one, I do believe that there is, like, there could be an intelligence explosion, and you really want to be ahead of that, and you don't want to help them get ahead on that. So I think like the expert controls and whatever are wise. As for just, man, it seems like in the middle ground here, where I wouldn't want to just generally try to harm China by tariffing batteries or cars or something. This is an application of AI, and it's complementary to American AI Foundation Labs, because they're using the Claude model, right?

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  So, I honestly, I don't have a strong take, but what do you guys think?

• 42:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't, I'm exactly in the same position as you. I don't have, you know, if American, you know, I did find it a little bit weird that some American venture capitalists were just like cheering on DeepSeek, just like, you know, blanket statement, like, you know, open source is good, this is good, when it felt like the way the launch was like rolled out and announced was done in a way to potentially sort of harm American financial markets, but...

• 42:29John Coogan?

  I mean, my take has been that just, just on a pure investment finance level, like, investing in a Chinese company just can be difficult to get your money back at a certain point, because the money just gets kind of stranded there, and then depending on who's in charge of America at the time, it could be very onerous to bring that money back. But I want to stay on China real quick. I thought, I mean, fantastic piece, I don't even know what you call it, video essay, essay, but the, one of the things that really stuck out to me as a creator like yourself, was the, was the lack of Chinese Joe Rogan, basically. And, and I was wondering, like, have you, have you thought about that more? Have you unpacked that more?

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Like, you would almost expect that, even if all the crazy censorship is true, why is there no power law winner, and there's a Joe Rogan who just spouts propaganda constantly? Like, what is going on that's driving the lack of these like, long-tail, like, you know, like, country-renowned, country-famous people?

• 43:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like you guys might actually have a good perspective on this, because somebody might have said, why doesn't tech have their, like, Joe Rogan equivalent? And you guys started your podcast network, and I think somebody could have said before you guys started your podcast network, why doesn't something like this exist already?

• 43:48Dwarkesh Patel?

  I honestly, I don't speak Chinese and I don't. This is just secondhand stuff I heard in China. I feel like reluctant to make grand conclusions about Chinese culture based on like, why don't they have a Joe Rogan? And it's because like this is Chinese culture is like this or something. The sense I got was that they are more concerned, like whether it's young people or just whatever people want to consume is often more focused on practical matters. And if you listen to Joe Rogan, it's very much like, let's just shoot the shit about whatever. I get the sense that it's like, that is just not that interesting, at least the people I met.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's less practical stuff. I wonder if there's also the fact where just some of the first social networks probably accelerated more quickly to these highly diffuse, algorithmic driven TikTok feeds that allow for smaller micro celebrities essentially. Whereas we in America, we've been building up this celebrity culture for so long that we have this more of a power law dynamic. I don't know. I don't really have a thesis on it. That's that that's super built out, but it is fascinating.

• 44:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. Have you been there?

• 45:00John Coogan?

  I was there once on a layover, but Jordy did live there for a while.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  I, in 2016, I worked at a, I went to Fudan.

• 45:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  It was a little hedge fund called High Flyer.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no big deal. No, I just studied abroad there. So I was there for a semester and I worked out of China Accelerator, which is like a startup accelerator. So a very, very interesting experience that I don't.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  I mean, the scale is crazy. I was in Guangzhou even just for a day and the scale of the buildings there, it's just, it really is remarkable. Like you need to see it in person because the pictures kind of compress everything. You don't really understand until you're there.

• 45:39Jordi Hays?

  The one, the one thing that I found that was weirdly fascinating is I would, I, for some reason, I don't know if it was the iPhone camera at that time, but I found it very difficult to get high quality images because it was so polluted that like something about like your own eyes would be able to kind of like, you know. I don't know, I would take a picture and I'm like, that's not what it looks like.

• 46:01John Coogan?

  How weird.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  And I realized over time that it was just like certain areas were so heavily polluted that

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 46:07Jordi Hays?

  The iPhone camera would just kind of bug out, but.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  It's like your.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  I had a question for you, uh, you know, something from this week that I thought was, uh, funny was that the sort of like, we were all kind of like holding our breath for the next like chat GPT moment. And then it was also, you know, chat GPT, uh, with, with their image generation product. Uh, do you, do you think we should be holding our breath for sort of another company to sort of experience? This sort of moment like that where it's just.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Full, you know, complete takeover of the mindshare, right? Because, um, mindshare is just so important right now. The, the sort of benchmarks come out and everybody in our corner of the internet is like hyper fixated on it, but the average consumer, you know, one of the things I thought was fascinating is, you know, John and I had a couple of Ghibli posts each that sort of broke containment. And a lot of people were quoting it and saying, all right, like, tell me what this app is, everybody. Like, what's the joke? Like, they just still didn't know like chat GPT or anything like that, but.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  I think it would be amazing for the industry if another company could have, you know, a moment that, that big. Uh, do you see something like that happening, you know, this year? Or have we sort of reached?

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, like even like the, the agent stuff, like flight booking, you could see that like there's some application that would go real broad or is there any like next, uh, next milestone that you're waiting for?

• 47:22Dwarkesh Patel?

  If somebody did get a reliable agent to work, I think that would be just be like, that, that would have a similar break the internet. In a way that you personally could use and you could just like log in and, um, I think it'll probably be one of the foundational lab companies. People have been for years trying to build agents, um, and they just haven't worked and it makes it's, it makes me think that that's a fundamental limitation of the current models. And so it'll just be the company that is building a future model that is geared towards computer use and so forth. That is what I'd expect to be, I mean, I had, I was thinking the other day.

• 47:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  Remember when Sam got fired and people were posting on Twitter, oh, there's something, what did I see?

• 48:03John Coogan?

  What did I see?

• 48:04Dwarkesh Patel?

  There's a Q star. Yeah, yeah. I don't think that's why he got fired.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  But it is notable that in retrospect, if you were following the Q star rumors, you actually would have been in a good position to anticipate.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 48:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  You know, that there would be this like reasoning breakthrough. That's kind of what they were talking about by the time.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  Similarly, GPT 4.5 and Grok 3 being not that much better. If you were following Twitter and six months ago, you would have seen, oh, pre-training might plateau, but we'll have to go with inference scaling or something.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  So maybe my update has been that you can sort of know what's gonna happen. I mean, I remember at the time, I was just like, these idiots on Twitter are just like, they don't know what they're talking about.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  It's a rumor mill.

• 48:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  And in retrospect, I'm like, eh, kind of like, I mean, you know, you like take it with a grain of salt, but they kind of had the big picture. There's like no secrets.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was always this funny dynamic where people were criticizing Sam for launching ChatGPT without telling the board, but then at the same time, people were criticizing Sam for like being non-technical and not driving the product forward. And I was like, no matter what you think of Sam, like those two things cannot be true simultaneously. Like you have to pick a side here. You can't criticize him for both like not innovating and also innovating too fast.

• 49:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  But anyway, I want to talk about, I think, like a flip side of the P doom argument that I've been kicking around. Basically, like, we've seen these like accelerating trends before, nuclear energy, energy too cheap to meter, has been talked about before, and we have hit stagnation. Like, it is possible that just something can break in our society and all these different economic and political forces can align to just say, hey, you know what? Nuclear energy is not going to double every couple of years, and it didn't. And I'm wondering, like, what is your P stagnation? Like, just your probability that something happens, maybe people freak out, maybe there's just, you know, one world government or something, but we actually see AI stall for a significant

• 50:00John Coogan?

  amount of time, like 50 years, there's no intelligence explosion purely for stagnation reasons. Do you think that's a possibility?

• 50:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  Like 10, 20%.

• 50:11John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 50:13Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think there is a dynamic I talked about earlier where we, in the past, we have underestimated how much it takes to make a coherent intelligence that has agency and so forth, right? That could be part of it. Another is that there is no intelligence explosion. So, I'm sorry, I mean, the most important thing here is, look, we can keep increasing compute that we're putting into these systems for maybe the next five, 10 years, because computers are just growing at this ridiculous rate, where in three years, we're going to have 10x the amount of global AI compute that we have right now. But at some point, right now, we're spending 2% of GDP on compute and data centers and stuff like that. You can't just keep like 10x-ing that forever.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  So if somehow this whole deep learning paradigm is wrong and we just like totally miss the boat somehow, then I could see it happening, that's like at 10, 20%. Otherwise, if we do get AGI, I'm of the opinion that we're not, it would just be so hard to contain it. Like, it's an incredibly powerful technology, even if there's no intelligence explosion, even if it doesn't help you make an ASI or something, just AGI alone

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  is like, would just make the economy explode and all kinds of crazy shit.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  I mean, on the, like, there's a little bit of a force of deceleration, like the GDP question, but also just, I've had this idea that like, no matter how intelligent you are, you can't break the laws of physics. At a certain point, you need to like, get the sand out of the ground and turn it into silicon and like, at a certain point, just moving the sand around fast enough, even at light speed, you're not 10x-ing every two years. And so it feels like there could be a slowing down, even as we're having the robots do basically everything. It's like, the robots are still maxed out by physics. I don't know.

• 52:03Dwarkesh Patel?

  I was thinking about this this morning, actually. And the intuition I was thinking about is, so since 1750s, we've had 2% economic growth in the world. Before that, it was like a 10th of that, right? 0.2%. If you were around in the 1500s or 1000 and somebody said there'd be like 2% growth, I think you might, given your reference class, have been like, look, it just takes a long time to learn how to Artificially select crops and how to build like new structures and aqueducts and whatever. That is a process that takes a while. So why do you think you're just going to be going through like increasing that two, three percent a year?

• 52:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  And in retrospect, it is like a really weird. You look at the last hundred years of history. We're discovering all this new things in physics and chemistry and so forth. The last 50 years, we're like, we start with the transistor and now we're talking on this magical screen. And that was just like physics didn't bottleneck that. I think like you get another 10x and I don't see any in principle reason why at the next 10x of physics is like, just would not allow the robust to move fast enough.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, certainly on the GDP question. I think the energy question is like maybe a little bit murkier, but then there's probably other ways to optimize and still get those GDP lifts even with even with energy growing at like a more reasonable, less explosive rate. So I think I agree with you there.

• 53:31Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you've talked about this in other interviews and with some of the individuals that are sort of leading initiatives at these companies. But what's your sort of broad take on Apple's position and how they've been approaching everything in AI? You know, it's sort of like I've seen, you know, they've sort of led with like gen moji almost as much as they've led with like, you know, everything, all the potential of what you would want out of sort of AI assistant. But how do you think these, you know, companies like Apple and Google sort of like figure out product development and like proper distribution of these products? Because I feel like that's been the big critique. It's just like they have every, every possible advantage, such talented,

• 54:17Jordi Hays?

  you know, team members and it has to be so frustrating.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  And it should be a sustaining advantage or sustaining innovation. If you're looking at the innovator's dilemma framework and yet it feels like it might wind up being disruptive. I don't know.

• 54:31Dwarkesh Patel?

  They're not AGI-pilled enough, you know, like if you treat it like another feature. Well, I mean, even if you treat it like another feature, it's like mysterious why Siri doesn't work on my phone, but.

• 54:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  But yeah, like it's like, it's like more people, basically. And if you take that seriously, you're not just gonna be like, oh, and the 25th department in our complex is about making Siri better at speaking or something. It's like, this is, this is the future.

• 54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  And then that's, is that the, that then becomes like the gigaball case for safe superintelligence, meaning like none of the features or like consumer applications really matter at all today and you shouldn't even release them. And you should just sort of accelerate towards the, the end goal that enables all the other goals.

• 55:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  Hmm, that's, that's an interesting point.

• 55:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think maybe somewhere in between where like, if you didn't release ChatGPT, you wouldn't have been able to just like know that this is a feature people really wanted. And that they would get a lot of use of as compared to the other things people are reusing GPT 3.5 to do. And I wonder if other things that, other like features of AGI will be similar where if you don't, if you don't deploy it to a bunch of engineers on cursor, you just like won't know what it would actually make something a good coding bot. The counter argument to this, and I think what the SSI people would say is that they actually are deploying, but they're deploying towards the one thing they care about, which is accelerating AI research. And they don't need to do that externally. They can just do that internally.

• 56:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  And so the basic question is, can you get this like closed loop where you build the AIs which are helping you accelerate AI research, dot, dot, dot, superintelligence? I'm like 50 50 on that question. So, but that other 50% is like a big deal.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, you, you mentioned AGI-pilled. Is there a difference between AGI-pilled and ASI-pilled? And why do OpenAI co-founders seem incapable of starting anything but a foundation model company?

• 56:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  I always wondered like, I just want one of them to be like, yeah, actually I'm starting a travel company. But it seems to be like they are-

• 56:42Dwarkesh Patel?

  They're gonna be traveling a lot after their jets are gone.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  They only know one thing. They're all one-trick ponies. I mean, I love them all, but like, it's just funny that none of them started anything else.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  It's the only thing that matters, maybe.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  I mean, I think you're right. I think, um, some people, I wouldn't even put it as ESI, because even if you don't believe in this like god-like intelligence that's gonna control the world, I'm not sure I believe it either. I think, um, there's AGI pill, and there's like transformative AI pill, where you say, look, even if they're just like humans, if they have the advantages that AIs will just intrinsically have because of the fact that they're digital, which is the fact that they can be copied with all of their brain, all of their knowledge, right? So, think of the most skilled engineer in your company, like Jeff Dean or Elias Sescover. You can like copy that person with all their task and knowledge and everything. You can merge different copies, you can scale and distill AGIs.

• 57:34Dwarkesh Patel?

  Those advantages alone, and the fact that there will be billions of copies as we increase the amount of compute in the world, that alone is enough for transformation in the sense of going from, you know, like, what we were like before the industrial revolution to the industrial revolution pace of growth. And so I think somebody can be AGI pill in the sense that say like, yeah, I expect like human-level intelligence to emerge in the next 10 years. But they still don't take that seriously as in like, okay, well, what does that imply about what is happening through the economy? Does that just mean like, oh, you've got a smart personal assistant? Or does it mean like, no, we're in a very different growth regime?

• 58:06John Coogan?

  Last question.

• 58:08Jordi Hays?

  Two last questions, I guess.

• 58:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  Go for it, go for it.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  One question. So, are there any people in the book that you feel like, uh, in the fullness of time, uh, are sort of very under-hyped, are not getting enough attention? People that are unsung heroes, that maybe don't post a lot on X today, but when we look back, you know, 15 years from now, we'll be like-

• 58:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  Good question.

• 58:28Jordi Hays?

  Those were the people that were doing, because there's this weird phenomenon right now where it's like, if you're just loud on the internet, like, you just like, you know, you suck mindshare and attention, and maybe there's somebody like a building over that's doing more impactful work, or really at the forefront, that isn't posting at all because they're actually on to something.

• 58:46Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's a really good question.

• 58:49Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think a lot of the people I've interviewed have subsequently, or, you know, at the same time, like, are well-known, right? So, even if you're not a lab CEO, so if you're like a Leopold, or you're a Schulto, or a Trenton, people know who you are on Twitter as well. The person who I think might be underrated still is an interview I did that we only released in the book, so we have two interviews that we kept for the book. One of them is Ajay Kotra, and she is somebody who has been doing these really interesting, like, since the 2010s, these really interesting analyses of how much compute did evolution spend in total in order to, like, over the billions of years evolution's been going,

• 59:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  like, how do we model that as a computational, like, pathfinding exercise? And using that as an upper bound on how long it will take to build AGI? And then, like, how much computer does the human brain use? How much, how much, like, time do we spend learning as kids? And how much compute is that in total compared to how long it takes to train these models? What does that teach us about how much better these models could get, given this overhang? That has informed, I think, a lot of... Oh shit, sorry, that, this is the wrong answer. Although, AI is excellent, and she, like, she's also underrated. The, um, the one who is, like, also super, super underrated is Carl Schulman. Okay. And I think, I don't know if this ring, name rings a bell to you. This man is, like, you would not believe the amount of ideas that are out there in

• 1:00:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  the AI system, from, like, the software-only singularity, basically the intelligence explosion kind of stuff, to these, like, transformative AI and modeling out the economics of this new growth regime, to, like, so much more. It's like, this one guy, it all came from him. He doesn't like to write that much, so he, um, he, like, tells other people his ideas. I had him on my podcast and we put his stuff in there. And he, but what, like, he just has all these galaxy brain takes. Like, one of them was, he looked at the research on what changed between chimpanzee brains and human brains, and he's like, "Oh, there's, like, there's a ton of structural similarities, it's just that the human brain is bigger." So, this lends credence to the scaling hypothesis. All kinds of galaxy brain stuff.

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. I have one more question and then we'll let you go. By the way, X is down. I think you broke it or we broke it together. I think we broke it. But yeah, we're still live on YouTube. But how do you think about more on like the business side? Because I've just, I think everybody's been fascinated with your journey. When you started your podcast, everybody would have said like, there's enough podcasts, like we don't need, you know, we just don't need more of them. That clearly is not true. There's plenty of white space and your growth is proof of that. But how do you think about value capture and what you're doing? Because I'm sure you've had people come to you and say like, hey, look, like, you know, just, just come, keep doing the show, but we're going to give you $50 million of sort of like shares and you don't have to.

• 1:01:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  Nobody's coming to be with that.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, they should, I think. But yeah, like, how do you think about kind of, I think there's this general fear in the tech community right now, where it's like, this is the last two to three years where you can like, you know, accumulate wealth and then like, it's over. And I don't believe that that's true, but how do you sort of balance like, you know, you're doing something you love all day long, which is just like talking to interesting people and like thinking about the future and, you know, humanities potential and technology and all this stuff. But, you know, how do you balance, how do you balance all of that, that fear and, and, you know, wanting to capture value from your work, but also wanting to not be conflicted, right? And being able to just be sort of this independent actor.

• 1:02:21Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep. I actually am very curious about the answer for you guys, because even though you're the sort of the network you're starting now, it like just, it started with a much bigger bang than my podcast I started out with. So I, I assume you actually got a bunch of these kinds of offers, right? As you're like, oh, this is like new and exciting.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, we care, we care a lot about, you know, being like Switzerland, but specifically from like the investor, the investor side, right? Like long-term, we want to have any sort of investor be able to come on the show and talk about what they're doing.

• 1:02:52Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 1:02:52Jordi Hays?

  And I would imagine the same thing for you. Like you don't want to be like, you know, so tied in or have to one, you know, foundation model, you know, company that you can't talk about the incredible things that someone else is doing, right?

• 1:03:05Dwarkesh Patel?

  Yep, yep.

• 1:03:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  I have had like different podcast networks or whatever reach out to me in the past and I've seriously considered them. In one case, I was like close to saying yes. And in retrospect, it was like, this was many, many years ago before like the podcast had grown that much at all. And it was like, we'll give you, we'll edit the show for you and we'll produce it for you. And all we ask is 50% of the revenue you earn through the future. That's a rough trade.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  50% of your lifetime earnings.

• 1:03:37Dwarkesh Patel?

  50/50. Yeah. But I had a couple of friends who I was like, they were like, dude, it's like working, just do it yourself. And I'm glad. Because also, another thing that might have influenced your decision as well is, talent is so key. Talent in the sense of, I think it really matters to have one, or in this case, two, in your case, two people who are like, we care, this is our vision, and we are going to instill it, rather than this is an institution where I'm the face of it. But secondly, what I was going for is like talent as your editors, your other people on your team. For me, I've just been super delighted with the people I get to work with there. And it just like, the care and attention to detail they have just would not be replicated with, here's a team of editors at this podcast

• 1:04:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  network. It's like, instead of the people I've sought out, and I love working with, and I give them detailed feedback, and they give me detailed feedback, and you know, yeah. That's also what makes it special. Yeah.

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Onto the specifics around, do you think the general techno, you know, techno-capitalist fear of, you know, like, you know, basically like, I think a lot of, you know, 22-year-olds right now are coming in to their sort of careers, and they're saying like, well, everybody's gonna be paper clipped in a few years, like, you've gotta sort of like, create value and capture it now, so that you're okay in this sort of like AGI future. I do feel like that's maybe sort of common fear throughout history, right? Where there's like, people have this sort of pending sense of doom, sometimes. But do you think that's like, you know, what would you say to somebody that had that sense?

• 1:05:14Dwarkesh Patel?

  Um, I think like...

• 1:05:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think the way to model out the next few years from a career trajectory is you'll just have 100 extra leverage, but you want to be in a position where you can use that leverage. There's a common thing, and I'm sure you experienced this now as well, is that as you advance in your career, before you're like, I've got a bunch of time, but I don't know what to work on. And after you're further along, you're like, I have no time, but there's like a thousand different ideas I have for things that would be super valuable, or I think would go really well, or something. So that, I think what you should do is just get to a point where in whatever you think is interesting or care about, you're at the frontier and can see what the problem space actually looks like. If you care about AI, I would really recommend moving to SF. And then just start working on problems and, you

• 1:06:06Dwarkesh Patel?

  know, use the leverage that AI gives you. And if you end up getting paper clipped, it's like, look, what's the point of like, you personally, what's the point of that you like not doing anything worrying about that? In the 80% of worlds, or 90% of worlds where we don't get paper clipped, you'll get to say you worked on something really cool at a time that was really important in the history of humanity.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on. This is fantastic.

• 1:06:29Dwarkesh Patel?

  This is fun, guys.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  We gotta have you back. This is really, really awesome.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it a regular thing.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  I enjoyed this.

• 1:06:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  And super bullish around you guys. I mean, like,

• 1:06:34John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:06:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  You're like, well, your previous thing is a couple of months in, but this is like a couple of weeks in, and you're already killing it. That's awesome.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We really appreciate you coming on.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  And for, for, for the record, we're not building a network.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's actually a head fake.

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  It's a head fake.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  It's just a show.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  It's just a show, forever.

• 1:06:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  That's right.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  It's a show with a funny name.

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  We'll never come to you and say, give us half for, for editing, you know.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  You can't.

• 1:06:57Dwarkesh Patel?

  You want at least 75%.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Great having you on.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Great having you on, Dirk Ash. This is fantastic.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to get, you know, everybody to get access to the book.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, go get the book. I printed it out.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  We have a manuscript.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  You can buy the actual thing.

• 1:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Dwarkesh Patel?

  Thank you for doing that.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Stripe Press. The scaling era is here.

• 1:07:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  Cheers. Thank you guys so much for having me on.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:07:18Dwarkesh Patel?

  See ya.

• 1:07:18John Coogan?

  Bye. And we got Casey Handmer coming in. We kept him waiting. Sorry about that, Casey. Hopefully, you're still here with us, because we want to hear about Terraform. We want to, have you seen his office?

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  He builds from a castle in Burbank. It's, it's like,

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Some guy built this, these crazy castles. It's a fascinating company.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  Hey, Casey, how you doing?

• 1:07:43Casey Handmer?

  Hello. Very well. Can you hear me?

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you great. Are you in the castle today or are you somewhere else? Where are you?

• 1:07:49Casey Handmer?

  I'm in the castle. I'm behind a fancy background of some synthetic natural gas samples we made last year. But yeah, I mean, the castle windowless wall is right by me here.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Very cool. Can you, can you give me just a little bit of intro explanation of the company? And then I mean, I do want to hear the story of like how the castle got built again, because it's a funny story.

• 1:08:10Casey Handmer?

  Sure. Well, let's start with Terraform. So three and a half years ago, I rage quit my job at NASA JPL and incorporated Terraform Industries to build cheap synthetic natural gas from sunlight and air. And we've been at that for three and a half years now. We've made a lot of progress. It's super exciting. The castle itself was built in the eighties by the Bandi family, who built many of the industrial buildings in Burbank. And they worked with a general contractor who, who was down to do crazy stuff. And it turns out if you're building from cinder blocks, you can make them any shape you like. So.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's amazing. Can we, can we start with this, this quote tweet that went mega viral this week? You said, I think a general misunderstanding in either direction about how hard this is, is a major contributor to the outside context problem occurring in politics right now. Don't at me. It's a video of Elon Musk landing a rocket and, and I think Elon quote tweeted you and said, just read the instructions. But can you give us some more context on like, unpack that, like what exactly is the outside context problem? What's going on?

• 1:09:22Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, it's a bit of a geeky, deep cut. So the outside context problem is a concept popularized in, in Banks's culture novel series, in particular, the novel Excession, which primarily deals with the culture coming in contact with a, with kind of a previously unknown alien. I mean, the whole books are full of aliens, but this is like an alien, alien intelligence that's, modality is very reactive. And so the usual ways of kind of reaching out and probing and attacking and so on are just being reflected with overwhelming force.

• 1:09:57Casey Handmer?

  And then just read the instructions is the name of one of the culture ships in, in, in a mix novel. So in this novel, there's millions and millions of, of fully sentient, very, very large spacecraft that fly around, basically looking after humanity.

• 1:10:12Casey Handmer?

  The deeper point is, I think Elon's a very interesting person. I think he's obviously very underestimated, has been throughout his entire career, for whatever reason.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  But is he?

• 1:10:26Casey Handmer?

  And I think, you know, convention, sorry.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt, but is he underestimated in our corner of the internet? Or just sort of broadly? Do you think he's still underestimated by the average Elon, you know, fanboy?

• 1:10:40Casey Handmer?

  I think even then, yeah. And I think, you know, conventional wisdom a year ago was like, oh, Elon is getting involved in politics, he's gonna, you know, shoot his feet off. And I think, yeah, he genuinely took a big risk backing Donald Trump for the election. You know, if Kamala had won, I doubt it would have gone very well for him. But, you know, now, there's a person who a year ago, we're hearing all these op-eds like, oh, he doesn't understand politics, you know, we're still hearing, he doesn't understand politics, he's taking a huge risk, he should just focus on Mars, what is he, what is he talking about, etc. He's now in the White House, like, literally running the IT modernization process of the entire federal government, which is code for, he has root access to the entire government.

• 1:11:22Casey Handmer?

  And I think ultimately, I think history will show this is gonna be a massive net positive for United States, you know, obviously, there's gonna be some mistakes and some struggles and pain along the way. That's always been clear from the outset. I wrote a blog post about this last year, saying, you know, why do we need a Department of Government Efficiency? But I think, overall, we should probably regard ourselves as extremely lucky that someone of Elon's caliber has taken interest in fixing the processes that affect all of us, not just, you know, finding ways to serve the interests of his particular companies, or like, you know, skirt around certain regulatory issues, such as the normal way that you deal with these things. But, you know, I think the conversation needs to be had here, and my general complaint is that the, is that the criticisms that are being leveled at the Doge process are

• 1:12:07Casey Handmer?

  not constructive, because they're not engaging with the reality of what's going on. And I think, you know, this is a process that would be improved by constructive and high-quality criticism and suggestions and, you know, better ideas flying into the system. I think that's always the case. But there's an outside context problem, because most of the people who are jumping up and down about, you know, the various alleged outrages that Doge is committing, do not understand what's going on. It's beyond their context, which is not a huge surprise, but, you know, it is a major problem.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting.

• 1:12:41Casey Handmer?

  Particularly for their interests, you know, and I wrote a post about this as well in the context of California. California, I live there. I love it. It's great. It's a great state, but it's not the state that anyone wants to be like right now. And that's a real problem for the future of the progressive movement. You know, like San Francisco needs to be a shining city on a hill.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I agree. I have a sort of a random question, but I think you're going to have an interesting take on it. Do you have any sort of like broad advice for investors that are fancying themselves as deep tech or hard tech investors after years of SaaS and sort of Web three and now it's sort of the hot thing? I mean, even you started your company in 2021, even then, you know, it wasn't, you know, there's sort of the meme, right? Which is, you know, deep tech would have loved zero interest rates, right? But like, there wasn't a lot of like companies like yours actually being, you know, there were plenty, but there was not as many as there are now. Do you have advice to just sort

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  of venture capitalists broadly about how you're evaluating, you know, if a, you know, bright entrepreneur comes to you and says they want to do something that like many people say is impossible, like how do you actually, you know, how, how, how would you advise them to kind of like evaluate that? Because like, it just seems like there's so many exciting companies right now and some are very clearly like fake and some are very like real and maybe they won't succeed, but like they're doing like very real work and, you know, very likely will, will have dramatic impact.

• 1:14:08Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, thanks for that. I mean, one can theorize about these issues and how one might go about, you know, acquiring the necessary expertise to make, you know, better than random judgments when it comes to potential deep tech startups. But, you know, the reality is it's extremely capital intensive. It operates on a different set of both physical and, you know, legal laws than SaaS. And that, that actually makes it, you know, significantly less efficient, I think, in terms of. The health and functionality of a typical VC ecosystem in this case. But instead you can look at like, well, what are the contemporary and historical cases where

• 1:14:49Casey Handmer?

  major innovations were successfully brought at scale into the market? And in almost all cases, it was actually led within an organization. So you have an existing organization that has existing capital relationships and projects. And in particular, a large team of very skilled people who are extremely aggressive about delivering value. And then you take that team and you throw the one a new kind of problem and a new kind of problem and so on. And the most salient example in the recent past is the Elon industrial complex where Elon has this family of companies that are doing things that everyone else really struggles to even wrap their heads around in most cases. And but history is replete with examples. And I recently have kind of gone very deep on Henry Kaiser, who founded more than 100

• 1:15:32Casey Handmer?

  companies, built the Hoover Dam, built 1,500 ships in World War II. Stuff that we regard as impossible today, like, oh, how can we fix American shipbuilding? He just stood up a shipyard from scratch in like, less than two months in 1941. Like, they didn't have computers back then. It's just insane stuff. So, yeah, there are historical examples of this happening. And I think one way of thinking about it is that capital allocation in hard tech is a stronger emphasis on human capital than on just liquid money. And probably the optimal place to put the capital allocation layer is within already successful organizations that have already proved their worth.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of organizations, you said you rage quit NASA. Is NASA's best work behind them? Or if now that Elon has root access, could we see the organization sort of revitalized at some point?

• 1:16:32Casey Handmer?

  I very much hope that the DOGE team will devote some efforts to helping NASA recover its historical capabilities, which we have to remember within living memory were the envy, remain the envy of the world. But unfortunately, my experience, it's personal experience. I didn't see all of it, obviously, but my experience in NASA was that the organization is, you know, it's still stuffed to the gills with brilliant people, but most of those people spend most of their time not being allowed to do really extraordinary work, like actively being blocked and hindered and punished for going above and beyond, which is not how we should be running a space program competing with China. Like China's program managers in their space program,

• 1:17:13Casey Handmer?

  they fear the consequences of failure. And NASA's program managers do not. And that is the key difference.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about stagnation? The, you know, what happened in 1970? There's a whole bunch of different theories. Is it a culture issue? Do we need to just adopt like a you can just do things mindset? I've always been tracking energy. We, that's the point where the energy growth kind of broke from 2.7% per year to 2%. It feels like AI might be enough of a moment to kick us back into gear. Maybe it's this DOGE stuff that's going on. Will it be political? But how important is unstagnating on the energy side to kick everything into gear?

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  And what are the stack ranked priorities for actually seeing increased human flourishing, economic growth, energy, all the, all the proxy metrics that are important?

• 1:18:10Casey Handmer?

  Well, you hit on the most important aspect there, which is we can measure this, right? At the end of the day, we either have total factor productivity growth or we don't. And if we do, then our children will have a better life than us, no matter what. And if we don't, then they won't, no matter what. It doesn't matter how innovative we get about, you know, social programs and redistributive spending and like various sneaky forms of communism. At the end of the day, we're either growing the economy or we're not. And I think that, you know, what the hell happened in nineteen seventy one is over determined in some ways. Um, you know, Henry Kaiser died in nineteen sixty seven. Uh, you know, various OPEC issues and oil shocks and so on occurred. Um, we had the passage of Nipa and and Siqueira in the early seventies as well. Um, you know, all of these things, I think, well intentioned or or kind of contingent at the time. But but since then,

• 1:18:54Casey Handmer?

  we've, I think, if we had not seen the emergence of Moore's Law and improved computing capacity, we would have been in much more dire straits as far as economic stagnation goes.

• 1:19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:03Casey Handmer?

  But I'm also extremely optimistic that we're gonna, we're gonna turn this around. First of all, because we seem to have gained the ability to talk about stagnation, first of all, and like to measure it and to worry about it and be conscious of the fact that this is probably actively impeding, for example, the fertility rate. Um, and the second thing is that, uh, you know, obviously AI will help. Um, but we've also got this incredible technology in in solar power, which is allowing us to convert, in a sense, we're going back to the lab.

• 1:19:30Casey Handmer?

  Inverting sunlight into energy about a hundred times more efficiently than plants do, and electricity is quite a bit more useful than coal. Um, so I'm just very optimistic that we're going to solve, uh, the energy problem, you know, this decade. Um, we might may have a take a good crack at the permitting problem, at least in the West, uh, this decade as well. Um, and I think those two things combined, plus, you know, some, uh, intelligent AIs will really help us get back on the Henry Adams curve.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Can you talk more about solar? Why are you so bullish on solar and not maybe less bullish on nuclear? There's a lot of chatter and both. Everyone loves both right now, but why, why is solar what you've chosen to kind of make your lives work here?

• 1:20:12Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, at least for now. I mean, to be clear, I'm not bigoted against nuclear power. I'm not worried about nuclear radiation. I taught nuclear physics at Caltech for a while. Um, uh, it's a fabulous technology, but but again, like, we can theorize about it, we can look at at history, and history shows us that, uh, nuclear reactors have been enthusiastically adopted, uh, by various navies, uh, for operating, you know, clandestine, you know, underwater vessels that need air independent power supplies or nu- uh, nuclear aircraft carriers that need the ability to outrun, uh, said submarines. But other than that, you know, even the Navy moved away from using nuclear reactors to power their surface fleet. And I think if you, you know, want to honestly understand this, you need to to kind of dive into why that is the case. At the end of the day, nuclear reactors are steam engines.

• 1:20:56Casey Handmer?

  And steam engines operate on what's called the Brayton cycle, and there are certain irreducible costs associated with, you know, steam turbines and so on, that that just drive the cost up.

• 1:21:05Casey Handmer?

  And that's even if N R C didn't exist tomorrow, right? Even if even if you could buy enriched uranium on Amazon dot com, it would still be the case that that that just the steam engine component of it is going to cost no less than coal.

• 1:21:18Casey Handmer?

  Solar, on the other hand, is fascinating because sunlight rains down on the earth every day for free. There's a fusion reactor up in the sky.

• 1:21:27Casey Handmer?

  Due to some like weird quantum effects, and again, silicon trickery, it is possible to convert that into high-grade energy in the form of electricity with, you know, a layer of a layer of silicon that's thinner than a sheet of paper, considerably thinner than a sheet of paper. That silicon is enormously abundant on the earth. We've gotten really quite good at making it. There are factories worldwide now churning out more than a terawatt of solar per year with no signs of slowing down. If anything, production is increasing thirty to forty percent per year, which is just bananas. It's it's it's it's a sort of growth rate you'd like to see for any technology. And and the reason this is occurring is because there's a positive feedback loop that's already been kicked off, right? So we don't have to theorize about, well, what is it going to take to get to, you know, first of a kind, second of a kind, hundredth of a kind?

• 1:22:12Casey Handmer?

  You know, start getting those economies of scale down in solar, that's already happening. It's a commoditized product, it has no moving parts, you don't need any special, you know, skills or labor to install and operate it. It's even easier to do than planting corn. It's put on the ground and it spits out power, which in our discussion about nineteen seventy one, you know, electrical power is basically wealth. It's a it's a free money printer you can put on the ground. And this is one of the reasons that I'm slightly frustrated about the various tariffs on solar panels. I think if if China, our geopolitical adversary, is attempting to to harm us by giving us Solar panels subsidized at their taxpayers' expense. We should do the textbook thing that you do when people are trying to do predatory dumping, which is buy as much of it as you possibly can to hurt them even worse.

• 1:22:52Casey Handmer?

  And pave Nevada with them or something like we could figure out something useful to do with them down the track. But yeah, basically, that's the key. You have some batteries on the side and the problem is solved.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, speaking of like paving Nevada, what does your, what does the future of Earth look like in 2050 years? Is it solar panels all over in space? Is it solar panels all over the Earth? Is this, is it going to feel cyber punky? Or will there still be trees around at all? Am I just in a matrix pod and, but, but my total factor productivity is going up, so I'm happy. What does the long-term future look like for you or in your mind?

• 1:23:30Casey Handmer?

  I think it's a bit hard to say. I'm quite optimistic. You'd have to be to start a hardware company. And I think really what the future looks like comes down to people like you and I and what we decide to build.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:41Casey Handmer?

  Right? Like if you want a great future, go and build it. In terms of energy, we can, we can give every man, woman and child on earth the amount of energy we enjoy here in the United States, which is about 20 barrels of oil per person per year. With something like 6% of Earth's surface under solar, which is, it's a, it's much, much less than we currently use for grazing or for row crops or for forestry.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:04Casey Handmer?

  It's a little more than we currently have covered in like densely populated cities. But, but it's, it's quite a bit less than agriculture. That's, that's enough for everyone. If you, if like the, the scenario, the previous call you were talking to Dwarkesh about like getting paper clipped. We're not going to get paper clipped. What's going to happen is the, the net present value of land for agriculture is about 500 bucks per acre per season. But for solar, it's about, you know, a hundred or $200,000 per year. Now, if that's powering an AI, an artificial super intelligence data center, which is a thousand times more economically productive than your terribly poorly evolved human brain, which has to sleep eight hours a day and, you know, browse Twitter, then, then obviously. Economically speaking, our farmland is ultimately going to get paved over with solar and we're going to starve to death.

• 1:24:49Casey Handmer?

  And that's the, that's the, the true AI doom scenario. So again, that's something we should be aware of and something we should, should figure out how to, how to forestall. We will obviously have a lot of solar in space, but I think mostly it'll be for powering applications in space. I don't think people are going to be beaming power down from space to the earth any time, any time soon.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Is that just because the economics don't work out? I've seen a couple of these companies, they're using mirrors or lasers.

• 1:25:12Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, the, the mirror one is interesting, actually, because, because it kind of exploits the fact that like you're, if you're a solar array owner, you have no other way of getting more power other than paying someone to reflect some more down to you, which is super cool. Don't get me wrong. As far as solar cost goes, the Starlink constellation is solar powered. It's in orbit. It generates considerably more power than the space station does collectively, obviously. Like maybe a hundred times more power than the space station. And most of that power is used to amplify radio signals and transmit them down to earth where they're received by our antennas. And the revenue per, per watt of electricity used to transmit microwaves through our atmosphere to the consumer, because it's, you know,

• 1:25:57Casey Handmer?

  chopped up and turned into internet data as opposed to just raw power is about a billion times higher. Like the revenue per watt is a billion times higher with it being internet at a few hundred watts or whatever transmission power than it being, you know, attempting to transmit gigawatts of power down to power plants where we pay, you know, 10 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that. Now, Starlink is actually fabulously profitable and I'm super proud of the team there. I just, I think it's absolutely incredible what they've done. But there's no way in hell that the profit margin is 10 million percent. Right? So like, it's just, it's just not possible. So I don't think that space-based solar power is likely to be a thing.

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that the average seed stage deep tech founder doesn't take economics seriously enough? Because in almost, almost every sort of question we've asked you, you've had sort of economics or rationale behind your answer. And I think we've seen some companies emerge recently that, you know, there's sort of this like sad scenario where they like achieve the impossible or do the really hard thing. And then what's waiting for them is, is potentially a, a product that like is not economically viable in the sense that like you made the product, but then there's sort of. You can't actually get any value.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've heard about nuclear companies where it's like they literally just had one number wrong in their spreadsheet model and they did the thing, but it just didn't. It wasn't competitive on the grid at all.

• 1:27:22Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, that's a nightmare scenario.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:23Casey Handmer?

  No, I mean, like, at the end of the day, if you're super passionate about a particular technology and you think it has a chance of success and you have investors who agree with you, then go give it a, give it a shot, right? You don't know, I don't know. Like customers and consumers, they like, they like weird things. We don't, we just don't know. Like, that's the fabulous thing about capitalism. It, it just fire hoses of options and potentials at, at the market to see what sticks. And if you think back to when we were children, there's no way we would have known that like the, the stable attractive form factor for cell phones would be something like this. That's, that's not how they worked back then. So, um, for the younger listeners, uh, just like quiver in fear. We didn't have cell phones when we were young.

• 1:28:02Casey Handmer?

  So, so you should give it a go. On the other hand, if you are trying to do a hard hardware tech thing at massive scale, you absolutely have to have capitalism behind you. You cannot fight capitalism.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:12Casey Handmer?

  You know, to, to get to massive scale.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Forever.

• 1:28:14Casey Handmer?

  You have to deliver massive value.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  The gravity.

• 1:28:15Casey Handmer?

  It's not a mystery.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Economics.

• 1:28:17Casey Handmer?

  Yeah, exactly. Would you, would you rather have them on, on your team or against you? And, and I just see this, this mistake time and time again, which is like, well, this technology will work if we can bring about some like massive behavioral change in the entire market or something like, probably that's not going to happen. But if you can produce a product like an iPhone, where, when the new one comes out, hundreds of million, hundreds of millions of people worldwide feel actively burdened by a thousand dollars of cash in their wallet. And they just, they just like, shut up and take my money. Then, then you've done the right thing, right? You're, you're thrilling people that you're, you're, you're giving them something that they, they'll happily part with their hard earned cash to receive. And, um, yeah, I mean, it's not like this is a mystery.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  I have one last question.

• 1:28:54Casey Handmer?

  Build something people want.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  I have one too.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, look, uh.

• 1:28:57Casey Handmer?

  We'll go fast.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, the scrolls project, is it just about inspiration or is there a practical application to that project?

• 1:29:09Casey Handmer?

  I think it's, there's a certain kind of person who really likes to curate, uh, curate and organize information. And, um, and I think it will ultimately tell us a lot more about our historical origins and past, and I think that's worthwhile.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned briefly the sort of AI doomsday scenario where the AI just realizes that it should blanket the earth with solar panels and to, uh, you know, feed itself. What else scares you in the world?

• 1:29:33Casey Handmer?

  That's a good question.

• 1:29:34Jordi Hays?

  To end on a high note.

• 1:29:39Casey Handmer?

  I think that when we figure out how to drastically increase human lifespans, it will turn out that we would have been able to build these drugs since the 1930s. And so we've, we've literally allowed billions of people to die painfully lonely in old age. When if we just had enough insight and enough effort, we could have figured out how to stop that a long time ago.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Wow. Interesting. Well, hopefully we go build them soon because the best day to plant a tree.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, unfortunately, we used all the GPUs to make Ghibli.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Maybe next week we could put it towards extending our lifespan.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Extending our lives. Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was that?

• 1:30:15Casey Handmer?

  I was gonna say one last thing. Like, one of the major problems with Doge is that, like, we have these entitlements, costs of social security, Medicaid, Medicaid, and so on. Like, 1% of the federal budget is spent on dialysis, right? These are all diseases of old age. Right? If we can just increase human lifespan by 10%, we cut that whole trench, trillions of dollars of annual spending by 10% because 10% fewer people die every year.

• 1:30:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:30:38Casey Handmer?

  Like, and they also get to not die. Like, this seems blindingly obvious. And yet, we spend less than 0.1% of our, of our national health budget on anti-aging research.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  That's, that's wild. Wow. Well, we'll have to dig into that more. Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  We would love to have you back on. Maybe we'll come over and we'll, we'll do one in the, in the castle at some point.

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  That'd be great.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. This is, this is fantastic conversation.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  Really enjoyed it.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Have a great weekend. Talk to you soon.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  What a brilliant, what a brilliant mind.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Yes. Scrolls enjoyer. You always get good stuff with scrolls enjoyers.

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Scroll guys.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  The scroll guys. We gotta have the whole, the whole, maybe we should do a scrolls day.

• 1:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Scrolls day.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  But back away from scrolls, we're going back to books. We got Nadia Asprey Huff coming in the Temple of Technology. She has just announced a new book called Anti-Memetics. She's a former Stripe Press author in the, in the, the Hall of Fame of authors, in my opinion. If you publish on Stripe Press, you're...

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  If you can publish there, you can publish anywhere.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  That's what people have been saying.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's really, it's really the NFL of publishing. Yeah. Like, it's, it's, uh, anyway, let's bring her in.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  Super excited for this. Let's see.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. We're having some fun.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for joining. Can you give us-

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised that Delian didn't join, by the way.

• 1:32:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  Because Pavel was about to have his, he was about to have this amazing, you know, this first-

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Do not send Delian the link.

• 1:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  He will just bomb-

• 1:32:11Jordi Hays?

  I think he has the link.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  ... this interview. He does have the link. Don't let him know that he can use the link because he will pop on. He's a great hype man. Anyway, do you mind just a brief introduction and give us a little high level of the book?

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  Sure. I'm Nadia, writer and researcher. I just published this new book called Anti-Memetics: Why Ideas Resist Spreading. And it's about this idea of anti-memes, which are self-censoring ideas. So ideas that we find really interesting and compelling in the moment, but for whatever reason, they kind of resist sharing or being remembered. So I think we usually think that if an idea is good or interesting or compelling, it's going to find a way to share, be shared or spread on its own. But there's this whole other class of ideas. So things like taboos, forbidden ideas, stuff we don't really talk about in public, cognitive biases, so stuff that we are sort of like blind spots about ourselves that we don't really realize.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  All this kind of forms this class of ideas that are anti-memetic and don't spread super easily, even though they're interesting and brilliant ideas. So that's what I wanted to write about.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  How much of memetics is just actually compressing the idea down? I was thinking about how Lulu's Going Direct manifesto has this really pithy phrase, "Going Direct." Founder mode, same thing with the network state, kind of two words that really hits. Versus Leopold Ochenbrenner, wrote a fantastic essay about AI, called it situational awareness. We don't see people using situational awareness as a meme to talk about acceleration and where the future of AI is going. Is it just a packaging problem? Or is there something about the ideas itself that creates an anti-memetic property?

• 1:33:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think some of it is a packaging problem. Like, ideas themselves have these innate qualities that are memetic or anti-metic. Some of it is just about like how the person perceiving that or receiving it is like, how do they interact with that idea? So you can think of certain ideas that are spread really, really easily in certain networks, but not in others. Conspiracy theories are a good example of this. So yeah, I think it's a mix of both. It's partly about the idea. It's partly about the person that is like sharing it or receiving it.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure. Jordi?

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, one, I want to make this segment like the most beautiful ad for your book. So I'd like to go like through a number, a number of the, of the ideas. I did want to, a book had been going viral and I got a copy of it. I wanted to get kind of your high level take on it. It's funny, there was, this was maybe released in 2021. There is no anti-memetics division. It sort of went viral a little bit last year, but then it is no longer like for sale, or I guess you can buy it, or the paperbacks are trading. Is that the?

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Hundreds of dollars on eBay right now.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I have one, I should probably, you know, just sell it and buy like 20 copies. No, keep holding, keep holding. You're sitting on something that's worth a million. But it's, I just thought the great irony of like, you know, they were, they're maybe going after like, you know, something similar to what you've been researching it. But, but the, but then it's not even available anymore. So it's like not, not, not, uh, not spreading. They're dog fooding anti-memetics. Do you have any sort of like, uh? Take on that book. Yeah, I'm curious, like, and then more broadly, like, in researching this, like, what's the full breadth of what you were kind of like looking at, right? Because I imagine you were researching and finding like forbidden PDFs and books in a bunch of different areas, right? Of like this sort of esoteric knowledge that humanity ignores for some reason.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'll go a big plug for Quantum, who wrote There Is No Anti-Memetics Division. And he actually coined the term anti-meme like back in the day. And it originates from this fiction, like horror sci-fi kind of online wiki. And so, yeah, he published that book, I think, 2021. It's a horror science fiction book and it's about anti-memes as a sort of like anthropomorphized creatures that are. Kind of like these black holes, they destroy everything they touch, they consume everything that comes in contact with them, but for whatever reason, we can't seem to remember that we've interacted with them. And so there's this intelligence unit that is trying to fight anti-memes, but like can't even remember that they're doing it. Hence the title, There is an Anti-Memetics Division. Super cool book, highly recommend

• 1:36:21Speaker 05

  it and all of his writing, honestly. And that was the first book I read back in 2021 that kind of kicked off my interest in the topic. I had never heard of the concept of anti-memes before this. And yeah, I was reading that book, kind of like depths of COVID, yeah, 2021, sad, dark times, but like also, you know, it was kind of everyone was doing stuff in like group chats and they were doing stuff like Clubhouse was a thing and I had been working at Substack. And so I was thinking a lot just kind of about like, how does this concept apply to the real world and like where do anti-memes show up in the rest of our life? So that was definitely a direct inspiration for this book. But yeah, I wanted just kind of like a nonfiction treatment of the concepts.

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Totally. It was not practical in any way. It was just sort of like you said, a sci-fi horror exploration of it. Can you talk about?

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about, like, I feel like we're in such a weird time, like, our generation was sort of like, not born on the internet, but we sort of like gained consciousness on the internet and the internet is something that just like circulates ideas, both like fact and fiction, like extremely rapidly. And so in many ways, like conspiracy theories and these like sort of forbidden, potentially truths, or maybe it's fiction, you know, you don't know, that's sort of like, I feel like I've grown up in a world where I don't, you know, like, the only conspiracy, like, the only conspiracy theory I believe is that there are just like many, many, many, many conspiracies going on and all sorts of things at all times, right? So can you talk about, like, yeah, I think like, what, what can

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  people take away maybe from your book in terms of how to just like process information online when you don't know if something is completely false or an idea that, or something that's factual, or maybe it's an idea that's sort of just anti-memetic and it doesn't want to be known, or it doesn't want to be identified as, as truth?

• 1:38:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I thought about that a lot while I was writing this, just because I think there's a lot of doom and gloom about kind of like where the internet is right now, or like social media didn't turn out to be what we expected. And I really didn't want to write that kind of a book. And because it is partly about this transition from, you know, once upon a time, it was you could post whatever you wanted on Twitter and you weren't worried about like getting, you know, trolled, canceled, attacked, whatever. And a lot of people, I think part of why we kind of withdrew to group chats and these more private spaces is because we kind of just, you know, wanted to tune out, tune out all of that. But I really wanted to show that it's not that one is replacing the other. It's not like, oh, you know, Twitter or whatever is over and we're just going to all like go back into our little caves and only talk to our friends.

• 1:39:00Speaker 05

  But like both of these things actually feed off of each other and, you know, all the things that get workshopped in the group chats kind of make their way back out into public channels and vice versa. And I think like there's, there are things about that that are good and bad. And maybe to your point, just about, yeah, not being able to even tell what's real anymore, but like group chats aren't really like a safe haven from whatever is happening in, in public channels because they end up kind of like becoming these super incubators for crazy ideas. And so ideas can get even crazier and even weirder when they're being workshopped by like a small group of people. And so in some ways are kind of like mutating and making ideas even, even crazier. But yeah, I mean, not to be like overly defeatist about it, but I think it is also kind of like your reality is what you make of it.

• 1:39:46Speaker 05

  And like where we decide to direct our attention, what we decide to focus on, that is what your reality becomes. And so maybe that's a little bit scary or destabilizing to people to feel like they can't tell what's real anymore. But I also think if you just can find ways to harness your attention and focus on the things you actually care about, then life is not really so bad.

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And like you, you compared like, you know, what's happening in sort of the town square, like something like X. And then what's happening in group chats, right? Like oftentimes like we're in this world where there's sort of this like fiction appearing on the timeline. And then the truth is like racing through group chats and on a long enough time horizon, they intersect, right? Because like they almost like an idea can be like put out there and maybe people agree with it in the moment. But then eventually sort of what's happening in the sort of like private group chats like actually does start spreading and sort of like breaking containment. And in many ways, it feels like that's happening faster than ever, right?

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask a question about kind of like practicality here. I think a lot of founders and business folks think about can they align their company or their mission or their vision of the future along with a meme or condense it down? Obviously, the going direct thing has been a great encapsulation of like what Lulu does and it's helped her business as opposed to, in addition to helped people that have adopted that strategy. Is it possible to do the opposite, to take an attack on you and somehow twist it into an anti-meme so that the idea that is hurtful to you or your business or whatever becomes harder to discuss?

• 1:41:28Speaker 05

  Interesting. Yes, definitely. Yeah, I do talk in the book about this idea of like obscurantism, which Nick Bostrom coined, but the idea of like, can you make things boring or can you kind of hide them as a way of sort of suppressing them? So if you think about like suppressing ideas, people often think about like putting a hard, like a hard lock on it so that, you know, make it forbidden, make it password protected, whatever, but that often makes people more excited to figure out like what is actually going on under there. But if you make really, really boring and really uninteresting and like, or just like really difficult to parse, people kind of just lose interest and wander away. And that's definitely, that would be like an anti-memetic information warfare tactic, I guess.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen this where I've seen people chirping at each other on X and I've noticed that whoever puts up the longer piece of content usually ends the conversation. So you post, you know, I like SpaceX and then I quote tweet you and you're like SpaceX is terrible, but then if you quote tweet back with something that's just like an essay, I'll just be, oh, I'm tired, I'm out. And you kind of win by default.

• 1:42:33Speaker 05

  No left steering.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  And I've also seen the, I've also seen these attempts to take, you know, a legitimate attack vector and then, and then wrap it in political extremism on the left or the right. And so if you're being attacked by someone, you can say, oh, well, like that's an idea from 4chan or that's an idea that's from the Communist Manifesto. So we should disregard it and, and put it in the forbidden category, even if it's a legitimate criticism of whatever's going on. And so, I don't know, it's a fascinating topic.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  Can you, can you talk about some of the differences between anti-memetic ideas and anti-commercial ideas? And anti-commercial, I would... Put something like intermittent fasting in that bucket where nobody makes money if people eat less, right? Like, like, it's sort of this idea that like, there's, there's whole conspiracies around intermittent fasting, which is like, big breakfast was like, came in and they're like, you gotta eat a big breakfast and like, there's a bunch of people that benefit from like, the big breakfast, you know, uh, you know, complex. Uh, and then if you start going around and saying like, hey, you know, you can just have coffee or water and like, just eat lunch, like, it's hard to monetize that, right?

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  It's not like I can be like, hey, don't eat food and also like, you know, pay me to like, teach you how to not eat food and, and some people have done that, but like, I feel like there's maybe a line between ideas that are anti-mimetic and like, just don't spread for one reason. And then stuff that's maybe like, slightly more obvious, but it's just like, not spreading because there's no like, sort of economic or commercial interest that's like, trying to spread a certain idea.

• 1:44:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's super interesting. I hadn't actually thought about that yet. Um, yeah, I think like, there's still plenty of ideas that can spread mimetically, even without sort of like, a commercial engine behind them. So yeah, folk was, um, aphorisms, things like that. Uh, but you're right that, uh, having, especially, I think in like, the realm of like, health-related things. I'm just thinking about like, a lot of chronic health issues and stuff like that, where people kind of have to like, bumble around and like, find their own answers to things. And it's partly, even if they're like, you know, chronic health issues that tons of people are facing and dealing with, there's no like, clear answer to them. And I think sometimes, when the answer is something that can't be, yeah, uh, monetized or, or sold, then it's, it, uh, if we think of it as just like, another engine for driving the spread of information,

• 1:44:49Speaker 05

  if that engine is missing, then, um, something kind of might languish and, and not reach everyone that it should. So yeah, that's super interesting.

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, uh, Elon's positioning with XAI around the sort of like, truth-seeking AI? Like, is it possible that a, you know, properly-trained LLM could be more inclined to spread ideas that, that are sort of anti-mimetic within humans? Yet like, the machine is just like, you ask it a question, it's like, well, obviously like, this is like, you know, what you're dealing with, whereas a human would tell you, uh, you know, you know, some other, you know, answer that, that, uh, maybe was like, more correct in some ways.

• 1:45:26Speaker 05

  Hmm. I think it could be really useful for like ideas that are anti-medic on an individual level. Like I know some people will use AIs for this where it's like, tell me, based on the conversations we've been having, like, tell me something about myself that I don't know or I don't realize. And maybe just having someone that can just tell you straight up what the answer to that is versus your friends who might kind of not be super honest. That could be useful. I still think it's like really hard to spread things that are like taboos or forbidden ideas through a network. So even if one person really believes it and, and yeah, is totally bought into an idea, like, how do you get it to actually spread from person to person? And yeah, it's a little bit harder to think about like how that, that takes place.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Well, I'm super excited for the book. Congratulations.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should do what, like, once we get a full copy here, it's like actually ordering, we'd love, we'll, we'll do a deep dive on it.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Jordi Hays?

  And we'd love to have you back. We're gonna try to, yeah, we'll have you back on and we'll, we'll help the audience figure out how to make money.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  How to make money for anti-medic.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  Cause that's, that's what's gonna spread, that's what really matters. Really gonna get the book.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you, oh, my competitor? No one's ever heard of them now, all of a sudden. No one can remember them. They just disappeared from the internet.

• 1:46:35Speaker 05

  They're gone.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Cause we put anti-medic to work in capitalism. Fantastic having you. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:46:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

  And congratulations, two-time author now. Fantastic.

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Uh, we're going, uh, the opposite direction. We're going straight into the, uh, the AI SDR scandal that's going on. We're going back revisiting 11X. You heard, you might've heard about it earlier this week. Uh, 11X, there was a TechCrunch article said that maybe the ARR figures were inflated. Maybe they were using, um, uh, customer logos who had churned and they hadn't been removed from the, from the website quickly enough. We have the, uh, the founder of Rocks on, um, who is here to tell us all about SDRs, AI SDR technology, agents, and, uh, a whole lot more. But I'll let him introduce himself.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  Welcome to the Temple of Technology. Great to have you here. Uh, how you doing today?

• 1:47:32Speaker 06

  I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me on, John. Jordy, nice to meet you. Sam connected us. So excited. Excited to join your Ramp sponsor.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a Ramp sponsor segment.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Shout out to Sam.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Seriously, like I went to Ramp and I was like, okay, there's a whole bunch of noise in this whole industry, but there's probably something that's working. Like, just tell me what you guys use. And they were like, well, we use Rocks and it's great. And so they introduced us and I'm glad to have you here. And I want to learn more about the product genuinely because it's not something that we're using yet, but in the future, we imagine that, you know, millions of people are getting phone calls and emails from us every single day, encouraging them to listen to the show, encouraging them to, to, you know, download, rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts. We want a really intense million AI sales force and we're hoping you can help us with that.

• 1:48:22Speaker 06

  We want to swarm.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  We want to swarm.

• 1:48:23Speaker 06

  You want to swarm.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  The board.

• 1:48:25Speaker 06

  Amazing.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  But anyway, what do you actually do?

• 1:48:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So we're set pretty early. Most of it is all word of mouth as yet. So there's a big launch coming in a couple of months and we actually have a marketing team. So we built the first enterprise-ready agentic CRM. So it's a new generation of software where the CRM works for you. So Rocks and System like in Ramp gets installed. It unifies all your customer data in one place, keeps it in in Ramp's environment.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:55Speaker 06

  And then feeds a swarm of agents and our agents are designed to supercharge the Max Freemans, the sound of the world. Like, how do you supercharge the highest compensated frontline kind of winners or killers that go to market? I love it. And the way we do that is we double or triple their productivity by having these agents basically do a lot of the back office work. Like, and that's kind of our vision is the winning companies of tomorrow, like Ramp, are going to have supercharged builders with cursor and cognition and supercharged sellers with hopefully Rocks. So that's what we do.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  I love it. I have a ton of follow up questions. I mean, it sounds like one thing that we were kicking around was this idea that maybe it's too early to have an agent at the frontline actually writing copy, hitting send, and maybe we're more in the centaur era where a human with an AI is more powerful than either a human or an AI alone. Is that how you're thinking about it right now, even if in the long term, you're going full, the AI will actually send the emails?

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And kind of going off of that specifically, I think everyone can see why back, back office work is getting sort of automated.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Perfect for LLMs.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  And cursor can have an amazing NPS, even if it has like a huge error rate. Yet front office work, when you're interacting with customers, like everybody's experienced this at some point, you know, either the individual themselves or an employee of the individual like sort of messes something up with a customer. And it's sort of like this frustrating experience because it's like actually lost revenue versus like a lost five minutes, like correcting a bug. So balancing that sort of front, like the bigger challenge is probably like the front office work where the error rates just have to be much lower.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 06

  Absolutely. As Lulu kind of gave me the best advice, like we're building bat suits, not butlers. And the core idea comes from, I've held the bag all my life and I ran a good market for a public company before. We're not at a point where you can completely go FSD for your largest customers. The core idea is how do you supercharge Sam or Max or Eric with AI? But they are the ones who are orchestrating or QBing the system where they review and send. Because the cost of really messing up is in, in my kind of the small term feels like a bad email, but it's you, you would degrade trust through the brand, through the person. And that's what we focus on is how do you build an agentic system that you could use today?

• 1:51:16Speaker 06

  It's not vaporware, things we can use today, but how do we supercharge the kind of frontline kind of back carriers? I think over time, like there's going to be dramatic seat compression or, or efficiencies to be had where people who support those back carriers, which is kind of 80% of the employee base, they will have to kind of evolve to thrive or, or kind of risk basically not being relevant.

• 1:51:39John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the innovator's dilemma sustaining innovation in agentic systems versus disruptive innovation? Logan Bartlett on his show said that, you know, if you go back to mobile, the, the, the sales force of mobile was just sales force. And his thesis was that maybe the sales force of AI is just sales force, but, and they're obviously doing stuff in AI. But at the same time, we're seeing Apple drop the ball on product development. Google's dropping the ball on product development. It feels like there's more fertile ground than ever. So how have you reasoned through that? And why are you taking this bet? Even though there's some people that are saying, hey, it's only a matter of time till the big guys get it together?

• 1:52:17Speaker 06

  A hundred percent like Benny Off's the goat. Like he's the goat of all goats.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Benny Off, folks. They're a legend.

• 1:52:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, like I grew up not in the Bay Area, like you read up on them and they're the big inspiration. So if you look at ServiceNow and Salesforce, they have a massive advantage because they have distribution, but also data, like kind of firm belief is that the alpha is in working with the intelligence providers and being earning the right to be the custodian for enterprise data and bringing in public data. So our position is what we're arbitraging is what some, somebody who holds kind of a bag at a public company knows is traditional systems have both lost usage, the users, they don't want to use them. They use new tools, but they've also lost data. Data is now in the warehouse. So if you, 40% of the data in a, in a software kind of data warehouse, like a snowflake is actually go to market data. So when we think

• 1:53:09Speaker 06

  about kind of building these new systems, incumbents, a $3 billion kind of incumbent has a massive advantage. But what we're focused on is how can we A, earn the eyeballs of the Sams and, and Max Freeman's of the world, but do it in a way where we're doing a rug pull where build a system of record, which indexes data that's not already in the system of record, right? So Ross gets installed, indexes everything in the warehouse, brings in, you can connect all the other sources. And I think the winning kind of companies would be folks who bundle data and users in these platforms and hopefully earn the right to be the next kind of D4 platforms.

• 1:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the pressure that you feel and then maybe other.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Other companies, specifically in San Francisco around, you see these companies coming out, you see these revenue charts, right? It used to be.

• 1:54:00Speaker 06

  The billboards on the 101.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  It seriously, in 2021, I remember saying, investors would say, you know, it's sort of best-in-class companies are getting to 1 million ARR in nine months.

• 1:54:09Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  And now it's basically like, okay, best-in-class companies are getting to 10 mil in three months.

• 1:54:14Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:54:14Jordi Hays?

  So if you're, and so what the, the sort of potentially toxic thing about this pressure is that it's making some people feel like, well, if I want to win as a company, like, we need to put up, you know, just these ridiculous numbers that, you know, and anybody that's built a company knows that like, like revenue ramp is not necessarily like always connect, you know, tied to like customer satisfaction or product quality or everything like that. So I'm curious to know, like, do you think that sort of pressure to grow extremely quickly is, is forcing people to make sort of like short-term decisions or riskier decisions? Or in some cases even like, you know, misstate facts?

• 1:54:58Speaker 06

  Yes, I think it's ultimately the founder's psyche. Like, I've been around the block, but I have to say two things this time around is makes me the most insecure. Like, all of us are very insecure, right? My wife's listening in, obviously, like, we're all insecure monkeys in some way. So two things. One is, I think this, this new generation is about talking about these crazy kind of, kind of revenue curves. The way I internalize it is ultimately like the secret to building enduring, high-quality revenue is to make customers happy and the right customers happy. So we focus on strategic, like, the seams of the world, enterprise customers, like Redis and MongoDB and Ramp, like, how do we land there? How do we earn the right to expand and be essential in these businesses, which will generate enduring revenue over time, as long as we're kind of helping them kind of secure

• 1:55:43Speaker 06

  and grow their own revenue? So that's how I internalize that. I think the game is going to be at quality about enduring revenue. And there are businesses like Wiz and Data Dog to be built now. It's just that Data Dog and Wiz, although they were rocket ships, they always focus on essential kind of solutions to really, really large businesses. And that's what we're focused on. The first part of the psyche is I think is not spoken enough is the fact is end consumer expectations are in this invisible asymptote where they're expecting singularity like consumers, because they've been soared singularity and are using perplexity in chat GPT, they expect all work to be done by software. So that is actually the one that keeps me up at night.

• 1:56:26Speaker 06

  Like, how do you deliver your gigantic experiences which are inherently probabilistic to meet these kind of insane kind of consumer expectations? And that's where I think the revenue products are going to come from. So the revenue stuff kind of really, really hits, but I kind of process it out. But the consumers and their expectation, there's some stuff that kind of keeps me up 24/7.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it internally, are you thinking with the team, like, how do we achieve the sort of like chat GPT moment for the enterprise, right? Like, you could imagine, like, there is some place that you guys could hit in terms of product quality that would be so magical that, like, you would get that.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  I mean, cognition kind of had that where they launched Devon and it was like this viral sensation, even though it was an enterprise agent for coding. But this is a great question.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like, do you think that's, do you think that that's, like, maybe it's the wrong way to look at it because businesses will realize, hey, we have something magic here, we're not going to talk about it, we're just gonna like, you know, it's anti-matic, you know, we just.

• 1:57:25Speaker 06

  Right, yeah, you're spot on. So we're in the boring space of ERP and CRM, the most essential, but also the most lucrative software market. Like, we've chosen the part to be the daily driver for all customer-facing knowledge workers. So we focus on building something that's a land expand, land with the maxes and the sounds of the world, but grow into a 200-plus kind of active users at ramp. Like, that's kind of the core motion. I think that agentic applications that win is where everybody's using it day in, day out. And so we optimize for like internal, like, post-land virality. So there is no seats, you land rocks and everybody uses it. And I think that's, that's at least my thesis is become a daily driver.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the actual instantiation of the product? Obviously, it sounds like you're plugging into the data warehouse, the snowflakes of the world. It sounds like you're maybe not plugging into the Salesforce installations. Is there a Rocks app? Like, how does a salesperson actually interact with Rocks day to day?

• 1:58:22Speaker 06

  Absolutely pure ramp like kind of cracked engineering shop. So we build product. We're pragmatic product builders and we work with the platforms. So we have a web app, an iOS app.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:34Speaker 06

  Um, the guy who built Ramp and Robin is here. Uh, we have a Slack app. We have an email app. So we want to be the front application where it is a swarm of agents working for you. It's powered by our own warehouse, uh, native CRM. So it's running in your warehouse. And it's a two-way sync to Salesforce or HubSpot, right? So that's kind of our core idea.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:58:53Speaker 06

  Um, in, in kind of large sophisticated organizations who are already winning, like the Mongos and these folks like, we would definitely integrate our API into the internal tools in most of the rest. We want to build an, an application that humans actually want to use. Uh, and then hopefully get two to three X more productive this year and put them on a path to being kind of 10 times more productive.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Love it. Jory, you got anything else?

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  That's all I got.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, this is fantastic. We'll have to have you back with this big news. I hear there's big news coming. I want him back when he announces it. I want to hear it here first.

• 1:59:23Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Well, one shot. So sorry, I'm a sports nerd. I grew up in India, getting up in the morning, seeing SportsCenter to see like Jordan and the Wizards. That's, that's when I started watching it. So congratulations on the success.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  You're, hey, hey, we talked about this morning, like there's going to be a one-name entrepreneur.

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:40Jordi Hays?

  For AI B two B SaaS and you could be that, you could be that guy. So you could be LeBron, you could be Kobe of B two B SaaS. We're rooting for you.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Wilt.

• 1:59:50Speaker 06

  Let's go.

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  Jordan.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for coming by. This is fantastic.

• 1:59:55Speaker 06

  Cheers, guys. All the best. Congrats. Yeah.

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Thank you. Well, we got another one-name entrepreneur coming in the temple of technology any minute now.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Augustus.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Augustus. You don't even need to know his last name. You might know him by his, uh,

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Augustus.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  The Rainmaker.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Former Roman emperor.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  Former Roman emperor. The, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Accused member of the deep state.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Accused member of the deep state. We're here to confront him, put on the tinfoil hat, break it down. I promised him we wouldn't go too crazy with the jokes because we know the internet is watching and this will be clipped.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  I won't go too crazy.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Augustus, I really appreciate you taking, uh, taking a shot and taking a chance on this crazy show.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, the man has no fear. He faces his, um, he faces his vocal opponent, uh, opponents, uh, daily.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, he really is good at duking it out on the timeline, never lets them get to the last quote tweet. Uh, he's having fun with it too, but it must be a high stress situation because the numbers are getting crazy. And we got Augustus here to break it down for us.

• 2:01:00Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Welcome to the Temple of Technology, Augustus.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I feel like your hair grew an inch. You must be drinking a lot of like milk or whatever to stimulate that, uh, hair growth.

• 2:01:09Augustus Doricko?

  I'm, I'm drinking Justin Mayer's bone broth, bro.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  There we go. Kettle and fire shout out. Let's hear it.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Former brother, brother of the week.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Former brother of the week, Justin Mayer's. Uh, can you give us, just set the table for us, for those who haven't been following the drama? What's going on? Uh, how'd you wind up in this situation? Is it frustrating? Is it hilarious? A little bit of both?

• 2:01:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's great. It's, it's the same effect as like the sort of historical attempted hit pieces where it's like, your attackers are like, he is the most powerful man in Silicon Valley. He is controlling the weather.

• 2:01:39John Coogan?

  We, yeah, the hit pieces have gone direct now. Like you're getting the puff pieces in the, in the mainstream media and then the decentralized media, the citizen journalists are coming for you. So break it down.

• 2:01:48Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah. No, dude, my favorite so far has been the guy that was like, this is clearly a CIA psy op to make weather modification cool. He's backed by Peter Thiel and the same clique of, the same cabal of VCs as all these things. Um, the, the state of the union is 29 states this year have proposed legislation to carte blanche, all weather modification and atmospheric engineering. And so these bills, they're essentially coming from a place of people being concerned about chemtrails and people being concerned about solar radiation management. Um, chemtrails, it's a suspicion that the government is like, what you see is contrails along streets and this guy, they suspect that's just like poison.

• 2:02:31Augustus Doricko?

  Probably not. I haven't seen evidence of that yet, but open to being convinced. And then solar radiation management is an attempt to dim the amount of sun that reaches the earth to cool the planet down. So it's this climate intervention. And then cloud seeding kind of just gets lumped in. Cloud seeding is what Rainmaker does. And it's nothing like the other two things that people are describing, but because nobody knows the difference, they're trying to ban it because they think that people are either getting poisoned or that we're some sort of like agenda 2040 anti-human globalist initiative. And so surreal as it's been, I'm both in the trenches in Twitter and in many state capitals throughout the union. A lot of them I haven't testified at because I realize that actually runs up a lot more craziness than maybe is good.

• 2:03:12Augustus Doricko?

  But we're in this, we're in this public knife fight with the government of Florida and Tallahassee just trying to, you, you know that tweet, that, that iconic tweet where Trump says like, I just want to stop the world from killing itself. Like, I just want to bring people water that need it. And I think that if you ban cloud seeding, you're basically banning like rocketry or fission. And so that's what we're trying to stop right now.

• 2:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about water scarcity? I think people, it's hard for them to process because they turn on the tap or they turn on the shower and just water comes out and it's not that expensive.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Their water comes from the faucet.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, we're here.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Vaseline comes from the pot.

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  We're here in Los Angeles, which is, you know, one of the most, you know, sort of arid, you know, parts of the United States.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  It's like only possible because of some corrupt bargain that happened to like reroute the river like 50 years ago, right?

• 2:03:58Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there's one, the Owens Valley situation. So LA County basically had to like, send out agents posing as private people to buy up all the land between like the Owens River Valley and then redirect the water. Then there's a couple of water barons that like, you can't even say the name of, or you'll be like, disappeared in California. But the, the California state water supply strategy, like from the Department of Natural Resources, says that half a million acres of farmland have to turn into desert by 2030 in California. In order to like maintain water supply for the cities. Like Phoenix, Arizona is banning new housing development because there's not enough water. Salt Lake City, people are getting respiratory problems because the Great Salt Lake is drying up. And there's not enough water. And then, you know, like the wildfires that go on all over the country.

• 2:04:43Augustus Doricko?

  That's because there's not enough water on the ground. And in the case of Florida, a lot of people have told me like, you know what, listen. I'm convinced that cloud seeding is useful and beneficial for a state like California that is in a drought and that that is a desert. But Florida, we get plenty of rain. Like, why do we need to bother modifying the weather here? Well, fourteen million acres of farmland in Florida is currently in a drought. And then thirty thousand acres of Miami Dade County just burnt to the ground because there wasn't enough water. Because there was a drought. So like, if if Mayor Suarez is listening, um, please save us. We, uh, yeah, we we just want to bring people water and and drought is much more ubiquitous and consequential than people realize. Like, if you want to make America healthy again, we have to grow food domestically.

• 2:05:28Augustus Doricko?

  And if we don't have enough water to do that, then it's going to be some kooky GMO, like Chinese stuff that gets shipped over the ocean. Or like soiling green product, not to.

• 2:05:39John Coogan?

  No, I hear you.

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  Deep cut.

• 2:05:41Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, that's that's where we're at right now with respect to drought.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  No, no, uh, yeah, a lot of.

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  What are these, uh? Is there anybody besides you, uh, fighting to save, uh, you know, uh, the the private and public, uh? Just private and public groups from being able to do, uh? Cloud seeding, like, are is it, is are are you the the last man standing, uh, or do you have a team?

• 2:06:08Augustus Doricko?

  So, well, I've got a great team at Rainmaker and I'm really grateful for that. And we've got a bunch of farmers, um, that are beneficiaries of our program, go to bat for us. Because like they previously had to tear up their pistachio ranches or their pistachio orchards because they didn't have enough water for them. And now they're better able to farm because of the production of water that we're we're doing. Um, but you know that that part where or that like famous Stanford speech where Teal says, um, you know, you should go after a really small market. Like, if there's lots of people involved and it's already too late, well. I'm not like the last man standing. I'm kind of like the first man standing. Um, so it's other than the farmers that we're helping and the other great team members I have a rainmaker running around the country.

• 2:06:48Augustus Doricko?

  It's it's Augustus Dureco V a couple states, 30 states.

• 2:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, and and what is that? Yeah, like, how do you even balance this sort of simultaneously? You have, uh, you know, you're you're a company, you generate revenue, you have expenses, you're sort of planning timelines, and you're also potentially fighting like legal battles, and you're also dealing with like technical risk in the business like, right? Like what you're doing is very hard. It can be done, but like, that's also a challenge like as you know, as an entrepreneur, you know, how do you kind of balance all those things? And it feels to me like, you know, the the sort of legal risk is like the most asymmetric, you know, risk, you know, you can always launch and you need to create a new prototype, you know, take another flight, etc.

• 2:07:39Jordi Hays?

  But then if there's sort of these like blanket bans, uh, that that feels like i- is that like taking up 60% of your time now, just making sure that you're going to be able to do this in five years?

• 2:07:50Augustus Doricko?

  Well, so not not quite. I mean, it's definitely like a large double-digit percentage. The interesting thing with respect to the political dynamic, though, is this. It's not really like a right-left issue so much as it is like an east-west west issue, because the West doesn't have water. So Democrats and Republicans alike on the western half of the US are like, oh, this is sick. I would love to have water. Then the people that have as much water as they have conventionally needed and aren't a subject to drought, they're the ones more wary of it. Um, so I'm not worried about Rainmaker domestically. At a state level, uh, just because there's a lot of states that we haven't gotten into yet, like Nevada or Arizona or New Mexico. I do think that the domino theory thing holds true to some extent. So yes, we do have to focus on it.

• 2:08:35Augustus Doricko?

  The super like funny, crazy outcome is that I just like, if Rainmaker was totally banned from the US, then we just double down on Riyadh, and then we like camp out there for five years and come back weathered and and, you know, wearing desert garb. But, uh,

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  My Iraqis.

• 2:08:51Augustus Doricko?

  Lawrence of Arabia mode.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  My Iraqis. My Dune.

• 2:08:54Augustus Doricko?

  My Dune. They're gonna send you to Dune. I watched, I watched Dune 2 in theaters five times, bro.

• 2:09:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:09:02Augustus Doricko?

  A religious zealot comes to turn the desert manic green.

• 2:09:05John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah, that's great.

• 2:09:07Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. So no, I, I trust my team a lot. I have a really great team.

• 2:09:09John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about, um, just like the general fear around cloud seeding? I think that right now with health and Maha, there's just this general idea that like, anything new is risky.

• 2:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, mudites, mudites are having a heyday.

• 2:09:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, bull market and let it, for sure. But I mean, at the same time, like, you know, you eat too much salt, your doctor will tell you that's gonna hurt your heart. And there's a million different things where even if it's safe at a certain level, you take it up by a hundred X and it gets bad. And there's just all these balancing and then also we do the mice studies, but does that really transfer? And, you know, what happens when someone's like, you know, vaping pink liquid for, you know, 50 years? Like, we don't really know and we're kind of figuring it out right now. How, what, what gives you confidence about the, the low impact of this?

• 2:10:06Augustus Doricko?

  Mm hmm. So, you know, I, I really sympathize with people that are worried about this because it sounds on its face like crazy to be modifying the weather and to be dispersing chemicals. But, um, to your point about like vaping stuff for 50 years and not having longitudinal data on the health outcomes. Like cloud seeding, even though Rainmaker is very innovative, even though a lot of new things have been done in academia that we're implementing from like the last five years. Cloud seeding is 80 years old, dude. This was invented in the United States in 1945. GE has the first patent from 1946. People have done 80 or 30 or 50 years, depending on the watershed, studies on the concentration of silver iodide that ends up in the water and the soil. And after decades of operation, you only see parts per trillion of this stuff.

• 2:10:51Augustus Doricko?

  Like you need super sophisticated instrumentation to even detect it in the first place. So there's, there's been no negligible health impacts found to either people or agriculture or the environment. And those studies, they've been done and like, should Rainmaker replicate those? Should we continue to do it just to prove it out further? Totally agree, but like, it's totally safe. And if you think about the, like, LD50, like the, the lethal dose of silver iod- It's less than salt. It's less than table salt. It's milligrams per kilogram with salt. And then it's 2,800 for silver iodide. So this is, this is like a resoundingly safe material to be using. And the data for a decade shows that.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Can you talk about a little of the history of, I feel like when it's easy to look at the chemtrails thing and be like, okay, well, like the most aggressive conspiracy theory there is that it's like literally like mind control. And it's like, we're such, we're so divided in America. I don't know. The mind control drugs clearly aren't working because what are they mind controlling us to do? But there is a legitimate criticism that like, when you fly a bunch of planes around, those contrails are emitting pollution and your, your skies get dirtier. And I remember after nine 11, all the planes were grounded. It was the clearest day in the skies ever. And there is some sort of like low key harm.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  And, and there's always these like knock on effects. I'm sure with the solar radiation management, same thing. We, we have been experiencing global warming, but we've also been experiencing global dimming. And those have been kind of counteracting each other in some way. Can you just talk about some of the history of these things and, and how you think about worrying about the, the second and third order effects of cloud seeding?

• 2:12:31Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. So with respect to weather modification and climate engineering, like the, the thing that I think everybody needs to realize is that we've been doing it unintentionally for hundreds of years.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:45Augustus Doricko?

  Like build a city, then you have a heat island that affects cloud formation and precipitation patterns. If you have a coal plant or a steel plant or nat gas plant, the steam and the aerosol you emit reliably creates more clouds and precipitation, like tens of miles downwind as well. The, the emissions from our cars, right? Like those have pollutants in them. Apart from just like CO2 considerations. So we, we do modify the weather unintentionally all the time. Rainmaker sees this as that like, we should be modifying it intentionally to either like unfuck the earth as it stands, or make it more lush and abundant. Once we've done the former. When it comes to knock on effects,

• 2:13:28Augustus Doricko?

  the common question is like, you know, if you're making it rain more here, is that reducing precipitation downwind there?

• 2:13:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:35Augustus Doricko?

  Totally reasonable question. Like I think on its face, that, that logic makes sense. Unfortunately, the system's pretty complicated.

• 2:13:42Augustus Doricko?

  It turns out that only nine percent of all of the water that traverses the atmosphere in the United States precipitates over it. The vast majority is either recycled by the oceans, precipitates over the oceans, evaporates away and never condenses again over the US. So if you just increase the utilized water in the atmosphere, then it's purely positive sum and you can select to some extent for which clouds aren't naturally going to precipitate with the appropriate radar and probes. The evidence of downwind drought is totally uncompliment. Nobody's provided reliable data there, but are people concerned about it? Are they rightfully concerned about it? Sure, totally. And then the last thing I'll say with respect to contrails.

• 2:14:24Augustus Doricko?

  You know, there's this funny thing that people realize where if you fly a bunch of planes early in the morning and then develop contrails, you'll actually cool that area locally in the planet to some extent because it'll reflect sunlight before it warms the planet up with the light of day. And if you fly a bunch of planes at sunset, then that will retain the heat and kind of act like an insulating layer and keep the earth warmer. So like just plane flights, you know, American Airlines, Delta, whoever, they are doing weather modification unintentionally, apart from any chemtrails stuff. I'm just hoping to give a little bit more sanity to the ways in which we're modifying the weather.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Earlier this week, there was a video that went viral of a very cinematic desert in China that has been reforested. Do you think you'd have an easier time in the public eye if you were just planting trees? Or is any modification of our terrain just a hot button issue regardless? And do they have to do cloud seeding in addition to that? Or are they just using traditional irrigation? Like, how does that? I wanted to talk to you about that Chinese video that went viral because it was so striking and it was like, for me, it was like, I want that here for sure. But I don't know how other people took it.

• 2:15:43Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, it looks like you get like a thatch roof in the middle of the Gobi.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, it felt like this idyllic like little preserve. You put a ranch house on that. The golden retriever is running outside. You're taking the horse down to the local.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Golden retriever mode.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  To the local saloon and it just seems like, like it's the, it's the West, right? Again, you have new land that people can go live in and that's just like a land of opportunity. And I think that'd be so cool. But yeah, what, what's your take on it?

• 2:16:11Augustus Doricko?

  Dude, I mean, that's what the Central Valley was. The Central Valley used to be deserts and swamps. And now it is the most productive agricultural region on the planet. It produces like 30% of all of the fruits and then the majority of like the red fruits in the United States. We used to terraform all the time, like the Hoover Dam was an attempt to terraform the West. I think that like people that, you know, like maybe it's a last man problem. Maybe it's Ludditism. Maybe it's just like general, like, well, no, I won't say that.

• 2:16:49Augustus Doricko?

  Like we've just lost the desire to be great. I think in the United States, we've lost the desire to like, build the future and see the future through. If I was just planting trees, yeah, for sure. It would be easier. You need the water though. So unless you're setting up enormous conveyance systems, which China largely is, and cloud seeding in addition to that, it's a nonstarter. There's a couple of technologies, you know, I mentioned last time, like soil amendments that can get soil to retain more water that would be good. But you know, trees, they emit dust that creates like a majority of our clouds in some regions and induces precipitation. Cloud seeding like it mimics that natural process. It's just with a material that works a little bit better.

• 2:17:31Augustus Doricko?

  So, uh, yeah, man, like I, I plan to plant trees in the future. I plan to make as many things green as possible. I hope that people like get on board with the vision to make deserts green and great, but it's going to take a minute.

• 2:17:45Jordi Hays?

  I had a funny experience at Hereticon. There was a guy talking about terraforming. I'm blanking on his name, but he put out this like amazing.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Thomas Huero.

• 2:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Thomas Huero made this amazing presentation. It was like 40 minutes long, showing all the different places around the world that we could terraform and how amazing it would be. And one of the places that he highlighted was. The Salt and Sea and how you could theoretically divert the Colorado River.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  I've been there with Augustus. We went out there.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 2:18:12John Coogan?

  And Ben.

• 2:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And then I went up to him afterwards and I was like, this is an amazing project. I would love to make the Salt and Sea Dubai. Which is like, you know, it's a.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Jordy comes up, how do we make money off this?

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  No, but I asked him, I was like, how do we actually do this? You know, I was thinking like, the way to do it is through a hyper commercial project that says all this land is worthless right now because it's toxics surrounding this sort of evaporating sea. Like if somebody were to come in and buy up all the land around the Salt and Sea that's now very depressed. And then start lobbying to actually make this stuff happen. Like it feels like you need like, like he, I asked him, how, how does this get done? He was like, I have no idea. Like somebody should try it, but like, I don't know how they would actually get it done. Is it, is it really just like one person caring that, that sort of like makes these kind of projects possible, right?

• 2:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Like in the case right now, there's like a good chance that whether, you know, weather modification, cloud seeding, et cetera, just would get banned if you weren't like flying to Florida frequently.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Great man theory of history.

• 2:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Great man theory of history. But, but, but yeah, like, like it feels like we miss air then the sort of Doge era. Like if we do enter a period of like deregulation in some areas, like some of these projects, you know, might be possible. But yeah, how, how do you think about the Salt and Sea opportunity? And then just like, you know, if we're even capable of doing projects at that scale anymore.

• 2:19:42Augustus Doricko?

  So a related thing, interestingly enough, is like, I think that there should be way more alternative finance that startups employ. I promise this is related. I'm going to wait until Q1 or Q2 26 to do this, but we're just going to stand up a land fund. And we're just going to start buying up the land that currently isn't arable, primarily in Arizona and California. Because the same acre of land that's worth like six grand in either of those places has the same soil quality that the Central Valley does that would sell for like 70 to 500,000. Like we'll, we'll set up a subsidiary that we sell some equity in to get LPs involved so that we can terraform that and then flip the land or keep it as an agricultural asset.

• 2:20:27Augustus Doricko?

  That is only made viable because of the water that we bring. Um, it has to be a commercial interest. I don't think that we, you know, may, maybe America at one point had like, maybe there's this idyllic previous America that existed. I'm not sure where people did things just for the public benefit, um, or because it was cool. Um, now, yes, it has to be cool, but moreover, like there has to be commercial interest and, um, yeah, I'm going to do exactly that. And I, I hope that somebody beats me to it for the sake of all of the benefit that'll come from it. But, um, if they don't, I'll make a lot more money because of them.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  This is hilarious because, uh, you're going to be duking it out when you're buying that land because Casey Handmer, we had him on the show earlier. He wants to put solar panels all over it and turn it into a parking lot. And you're going to be like, no, like I'll pay a dollar more per square foot. But, uh, I, I, I do.

• 2:21:15Jordi Hays?

  We can have the auction. We'll have the, we'll do the auction.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Hey, five dollars, five dollars. I have six dollars. I, I do have a question about, uh, the, the cloud seeding stuff. It feels like, I mean, it, all of this stuff is somewhat zero sum. Like we're not really creating new water. We're kind of moving it around. Uh, but desalination seems awesome. I was looking at it pretty intensely a year ago and it seemed really difficult, honestly. But, uh, desalination, like what is your take there? And it just feels like we have, you know, I, I would expect a Gundo company to be doing this. Like we have people working on nuclear now. We have people working on solar. You're working on cloud seeding. Like, like desalination, if I

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  heard like, oh yeah, there's some hot guy, hot startup who's working on, um, on desalination. I wouldn't be like, oh, this is breaking my mind right now. I'd be like, of course, that's the next thing that the guys will go after in the El Segundo because like they've kind of checked the box on everything else. Uh, what's the state of desalination and what's your take?

• 2:22:17Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. Um, D cell is great. I'm not anti D cell. I don't think that we step on each other's toes. Um, it is a modification of the water cycle, right? Like whereas, whereas they are taking salt water out of the ocean, making it fresh and usable. We're taking cloud water out of the sky and bringing it down to make it fresh and usable. Um, it's, it's relatively efficient right now. I think there's a lot of promise in, um, Catalytic desalination, I'm not enough of an electrical engineer to come up with something sufficiently innovative in the space, but I think that probably shows more promise than RO. It's relatively efficient as it is.

• 2:22:54Augustus Doricko?

  The problem with desalination for giga-scale American projects for a lot of the world that is commonly undersupplied with respect to water is conveyance. We can set up a huge desal project in LA, sweet. No dice for Colorado, doesn't matter for Nevada, barely even matters for the Central Valley. Because you have to step hundreds of miles of huge pipes and then maintain those pipes for as long as the project exists. And it's doable, like the California State Water Project is evidence of conveyance working, but it is crazy infrastructure and crazy eminent domain that goes into shipping that water. So should California be more reliant on it? Totally.

• 2:23:36Augustus Doricko?

  Could we like with tariffs or something, strong-arm Mexico into giving us like the Sea of Cortez to desalinate for Arizona? Maybe. But if you're in the interior of the United States, the only way that you can make more water is if you bring it down from the sky. And that's who we're primarily trying to serve.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  This was Blake Masters' point that I really enjoyed. He said, you know, how do we get water into the interior states, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico? Well, we're going to reroute all the water from California into those states. And then California, the future of water in California is nuclear power desalination. And he said that like 10 years ago. Haven't heard anyone try and build it. Maybe he should have stuck with venture capital and backed that company because I want it to happen. But maybe it'll happen soon. That'd be great.

• 2:24:20Augustus Doricko?

  Or no desal, no cloud seeding, boiling the ocean. Nuclear boilers on the surface of the ocean to make big enough clouds to fly inland.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, so you just make the clouds and then float them over the river, atmospheric rivers, right?

• 2:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Many people have wanted to boil the ocean, but not literally. So we need more literal ocean boilers.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  I have a more personal question. How are you doing with all this? I care about, you know, I'm lucky to be an investor in Rainmaker, but I care about you, you know, even more on a personal level. I think your prefrontal cortex is like, you know, about to maybe fully develop, right? But like, you're under a lot of pressure for being like, you know, in your mid twenties, like, I, you know, anybody who's had a post go viral or sort of break containment knows what happens. Like, your message requests on every platform are probably like, you know, very dark. And, you know, are you, you know, you seem like you're handling it incredibly well, but does it ever, does it ever get to you?

• 2:25:23Augustus Doricko?

  That's really, that's really caring. Thanks for asking, man. Um, you know, like, I, I view Rainmaker as the best means by which I can serve God in my lifetime. And I owe everything in my life to Jesus Christ because of all that he's done for me in this life and then hopefully in the next. So this, this situation that I'm going through, no big deal at all. Like, if it ends up on the other side with, you know, ideally me having gotten to educate and convince some people and bring them more water in places where they need it, I am happy to take the punches into death

• 2:26:03Augustus Doricko?

  threats in the interim. And even if it didn't work out, you know, I'm gonna give it my all. And I was a high school debate kid, so I live for this kind of dorky.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Do not mess with the high school debate kids. They will go to war with you on the timeline.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we kind of predicted, like, like, the rise was so quick, the mood would shift, but I didn't expect that this was the instantiation of that mood, the shift around the vibe of the company, right?

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just have to say, like, there's so many people rooting for you, right? Like, you really are, you know, your critics that call you an industry plant, you know, in many ways, like, you are, you know, you are a product of our industry and there's just a lot of people, you know, rooting for your success. So, proud of you for not, not letting the...

• 2:26:59John Coogan?

  Never back down.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Never back down.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Always claim victory.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Always claim victory. Don't let the haters get to you. And I would say, you know, like, have a good rest of your Friday, but I'm sure today's basically a Monday for the Rainmaker team. Job's not finished.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm so sorry that the squat rack had to go. How are you getting fitness in these days, then?

• 2:27:22Augustus Doricko?

  That was tragic, dude. I am walking to and from the office, because I live four blocks away in Gundo, and otherwise I'm going hard skinny priest mode. I'm big skinny priest.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  Skinny priest mode. You've been the muscular warrior. I look forward to when you exit this and become a portly merchant. It's gonna happen. You're gonna IP other companies, sell it all, and become a private equity guy, roll it up the rest of the farmland or something.

• 2:27:54Jordi Hays?

  Rest of the world.

• 2:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. The portly merchant is the future, for sure.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm excited to have you back on when you're doing some of the land stuff, because like, that does feel like, you know, verticalizing and like capturing the full value that you guys can create over time is just like, very obviously, like, you should own the land that you're raining water down on and, you know, gain, you know, the full economic benefit of the work. So, it's fantastic having you on.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  As always.

• 2:28:26Augustus Doricko?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Our weatherman.

• 2:28:28John Coogan?

  Our weatherman.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  We needed a weatherman. We got it.

• 2:28:32Augustus Doricko?

  We're forecasting for TVPN.

• 2:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  It's, you can't do forecasting would just be too easy for you, because like, yeah, there's gonna be rain like in that square mile over there.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need the Zoom background, like, the green screen, and you and like, the map of, next time you're on, fake Zoom background with the map of LA, and you can tell us where it's gonna rain this weekend. I'll have you on Friday. Hang out. It'll be fun. Great hanging. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  That's great. And so, next up, we have Mike Newp from, he founded Zapier. He also founded Arc Prize, which we've talked about on the show before. So, Arc Prize, I highly recommend everyone go and check it out and try and do them. So, Arc Prize is a AGI eval, an evaluation that is designed to be Hard for AI, but trivial for human beings. And so they look like puzzles and there's a grid of squares that are different colors. And your goal is to is to recreate the pattern or understand the pattern.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  It gives you a whole bunch of references and then you are tasked with creating the solution to the puzzle. And it's been very, very difficult for AI. AI has struggled with this, even though it looks like something that should be able to be one shot. And Mike is in the studio now.

• 2:30:01Mike Knoop?

  Here we go.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Welcome, Mike. How are you doing?

• 2:30:03Mike Knoop?

  Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. I'm doing good. How's your Friday going?

• 2:30:06John Coogan?

  Oh, it's great. How's yours?

• 2:30:08Mike Knoop?

  Quite excellent. Spent a lot of time with the research team.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  Oh, awesome. Uh, can you give us just a brief introduction, your background, and then how you wound up working on Arc Prize? And kind of what you're excited to announce most recently?

• 2:30:19Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, so I'm, I guess, probably best known for a couple of Zapier about 15 years ago. Uh, an automation company that's been working on the last 13 plus years. Um, and you know, I had sort of like, I'm AI curious. Uh, I got, I went sort of all in on AI early January 2022, when the chain of thought paper first came out. All these like LM reasoning benchmarks were sort of like spiking up in performance. And it got me really curious, like, are we on path for AGI or not? And this ended up leading to Zapier deploying, I think, a lot of AI products really early into the market. And there was this trend I had seen and heard. I spent, you know, probably hundreds of hours talking with customers around, you know, playing AI agents. Zapier's been deploying it for a couple of years now. And the the feedback was always consistent, like, hey, I get the, I get the hype, but like, they just, they're not reliable enough yet.

• 2:31:04Mike Knoop?

  You know, they don't, they don't work two out of 10 times. And that just doesn't work for these unsupervised automation products. And this was sort of in contrast to all this like AGI hype, right? That I see on Twitter all day long.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:15Mike Knoop?

  Same thing. I'm sure you guys saw, you know, the 2023, 2024 era. And so I tried to set out to figure out, how do I like, explain this? Because like, I have two sets of lived experiences that sort of don't match. And, uh, this is how I rediscovered, uh, France Washington's, uh, Arc Benchmark that was originally published in 2019. Um, and I sort of expected to have gotten kind of beaten by this point, you know? Uh, first looking into probably, again, 2023, 2024, surprised that basically hadn't. And not only hadn't been beaten, there'd basically been no progress in it, uh, which I thought was really fascinating, given the fact that we've like scaled up these language model systems by almost like 50,000 times over the last, you know, three, four years prior. And so that was kind of the genesis of me leading to meeting Francois and kind of pitching with this idea of like, hey, I think this is literally the most important unbeaten AI

• 2:31:59Mike Knoop?

  benchmark in the world. I think it makes a really important statement that like pre-training scaling alone is not sufficient to get to AGI and more people should know about this fact. And so we launched Shark Price together to try to sort of raise awareness of the benchmark and just honestly inspire more people to work on new ideas again towards AGI.

• 2:32:13John Coogan?

  Can you talk about a little bit about the prize money and then what happened with Arc Prize one and then what's happening now with the second iteration?

• 2:32:22Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. So when we launched last year, you know, like I said, there'd been very little progress towards I think GPT four O had was scoring 4% on the benchmark. That's four years in, five years in.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  And again, like a like a like an eight year old should be able to do these.

• 2:32:35Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, especially our AGI one. It was, it turned out to be in retrospect quite, quite simple. It's very binary sort of fluid intelligence test.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:43Mike Knoop?

  And yeah, like, you know, all the knowledge you need to solve this benchmark are doable by you acquire the knowledge very early on in childhood development. You can take the tasks in fact yourself if you go to arcprize.org. We have a big player. You know, I think what's what's special about Arc is that it is a it the sort of design concept of it is it targets something that's quite straightforward and easy and simple for humans but hard for AI. And this is in contrast to every other AI benchmark that exists today, which are trying to like challenge this like PhD plus plus frontier, you know, like frontier math or humanity's last exam. You know, these are sort of AI benchmarks that you really do need to be like PhD level plus to be able to even solve as a human. And in contrast, Arc makes a very different claim that, hey, there's still a lot of like very straightforward

• 2:33:28Mike Knoop?

  for human capability that these frontier AI systems don't have. And so that's why we launched Shark Prize during the contest. The I think one of the things our price 2024 will be noted for is probably the introduction of this like test time adaptation method. That was some of the papers that came out from the the contest. We had a big million dollar prize in order to beat the benchmark to get to 85%. No, no one did. You also have to do it with a very high degree of efficiency. And we kind of expected that was going to be the case. We also this paper track where people could submit new ideas and push the conceptual forward force, which is where most of the coolest progress came out from from last year. And then at the end of the year, obviously, last fall, we started seeing things like a one and O three.

• 2:34:07Mike Knoop?

  And these are, this is a very big, this is a very big update, I think, because systems like O1, particularly O1 Pro and things like O3 are not just purely scaling up language models. These are not language models anymore. These are really AI systems. They have a big model as a component of the system, but they have some sort of synthesis engine on top that allows them to reuse their existing pre-training knowledge at test time to recombine the knowledge, and that allows them to make significant progress towards ARC. And we saw it with three in December, you know, score a pretty high degree of efficiency solve ARC AGI on it's 75%. So they're not quite at the 85%. And then, you know, opening I tested an even higher compute version of it that probably was probably a couple million dollars to test. They got 87%, I think.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:34:53Mike Knoop?

  And so that was kind of where we wrapped up last year. We've been part of work over the last couple of years.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  Just real quickly, while you were saying that, fantastic setting the table. I went to arcprize.org/play. I did the daily puzzle. I still got it. I'm still at a job. You could do it at home if you want. arcprize.org/play.

• 2:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Do you think with all the billions of dollars flowing around the ecosystem, do you think ARC Prize is capital constrained in any way? Like, would we have seen, you know, better results today? Or is this sort of social status of just like, you know, achieve?

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  This is kind of like scaling, are we compute bound here or is it algorithm bound?

• 2:35:33Mike Knoop?

  Right now, I think ARC AGI 2 that we just introduced this week on Monday is pretty direct evidence that we need new ideas still to get to AGI. We shared, I don't know if we can throw it up or we can put in the show notes or something. There's a chart I shared on Twitter that shows the scaling performance of even frontier AI systems like O1 Pro and O3 against the version one of the data set that we've been using for the last five years, and then version two that we just introduced this week. And basically it resets the baseline back to 0%. Language models, parallel LLM systems are scoring like 0% now again on on ArcB2. Single COT systems like R1 and O1 score like 1%.

• 2:36:15Mike Knoop?

  And the sort of estimates we have right now for the frontier systems that are actually adding pretty sophisticated, you know, synthesis engines on top like O1, Pro, and O3, single-digit percentages on their efficient compute settings. So I think there's a very interesting point that like, you know, we we kind of moved from this regime where people were claiming, oh, we're just going to scale up language models, right? More data, more parameters, we're going to GGI. And people realize, I think, that's not quite the story now. And then there's a new story that's emerged over the last, like, five months, which is, oh, we're going to scale up this test and compute. And that's going to get us GGI. And I think what V2 shows is that that's not quite either. We we still need some structural ideas in order to like, get to a regime where we can scale up to actually reach human performance on this stuff.

• 2:36:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, like, with how mu- how much human capital is sort of concentrated in San Francisco? Like, do you think that is in many, in the, in the sort of like geographic concentration of so many of the brightest minds in AIs? Sort of like potentially even holding back like new random ideas? And that's why Arc can potentially sort of, if we need new ideas, like, maybe they don't come from the sort of the center of the AI universe. And maybe they come from, you know, some random kid on the internet who's just like, you know, has, has the time to think, you know, completely independently and.

• 2:37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, this feels kind of scrolls adjacent.

• 2:37:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:37:32John Coogan?

  You, you, you put this idea out and a bunch of people can take wild, wild swings at it. And you get just new idea generation.

• 2:37:40Mike Knoop?

  I gotta say, thank you to Nat Frey, you talk about the CB's challenge.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:37:43Mike Knoop?

  Literally, I'm very inspired by what they were able to accomplish. And that was one of the motivations for actually running the prize in the way we did. I think, yes, part of the goal of running our prize was specifically to try and reach independent researchers and teams. And like, give them a problem to work on that they could actually make meaningful frontier progress on, right? I think the, especially in academia in the last maybe five years, there's been this disheartening belief of like, hey, can we really? Advance the frontier because like you have to have billions of dollars in funding to scale up these language models. And I think ARC shows that like, yeah, there actually are frontier problems that are unsolved. That individual people and individual teams can actually make a difference on today. You know, that part of our whole goal of launching our processor was re-inspire a lot of independent researchers to work on things like this and bring new ideas to the fold.

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  I remember when when chat GPT got a computer and it was and it was able to write some Python code, then execute it. Is there, are there restrictions on kind of custom systems that are LLM or reasoning model driven? But fine tuned to help with the execution of ARC prizes? Is that, is that breaking the like the the rules? Or is that something that is actually encouraged and fine? How do you think about like, I guess it all, it all boils down to like overfitting on this problem. But it seems like even with the incentive to overfit, it hasn't really happened yet.

• 2:39:14Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, ARC, this is one of the reasons ARC lasted five years was because it was, it had very good design, original design built into it with a public test set and a private test set.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:39:23Mike Knoop?

  And that private test set really prevented folks from being able to sort of overfit on it. And so we, there's actually two tracks for the ARC Prize Foundation. We have the the contest track. This is on Kaggle. This is the like big grand prize. All the prize money is attached to this. Kaggle graciously donates a lot of compute to allow us to host there. And on the grand prize is basically to get to that 85% within Kaggle's efficiency limits. So this is about get about $50 worth of compute per submission that you send in. And this is like a pretty high bar for efficiency. And in fact, this is not an arbitrary bar. We do think that efficiency is actually a really, really important aspect of intelligence. You know, you can brute force your way up to intelligence, but we really do want to be shooting for like human targets and efficiency for this stuff. That's the contest.

• 2:40:06Mike Knoop?

  When we launched last year, there was a lot of demand from just the community, the world on like, hey, I, okay, I get that, like, I can't run my big language model on this, you know, in Kaggle, but I really want to know how to frontier AI systems do. And so we launched a second track that's hosted on arcprize.org, where we benchmark and test all the like frontier commercial systems to showcase what are they, you know, capable of doing. Basically, these existence proofs that I think will eventually, you know, filter down to the higher efficiency solutions and open source solutions that can be run on something like Kaggle. And even there, like, within this sort of same efficiency and, you know, accuracy specs, we still haven't seen any frontier AI system beat R K G I two, let alone R K J one.

• 2:40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:44Mike Knoop?

  So there's still a long way to go.

• 2:40:45John Coogan?

  What does that track actually look like? Is, does that mean that, like, the team from OpenAI is writing the specific prompt? Are they doing prompt engineering? Or is it your team is just taking the API and, and giving everyone kind of the same goal? Is there any standardization there?

• 2:41:02Mike Knoop?

  There is. We, so we, Arc Price does most of the testing today ourself. Like, we basically, we wait for API access, either get early access or you wait for the public access. And we have a GitHub repo where we just have a standard, very simple prompt that we use to baseline across all the sort of frontier systems that, that we test. OpenAI situation was a little different because they had reached out to us and said, hey, we think we've got a really impressive result on the public eval set and we'd like your help to verify on a semi-private set, which is what we created that data set to be able to do. And in that case, there were really, you know, very little prompt engineering at all. It was very, mostly just a verification of what we, what we'd seen from them. So yeah, the, in all these cases, the, the amount of prompting that goes into these is extremely minimal, or basically just giving it the sort of grid with numbers

• 2:41:47Mike Knoop?

  and asking it to solve it and it directly goes into it.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Can you talk about consumer AI agents we've talked about on this show? Like, it feels like, you know, once a week, someone comes out and says they're building the consumer AI agent that's gonna like, book you a hotel or book you a flight or like, do, do these things that sound really simple and then like, nobody's delivered, to our knowledge, like a truly magic, agentic consumer experience to book a flight. Even, even, you know, you could use like OpenAI's operator to do this, but like, even when you're sort of watching operator work, it's like, it feels like you're using, it doesn't feel like truly magic yet. And just, you know, given, like, in many ways, like, Zapier is just like the, like such a foundational company when it comes to.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Automating anything on the internet. I remember that was magic to me as a kid where I was like, oh, data, you know, a kid, I'd say like in like college, right? It's like,

• 2:42:45Mike Knoop?

  Yep.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  Wait, data came in here and then it just went and did this other thing or like I did this one thing.

• 2:42:49Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, it feels like a supercar, right?

• 2:42:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so in many ways, it's like criminally underrated in terms of getting to that sort of like, you know, agentic internet. But like, why haven't people been able to like, I even saw like perplexity, like was saying last week, like, we're building, you know, consumer agents that's going to like book your flight. So like, and Apple's promised this and everybody's promised it, but we haven't seen that magic experience yet. And I'm curious why you think that is.

• 2:43:17Mike Knoop?

  We've been trying to deploy agents for two years at Zapier. And this was kind of what led me to sort of originally get a bit interested in ARC is, you know, it's this reliability problem. Language models fundamentally are stochastic in terms of how they work. And so you're just never going to get that 100% accuracy directly from the model without adding a lot of extra additional guardrails. So we're like processing on top. We've done some of that for Zapier. The way that I kind of think about it, you've got these concentric rings of use cases that kind of get locked as reliability and consistency goes up. And today, we're pretty much still in the, and this is true at the frontier. We're pretty much still in the kind of concentric ring of like personal productivity and team-based automation, where the risk to failure isn't very high, right? Like if you're going to start deploying one of these like completely unsupervised agents into the wild, you're going to have a pretty high bar, right?

• 2:44:01Mike Knoop?

  If there's a sort of high degree of risk, if this thing goes wrong, it will burn customer trust or brand trust or something like that. So that's what we've been kind of seeing is companies and users sort of slowly increasing those concentric rings as the progress, as the technology is improving. I actually think we're going to start to see agents start to work this year, specifically because of progress in ARC. I think this is an underappreciated fact. Like people always ask like, hey, don't ARC looks like puzzles? Like, what's the economic utility of this stuff? One of the most important things that ARC tests for is your ability to adapt to problems you haven't seen before. That's really the spirit and the essence of what it is. It's saying, hey, can you solve problems? You didn't just memorize, but you actually have used knowledge you did memorize to like solve new things that you've never seen before. This is fundamentally the same aspect, like thing we're testing for in terms of generalization or reliability.

• 2:44:46Mike Knoop?

  With with agents. So I think because we're starting to see AI reasoning systems that are able to make progress against R K G I one, albeit relatively inefficiently. Uh, but the capability is sort of now existing. There are AI systems out there that exist some degree of fluid intelligence. That's going to start increasing the reliability and more and more of those concentric rings are going to get unlocked, I think, starting this year.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  I want to talk about um, just like AI AGI ASI metrics. I I feel like Arc Prize is a fantastically important benchmark. I agree with you on that. Ray Kurzweil has been benchmarking against just like flops to human flops. Basically, he's put the singularity at twenty forty five. He kind of nailed the Turing test date, I believe. Um, but I've I've been kicking around this idea of like, maybe the real test of like AI. Hitting some sort of like tipping point is just like how much economic value is being created by AI and

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  once that hits some sort of like ten percent of total global GDP or fifty percent, then we've reached the AI singularity or something. Uh, are there any metrics that you're looking at for kind of this like intelligence explosion, ASI, AGI? But outside of like an individual moment or, you know, application use case benchmark, something more uh, global and like human relevant.

• 2:46:11Mike Knoop?

  You know, prag- pragmatically, um, you know, I think the the definition that I use for AGI these days is basically when we stop being able to easily find tasks that humans can do that AI can't do. We've got, we've got AGI. Um, and you know, I think that's like I said, a bit of a pragmatic answer. Uh, one of the things that surprised me about R K G I two was the relative degree of ease by which we were able to create it. Right? Given this like big moment in December of like. Oh three beating R K G I one. Um, you know, it was actually not too hard for us to come up with tasks that we are able to sort of verify. We actually did a controlled human study to make sure every task in the B two data set was solvable by at least two humans on the same rule set.

• 2:46:53Mike Knoop?

  Um, and we were able to find that relatively easily. So I, I think that shows we still have ways to go. Um, I, I think once we hit that bar though, when the gap between like easy for humans, hard for AI is zero. I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to like argue the opposite side that like we, we don't have AGI. Um, I, I'm not, I don't find the economic like measurements quite as useful for understanding the capabilities of what frontier AI does. I think it's a good measure of impact and I have no problems using it for that point. But I think if you want to use like an economic measure to make a statement about capabilities, the challenges it obscures and there's multiple ways to get to that outcome. And this is one of the challenges of like language models, like language models generally work in like a memorization style regime.

• 2:47:37Mike Knoop?

  Where they're right, learning lots of data, they're able to apply it to very similar types of patterns that they've seen before, but not novel patterns. That's what R K G I, R K G I shows. And like those have economic utility. It turns out that like intelligence is just memorizing actually does interesting things for us. Uh, Zapier is making money with the current regime of AI today. And so I think if you really want to like, understand capabilities of frontier AI systems to make predictions based on the capabilities, you need more precise, narrow like wedges on that capability. And that's really what R K G I tries to be is this wedge on, you know, do, do, do these AI systems have the ability to actually adapt to problems that they haven't seen before and acquire skills, you know, rapidly and efficiently to apply to new things that haven't been done before.

• 2:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a little, a little more fun, uh, question. What, what was your reaction to, uh, this week's sort of Ghibli moment? It, it felt like, uh, we, we talked about this on the show earlier, but uh, the, the funny thing for me is like, so we had a couple of posts each that sort of like broke containment out of like traditional like teapot or whatever.

• 2:48:38Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:39Jordi Hays?

  And you know, there were, there was a lot of people quoting

• 2:48:42Mike Knoop?

  Like normies.

• 2:48:43Jordi Hays?

  People quoting our posts being like, all right, the jig is up. Like what app, what filter app did you use for this? So like, there's still people out there that like, you know, are just like completely unaware of like progress, but like for those that sort of use these tools every day, it felt like this magic moment where people are just one-shotting uh, these sort of image generation models and getting these sort of incredible.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Outputs, but, but, uh, and yeah, it just felt

• 2:49:08Mike Knoop?

  And what they're very excited about, like, I guess my, my question to you guys is, you know, do you think that,

• 2:49:15Mike Knoop?

  the degree by which we saw like the, you know, Ghibli-ization of like Twitter and X over this week? Do you think that was, uh, the degree of baseline interest in that like series and movie? Prior to this week, or do you think like most of the people that were posting that stuff were? This is the first time they've ever really got exposed to that kind of content.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I kind of ran a test on this inadvertently because I posted both a scene from Oppenheimer, Ghiblified, it got like 30,000 likes, uh, and then I posted an actual picture from Spirited Away, a real still from the actual movie, 24 likes. And so there's a little bit of like,

• 2:49:53Mike Knoop?

  I love it. I love the fact you're an experiment. That's fantastic.

• 2:49:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And so there's a little bit of like, okay, it's not just the filter, it's this recontextualization. I, I, I thought a lot of it was like the, there's a reason we're using Studio Ghibli specifically, because there are other art styles that you can recreate with style transfer for a long time. But Studio Ghibli fits this like perfect, it doesn't quite go into the uncanny valley. And then if the AI, if, if you say, hey, uh, I want you to recreate a picture of me, but use a Hollywood VFX pipeline to recreate the 3D model, and then do exactly what they do in the Avengers and take it to the top level, it'll just look like a photo because VFX has now become photoreal.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  And so you, you can't go full photoreal or else it just doesn't look like a filter at all. And if you go to stick figure, it's unimpressive. And so you need this like perfect art style that looks clearly different, but still recognizable. And the level of alteration that happens in Studio Ghibli's animation style is that perfect intersection where it feels like impossible to just create with a vanilla style transfer or like edge detection and just pixel manipulation. You're not just recoloring, it's not a filter, but at the same time, it's not. Just, oh, so it's so photoreal that it's just like, oh yeah, you took a picture of me like this and then it looks like this and it's like, that's impressive, but it just looks like you took the photo like this. I don't know. That was my take.

• 2:51:23Mike Knoop?

  I guess like, I just get, you know, my, my own answer to that is like, I think it significantly increased, increased the awareness of like this art style, this media.

• 2:51:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:51:32Mike Knoop?

  I, I, I don't, I, I don't know by how much, but clearly like people are doing it who've never even like seen Spirited Away or heard of the director or like anything like that. And so I do think that there's really important, you know, thing around the ease of use of the tools, you know, actually gets people like, uh, I think exposed and empowered to actually like do this stuff on a very mass scale and very rapid. But I think it's the thing we saw, saw this week, but you actually really matter for mass adoption on this stuff.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:57Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. So I think I'm very excited to see it.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  What would you do? Human, like the human creativity, like we had basic like AI image generation for a while. And then we got the Harry Potter Balenciaga video and that was clearly like AI generated, but the idea to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, which are these two very orthogonal concepts. Like that creates the humor and that came clearly from a human. And so I'm, I'm excited to see like where this goes to where I will see a Ghibli or a, or Ghibli inspired video and be like, oh, wow. This is like actually entertaining to me, not just a tech demo. Jordy, what was your take?

• 2:52:34Jordi Hays?

  So I'm curious to get your take. So, you know, if you were running an image, it was a bad week to be running an image generation model because unless you're, you're having your users prompt and get that quality of output that consistently. And, and there's just sort of like a distribution effect too, where like, you know, I'm sure they're, they're, you know, even just like the, the user base increased, uh, you know, dramatically just off of this one sort of meme cycle. Like, uh, where, where would you, you know, if you were running one of these sort of image generation models, where would you go?

• 2:53:08Jordi Hays?

  And do you think that some of these players should be thinking in a more weird way, like kind of trying to generate these new ideas versus making like sort of derivative foundation model, um, efforts?

• 2:53:24Mike Knoop?

  There's an interesting tie in to things like ARC that we were talking about before and trying to assess capabilities and pushing new ideas forward, right? Like, um, this is steering the conversation a little differently from how you sort of framed it there. But like, you know, one of the, you know, risks of like a sort of frontier of AI that is sort of dogmatic in its view of scaling up is going to produce systems that end users use and they all look the same, you know, the exact same capability. And, um, you know, our arc shows us like, hey, there are still frontiers that are unsolved for, there are interesting things. Here's a benchmark that you choose that you can kind of go measure against and actually, you know, direct progress and inspire folks towards.

• 2:54:04Mike Knoop?

  Um, that potentially could have like some sort of large step function change in capability of what these systems are actually able to do. You want like people, I think, pushing and exploring that frontier and, you know, measures of benchmarks, I think, are actually good ways to, you know, help direct and guide, guide research attention there. And I think, I don't know the full details on how the new image generation from R works. But like at a high level, it does seem quite structurally different from the diffusion approach that even Dolly three and a lot of other, you know, image generators are using. They're doing some sort of like tokenization, like system, decoding system. Um, you know, they're, they're like, clearly have tried something new that like, doesn't exist, that didn't exist before this week. It's allowing them to get these like frontier results.

• 2:54:42Mike Knoop?

  Um, I think we want to see basically that mindset continue to get pushed across like the entire field, both on, you know, media, obviously, but also on this sort of reasoning in AI side. But I think that's going to unlock a ton of use cases that people have sort of written off AI for today. They're like, okay, I think I, I think I know what AI can do and can't do. And, you know, now I'm comfortable in my sort of, you know, what my, my job or, you know, the, the things I'm going to ask it to do. Um, and I, like, I think there's still a lot that we want it to do, it can't yet. And, uh, things like ARC are hopefully useful measures towards, uh, towards those tasks.

• 2:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my reaction was just generally like, if you have a hundred million dollars in a bank and you were in the bank and you were trying to do what OpenAI is now doing, like remarkably better than you are doing, then like, maybe you need to focus on like, you know, true innovation and trying to create these sort of like novel approaches to do said thing. Otherwise, it may be difficult to compete.

• 2:55:32Mike Knoop?

  Some unique distribution or something.

• 2:55:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:34Mike Knoop?

  We talked about the enterprise. I had this hot take like a year ago. I was like, I think anyone who's like just doing model training at this point is like lighting money on fire. Uh, if you really want to make a unique difference, especially if you're a small startup, like a founder, like you gotta go take an orthogonal approach. You gotta try something different than what everyone else is doing. That's the only way you're going to be able to. Potentially like I think capture attention and provide a lot of new value to the world.

• 2:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talk, I know we're probably over time, but like there, there's no capital constraints in early stage AI right now, right? And like with Zapier, like I think the number one, one of the number one reasons that I would like see you guys in headlines is like another story of like, oh, Zapier raised X, you know, single digit millions or whatever.

• 2:56:19Mike Knoop?

  You want to hear the funny quick quip on that? It was about a million bucks back in 2012. We never spent the money. By the time we actually got the round closed, figured out who we wanted to hire, got the payroll started, like revenue had caught up. And so literally I think you could trace every dollar we raised all the way to today.

• 2:56:34Jordi Hays?

  There's sort of like, it's potentially a problem right now that people aren't forced to be hyper creative because they just are like, oh, well, we have $30 million. Like we might as well like we were supposed to spend it. And like spending money to be innovative is different than like, you know, like being innovative because you are constrained on the capital side.

• 2:56:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a follow up here. How should we be thinking about Gary Marcus these days? He wrote, deep learning alone isn't getting us to human like AI. He's been an advocate for symbol manipulation. He's been kind of on the outs in inner AI circles. Rich Sutton wrote the, you know, scale is all you need, the bitter lesson, of course. But we're in this weird scenario where we're like, we've done the scaling, we're still bullish on scaling. We are going to build bigger data centers and do bigger training runs, but then we might also need new algorithms. So he's like, kind of right. How do you interpret, maybe not just his legacy, but just the, the puzzle of how scaling fits into all of this?

• 2:57:37Mike Knoop?

  I generally think he's been more right than wrong. I think if you like, just take a limited five year view on this from 2020 up until 2020, end of 2024. You know, I think it was a generally right, like he was making the right ideas. You know, I think one of the reasons I personally find things like ARC more useful is they provide a direct way to do sense finding on this stuff. You don't, I don't have to like rely on my trust of another individual or another human in order to make like. Statements or build my confidence or intuition or my model, personal model of the world based on like trusting someone else's analysis. I can just look at reality. Arc is a contact with reality mode. We can have AI systems. I could go try to do this stuff, have humans try to do it and measure the difference and actually look and like.

• 2:58:18Mike Knoop?

  I've always found that that's a going straight to the truth is like a much faster way to get to the frontier of knowledge. Uh, if you really want to know what's true or not, you kind of just have to look for things like that that measure it as opposed to like, you know, relying on proxies like, like other folks. But yeah, I would say Marcus has generally been more right than wrong. Uh, and for what it's worth, I think actually the bitter lesson is somewhat under like, uh, I, I think often gets misinterpreted. You know, makes a statement about search and learning as these general for, for methods of, of scaling. But uh, so it also makes the key point in the, in the paper that, that, hey, like these are the, the, the thing that we are actually applying search and learning on top of. Is an, an architecture that was invented by a human in the first place. The core idea.

• 2:58:58Mike Knoop?

  Of the thing that we are scaling finally came from, from, from a person, from a human, and that's still to do true today still. And I think. That is very inspiring, even in the current regime we find ourselves here in March 2025 where. Uh, yeah, I think we actually do need some idea changes. I think we need some structural changes in terms of how the architecture, how the algorithms work here. Uh, in order to, you know, certainly beat something like Arcy J two, the high degree of efficiency. And yeah, there's going to be a scaling component to it, but like, uh, don't miss that. Like, ah, yes, there's actually an idea component too, that often gets like kind of brushed over.

• 2:59:29Jordi Hays?

  Final question, uh, who do you want to highlight that you feel like is doing important research in AI that's maybe. Under hyped, but uh, and not super online, but you know, whether they're attacking. Arc, uh, or, or just generally doing work. Uh, cause there's a lot of people that love, uh, you know, the sort of. Hyper commercial approaches to AI, you know, going and working at the labs, but there's. Totally valid if you just want to like do research, uh, somewhere and, and just like focus on that.

• 3:00:00Mike Knoop?

  Well, a few individuals that I think are sort of doing really interesting work in and around program synthesis, which is a sort of a parallel AI paradigm to deep learning. Actually, I don't think either is sufficient. I think some merger of the two is what's necessary to get to AGI. Top story for another day, but there's quite a few people that are sort of working in this alternate paradigm that are doing some interesting work on Twitter. This is not, this person's extremely online, but Victor Taylan is a really good follow on X and Twitter. Been working on this sort of alternative like system called HVM that does this like crazy like enumeration of program synthesis really quickly. There's a couple academics that I respect a lot.

• 3:00:41Mike Knoop?

  Josh Tenbaum at MIT, Melanie Mitchell at Santa Fe Institute are two folks who've been really deep in this the ARC world and the program synthesis world for many years and have sort of cultivated and stewards some of the community over the last five years for its working towards new ideas. So I really do respect and appreciate those folks for that.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  I have one last question and then we'll let you go. Would you recommend against learning to code? And do you think it's possible to try and build an ARC prize for programmers? A task that a novice or reasonable programmer could do that no AI could solve?

• 3:01:16Mike Knoop?

  Yes, in fact, let me answer the second first. ARC is that challenge itself. So one thing that is somewhat maybe confusing is like we present the puzzles very visually for humans to take, right? They look like grids, you like draw them out, the pixels. When these challenges are presented to computers, it's not an actual image processing challenge at all. It's just a 2D list of numbers. It's a matrix of numbers that represent the input grade is just zero to nine for the each number represents a color. And then you get an output matrix for the output. And your job as a programmer is to write a program that maps the input sequence to the output sequence. And that is absolutely a challenge that every programmer human today could do because they'd be a look at this, you know, look at the pattern and say, okay, I'll just write the program that transforms this. I can figure out the rules because I'm like a smart, intelligent human.

• 3:02:01Mike Knoop?

  I have like the capability of adapting to problems that I haven't seen before. And this is actually a like program synthesis challenge. You literally are asking a human to write a program to solve it. And that's the same thing we're asking the AI to do as well is to produce a program that can solve it. And things like O3 are kind of unique because they're like language programs, right? They have this chain of thought, you know, you can think of a chain of thought as like, you know, a program in that in English that transforms the input to the output. Uh, but yeah, literally ARC is is the second thing that you that you asked for there. Uh, on the first question, should you learn to code? Uh, I like, I I haven't like, I guess, thought super deeply about this. My hot take is like, I guess, yes, you should still learn to code. Uh, like,

• 3:02:41Mike Knoop?

  primarily because it's been, it gives you like leverage over technology today. Um, and yeah, like, I I don't see that leverage over technology going away anytime soon, particularly if you want to work on like, the frontier of this stuff. Um, and so, you know, I I sort of think that the arc of humanity's history has generally been to like, produce tools that give individual humans more leverage over the universe around us. And I still think code is is that thing today. Um, you know, I think AI will probably eclipse it, but like, I don't think code is going to go away in that future.

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  Got it. Well, thanks so much for joining. This was a fantastic conversation. We'll have Thanks, guys. back. I know that there's going to be more developments with ARC Prize 2. I want to stay abreast of them. So please, uh, come back when there's big news.

• 3:03:26Mike Knoop?

  Thanks, guys. ARCprize.org if people want to enter the contest.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, go check it out.

• 3:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:03:30John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 3:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:03:31Mike Knoop?

  Bye.

• 3:03:33John Coogan?

  I mean, I I love, I love ARC Prize. I think that they should, uh, take out like a huge billboard for it. Go to adquick.com. They should be doing out of home advertising, especially with Adquick. They could make it easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home technology. Only Adquick combines.

• 3:03:47Jordi Hays?

  I have an idea.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's donate them enough money just to run a billboard with Adquick.

• 3:03:53John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic.

• 3:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Now we're talking.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  I want everyone working on, uh, on ARC prizes. It's a, it's a fantastic project. It's very, very fascinating. We'll have to have Francois Charlet, the creator of the actual, uh, the actual test as well on the show at some point. Um, and maybe we can get him to pick up a watch on Bezel, because they have over 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts.

• 3:04:17Jordi Hays?

  And you know, if if, uh, any company running on Ramp

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  will save time and money, and then they can sort of actually, you know, potentially do more distributions, and then the shareholders would actually be able to spend more money on Bezel.

• 3:04:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Which is one of the many reasons to use Ramp.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  And I mean, if they're doing all that, like where should they stay when they're on vacation?

• 3:04:38Jordi Hays?

  I would find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 3:04:44John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service, folks. It's a vacation home, but better. Do you want to do any of these, in any of these timeline posts before we get out of here? It's already past 2. We've done a great job this week. I think we've streamed a lot. I'm excited to get home and just completely sleep on my 8-sleep.

• 3:05:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:05:08John Coogan?

  Because their late sleep brings you nights that feel your best days. You can turn any bed into an ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn.

• 3:05:15Jordi Hays?

  I love the, I love the head fake. Oh, should we get into some content?

• 3:05:18John Coogan?

  Oh, it's back to another ad, baby. Let's do it.

• 3:05:21Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  I mean, there's, there's some other news that we should cover. Crusoe raised $225 million in debt to buy more Nvidia GPUs, and they're using current Nvidia GPUs as collateral. And people are saying this is very circular, but it makes sense. I mean, Nvidia GPUs have, have value, and of course, they can be priced and leveraged.

• 3:05:41Jordi Hays?

  My take, lever up, do it again 10 times, you know, just, just one hand washes the other.

• 3:05:46John Coogan?

  I love it. We also have a post that we should, we should shout out to Rob Schultz over at Snagged. They're officially launching domain sales and brokerage service. We're starting with a list of 50-plus premium domains like try.com, tuscaney.com, geeks.com, and beverage.com.

• 3:06:01Jordi Hays?

  You had me at tuscaney.com, Rob.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:03Jordi Hays?

  No, but here's the real story. Rob got us tbpn.

• 3:06:05John Coogan?

  He did.

• 3:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Dot com, and he did it in a shockingly little amount of time. It was like.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  A lot of people have been like, oh, tbpn, kind of a mouthful. It's a lot of letters. But I'm like, okay, think of another four-letter.com that we could get very quickly. And we have the four-letter handle on X. And, and so I think that there's, it's underrated to find one of these, one of these short, single-word domains, single acronym domains, and then build your brand world around it. And I think even though it's been. It's probably harder to get people to remember TBPN the first time they hear it. After they hear it about 10 times, it has the chat GPT effect.

• 3:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, TBPN. It's a weird thing, but it just it stands for what it stands for. It's great. Anyway, also, Xi Jinping advocates for stable trade at Beijing business meetings. This is a bigger story I'm sure we'll be digging into later. But the Chinese president Xi Jinping engaged in a series of meetings with global business leaders and foreign dignitaries in Beijing, highlighted by his discussions with representatives of the international business community. Xi emphasized China's continued openness to foreign investment. He's saying, let's open the floodgates. Let's get some capital in here. Let's build some tech. We'll see how it goes. And we'll close out

• 3:07:16Jordi Hays?

  You should have him on the show.

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  with an Elon Musk post that you were alluding to earlier. Kitsi, he's quote tweeting Kitsi, who says, finishing touches, we need more compute to cure cancer, right? And you can see that the image is loading a looks like a Simpsons character. And so it's very funny, we're in this weird thing.

• 3:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that loading effect is is just to make it more addictive?

• 3:07:41John Coogan?

  It's not. I think it actually does relate to the change in the algorithm or technology, because we're no longer using pure diffusion where it's all random noise. And then you're de-noising it iteratively at the whole image level, which is what you see on Mid Journey when they're sending you those updates. Now it is more going line by line because it's a token based system. So there's some diffusion that's going in. And then there's also some tokenization. And I think OpenAI, you know, the gibblification kind of drowned out the technical discussion that should follow. Ben Thompson broke it down a little bit. I'm sure there will be other deep dives. And I'm sure there'll be open source versions of this, like every time a new, you know, Manus came out and there was Open Manus.

• 3:08:24John Coogan?

  And and people always love to dig into, even though the papers aren't released. You know, this is not an open source technology. I'm sure we will see an open source version of this technology within six months to a year, probably two weeks if we're being honest. Because as soon as people see this tech, they they want to build it. They want to figure it out. And so that's the story. Anyway, thanks for listening.

• 3:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic week.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Go leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and stay tuned. We have a bunch of stuff lined up for next week already. Going to be doing more special days. We had a really fun time with Defense Day. Today kind of turned into AI Author Day. There was also some terraforming day in there, but we're very excited for it.

• 3:09:06Jordi Hays?

  You never know what you're gonna get.

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  You never know what you're gonna get. So stay tuned, follow us.

• 3:09:10Jordi Hays?

  We are excited for Monday.

• 3:09:12John Coogan?

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

• 3:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon. Have a good one.