H200s in China, Apple Blocks Vibe Coding, Peptide Debates | Andy Fang, Matt Jayson, Dr. Cameron Sepah, Chris Gadek, Chris Hladczuk, Georgios Konstantopoulos, Matt Huang

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (05:54) - H200s Are Going to China (18:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (27:33) - Apple Cracks Down on Vibe Coding Apps (37:36) - Peptide Debate (46:17) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:50) - Private Credit Meets the AI Shift (01:05:44) - Andy Fang, co-founder and head of consumer engineering at DoorDash, discusses the company's recent acquisition of Metis, an applied AI research lab, to enhance AI integration into their services. He highlights the potential of AI to improve customer experiences by addressing decision paralysis through agentic commerce, and to assist restaurants in optimizing operations, such as pricing and promotions. Fang also emphasizes the importance of creating seamless, beneficial AI-driven experiences without overtly branding them as AI features. (01:25:05) - Matt Jayson, founder and CEO of Multiply, discusses his company's innovative approach as the first hybrid AI media agency, combining AI agents with human expertise to create self-learning ads that adapt based on customer feedback. He highlights their recent emergence from stealth mode with a $9.5 million funding round and emphasizes the need for modernized advertising strategies in the B2B sector, noting that traditional ads become stale quickly. By integrating AI with human media buying, Multiply aims to revolutionize advertising effectiveness and efficiency. (01:34:12) - Dr. Cameron Sepah, a licensed clinical psychologist and former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF School of Medicine, is the founder and CEO of Maximus, a company specializing in men's health and hormone optimization. In the conversation, he discusses the concept of performance medicine, emphasizing the use of FDA-approved treatments like testosterone, GLP-1 agonists, and growth hormone peptides to enhance health and performance. Dr. Sepah also highlights the importance of personalized medicine, advocating for tailored protocols that address individual health needs beyond traditional healthcare models. (02:06:19) - Chris Gadek, CEO of AdQuick, discusses how the company is revolutionizing out-of-home (OOH) advertising by integrating technology to streamline planning, buying, and measurement processes. He highlights AdQuick's recent partnership with OUTFRONT Media, a major player in the OOH space, to enhance campaign execution and measurement across various formats. Gadek also emphasizes the importance of proving the effectiveness of OOH advertising through advanced analytics and measurement tools. (02:17:05) - Chris Hladczuk, co-founder and CEO of Hanover Park, an AI-native fund administration platform, discusses how his company streamlines financial operations for investment firms by replacing manual processes—referred to as "human duct tape"—with AI-driven solutions. He highlights the platform's ability to provide real-time data integration, enabling faster decision-making and reducing reliance on traditional, labor-intensive methods. Additionally, Hladczuk emphasizes Hanover Park's commitment to becoming the default partner for fund CFOs seeking AI transformation, underscoring the company's rapid growth and focus on customer satisfaction. (02:30:07) - Georgios Konstantopoulos, Chief Technology Officer and General Partner at Paradigm, leads the engineering team at Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain project. In the conversation, he discusses Tempo's recent mainnet launch and the introduction of the Machine Payments Protocol (MPP), designed to enable agents to perform transactions seamlessly. He highlights Tempo's optimization for fast, low-latency payments and introduces features like Sessions and Access Keys to manage transaction scalability and security. (02:45:24) - Matt Huang, co-founder and Managing Partner at Paradigm, discusses the rapid development and launch of Tempo, a Layer 1 blockchain designed for stablecoin payments, highlighting the collaboration between Paradigm and Stripe to address existing infrastructure challenges. He emphasizes the importance of promoting stablecoin adoption beyond merely offering another blockchain, noting their potential to modernize the financial system by enabling instant, 24/7 payments. Huang also reflects on Paradigm's investment strategy, comparing early investments in Bitcoin and Ethereum to current considerations in the AI landscape, and underscores the firm's commitment to supporting frontier technologies. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're rocking TVP. Today is Wednesday, March 18, 2026. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the Temple of Technology. The fortress of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Let's also pull up the linear lineup. Of course, it's the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspace on linear using agents. We have a great show lined up. We have Matt Wang from Paradigm joining at the end of the show. Cameron from Maximus is coming in person. We got Andy Fang from DoorDash. Matt. New acquisition. We got a, we got a great lightning round. Chris from Adquick. Two Chris's. We're going back to back Chris's today. Anyway, thank you for tuning

• 0:44John Coogan?

  in. Thank you for watching TVP. And as always, the big news of the day, more news out of Nvidia GTC. Lots of Nvidia announcements. The stock is up. It's a 4.44 trillion dollar company. Last time I checked, that is big. Nvidia's been on absolute tear. And some really promising things with the Grok acquisition already, or like pseudo acquisition, the deal, the Grok partnership. They're already starting to explain a little bit more about how those two technologies fit together. And there's a good, there's some good coverage and strategy about that. But the big news out of Nvidia yesterday was that Nvidia says

• 1:24John Coogan?

  it's restarting production of AI chips for sale in China specifically. So Jensen Wong says the company's supply chain is fired up after months of mixed signals from the Chinese market. We've been tracking this for a long time. Of course, chips were banned first from sale, for sale to China in 2022 by Joe Biden under the CHIPS Act that also unlocked billions of dollars in incentives for American chip manufacturing. We began following the Intel story. We began following the Huawei story. There were a number of different initiatives. And then the narrative flipped back and forth, back and forth on what are the risks and what are the costs and benefits of actually selling chips to China?

• 2:09John Coogan?

  Back in 2022, after the CHIPS Act, which if you want to read up more on it, we've interviewed Chris Miller, the author of Chip War. It's a great book. Highly recommend it.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  We should have him back on.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  About that time.

• 2:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ben Thompson's also covered the story throughout. There's a whole bunch of good stuff in stratechery on CHIPS in China. And the calculus has always been pretty clear, like on the first pass, the first order effects, AI is an important technology. America wants an advantage in the AI race, the AI build out. So less CHIPS for China means more CHIPS for America, stronger US economic engine.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Massive chip shortage right now. You see old CHIPS being valued basically more than they were when they launched, which implies there's plenty of demand in America. So you'd want to keep those here.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  And plenty of demand at TSMC from American chipmakers specifically. I mean, even Apple is sort of getting crowded down there on the 2 nanometer, which I think is better for phones than for GPUs. But they're grappling with what the compute boom, what the AI build out boom will be for their business. But the second order effects are what are more complicated. So in November of 2022, I was writing about this and I said on a YouTube video, "In the past, China's dependence on foreign technology companies has been seen as a key bargaining chip. Why would China invade Taiwan when they need to keep TSMC's manufacturing facilities

• 3:39John Coogan?

  online? Chip manufacturing is extremely precise. One of these factories isn't going to withstand a rocket hitting it." So if there is any sort of broad military action in Taiwan, TSMC probably gets a little bit damaged. I mean, even the tiniest earthquake.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Right. They have to track the weather.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Outside of the facility.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  If the weather outside of the facilities is fluctuating at all.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Inside.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Earthquakes. Taiwan is famous, or TSMC is famous, where they don't even need apparently a like a detection system or a push notification to their employees if there's an earthquake. If the employees sense that there's an earthquake, they just get up and go to the factory and start working on things. It's not like they need to like, oh, we need to email all the employees. The employees just know, because that's the level of sensitivity over it. The TSMC fab. So, so if you want to keep TSMC producing chips, you can't invade Taiwan. And so by banning the export of chips to China, the cost to China of a Taiwan invasion decreases. And so if China can't access TSMC chips anyway, it's a lot less risky to go to war.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  And that was always the risk with hardcore chip bans, that you'd create an increased risk of geopolitical conflict. And in 2022, the Russia-Ukraine war was about six months old. Global conflicts have grown significantly since then. Obviously, we've been tracking the Iran war. And America's military is potentially stretched thin, so the risks of a Taiwan conflict are higher than ever. And so you add to the fact that everyone agrees that we will be in chip constrained, the chip shortage through at least 2030. And the need to keep TSMC supplying chips to American companies is extremely important. It's always been difficult to parse the various arguments around selling chips to China because there's an insane amount of money at stake and many, many people whose, basically their

• 5:27John Coogan?

  full-time job is to advocate for a particular position. I was talking to a friend who, who is interfaced with a lot of the different groups in, in Washington, and there are like huge think tanks, huge lobbying organizations for, on both sides, because there's so many different interests going on.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not to mention how much of everyone's retirement accounts Nvidia actually makes up.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Holding up the world economy, right? That's the meme. And that's certainly true. So there are good arguments on both sides. One that keeps getting trotted out is, you know, it's important to keep China dependent on the American AI stack, and it's reasonable. The better argument might just be dependent on a functional TSMC fab. But there is, there are benefits to the CUDA ecosystem and to the, the idea that whatever models get built there will be applicable here, will be able to transfer those, that research and development that happens over there very quickly. But the much more important thing is just that the more the economies are interlinked, the less likely there is a conflict.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  So all of this underscores the importance of TSMC Arizona, Samsung, Intel broadly, as well as startup fabs, startup fab projects like the TeraFab.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  TeraFab.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  And there's a whole bunch of other companies that are doing, that are at least talking about toolmaking, talking about getting a fab up and running. Nothing that's really taken off. I mean, even Samsung is not. Fabbing any of the leading edge Nvidia chips at this point. But you know, there's incredible economic incentive and people have known that this is an important cash cow business for a few years now, at the very least. And so there's certainly been a lot of incentive to put plans in motion that might play out before 2030 because there's such a shortage. And so in general, we're traveling this like long and narrow road, but I'm coming around

• 7:24John Coogan?

  to the idea that selling some chips to China is the best possible move at this particular moment in time. It was easy to stick with like the first order, the first order logic of just, we want the chips because we can use them to power our economy, so we should have them. But going forward, it'll be really interesting to track how China's indigenous, indigenization project of their domestic supply chain evolves. They of course have.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my take has always been like, even if they are getting chips, it's not like the party is going to say, actually, the domestic, our domestic supply chain is no longer important because we're getting a drip of H200s.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, so there's.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  They're still going to keep the momentum that they have, it just wouldn't be, wouldn't be like them.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  There's a lot of debate over that because momentum comes from.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  You can take some of the wind out of the sails.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  But they can just spend more.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  You can slow the momentum.

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  Dollar potentially.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  That's the argument is that, is that by limiting demand, like there's a local, local fab in China that just says.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  A chipmaker.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  A chipmaker that, that says, okay, well, you know, our demand is half as much, so we're going to, so like, we can't afford to scale. Sure, we have the money, but we don't really need to deliver this because there's no buyer. So you don't get the process level of like execution. You don't get the excellence that comes from actually needing to run the real business. It becomes more of like NASA than SpaceX. That's always the risk with like, you know, you're just throwing government money after it. Before we move back to the Wall Street Journal, let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make Claude Code or Codex or Sketch, the Figma canvas is where ideas take shape and products, ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. And let me also tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. So. Nvidia and the Trump administration have been involved in a complicated tango over the sales of its advanced artificial intelligence chips in China. Last April, the Commerce Department halted exports of the H20 processor Nvidia designed explicitly for the China market. That was the nerfed H200 that was not supposed to be able to train as advanced of models, but it was reported that the high-flyer team behind DeepSeek sort of figured out how to use those chips effectively. So there was a debate over, is the H20 actually just as useful as the H200 or close to it or closer?

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Well, it's sort of a moot question now because H200 is coming to China, which is the more advanced version, the not nerfed version. So the company's fortunes turned again in December when the US said it would allow Nvidia to sell its H200 processor, a chip that is a generation behind its most powerful series of GPUs. So this is not the B200, not the Blackwell, this is the Hopper, but it's still very advanced. In China, as long as the company shared 25% of its sales with the US government, so there's basically an export tariff. GPUs or graphics processing units are powerful chips used in training AI models, I think everyone knows this. In late January, after Wang visited China, officials there signaled they would approve H200 sales as well.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  So there was a big debate over whether or not Beijing would block the imports of H200s in order to stimulate the indigenization of the domestic semiconductor supply chain. It seems like these will be going through and they will be purchased.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Basically inspire inspire local industry to grind harder.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Basically, but you have a whole bunch of AI labs that are not in the fab industry, that are not involved in the verticalization process, and they just want to train great models because they have real businesses, like they're running Alibaba or Baidu or any number of companies and ByteDance wants good AI and they want the best chips and they're not really interested in getting into the supply chain at a deep level, at least in the short term. So. But until Tuesday, the status of the B200 or the H200 in China was unclear. In Nvidia's most recent earnings report, the company said that although it had received approval to ship small amounts of H200 products to China, to date, we have not generated

• 11:44John Coogan?

  any revenue from those sales. Speaking at the company's GTC event Tuesday, Huang said that in recent weeks, demand signals out of China have strengthened. We have been licensed for many customers in China. We've received purchase orders from many customers, and we're in the process of restarting our manufacturing. Our supply chain is getting fired up. Nvidia didn't comment on how much it expected to earn from H200 sales in China, but in the past, the company has said that the Chinese market for its AI processors could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year. That makes perfect sense.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  And Christina over at CNBC got the original scoop near the bathroom line at GTC.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Really?

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  Huang happened to walk by security and asked if he'd answered her earlier question. She said she had one more. He said you got China purchase orders. That means you got the green light from both sides. He said yes.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Wow. That is a scoop athlete there.

• 12:38Jordi Hays?

  You never know. As a scoop athlete, you never know where your next scoop is going to come from.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 12:43Jordi Hays?

  You've got to be ready.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  The sticking a microphone in someone's face as they're walking by really does make sense.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  With the camera flashes.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Jensen loves answering some questions on a microphone line. Chinese authorities approve Nvidia's H200 chip sales, a source says, and Tior Taxes says Xi Jinping has given up the situation with the H200 sale in China summarized. And it's everyone jumping off and Xi Jinping saying, stop, domestic chips can work, maybe. And everyone at the lab saying, must get CUDA, dude. Nvidia is the future.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Falling into the moat.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Just buy H200s. And they're falling into the CUDA dependency moat. Will be interesting to see the evolution of the CUDA moat as other chips come online. I mean, we've seen TPU become functional, so there are questions about the CUDA moat long term, but it certainly seems like not a stopper to demand right now as labs place orders from Nvidia.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  In other news, J R R Tolkien used Gen Z brain rot slang over 70 years ago. That's how ahead

• 13:57John Coogan?

  No way.

• 13:57Jordi Hays?

  he was. And the quote maggots jeered that, and cigars, you're cooked.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  You're cooked.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Whiteskins will catch you and eat you. They're coming.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Oh, he's like using it literally, like you that you will be cooked by the some, some, I don't know villain, I suppose. A cry from the Grishnok showed that this was not mere jest. Horsemen riding very slowly had in, this is really hard to read with these hyphens, had indeed been sighted. Still far behind, but gaining on the orcs. So the orcs will cook you if you, if you fall behind, I suppose. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Nvidia's biggest GTC announcement was a $20 billion bet on the same problem that Cerebrus solved six years ago, says Andrew Feldman, the CEO and founder of Cerebrus.

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Shots fired, indeed. He says their next gen inference chip, not available yet, has 140 times less memory and less memory bandwidth than Cerebrus. To run a single 2 trillion parameter model, you need 2,000 Grok chips. On Cerebrus, that's just over 20 wafers. Even paired with GPUs, Grok's max is out at 1,000 tokens per second. We run at thousands of tokens per second today and every day in production now. Why? When you connect 2,000 chips together, every internet connect has latency, every cable has overhead. It doesn't matter what your memory bandwidth is on paper, if you're bottlenecked by the wiring between the thousands of tiny, tiny chips.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  We solve this with wafer scale, one integrated system, little interconnect tax. Jensen told the world that fast inference is where the value is. He's right. It's why the world's leading AI companies and hyperscalers are choosing Cerebrus. And so he puts up a little graphic of Cerebrus versus Ruben plus Grok together on one system. And he is touting 90 times the amount of memory, 90 times the number of chips needed to run a 2 trillion parameter model.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  I don't know how relevant, I don't know, is there, like, I wonder how this scales relative to, well, what if you're not running a $2 trillion, a $2 trillion parameter model? If you're, you know, buybacks lower, does this number get much more manageable? It does feel like he, you know, I mean, he's talking his book here.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  But I don't know, there probably

• 16:38Speaker 02

  But it's a big book.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  It is a big book.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Lots to talk about. It's a big chip.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, have you, Tyler, have you ever run into any Grok chips in the wild? I remember the original demo was inferencing llama that was pretty fast and everyone was like,

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I fit the API a few times.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  Because, yeah, you can like, there's just like consumer API where you can run like local, smaller models.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  I had heard that you need a lot of chips, but that's not on its face like a huge, a huge problem necessarily. But it did seem like they had made some, some design decisions that maybe painted them into some particular corners, but those corners might be still economically advantageous in certain cases.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it was definitely still slower than there was like the ChatGPT thing, right? Because, because that's very much like, it's literally the model.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  No one can beat ChatGPT.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  I mean, do we know that that's what's happening with the ChatGPT.ai demo? Because like the Grok demo was very much like, we have a chip, here's a demo, and it was actually 2,000 chips behind the scene, or a bunch of chips together behind the scene, behind the scenes. And so it's possible that the ChatGPT.ai is doing something similar, where in order to speed things up.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  I just asked ChatGPT, what's your favorite thing about Tyler Cosgrove from TVPN? Couldn't find any information about a person named Tyler, especially in the context of TVPN, which might refer to The Big Bang Theory, a popular TV show, or maybe The Bachelor. Paradise.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  The.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  A reality TV.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  TBP?

• 18:15Jordi Hays?

  TBP.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  The Bachelor Paradise Network. TBP, okay, yeah, that works.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's fast, though.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  It's fast, but it doesn't, I, I, I don't think ChatGPT.ai has search.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Like, I, I think it's all just.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  That would, that would slow, that would just slow things down.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Um, let's, uh, let, let's play this video of, uh, I want to play this video of Jensen back in September 2009. Uh, Bubble Boy is having some criticism of GTC because apparently people are getting up and asking questions that are intended to pump bags. He says, GTC has turned into a conference less about tech and innovation and more about pumping your bags by getting a Jensen soundbite on some niche supply chain player. And so someone, uh, someone stood up and asked, uh, hey, why'd you invest 4 billion in these companies? I mean, that's, that's a reason.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's take a walk through history.

• 19:05Speaker 03

  I make content for these investors, uh, so they can have, you know, the average American and people around the world can have a state.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Let's play this, uh, this Jensen clip from 2009, September 2009. Jensen walks onto a small stage at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose. Uh, about 1,500 people in the room.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  In computer science, now, if Dave Patterson and John Hepsi, and I know that Pat Henry is sitting here watching me, that you guys are gonna go nuts.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  They need to put a mic on him.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  This is called CEO now. This is not computer architect now. This is called CEO now. But it illustrates the point exactly.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  So much smaller.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Well, I could, it makes a lot of sense. This is an illustration of co-processing.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Carlos says no jacket.

• 19:51Speaker 04

  I realize there's a lot of words.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  No jacket.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  He is looking pretty jacked.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Simple now, we're gonna do, there'll be a short test at the end of this presentation. So this is a simple now. Um, the first, the first section on top is a, an example of a program that is, uh, parallel intensive. And on the bottom is an example of a program.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  What is this person doing? It's a camera.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Uh, the way that I simply made it is the serial, the serial code part of the intensive, parallel intensive program is, takes about one second to run. Whereas the parallel, parallelizable part of the code takes 199 seconds to run, which makes sense. It's an enormous amount of data.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  Nvidia was a $7 billion company when this happened.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Jensen kept saying the GPU wasn't just a gaming chip, it was a computing platform. Kept saying, "Parallel processing would reshape every industry from medicine..."

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  They're like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, just put the video games in the bag."

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Seriously, yeah. This was, uh, yeah, before training neural networks. Wow. Um, pretty, pretty remarkable. Uh, 17,000 people are at GTC 2026 now, packing a hockey stadium, watching the same guy explain what comes next. Very, very interesting. Um, anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Um, LinkedIn.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Semi-analysis is over there, slopping it up. They say LinkedIn is the only social platform where you can post a sloppy reaction poll and it will get tons of engagement.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  We need to do this.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Wow, they're just really throwing shots. I, I give LinkedIn a chance. On a long enough timeline, they will all come to X.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  It might take 30, 40 years, but they'll make it over to the dive bar eventually.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 21:43Jordi Hays?

  And so...

• 21:44John Coogan?

  I, I like that Semi-analysis leans into the particular, like, rough edges of every platform. Like, I follow them on Instagram and they actually post just like hilarious vibe reels and brain rot.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  It's just like brain rot.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, but often it's...

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  Completely, I'm the only one that's liking them. I comment on a lot of the videos.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I comment too. It's amazing. Uh, like, they are not having broad success, but as far as like what Instagram deals like...

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's like, you know, the fine details of, you know, inference max or something.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  And then it's like Minecraft parkour over it. Yeah.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I, I was in a few of them because, uh, they clipped our, our interview with Dylan Patel from Cisco AI Summit and put some, some videos on there. But there's hilarious, there's hilarious one where it's like, it leads in with some, some, some text about like, like, you know, semi ana- uh, semiconductor analyst, like, explains like this thing. And then there's just no audio while he's explaining it. And then it just cuts to me and I'm like, hmm. And then it cuts back because we, we, we were editing the footage. And so I don't even know if it was like a mistake upload or it's like intentional, but it's all very, very funny.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Apple cracks down on vibe coding apps. It's over for you, Tyler. Apple's moves come as vibe coding apps help people create apps.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  Vibe coding apps, not vibe coded apps.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  I know, it's over for him times two.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  No, because he doesn't, he doesn't vibe code on a phone.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm kidding.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  He doesn't vibe code on a phone.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm kidding. Apple's move comes as vibe coding apps help people create apps for Apple devices as well as web apps that aren't listed in the App Store. Let's get into Stephanie and Aaron's reporting from the information. Apple has quietly prevented AI vibe coding apps such as Replit and Vibe Code, which help people create games and other applications, from releasing updates to their mobile apps on the App Store unless they make modifications. Company confirmed it has told some app developers that the vibe coding capabilities violate longstanding App Store rules that say an app can't run code that changes the way it or other apps function. Apple's crackdown is happening at a time when vibe coding apps are emerging as a potential threat to the company by helping developers

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  create web apps that aren't listed on its App Store, a key source of revenue and profits for Apple. Some of these vibe coding apps also help developers create apps for Apple devices. That ability has likely contributed to the explosion of new apps launching on the App Store in recent months, leading to a slowdown in approval process in some cases, developers say. An Apple spokesperson said the policy isn't specific to vibe coding apps. Following the information's questions about the standoffs, two of the people with knowledge of the situation said they believed Apple was on the verge of approving updates to Replit and Vibe Code. Those app makers had agreed to either tweaks, tweak their apps, the way their apps showed customer previews of vibe coded apps, or get rid of certain vibe coding capabilities entirely, like making apps for Apple devices.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  So it sounds like you're able to basically like generate an app with Replit and then like use a preview of it that maybe is functioning a little too much and effectively allowing Replit, the app, to do things that Apple didn't approve of.

• 24:51John Coogan?

  So, yeah.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of vibe code.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  That's what I was looking up. The app store is always so fascinating. So if you search vibe code, you get an ad for Replit as the first response. Replit is number three in DevTools, has 14,000 five-star reviews or reviews. Then vibe code is listed as vibe code website builder, has 3.3K. Pretty solid. It doesn't look like it's charting, but it says, learn how to vibe code. No experience needed. Build websites with professional designs, much more focused, I think, on static content. But there's been a number of these like website builders in the app store for a very long time. Then Replit ranks number two when you search for vibe code because it says, Replit, vibe code apps.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Then you get Sticky, an AI game maker, vibe coder, AI app creator, anything, the AI app builder, vibe code, Claude and Codex AI with 21 stars. There's a lot of people that are like, just jumping in. There's one that's called vibe code AI.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Replit's argument is that they're helping the user generate an app that's just opening it up in a web view. So it's effectively just a mobile, an app built for mobile web. And Apple's arguing that no, that's effectively in, in the Replit app.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Would you download this app already? I don't know.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  I don't know if you can see, but it's like.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Definitely vibe coded the app store preview.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  It's like a graphic, like an AI image of the GigaChat using the computer. It's very funny. But man, there are so much IP infringement. Love a code. Not from lovable, love a code. Build with vibe code. They're like, I wonder who they're trying to SEO against. Clearly, there's a whole bunch of people that are just trying to steal market share from incumbents that have name recognition.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Do you remember that company that was doing vibe coding on the iPhone and they would tap your phone and basically airdrop you the app? We talked to them at YC Demo Day last year.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  And there's a number of these companies that are trying to be like the AI game store, sort of like the meta simulator, like build a simulator and create a harness that's really good at vibe coding a game. It feels like a really valuable category if you can crack it, but you are going to be bumping up against the App Store all the time.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  You just have to compete with Sam Altman, Dario Amade.

• 27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  Amjad.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  I do, I do wonder if there will be some sort of, I mean, Roblox would be like the bigger one, maybe? Or does it come out of Codex and Claude Code instead? Like, how do you, I wonder, I wonder what the barrier and how much distribution matters there for that, for that audience of people that want to like vibe code a game?

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for gaming, I just think Roblox is just going to continue to be like, Roblox is the Roblox of vibe coding.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  And yet, we did not build our simulators in Roblox.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they're not like massive multiplayer games.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  And we want people to be able to click a link and, and use it on their phone immediately.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  We have a new simulator coming, by the way. We're addicted to simulation.

• 28:16John Coogan?

  We do love simulators.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  And this one, we're, we're putting a little bit more effort into, and John's already addicted.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  I would say this one is like, just actually fun. Jeremy Gaffon's simulator was more just like, a different way to experience.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  It was educational.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  It was educational.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. It was for people that didn't just listen to his episode on Investec.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  They sat down, simulated it, yeah. But the, the actual interaction pattern of like guessing and whatnot, like, it, it was like, oh, this is novel. And then it was like, okay, this is a chore. And then it was like, okay, how many questions are there? 200? There were like, 60 questions or 40?

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Forty-eight.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  That's a lot of questions.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  This is, this, this new simulation, you're not going to be able to put it down.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  You're not going to be able to put it down.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  And it can effectively solve some industry-wide issues that are happening right now.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Potentially, but.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  We're going for impact, we're going for fun.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  But you know, Apple's had this longstanding policy around do not, do not, like, like, they want to review the software and so you can't create an app that rewrites its software. But

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if Apple can do anything to create more like a peer, like a mini, like sort of peer-to-peer experience because I remember I made, I was like learning how to, to build iOS apps when I was like an early teenager and I was so frustrated that I had built Pong, but I couldn't just like share it with my dad and say like, hey, you can play this. Like it just wasn't, it was

• 29:46Speaker 02

  But you can do test flight, right?

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, test flight, but, but test flight is still like, it's certainly not designed for

• 29:53John Coogan?

  It's not like airdrop or iMessage.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Peer-to-peer experience.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Like, you, you, you still have to opt into the test flight network, do all these, do all these jumps, like, it would be, and it, for some reason, it is weird that it kicks me out of the Apple ecosystem when I get a test, a test flight.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock says, high-key Tyler could make better Siri and Replit with a thousand-dollar budget.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  And Replit, two massive things.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  No, better Siri in Replit.

• 30:19John Coogan?

  Oh, better, oh, okay, oh, yes.

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  For, for his last thousand dollars.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  In Replit, okay.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  He's down to his last, he's down to his last thousand bucks.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  That's a good challenge. Yeah, maybe that should be the new constraint on, on, like, like hackathons, instead of it, it's being like two days, it's like 20 grand is the max budget. And you, and what can you do with that budget for the token allocation?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  20K's big budget for hackathon.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, maybe the $200 plan or something, like exhausted, you can't use multiple or something like that.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  The question is, how much is Apple itself vibe coding? Because the software quality in the apps that I use.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Mark Gurman said they're using, they're using Claude all the time, right?

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, but, but, but to me, I'm saying So far, my experience recently, I've had, I've had an issue with the most important application on my phone, which is.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  You were complaining about the Photos app, the.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  That was just poor design.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  The phone app has gotten a lot.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John finally came around because the phone app is like, you're like, okay, I'm gonna hit this button. I might be calling this person out of the blue, even though I just want to.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  And I'm not sure what phone line I'm calling them on. I guess they're designing for a world where people only have one phone number, but I still have a lot of people, this is blowing your mind, Tyler, but back in the day.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  Talking about like a home phone?

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Back in the day, people used to have multiple phone lines, multiple phone numbers. That's true. I'm so unc.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Like a work phone?

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, like a work phone. I mean, when I was at FF, I had two phones, but.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  Two phones.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Two phones, that's right. But, but a lot of people will have a home phone and a mobile phone. And so that was the thing that you saved in your contact book a lot, a long time. And the problem with the new, the new iOS phone app is that I've been calling randomly people on their home phone if I have it saved, so I need to maybe go delete those numbers or like, put them in like a comment field so that it always calls their iPhone. Cause I have moved to just calling people on their mobile phones, but anyway.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, the good news, we have our first ever Apple employee coming on the show.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Really? Oh, yes, we do. We do, I'm very excited.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  First, first ever.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  That's gonna be exciting.

• 32:31Jordi Hays?

  Apple employee on the Technology Business Programming Network.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  That's not, I mean, current Apple employee. We've had ex-Apple employees, of course, but.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Live players.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Quickly, before we move on, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai and let me also tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password reset. So, Martin Scrawley.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  We gotta go over to SF with Martin Scrawley.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, oh, okay, this is part two, we're just jumping straight into the sequel?

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  We're going straight into part two.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  Okay, we're going straight into part two.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  He says, have you ever had the thing that you know a lot about become the current thing? That's happening now with peptides. Holy S-H-I-T, I don't know where to start. Pharma basics. Most people obsessed with peptides, don't know a few things. Peptides as pharmaceuticals have been around since the 1950s. A peptide is just a small protein. Peptides have.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  1950s, so that's like 10 minutes before 8pm yesterday?

• 33:33John Coogan?

  1950, that's like, that's like 10 minutes before 8pm yesterday.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes, correct. Peptides have extremely short half-lives, often on the order of seconds or minutes. So if you're saying you're interested in peptides, you're saying, "I'm interested in biopharmaceuticals, but only drugs with very weak pharma..."

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Pharmacokinetics.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Pharmacokinetics. Pharmacokinetics, that's a new word for me. Drugs of which peptides are a subgroup usually have a specified target. This is an electrostatic interaction, usually hydrogen bonding between the atoms of the drug and the atoms of the target, typically but far from always a receptor. If you can't tell me what the target is and how the drug is binding to it, you do not have a drug, you have delusion. Next, drugs are rigorously tested rigorously, not only for safety reasons, just identifying the pharmac kinetics of a substance, how it travels in the body.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Pharmacokinetics.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Pharmacokinetics.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  It's a collab.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  They're linking and building.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  Is arguably the most important starting point for any medicine. How is it metabolized? What is its half-life? Without this basic information, you can't even begin to have a medicine. You can start pharmacokinetics in animals and scale to humans, but you also need a therapeutic hypothesis. This is a thoroughly vetted biological idea, considered a priori as to why this medicine just might work. You very rarely discover these after the fact. Determining target engagement requires assays.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Assays.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Assays.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  This is gonna be a rough one.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  This is a rough one.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  Also, a priori. Not a priori.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  A priori.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Exposed. What assay was your drug tested in? What did it show? Direct target engagement is very important to falsify your biological hypothesis. And you can continue, John.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  Preclinical studies are so manufactured and fraudulent in today's day that I wouldn't rely on them for biological hypotheses unless they are from an incredible lab where done a priori, etc.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Clinical reality is far harsher. Without a double-blind placebo-controlled study, there is often nothing to talk about. If I hear, "But I know dozens of people..." One more time, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Screw the FDA and pharma. Really? Really? Coming from Martin Scarelli. He is saying, "Maybe don't screw the FDA and pharma." When most of the SF and elsewhere crowd talks about peptides, they're not thinking...

• 35:58John Coogan?

  And this is gonna be a hard one for me. Oct- octreotide. They're thinking some random stuff that's been thrown in animal models and is not FDA approved. Look, I'm not a softie. If there was a drug that could help me or my family, I'd find a way to get it. But I'm also not stupid and spent 20 years looking at pharmaceuticals. Drug companies like to make money. Drug companies love looking at random molecules and putting them in clinical trials. There are thousands of biopharmaceutical companies that are publicly traded. It is not hard to do a trial, a clinical trial from a university. If your drug has never been tested, there is a reason. The reason is not that you are a biopharmaceutical genius who has found something cool that everyone else missed. The FDA plays an important role.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  They make sure that whatever is on the label is actually in the drug. That's why prescriptions are important. If I operated one of these research chemical shops, wildly illegal, I might add, I would just ship people alanine or something. No one would have any idea that it was BP, that it wasn't BPC BS or whatever is popular right now. The other side of the argument. But Martin, there has to be some unapproved drug out there that's useful to take. Yes, there are plenty. That is how I made a living, says Martin Scrawley. But it is not for you, world traveler, to think about this. The things you know do not apply to pharmaceuticals. It's not that you're not smart. I'm sure you're smarter than I. It just takes practice and time to understand medicine.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  I believe some places will even require you to go to school before you can decide who takes what drug. Just ask your doctor for medical advice. There's a reason you don't do surgery on yourself, fly a plane by yourself, etc. But Martin, I want to optimize my health.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  You could fly a 747, though.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  I could. That is the thing that I take.

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  That's established. We don't need studies to know that you could land a 747.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  If I needed to.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  If it was asked of you.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. But Martin, I want to optimize my health. No, stop it. You're not sick. It's all nonsense. Leave medicine to physicians. You do not know what you are doing. Become a physician if you are that interested or spend a lot of time and money on biopharma. I have zero doubt you'll change your mind. There are no healthcare professionals that I know of who give an S H I T about these unapproved research chemicals. But wah, there are actual people, there are actual dying people in the world. Ducane muscular dystrophy, PCAN, LeFora, go fix those diseases. You'll make someone and their family a lot happier than LARPing that you know about medicine. This has to end. Interesting. Lots of debate.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 38:34John Coogan?

  We are going to be hosting a debate.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  We have a debate. Max Marcioni from Superpower will be coming on Monday at 12 to debate Martin Shkreli, the professor himself. So we're going to have a little debate. Superpower, I believe, sells these small proteins.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  And so it'll be an interesting conversation. So Monday at 12 Pacific, we can look forward to the great debate.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  So there's some conversation in the comments here. Michael Druigan says, "When people talk about peptides, they mostly mean things like retotid, reta, which is in stage three clinical trials and looking extremely good, or BPC157, which has tons of clinical and anecdotal evidence. Your critique is just self-aggrandizing fluff that falls apart when you apply it to the actual examples most people are using." So he's saying, "Look, most people aren't using this stuff that's like crazy far out there. They're just pulling forward things that are actively being worked on by the pharmaceuticals."

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  Just another pod, guys, says, "Great post. Would be even better if you were in a flow state with a low dose of reta."

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Martin does not think, he doesn't like BPC 157. He says BPC 157 has no evidence LMAO. Retitratide is literally a biopharmaceutical from Eli Lilly.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the concern with BPC 157 has always been that it could accelerate cancer growth.

• 40:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  It stimulates, it stimulates growth.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  And so because it hasn't been studied.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:13Jordi Hays?

  Well enough in humans, that is a risk that people, I think.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  Should be aware of.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  How much of this is actually because of people's AGI timelines? Like, is there, is there a real overlap in San Francisco between like, yes, it might give me cancer in 20 years, but I think we will cure cancer in 10. So if it makes me look good in the next five.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's all about people just want some type of edge.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  They want to alter their state.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  It's somewhat basically human nature.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  You can make the same argument for, for why you should wait though, because then in 10 years, AGI will create like a super drug that will just instantly make me jacked.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  Right?

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  It's like you can do it either way.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  No one has a decade to wait to be.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  You want to be jacked now because, because all things equal, if the cancer risk of both scenarios is zero, you'd rather be jacked for 45 years as opposed to 40.

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much would we have to pay you a day to not lift anything heavier than a single piece of paper? There's no amount of money you can pay me. That's right.

• 41:16John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  You can't wait 10 years.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full tech search. Built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about Cisco, unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless, real time experiences, new value are unlocked every day with Cisco. Pretty iconic, someone hire this kid, Robin Smith is sharing a poster.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  Warning.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Warning.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  This man has been known to increase shareholder value with a QR code out to his LinkedIn.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  I love this.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  And his name is Lachlan Von Egman.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  That's a great name and he's looking for a job as a summer 2026 electrical engineering intern. And I cannot recommend this gentleman enough. He has the, the correct mindset to go into a summer internship, optimizing.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Lachlan Von Egman, you should.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Get a job as an electrical engineering intern.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  If you don't, hit us up.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Yes, this is good marketing.

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we could hire Ben. Maybe we could hire this guy to work on our little electrical engineering problem back here. We got a lot of cords.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  He's just doing cable management. I think that he has, I think he has bigger, bigger fish to fry. But whatever increases shareholder value the most, he might go for.

• 42:33Jordi Hays?

  If you can handle cable management in the UltraDome.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can go far.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Dependable thermonuclear work ethic. That's a good phrase. Thermonuclear work ethic. He says he's smart with a capital S and he shares his email. So if you're looking for an electrical, electrical engineering intern this summer, uh, give, give Lachlan a call or shoot him a call.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Eric Soufer.

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  At Mobile Dev Memo. He writes, private credit and the AI value reallocation. Starts with a quote, "The essence of technology is in a lofty sense ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e. of truth."

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Martin Heidegger. I like it.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Says, "A familiar intuition about the emergence of any new technological paradigm is that new methods of engaging with the world create uncertainty, which is most easily interpreted through the lens of perceived negative outcomes. As private credit markets deteriorate, it's tempting to not, not only to blame AI for that decline, but also to extrapolate any dislocation to its logical extreme. That is, where rising default expectations among software companies are increasingly framed as early signs of a global systemic crisis. The most convenient analogy is the G M C."

• 43:48John Coogan?

  And, and, and yesterday, um, carried no interest was, uh, giving a little bit of a doomer take around some of these software private equity deals, but he was not ringing alarm bells to the tune of the global financial crisis.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  He was just saying that, uh, some of these deals are underwater. Some of those investment professionals might be needing to join different firms to find different opportunities, uh, sort of the bull case for special situations, right?

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Leaving the firm and be like, ah, I didn't really work on it. I was, I was an investor, but I didn't do much investing during 2018 to 2022. I was, I was mostly just sitting there saying, guys, like, I don't think we should do this deal. Um, the, the, I guess the, the beauty of private credit is that you have all these different funds that are being deployed and have been deployed on different time horizons that have longer time, time horizons in general, right? And so you can have basically like a rolling collapse versus like a, like, versus, versus like a, like a run on the bank.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  Where you have like one day.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  Where everyone realizes.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  A rolling collapse.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of like the worm, like you were doing the worm yesterday.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of like a, like that.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. That does not seem great. It's like a weight.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  Like when you start, when you start the worm.

• 45:10John Coogan?

  It starts small and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  Right? Yeah, no, so you're, you're six eights. You're starting the worm.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  And you're really tall and you're kind of coming down.

• 45:20John Coogan?

  Fall like a tree.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  Falling, but then you bounce back up like this.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  And you're steadily kind of like losing.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  I, I hope that's not where this goes. Let's continue. Uh, this framing is incomplete, says Eric Sufer in Mobile Dev Memo. Says it isolates the destructive effects of AI while ignoring the mechanisms through which those effects propagate and where value ultimately accrues. In this piece, he makes the case that contemporary economic conditions bear no resemblance to those leading up to the global financial crisis of 2008. I also argue, he says, that any weakening in various categories of the software landscape as a result of AI will not only mostly remain contained there, but will likely lead to economically expansionary productivity gains and efficiencies that offset potentially disproportionately losses in private credit. That's very exciting.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Um, the private credit market, he gives a little history on the private credit market. The private credit market has grown precipitously since the 2020 era COVID pandemic. In a note from the Federal Reserve, you're just like, there will be a rolling collapse, but also I'm excited to grow.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  You gotta hit the air horn for growth.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  The authors, in a note from the Federal Reserve, the authors remark that-

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  It is funny, it is funny that if you go back to the, to our early bits.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  We were joking about praying for bubbles, encouraging leverage.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  People were listening. I'm not saying who was listening, but people were listening.

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  Encouraging, encouraging ads.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of things came true.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, we were joking. They were bits. I guess some people, they have taken it a little too seriously.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Isn't there, isn't there some humor in every joke? Isn't that the point of humor?

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  You mean some truth.

• 46:59John Coogan?

  Some truth, some truth in every, what did I say? Some jokes.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  There is some humor in every joke.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, some, some truth in every-

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  As John Coogan once said, there's humor in every joke.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  I'm only on my second diode, okay? Don't talk to me, don't talk to me until I've had my 10th energy drink.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  Cheers. Anyway, this is what the Fed had to say. Private credit has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of non-bank financial intermediaries, NBFIs. Over the past 15 years or so, reaching a total asset class size of 1.34 trillion in the US alone by the middle of 2024. A report from Morgan Stanley, published in October of 2025, estimated the size of the private credit market at the start of 2025 at 3 trillion. A report from Vanguard said it was 1.8, so people are sort of all over the place. Private credit is an asset class that functions as a parallel banking system. Don't call it a shadow banking system. It's just merely parallel in darkness.

• 47:57Jordi Hays?

  Look, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be concerned, here's when I'm gonna be concerned. When you have leaders at, at these private credit firms that say, you know, look, private credit's amazing.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  But, it's, it's unfair that we're keeping all of these gains private and we need to make them public.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  So some type of like federal kind of involvement in the private credit sector could make sense.

• 48:24John Coogan?

  It would also be really, really bad if like, one of the most respected- Leaders of one of the biggest banks in the world was to compare the industry to like

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Cockroach.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yes, like some really like, you know, some bug. That would be, that would be a

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  You don't want to be compared to a scotiling creature.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Maybe a soaring eagle instead. There are some soaring eagles in this, in this, in this portfolio of private credit assets. So while it predates the global financial crisis of 2008, the scale of assets under management for private credit began growing precipitously following the global financial crisis to fill a funding gap. As the regulatory standards for lending and capital requirements applied to banks such as those introduced by Basel III intensified in the wake of the GFC, non-banks such as private credit lenders became a key source of funding for companies, especially those operating unprofitably as many software companies might be earlier in their life cycles. Chernenko specifically

• 49:25John Coogan?

  attributes an increase in non-bank lending to regulatory rigor. So the banks become more regulated after the financial crisis and so non-bank lending that is not subject to the same regulations increases. Many, many such cases. Another note from the Federal Reserve identifies private credit as a significant vehicle through which private credit is, or identifies private equity as a significant vehicle through which private credit is deployed because private equity acquisitions are often funded with debt through leveraged buyouts. They used to go to banks for that, for those lines of debt. Now they're going to private credit firms.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and I think we should fast forward to down further private credit in the AI bull case because this article is very long and you should go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo and read it entirely, but let's skip to the AI bull case.

• 50:12John Coogan?

  Okay. So last month, Blue Owl sold $1.4 billion in private loans across three of its funds and announced that it would end regular quarterly liquid, liquidity payments in one of its funds, O B D C two, opting instead for payouts tied to asset sales and other liquidity events. This month, Blackstone experienced a record number of redemption requests.

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  And this is, they wanted to inspire their LPs to grind harder.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Yes. The company indicated that it would honor all requests.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  If we give you too much mailbox money.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Mailbox money? I've never heard that term.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  Mailbox money is just money that, you know, like

• 50:46John Coogan?

  It shows up?

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  You have some apartment somewhere and they just send you the check.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Okay. No, I've never heard that before. Huh. Wait, do you know that Tyler? Mailbox money?

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  No. Am I crazy?

• 50:55John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  Mailbox money refers to passive income thrives regularly with minimum active effort.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Commonly in the form of real estate income.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Learn something new.

• 51:05Jordi Hays?

  Oil and gas royalties or dividends.

• 51:07John Coogan?

  That's why you listen to TVPN.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  It also is a mixtape by Nipsey Hussle.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Nice. That's why you know. Also this month, JP Morgan marked down the value of loans the bank holds as collateral from private credit funds related to software businesses, reducing those funds' ability to borrow. Some of this negative sentiment is attributed to recent bankruptcies from firms to which private credit facilities were exposed. First Brands and Tri- Tri-Color are among the headline cases. But the substance of the current negative outlook might be traced to fears that AI will render the vertical SaaS products into which PE funds invested in the 2020 to 2022 vintage irrelevant. So this is the SaaS apocalypse narrative, but playing out in the private markets.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  In a recent note, JP Morgan states, "Private credit has 21% exposure to software driven by the attractiveness of SaaS recurring revenue models and the fact that 97, 96% of software companies are privately held. Exposure rises to 40% when including broader tech and business services, the highest among extended credit markets. We see software volatility as a sector-led reset rather than a start of a macro default cycle. Similarly, last week in an analyst memo, UBS proposed that investors increasingly want to talk about AI disruption and our tail risk scenario, a rapid, severe AI disruption. This is not our baseline."

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  This 20, this 21% exposure thing is important because when John Zito was talking to the Journal, or he thought he was talking off the record and being a little candid, he was saying, you know, you, you, I would expect, you know, some of these loans to record, only recover 30 to 40%

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  of, of the overall loan value. And that just says to me like, okay, if you have 21% exposure, but you can

• 53:00John Coogan?

  Get 30 cents on that.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still recover.

• 53:03John Coogan?

  You're down 15% overall.

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not, it's not.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  But the goal is not to be down at all.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you're also getting, you're, you know, a lot of these companies have been getting interest, you know, you've been getting some amount of interest back

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  on the loans, so. But it, but again, it doesn't feel Like you're getting anything close to a GFC-style systemic risk yet, especially when you account for the fund kind of time horizons and the fact that you can just say, "Sorry, you can't get any money out right now."

• 53:36John Coogan?

  So here's what the Swiss bankers over at UBS had to say. Said, "What is new is a clearer catalyst, rapid severe AI disruption. Assuming contagion impacts not modeled in our earlier note, we anticipate US H, Y, L, L and P C high-yield leverage loan and private credit defaults could rise to 3% to 6%, 8% to 10% and 14% to 15% for private credit respectively. Blue Owl's updated redemption policy has been compared to BNP Paribas' suspension of redemptions for three funds exposed to US subprime MBS in August of 2007, roughly one year before Lehman Brothers failed.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  For reasons I've stated above, I think that comparison is flawed. The GFC was a systemic crisis driven by leverage, opacity and reliance on short-term funding. Mortgage credit risk was embedded throughout the financial system and amplified by opaque securitized products like CDO, CDO squared and CDO cubed securities, which established tight interdependencies between institutions. Furthermore, the deep interconnectedness of the US financial system rendered the GFC inherently systemic. Home prices were tethered to a mortgage derivatives market that was amplified in value by complex instruments that couldn't easily be valued or understood. The same isn't true of the private credit market," writes Eric Sufer,

• 54:59John Coogan?

  "which comprises relatively straightforward bilateral loans and is largely concentrated within private equity-backed companies and dedicated credit funds. While pockets of stress have emerged, the system is less dependent on short-term funding and less tightly interconnected with core financial infrastructure. While the total value of the private credit market is vastly larger than the high-yield energy debt market of the 2014 to 2016 period, my belief is that distress will remain similarly localized and not spill over into the broader economy since..." There are limited direct risk conduits into the core banking system or short term funding markets. So further, valuation multiples for PE-backed software companies and especially vertical SaaS companies are compressing for two reasons.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  One, rising interest rates have increased their debt burden as a result of their floating rate loans. So a lot of these companies were sitting at, you know, with Fed funds rate of 3%, now it's at 6% or I don't know what the Fed funds rate is. But interest rates have basically doubled since the Zerp era. And so their debt burden has also increased. And then two, AI and AI-enabled coding tools, more specifically, jeopardize the defensibility of their businesses. So viewing the composite impact of these two effects as a potential threat to the broader economy ignores the productivity gains posed by AI that imperil vertical SaaS software solutions in the first place. If a company can replace a SaaS vendor with a homemade solution because new AI-enabled engineering tools reduce the time

• 56:27John Coogan?

  to deployment of a narrow task-specific piece of software to days from months or even years. That's exactly what we've done here. We have a number of point solutions that didn't really exist before. But previously, we might have gone to some sort of software company and said, oh, well, can you do a special version for us?

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  Or can you change?

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  Changes the economics.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Changes the economics.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Reduces basically like modes.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that same company is not only saving money by no longer paying for that specific point solution, but they are also likely accomplishing more across a number of other software development-related vectors, like clipping in our example. What might be critical here is the hurdle rate in terms of labor to accomplish any task. If one person can build software now with assistance from AI-enabled development tools that previously would have required a team, then building software becomes more accessible generally throughout the economy. For small companies, there is no build versus buy tension. The base cost of SaaS solutions may have simply priced them out of the market completely, since hiring a software development team is likewise unattainable.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  With AI-enabled tools, the cost of building a point solution is reduced dramatically. Certain companies may now benefit from those solutions where before the economics were prohibitive across either building or buying. As Civil Security Notes, in a rebuttal it published to a recent macro short thesis, that was something big is happening? Or no, that was the Satriani. Prediction. Job postings for software developer roles have increased with the availability of AI-enabled development tools. Critically, AI reduces not just the cost of building software, but the cost of attempting it, expanding the set of economically viable solutions across the long tail of firms. Not just more software, but more bespoke solutions to commercial problems that should result theoretically in better firm-level outcomes that aggregate to greater levels

• 58:19John Coogan?

  of economic productivity.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for better firm-level.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Philippe Agion, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics last year, speaks to the expansionary effects of technology in his book, The Power of Creative Destruction, co-authored with two other authors. Automation is thus not in and in itself an enemy of employment. Automation is not an enemy of employment. By modernizing the production process, automation makes firms more competitive, which enables them to win new markets and therefore to hire more employees. This is what we call a productivity effect. This same productivity effect was at work in prior industrial revolutions, those induced by the steam engine and then by electricity, and explains why neither of these revolutions produced the mass unemployment that some had predicted.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  How can we reconcile this optimistic conclusion with the more pessimistic finding mentioned earlier that automation has a negative effect on employment at the level of commuting zones? One response is to invoke the difficulty of measuring automation and robotization at the commuting zone level, as we discussed earlier. A second possible explanation is that firms do not automate sufficiently, that do not automate sufficiently, end up downsizing their employment, outsourcing their production, or simply going under. This would reflect an eviction minds, an eviction effect of automation on employment. Firms that invest significantly in new industrial equipment substantially lower their likelihood of going out of business over the following 10 years compared to firms that do not make such an investment. It is thus not automation or manufacturing processes that causes firms to eliminate

• 59:51John Coogan?

  jobs, but rather missing the critical juncture of automation and consequently finding themselves forced to reduce the scope of their activities or even exit the market. In other words, it is through the process of creative destruction that automation can lead to job losses. In that sense, the vertical SaaS companies acquired by PE firms under low interest rate conditions face headwinds, not just from rising rates, but also because it's simply more costly as a result of institutional momentum for them for them to build rebuild their workflows and internal development processes around AI than it is for a company to establish those workflows and development processes in the first place. In other words, established companies face higher costs in adapting to the AI era than do

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  new entrants or companies that are internalizing these tools de novo and PE-backed firms are fundamentally averse to cost increases.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  All right. Go subscribe to Mobile Dev Memo. And before we get to our first guest of the show, we got to check in with Jeans, the restaurant in New York. They are weighing in private credit. They say, if you think private credit is a problem, wait until you find out about the annuity businesses they all bought.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  I love that this story has gone so broad that it is now being posted to the Instagram stories of New York restaurants. But that's where we are in this cycle. Anyway, let's move on to Andy Fang, the co-founder of DoorDash, who is waiting for us in the restaurant.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Andy, how are you doing?

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Hey, what's up, guys?

• 1:01:23Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Good to see you again. Welcome back to the show. Wait, actually, we did not have you on the show.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  No, I was never on your show.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, my first time. Stanley and Tony were both on the show.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  The boys. Is it just the three? It's just the three of you guys, right? Or is there a fourth?

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the three musketeers.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  The three musketeers. How's life these days? How's 2026 going?

• 1:01:43Speaker 03

  2026 is good. I mean, lots going on. I mean, I guess, you know, for us, I think AI is like a big focus of mine personally at the company. So, yeah, I mean, recently, we just announced.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe start with some background on your role, how it's changed over the period of building DoorDash and growing the company. I'm sure it's been a wild ride, but I'd love to hear it from your perspective. And then we can go into the acquisition.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I mean, let's see, thirteen years in the making, I guess. I mean, so I've been always involved on the tech side. So really focused on product and technology at DoorDash. You know, I have scaled up our like product and engineering teams for I don't know, like eight, nine years, first eight, nine years of company. More after that, we brought on, you know, more senior leadership to kind of manage the, the growing organization. And I've been more focused on how do we help DoorDash find the next big bets to help us keep growing. You know, I think whether it's our international businesses, our Dash Pass subscription program, more recently with AI stuff. And so I think really just like sinking my teeth

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  into various technology and business problems and figuring out how we can like, kind of continue to grow the business and find those next seeds.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  So talk about, so talk about how the, how the, the news today ties into your focus.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So yeah, I was briefly mentioning, so AI is like something that we're really trying to figure out DoorDash, how we can incorporate it into our business. And so earlier today, we just announced that we acquired a company called Metis. They're an applied AI research lab. They went through YC and like, we, we met with them, I want to say like six or seven months ago. And I think we were thinking about how to

• 1:03:37Jordi Hays?

  Was that intentional? Be honest. Six, seven?

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Six, seven's a viral name.

• 1:03:42Speaker 03

  I don't know. I was like September.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  It really just pops into your brain. It's such a weird set of numbers.

• 1:03:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh. I'm such an old head.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  No, I, I was, I was reading through some Wall Street Journal article and I was, I kept saying the, the, the two numbers that shall not be named together. And Jordy was like, are you doing this intentionally?

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  September, September.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  September. You meet them.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So yeah. So then September is when we first started talking to them. And we were trying to figure out how to productionize AI use cases at DoorDash. And so really, I mean, we kind of spread in terms of talking to a bunch of different startups. There's a lot of startups like trying to figure out how to deploy AI for like the enterprise use case. And we just like, decided to be really open minded about it and partner with a bunch of them. But Metis really stuck out to us. I mean, we were working with them since September. There are some really cool use cases around agetic commerce and physical intelligence that I can talk about a bit that we're working with them on that we're super excited to accelerate with them joining the

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  company. So, um, yeah, I mean, they're like a bunch of cracked 22 year olds. AI pill people and they're like super um high hustle, very knowledgeable about what's going on in the space. And you know, we just wanted to inject a lot of the energy into how we're trying to innovate here.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe maybe maybe take you through some of the the the history of AI at DoorDash. Because I imagine you were doing recommendation systems very early.

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Matching.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, all all sorts of stuff. And then when the LLM revolution happens, like the obvious like bolt on like chat box went into a lot of apps. Like, did that happen? And then and then everyone starts using coding agents and IDEs. And so like, what what have been the key turning points just internally at DoorDash and AI adoption?

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so I think to your point, I think there's two themes in terms of how we're trying to think about it. I think one is like employee enablement or like productivity. I think obviously you guys are very well aware of like since November, basically, I think there's been an explosion, especially the the the coding side in terms of people being much more productive. I'd say I think at DoorDash, our evolution in terms of AI on like the product facing side has been a longer journey in the sense that I think we've been trying to figure out how this all fits into our marketplace and how this would benefit our customers. Like to your point, I think a lot of people, ourselves included, we're just trying to bolt on some sort of chat box just to see how it would play in. And I think one, when we did that a couple of years ago, the LLMs were not nearly as smart.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  But two, I think we just need to be more thoughtful, like, how do we integrate this into the experience? And I think agentic commerce is something that a lot of people have been talking about and trying to figure out. And for us, I would say like agentic commerce is basically figuring out how we can leverage this technology to make it actually easier for restaurants to run their business and for customers to like find what they want on DoorDash. You know, I think one of the big problems that we've had on DoorDash is and what people tell me all the time when I talk to them is like, look, Andy, like you guys got a ton of selection, I have no idea what to order. You know, it's like, there's so much, you know, so many different restaurants and all these different cuisines like. I'm having like decision paralysis right now. And so I think like, that's a very interesting

• 1:07:05Speaker 03

  problem where we feel like AI can be beneficial in helping you like find what you want and give you confidence in that as a customer. So.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  I can't.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  One of the, one of the, the, the greatest luxuries, uh, or first world problems in life is, is a decision paralysis on what to eat. Comes, comes for everyone.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have, have you been seeing folks like vibe code, uh, sort of like plugins or, uh, add-ons or features that then you can potentially use to adopt or roll into the actual roadmap? I swear I saw someone post something about this where they vibe coded basically a Chrome plugin that would filter DoorDash for vegetarian options. And it was like a pretty mature functionality and they just went through like a series of prompts and got to like something that they were very satisfied with. But that feels like they're sort of doing the R and D on their end. And then once it's working, they, you, you can actually bring that back. I'm wondering about

• 1:08:07John Coogan?

  this like primordial explosion of, of, you know, people building custom software and then the pipeline to actually bring that into the business as new features.

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  That's interesting because I think there's some, I haven't heard of that one specifically, to be honest, but I think there has been a lot of interest is like, hey, like, can you figure out a way to like enable whatever my agent or like whatever software I'm building to integrate into the DoorDash ecosystem? Like I've gone to pings from founders and be like, yo, when's the DoorDash CLI coming out? And I'm like, hold on, like, well, we need to figure out what that, what that means. And I think, I would say, you know, and we also did something with OpenAI in terms of like being an early partner with their app's ecosystem and stuff. So we're trying to figure out how we want to play in this space, to be honest. And I think.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  So, so just walk me actually through that OpenAI partnership because like, wouldn't that be the CLI? Like if I have Codex, that's a CLI. And then if you have a partnership with OpenAI, can't Codex CLI talk to DoorDash then? Or is there some break in the chain that needs to be resolved?

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  I think it's more like in chat GPT. It's like not, it's not really accessible through Codex, I don't think.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  So I have to tell Codex to go use chat GPT, open a web browser, click on the chat GPT box. Uh, it is weird like these unhobblings are so like intuitive and then you realize that, okay, there's actually some sort of business reason or whatnot. Yeah.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people are just trying to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. So I think one thing that we've been finding really like getting a lot of traction, especially with like what we're working with medicine is I think there's some actual agentic workflows, like customer facing workflows that we're working on that, like just like us playing around with it the past couple of weeks, like we legitimately think this is going to be something that's going to be beneficial to customers and help you find what you want and help you order like.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Okay. So.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, how do you think about even positioning these products? Cause like, uh, obviously like broad public opinion on AI is not great. Is this the kind of thing? I'm assuming you're just like trying to deliver a great experience and not, you know, slap like DoorDash AI. The thing you've been waiting.

• 1:10:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. I think we want to introduce it in a way that's actually like beneficial to like conversion or like you finding what you want and being satisfied with it. And so that's why we've taken our time in some ways in terms of like rolling something out that we want to launch more broadly. But I think some of the challenges we've had historically is like, these agents are not very smart at like finding what you want. This was like a while ago, right? Obviously things have gone a lot smarter. The question is, how do we get leverage the intelligence that, you know, a lot of like harness building, context engineering type stuff. Um, but it's also like, how do you build a great experience around it? Like, you know, there's like, obviously LLMs, if they're super smart, sometimes they like are slower with their reasoning, but

• 1:10:55Speaker 03

  um, we're just trying to find that balance. And like, I think to your point, it's like, how do we create an interesting experience that doesn't just feel like we're slapping something AI on?

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Are you going to do anything, uh, with, with voice at all? Like I can imagine somebody in the DoorDash app saying like, hey, I want uh, Chinese food. I want to avoid.

• 1:11:14John Coogan?

  This is where it tells you that they integrated with Siri a decade ago.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  We do have some voice modality stuff, but I think I would say that's a little bit more like just a modality in terms of how you

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:11:28Speaker 03

  place your order and like, I guess a bit more natural language with the AI technology. Like that's a natural.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm saying like, yeah, it's a natural language. You're kind of searching over all the offerings in your area and, and then it's like potentially putting together like a cart for you that you are in order to check it out. A couple, couple more things. How, how does Metas tie into the physical AI autonomy? You mentioned something about that earlier.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, I mean, I think DoorDash wants to play the frontier of physical intelligence. I think that's something we've talked about for a while. Obviously, our

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  You guys have your cute little robots.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  Exactly. The dot delivery robots. So my co-founder Stanley, who has been working on that full time, like we're super excited to deploy those more broadly. But, you know, we have, you know, a large courier network. We have a large support network where we're collecting billions of data points in the physical world every day. And it's like, how can we leverage that to actually push forward what's possible with robotics and physical intelligence? I think, you know, there's some interesting conversations we've had with various startups and labs on how we collaborate to push forward the frontier together. And I think Metas has some great experience doing that type of stuff in the expert data space. I mean, you know, Ari and the CEO is like a former Merckor. So I

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  think there's some really interesting stuff there that we're interested to explore. And yeah, we're excited to accelerate some of that together with them.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Matt from Tempo is coming on later today. Tempo is launching today. I know you guys were an early design partner.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Talk about kind of that decision to get involved.

• 1:13:03Speaker 03

  It's funny you bring that up because Matt literally texted me before this. Hey, we're going to be on the show together. I was like six. So yeah, we're excited. I mean, I'll let Matt talk more about that, but I think some of actually what Matt's working on is going to be synergistic with the AI to commerce stuff we're working on potentially. But essentially, like, we are very excited to just partner with companies like Tempo to see how stable coins can be disruptive and innovative in our space. You know, more to come in terms of what exactly our pilot use case is going to be. But yeah, we've really enjoyed working with them and, you know, Matt's been great. We've known Matt for a while. So.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  I want to ask one more about agentic commerce. I'm trying to think about like the product that I might actually want. I understand like when most people say agentic commerce, it's like open up chat GPT and fire off a query. Say, order me a burrito and it goes through DoorDash and you handle the rails. But I'm thinking more about like the the the next version of that. And maybe it's something like, okay, I have, I want lunch every day, but I need you to check my calendar because the show ends sometimes at two, sometimes at 2:30. That information's on my calendar, but also sometimes I'm leaving to go to the airport and I'm flying.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  So I'm not available and I could potentially like encode all these preferences. I have favorite things at different restaurants. I'd like some variety, but some consistency. Maybe you should fire off a text message to me and and let me know that I can opt out of today's, you know, order. And I and I feel like that's like the system that someone would vibe code if you gave them the CLI. But that should probably just live within DoorDash. So how do you think about that sort of that sort of like operating at a higher level? Like encoding all of your preferences and then putting your DoorDash experience like basically on autopilot?

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  Totally. I mean, I think one thing we say to ourselves is like if someone's building DoorDash today, it would not look like DoorDash. You know, like it would be, I think, and when we think about agents versus like just like outlines, like agents in an ideal world, they're not just telling you stuff, they're actually doing stuff for you. And I think I would say from a consumer facing use case perspective, in my opinion, I think besides the chatbots, I think OpenClaw is like kind of the closest thing we've seen to something that is like where agentic commerce is heading towards. And so we're very inspired by that type of, I don't know if use case is the right word, but that model and that paradigm of like agents doing stuff on behalf of you. And I think your example like kind of hit it on the head is like, I don't want to just like you tell me stuff, like do stuff for me.

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  And I think we have a ton of information on your preferences. We have a ton of information, real time information on what's going on logistics wise in your neighborhood and your city, like real time inventory information and restaurants and retailers. And so like we can create some magical experiences there. And again, for us, it's not just about slapping this technology on just for the sake of it, but it's like actually stuff that's like. Restaurants would really appreciate because we can help them run their business better. Like a concrete example on the restaurant side, just, and I'll get back to your use case in a second. But on the restaurant side, it's like, I don't know how to price my pad Thai in my neighborhood. You know, like, or like what deals or promotions should I be running right now? You know, it's because like, I just want to figure out how to grow my sales. Or like, help me figure out how to, you know, the lulls between lunch and dinner.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Help me figure out how to like, you know, get more demand there. And then on the customer side, I think to your example, it's like, you know, like, I don't want to think about like ordering my lunch to the office every day. Or like my weekly groceries. The grocery use case-

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Which is a crazy thing to say because like you basically invented the I'm hungry button on your phone. And it's literally like two clicks for me when I use DoorDash.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  And I'm like- We still-

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  I'm in the past. I don't want the horse anymore.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  What did you eat for lunch yesterday?

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  I didn't have lunch yesterday. We actually messed it up somehow.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  We at the office forgot to order.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we forgot to order, actually. I know, I did have a salad, but it was like hours later and I figured it out.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how rare, how rare is it to be 13 years into a business that has been as successful as DoorDash? To still have three founders in the business?

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  It feels like-

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to come up with an example-

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  Narrative violation here.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  Of a business at this-

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  At this scale.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  That's interesting. I did not expect that, but I, I don't take that for granted at all. I mean, in fact, Tony's getting me-

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  You guys secretly hate each other, right? But there's like some weird contract. There's some weird contract where if any of you leave, the whole company shuts down. So you're locked to each other, handcuffed on the Titanic together? No.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  I, I, I think like, I, I'm very grateful for the dynamic and the relationship we have. I mean, I think Tony is like, you know, one of one CEO. And I think like, we have a really good dynamic together and we put a lot of trust in each other to like, just do the right thing.

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  Have you guys always had the same, the same roles basically and sort of known, okay, I'm not going to step on this person's toes in this particular region. Because then there's mutual trust as opposed to like, a lot of founding teams, they get in trouble when it's like, there's three people that want to be CEO. And they're like fighting over a cost. I mean, that's usually what happens.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  No, it's true. I mean, I would say we delineated our responsibilities pretty early on. And I think Tony's role has stayed consistent. I mean, CEO is CEO. But I think Stanley and I, our roles have evolved around both how to stand the forefront of innovation, but also just making sure like, we're thinking about like, what are the most important problems to solve? But no, I think we have a really good relationship. I think it's high trust. Um, we, I mean, we're getting dinner tonight. We, we try to catch up every so often. Um, but yeah,

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Door dashing dinner tonight?

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  No, we're gonna go out. I don't know where we're going out, but we'll pick a spot, but uh, No, it's a, yeah, it's a, it's a special relationship. I, I did not expect that, but yeah, It's right.

• 1:18:56Jordi Hays?

  No, it's cool. Um, last, last question. After the, the, uh, very silly Satriani piece, did you guys, have you thought about doing a hackathon and getting your best engineers to be like, hey, just vibe code Door Dash. Make the agent native Door Dash. Cause I think it would actually be really interesting to just actually try to do it and see.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because there's, uh, that's a training report like blew up out of nowhere. Um, and I don't know. I mean, honestly, we didn't react too much to it. I mean, I tweeted something in response to it, just in terms of my own thoughts there, but I would say like in general, like

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Two words, network effects.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I would say in general, like we just try to focus on growing our business and focus customers, but, um, I don't know. Like we try to get people to vibe code a bunch of different use cases, but not try to vibe code Door Dash. Uh, yeah.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's more to it, more to it. Uh, a bits and atoms company. Well,

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Great to, great to meet you, Andy. Next time, bring, bring all three.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll do a roundtable. We got, we have enough chairs and mics. We'll do the whole history.

• 1:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, yeah. Congrats. Uh, give our best to the best team. Uh, congrats on, on, uh, on the partnering apps. Very cool.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Speaking of agent to commerce, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And let me also tell you about voice mode. You want voice mode? Why not sign up for 11 labs? Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. And without further ado, we will bring in Matt Jason from Multiply. How you doing, Matt? What's going on? Hey guys, nice to see you. We're talking about my favorite topic. What are we talking about? Introduce yourself in the company.

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  Right on. So my name is Matt Jason. I am the founder and CEO of Multiply. And we are the first ever hybrid AI media agency for a media company.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  We're making ads.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  You're speaking my language.

• 1:21:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, we run some ads.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:21:03Speaker 05

  Do you guys like ads?

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  We love ads.

• 1:21:05Speaker 05

  Ads make you guys some money?

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Yes, the entire business is ads and we uh.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  We refuse to have any revenue that isn't ad.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  And, and just to be clear, we would run ads even if we weren't being paid and we have run ads that we didn't get paid for. Because we have a love of the game.

• 1:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Early on, we had this bit uh where, where we would just be talking and then we'd be changing the subject and John would go, before we talk about XYZ, I need to tell you about Gulfstream.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  And it would sound like a podcast ad. But I didn't say that we were sponsored by them. I just said, I gotta tell you about this company because it's really cool and I gotta run an ad.

• 1:21:43Jordi Hays?

  And we would put in, in, in the description, like this show wouldn't be possible without.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  And then just another. We weren't being paid. It's just like they, like it wouldn't be possible without them because they're awesome.

• 1:21:52Speaker 05

  I like it.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  They love this company. Anyway, uh, break it down a little bit lower. Who are your customers? How are they actually using Multiply? Uh, what, what pieces of the funnel are you touching in the B2B advertising space?

• 1:22:06Speaker 05

  Definitely. All right. So first, just the big news of today is we've raised, we kind of, we came out of stealth today. We raised nine and a half million dollars.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:22:21Speaker 05

  Ed Soares and Capital, Instacart, co-founder Max Mullen, Josh Woodford, leads Gemini, Google.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  And lots, lots more great people. And the reason we're all huddled in this advertising space, this is an old world in advertising. Google has built massive business, LinkedIn and Twitter, massive advertising businesses. But ads feel the same way they did five, 10, 15 years ago, despite the crazy rise in AI.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  And we work for B2B companies. We work for, so I came from Brexit before this. We work for high-growth B2B companies. Who have these crazy goals in their head. They have to go 5X their sales pipeline. And that's a lot of, honestly, your sponsors, um, here, here too. And.

• 1:23:03Speaker 05

  It's pretty impossible of a task today. You've got to go figure out across all your channels, how can you go grow faster? And advertising is just stuck in the old world.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  So what what we found a way to do is say, hey, the big problem in advertising is stuff goes stale right away. You launch a new ad, your audience is tuned out in two, three days, a week tops.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  And your message is still. So what we've done, we've said, great, let's go combine AI agents with the best humans in the world at Mediavine. And we've built this combination AI plus human media agency. And what we do together is we build self-learning ads. So really what that means is you put out initial campaigns. We're we're connected into your sales call recordings. So we see why your customers actually say to your sales team.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:48Speaker 05

  Hey, we love what you do. Here's why we want to buy from you versus competitor.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:52Speaker 05

  We read your your customer emails. We get the same thing. Every time there's a new quote or pain point, we ingest this and we can actually go create tens or hundreds of new ads dynamically learning based upon why people love just what you do.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Speaker 05

  So that's our world. We're already partnering with companies like Vanta, like Listen Labs, and Superhuman, powering their business. Thank you. And the growth is insane. And for a lot of these companies, they're hitting three hundred to five hundred percent or more growth on these ad channels, just from changing from static old world ads.

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:25Speaker 05

  To new world self-learning ads.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Basically, there's all this, all this like knowledge that has been trapped in sales and you're basically just like bringing it over and helping.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  And it's different from just going to an off the shelf L L M provider and saying like, come up with some taglines for my business because you're ingesting proprietary data that happened on a phone call between the top salesperson and an interesting client that surfaced something interesting. And then you can actually pipeline that through to the creative. That makes sense?

• 1:24:55Speaker 05

  That's it. That's it. Spot on. It's grabbing this proprietary data for your business.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  Like, we see why people love like what you do, not like some generic company might like it.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Speaker 05

  Like specifically your product, what you have.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:06Speaker 05

  And then we help you grow based on it.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  Which we love, like renovation help companies discover.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  And, and, and a lot of that stuff isn't, it's just not available on the open web. Like, that's ma- probably true for consumer. People do post about their clothes, the clothes that they purchased and the food that they eat. But a lot of people aren't actually sharing how a particular piece of B2B software is making their business more efficient just organically. So even if you have-

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm euphoric right now.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Even if you have an LLM that can scrape the web and is very good at searching, it's not going to have access to that data.

• 1:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Help me, help me with a kind of thesis I've had for a while now, which is historically ads had very like limited targeting. You'd be, you know, let's say running like a TV ad on a specific channel, like very limited targeting. You're creating creative that's going to be seen by tons and tons of people and you can't really control who those people are. It's like the most general ad, but then, and then with social, you could create an ad that was like effectively for, you know, a hundred thousand people. And you run it and it gets stale quickly and you have to create more creative. And it feels like we're on a trajectory towards at some point, and people that hate commerce and ads and the economic engine of the internet won't like this.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like we'll get to a point where like every ad is basically created in real time for a specific individual. Do you, do you, do you see that? Do you see us kind of headed in that, in that direction? And, and part of that is just like the right message at the right time for the right, like one specific person. And there's obviously kind of like layers to that stack. Maybe you need to multiply. It's also working with like a, you know, a meta platforms, et cetera, but headed towards like targeting that's so extreme. It's like one ad for one.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Or potentially a vibe.co where DC brands, B2B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on Meta. You could deploy for your customers. You could potentially be a big partner to vibe.co, our partner.

• 1:27:07Speaker 05

  So I, look, I love, I love that vision. We're seeing companies are demanding the same thing. We're running these personalized ads where we see, hey, a similar set of customers.

• 1:27:19Speaker 05

  Decided to buy from this reason. Hey, actually, let me step back. When we're seeing financial services companies with a certain sector buy from a certain reason, we're already running different ads to them than manufacturing customers with certain revenue ranges. So it's already, we're actually ingesting CRM data, where we can do a version of what you're talking about and saying, hey, don't advertise to these folks. And for these folks, give them this specific messaging based on why they buy from you. So we're going there. We're having companies ask us all the time for more personalization. So we're building more for one-to-one as well. I think the question and the thing that I think is so interesting about the space, even if you can go do one-to-one advertising for everyone, how do you know it's the right message when it's predictive?

• 1:28:01Speaker 05

  And really, one of the things that we focus on is not saying that we know the right answer. A lot of traditional media agencies have like a playbook. They'll say, hey, we know the best way to break through, and we fundamentally disagree with that. We think the best approach is always on obsessive testing. So when we talk to growth marketers, like the way we frame a lot of our AI, we frame it as we built the world's most insatiable AI agents. And just like a good growth marketer, there's no such thing as a pipeline. And the reason I say that here is we're running hundreds of experiments every week for a lot of companies. It's thousands over time. And when you see all of that, you're actually learning by doing. You can't just say one-to-one,

• 1:28:42Speaker 05

  here's the right message. It might be one-to-one, let's try 10, 20, 30 things until we crack. This is what really isn't speaking the language of that person or that customer that speaks to them. And you want to speak their language, even though it's your value you're bringing to life.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  All right, here's a challenge. Sell me a pen in the next 24 hours.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Sell me, actually, sell me a, it would be the B2B equivalent. Like, I want an ad for a co-packer that can make me custom pens by the billions if I want them. TBPN branded pens. This could be our next merch drop. Thank you so much.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Matt.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the Riz. Very exciting company. We'll talk to you soon, Matt. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And we have Cameron here in the studio. Are you a doctor? Should I be calling you doctor?

• 1:29:49Speaker 06

  You don't need to call me doctor, but I am a licensed clinical psychologist.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  Wow. Congratulations. Give a little bit of your background, explain the company. And then obviously I want to dive into the current thing, which is the peptide debate.

• 1:29:59Speaker 06

  Of course, yeah. So I'm Dr. Cameron Sepah. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I served as an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCSF School of Medicine for over a decade.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  That's a good school, right?

• 1:30:10Speaker 06

  It's the number three medical school in the country. And since 2012, I've become a serial healthcare entrepreneur. So I was on the founding team of Amada Health, which is a unicorn that went public last year that creates online weight loss programs to help a million people lose 10 million pounds and cut their risk of diabetes and heart disease in half.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  That's a great KPI.

• 1:30:29Speaker 06

  The thing I'm much more proud of than the financial outcome. Spent a year at Trinity Ventures on the VC side of the business. And now I'm currently the founder and CEO of Maximus, where we are pioneering performance medicine.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  And what's the core focus of Maximus? Obviously, we're going to talk about peptides, but you've been in the business since before the peptide boom, correct?

• 1:30:47Speaker 06

  For sure. Yeah. And peptides is really, you know, almost like a meaningless term. It just really means like drugs. It's a particular chain of amino acids that are getting hyped right now. But performance medicine spans hormones, peptides, and other small molecules.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  You'll appreciate. So we were at a conference in 2024 and it was like we had, we had just started kind of doing the show. And we were asked to give a talk, kind of last seconds. We were like, oh, what should we talk about? And it was, it was meant to be like somewhat of a provocative subject. And we were making the case that basically founders should be on like a performance drug stack, right?

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Yep. And that venture capital firms should have platform teams.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Platform teams should be like helping them optimize.

• 1:31:32John Coogan?

  They have their go to market team. They have their brand team. They'll help you with hiring. They'll help you optimize your performance stack. But how important is performance these days outside of, you know, bodybuilding competitions?

• 1:31:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, I think a lot of, in fact, the trend that we're seeing, this huge consumer wave, whether in peptides or sort of performance enhancement, really trickles down from professional athletes and bodybuilders.

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 06

  You know, one kind of hack I describe is you can look at the WADA list, the World Anti-Doping Association, and that gives you a pretty good indication.

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  That was our point, is like, there's no, there's no banned substances. I mean, there are like actual legal drugs, but there's not like, there's no governing body in business that says you cannot take these because they actually, they work too well.

• 1:32:15Speaker 06

  Exactly, right. And I have a private practice on the side. I work with the top Silicon Valley CEOs and VCs. I can tell you, without naming names, a lot of the folks that you interview are taking essentially, doctor prescribed, but performance enhancing substances in order to be more effective at their jobs with less stress.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  And what does that mean effective? Because like you, just being in shape and, you know, being able to walk around and not be too tired during the day, that's valuable. But then there's also focus if you're working on a spreadsheet or programming. Like, there's so many different like levers to pull on performance broadly. How do you narrow it down? Is it case by case?

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the way I describe it, I think there's sort of five foundational health behaviors. So diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and intimacy are the five things that are critical for health span and lifespan.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:33:06Speaker 06

  And let me make a little bit of an analogy that I think really captures the, the field of performance medicine. So Steve Jobs used to love to tell a story about how there's an article in Scientific American that would track how effective various animals of the world are at locomotion. So who can travel a kilometer with the least amount of calories, right? Now, the condor, a bird, was the most efficient animal. And human beings,

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just swords, right?

• 1:33:30Speaker 06

  Human beings, despite being, you know, the crown of, crown jewel of creation, were like a third of the way down the list. So it was pretty, pretty unimpressive showing. But someone had the bright idea and they said, if you give a human being a bicycle, they skyrocket to the top of the list.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:43Speaker 06

  And so Steve would make that analogy, that the personal computer is the bicycle for the mind, right? And really revolutionized the world with that idea. I'd argue now we're seeing the precipice of two new revolutions. In that AI is the motorcycle for the mind. It's not only as smart as a PhD, but it has all of the PhDs and can work 24/7.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:01Speaker 06

  And similarly, we're seeing a revolution in biology and this shift towards performance medicine.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Speaker 06

  So if you take the five foundational health behaviors that I described, and you want to enhance your ability to do these things because they're critical to your health, you probably have a supplement stack, like you're saying, right? So let's just walk down those five things. So if you're trying to enhance your exercise and the main goal of exercise is to build muscle mass, you're probably going to take the most studied ergogenic supplement, which is creatine.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:29Speaker 06

  Right? Now creatine, if you just sit on your couch all day, is not going to do much for you except make you bloated. But if you combine it with strength training, it will increase slightly the amount of your lean mass. Now, what happens if you introduce testosterone? Now testosterone, there was a great study that was done.

• 1:34:43Jordi Hays?

  Don't get John started. Don't tempt him.

• 1:34:46Speaker 06

  There was a great study that was done that gave guys testosterone and told them not to exercise. They gave another group, they told them to exercise without testosterone and then obviously the combination. Now, the combination obviously grew the most amount of muscle in that testosterone and strength training are obviously synergistic. But the fascinating thing is the guys who take testosterone and sat on their butt all day, grew far more muscles than the guys who were lifting weight five days a week without testosterone. It is literally a cheat code. And so it literally mogs creatine, if you will, in that it is far more performance enhancing, which is why it's banned by water.

• 1:35:22Speaker 06

  And so really, if you want to, you know, grow muscle in the most efficient way possible, testosterone is clearly the best way of doing it. Now, what about diet?

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  Wait, quickly on creatine, I have a question. So I heard a theory that creatine has benefits outside of muscle building and the basic effect was that it helps with hydration. It's good to be hydrated. It's helping your cells retain water, which is why some people complain about creatine. Oh, it's just water weight, but water in your muscles makes your muscles look bigger. So people are happy with that. But that creatine could potentially be beneficial outside of a bodybuilding context.

• 1:35:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, so there's some recent studies that show that it can help with sleep deprivation.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:03Speaker 06

  So there's some brain absorption effects.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  Don't you have to take a ton of it for that, though?

• 1:36:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's a little overhyped, I would say.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  I've tried doing that on some, I'm like, I don't know, boss. I don't know if I could have the 50th gummy today to get my.

• 1:36:16Speaker 06

  Well, that's the irony, right? People are mega dosing creatine in order to eke out some some very slight performance enhancing benefits when they could be taking testosterone and having very clear performance enhancing benefits, right?

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  So the other health behavior, diet, obviously critical for minimizing fat, body fat. So the most common supplement that you can take to try to regulate your appetite is fiber, right? Almost everyone takes fiber in some form or another, whether through whole foods or a supplement. You might lose one, maybe 2% of your body fat if you're consuming a fiber supplement. But now with these prescription GLP-1s, semaglutide, tirzepatide, there is clinical studies are showing 14.7% weight loss, 22% weight loss. So it absolutely trumps anything that you can take in terms of a supplement and it's obviously literally bending the obesity curve in America.

• 1:37:04John Coogan?

  It's remarkable.

• 1:37:04Speaker 06

  If you look at sleep, the most common over the counter supplement for sleep is melatonin, right? Melatonin mildly works, it can particularly help if you have jet lag. But what if you take a growth hormone peptide? So when you.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  That's really aggressive.

• 1:37:18Speaker 06

  It is, but think about this, your growth hormone peaks at puberty and it actually declines throughout your lifespan.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  What if you stub your toe? Have you considered tren?

• 1:37:29Speaker 06

  Well, tren is an anabolic steroid that I would not recommend for the most people.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Or a stubbed toe.

• 1:37:34Speaker 06

  There's a lot of anti-aging.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  John's like, alright, you forced me, forced my hand, I'll take it.

• 1:37:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. But the fascinating thing is because growth hormone declines across the lifespan, you can take a growth hormone peptide and just restore yourself back to youthful levels.

• 1:37:48John Coogan?

  And that's what a lot of the scientific consensus is about, not the super physiological levels, not getting your testosterone 10,000 times bigger than what it would be naturally. But if you are truly at a deficit, bringing you back in line, that's sort of the medical consensus, correct?

• 1:38:04Speaker 06

  Exactly. So there are growth hormone peptides now, seromarin and tessomarin that enhance sleep, they enhance recovery, allow people to sleep back till they're towards that seven, eight to nine hours of sleep. That's critical for physiological restoration. If you think about stress management, the other kind of fourth health behavior, the most common. And supplement that people take is magnesium. It helps you kind of be calm and kind of not be too stressed. It works mildly as well, but now you can take oxytocin. So oxytocin, you probably know is sort of the love connection hormone.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Speaker 06

  Right. We've actually developed a topical formulation of it. So you can actually apply it. I'll show you what it looks like. This is a little container. You can apply it intranasally or on thin skin.

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:38:45Speaker 06

  Such as the scrotum or the perineum. It absorbs and it reduces cortisol, the stress hormone, and it helps people feel more connected, far more than, you know, a magnesium.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  This is what the the kick streamers need if they get frame mogs.

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Oh, that's true. The cortisol spikes. Yeah.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  An EpiPen, EpiPen.

• 1:39:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it will prevent actually a cortisol.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you're getting frame mogs.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  There you go. Yeah, you don't just have to apply it, I would say.

• 1:39:11Speaker 06

  And then finally intimacy, I think, is the most underrated health behavior. Zinc is the most common supplement that people take in terms of enhancing sort of sexual function.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:39:20Speaker 06

  But the ED drugs, Tadalfil, Viagra, Vardenafil.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  Yep. There's been a big boom with Hims and Hers and Roman.

• 1:39:27Speaker 06

  Exactly. So people are taking that because it not only enhances sexual function in terms of erectile strength.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  Ability to last longer, enhancing the enjoyment of sex, but it actually increases blood flow to all of your body.

• 1:39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Speaker 06

  And into your muscles, to your brain. People take it as a pre-workout. There's interesting associational research showing that it reduces the incidence of Alzheimer's and dementia. There needs to be further studies that needs to be done to substantiate that. But that's the future that I see is that almost everyone right now has sort of that supplement stack. But I predict, this is my kind of bold prediction, is that the top founders and VCs in the next five years will be taking at least three of those five things that I mentioned. So testosterone to build muscle, chiares appetite to drop fat, testosterone to increase growth hormone and recovery, Tadalfil to increase intimacy and blood flow, and oxytocin to reduce their stress.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  Okay, so those five, so you have the five supplements and then the five drugs that need prescriptions, right? Is your prediction that the the FDA will approve off non-prescription versions of those exact chemicals? Or that everyone will sort of elevate to working with a doctor that can actually write prescriptions?

• 1:40:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. All of these prescription drugs that I mentioned are already FDA approved.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:45Speaker 06

  But a physician has the right to prescribe any of these off-label.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 06

  Right? So Tadalfil is a great example. It's FDA approved for erectile dysfunction.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:40:52Speaker 06

  But we actually prescribe it as a blood flow enhancer. So some people literally take it as a prescription pre-workout.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:58Speaker 06

  For non-sexual reasons.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:00Speaker 06

  Or they are taking it as an anti-aging sort of drug.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:03Speaker 06

  Because that's sort of the vision of performance medicine is it's not just treating a deficit or a medical problem, but it's enhancing your health, your aesthetics, or your performance.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Sure. And so, like, between those two, you would expect, like, many more doctor's visits, many more consultations with medical professionals to get access to that tier of prescription-only medicines.

• 1:41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, I feel like that fits into this, like, you know, put differently, you're positioning this as like much more proactive approach to medicine, not just trying to survive when something bad happens or you're experiencing some sort of disease, but like proactively trying to take yourself from the baseline

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  to the best you can possibly use.

• 1:41:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, you absolutely nailed it. The problem is, right now in America, we don't have a healthcare system. We have a sick care system, right? And it's run by an oligopoly of insurance companies that are not in the business of providing healthcare. They're in the business of denying healthcare, very sadly and tragically, when the UHG CEO is killed.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  There's some issues where, like, various health tech companies will, you know, be talking to VCs and they'll say like, "Oh, like, we're gonna be able to get access to insurance dollars." And the issue with that is that insurance companies don't care if something will make you healthy in 10 years, because you're most likely gonna be on a new insurance plan.

• 1:42:26Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  So they're just wasting money, right? They expect you, the average American stays at their job, like, you know, low, single-digit. Years, I think, and so that just means like they're like, that's great, you're gonna be healthier later, but, but I'm not gonna pay for the benefit of some other insurance carrier.

• 1:42:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was what we learned at Omada, because we sold through employers that if the employer didn't retain their employees for more than three years, there's no point of selling into it, because they're like, it's not my problem, someone else is gonna have to pay for it. So, really, the antidote to that is performance medicine, in that it bypasses the insurance system altogether. And within, basically, we're a cash pay private practice that operates in all 50 states. And our belief is that the only person that should be making a decision is you and your doctor, and that every drug, of course, has risks, but it's up to you and your doctor to decide whether the cost benefit is worth it for you in making that decision, not the insurance companies who are really in the business of minimizing the amount of care. I'll give you a really great example of this.

• 1:43:22Speaker 06

  If anyone measures their testosterone levels, unless you're below the second and a half percentile, the insurance company will deem you're not sick enough, essentially, to be warranted to re-.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  You have to have the bottom, be in the bottom two and a half.

• 1:43:35Speaker 06

  Two and a half percentile. So, the question is naturally, what happens to the other 97.5% of Americans? Obviously, the lower half of that would probably feel better, in terms of their energy, their motivation, their drive, their sexual function, their ability to build muscle mass, but even folks who are, let's say, low-normal would probably benefit from a higher level of testosterone in terms of the performance enhancement that we're talking about.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:56Speaker 06

  Right? Insurance will never pay for that, and so there's been a proliferation of the rise of sort of private practices like Maximus, in order to really meet the needs, because I think there's this huge consumer trend, which includes peptides and hormones, of people who want to enhance their health, enhance their performance, and enhance the quality of their life.

• 1:44:12Jordi Hays?

  What are you, how are you advising clients and just people broadly around the risks associated with peptides? There's a debate. Raging right now. Is BPC 157. Just like efficacy, but also the potential risk. Yeah. Because we don't necessarily have, for some of them, we have plenty of data. Right. Even if we don't have full-on, full-on studies. But, but how are you kind of guiding people?

• 1:44:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, the really, the question is which peptides and which drugs? Because we can't sort of.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Because some are fully approved.

• 1:44:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So the GLPs are really, these are peptides as well. Oxytocin that I mentioned, those are also peptides. They've literally been FDA approved, some of them for decades.

• 1:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:55Speaker 06

  Have a very substantial body of literature on them. And so, you know, comparing that to, let's say, a BPC, which is not FDA approved.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:45:04Speaker 06

  Is a very different ballgame.

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:45:05Speaker 06

  So responsible clinics, I would say, like ours, are only prescribing FDA approved drugs. That have a very substantial body of human literature, in addition to a lot of clinical experience. Right?

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17Speaker 06

  So some of the, like, we're actually the largest prescriber, for instance, in clomiphene in the United States. We publish studies with ends in the thousands on the safety and efficacy of these things. And so with the body of literature, then I think you can evaluate each drug on their own merits and decide, okay, is this something that's worth prescribing as a clinic?

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Speaker 06

  And then, obviously, each person between them and their doctor make a decision of whether that cost benefit is worth it for them. Now, I think, you know, individuals can always make a choice in taking something that's a little bit more experimental. That's up to them. But really, I really recommend that people are getting it through a doctor. And it's fulfilled by an FDA inspected compounding pharmacy.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what kind of, have you heard any horror stories around these kind of like offshore compounders? Just people getting.

• 1:46:04Speaker 06

  Well, those aren't compounders. Those are just, yeah, there's a lot of people who are just literally buying black market illegal drugs.

• 1:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:11Speaker 06

  Directly from manufacturers or from resellers in the United States. And yeah, I mean, you know, there's literally labs that are, the problem is you can't ensure what you're getting is pure.

• 1:46:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:23Speaker 06

  It's even the compound, like peptide sciences, which just shut down was, you know, people were testing it. They're buying a non-FDA approved GLP that's soon to be on the market. And literally, it didn't.

• 1:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Retin?

• 1:46:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, it didn't contain any of retin in the vial.

• 1:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:46:38Speaker 06

  Or what's a common thing is they, it might contain it, but the dose might be off by 50%. And so what you're seeing is people having side effects because retin is a glucagon agonist. It has effects on the heart, increases heart rate. Reduces heart rate variability. If you're not able to dose it probably proper properly, you're more likely to have side effects as a result. So it's a wild west. Any responsible clinician would say, don't buy things on the black market. Now, obviously, individuals can make their own libertarian choices about what they do. But the difference is that there are good alternatives on the market. For instance, tirzepatide is generally efficacious for weight loss. There's no reason for most people to be taking retin, and also to be dealing with the potential. We have one that's FDA approved. We have one that's FDA approved. We have two, actually. You know that it's pure. Yeah.

• 1:47:21Speaker 06

  You know that it's relatively safe because there's a wide body of literature and it doesn't have the cardiac effects. So it's

• 1:47:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Hollywood is going to be somewhat of a model for Silicon Valley in the sense that like actors are have historically been like, how did this actor have this insane transformation?

• 1:47:38Speaker 06

  Chicken broccoli.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Chicken broccoli and a lot of water. And it's like, I don't know about that. But but it basically is like bodybuilders lead the charge. Hollywood kind of picks up on that and then and then but but is Hollywood kind of the somewhat of of the model?

• 1:47:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think so. And I think increasingly Silicon Valley investors and founders are going to increasingly become the model. The problem with Hollywood is until maybe recently, a lot of people literally had to lie and say they weren't on TRT despite the fact I have friends who are personal trainers to these guys who prep them for the movies. They're clearly on performance enhancing drugs. Nobody bills like

• 1:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it is irresponsible for like, you know, Zac Efron to be like, yeah, I'm on TRT because a bunch of young people are to see that and be like, I want to look like that.

• 1:48:24Speaker 06

  Exactly. But this is it's a really great point that you you mentioned about sort of young people in TRT. And this is actually one of the whole, you know, founding genesis of Maximus, right? So testosterone is a really interesting compound. The gold standard is injectable testosterone. So if you inject exogenous testosterone from outside of your body, your body realizes it's getting enough. And so your testicles will shut down, shrink, and you become infertile. So nobody under the age of 50, or nobody who wants to still have children, should really be injecting testosterone. Now, you can take something called HCG, which is a replacement for LH, and it can help you get off of it and restore your fertility. But it's not perfect. And it's There's some risks involved.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  However, there are alternatives nowadays. So, we actually prescribe oral and topical testosterone. You don't need to inject it. And it's native testosterone, the same testosterone that your body makes. The problem with injectable testosterone is, we made sort of an interesting devil's bargain, is we took testosterone and we added a molecule to it called an ester. You've probably heard of testosterone cypionate. The benefit of the ester is that, because it's annoying to inject every single day, you only need to inject it once a week. So, it becomes more convenient. The downside is it redlines your testosterone for 24/7, for a whole week, and so it shuts down and suppresses your endogenous production. So, you basically become dependent on it, and if you come off of it, you're going to go through withdrawal symptoms. The benefit of oral testosterone is that it peaks within 2 to 4 hours, lasts about

• 1:49:46Speaker 06

  6 to 8, and topical testosterone peaks at about 2 and 1/2 hours, lasts about 12 to 6. And so, they're shorter half-life, shorter duration, and they're less suppressive. The interesting thing that we found in our research is that if you take oral testosterone, it's actually not very suppressive for most people. And if you combine it with enclomiphine, which is a selective estrogen receptor modulator, it basically blocks estrogen in a particular part of the brain, the hypothalamus and the pituitary. It prevents that suppression from happening. And so, you can kind of have your cake and eat it too for the first time, in that it you can-

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat of like a free lunch.

• 1:50:18Speaker 06

  A little. There's no such thing as completely a biological free lunch, but you can maintain your natural testosterone production and then supplement it with oral testosterone and enclomiphine. And then, the really revolutionary thing that we found is topical testosterone, which has been used for over half a century. You apply it to your scrotum, it can increase your testosterone by several fold. It's normally suppressive, but when you add enclomiphine to it, you can maintain your natural testosterone production and enhance it to high normal levels. In fact, we've patented, we have 2 patents on the combination of oral and topical testosterone plus enclomiphine. And so, actually, men as young as 18 can take these without suppressing their fertility markers. So, it's really a revolution, and it allows us to really fulfill the vision of performance

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  medicine, because there are safer alternatives. The injectable testosterone is still great for the guys who are over 50, and they don't mind being on it for the rest of their lives. But they're- Now essentially safer alternatives for younger guys or guys who want to maintain their fertility. And we're actively doing this research, publishing it, patenting these protocols and disseminating them so we can democratize performance medicine.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  How do you think about the personalization of medicine? We talked to Paul Quiningham on Monday. He was the fellow who used AI to process some DNA data around his dog who was suffering from cancer. And was able to work with a lab to synthesize a custom mRNA vaccine that was targeting the specific cancer that his dog had. Sort of looking at the delta between the healthy dog's DNA and the cancerous DNA in the same animal. And then was able to create sort of a one of one medicine for that dog. I could imagine that coming to, well, there's these peptides.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  They work broadly on populations, but in the future, is there a world where you're getting a terzepotide that's designed specifically for you? And would there actually be a benefit of that or is that where we're going?

• 1:52:12Speaker 06

  Absolutely. It's already here. In fact, with terzepotide, we have micro doses. So this is like.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  So that's modulating the amount of product, but not the actual molecular construction.

• 1:52:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's in that, in this particular case, it's not. But the, the, the benefit of doing a microdose, for instance, is for people who are not overweight, right? So BMI under 25.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Why would you?

• 1:52:33Speaker 06

  They may not even want to lose weight, but they might want to take it to reduce their inflammaging is sort of the term that's, that's used. It reduces, you know, impulsivity and just help reduce some of the food noise. And maybe there's some folks who are not necessarily overweight, but they want to maintain a six pack without having to constantly fight this willpower battle for the rest of their life. That's obviously a little bit more aesthetic and performance enhancing, but that custom dose, we can, people can kind of find the right dose that's fits for them. So yes, there's going to be both personalized medicines in terms of the, the, the type of medicine. But also I think the dosing is really critical because it allows flexibility. So inclomiphine is a really good example. When inclomiphine first was introduced to the market, literally the only dosage that was available, 25 milligrams. And it's like him.

• 1:53:15John Coogan?

  That's what they studied.

• 1:53:16Speaker 06

  You, you get 25 milligrams of Viagra, no matter who you are, right? We offer eight. Different dosages all the way from 3.125 milligrams to 25 milligrams.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:24Speaker 06

  And the way we titrate it is actually through lab testing. So we have an at-home blood test.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

  You don't have to go to a Quest. You can just stick it on your shoulder. You press a button and you can take out about half a pinky full of blood. And we can not measure 100 markers like at Quest, but we can measure about a dozen of them.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  And so you mail that back, you take it to a lab.

• 1:53:40Speaker 06

  Exactly. Mails next day air to a lab. So you can take your baseline levels. You know where you stand.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:45Speaker 06

  And then we can put you on, let's say topical testosterone plus enclomiphine. You'll probably notice your total testosterone goes over 1,000. Your free testosterone goes over 200. And then we can titrate you to the just the right amount by retesting you after 30 days. And usually after one or two iterations, we can get you to make, make sure that your lab numbers are ideal, but also that you're feeling and functioning your best. So this is really the promise of personalized medicine that you're talking about that will be personalized to every single person.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  How much do you care about wearable data when working with clients?

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  I would say in my private practice, I look a little bit more at that. At Maximus, I honestly think most wearables are a little bit overhyped.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I noticed I don't think you're wearing one.

• 1:54:27Speaker 06

  I'm this, yeah.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  You have a nice watch.

• 1:54:28Speaker 06

  Thank you. And it has, it has no battery technology. My anti-tech watch.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. Interesting thing as a psychologist, I think it actually causes anxiety in a lot of people. Right? A lot of these sleep wearables, you know, because they, they look at it and you're like, oh, my, my whoop score is not 100. Now I'm going to be sleep deprived.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  I have sick trend.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  John, so John's entire life is just signaling like, sick trend.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  I, I got a, I got a, I got a 98 on eight sleep and I immediately Googled like, D-Ball plus Anavar plus tren plus massive needle this big.

• 1:55:04Speaker 06

  There you go.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  That's what I want.

• 1:55:06Speaker 06

  Your, your sleep score is going to go to about 20.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  I know. Do not do any of this.

• 1:55:10Speaker 06

  But yeah, I mean, look, it can be helpful. We, we use tracking really when we want to see if an intervention is making a difference. So a lot of our clients actually, when they're using oxytocin, because we've published a study showing that it enhances sleep quality, extends sleep by about 25 minutes, sleep duration on average. They'll, they'll look at their aura or their whoop scores and then they'll notice improvements in, let's say. REM or deep sleep. And this is kind of, I think, you know, beyond sort of randomized controlled trials. The top of the evidence-based hierarchy is running really a randomized controlled trial of one. And so you can look at your own data. And then if you see, you know, if you do sort of an ABA test where you don't do the intervention, you add oxytocin and then you come off of it. And during that period of time, that B portion, when you were taking the intervention,

• 1:55:51Speaker 06

  you're clearly sleeping better, your sleep duration is better, your deep sleep and REM are better. It gives you a pretty positive personal indication that this treatment is working for you.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  You didn't mention across any of those five categories, like the ADHD meds. That I feel like have been popular in Silicon Valley for decades. Across Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse and Modafinil. There's a few others that people take occasionally. Some of them are prescribed. What is your overall thesis on that? That one feels, it's always felt like a Faustian bargain, but what's your take?

• 1:56:22Speaker 06

  Exactly. And I think it is. And I'm, especially as a former psychiatry professor, I'm incredibly conservative about things that are psychoactive and specifically work on the neurotransmitters.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Sure, it doesn't come from a biomarker. It's not like I get a blood test and says, oh yeah, you're low in amphetamines.

• 1:56:40Speaker 06

  There's no great blood marker for dopamine, for instance.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Sure, okay.

• 1:56:45Speaker 06

  And the diagnosis of ADHD is problematic. Most people aren't doing a full neuropsychological examination to get a true diagnosis. It's a little over diagnosed these days.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  One of the questions in the survey was like, did you lose things as a kid? And I was like, who has never lost anything as a child? Like, everyone loses their sweatshirt when they go to school in the morning and then it gets hot. You take the sweatshirt off, you lose it. Like, this is not like.

• 1:57:08Speaker 06

  I never, I never did.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  You never did? Okay, well, then.

• 1:57:10Speaker 06

  Fair enough. Yeah, and there's a lot of folks who may have, there's kind of a notion that people outgrow ADHD in adulthood. Really what may be happening is they're learning to behaviorally compensate through routines and patterns. But anyway, the, obviously if you have true clinically diagnosed, properly diagnosed ADHD, prescription stimulants can be like Ritalin, Adderall. The various amphetamines can be life-changing in that despite their, despite the risks and trade-offs, obviously if it lets you function and keep a job. That cost benefit, it's going to be beneficial. From a performance enhancement perspective, I've been very public in companies like Cerebral. We're doing the wrong thing by shilling Adderall on TikTok. We won't prescribe it because it's addictive.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  And we don't prescribe things that are addictive because I think to your point, it is a Faustian bargain. And there's significant trade offs in doing so. So I didn't mention focus as part of those five. I do think there are.

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Well, it feels like your philosophy is that focus comes from the other, the other areas. If you're balanced everywhere else.

• 1:58:11Speaker 06

  Well, in 2019, I popularized dopamine fasting as a behavioral way of improving focus. The main thing that's actually messing with people's focus for the majority of people is not ADHD, but digital distraction. Right? So everyone's distracted by social media, gaming, gambling, shopping.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  I do a dopamine fast every single day, like at least six hours.

• 1:58:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's fantastic.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Usually from like 11pm to 5am.

• 1:58:34Speaker 06

  So yeah, I mean, you know, you know, in China, actually, literally from 11pm, I think to like.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Well, you just can't access it, right?

• 1:58:40Speaker 06

  You can't, uh, computer game manufacturers are legally required.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  To take the servers.

• 1:58:45Speaker 06

  To do it. And so there's something there, right? That's like institutionalized dopamine fasting.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how often do you do full blood panels? And by 2035, how, how often do you think the average kind of American will be doing a blood panel?

• 1:59:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Assuming right now, the average person does it if they're sick and they are having an issue that's starting to change. But what's your protocol now?

• 1:59:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't even have a primary care physician. I mean, I think the standard recommendation and one that I will continue to espouse is everyone should get an annual physical every year. And have a relationship with a doctor, ideally, you know, a good primary care physician. Unfortunately, because of the health insurance situation that we have aside employers, a lot of people are freelancers. They don't have health insurance, or if they do, it's like a minimal amount through the open market. They don't have that. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is the blood test that you get through your primary care is very sparse. So I'll tell you a funny story. So, um, you know, being at Omada and literally being in the diabetes industry, I never. Had my blood sugar level checked and when I brought it up with my doctor like you're young and healthy. You don't need to check your blood sugar. And I was like, my dad has type 2 diabetes. I want to check,

• 1:59:57Speaker 06

  you know, and just make sure I don't develop it. But that's the, that's the mentality. Similarly, it's not routine to measure your testosterone levels or get a hormone panel unless you are like incredibly low energy and symptomatic and your doctor would be concerned. They, they don't think it's sort of necessary. And so the unfortunate thing is going through the traditional healthcare system because they really want to minimize the cost associated with the panel. You're not going to get a good comprehensive blood test done. Right? So through Maximus, we have a comprehensive test. It costs 199.99. You can get 110 biomarkers measured, true unique biomarkers. There's a couple of companies out there that repeat tests every six months and they're not unique biomarkers. So that will give you an assessment of, you know, standard CBC, CMP, your lipids, your hormones, your thyroid,

• 2:00:39Speaker 06

  all the things that you need to know. And obviously now with AI, you can, you know, throw that into an AI and identify areas that are problematic. And obviously if you have a clinic or a good PCP that can work with you, it can help optimize it. Like a good example of this is almost everyone is vitamin D deficient because we just don't get enough sunlight. It's the easiest thing to fix. You can take a multivitamin like the building blocks that we produce and we do before and after lab testing so that after a couple of months, you can get into an optimal range and it's going to enhance your mood, your sleep, 100 different biological functions.

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  We gotta pop the top on this ultra down, let the sun in, get the vitamin D going. No, we actually, we actually, we actually want to eventually. Get to natural light. It would be so good. We gotta make it happen. Anyway, thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon. And I will tell everyone about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I will tell you also about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we will kick off our lightning round, the Lambda lightning round. We will go to the cloud, hopefully. We'll see. The Lambda lightning round begins now with Chris from AdQuick,

• 2:01:54John Coogan?

  one of our favorite people, TBPN royalty, as the chat likes to say. Let's bring Chris in to the TBPN Ultra Room. Chris, how are you doing? Great to see you. There he is. Is that a TBPN green suit? Beautiful jacket. That is a fantastic jacket. I like the liner too. Anyway.

• 2:02:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, I picked it up in London at Charles Stewart.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  No way. Very cool.

• 2:02:17Speaker 07

  Couldn't. Miss out on the opportunity to get dripped out with my fellow technology brothers.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. Uh, uh, re reintroduce the company and sort of explain the shape of the business these days and then take us into the news.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  For anyone that hasn't heard, 1,000 ad quick reads.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  I think it's 250 last year, something like that. Probably more. Yeah.

• 2:02:39Speaker 07

  So Adquick's building the infrastructure for real world advertising. So out of home. So when you think about it, over the last 30 years, um, every dollar of every ad spend has gone to doing one thing, reaching, uh, human beings with a message. And that's primarily been done through digital channels, cookies, pixels, real time bidding, programmatic. It's all digital. Um, but what they did forget is that people are outside. People are constantly getting exposed to an advertising medium. And this one hasn't been optimized. It hasn't been architected with technology. And so, you know, the big players like Google, Amazon,

• 2:03:23Speaker 07

  uh, the Trade Desk, uh, none of them have cracked the nut that is out of home advertising. And, you know, we're, we're building the pipes and the plumbing for it.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's a lot of interaction with the physical world. At a certain point, someone has to physically print the billboard, put it up, like tape it down, tie it down, do whatever. And you are able to abstract that and then serve a company with a thing that looks like a, you know, more traditional digital, uh, platform, right?

• 2:03:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. And most importantly is, uh, proving that the medium works. So we now live in an age where, you know, you don't get investment in advertising unless you could prove that it works. And so we pioneered, uh, the measurement and the analytics. So if you get exposed to an out of home ad and then to subsequently do something, uh, online in an app, go into a store, uh, we can attribute that to the exposure and then model it out with, uh, all the rest of your channels.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  So it's out of home advertising made easy and measurable. That's what I'm getting from this.

• 2:04:25Speaker 07

  That's right.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  But take us through the more recent news. What's going on with the business?

• 2:04:30Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, uh, there's three big players in the space. Um, in, in the United States, uh, it's a $10 billion market. Two billion roughly is, uh, is sold by out front media. And you'll see their billboards and their transit in New York, Los Angeles, and all the major metros.

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  And to be clear, they own the physical real estate, they own the physical, like, the the structure that the billboard goes on, that's part of their business?

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Or just the the rights?

• 2:04:58John Coogan?

  Or the rights?

• 2:04:59Speaker 07

  The rights, the rights and the structures.

• 2:05:01John Coogan?

  Got it, okay.

• 2:05:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, and so this is a, this is an organization that's like two, 2,000 employees, 1,000 sellers, all regionally distributed. And they've been selling this medium very much like, you know, real estate agents have prior to like your, your open door, your Zillow, so on and so forth. And for the first time ever, they're going to have world-class technology to support their sales efforts across these thousand sellers. And then they'll be also using our audiences to find the best fit for their inventory against an audience, and then also measure the success for their clients.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  So, yeah, walk me through the, the, the, the measurement problem, because on my drive to work every day, I drive through Hollywood, I see so many billboard ads for movies. And whenever I buy tickets, I wind up going on Fandango, and there's a huge disconnect there. I don't know that I've gotten a survey, but with the right data, you could probably see that I was in this area, or I purchased something on a credit card panel in this area, and I might have been exposed to that billboard. Like, I could imagine how you could piece that together, that I went to this particular movie because I saw this billboard. I've been seeing billboards for the Project Hail Mary, and we are actually going, and the billboards should get some of that attribution.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  But other than hearing me say it right now, I don't know how you would puzzle that together. So what is the process these days?

• 2:06:31Speaker 07

  Sure, so.

• 2:06:34Speaker 07

  Your weather app doesn't make money by telling you it's gonna rain.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:38Speaker 07

  We buy up all the highest quality mobile traffic data.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:42Speaker 07

  We pipe seven billion pings into our platform every single day.

• 2:06:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:46Speaker 07

  So we know where you are.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:48Speaker 07

  Uh, what time you're at, what direction you're heading at, what speed you're heading at and all these things.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:53Speaker 07

  Um, and then we, uh, use that to basically identify when the mobile device is inside of a geofence that we have geofenced all of the inventory in the platform.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:07:05Speaker 07

  And then we count that as an exposure.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:07Speaker 07

  We then map the exposure to a pixel on the website and, uh, an SDK in an app.

• 2:07:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:13Speaker 07

  Or we also, in the case of brick and mortar, will actually geofence the store location.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:18Speaker 07

  And so we can kind of connect the dots that way.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Breakdown kind of trends in the SF out of home market. Like how is, how is kind of all the, the AI funding boom?

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does a billboard up in SF cost like 10 times as much as anywhere else? Like what's the ratio at least?

• 2:07:38Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, it's, uh, after, you know, we had that 2023, we had the software recession, 2024.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:45Speaker 07

  Uh, we started to see things come pick back up. And in the last 12 months, uh, it's gone gangbusters for, for the AI companies. To answer your question, yeah, the, the prices are some of the most expensive in the market and, um, but you know, you know, some of our customers are some of the leading AI companies, Finn being one of them.

• 2:08:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:06Speaker 07

  Uh, 11 labs we've, we've done campaigns for. And so, yeah, you're starting to see, uh, AI companies use this channel to, you know, kind of break through the clutter of, uh, of digital.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  What's the most underrated out of home form factor in your view?

• 2:08:24Speaker 07

  Um, if you're B to B, um, I really like account-based marketing or account-based. So basically you take all of your HQs for your target accounts, you put them in the map, and then you buy up all the inventory surrounding them.

• 2:08:39Jordi Hays?

  That's like bus stops, you know, basically like just flood the zone in a, in a like two-block radius kind of thing.

• 2:08:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And I don't know if you recall, but say like maybe like five or six years ago, the founders of Brex took over all of San Francisco, most of San Francisco being their target market. And I think they spent like half a million bucks and, you know, customer acquisition.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think people haven't fully processed that like there seems to be like increasing like returns as you spend more on out of home, which is that like, you know, if you spend 50 grand on a campaign somewhere around LA, you're going to have, you know, some effect. But if you, if you spend, spend, you know, dramatically more than that, like an order of magnitude, it seems like you really like break through in a different way. It's funny, Sam, Sam Blonde, who, who did that original campaign, he's back with his new, a new company and taking the same approach, you know, heavy, heavy, heavy out of home spend.

• 2:09:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, so some of our teammates in San Francisco were saying that Monaco's up and down the 101. I think they bought like 60, 60 or 70 billboards. So they're making their presents, Phil.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, he told me about that before we had him on the show. And I was like, that is such a bold way to, to introduce your company. But it, it really does break through. I've seen photos of it. And if you're there, you'll, you'll see.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  What about on the, on the supply side? How, how heavy are the restrictions on bringing on new out of home supply is, I'm assuming, obviously.

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  You're thinking for your house?

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  City by city. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to put like, you know, a massive billboard on my, on my house. But no, I just think in, in general.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Hey, honey, I sold the front yard.

• 2:10:31Jordi Hays?

  I sold the roof.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  Hey, our mortgage is going to be half the price now. That's amazing.

• 2:10:36Speaker 07

  Yeah. So in terms of limitations, in 1965.

• 2:10:41Speaker 07

  The Highway Beautification Act was passed, so that kind of restricts to how many-

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  That required every highway to have ten times-

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  To have beautiful billboards?

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:10:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, so basically, there's only a certain subset that you could put in your highways, but you're starting to see all these other formats kind of come about.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:59Speaker 07

  You know, there's folks putting ads on trucks.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:01Speaker 07

  There's folks wrapping Ubers. They're putting ads inside of Ubers. They're putting- pulling planes in the sky, which is kind of old school, but-

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, skywriting.

• 2:11:13Speaker 07

  And then drone shows are the new big thing, and you expect to see a lot more of those in the future.

• 2:11:18Jordi Hays?

  I know. I'm surprised it hasn't been utilized.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  The only other thing is, can you put a blimp on AdQuick? Like, I've given this advice to enough companies now, and they haven't done it.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  I feel like-

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  But just like, flying a blimp, like a Goodyear blimp over SF for-

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Goodyear's just cornering the market. I think that they wouldn't, I don't think Goodyear would sell their blimp for a billion dollars. I think there's just their greatest capital asset they have, because you could monetize that thing so well flying around San Francisco.

• 2:11:49Speaker 07

  You know, we do have 2,000 media owners on the platform, and I'm pretty sure that might fit the bill.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing.

• 2:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations on the partnership, and thank you again for being our-

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  Makes so much sense.

• 2:12:04Jordi Hays?

  You had to have been the second-

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  Day one.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  The second advertiser right after Ramp-

• 2:12:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  To back us, and we'll never forget your support.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  We appreciate you, Chris. Thanks so much.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team.

• 2:12:14Speaker 07

  Alright.

• 2:12:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me also tell you about Labelbox RL Environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm expecting our next guest to be duct taped to his chair.

• 2:12:38John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, is he? Is he?

• 2:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Is he?

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  He was duct taped. Oh, he's free. He got free.

• 2:12:43Speaker 07

  I'm alive.

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Introduce yourself, introduce the company, and then explain the duct tape stunt.

• 2:12:49Speaker 08

  I love it. Co-founder CEO of Hanover Park. Think about us as financial infrastructure to power investment firms, private equity, venture funds, the most unsexy industry in the planet. We're now making sexy.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  Thank you for your

• 2:13:03Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. So I was duct taped to a chair and I announced a blooper that I tagged Jordan, you guys. And I was like, okay, how can we make the most boring industry in the world sexy? And that was obviously replacing human duct tape. And so yeah, pumped to do it. We launched our announcement series today.

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  Okay. So the metaphor is there's a lot of human duct tape inside these funds, piecing different puzzle pieces together to manage the financial assets and LP relationships. And you make all of that go away. Correct?

• 2:13:31Speaker 08

  A hundred percent. And also like, I don't know. I've been saying this for two years, like B2B SaaS is dead. We want to sell outcomes, not tools. And so tools are things that are a bunch of duct tape around with humans and software. And we're like, we're going to replace the human heavy services business out there too.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what is the, what is the key moment for an allocator using the platform that, that really wows them or clicks?

• 2:13:58Speaker 08

  When you want to make a hundred million dollar follow on decision and you have to ping your CFO and say, hey, can you pull together the data that we haven't had in real time for the past two months? Can you figure this out?

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:09Speaker 08

  AI agents solve the problem by getting you real time data and then help you make those decisions. And so we're pulling in data from granola notes. We're pulling in data from emails and board decks. We're pulling in data from all the boring accounting data on those positions. And so people are like, oh my God, I can finally make a decision in real time without waiting a bunch of days.

• 2:14:28John Coogan?

  Okay. So there might be a whole bunch of decks from all the different investments and all the different companies that have various ARR figures and growth rates, but they're sort of buried. Uh, Hanover can go in there, get that data, put it in some sort of centralized database and then visualize that or maybe even help with marks. Is that something you do? Or is there still a human in the loop for that?

• 2:14:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, even more importantly, we think there's a world where you don't even need to log into Hanover Park. We're going to expose all the data via MCP server. And so we launched that where people are accessing it via Claude, Coork and via GPT, etc.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:04Speaker 08

  And so that's been a key piece, I would say for like GPs, whereas like CFOs are going to use us for things like capital calls, distributions, financial reporting to LPs, etc.

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  Got it, got it. What, what, uh, so interesting. Uh, so if somebody's on like the like enterprise OpenAI plan or something, they, uh, they, they, they, do they have to integrate this themselves or is that just like a off the shelf plugin? And then, and then, uh, if they want to actually get this into like a deck, what's the current stack to get that information? They would be exporting it, like transforming it over in their LLM tool of choice and then taking it to the LPs?

• 2:15:42Speaker 08

  It's actually even worse. You would have to email some human called your fund admin and say, "Hey, can you pull that data that's locked in some random tool you don't give me access to?"

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:51Speaker 08

  You then get a spreadsheet, you then put that into another tool, you then put that into Claude or GPT, etc. And so a lot of the value prop here is you're going to pay a fund admin anyway to do this boring financial reporting. LPs demand this from a third party. And so instead of having that data locked away, we can at least give you access to it and then you can put it into Claude and other things.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  How big is the market? I, this is a market that like, you know, compared to like SMB.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  There will never be too much venture capital.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know, I know. And we're trying to, we're trying to, to, to get more people to be.

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  There's a hundred and ten billion dollars raised this month. Okay.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, but, but yeah, so I'm, I'm assuming with, with, you know, venture funds, private equity, all this stuff, you know, you, you have to kind of ignore like individual SPVs and entities. But, but, uh, I'm assuming you can kind of clock pretty precisely like what the, how big the market is. And then you got to go and try to get as much of it as you can.

• 2:16:50Speaker 08

  Yes, there, there's a hundred trillion of global assets and there's a twenty billion dollar public company.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  But isn't that, isn't that, isn't that like somewhat of a?

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Are you gonna get PIMCO at some point, right?

• 2:17:00Speaker 08

  It's, yeah, it's like hedge funds, right? You have like private equity funds, real estate, private equity, venture, etc. Like SSNC is a public company today. They have like five billion of revenue. Sitco has five billion of revenue, right? So there's a bunch of like these massive dinosaur companies that exist and it's really like. Venture and private equity is just the start.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:19Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  And so within, I mean, venture also scales from $15 million fund to $15 billion fund. Like, I imagine that there's some trade offs where the bigger you go, the bigger the dollars, but also the bigger integration, the more requests versus somebody who's just starting a, you know, a new fund, they don't have any software, so it's super easy to get off the ground. Have you been picking one or the other as like a beachhead market? Or have you just been doing like whoever you know?

• 2:17:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, you'd be surprised. The bigger it is, the easier it is to differentiate, actually.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:54Speaker 08

  And so a lot of these bigger funds, they've been like running around with players like S and C, which I call like the evil empire, which is basically like you're using them and all of your data is kind of trapped. Whereas like an early stage venture fund that's just getting off the ground, things are pretty clean and pretty easy. And so we've actually focused on like mid-market enterprise to think like 250 million plus in assets.

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:16Speaker 08

  Venture and private equity to start at least.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Uh huh. Do you do any work on the, on, is it all equity or are you starting to do stuff in private credit or private or like public debt or any of the other asset classes? Or are you just purely in alternatives?

• 2:18:32Speaker 08

  Purely in alternatives today. I would say like six to 12 months from now, obviously focused on expanding into things like private credit.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:38Speaker 08

  Obviously a big opportunity being here in New York. I've been saying this for a long time. Favorite sponsor ramp. It's like Stripe for payments, Ramp for expenses, Hanover Park for investments.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:18:46Speaker 08

  And so that's kind of the, the.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Have you had any customers just ask you to just handle just all the actual investment decision making? They're like, I'll just put money in a box and then you, you deploy it. Let me know how it goes. Talk to my LPs too. I don't want to talk to, I don't want to talk to them anymore.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Talk to founders or LP.

• 2:19:06John Coogan?

  Not yet. Not yet.

• 2:19:07Speaker 08

  I, I think it's been funny. It's like a lot of LPs that we talked to are like, I keep, you know, my venture funds are investing in AI, but they're back in middle offices run by the anti-AI. And so this idea of like, we're investing in it, we might as well move to it as well, has been pretty exciting for people. But I think a lot, long-term, it's like unlocking alpha for the investment firm based on all the unsexy financial day that we have could be interesting. And we got a lot of work to do to get there.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Uh, unpack a little bit more of like the dream. Unsexy proprietary data set. Does that look like PitchBook or Crunchbase data? There's a lot of different data sources that venture capitalists go to throughout diligence. Do you want to be a conduit to those sources? Or do you imagine that the LLM tools that venture capitalists are using will interface with those separately? And just do the joins in whatever work session is happening?

• 2:19:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's actually not really Crunchbase PitchBook. It's really like the unsexy financial cash flow data. So like, give me the cash flows from every LP through history and how that flows into our next cap call or our next distribution or our next financial statement. So it's actually that data, which is the data that's mostly trapped in these fund admins. I think Crunchbase and PitchBook access will get commoditized. Those will go into the underlying models and I don't think we want to play that game.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the overall health of the venture capital market. I feel like you're in a unique position. There's been these like sort of warring narratives we joked earlier, like $110 billion raised, but that was OpenAI. There's a lot of, there's like sort of a crunch in K-shaped recovery, maybe in venture capital. There's a variety of mega funds that are scaling up. Like what are you seeing when someone just asks you from the outside? Maybe they're a public markets investor and they say like, how is venture capital doing these days?

• 2:20:56Speaker 08

  We're actually seeing a lot of haves and have nots. It's a very stark bifurcation because when you start a fund, you basically sign a lawyer and a fund admin. And so we see from inception of how your raise is going. And so literally it's, there's people that are raising in three, six, nine, 10 weeks for a first fund, which is crazy fast versus six to 12 months. And then there are people who are never raising. And so I think it's the people that are spinning out of a lot of the major funds that are targeting, call it 100 to 200 million dollar fund ones, are having actually an easier time from some of the emerging managers that are focused on like 25 million dollar fund ones. And so it's a pretty big bifurcation there.

• 2:21:31John Coogan?

  How are you processing this new holding company rollup firm? It looks like a private equity firm, but it also sort of looks like a startup. We've had a couple of these founders on where-

• 2:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, those probably aren't clients because they just get a bunch of money.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, would they be or could they be in the future? How do you think about that?

• 2:21:52Speaker 08

  It's actually funny. We've had a lot of these folks reach out because fund admin and like accounting services more broadly, right? Think about us as a subset of that because we're doing financial accounting reporting for investment firms.

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:02Speaker 08

  That is a ripe industry for rollup. And so people have been like, oh my God, should this be a fund admin rollup? As an idea in terms of vertical buyout, what we've realized is like, if you just toss agents, the word agents on top of any accounting data, it doesn't really do anything. Having like the core ERP for the fund and the system of record that we had to build from day zero, it's actually like way more important than just saying like AI solves all our problems, which I don't think does quite yet.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you had to do any like fine tuning on your own data or your system? Or are the agents sort of able to, you know, find their way around your system pretty quickly? Like, did you need to build your own MCP servers or your own CLIs for these things? Uh, we were just talking about this with DoorDash. There's like demand for a DoorDash CLI now. And it's funny, but it makes a lot of sense in the context of agent tech engineering.

• 2:22:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, we've actually had to build our own little AI fund account, and I call it, which is doing simple things like AI cash reconciliation. When you get an email from someone to make a decision, how does a human do that? It's actually client specific, different clients have different preferences. And so almost how do you build that like AF and accountant? So we're using a bunch of the models off the shelf-

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:11Speaker 08

  Uh, to do that as well. And then we're doing some fine tuning on top.

• 2:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Does that look like, like a, like an M, like a .md file, like a skill? Or is this more of like a full harness that's actually, uh, you know, like a whole bunch of code that you've written? Like, how do you see that system growing as you develop more core capabilities?

• 2:23:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so. There's a bunch of different ways that we sliced it, but like for something like migration, which is how do I get the most complex financial data in the entire world from one system to another? That's a lot about building harnesses and building skills in and around the core underlying model providers to say, this is the weird, messy financial data from pick your massive investment firm. Here's how we need to think about this. And then for things like doc processing a little bit differently. So depends on the depends on the workflow.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell me a little bit about the progress of the company, like where are you based? How big is the firm? How are you growing? Where do you see this going over the next couple of years?

• 2:24:04Speaker 08

  Yep. So two years old, raised 31 million. Obviously, we're today, we're announcing a $27 million Series A led by merchants. We went, oh, oh, there we go. We did it. We're just getting started though. We're just getting started.

• 2:24:20John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 2:24:21Speaker 08

  We're just getting started. What are you talking about?

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:24:25Speaker 08

  We went one to 15 billion in assets in the past 12 months. We 15 axed. We've had a lot of excitement from folks. I actually, I was joking with the team. I said, guys, this is a top 0.1% problem. Having unlimited demand and people excited. Now let's go make them raving fans, which is our goal for 26. And so not cursor, but we're focused on, you know, keeping our heads down and executing.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  I love it, dude. It's awesome. Awesome to see your, your progress.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been calling you for years.

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the absolute thread grinder from the 2021 era. Just ran it up.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:01Jordi Hays?

  And you're just.

• 2:25:02John Coogan?

  And so I'm sure you angel invested, right?

• 2:25:04Jordi Hays?

  I did. I did miss this one.

• 2:25:06Speaker 08

  What happened, guys? Saw a one got in. You didn't get in.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  This is, this is the nature of the show. This is why we're podcasting because we, we, we, we, we see people like you all the time and we just miss everything. So back to the show.

• 2:25:17Jordi Hays?

  I don't.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jordy makes a lot of good investments. I, I just don't, I just don't do it. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Chris.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. See you, Chris. Let me tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without middle, without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And our next guest is in the restroom waiting room. How are you doing?

• 2:25:48Speaker 09

  Good afternoon.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Good afternoon.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:25:52John Coogan?

  Please, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:25:55Speaker 09

  I'm Georgios. I drive the engineering team at the Temple project.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:59Speaker 09

  Temple is a payments-first blockchain that we started developing in August. Today, we just launched the Temple mainnet live in production. Alongside it, we also launched the machine payments protocol, which is our answer to how agents should pay.

• 2:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:16Speaker 09

  If you think about it, agents are great at searching the web. We use agents all the time in our development process. My AMP, Cloud Code, Codex, whatever it is we're developing. But we find it very hard to make them pay. So we developed a solution for it. And I'm excited to talk about both.

• 2:26:31John Coogan?

  So you have MCP. A lot of people were saying, like, why doesn't MCP have a payment spec already baked into it? There's this whole debate about HTTP maybe having a payment spec in it. That would have been about 20 years ago or something. MPP solves that. But is MPP like a subset or a superset of MCP? Or is it a completely different spec? Is there any relationship between the two technologies?

• 2:26:57Speaker 09

  They're complementary. You should think of MCP as a way to talk to an API that has been designed to be baked into the agent harnesses. And MPP is a way that you can payment-gate an MCP. So imagine that you have your service, you have written an MCP for it, but you actually want to make that a paid service. Maybe, for example, on TBN, you guys do great prep for all the people that you work with. Hey, well, what if you just added a paid API to that? Sometimes.

• 2:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. So, yeah, I think anybody that hasn't been living under a data center has heard of the potential for agents to use stablecoins and blockchain technology generally for various services. You guys are working with a bunch of really cool companies. Like, what kind of use cases are you trying to guide your design partners towards enabling?

• 2:27:57Speaker 09

  I think the most exciting use case that they have do around commerce. Basically, there's a lot of like very interesting work around, hey, I'm on ChatGPT. My ChatGPT is browsing around, but hey, it wants to buy things for me. I think that's one of the things that is unlocking. The other thing to think about is that your ChatGPT is again browsing the web, but it hits a paywall. You want it to be able to, instead of saying, hey, I can access this information. You want it to instead be able to say, actually, pay thirty cents. And you can actually access this wonderful article that would have been paywalled, which might improve your research queries by, say, thirty percent or something.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  So in that, in that case, you'd be going to, like, so is there a plan to go to publishers, people that do have paywalled content and try to get them to enable MPP? Is that, is that the idea?

• 2:28:50Speaker 09

  Totally. I think that would be awesome. And the other thing that I think is just happening already is that, again, envision that, that people these days don't have an attention span and people these days also don't want to click buttons around. They just want to tell their, again, their AI app to do things for them. I think what we've been seeing ourselves as developers is instead of me going to, say, CloudFerv or Sell and saying, hey, login, add billing information, get API key, pull it back to my terminal, or go to Eleven Labs and say, hey, do me this text to speech thing, or any kind of like API gated service that exists today. Instead, I can just say, hey, agent, here's five bucks.

• 2:29:31Speaker 09

  Go and figure it out for me. And actually, he doesn't just do it in one service. It does it on many services. You can imagine a waterfall of queries. Can tell it, hey, go search the web, pull off this data, translate it with this API, then voice to speech it, text to speech it with some other API, and then upload it onto a website and email me that link of the website, all one shot.

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask more on the on the technical side. There's been a lot of protocols created blockchains over the last decade. You've seen pretty much all of them. I'm assuming this is your Mona Lisa, you know, taking all the different learnings from the different blockchains and trying to build the perfect, perfect product experience this time around. What kind of like technical decisions did you and the team make for this kind of use case?

• 2:30:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, so the Temple blockchain is itself optimized for payments, which means that it's really fast. It has very high throughput and very low latency. Our block times are less than a second, which means that you hit and before the spinner even finishes spinning, you have a confirmation back, which is what any normal person would expect from a payments experience. But in addition to these, the innovation we've done on the MPP side is a feature called sessions where normally you would need to, let's say you're talking to, I don't know, let's say again, the OpenAI API. And if you were to do payments, if you were to pay for every query that you're doing, you would need to wait for the blockchain to like confirm your transaction.

• 2:31:11Speaker 09

  You would need to pay a fee anytime you do your transaction. And that, these days, maybe you can do 10,000 transactions per second or something. But really for the agentic web, and it does seem that everyone will be making a lot more API calls than they were doing before, we need to scale up to hundreds of thousands, millions, if not, you know, billions of payments per second. Just to put it, the analogy would be that instead of thinking of like financial transactions, we should be thinking about API calls per second. So we developed this feature called sessions, which let you really go at API scale by bypassing the blockchain and thinking about it like going to a, opening a tab where you say, hey, I'm opening my tab. And then every time on your notebook on the side, you write, what are the updates?

• 2:31:56Speaker 09

  And then only at the end, when you want to settle, do you pay, which amortizes the cost of a very expensive otherwise operation. If you want to do, you know, a thousand or a million API requests, just two, the opening and the closing.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:32:12John Coogan?

  What do, how are you dealing with the just general perception that there's always a risk that AIs hallucinate and so maybe, you know, you don't want to have, you don't want to give an agent the ability to go spend an unlimited amount of money, maybe you want a transaction to be reversible. There's this joke about like giving open claw your, your credit card, that seems irresponsible, but in some ways, I would maybe rather give a credit card to an agent than, you know, a crypto wallet that if it sends it to the wrong address, it's gone forever, it's not really reversible. How are you thinking about

• 2:32:55John Coogan?

  handling those like long tail errors that are, that can be catastrophic?

• 2:33:00Speaker 09

  That's an awesome question because I absolutely have in the past, lost money using systems that, you know, others had built where, where you just give your agent money and then the agent goes and spends it without realizing how much access it has.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:16Speaker 09

  We developed a feature called access keys, which basically is your standard card permissions. It's a bit more programmable, but you should think of it as limits, spend limits, and you can program that. So whenever you open a tempo session, you can just authorize the agent and say, you can only spend up to 10 bucks, or you can tell it, hey, you can only spend up to 10 bucks an hour, or $1 a second. So it lets you have any kind of granularity on the assets that you're accessing, the functions that you can call or the API calls you can make, and also on the frequency that these budgets can be applied.

• 2:33:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about getting the long tail of publishers onto some sort of agentic payment rail? Because-

• 2:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully they're already on Stripe, otherwise they've been living under a data center.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Yes, I'm just thinking about like the actual

• 2:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Like that's like, that's to me, that's like why when I saw the launch and heard about the product, uh, the, the project previously, I was like, okay, Stripe already has a long tail of merchants. If they can easily enable MPP, then you're kind of able to kind of bootstrap a network.

• 2:34:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm just thinking like, if you have a blog and you put ad words on it, you got a stream of payments from Google. Whenever you would show page, they'd show an ad, they'd auction that ad. They would send you maybe 50% of what they made on that ad and that would be paid monthly. And they were able to onboard sort of the long tail. If you, it feels like the, the opportunity here is like this many to many relationship. But I'm wondering about like, is that onboarding going to happen on tempo directly? Is, is that going to be decentralized or would we expect the big labs like OpenAI, Anthropic to say, okay, now we have opt-in for anyone who wants to get paid when, when one of our LLMs,

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  one of our agents hits your website and we will use Tempo as the payment rail?

• 2:35:20Speaker 09

  So there, there's a few questions here. So I think what you just said is true and will happen. It's already happening, right? So Anthropic or OpenAI or both already have a service where you plug in only to OpenAI and then you can just have a billing relationship with all of the integrated partners that they have.

• 2:35:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:37Speaker 09

  So that, that will happen for sure. On the Tempo side, the machine payments protocol, MPP, which is what we launched this morning, it is co-built with Stripe. We co-authored it and it's payments method agnostic. So every merchant that is on Stripe, and if you go to the Stripe docs, MPP is already there and it's already an option you can enable. Um, every merchant could turn that on and their API and their website could become MPP enabled, which would cover a part of that tail. If not, you know, that part that you just said.

• 2:36:10John Coogan?

  Sure. So is this a bet on model commoditization and local compute? Because if there's consolidation and the vast majority of LLM traffic is coming from like a single lab or two labs or three labs. Yeah, winner take most. Like, the Wall Street Journal does get scraped by OpenAI, but they have a deal between OpenAI, the corporation, and News Corp, the corporation. And they sat down in a boardroom and they said, hey, this is the value, like, send me the check and pay, you know, via invoice. And it's a very different relationship. But for these long tail, if the long tail with Google can pay a ton of small bloggers who set up their own websites on whatever, they can go to, you know, their own, their own blog.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  But is this, is this maybe a solution to like, if models commoditize and you're seeing LLM traffic come from all different sources, then you need your agent to go and make the payment?

• 2:37:06Speaker 09

  I think for the publisher use case, I think that's totally could be the case.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:12Speaker 09

  The thing that we're the most excited about, the machine, machine payments world and developers, right now, every, there's just a tailwind right now where with AI, more and more people are building things.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:24Speaker 09

  Everybody wants to make paid APIs or everybody wants to monetize their knowledge base, their API. And these are just not things that, it just means that the tail is just going to be so long.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:35Speaker 09

  That it's not something that I expect will be realistically captured by the labs in that way. Just because any random dev can spin up an API that could be very, very, very valuable. And I think that the lowest friction way to access and monetize that API will be via MPP on Temple.

• 2:37:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. I, I've, I've run into this issue where I've gone to a particular LLM and said, I want you to take this video, convert it to an MP3, then transcribe it, then, you know, transform that. And it can do, and it's like, oh, I need a tool for that. Like, why don't you download the file? You're like, no, you're a computer. They literally told me, like, open up QuickTime and turn it into an MP3. I was like, no, no, I want you to do that. And if you Google it, like, you know, MP4 or M4A2 transcript, like, there's a tool out there that does it. It's. I don't know if it has an API, it probably should. It probably is an API out there for a lot of these things.

• 2:38:24Speaker 09

  It might have malware in it.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of them are like websites that have a million ads and stuff. It's way better if it just came back to me and was like, hey, that's going to be fifteen cents and I've already approved that. Or hey, it's going to be fifty bucks to do what you want because you asked me to go generate a whole bunch of AI video and crazy stuff. And, you know, that was a big request. Is this in budget? And I can be like, yeah, absolutely.

• 2:38:46Speaker 09

  Absolutely. And this is right now supported. There's the MPP Services Registry where if you literally go tell your agent, hey, build me an image, convert this to whatever you want. There are APIs already integrated, which lets you do all of these things without ever leaving your agent, without getting this like API, you know, install your own API tool thing. So totally.

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Explain if I'm a developer and I'm using something like Codex and I want to like effectively enable the agent to buy different services with MPP. What is the process for, what is like the recommended process for like actually giving it funds, everything on that side?

• 2:39:31Speaker 09

  So this is the use case that we've been optimizing for. It is the exact use case because we're developers and we actually dog food this experience every day. The process is extremely simple. You tell it, install the Tempo skill. The Tempo skill is available on Tempo website. You just paste the link in your agent. And then once you tell it to install the Tempo skill, the Tempo skill bootstraps the whole process and says, install the Tempo command line interface from your Codex and then onboard the user. The user's browser opens, the user face IDs and then or touch IDs if you're on your MacBook. And then the user just gets on boarded via Apple Pay if they have Apple Pay, if they have an Apple card. Or via another crypto, if they have stable coins, or we, right now, we provide some referral codes to make onboarding easier for people.

• 2:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:40:16Speaker 09

  And then you're in, then you're logged in and you can go crazy.

• 2:40:19Jordi Hays?

  And then you could ask the agent, like, add more fu- you know, I need to add more funds.

• 2:40:22Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 2:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:23Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 2:40:24Jordi Hays?

  And so if you hit it, if you hit some type of Paywall experience or Paywall API, it'll just tell you, I need access to more funds.

• 2:40:32Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  And then you can just enable it. That's very cool.

• 2:40:34Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 2:40:35John Coogan?

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

• 2:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very cool.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:40:41Speaker 09

  Anyways, have a good day.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and NHR built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. And without further ado, we have Matt Wong from Paradigm in TV and Ultra. How are you doing, Matt?

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:41:06Speaker 10

  What's up, guys? How's it going?

• 2:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on the show.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic.

• 2:41:11Speaker 10

  Longtime listener, big fan.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  Appreciate that. Uh, where should we start, Jordy? Should we, can we do a little biograph- biographical stuff? Can we go back in time a little bit, get to how we got here?

• 2:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's touch on tempo.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Since we've been talking about tempo and then there's a bunch of other stuff we can talk about. But, uh, glad to see you're drinking a diet, virtual Diet Coke with, uh, with John.

• 2:41:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess my question for you on, on tempo is, uh, it, it, it feels like a big project. It feels like it launched very fast. Is this faster than expected? Like, what were the keys to actually getting to this point as quickly as you did?

• 2:41:46Speaker 10

  I think it's, uh, perhaps one of the fastest, uh, you know, projects start to mainnet launch.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:52Speaker 10

  In crypto.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:53Speaker 10

  And it certainly was top of mind for us to move really fast. I think the genesis of the project was around noticing the problems that existing infrastructure had, serving all these stablecoin use cases. Uh, we didn't want to wait around for many years.

• 2:42:06Jordi Hays?

  But certainly you would have seen the opportunity before August of last year, right? Like, it's not like you weren't thinking about AI or stablecoins or anything. So, so was that like somewhat of an intentional strategy of like, hey, we need to build a really strong thesis of, of how this market is going to evolve and it, we shouldn't just like rush in, launch something and then go through kind of wandering in the wilderness to then get to the point where you could launch something to mainnet.

• 2:42:31Speaker 10

  You know, you're ascribing a lot of foresight.

• 2:42:36Speaker 10

  Candidly, I mean, obviously, we've been paying attention and investing and building in the crypto space for a long time. Candidly, it was kind of two sides coming together. On the paradigm side, we were noticing the slowness of existing infrastructure. And then on the Stripe side, they've been doing a bunch of great work in stablecoin and were themselves experiencing a lot of the infrastructure challenges that existing chains had. So, we had a conversation in April about maybe we should actually get together to build something. And then a week later, the entity was formed.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Are there any other big, like, distribution nodes that need to fall into place besides having the network up and running and then the partnership with Stripe? Because it feels like that solves everything, but I'm curious to know, like, what are the other next steps in the rollout broadly?

• 2:43:30Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think there's probably two layers to think about, right? There's Tempo, the chain, which all the crypto infrastructure and exchange infrastructure needs to support. And we have a bunch of great infrastructure partners there. Then I think there's just the broader trend of stablecoins. Like, if you think about payments, I like to think about it as like 1,000 or 10,000 different markets. It's not a single market. You know, there's what country does it originate from? Where does it go? The size of payment, whether it's a business, consumer, et cetera. And so some of those are much better served by existing infrastructure and some of it's much worse served. And so, stablecoins are

• 2:44:10Speaker 10

  actually particularly good at certain segments of that kind of big matrix. And that's where it's being adopted first, you know, cross-border, remittances, payouts. And so, part of the goal around Tempo is to kind of promote stablecoins more broadly, not just offer another chain.

• 2:44:31Jordi Hays?

  How predictable has stablecoin adoption been to date? Like, if you go back five years ago, were you pretty confident that you'd see it more in emerging markets and then, and then it would go, you know, eventually to business use cases for, you know, businesses that were operating, are operating internationally, like, and then obviously, trading use case, which has been, you know, dominant since the beginning?

• 2:44:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, stablecoins have been around for 10 years, mostly dominated by trading. And

• 2:45:05Speaker 10

  I think the emerging market use case is definitely expected. I mean, the monetary rails and monetary units are much worse there.

• 2:45:15Speaker 10

  I will say, we were probably surprised the last 18 months by how much it's taken off. I think even the most bullish people inside of crypto, maybe some predicted it, but all of us have been surprised by how much stablecoins are being used outside of crypto. And that's really the bullishness that drove us to get excited about launching something like Temple.

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  And is the big driver, I mean, I've heard about the like Scale AI use case. I think SpaceX has mentioned a use case for stablecoins. There's a lot of like cross-border.

• 2:45:45Jordi Hays?

  Deal is, you know, invested heavily.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Is that the current narrative? Or are there other little offshoots popping up around adoption?

• 2:45:56Speaker 10

  There are probably three big buckets. The first is the cross-border.

• 2:45:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:00Speaker 10

  And so that's where you have Deal, which serves so many different countries. And Shopify is thinking about similar things. And then you have the instant nature of stablecoins. So I mean, when you think about it, it's kind of crazy that the financial system shuts off during nights and weekends. Like the internet is on 24/7. The financial system is off more than it's on.

• 2:46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:28Speaker 10

  And so I think stablecoin potential is just to bring that into the 21st century where it's on all the time.

• 2:46:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the US dollar has insane network effects, obvious product market fit. And then you're taking a product that works, that's pretty great. And then, you know, it has some of its issues. But and then you just like wrap it in something that, you know, unlocks, you know, all this additional airtime.

• 2:46:53Speaker 10

  And, you know, there is a trend in the 70s and 80s called Eurodollars, which is sort of the offline tradFi equivalent of this, of dollar deposits outside the US. And that also started kind of illegal and frowned upon pretty small and has now grown to, you know, north of 10 trillion in offshore deposits and fully legitimized by the US system. And I think stablecoins are probably on that track as well. But back to your question, like the instant payouts, instant payments. I think is underrated too. So it's not a cost advantage. It's more getting the money immediately and being able to spend it immediately. And if you think about a lot of these labor marketplaces, that's something that the supply side of those labor marketplaces really value.

• 2:47:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the shape of the kind of issuer market evolves? You think it's, you know, right now it seems to be like a winner, winner take most market, but certainly a number of companies are kind of promoting this idea of like, there should be millions of different stable coins. What's your, what's your view?

• 2:48:01Speaker 10

  So I think, I think there's probably, there's the, how many stable coins will there be that are generally have some usage? And like, what will the distribution of volume and deposits look like?

• 2:48:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:14Speaker 10

  And I think the distribution is going to be very top heavy just because network effects around a single unit of account and how liquidity works in DeFi and exchanges. On the other hand, I think a lot of enterprises that we're talking to own the interface that people are going to be using these stable coins through. And you can think of them in that context, maybe a little more like stored balances or gift cards, where like Starbucks has a massive gift card program. And it's essentially bank-like, if you think about it in some ways. And so I think a lot of those types of financial services that are kind of hiding inside these consumer businesses will end up considering launching their own stable.

• 2:48:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:49:01John Coogan?

  How are you feeling about the regulatory environment? It felt like 2025 was a great year for just getting clarity around where crypto was going from a regulatory perspective. Has that trend continued in your mind? Are you happy with where things are? Are you optimistic for new regulation or less regulation or any changes? Just what's your read on the regulatory environment right now?

• 2:49:29Speaker 10

  I'd say we're in the top 1% of universes that we could have hoped for, so things are going well.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:49:36Speaker 10

  Like, the Genius Act passed, that's been huge for stablecoin adoption. Obviously, stablecoins were growing even before that, but a lot of the enterprises we talked to, they weren't really comfortable participating in stablecoins until the regulatory clarity. The next stage, hopefully, we get market structure, the Clarity bill passed as well. There's some kind of last details to work through between the banking industry and crypto, but I'm feeling optimistic that we can hopefully sort through that.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  Are you a believer in stablecoins to the degree that you'd put your own fund capital in stablecoins?

• 2:50:13Speaker 10

  Well, yeah. Tempo would not be the best place to hold stablecoins if we weren't comfortable podfooting.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, is there actually a future where stablecoins wind up showing up in venture capital?

• 2:50:31Speaker 10

  Well, stablecoins, I think, will be like as a cash instrument, I think, for sure.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:37Speaker 10

  Yeah. Then you don't have to, I mean, you can do instant capital calls when you sign the term sheet at 9:00 PM at night. You don't have to wait till the next day.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  That's actually pretty bullish. Take us back through some of the previous investment experience you've had. There was someone in the chat asking about your early Fund I investments, very heavy on Bitcoin and Ethereum. Can you tell that story of what that was like from a risk perspective, what actually played out there?

• 2:51:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, when we launched Paradigm in 2018, I mean, a lot of our thesis was we knew that crypto would expand massively. And then there was this open question, should you invest in the core protocols like Bitcoin and Ethereum? Or invest in startups. And obviously, in hindsight, the answer was both, like you could own Coinbase and Bitcoin. But I think it's a lot like the AI landscape now of this question of, do you own the model companies or do you own like the

• 2:51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:51:39Speaker 10

  the agent layer on top?

• 2:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:40Speaker 10

  And so in 2018, like Bitcoin and Ethereum were like OpenAI and Anthropic. And those are the things to own. And we were sort of, we're thinking much more bottoms up about what we wanted to own for five to 10 years. Rather than like, is this too much in one investment or it happens to be a publicly traded thing?

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Speaker 10

  Those are all details.

• 2:52:01Jordi Hays?

  That's such an interesting comp because I feel like you can almost think of like L2s.

• 2:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Like, and comp those to like cheaper, smaller, open source models today where like L2s have been, you know, great in some ways, but also kind of threaten the revenue stream of the underlying protocols at that point.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  Take me back to the ByteDance investment. Was there a similar thesis around, should you own ByteDance or Facebook or something? And in reality, the bet was to own both. What went into your initial investment? Take me through the thought process for that one.

• 2:52:41Speaker 10

  You know, I wish I was that thoughtful back then and could claim some, some kind of genius.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:48Speaker 10

  But I was just very lucky to meet the entrepreneur, I mean, on a trip. And, you know, he's just one of those people you meet that jumps off the page. And I'm sure you guys have had this experience. And I was going to give him money even if he was building a hot dog stand.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. What was it that stuck out? It's just the conversation, the level of detail, the technical side, the EQ, IQ? Like, how were you evaluating him at that time?

• 2:53:17Speaker 10

  Well, it was a weird conversation because he was, I don't really speak good Chinese. I can kind of stumble through ordering them some.

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  I don't speak good Chinese either.

• 2:53:28Speaker 10

  And, and he didn't really speak good English. So it was through a translator.

• 2:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:32Speaker 10

  But, you know, he's one of those entrepreneurs that like seems very

• 2:53:38Speaker 10

  Thoughtful, academic, highly technical, but then in the revealed nature of his actions is just like extremely hyper aggressive. And I think a lot of

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:48Speaker 10

  Some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs look like that, too.

• 2:53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I I'm thinking of a number of of CEOs.

• 2:53:59Speaker 10

  Patrick at Stripe.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  I was I was gonna say, yeah, exactly. Where where they have one demeanor, one level of they can communicate about the technical side of the business very thoughtfully, the high EQ, but the level of ambition is just unlimited. And that's it just seems like such a rare combination. But when you find it, you got to go all in.

• 2:54:21Jordi Hays?

  How should people think about Paradigm today?

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  That's a good question.

• 2:54:26Speaker 10

  Um. So, you know, we've spent a lot of time in the crypto space and increasingly as crypto goes mainstream, we're finding that distinction to be a little less meaningful. And there's a lot of interesting things happening in the world. So.

• 2:54:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like it was it was it was entirely right to be entirely focused on crypto in 2018. And then as the technology diffuses, you realize like, hey, there's a lot of other businesses. And then you also have to follow your own personal interests. And I and I feel like if you're if you're, you know, logging off and then thinking about, you know, biotech or AI at a certain point, like, I think the best investors like follow their obsession. So.

• 2:55:14Speaker 10

  Yeah. And don't get me wrong. I think crypto is still one of the most interesting frontiers. It's finally winning. It's getting mainstream. It's getting integrated everywhere. But AI and many other areas are also super interesting. And I think Paradigm today is a lot of the team we've assembled. I mean, you just spoke to the our CTO.

• 2:55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:34Speaker 10

  And, you know, he found out like what a balance sheet was somewhat recently. And like is not a typical GP or investor at a fund. But everyone at the fund knows how to code and is in kind of some kind of CLI tool all day. And the team really embodies this hacker ethos that lives at the frontier. And we want to be spending time anywhere that is interesting at the frontier.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Is this the best time in history to be that hacker archetype?

• 2:56:06Speaker 10

  I think so. It's like the joke that there's a billion dollars stuck in your laptop. You just need to press the right keys to extract it out. And I think that's never been more true with the leverage of intelligence kind of on tap.

• 2:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I completely agree. What a time to be alive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on.

• 2:56:27John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, excited to watch the rollout.

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:56:32Speaker 10

  See you guys.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks, visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And let me also tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Jordy, what else is in the timeline? Trevor Milton is out raising money for a new company. Trevor Milton, of course, was convicted and then pardoned for defrauding investors in his truck company Nicola. Now he's raising funds for a new jet that he claims will transform flying.

• 2:57:12Jordi Hays?

  There's a quote in the Journal that we can pull out. He said, from the Journal, "Now Milton has joined an exclusive group of post-pardon business people seemingly anointed by Trump's favor." I hope they've got a group chat for the post-pardon mafia. Trevor says, "I walk into meetings now and I'll get high fives from the most wealthy people in the world," he said. "They're like, 'Welcome to the club. You can withstand the fire. We can trust you now.'"

• 2:57:41John Coogan?

  Wow, that is a wild quote. Milton has wasted little time embarking on a second act. He's now CEO of Cyberjet.

• 2:57:49Jordi Hays?

  And he's unveiling plans for a new small jet that he says will have the highest speed and range and largest lavatory in the light jet category.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's important. It's important.

• 2:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess we want to be able to take a full shower.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Investor documents reviewed by the Journal said the goal is for the plane to be the first light jet to focus on AI flight to get the market. Cyberjet plans to create an entirely new avionics system, likening the effort to Tesla's approach, designing its infotainment and vehicle control system. The company also needs to secure more funding and suppliers and overcome regulatory hurdles. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the concept...

• 2:58:32Jordi Hays?

  Of the jet is cool. This was an existing business that he acquired with an investor group. And then they're raising, you know, more money.

• 2:58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:40Jordi Hays?

  After that. The, the, the kind of interesting thing in, is I feel like Trevor made a name for himself for being a great showman, but not exactly, you know, the most competent and, you know, sort of like engineering led CEO, right? Like everyone stuck in their mind. You have the video of like

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  Truck rolling down the hill.

• 2:59:06Jordi Hays?

  Down the hill.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  And I don't want to buy a jet from that kind of archetype of CEO, right? You kind of want to buy a jet from.

• 2:59:16John Coogan?

  Like a hacker, like a hackathon guy who just like whips it up.

• 2:59:19Jordi Hays?

  A vibe coder.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  A vibe coder.

• 2:59:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, no, no. You know, the, the, the, you, you want to buy a jet from a company.

• 2:59:24John Coogan?

  Decades of experience.

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, a company with ideally with, with decades and decades of experience, you know, uh, millions of flight hours, uh, because reliability is more important than anything when you're, you know, thousands of feet in the air. So.

• 2:59:41John Coogan?

  Well, we'll, we'll make Tyler demo it first.

• 2:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think.

• 2:59:45John Coogan?

  Step aboard.

• 2:59:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, and then, and then the, the, the AI, AI component is interesting. I mean, I think there's a number of, there's a number of light jets and even I think the Pilatus PC 12, I think the PC 12 has like an odd, a lot of the planes have the auto land functionality.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:05Jordi Hays?

  They still require pilots.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure big pilot will figure out a way to make sure that like legally.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  Well, you just get a normal, a normal jet with no autopilot and then you put a Tesla Optimus in the front seat.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We got a pilot.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  Drive the plane.

• 3:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Grok, take the wheel.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  Take the wheel. Uh, Kalshi has a market here. Tesla Optimus released this year, uh, 25.2% chance right now. Obviously it's declining a little bit as the year goes on because every day that it's not released, there's a lower chance. Uh, it was up at, uh, Where was it? It was up at like 50, above 50% last April, but it's since declined. And the market resolves to yes, if Tesla Optimus or another humanoid robot is on sale to the general public before December 31st, that feels tough because I have to imagine that, what is on sale to the general public? Like this, the demand's going to be so high, you would think that you would go with, with business consumers or someone that's at

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  least, hey, why don't you come in and let's talk about your use case and let's see how we'll be, how we'll be pricing this like, because it's more.

• 3:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about the security use case.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  Quick, oh yeah.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Oh, I was gonna tell everyone about Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 3:01:22Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about the security use case. Tech companies are now using robot dogs costing up to 300,000 apiece to guard AI data centers. Remember I was saying, I just want to put a humanoid in my backyard, let him patrol around. I think it'll be a good deterrent. It's working for dogs. Let's pull up this video.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:40Jordi Hays?

  All right, that's, that's freaky.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  It can open a door.

• 3:01:45Jordi Hays?

  This is the last thing you want to see when you're.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  They're sort of mixing footage here, right? Because you wouldn't have a robot dog walking on two feet in.

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's its attack mode.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like it. Yeah, I guess that's just the news, that the robot dogs are being deployed. Guarding? I don't know. Seems, seems relevant.

• 3:02:08Jordi Hays?

  You're not impressed because you think you could take it?

• 3:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  You kind of know you can take it?

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Dropkick that thing, no problem. Still got it.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Taylor Lorenz highlighting from this Vanity Fair profile, which we'll get into tomorrow. But in the profile, Dario Amadei never actually gave me an interview, stiffing me after months of planning. So I created a version of Dario Amadei using his own machine. I've led Claude several published interviews, including everything Amadei said at Dalvos, plus the contents of his two books of essays and told, which I'm sure Claude already has access to.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:44Jordi Hays?

  Told Claude to simulate the interview using variations on real quotes and to make it like a scene from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. It took Claude less than three minutes. You probably couldn't tell the difference. And maybe there isn't one.

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  Okay, there was.

• 3:02:58John Coogan?

  There was like some hot mic moment. Is that real? I, I, if everything's, if everything's

• 3:03:03Jordi Hays?

  I still have to read through it.

• 3:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we, yeah, we got to properly read through this.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  I'm sure there's, I'm sure there's some interesting stuff. It does seem like there's a few interviews. I saw some, I saw some quotes about like, uh, uh, Trent saying that he doesn't wear sunscreen anymore, which I've been advocating for, you know, getting on the trend and D-ball Anavar because AI will cure all the downsides, uh, potentially. It's sort of a, sort of a twist on that. But at this point, now that I've seen the screenshot, I'm kind of wondering like, okay, like what in here is real? Is it all going to be revealed at the end? It's a very long piece, um, but we'll, we'll give it a read and

• 3:03:35Jordi Hays?

  And last but not least, we can, we can briefly cover introspection gate.

• 3:03:41John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Mark Andreessen shared, uh, something from Marcus Aurelius, meditations. Stop talking about what the good man is like and just be one. And Roon says, an entire book where the guy is introspecting.

• 3:03:57John Coogan?

  I think that's the joke, right?

• 3:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:58John Coogan?

  Is, is, yeah, Mark Andreessen's like

• 3:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, uh, I, I, you know, seeing through.

• 3:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:04Jordi Hays?

  I think we saw, we, we, we got what Mark was, was saying, even though a lot of people have, he's, you know, leaned into the chaos and it seems to just be having a good time, but

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  Are you saying he's

• 3:04:17Jordi Hays?

  He was basically saying just

• 3:04:18John Coogan?

  Joking about it.

• 3:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Stop ruminating.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  Stop ruminating.

• 3:04:22Jordi Hays?

  Just, uh,

• 3:04:23John Coogan?

  I mean, it's an, it's a transposition of the you can just do things idea. It's like actually go and do the thing, you know, uh, uh, Jeremy Giffon has another post about this. So where it's like, people are like rehearsing for the fight that never comes. And, and that is like a different form, formulation of like the don't, it's like, don't, don't, don't spend your entire life just thinking about what you're meant to do with your life. Like go do something, get some real experiences. There's probably a room for introspection and then go back and forth and watch the game tape, monitor your, your KPIs, but also just think about what brings you joy and what you can do in the world. That's, that's beneficial. What's your ikigai? What's, what are you good at? What does the market want from you? What can you make money doing that type of stuff?

• 3:05:04John Coogan?

  Like, these are reasonable, but should that be 99% of your, uh, of, of, of, of the, your time spent? Probably not, you know?

• 3:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Never ruminate.

• 3:05:14John Coogan?

  Never ruminate.

• 3:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Always spect, never ruminate.

• 3:05:18John Coogan?

  Always spect. Okay.

• 3:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Spect max.

• 3:05:21John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers give apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI.

• 3:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Bill Gurley says, I fear that AI has decimated the traditional email inbox as we know it. Too many personalized sloppy mail slipped through the spam filter. Hope someone builds a better mousetrap. This one is cooked in its current form. Great use of the word cooked.

• 3:05:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Nikita was saying February 11th prediction in less than 90 days. All channels that we thought were safe from spam and automation will be so flooded that they will no longer be usable in any functional sense. I message, phone calls, Gmail. Email inbox certainly feels that way. Nikita says spam laws will need to be rewritten soon. Machines should be prohibited from communicating with humans unprompted. This will actually make your job just actually just hitting like the button. Because like, no, a machine didn't send that, a human did. The human hit the button and you're gonna have to press a button like, you know, 10,000 times a day if you're BDR sending sales emails. So anyways, it has been an honor to do the show.

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  We have one last song.

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Today.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Kendra Barnett was just served her first OpenAI ad impression. It's amazing news.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  For the Wall Street Journal, the benchmark in business coverage since 1889.

• 3:06:41John Coogan?

  I can't imagine a better ad to get served. We love the Wall Street Journal here and we love ads. So congratulations to Kendra for being served that first OpenAI ad impression.

• 3:06:52Jordi Hays?

  We hope you all have the best afternoon, evening of your entire life. And we look forward to being back with you tomorrow.

• 3:07:01John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Goodbye.