Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers, Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI, NATO Takeaways | Mike Gallagher, Pippa Lamb, Dan Shipper, Eliano Younes

(02:28) - The Social Network 2 Sneak Peak (06:27) - Meta Poaches OpenAI Researchers (29:28) - Murati's Plans to Take on OpenAI (31:18) - Pippa Lamb is a partner at Sweet Capital, an early-stage tech fund established by the founders of King.com following their $5.9 billion sale to Activision Blizzard in 2015. In the conversation, she discusses the recent increase in European defense spending, highlighting the UK's commitment to allocate up to 5% of its GDP to defense by 2035, and the potential opportunities this presents for both established defense companies and emerging startups in the sector. (01:00:34) - Timeline (01:10:07) - Dan Shipper, co-founder of Every, a writer-focused media company, discusses the public launch of Quora, an AI-powered email assistant designed to streamline email management by filtering messages, drafting responses, and providing concise summaries. Priced at $15 per month, Quora aims to reduce the time users spend on email by automating routine tasks and prioritizing important communications. Shipper emphasizes the challenges incumbents face in integrating AI into existing platforms and highlights the advantages startups have in leveraging new technologies to innovate user experiences. (01:23:45) - Eliano Younes, Palantir's Strategic Engagement Lead, discusses the successful relaunch of the company's merchandise store, emphasizing its commitment to American manufacturing and the overwhelming demand that led to rapid sellouts. He highlights the store's evolution, noting the shift to U. S.-made products and plans for unique, limited-edition items. Younes also mentions the significant traffic from international markets like South Korea and the store's role in strengthening the Palantir community. (01:32:19) - Mike Gallagher, Head of Defense at Palantir Technologies, discusses his transition from military service and Congress to the private sector, emphasizing his commitment to national security and preventing global conflicts. He highlights Palantir's partnership with The Nuclear Company to develop an AI-driven Nuclear Operating System (NOS) aimed at streamlining nuclear reactor construction, reducing costs, and enhancing energy security. Gallagher underscores the strategic importance of this collaboration in maintaining U. S. leadership in nuclear technology amid global competition.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, June 26, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the capital of capital.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The fortress of finance. Remixed it for you there. We got a great show for you today, folks. The current thing is the AI talent wars. Meta has poached three OpenAI researchers. Then there's also news in the information about what ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is planning to do with thinking machines, or Thinky, as we like to call them.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  Thinky.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  They're gonna make money. That's the plan. Make money.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Going to help other businesses make money as well.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  I'm excited. Pippa Lamb is joining to break down what's going on in Europe. She's our European correspondent.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Developing nation correspondent.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Developing technology. Potential, lots of potential there. Very excited for that. We might revisit what's going on with Bumble. We might talk about, if you didn't follow the story yesterday, Bumble cut 30% of staff as online dating hits, quote, "an inflection point." We might dig into that. Also, Google has a new artificial intelligence which will help researchers understand how our genes work. Very interesting. There's new investment platform, Republic, is planning to let anyone bet on SpaceX. They're going to apparently put secondary shares on chain.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Also, we mentioned this yesterday, but China is tracking down.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Lever up your fart coin.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  To buy SpaceX.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  That might be the right move. You never know. China's tracking down its rare earth experts and taking away passports. And Mike Gallagher is joining from Palantir, and so is Eliano from Palantir. And so we will get the Palantir update, which will be a lot of fun. Also, you know, we have to tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Of course, the news that was tearing up the timeline was the fact that the social network 2 is officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning, this time as director. Yaxine says, "Wrong, I'm the director and I'm also the main character." I thought that was really funny.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Definitely a main character.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  Andy2cents.money is, is writing some, some, you know, jokey dialogue here. He says, "Sorry, I left my Aura ring at South Park Commons, along with my eight-slee burner phone and Bored Ape Ledger Wallet, you absolute D-sell."

• 2:25John Coogan?

  It's pretty funny to reimagine it, but interesting, we have a little scoop here. We actually got our hands on the, on a couple of pages of the new script.

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was left at the gym.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yes, in Hollywood.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  In Hollywood where we are. And we're fairly confident it is the, it could possibly be.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  This is the Social Network 2.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Official.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Official dialogue.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  They haven't shot it yet.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  An early script.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  So with the other script, they've been doing table reads. We wanted to do a little table read for you today. So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg, I'll play Nat Friedman.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Sounds great.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  And so this happens at the.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  This is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the Meta HQ.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, so a middle, a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused, yet restless. He stands at a window. Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters and Nat opens the scene. You've open sourced Llama, Mark. 70 billion parameters, running in 8K token context windows. And word, there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab?

• 3:27Jordi Hays?

  Open source isn't unleashed, Nat. It's a guided evolution. We publish the weights so the community can help tame them.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Community? A sizable slice of fare, hop to startups like Mr. All. How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers?

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Talent moves, ideas stay. Group query attention, scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching. This isn't incremental, it's a step change.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-autoregressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be token by token racers. He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Yan's job is to keep the herd agile. Llama is today's workhorse. Scout and Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Llama is our public manifesto.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets?

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Lama covers us. Cybersec eval, Lama Guard, full red team cycles.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  You know, Purple Lama isn't bulletproof, Mark. OpenAI is minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual, long context models for free.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  The Lama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark.

• 4:55Jordi Hays?

  Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first. Laura, Chora, NFR quantization. Lama derivatives already power agents. Rag stacks, university labs, it feeds itself.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Provided the community keeps aligning with you.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RLAIIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer?

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  No one controls progress, Nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret rooms, just a billion hands shaping what's next.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Then hold on tight and hope we're ready.

• 5:35Jordi Hays?

  We will be. We're building it together.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  And seen.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Uh, it really jumps off the page.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Wow, riveting.

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, Hollywood's back.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think this will be.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  People said that.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  I'm Oscar bait right here, for sure.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. So anyways, you know, maybe, maybe somebody just left this as a, you know, as a prank, knowing we'd find it, knowing we'd read it.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  It's entirely possible.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  It's entirely possible. This is, you know, totally real.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  But you know, they're going to be doing a lot of design work on the next Social Network movie. They're going to need to use Figma over in Hollywood. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  And make products. You can make products on there now. Check it out.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  So the scoop that we wanted to talk about Meta has poached three OpenAI researchers Lucas Bayer, Alexander Kolesnikov and Juao

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Juao

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Juao

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Juao Juao

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Juao

• 6:33John Coogan?

  According to people familiar with the matter, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the three have left the company.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  I've never I've never seen somebody abbreviate spokesperson into spokes.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Spokes. Oh, spokes.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  A spokes.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  A spokes. Okay, yeah.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  You're a TPN spoke.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Uh, Will Brown has a post. He says, wow, they snagged the whole Zurich office. This has been something that's been percolating, the idea that Mark was going on a hiring spree, sending out messages, setting up dinners with AI researchers. It seems like he's done it. Tyler Cosgrove has a little bit of background on these folks. I pulled up some posts, but what do you have for us, Tyler, to contextualize the trade deal that just went down?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so these guys are really kind of all stars.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Um, so so they're all at Zurich office. They started the OpenAI Zurich office.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Is anyone left? Do you know?

• 7:23Speaker 02

  I believe I don't know, but I think it might have been just them three.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Because I I know Lucas had, there was a tweet where he said he started it like just because he didn't want to move.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  So I think it was just them. But yes, so they all work on multimodal research there. So they're best known, they they were all co-authors on the original Vision Transformer paper.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  So this was in 2020. This is basically, this paper is like the reason why you can like basically pass an image to ChatGPT.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Because it then led to Vision Transformer, then to Vision Language Model, which is now just like kind of, they're they're all like multi multimodal now.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, VLM is what uh, Physical Intelligence has been very bullish on, right?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So um, I can just give a little background on on Lucas.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  So 2018, he finishes his PhD. He goes straight to Google Brain.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Um, this is where they basically write the the first like, you know, um, Vision Transformer paper.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  Uh, then from there. He 2021, 2024, he co-leads just the entire multimodal team there. Because now they basically realize that, okay, we can actually get these things to be fully general, not just text.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we saw a Gemini demo of that a couple of years ago, where it was like a phone looking at a desk and the demo person would draw something and then Gemini would be speaking in real time. And the idea was that that was not three different models kind of dancing between each other. It was all one model.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  And it was a little controversial at the time because it was sped up, I believe.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  But it was still incredible technology and you can see that that's something that is going to get better and now is more in real time. And we're seeing that with Gemini, where you can pull out your phone and show it the world and it will... And Meta is doing this too with the Meta Ray Bans. What am I looking at, right?

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really big because, you know, you used to have, you would have your text model, then you would have like maybe a convolutional neural network just for the images.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  It's very like...

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Or you'd like, or you'd like, take the, take the image, stuff it through BERT to like, get some tags around like, there's a dog in this image. And then the text model only really knows dog and it's only seeing text. But in this case, it can take, it can continue to see what's actually in the image. Got it.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, okay, so then Lucas, he's co-leading the multimodal team at DeepMind 2024. And then just this, in 2025, this year, he joins OpenAI, starts the new office.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So he's not even a full year, he's been there. Yeah.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  It's been really short. But yeah, I mean, these are like real killers. Like, you know, this is a huge, huge move.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I like Lucas because he's, it sounds like he's a legit legend in AI research, but he's also a poster. I don't know if you saw this, but he was getting back and forth with Yaksin. He said, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the most surreal...

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  He was the reason that Yaksin...

• 10:09John Coogan?

  It's entirely possible.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  ...is essentially terminated.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  So I present to you the most surreal exchange I've had on the X, on X, the everything app. And Lucas says, sure, if you add 10 hours to my days, 10 hours during which the kiddo sleeps, because it seems like he has children and is dealing with like kind of work-life balance. And Yaksin says, just perform less good at your job to fit the, to fit in the 10 hours with the kiddo. That's what I do and I'm sure we'll be fine. Going from P99 to P90 isn't that big of a deal. And then an hour later, wait, this might be bad advice. Please hold. And then Lucas says, oh dang, now I see I got fired today. And what was nice was that Lucas very graciously said, I originally kept the screenshot to wait until the wound healed as I'm not one to put salt on a wound. But since he's addressed this himself, now I assume this post

• 10:56John Coogan?

  is okay. Let me know if it's not and I'll delete it. So very, very nice. Also, there's a funny post in here where he says, no, I just found out that I left a 4090 GPU running and completely forgot about it for months. Oopsie daisies. I guess this is how you learn.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, I can say now that I think he can afford.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  I think he can afford $117.32 per day on a 4090 bill. You might even be able to expense that to Meta.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  Per week, per week.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Oh, it was per week. Yeah, that's not that bad.

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Just a flesh wound.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, AI Girl asks, does leaving OpenAI get you on the Sam blacklist? It turns out these guys weren't OpenAI's best people because last week, Sam Altman said, the best people haven't left for Meta, kind of, you know, saying, hey, don't leave because you'll be labeled as a non performer, basically. But the Wall Street Journal has more data here. They're joining Meta's superintelligence project. It's no longer Reality Labs or Llama project. It's the superintelligence project. And we've seen a number of the executives come in, but they're obviously staffing up on the research side as well.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  And we heard last week that Mark, or maybe it was earlier this week, that Mark is personally texting, calling people, inviting them to dinner.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Getting dinner.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Full founder mode, not leaving it up to Meta's massive recruiting team. So.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  I think it's the right move.

• 12:17Jordi Hays?

  Very motivated.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, this feels like a product and a project that doesn't necessarily need, you know, thousands and thousands of people. It seems like you need the really the 1000x engineers and you need only a few of them, the 50 people.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the interesting dynamic is if you're, if you're an engineer that joined in the last year, you're getting a pretty meaningful valuation bump, but not going from, call it 10 billion to 300. And now the other thing that's sort of coinciding with all of the, you know, this sort of like recruiting chaos is that.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI and Microsoft aren't exactly getting along right now in terms of restructuring their deal. So there's a lot up in the air in terms of can this entity transition to a for-profit? Is it going to be able to IPO?

• 13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  Sure, they provide, you know, different mechanisms for liquidity, but you know, Meta has the ability to provide potentially more stability in that, you know, you're getting equity at, what is it, 1.7 trillion-ish?

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  But it's highly liquid, unlikely to fluctuate.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  You know, necessarily to the same degree.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  And you're getting a lot of resources in that, you know, like OpenAI, Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars on, on CapEx.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  To support the incredible talent.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  It is interesting, like, like, the, the live player dynamic of Zuck in founder mode, like, you can, you can, you can do the horse race between Sam and Zuck all day long, but this feels like it, this puts the screws much more to what's Amazon doing? What's Apple doing? What's even Microsoft doing on the AI researcher side if this is such an important, such an important role? And we'll, we'll go into this with, with Thinking Machines and some of the other, some of the other labs and what they're doing, but they're, like, if you are Tim Cook, you have to be asking yourself, like, am I appropriately staffed for the next generation here?

• 14:20John Coogan?

  Because it's clearly possible for a trillion-dollar big tech company to catch up if you get the right people and you build the right things. And so it seems like this is, this is almost like less, this, this feels like it could be less nerve-wracking for Sam, who has a dominant consumer app that's growing, growing, growing, and a really solid team in place. He's hired a ton of people. There's been just as many big, you know, talent moves into OpenAI as have moved into Meta, but we haven't seen that on the Apple side.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  There's also more, I'm sure I would imagine more clarity internally at OpenAI. Around like we are building a what could become a new tech giant could be the mag eight. Right. Whereas at a meta, it's very exciting. There's a lot of resources. There's a lot of ambition. Right. This is a super intelligence team. But at the same time, it's unclear exactly how AI will fit into the meta ecosystem. And it's, it's, you know, if people want to work on something very specific, you know, working on an app that might a year from now have, you know, a billion plus DAUs and something truly novel is certainly going to be appealing to to some type of people.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Well, if you're trying to build an app with a billion with a billion DAUs, you got to get on linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Should we go to the chief OpenAI hater?

• 15:50Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI is a linear customer themselves. And I'm sure if you ask them, they would say the only reason we are successful is because of linear.

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. It's like the transformer model and linear.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Those two.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  And then you're done. Key ingredients.

• 16:06John Coogan?

  Nick is is pouring some cold water on OpenAI as he as he's known to do. He says, Microsoft signals to walk away from negotiations with OpenAI. OpenAI plans to convert into a for profit company to raise capital and potentially IPO. But Microsoft but needs Microsoft's approval. Microsoft has IP rights to all OpenAI models until 2030 and 20% revenue share. OpenAI wants to waive this AGI clause and end Microsoft's IP rights and swap 20% revenue share with royalty plus equity. Microsoft is not happy with the new offer. OpenAI is considering a nuclear option of accusing Microsoft of anti.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  Which is funny because having the nuclear option sort of like the leaking out already is kind of rough.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Part of the part of the strategy. Austin Allred says, still absolutely insane to me that Microsoft gets 20% of OpenAI revenue off the top. Not 20% of profit, 20 cents of every dollar OpenAI brings in goes straight to Microsoft. It's like something out of Shark Tank.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Now, you can imagine hearing a Shark Tank pitch and the and, you know, one of the sharks.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  It's one of 20%.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  Gives the sharkiest possible deal.

• 17:06John Coogan?

  Extremely sharky.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Here's the deal. Give you, you know, a million bucks, but I want 20 cents of every dollar that comes in.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, at the same time, like, would would OpenAI be where it is today without pulling forward that multi-billion dollar GPU credits and that investment that Microsoft made? Like, Microsoft did take a risky bet. Ben Thompson was basically saying that

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's just

• 17:34John Coogan?

  that if you're, oh, sorry.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  You know, I'm sure they have an entire plan around how they would accuse Microsoft of anti-competitive behavior, but overall, this was a deal that they did, that they agreed to, that OpenAI wants to renegotiate now.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  And I think that, you know, Microsoft made a big

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Jordi Hays?

  bet at the time.

• 17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  And

• 17:52John Coogan?

  So Ben Thompson was digging into this idea of like, what is the structure and incentives of Microsoft? So, Microsoft is not a venture capital firm, and so, do they, do they have a shareholder duty to, to hold on for another 10x in the stock, essentially? Or should they be comfortable getting out of the stock, essentially? Like, like, is there a world where they are justified with their shareholders to, to renegotiate this? And what are their incentives?

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  I think Satya has a fiduciary duty

• 18:28John Coogan?

  Just to maximize

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  maximize

• 18:29John Coogan?

  net present value, right?

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  The value of this partnership and this investment that they made.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  And so, what are all the

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  And I brought this up, I think, when we were talking a couple of weeks ago, which is like, they're not an investor that's like worried about their brand as an investor.

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  It's not like, you know, an important portfolio company goes to a VC firm and they're like, hey, we want to bring in this new investor and you're going to get diluted a little bit. It's like, Microsoft is not

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not like they're, they need to build a brand of being founder-friendly. This is a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company dealing with a multi-trillion-dollar company. And it's, at this point, it's not about, you know, being startup-friendly or founder-friendly. It's just business.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess I, I would probably lean, if I were Satya, just off the top of my head, like, lean into allowing the for-profit conversion, and I would want exclusivity over the OpenAI API, because I'm in the enterprise business. I wouldn't necessarily care too much about the long-term revenue split on the consumer app.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  I don't know, I might be willing to trade that for owning the B2B sides.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news from Lucas, Lucas Byer. Hey all, couple of quick notes. One, yes, we will be joining Meta. Two, no, we did not get $100 million sign on. That's fake news. Excited about what's ahead, though. We'll share more in due time. And he CCs his buddies in the Zurich office.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, it's funny, he said, it's very easy to say, no, we did not get $100 million sign on. That's fake news because he could have just gotten like 101 or 250 or could have just been like very, you know, it's like, yeah, investing, we're each vesting, you know, 500 million over four years.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  That's the only thing he denied. He denies getting exactly 100 million.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  He denies that we did not explicitly get a $100 million sign on.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Well, Lucas, no matter how much you got, I'm sure you should, you can afford a luxury watch. So you should head over to Bezel, go to getbezel.com. You're already in Switzerland. It's perfect. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. So Lucas, we'd be happy to introduce you to a Bezel Concierge to get you set up with some fantastic Swiss watches. It's so perfect having a watch sponsor.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he might have like today off, tomorrow off, you know, starting in Meta Monday.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Plus, if you're going into Meta, I mean, Sam is not a watch guy, but Zuck is. So you want, you don't want to walk into the skip level meeting with Zuck, you know, I don't know who he's reporting to, maybe, maybe Alex, maybe, maybe Nat, but you don't want to walk into that, that first meeting with Zuck and have bare wrist.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not an Apple watch.

• 21:10John Coogan?

  Certainly not an Apple watch. Like that is straight up rival. No. So yeah, you're going to want a racing machine on the wrist to let Zuck know that you appreciate high horology. This is important.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  Separately, OpenAI was at Hard Fork Live.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  And they were asked by the host about Dario saying that 50% of entry level white collar work could disappear in one to five years. And if they agreed, Sam Altman says, no, no, I don't. And then Brad says, COO says, no, we have no evidence of this. Dario is a scientist and I hope he takes an evidence based approach to these types of things.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, he went on in the clip to basically say like, yes, jobs will change. Right now, we don't have evidence and basically reorients around it's going to be important to know how to use these tools really well, but they are rolling out AI at tons of different types of companies from SMBs to large multinational firms.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  I also think this is more of like an economics question than an AI research question. There's this idea of like, what is the, so, so if AGI becomes a one for one replacement for a white collar worker, then what are you seeing in the labor market? You're seeing supply increase dramatically, but what is the demand for white collar work? Like, how much stuff do we have to do? How much software do we have to build? How many software products do we have to sell? Like, we might see the demand for labor is actually 10x. And so, yes, if you believe this world where we can not only have AGI at white collar

• 22:56John Coogan?

  worker level and then scale it up to produce, I mean, how many white collar workers are there? If you say 50% of entry level, that's, that's tens of millions of people. So can you actually run the inference at that level consistently without brownouts or whatever? And then, and then, and then will demand for labor stay the same? It could increase by 10. It could increase by 100. Like, we might find more things to do, in which case you might want both working. You might want to have 10 times as many AIs working as humans and you might still want all the humans working. This happens all the time. And so, I don't know, the fast takeoff thing, we can go back and forth on this, but I think we're kind of post this.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, going back to the, going back to the internet example in the dot com era, CEOs were selling that you would be able to run, you know, the same type of rhetoric around, you're going to have a 10 person team doing a billion dollars in revenue and that ultimately. Didn't play out.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, exactly that way. So.

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Well, staying in AI world, Sam Altman is providing some emails and extra context around the Jason Ragolo allegations.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  These four emails really.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Bodied.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  Mogged. Bodied. Jason Ragolo. Uh, so we were covering a few days ago, how there's a company called IYO that had been developing this audio, uh, type computing device that would allow you to leverage AI, speak, you know, speak with it. We, what was interesting to me is it was, um, that they have some type of technology that they're allegedly, allegedly developing uh, to provide kind of like different layers to audio to kind of give you like this like audio display. So cool language. Interesting to think about. Uh, Sam basically says they're suing us over the name. Uh, the name thing I, I do, um, I do kind of understand.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, clearly a judge felt that way. Otherwise I wouldn't have had to scrub everything. But the, uh, initial lawsuit really painted this picture like OpenAI was trying to mine this company for, um, for, uh, kind of IP beyond the name in terms of how the product work and then.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Do you think either of these names are good?

• 25:08Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Um, like, like my iPhone, I pulled out my iPhone, I pulled out my I O, I'm using my I O, hand me my I O, pass me my I O. Give me my, like, you know, I need to charge my I O. I need to charge my I O. Like, they're definitely confusing.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Has a history of naming things strategically.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  You know.

• 25:27John Coogan?

  Like, maybe it breaks through. Like, Google was not Airbnb. These names weren't like super logical, but then they became so popular that people, people used them. I don't know. It doesn't jump out to me as like a, as like.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think they're gonna, OpenAI is gonna be able to come up with a great name.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  They might be able to power forward. I mean, I imagine that this is a settlement.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 25:45John Coogan?

  I imagine that this is a settlement.

• 25:46Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we can read through some of the emails.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  If I'm I Y O and I have, he was asking for 10 million to invest in the AI meets audio hardware company. So it feels like $10 million would allow the company to kind of like move forward with the next thing. He's interested in research and development. Like, it seems like it's pre-launch. So like, you could settle, say, hey, yeah, we do have a claim on this name a little bit. Give us a couple million dollars to back off the name and we'll rebrand. And then when they come out with their thing, they can come up with a different name. It just feels like they would be able to.

• 26:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, this, this type of, the lawsuit overall seemed to be about more than just the name. It was like frustration with OpenAI's behavior. But these emails that Sam shares.

• 26:32John Coogan?

  Destroyed.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  Destroyed. Absolutely destroyed. So on March 4th, 2025, Jason, the CEO of I Y O, says, hey, Sam, I'll keep it brief. I'd love the opportunity to pitch you to invest $10 million in my AI meets audio hardware company. So the key issue here is that it seems very clear that OpenAI had been working on, working.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  People had been talking about Sam Altman's interest in hardware for AI for two or three years since he made the investment humane. And he was talking about this for a long time.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Love from had been started.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  And it's also just super logical that everyone who's building a consumer app wants to own the next platform. Zuck is going into VR. It wasn't rocket science to figure out that Sam Altman would be interested in hardware at some point. And so, like, that makes sense. But then, you know, Sam clarifies very, very, very quickly here, like, thanks for reaching out.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Let me chat with Johnny I. He's the one driving this. And Jason himself understands. He goes, Rutro, want to work together? I don't want to go up against you, man. Not the right. Language to try to set something up. Anyways, they go back and forth.

• 27:41John Coogan?

  They're both in lowercase. This is, this is breaking news.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're, yeah.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  Sam's gone back and forth on the lowercase.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Lowercase on lowercase violence. Anyways, Peter, another member of the team. They, I guess, tried the product on May 6th and you can see from Jason's email that there were

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Demo fails.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of demo fails in terms of like, basically wasn't working, still trying to figure out a way to partner. And anyways, Peter says the device is, this is May, about a month ago, very orthogonal to ours and doesn't really work yet.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  They offered that we look at the IP, but I doubt there's anything there. Again, the device wasn't working reliably, it sounds like. So anyways, more of this will come out in court, but at the moment, it seems like maybe something there around the name and some real frustration. But ultimately won't be probably a big deal.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Well, there's no frustration when you're using Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  I feel bad for people that have never gotten a chance to automate their compliance with Vanta.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  Joy of using Vanta. That's right. So Turner Novak says, huge if true, after raising an astonishing $2 billion at a $10 billion valuation from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, less than five months after its founding, Mira Murati has told investors that Tiny, what, Thinking Machine Labs?

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  T M L is developing custom AI that will enable businesses to make more money.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Thanks goodness. This is amazing news.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to get our paws on this.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  There's been so much, exactly. There's been so much yapping in AI about, oh, changing the world and exponential takeoff, fast takeoff.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. They're saying it's the first indication of the startup strategy. You know, the, the media had been taking this angle, like Mira just came out and just raised billions without actually talking about what she was doing. And yes, she could raise billions without really talking. She could get a blank check.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  But I have to imagine that she would have had conversations with some of the investors and said, here's generally what we're working on.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  And this is a pre-seed, remember?

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  So it's just about the team.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  What's interesting here is that there's been this pervasive narrative that OpenAI has been hemorrhaging talent and co-founders, right? Because Dario was at OpenAI, he started Anthropic. Then Ilya, Elon starts XAI. Ilya starts SSI. Mira starts Thinking Machines. And my question was always like, okay, the narrative has always been like, they don't like Sam and that's why they leave. But my question is like, why don't they all join forces and work together? Like, why didn't Mira go to Anthropic? Why didn't Ilya go to Anthropic? Why didn't Elon just work with Anthropic instead of starting another competitor? Everyone always starts like a new competitor.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  But this kind of seems like it reveals the idea that Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever might be very diverged on the path of where AGI is going. Mira wants to make money. Mira wants to do RL for businesses. Of other businesses. And Ilya is much more of this true believer, thinking that he wants to go straight shot to superintelligence, no products. So, anyway, we will continue to cover this story as we learn more about Thinking Machines. But we have to bring in our European correspondent, Pippa Lam from Sweet Capital. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 31:21Pippa Lamb?

  What's going on? Hey, guys. How's it going, coming in from Europe?

• 31:24John Coogan?

  It's great. Is your Starlink connection strong? I know they don't have broadband out there in the old continent.

• 31:32Pippa Lamb?

  You know what? We're all just trying to get ourselves to the Hague and get some of that defense procurement that we're now going to be spending on. So, yeah, hopefully the Starlink will make it here. Hopefully, him, you're okay.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Hopefully. Yeah, give us the breakdown of the latest news from NATO.

• 31:51Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, so it's exciting. I mean, I think that pretty much all global press has been focused on this morning. You know, President Trump and the current US administration has really managed to do, thank you very much, has managed to do the thing that no US leader has actually managed to do before, which is to get Europe and US's allies here to actually open up their wallets and increase their annual commitment to percentage of GDP on defense spending. So, you know, this is something that dates back to, I think, 2017. I mean, obviously, certain...

• 32:27Pippa Lamb?

  A lot of American presidents have really pushed for this before. This isn't a new ask from the US side, but certainly this is the first time we've really seen some progress. To put this in context, the US has really paid out, yeah, has paid about two thirds of,

• 32:44Pippa Lamb?

  you know, the NATO budget for the recent years. So it's really been on it upon Europe to really, you know, increase how much they're contributing. And so I think it's certainly a big win for the US, but also a big win for national security across the West and its allies. So yeah, definitely, definitely good sentiments here on the ground. And I think certainly when it comes to, if you see how, if you see how Trump's mood has changed from when he, when he was boarding that helicopter a couple of days ago to some of the comments he was making after Secretary General Rutter's comments, I think that, you know, the US is in a really interesting position now, and so is NATO.

• 33:30Jordi Hays?

  Did we ever figure out what the NATO chief, he claims he didn't call Trump daddy?

• 33:36John Coogan?

  I don't know. No, no, I'll break this down.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if he saw anything. I couldn't tell what was fake news. Did you have any insight there, the NATO?

• 33:45Pippa Lamb?

  So I saw the headlines.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  There's an ABC News headlines from yesterday. It says NATO Secretary General Calls Trump Quote Unquote Daddy.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, and then the White House put out a video about this.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  But then the NATO Secretary General, I guess, came out and denies it.

• 34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, the White House, this is on the official page, put out a one minute video, and it just, and the comment on Axe is daddy's home. Hey, hey, hey daddy. President Donald J. Trump attended the NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  And then the Secretary General came out and said daddy referred to US leadership, not Trump.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 34:29Pippa Lamb?

  I mean, the White House social media never disappoints. I have to say that is, I always have my expectations and they surpass.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  It's pretty wild.

• 34:39Pippa Lamb?

  I I did really, I did go back and watch the the original clip to try and understand the analogy and effectively Trump was comparing some of uh some of our some of the geopolitical conflicts right now to children uh playing in the playground and then of course Secretary General Rutter then comes and says and sometimes if people are being children then he brings in the daddy analogy and of course in the press conference Trump just jumped on that. He said, yeah, they called me daddy. You know, he it was he just ran with it. And as we saw on the White House account this morning, I think there's reels, there's, you know, there there's YouTube's, they they really went for it. So.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Uh, so on on NATO dispense spending, um, there's actually a graphic that is pretty interesting to pull up here. It is uh you the United States is paying like more than two thirds. So uh in 2023, uh NATO's budget was 1.3 trillion, uh 860 billion of that came from the United States. Germany was the next second highest with 68 billion. So less than one tenth, then the UK at 65 billion, France at 56 billion, Italy at 31 billion, and then a bunch of other countries in the 10 to 5 to 8 billion range. Canada's 30 billion. Um, and so, yeah, this is a big change. I guess the the current benchmark is 2% of

• 36:00John Coogan?

  GDP. And this is, I guess, it it is an agreement to to try and get to 5%. Now, that's going to roll out over the next decade to 2035. Um, and and I mean, the real key takeaway is that now Trump is publicly supporting NATO. He's been very against it, but he's in favor. Um, but and and then there was also some questions about the the shift away from the focus on Russia and Ukraine. Trump wants to end the conflict there. Uh, we can talk about that, but then eventually I want to get into what this means for startups.

• 36:31Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, I think I think what's also interesting is is I have the same questions as you, right? So they put out these headline numbers. It all sounds very good. We all agree that there needed to be more of a balance between the US spending versus the rest of NATO. And I think what was really encouraging to see in terms of how this is going to impact markets is if you look at comments that came out from the UK this morning from Prime Minister Starmer. He actually said, okay, well, we've got this, you know, target by 2035. We are going to dedicate up to, you know, five, well, 5% of of GDP spending on defense.

• 37:04Pippa Lamb?

  But he actually then gave us further information and said that actually, if you look at where we see the national security needs now, we actually expect to surpass 4% of spending by 2027 or in 2027. So that's, to me, that's that's a great signal to markets that this isn't some sort of lofty target that they're going to try and hit and push out and sort of, you know, relabel things as defense or really kind of be very gradual about how they're deploying and how they're going to procure. I see this and I think, okay, Europe is really serious about this. The UK is currently just for perspective at around 2.3% of its GDP.

• 37:43Pippa Lamb?

  So it's slightly above that 2% benchmark, but the fact to go from, you know, 2.3% to 4% by 2027 is is really encouraging. And I know certainly on the ground, we're already seeing quite a lot of increased interest in European defense plays. Some of the existing, I suppose, call them incumbents, but you know, the Andurals of the world are getting really excited about this market and less so from a change on their side, but the fact that, okay, the, you know, the UK and Europe is potentially finally actually putting its money where its mouth is in terms of how it wants to procure and how it really wants to beef up its national security efforts.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  The question will be, how does that budget actually get distributed between new players like Helsing, which Daniel at Spotify had a nicely timed investment in that.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, actually.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like he had a crystal ball or something and then new, new kind of the new American players.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Well, he's kind of like, he's kind of like the daddy of the Nordic tech scene.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure the NATO, the NATO chief would probably refer to him that way.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  And then, you know, Anduril all the way down to, you know, the the Boeings and the Lockheed Martin.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, the four companies that I think are really interesting to study in this, in this like. As this development plays out are probably Rheinmetall, Helsing, Anduril and Palantir. And they all kind of represent very different strategies and but you could see money flowing to any of them. But then there are also decisions with all of those, obviously Rheinmetall, very old company, legacy incumbent in Europe. And so easier to get across the a deal done because they have all the infrastructure there. Helsing is kind of the up and comer, Anduril is the hot American company, Palantir is, you know, founded by some Germans, but ultimately an American company. What are you seeing?

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting, even Rheinmetall has been on this crazy run.

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  It's $432 a share. In 2022, you could have bought it for 30 bucks a share.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Wow. And what is it now?

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  And 432.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  410x.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  So, so, yeah, up tremendously. Even even this year is up, you know, 250%.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, so, so what what are you thinking about? I mean, this seems like a massive military budget increase in Europe. How serious is the rhetoric around the desire for homegrown defense technology solutions in Europe broadly?

• 40:09Pippa Lamb?

  So, I mean, I think, Jordi, as well, on your point on Rheinmetall, I think you also want to pull up the chart for Saab. That's been rallying, you know, a lot. So you're definitely seeing some allocation from institutions into existing incumbents. But I think for me and other members of the startup and venture community, what we're really asking is how serious is seriously is this going to impact the pre-IPO and private markets? And I think what's very interesting here is you also saw Anduril announce a partnership with Rheinmetall, I think about a week ago. So you're certainly going to see some, you know, there's, there's plenty to go around in terms of the market opportunity. And I think the sentiment is really beginning to shift now in terms of, you know, both investors and governments opening their wallets. But I do think that, you know, on one hand, I do still tend to agree with this argument

• 40:53Pippa Lamb?

  that defense primes are really hard businesses. There is always going to be, in my view, a monopolistic or oligopolistic element to how these markets run. It's not that we're going to come out and see, you know, Ten Andurals all spring up. I think ultimately a defence prime doesn't doesn't spring up overnight. And as you mentioned, you already have Anduril in the US, who by the way, has been very present in Europe and the UK from the very start. Um. You also obviously have, you know, our Swedish backed but German company, uh, Helsing.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Pippa Lamb?

  And there's some really interesting companies coming out of the UK right now. There's one in stealth at the moment, which has been getting a lot of interest. Uh, both here on the ground, but interestingly, a lot of the cap table is is American. So I think. Well.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  It's here for America. Undefeated.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  The air horn is always ready. It's always ready.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 41:45Pippa Lamb?

  I think, so I think, look, on one hand, I I haven't changed my thesis on defence investing overnight. I still think that there is a monopolistic. Uh, advantage that that companies like Anduril will will have here, but I do think at the same time. This does mark a real change in sentiment and opportunity around European and UK defence. And I think there are a few reasons why. I think number one, if you look at, you know, pure dollar spend. The, you know, Europe and the UK is just coming from a a much further or earlier starting point. So. If you look at the multiples in terms of of pure purchasing and and procurement, they're going to far outspend the US because they've been so behind. So on a pure kind of procurement dollar basis, you know, Europe has to play catch up.

• 42:30Pippa Lamb?

  So I think that's obviously going to be, uh, you know, a tailwind both for, you know, companies like Anduril, but also some of the the local players.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Pippa Lamb?

  And I do think that this is is kind of furthering this idea of what's called trusted capital. So the opportunity for the US. And its allies. So certainly, you know, getting in, uh, so some contracts for a Helsing or a or a local company here in the UK. I think the second piece that's really interesting is that the UK in particular, uh, it is. You know, behind from a manufacturing standpoint. So there's going to be a huge opportunity for a lot of companies to really onshore here. And that could be, you know, American companies who want to build out manufacturing capabilities here in the UK or across mainland Europe. And that is also going to result in, you know, investment dollars spent and a huge opportunity for the defence sector.

• 43:21Pippa Lamb?

  I think the counter to this, and this goes along with a lot of conversations that I've had with Brian Schimpf from Anduril, who, by the way, was having a lot of these conversations at Bilderberg in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, across the Paris Air Show and with leaders here in the UK and Europe. And that's that the criticism has to be that Europe has had a template for modern warfare on its doorstep for the last, you know, several years. You know, Putin first invaded Crimea in 2014. There have been so many blueprints for how modern warfare looks on our doorstep. Yet the governments haven't really got the memo. This is really the first time that we're seeing

• 44:03Pippa Lamb?

  governments come out with real new blueprints for how modern warfare should be conducted. So, you know, the classic example is, you know, Houthis rebels sending over drones and, you know, the US and its allies having these exquisite weapons systems to shoot down these drones. So, you know, Europe has really been asleep at the wheel when it comes to some of these more kind of modern warfare or scrappy warfare strategies. And I think that from what it sounds like from conversations here on the ground, the government is actually getting a memo now, which does clear that path for startups to enter with a different product spec. I think, not to talk up my own book being British, but I do think that the UK is leading the pack here.

• 44:47Pippa Lamb?

  Sorry. You know, the UK has just done a strategic military defence review and they're actually really taking some interesting steps in terms of how they're reshuffling, how they organise the military. And, you know, I think some great work's been done here on the ground with You know, it was UK Tech Week a week ago and you know, Matt Clifford, who is an advisor to the Prime Minister, talked specifically about how there is going to be an opportunity to have a trillion dollar market cap out of the UK. And he actually mentioned that, you know, defence really could be somewhere that we could see that happen. So.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about British dynamism? Is there a ground swell of excitement in, on the ground in Europe? You have some great manufacturers, Bentley, Rolls Royce, Aston Martin. And then you also have ARM. So the computing, computing history as well. So it does feel like there's still some very, you know.

• 45:44Pippa Lamb?

  We just got a new, we just got a new head of MI6. So the one public facing, he was a woman, actually the first ever chief of MI6. And her role actually at MI6 had previously been Q. So I don't know if you follow the James Ford. But her background was, is.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  That's not just Hollywood creation.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  I thought that was entirely for the cinema.

• 46:04Pippa Lamb?

  Well, I mean, I think, I think that.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  The world is the cinema, John. It's the greatest cinema of all time.

• 46:10Pippa Lamb?

  That would be the adjacent role that she had before. And so, but, but C, which is, is the name that is given to the bureau chief, that is the one front facing full role of, of MI6. So. But, but she obviously does have a background in, in that space. And so I think it is very interesting. And, and you know, it would be remiss to say that the UK has, has got a fantastic R and D sort of heritage, you know, whether, whether it be in, you know, AI, obviously we've talked about this before, Demis and, and deep minds and a lot of machine learning talent. We've also had, you know, incredible stuff in robotics and synthetic biology. There's some really fantastic R and D centers, you know, outside of London, Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol.

• 46:55Pippa Lamb?

  And, and actually, we, we also saw some exciting news in the autonomous vehicle space about a week ago with UK company called Wave, who had announced their first public road rollout of autonomous vehicles on public roads, which is going to be in partnership with Uber, which is going to be the first time we have like a Waymo equivalent experience witnessing them on the streets of London. So.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we're, we're going to have, it's, it's Alex Kendall from Wave as the CEO. I think we're going to have him on the show soon. I'm excited about.

• 47:28Pippa Lamb?

  He's great. And also, I think if you look at some of the work that, again, advisor to Downing Street, Matt Clifford, has done, the government came out with this AI Opportunities Plan in at the beginning of the year. And in the spending review last week, the UK committed to spend, I think, $2 billion, or maybe it's two billion pounds on AI opportunities and a further $1 billion for ARIA, which is an R and D deep tech body. So I think certainly, you know, defense is one angle. We're also going to see continued interest, you know, in autonomous vehicles and robotics and some of these really deep tech sectors that actually the UK has got a very deep history in that, you know, hopefully is going to translate into market opportunities

• 48:13Pippa Lamb?

  for both both local investors, but also US investors that want to get some exposure to some of these increased dollars that are going to be spent.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Interesting. Flipping back a bit to the Ukraine situation, is it possible that we see like a drone company come out of Ukraine? Ukraine has a long heritage of fantastic software developers. There's a lot of companies that have had like offshore Ukrainian engineering teams for a long time. Like, the populace has clearly been very technical. But then, you know, the pressure cooker of the war has resulted in just insane industrial capacity. I'm pretty sure they make more drones in Ukraine than I think even even China, like anywhere in the world, they're making the most of them. Now, a lot of them are like handmade,

• 49:01John Coogan?

  and it's it's not fully automated, it's not fully productized. But like, my my hope would be the the war dies down, but then there's this residual capability that comes out of that. But have you heard any like rumblings about that? Or do you think that there's any sort of like peace dividend that could come out of Ukraine?

• 49:20Pippa Lamb?

  I think that what, you know, as I alluded to before, the Ukraine has really been a blueprint for, you know, how modern warfare is conducted. And I think that certainly we've, you know, definitely been following very closely in Europe, what's been happening on the frontline in the Ukraine. I think also, you know, the Americans have also been paying close attention. If you look at a lot of the work that Eric Schmidt has been doing, especially since the US announced that, you know, its intention is to pull back some of its commitments to the Ukraine. I think you've had private individuals such as Eric Schmidt, you know, really take the mantle when it comes to how some of these newer sort of more scrappy drone technologies are being built. So I certainly think that that is going to provide an opportunity

• 50:02Pippa Lamb?

  for, you know, scaling across procurement on, you know, other areas of the continent. I do think that in some ways, and I was talking to a defence founder this morning about this, there is an opportunity in this middle space. So I think that, you know, traditionally we had these exquisite weapon systems which are really, you know, the luxury, pick your car of choice, the Aston Martin of

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  B two spirit.

• 50:30Pippa Lamb?

  There we go. Okay. And then we had the very kind of scrappy, you know, drones that are being built on the frontline. And I think what is the really kind of sweet spot right now is going to be trying to fill out some of that, that gap in the middle. And certainly, you know, if you look at some of the products that Anduril have been building and some of the incumbents that I'm, sorry, I should say new entrants that I'm looking at here in the UK, they're really trying to, to try and fill that, not, not quite the very early entry sort of technology pieces, but that kind of one up which are more affordable. And you can still use against, you know, your Houthi rebels or whoever, and it's not going to kind of use up your entire budget. But it's also, you know,

• 51:13Pippa Lamb?

  Modern technology, it's, it's, you know, looking at technologies like autonomy, autonomous vehicles. So I think that that is a really strong entry point for some of the incumbents, sorry, the new startups are seeing now.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a interesting wrinkle to the idea of like, when you're ramping up defense budgets as fast as NATO is in this case, it's, it's, it's like, the budget itself isn't necessarily as big as America, but there's so much new budget coming online that you're almost better equipped to buy autonomous systems as opposed to the United States and the army modernization effort is reallocating budget. No one's saying like, oh yeah, let's double it. Like, we don't have the money to double it. And so every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous.

• 52:03Jordi Hays?

  We could print.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  But, but every dollar that we allocate towards an autonomous system, a modern system, has to come away from an exquisite system that has a ton of constituents, a ton of people that build it, a ton of lobbyists.

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  All the parts come from so many different states and regions and different senators that, that.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Whereas if you're bringing net new budget online, it's a lot easier to go with the newest and best technology that's actually equipped for the modern war.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  My question is, will we see, you know, a $5 billion company that just makes drones for defense, right? Like, could a Neros be something like that? Or if you look at history of these contractors, you see that they often are very, the primes are obviously all multi-product, right? And so we will have to see how it develops.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 52:50Pippa Lamb?

  I think what's most encouraging though for me is the sentiment has changed. So I think there was this hubris, right, amongst a lot of the, I mean, US and its allies, but particularly in Europe, where they just wanted to create these exquisite weapon systems that were really never designed to be used. And so I think the biggest shift for me has been kind of like waking up and realizing that this is totally unfit for purpose. And actually, you kind of look silly by having these exquisite systems that are completely, you know. You can't, you can't use them. So I think that for me, when I start to see more of a kind of cultural shift in government, which is very rare,

• 53:30Pippa Lamb?

  that's one I think you can start to see some of these impacts trickling into markets and be it in the later stage or in public markets, but then also really kind of at this, I'd say, series A stage at the moment where you're seeing a lot of interest from, from US and European investors.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Very cool. I mean, it's really exciting stuff. We got to track it more. I'm excited to talk to some of these founders. Wave and Helsing will have to get them on.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  What other situations are you monitoring? There's a lot going on this week. We've been, we've been, I don't know if you've been following the, the prediction market space, but with the, with the New York City, the primary was interesting. Is that, is that, is that, are you paying much attention to that category? Do you think there's potentially opportunities for new prediction markets or are, is Polly Market and other players kind of racing away?

• 54:21Pippa Lamb?

  I mean, I haven't been following it so closely beyond, you know, it's impossible to even sitting here in London, avoid all the, the memes that are coming out about, about what's going on in New York. I think that, you know, I think Shane Kuplan is a fantastic operator. I don't know how much space there is in, in terms of, you know, post deregulation of some of this space. You know, you would think that there, there are going to be other entrants. I think that, you know, Shane's created such, you know, in some ways a, a head start for himself and, and how Polly Market is, is, is doing that. I haven't been spending active time looking at sort of new entrants in that space, but, um, you know, look, ultimately I'm a,

• 55:02Pippa Lamb?

  you know, our, our fund has a heritage of gaming. And so I think certainly whenever there's an interesting consumer trend that is unlocked, or there is a regulatory shift that can. I guess, impact how a consumer product is is being built, then we do pay attention. But yeah, I've definitely been spending way more time on some of this geopolitics.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what about any, you mentioned Wave earlier in the autonomous vehicle space with their UK launch. Are you expecting, has there been any chatter about what Tesla would do around autonomous vehicles in in the UK? I think they they sold sort of, I think they sold around twenty five or thirty thousand cars in the UK last year. And so depending, it could be an interesting dynamic that we'll we'll see with Waymo here in the US and Tesla, where Tesla has, you know, a much, a much more efficient way to build a network, where they don't have the same CapEx requirements as someone like a Waymo. And I'm interested to see if, if, you know, how you see that market unfolding in the UK.

• 56:07Pippa Lamb?

  It's interesting. I think that Wave has really been the poster child for autonomous in the UK, especially in recent years and its partnership with the, with Uber. They also have launched NSF. I mean, Alex Kendall, I'm sure he'll tell you about this when he comes on. Fantastic founder, has been spending a lot of time in San Francisco. I think an interesting story for me here with the autonomous vehicle space in the UK is that, you know, much like I was saying earlier, the UK has a really strong heritage of deep tech. And there was actually initially another competitor in autonomous vehicles, who was sort of incubated out of Cambridge. I mean, so was, so was, so was Wave. I think Alex Kendall took his first VC pitch meeting in his Cambridge dormitory or something.

• 56:51Pippa Lamb?

  You know, the law is, is perfect. But actually, this is, I I often use autonomous vehicles as an example for the government, because there was actually a front runner ahead of Wave at the beginning, but because it was incubated out of Cambridge University, I think it was Cambridge Oxford, I think it was Cambridge. I'm ex Oxford, so not to kind of, you know, hate on a.

• 57:15Pippa Lamb?

  But what was interesting is that there was this technology transfer clause, which meant that the cap table got totally messed up by the arrangements in place from, from, um, you know, yeah, Cambridge University, UK government, which basically said for a product of, product of this nature, um, the, the, the, the university has to own a certain amount in order to unlock R and D, uh, you know, credits or, or, you know, research, uh, spending for this company. And actually, it's, it's a perfect example I use for sort of a, the old way of building technology in the UK, which was incubated out of these like very old historic universities. Enter then Alex Kendall, who also wants to pursue autonomous vehicles. And instead of going to the university or do the sort of traditional incumbent, uh, capital providers,

• 58:01Pippa Lamb?

  goes out and raises venture capital and is able to therefore scale much faster, uh, build up the technology. I mean, again, these are not overnight.

• 58:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, you got Masa on board. I'm sure that helps, right? For sure.

• 58:13Pippa Lamb?

  Yeah, right. And so I think for me, it's, you know, maybe just an interesting anecdote which pertains to the sector about, you know, how, you know, maybe mentality in Europe is at some, somewhat of an inflection point. And I think that autonomous vehicles, you know, is one of the examples where Alex Kendall was able to go out and raise venture capital and really, you know, prove out some of these more kind of hard problem, you know, the teal flying car, uh, you know, adjacencies in Europe. Um, so I think, look, going forward, let's see. I think that, uh, robotics, um, you know, hardware, you know, deep tech coming out of, uh, of the UK is not going to go, um, anywhere. I think it's going to continue to see a lot of interest from US investors.

• 58:57Pippa Lamb?

  Um, I think that the fact that, that Wave have partnered with Uber is also significant. So the idea is that, you know, it's not simply going to be, you know, one company is expected to be able to do everything. I think that on a distribution and. Kind of Reg's perspective, it makes a lot of sense to have been partnered with Uber. And I think Dara was here yesterday. So yeah, so look, I'm, I'm, let's see how the, the stage four trials go here. I think it's gonna be, it's gonna be a bit of a culture shock for, for the Brits here to see the cars driving around.

• 59:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think you could have a culture shock. You put a Waymo in the, in the streets of London and say it's driving on the wrong side of the road.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  No one would have a problem with that because Waymo is a Jaguar. That's a British car.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh, so it feels, it might feel at home.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  But the Wave car is built on the Nissan platform, which is extremely foreign to the

• 59:46Pippa Lamb?

  I did hear, I did hear rumors though, that, that the Waymo was going to change to a Chinese supplier at some point. That was, yeah.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  I was really hoping they went with Bentley.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  The Bentley Waymo.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Yes. We'll, we'll, we'll pitch Alex when he comes on from Wave. We'll tell him, hey, let's, let's get, let's rip out Nissan. Let's get on the Continental GT platform. This is logical.

• 1:00:09Pippa Lamb?

  Exactly. We need some like James Bond approved autonomous wheels on the streets. I, I'm a big Waymo maxi. So, you know, I'm just excited to be able to, to translate that to, to the times that I'm here in London. But, but let's see.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. So great having you on. Great to see you.

• 1:00:25John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. Have a good day.

• 1:00:27Pippa Lamb?

  Great to see you guys as always.

• 1:00:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Uh, let's go back to the timeline, talk about, uh, investment platform, Republic, uh, Mert Helius dev friend of the show says, big news soon. You will be able to trade SpaceX on Solana, which will be followed by Cursor, Ramp, XAI and more internet capital markets. Um, maybe they'll be able to trade Numeral one day. Numeral HQ, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um,

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so this, uh, this, uh, we can kind of go through the journal article.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, investment platform Republic plans to use blockchain technology to sell investors exposure to SpaceX. Another effort in an arms race to give regular traders access to hot startups.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  And bring in some liquidity.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Predicted, but felt like it had immense regulatory pressure, but they just, I guess they're figuring it out.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 1:01:21Jordi Hays?

  So we are going to have the CEO of Republic on the show Friday.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Excited about. Ken, he is an animal, but we can break this down. So they are planning to sell digital tokens that mirror the performance of SpaceX's private shares in a move largely untested with regulators and untested with companies. Because, you know, historically, illiquidity, simple trick.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  One simple trick.

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  No, you know, CEOs.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  Illiquidity is a feature.

• 1:01:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't want your shares to be getting constantly marked to market, right? Or imagine what Anduril shares would have been doing.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  It depends. Yeah, it depends. I mean, I remember a story about Enron during the dot com boom, the shares were absolutely mooning because they were kind of doing some cooking of the books.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  They were cooking.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  But everything looked really good. They were cooking. They were cooking the books.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Enron was kind of cooking.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  But, but I mean, the, the stock was truly on like a generational run and they had in the elevator, when you went into the office, you got in the elevator, the share price was right there in the elevator displayed at all times. And so you come in and the, oh, stock's up. Like, I'm happy. I'm working hard today. I'm, I'm worth more. You multiply it by the number of shares you own, you just know that your net worth just went up.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  By the time Ken Griffin showed up.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  It's probably flashing zero.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, they must have ripped that out of the elevator by then. But yeah, I mean.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, so they're going to start with SpaceX.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  It can be good or bad.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  And they plan to, and SpaceX, for the most part, only goes up. Sometimes the rockets, you know, blow up on the, on the launch pad. But token buyers won't have access to companies' financials and won't own actual stakes.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:02Jordi Hays?

  And the tokens could draw scrutiny from regulators, which, you know, we're in a friendly regulatory environment. Republic says it won't need permission from the companies whose token it is selling because the tokens represent securities sold by Republic. So.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  So is this kind of like a stablecoin play where for every token that is sold, they will try and go and buy one share? And so they'll be backed one to one or something like that? Or is it more like a meme token?

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  That's what it seems like, or they'll fractionalize it, or it'll be, you know, tokens that represent ownership in an LLC, you know, an SPV that owns shares.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  What's weird is that you kind of have this like dual float situation where there could be like, someone could be willing to pay a massive premium for these tokens that.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  They no longer track the underlying price of the secondary shares. So if SpaceX is trading at like a 350 million billion dollar market cap, but someone wants to get in and they're willing to pay up to a 500 billion dollar market cap, the token could trade. But that doesn't, I mean, that doesn't happen with stable coins because no one ever says, "Hey, I'm interested in paying more than a dollar for one stablecoin dollar."

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  These are unstable coins, John.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  These are unstable. It'll be interesting to see where they actually trade. I mean, it should be some sort of price signal. But at the same time, if the supply is so restricted, I mean, they're saying that they, the Republic says it's able to offer the tokens in part because of a provision in the 2012 Jobs Act that lets private US companies issue securities and raise up to $5 million a year from retail investors. Republic says it would be the issuing company, and the tokens are essentially a note that assures token holders they will be paid any increase in the price of SpaceX's common stock if it goes public or is purchased. Now SpaceX has $350 billion of value, right? And so if you're thinking about, "We are going to offer a $5 million slug of that",

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  what will demand for that be like? And will that track at all with the broader private market? It's, it could be completely disconnected.

• 1:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and important context, Ken, the CEO, was general counsel over at Angelist for in 2014 to 2016. So he's been in the space for over a decade now. And so anyways, the big takeaway here is that one thing is for sure, there will be, I think, an exceptional amount of demand for this product. The question is, will regulators like it? Will companies like it? And it's possible that it'll be no on both fronts, but it's possible that, you know, at the same time, the sort of overwhelming consumer demand. And I think that, you know, in general, you know, retail investors should be and are fair, can fairly be.

• 1:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Frustrated by not having access to companies like SpaceX, Figma, Epic Games, Stripe, Anthropic, Ramp, Cursor, Andro, Mercury, Canva. So these are all companies that they're planning to launch even linear. This is, uh, almost looks like a mirror of our partners.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Is Adio on there? Customer relationship magic?

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Adio is the AR native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  You're too smooth, John.

• 1:06:14John Coogan?

  Uh, adio.com?

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Slash T B P N.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Go check it out.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  But Republic has a license through the-

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  There's a, isn't there a SPAC that bought SpaceX secondary and trades at like a massive premium to the underlying value?

• 1:06:27Jordi Hays?

  That is, it's not a SPAC.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Oh, it's not a SPAC. It's a public ticker. Destiny.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  X Y Z.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, I mean, like there clearly is demand in the public markets for, for private market shares. And so, um, there have been a number of platforms and a number of strategies attempted. Uh, this is the first one that's using crypto, uh, but it'll be extremely exciting to follow what happens with the actual prices of these, uh, of these assets once they got, um, and if you're interested in trading-

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, right now the Destiny Tech 100 is trading at $425 million.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  And I'm trying to figure out the book value. I think it is a fraction of that based on what investors actually mark.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's because there's such limited demand, such limited liquidity.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  No, there's limited supply.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, limited supply.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  And so much demand that people are just willing to pay a multiple of what-

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Fascinating.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Institutional. So it's funny because in this effort to get retail access to, uh, these, you know, highly sought after private company shares.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Retail gets kind of hosed by ending up having to pay, you know, a massive premium.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. But if you're an investor who takes it seriously, you gotta get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  We have other news from Palantir. Oh, George Savolka, founder of Hebe AI. He's coming on the show soon. He is thrilled to share his acquisition of Flash Docs, the number one AI company in AI slide deck generation. That's fun. Flash Docs turns prompts into fully branded presentations in seconds. Goodbye PowerPoint. I need this badly. This is very helpful. I'm interested to see how he bakes this in because he's been focused on the Wall Street crowd, the hedge funds and the investment banks. So it could be more of like a B2B product than a generalization product.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Feels that way.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  But we will talk to him and figure out.

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  I expect some some pushback from from slides crafts people.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  People that treat, you know, the making of a great, you know, deck.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Something more, almost more than an art form.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:41Jordi Hays?

  And so interested to see the outputs here and we'll talk with him live.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Palantir has some news, which we'll talk about in a little bit. They have signed a hundred million dollar, five year deal with the nuclear company.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:57Jordi Hays?

  I had never heard of the nuclear company before.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  Well, we'll ask Mike Gallagher about it when he hops on the show.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  And we have Dan Shipper joining in a minute to talk about a new product that he's launching under Every, his parent company and media.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  Is he running out of home ads for it yet?

• 1:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Not yet, but he should. He really should. He launched it.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Go to adquick.com.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  Great video.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. The Mark Andreessen says the term chat GPT wrapper is tired and really, really wrong. Quoting Andre Karpathy says plus one for context engineering over prompt engineering. People associate prompts with short tasks, short task descriptions you give an LLM in your day to day use, when in every industrial strength LLM app, context engineering is the delicate art and science of filling the context window. I like Max Meyer chiming in here. Kinetic energy wrapper, gasoline wrapper, aeronautical

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  lift wrapper. Everything's a wrapper. Should we bring in our next guest?

• 1:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 1:10:12Dan Shipper?

  Welcome to Stream, Dan.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 1:10:15Dan Shipper?

  Good to see you guys. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you loud and clear.

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you back. You're always calling in from exotic places.

• 1:10:22Dan Shipper?

  Where are you today?

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Last time it was Anthropic Dev Day. Where are you now?

• 1:10:25Dan Shipper?

  I am currently in a cabin in upstate New York, in Hudson Valley, with Hersh Agarwal, CTO co-founder of the browser company, a good friend of mine, and another friend of ours and Hersh's wife and their baby. So it's a really fun time.

• 1:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Let's get right into it. What are you launching today?

• 1:10:45Dan Shipper?

  Break it down. We launched publicly Quora, which is, you can think of it like a chief of staff for your email that costs $15 a month instead of 150K. So what Quora does is it sits on your email, connects to your Gmail, it screens your email. So when emails come in, it decides, is this important? Do you need to see it right now? Is it urgent? If it is, it makes it to your inbox. If not, it automatically archives it. For anything that's a common request, Quora will pre-draft a response for you. So you open your email, anything in your inbox has a response. And then twice a day, we send you what we call a brief, which is a really beautiful summary of everything that's in your inbox that you need to see, but you don't need to respond to. And so you can basically like do three hours of email by just scrolling through in 30 seconds.

• 1:11:30Dan Shipper?

  It's very, very cool. We also have a full-on assistant. So you can chat with it, you can email it, you can tell it all about your preferences, all that kind of stuff. It's been in beta for about six months. We have about 2,500, between 2,500 and 3,000 users, active users on it. And we are launching it publicly today. So anyone can sign up. It's 15 bucks a month. It also is bundled with Every. So if you sign up for Every, 20 bucks a month, you get access to Quora, Spiral, which is our content automation tool, Sparkle, which is our file organizer, and all the writing that we do on Every, all for that price.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  You guys are cooking. You gotta raise prices $100 a month. You gotta get those numbers up.

• 1:12:07Dan Shipper?

  I'm thinking about it, but now that you said that, I can blame it on you. So, thank you. I appreciate it.

• 1:12:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can say Jordy complained that the price was too low. Very cool. The perfect irony of the timing here is right before we got on the show, John was onboarding.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  I'm texting him.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, an EA type person who just joined the team and literally saying all these things. So, these kind of emails, like just archive them. These ones, I want to see it, but it's not important.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  I'm sending the link right now so he can install it on my inbox.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we'll get it spun up.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  I mean, I have a bunch of very specific questions because I'm in, I'd like the perfect.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  No, and this is a product you've been asking for.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I've been asking for this because, yeah, I mean, I paid for like the top tier of Gemini and like, there's this Gemini button, but it just, it just gives me bullet points for each individual email. It doesn't do anything at like a higher level abstraction, at least that I can tell. And then when I search, if I search for Dan Shipper, it will, it will search like the JavaScript in some marketing email and find that like there's some token in the URL that has the text SHIP and then it'll surface that. And I'm like, instead of just the email that's obviously from Dan Shipper, like how does it not know to rank like the, the name of the person higher than like some embedded CSS

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  class or something? It's always super frustrating. I've been very, very upset about the Gmail search functionality for a while. I feel like it's, it's, it's not that it's like degraded. It's more like the nature of email has scaled where I think every person gets about an order of magnitude more email than they did, you know, a decade ago. And so the traditional search tools are just completely breaking down. And then also email marketers have adapted.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  If you're getting a couple hundred a day and you're averaging even 20 seconds an email.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  It's a lot. It's a lot. And yeah, and then also the nature of the way people write emails, like the, there's so many of these hacks where people say, like, they'll do that thing where they'll say like, if you're doing like outbound for every, for example, you'll be like introducing Dan and John. And it's like, wait. Like this is a sales email. Like, why are you acting like we're, why you're making a warm intro? Or, or people will do like re, like signing up for every. And it's like, wait, this isn't a re. Like, you're not responding to anything. Like, you just put that in the title. And there's a million of those little hacks that I feel like the traditional Gmail workflow has been exploited by kind of black hat emailers.

• 1:14:35Dan Shipper?

  SDRs.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  SDR, black hat SDRs. And I feel like it's the perfect, it's the perfect thing that you need to hammer with AI. So I'm excited for that. Talk to me about the drafting of responses. I was, I was talking to the fellow on our team about how, you know, like, we get a lot of pitches from people that say, hey, news, I want to come on the show. Sometimes I want to let people down like softly and say, hey, this isn't a fit right now, but we want to have you on when there's news or, or, you know, and I kind of have like a template for that. I'm, I'm, I'm a little bit hesitant to, to send something that has like a, an LLM flavor to it. So I'd almost rather just have a, like a pre-written script,

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  but I would also be okay with some fine tuning. Like, how are you thinking about making sure that the voice doesn't feel too LLM-y?

• 1:15:26Dan Shipper?

  So basically what we do is when you onboard, we will look at all, like about a thousand of your previous emails and abstract out, okay, what's your job title? How do you normally talk to people? What do you normally do in these kinds of situations? So for common emails that you get, so like a pitch, what do you normally say? And then we create a set of procedures for ourselves so that when we do the draft, we can refer back to, okay, you have a procedure for a process for here's how I respond to pitches. And that's what we use to fill in the draft. So it's basically we use your historical emails to inform how we, how we write the draft. To your earlier points, though, I think those are, I think those are really, really important.

• 1:16:06Dan Shipper?

  One thing that I think connects to something you said earlier in the show is the idea of rappers. So like, in a lot of ways, this is a rapper on Claude and Gemini, right?

• 1:16:19Dan Shipper?

  And What's really interesting is I think there is this narrative about like a year ago, two years ago, that all the incumbents were going to win in AI because all they have to do is bolt on AI. And you can see, like, if you go into Gmail, like, their AI features or their search features, like, they're still not very good.

• 1:16:34Dan Shipper?

  And that's because it's so hard when you have a scaled, huge user base that is used to things working in a, in a particular way and a large organization that's used to building things in a particular way, to actually start from a blank slate and get the most out of a new technology. And so I think that's, that's one of the things that we and other startups like us can do for email that like a Google can't or it'd be much harder for them to do. And I think you can see that, for example, in some of the filtering things that you're talking about. So one of the problems with the sort of black or gray hat emails that you get is it's a little bit hard to get a specific rule for, okay, this is the kind of email that I don't want to see. It's not going to be from a particular sender. It's not going to have a particular thing in a subject line. It's kind of a vibe.

• 1:17:19Dan Shipper?

  And historical email filtering has to be very rule-based. It has to be, it has to be from this sender. It has to have this keyword in the subject line, all that kind of stuff. And language models change that. Now you can filter emails on vibes, and that's what Quora does. It also has a rules-based filter too, but it has a vibes filter to be like, anything that looks like this, get rid of it, or make sure I see it.

• 1:17:43Dan Shipper?

  And that's much more powerful.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  And the funny thing is, people have been training, you know, a chief of staff or an EA to detect the vibe of an email.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, this is the kind of email, like, it looks salesy, but it's actually really interesting because it came from this person and it's an opportunity that aligns with, with, with what we're, with, with our focus. So it's interesting.

• 1:18:06Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. And, and, and I think incumbents, it's very hard, it's going to be harder for them to do that because it's very expensive to filter on vibes, on vibes for like everybody's email account because there's hundreds of millions or billions of people getting like billions and billions of, billions of emails a day. And so startups, because you start from a smaller user base, you can do the expensive L M inference that is going to get much cheaper in five years, but for now, it's not affordable unless you have a smaller user base that's all paying. And that's something that we can do, which I think is great.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the actual email infrastructure and rails evolved? It seems like every six months, Google Workspace just sends me an email. It's like, we're raising prices. And I always think it's funny because it's like, they could theoretically just like, continue to raise the price for a very long time without much pushback. Because like, what's the alternative, at least as a company? How do you see that evolving? Have you thought about other companies like Hey that actually want to kind of own the underlying?

• 1:19:12Dan Shipper?

  Deeper layer.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  The deeper layer? And?

• 1:19:17Dan Shipper?

  That's a good question. I mean, I think one of the beauties of emails is that it's decentralized and interoperable. And so, right now, we sit on top of Gmail, but we will eventually add support for Outlook and other third-party like Pop or IMAP-type services. And I think that that's great. And I don't think that you'll see us create our own. Like, Hey, that's very hard and complicated to make sure that you deliver emails and you don't get stuck in spam and all that kind of stuff. And I think we've been focused on building at a layer above that because that's where the new stuff is. There's something completely different about software that doesn't have to operate on ordered lists. So, email is just an ordered list of things in the order they came in.

• 1:20:01Dan Shipper?

  And software doesn't have to do that anymore. You can rearrange everything based on priority, based on vibes. And so, I think for us, I'd probably rather not get stuck at a layer of ensuring email deliverability for senders and all that kind of stuff. And like, let Google do what Google's good at for now. But, who knows? I think eventually, this will be an email client where you can do all of your email through Quora. For now, it interoperates with Gmail, with Superhuman, so that we don't have to mess with like, all of those baseline features. Even like, creating an email sending feature where you're like, it's a compose window. There's infinite amounts of complexity in there that you can get stuck doing if you're a small startup, that we've tried to avoid to like, just make something that's so good

• 1:20:45Dan Shipper?

  at one or two things that you'll use it even if it doesn't have everything. Yeah.

• 1:20:49Jordi Hays?

  How are you, how are you building the team? What, what's the ambition with, with this product specifically? You're wearing, I know you wear a lot of hats, so.

• 1:20:58Dan Shipper?

  Only wear the every hat.

• 1:20:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, so there's a super talented team building this that, and it would not be possible without them. So Kieran Klassen is the GM of Cora. He's incredibly technical, is a Rails guy, like very agent-pilled, like he's running like 15 Claude code instances at any one time.

• 1:21:19Dan Shipper?

  And we just, we have our, our most viral YouTube video ever is him like talking about how he uses agents. It has like 50,000 views from a week ago. And so he runs Cora. He, he also used to be like, in his past, he was a composer and a pastry chef. So he's got this like crazy resume. And he's amazing. We also have one engineer, his name is Nitesh, who's also amazing. And they're just like, I think they're both iterating on what email can be and iterating on

• 1:21:48Dan Shipper?

  how to actually build software in this new paradigm, because there's a whole new way of building software with agents. Like I think that they're, they, they use this term that I love called compounding engineering, which is like doing the work so that each successive feature you build is easier than the last. And I think that that has allowed them as a super small team to just move really fast and build this beautiful product that is scaling to thousands and thousands of users.

• 1:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Dan Shipper?

  We also internally, Brandon Gell is our head of studio. So he, he works a lot with them and then we have a whole creative team. So Lucas Crespo is our

• 1:22:23Dan Shipper?

  creative lead and he did like the video and all the visuals and all that kind of stuff. So, and I'm helping out with all, you know, whatever, wherever I'm needed. But I think all of those people are doing an incredible job and I think we want to kill email. I think you should do email very differently. I think generally.

• 1:22:40Dan Shipper?

  We all have a very anxious attachment to our inbox and it's quite unhealthy. And one of the things that I've noticed using Cora is everything is much quieter. And that can be really unsettling because you're like, where like, what if I missed something? But it has turned out, at least for me, that mostly it's fine. And only 10% of the emails or 20% of the emails are things I actually need to see. And when I use it, I get to spend much more of my time doing shit that I actually care about and want to do rather than, rather than email. And that's a very exciting mission for, for us and for this product.

• 1:23:16Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I developed email anxiety probably when I was like 10 years old. Whenever I first got an email, it was like summer break and everyone was just sending emails around and stuff. And it's stuck with me ever since. So thanks, email. But thank you for, for trying to help fix it. We're, we're excited to try the product and always great to have you on the show.

• 1:23:34Dan Shipper?

  Check it out. Thanks for having me.

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Have fun in the, in the woods. Cheers.

• 1:23:38Dan Shipper?

  Bye.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 1:23:39John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Eliana Eunice from Palantir coming in the studio. Oh, Tyler's perking up, sitting up straight, looking for some Palantir merch. The Palantir merch king himself in the studio.

• 1:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Head to toe.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Head to toe. Is this a dripped out technology brothers? What, what's going on here?

• 1:23:59Speaker 05

  You know, I was, you just kind of gave me an idea. I should get like, you know, like the Chicago Bulls, like, you know, 90s are coming out. They got the music and the coach for the Bulls is Phil Jackson, and then they start ripping them off. That's the next, that's like the next stage of the Palantir merch store. So, but anyways, good to see you guys.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Good to see you too. Uh, how many, uh, how many pull-ups have you done today? How many were kipping? How many were non-kipping?

• 1:24:21Speaker 05

  You know, it's funny. I have that tweet right over here.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  He's got the printout.

• 1:24:26Speaker 05

  This was, this was the beginning of our journey as like, you know, I remember I was just sitting there one day and I, and I get this clip. I'm like, who the hell are these guys? And it was like, you guys, you had just started out and you guys geeking out about it. And, uh, it was just really awesome to just see how far you guys have come, uh, since that. It's been, it's been, it's been like really crazy growth, but I actually did go to the-

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for printing that out. That's a sign of great respect in our culture.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  It is a sign of great respect in our culture. And, and I actually went to DC. I did pull-ups with Eliana. I can attest, he can do a ton of non-kipping pull-ups.

• 1:24:57Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, I, I, so I, I'll admit, I didn't go this morning because we were, we launched the store and, uh, it was pretty- You know, you're making sure everything's working and so, but I'm, you know, I will be at the gym tomorrow, John, and then I will bring the newspapers into the sauna.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Okay, give us the story of the launch, the store, the URL. Where can people go buy?

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  Well, so first and foremost, the URL is store.pallantier.com, but I think we sold everything out. We sold, we sold more merch in three hours than we did pretty much in any day, maybe in any week that we did last year. So the demand is at all time highs. And basically, this is the third iteration of the store. You know, when we first launched the store, it was well before I started. It was kind of, you know, as the company was going to DPO, they launched the store as a way to sort of cultivate people that were interested in the company. And then they took it offline because it kind of became a cost center. No one really owned it. It was kind of like made in China, the process, the shipping and everything was kind of weird. And so then last year, about a year ago, I was like, hey,

• 1:26:02Speaker 05

  like, we need to do this. And I eventually did it after a lot of internal lobbying and it ended up being a success. But around, you know, really about a month after we launched the store last year, it just, something didn't feel right. It didn't feel like Palantir. It didn't feel like the aesthetic, the website, the merch, like it was made in, like, we were buying hats that were blanks, that were made in other countries. And I was just like, Palantir is a special company. We do things a special way. We do things our way. And so I was like, we need to just tear this down and rebuild it. So that's what we did. And today, about seven months later of working on it, we launched the store. Everything's made in the USA. We're buying literally shirts from scratch. We're like, we're working with the mills and they're milling the cotton and, and we're making things all in America.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  I want a hand-sewn version from you. I want, I want, I want to see you on, on the ground in the factory, American dynamism, you know.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us the stats. How, how, how, how much have you sold?

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Are we turning into a profit center yet?

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  How big is this?

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  That's what I care about.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  How, how, how big is the scale of the merch operation? Can we ring the dawn for anything?

• 1:27:05Speaker 05

  I don't know if I'm allowed to like, give out details because then it's like, you, like, it's like during, like, uh, Market hours, people might, I don't want the lawyers to like say.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, sure.

• 1:27:15Speaker 05

  I will say this.

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  This could, this could cause some major price action.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  If people realize that it's not just, you know, in the ontology business, they're also in the, you know,

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  It's a merch.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  Onshoring apparel, which is a, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Well, we're still going to ring the gong for you because congratulations on the launch.

• 1:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 1:27:38Speaker 05

  I appreciate it. You know, I will say, you know, our car, you know, the Palantir as of its last earnings, it does like, what? Eighty percent, eighty something percent in margins, like a really good high end. You know, company that does like, you know, Hermes or Louis Vuitton, they're doing like 60% margin. So.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:27:55Speaker 05

  Until I can get to like 80% margins, I might even going to go to Dave Glazer, the CFO and even try to like get this in there. But for now, for now, the intent of the store really is just to get the stuff out there, get good stuff out there and grow the pot that I have to buy. And then resell stuff and invest in like really cool, like just like really unique, like one of 15 items that are going to be four or five figures. I mean, we're, we're going to take this to the next level.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  If you get into bespoke suits, call us, call us first. We're happy to wear the Palantir monogrammed suit. And I'm saying this, you're not saying this, of course, because I, I, I can say this as, as a news maxer. But you move the market, you know, if I was just looking at the stock chart, the stock popped this morning. I'm assuming it's because of the merch store.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  And you've moved the, the market cap is moved by about three billion. So.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fantastic, fantastic work.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Congratulations. No comment from.

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  No comment from Maliano. Just say no comment.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  But, you know, it's clear, it's clear what's going on.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  It's clear. The story is very obvious.

• 1:28:58Speaker 05

  You know, you do have, you do have a gentleman named Mike Gallagher coming on later, who by the way, is probably the biggest merch fan at the company. Like, nobody likes Palantir merch or anything. Like, I'll get, so if you think I go to the gym early, Mike goes to the gym at like 5:00 AM religiously. He will shoot me messages. He'll signal me from the gym and be like, like, what about an XYZ? And I'm like, bro, like.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Stranger.

• 1:29:24Speaker 05

  And like, so he, he, he really loves merch and uh, so you'll get a chance to talk to him about maybe some other reasons why the market cap may have moved.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. I, I, I, yeah, I saw him name drop you on a, on a podcast he was on and I was like, yes, let's go.

• 1:29:39Speaker 05

  He sees the vision. He sees the vision. So, but no, I'm really, uh, I think I, I, I don't, I don't know. I've, I've thought a lot about the merch store and just sort of like my role at Palantir and, and sort of how I engage the community. And I think it's, it really boils down to, you know, the founders and Dr. Carp and all these people and all these tremendous engineers have built this like great company. Um, and we just, you know, we're a company that stands for something. And so we've really built this community, um, organically. I didn't build the community. I just cultivate it. Um, and it just feels really good to serve them and just give them as much gear as possible. And so, uh, the demand, the, the, the numbers today, again, I can't show them, but the, the, the numbers today were way above anything I expected to the point where the site almost crashed within four minutes.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  And I mean, we're talking about the, some of the most traffic that we got was from South Korea. And so like we have a, that's our third largest market despite, you know, additional shipping.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the South Koreans. Palantirians out in South Korea. No, I, I thought it was funny. I looked at the website at all. It's all pre-order right now because I think you guys sold out and I was like, wait, they can't be doing this because of like, you know, about, you know, you know, a lot of apparel companies will do pre-order because like they don't have the balance sheet to, to, to pre.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, working capital is a real issue.

• 1:30:56Speaker 05

  So the reason for the, the reason for, um, sort of the, the eight weeks, so it's eight weeks. And the reason for that is actually, so when, when the whole tariff thing happened, all of these people were then looking to do stuff to find, um, alternatives inside the USA.

• 1:31:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:11Speaker 05

  And so we were already sort of tracking the whole USA thing. So our vendor, you know, they're working, I can't, they've, they've asked me and we want to just kind of keep it secret because they're very special. But basically the, the amount of demand that they got for like cotton that was American source and everything like skyrocketed. And then we tweaked some designs and stuff. So that's the reason for the delay. But as we sort of ramp this up and get it like fully, you know, basically like in production. Um, my hope is that we won't sell out of everything, but we'll actually sell out of a few items. Like sure, we're going to have limited drops of different products that are unique. But you know, hopefully the hats and like some core shirts will be available, uh, 24/7.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Thank you so much.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's great to see you. Let's get a workout in soon.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it. Awesome. Thank you, gentlemen. Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:31:54Mike Gallagher?

  Cheers.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company. Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing?

• 1:32:19Mike Gallagher?

  Great to have you. What's going on, guys? I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  You're famous too. Thank you for joining.

• 1:32:26Mike Gallagher?

  I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a has been. You're a technology brother. You're one of us.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's, there's, you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government too, and I want people like you in the government. And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment?

• 1:33:07Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, I think, well, obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin and the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East. I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9/11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level, really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps.

• 1:33:49Mike Gallagher?

  So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had a, just really an awesome experience, couple of great deployments, learned a ton, was a counterintelligence, human intelligence officer. And it's kind of similarly, when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy, never thought about running myself. I moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company. When some people reached out to me about running for Congress, I was very young, I was 31. And my initial reaction was, hell no. I mean, it was just, I was not, I didn't know anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone

• 1:34:31Mike Gallagher?

  read before they went on TV. I wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was, I felt like it was being an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And I'll swear, I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress is that

• 1:35:14Mike Gallagher?

  we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I'd do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that like, we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys. And I really felt like, you know, it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, i.e. now being surrounded by genius, you know, like 20-somethings that make me feel stupid, and then a continuation of the mission.

• 1:35:58Mike Gallagher?

  And I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War III. And I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the short version. And it's been really. Exciting.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Is that a typical flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them? Is there kind of like a scouting department in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, is this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no, and then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm?

• 1:36:43Mike Gallagher?

  Well, to be clear, I don't want to pretend like this was some pure aw shucks Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing, right? Like clearly I was driven, ambitious, like had kind of always had a drive my whole life and wanted to like test myself. But honestly, it was not like I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office, and then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress. And then you'd run for Senate and then you try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit.

• 1:37:25Mike Gallagher?

  Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of nine 11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros, like, you know, that you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just tired of business as usual.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  It used to be everyone, every single person was a lawyer.

• 1:38:01Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, being a lawyer seems miserable to me, no offense lawyers. But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption. That the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that like would, you know, could not like they can't leave Congress because they're otherwise unemployable and like, you know, they're like, they're not like the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent as well as the patriotism.

• 1:38:42Mike Gallagher?

  And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from, and they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like, there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full-time job. And that that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting,

• 1:39:27Mike Gallagher?

  of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch. My, I came to believe that kind of the the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years because the stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business. I think a healthier balance would be if Congress Article One, which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant grant ban branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs.

• 1:40:09Mike Gallagher?

  Congress surrendering its power since the seventies and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics. And it's why they've become so intense. And why people are turned off by it, I think.

• 1:40:22Jordi Hays?

  In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to the United States. It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know. You know, in in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. They're thinking in, you know, election cycles and and kind of creates some distortions. But I'm curious what you think, having been in there.

• 1:40:55Mike Gallagher?

  You know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow? I just want to throw that out there, both of you, in fact, as as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it, gentlemen.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Some people should just be news anchors, I guess.

• 1:41:15Mike Gallagher?

  It's funny, like, when I first came in, and I got elected in 2016, and we we thought, like, our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office. A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill. Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so, if memory serves, Trump actually weeded about it, endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media.

• 1:42:00Mike Gallagher?

  This is probably the apex of my power.

• 1:42:02Jordi Hays?

  You gotta dabble.

• 1:42:03Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, exactly. I remember doing some, like, selfie video coming out of the White House. And I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. I the counterpart, the counter arguments, which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason, the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment, the sort of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time, you know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo, business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he's going to support term limits. And then, secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was gonna say. You grandfather in if you're, if you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here. You let him phase out and then the new, the new guard, you put some limits on them. And then it.

• 1:43:00Mike Gallagher?

  Totally. The grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time and then the new people. So, and then, and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate. 12 years in the House, so six terms, and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do 24 years. They could do 12 in the House, run for Senate. And so that seemed generous to us, but it died. It died a slow death and then a sudden death. You know, the, the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a, a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power. So I really do think the paradox, it's like, the things we need to do to, to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress

• 1:43:41Mike Gallagher?

  actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Like, otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I, I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of, of, you know, the, the, the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented. We'd previously been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  And I want to run a theory by you around Iran. My, my working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because, part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration. And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would, was, it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted. And he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media. How is this guy gonna come back?

• 1:44:53Mike Gallagher?

  He didn't even have a Pinterest account.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so he, he, so, so if you're, if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon. Now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah. And, and, but then surprise, Trump's in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so into this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically. And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert, avert World War III. I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Is that bullish for avoiding World War III? Or is it a risk? Or do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts?

• 1:45:47Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, well, first of all, great question, a lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say, I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its over nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really, it was, it was, it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran.

• 1:46:21Mike Gallagher?

  Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a, recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel. The only problem is that, that, that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states. Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran.

• 1:47:03Mike Gallagher?

  The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge semblance of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama recognizing, because at that time, we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case.

• 1:47:45Mike Gallagher?

  He constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term. And basically, he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region. And then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position.

• 1:48:26Mike Gallagher?

  Now to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one. I think really going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran. The Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear Iran or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base.

• 1:49:08Mike Gallagher?

  So that the munitions we're using in CENTCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your your audience would evaporate.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there? Or I wanted to talk about.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to get a get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple of months and a couple of weeks specifically.

• 1:49:36Mike Gallagher?

  Well, I think so that my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia and China, because China sort of views Iran as both a a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about

• 1:50:20Mike Gallagher?

  is where Trump is going to go next on China. There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so there's I guess there's there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is a serious setback

• 1:51:05Mike Gallagher?

  for this this axis of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult, given that Iran is is is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows. How valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really

• 1:51:48Mike Gallagher?

  in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the Beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's undeniable. A bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was a lot of What's the population of Iran?

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into, but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining, you know, a lot of Bitcoin.

• 1:52:31Mike Gallagher?

  Fascinating.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to fund, you know, basically that the recovery effort even. It makes sense, yeah. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to

• 1:52:49Mike Gallagher?

  You know, I'm afraid I don't, but I do think, and I've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others, I think there's, or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Stile, who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue. You guys should have him on. He's really smart, young congressman from Wisconsin. Yeah, Brian Stile. He's always in style.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, welcome.

• 1:53:10Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think there's like an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right? Because the anti-crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies' national security interests. And certainly it was the case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan. That crypto was enormously valuable in that regard. It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I shouldn't that's a that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto.

• 1:53:55Mike Gallagher?

  But I hadn't heard that about.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears to the European continent. Wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing. But any any reactions there?

• 1:54:14Mike Gallagher?

  Well, listen, I think anytime that first of all, this this idea that, you know, the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense. It's not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump Eisenhower. The first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies time. And so this is like, and we've we've had Democratic senators tried to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like a an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general.

• 1:54:59Mike Gallagher?

  I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right? Like every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense. But if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role. Then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture.

• 1:55:41Mike Gallagher?

  And shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palter Technologies, no big deal. Then you have actually answered your

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  It's like a sports team, a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like, let's all give it 100%. And that's the only coordination. It's like,

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  You can easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah, we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any, do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Cause it feels like, it feels like to me, getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like an easier conversation. Or maybe I'm wrong there.

• 1:56:36Mike Gallagher?

  I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp, right? So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO, acquired is the wrong term. We've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally we've struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. And my hope is that that conversation is getting better, you know? I guess I worry sometimes that, kind of related to what you said earlier,

• 1:57:20Mike Gallagher?

  they, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say, obviously I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world, like by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country. And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the palleters of the world and, you know, European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, You know, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe.

• 1:58:03Mike Gallagher?

  Getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture. I think there's a huge opportunity here, and it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking it loose right now. I mean, obviously, it's a bit over-determined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and it's a massive wake-up call for Europe that they need to invest more and buy the right things. But I do think we have a moment here, and I think what's critical to our analysis in the US, particularly my own party,

• 1:58:48Mike Gallagher?

  the Republican Party, is to do a better job, and I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China, and why what happens in one theater affects another theater, and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power, we're a sole superpower, we have an existential challenge in the form of Communist China, we have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly that Indo-Pacific is the priority theater, but one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things, and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting-edge commercial technology, software or hardware.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  Great. Should we talk about the news today, the announcement, the nuclear deal that you guys announced?

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us?

• 1:59:41Mike Gallagher?

  Everything is nuclear.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear.

• 1:59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there, but then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States' energy production per capita has kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind. Mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race that we need to be building more energy infrastructure. And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've, we've, we've, we've tamed the atom.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  And yet, and we can't just seem to copy paste, you know, Diablo Canyon 50 times to, to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole, in addition to the deal.

• 2:00:39Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. But it's your fault though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:51Mike Gallagher?

  He talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously we can't dominate the, like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI. If we don't improve our, our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that, I mean, they, they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build. And collapse that timeline down. And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem. And we can't fall further behind.

• 2:01:36Mike Gallagher?

  And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well, because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, you can, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology. And we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5G internet cheaply, we'll just control the infrastructure. It'll be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about it.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Worry about anything.

• 2:02:09Mike Gallagher?

  And like in America, who's like, whoa, don't do that timeout. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south, like you're probably. Not paying as much attention to the CI concerns and so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. Um, you know, I, I think this is the custom of something big, both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with and or Seronic and non-traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply it in, into the nuclear space.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:02:40Mike Gallagher?

  I'm getting pulled.

• 2:02:41Jordi Hays?

  You're getting pulled. We'll see you on another.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  We have to have you back on soon.

• 2:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:02:47Mike Gallagher?

  Okay.

• 2:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on.

• 2:02:47Mike Gallagher?

  I'll come back for Packers commentary.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Great. Cheers.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, uh, the, the, the nuclear like, like, like a lot of people still don't understand fully what Palantir does, but you, you have to pull the example from Airbus manufacturing. So Palantir is, that's one of their partners. If you're making a plane, you need to know how many screws you have, how many wings you have, how many engines you have, and the lead times on all of those, how much they cost, when they depreciate, what the testing regimen is as you integrate them into the plane. Exact same process for building something like a 747 as building a nuclear power plant. So, uh, very exciting deal and, uh, I'm excited to see it play out. But, uh, that was fantastic. Let's run through a couple timeline posts and then get out of here. Uh, we got two ads left and that's why we're leaving early today because we're going to go

• 2:03:36John Coogan?

  film some ads for Wander.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

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• 2:03:40John Coogan?

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• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  City of Malibu, the great town of Malibu, California.

• 2:03:57John Coogan?

  That will be airing on TVPN and then go out on the, on the internet. Uh, and we're also filming an ad for Eight Sleep. How'd you sleep last night?

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  I got wrecked again.

• 2:04:06John Coogan?

  You got wrecked again?

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  I have a systematic issue with, uh, the three-year-old.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's rough. Have you, have you, have you tried telling him man up?

• 2:04:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I would be down for my sleep to be disrupted for a decade if it means he sleeps just a little bit better. But certainly, the thing that really hurts is losing to you. I got a 78.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  I got an 86, baby. Hit me with the Ashton Hall.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Mogged again.

• 2:04:31John Coogan?

  It's my, this is my favorite soundtrack on the whole.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need a new sound effect.

• 2:04:35John Coogan?

  I love this sound effect. No, this is, this is the sound of me winning. It's now, it's now, when there is a John win, I get the Ashton Hall sound effect.

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:04:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, go to 8sleep.com/tbpn.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  And if you're building.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

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• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  If you're building a company like 8 Sleep, head over to fin.ai. The number one agent, AI agent for customer service. It is number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, and number one ranking on G2, used by Coda, Consensus, Aspire, Lovable, all of your favorite software companies and more. So, check it out. We gotta have Owen on again. He's just demonic.

• 2:05:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, once a day, once or twice a day.

• 2:05:19John Coogan?

  That'd be great. You can co-host the show with us.

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute legend.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  I think he's a little busy for that.

• 2:05:23Jordi Hays?

  And, yeah, if you're, if you're selling to customers, if you're a businessman or woman, you're going to benefit a lot from Finn.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Well, that is pretty much everything. There's one more piece of news I want to cover. Baidu over at Aether Flux has a new board member, Dan Gallagher. He's worked with him for years. Dan is in the league of his own. He is a man of integrity and has become a close friend over the years. He'll help us engage in Washington DC and support Aether Flux and America to lead in space solar power. If you're not familiar with Aether Flux, they are putting solar panels in space and then beaming down the energy that's captured in space via lasers. Very cool company.

• 2:06:01Jordi Hays?

  They're beam maxing.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  Also, Baidu, absolute hitter on his wrist every time he's spotted. Absolutely criminal because this photo here in the slide deck.

• 2:06:10Jordi Hays?

  Cuts it out.

• 2:06:11John Coogan?

  Cuts it out. We can't see what he's wearing.

• 2:06:13Jordi Hays?

  What was the photographer doing?

• 2:06:14John Coogan?

  What was the, this is, this is.

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Huge missed opportunity.

• 2:06:16John Coogan?

  Journalistic misin, malpractice.

• 2:06:17Jordi Hays?

  We have another post here from Scott Belsky. "Observed among the most successful people I admire who really worked for it, they don't want to network, they want to learn."

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a good one.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  "They are mining you for information constantly."

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06:29Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes it looks like networking. But they're mining.

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, Zach Weinberg says, in fact, the networking part is really just a tax you get comfortable paying in order to do the learning. I like that. It's a good point.

• 2:06:41Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here.

• 2:06:42John Coogan?

  It's like, don't, don't ask for money, ask for advice. Like, if you're genuinely interested in something, you wind up meeting interesting people because that's the only way to get the real answers that aren't baked into the LLM yet. You gotta go to the source, you gotta meet people, and you gotta ask them for the answers to the pressing questions of the day.

• 2:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep. We have a post here from Woodrow Oats Montague.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  I'm so done.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  So done, I can't take this anymore. And there's a Bloomberg hit. A footwear startup is teaming up with two space companies to design a shoe in orbit as part of a mission to make artificial intelligence and blockchain less expensive and more eco-friendly than it is on Earth. Orbit's Edge, a company that supports AI and blockchain applications, and Copernic Space, which offers digital marketplaces for space assets, plan to send a solar and battery-powered satellite to space equipped with a computer that will use AI automation to produce a shoe design for the Cintilay brand. The mission is expected to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in early 2026.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  We should call Delian and do a wellness check.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:47John Coogan?

  He's been, he's been like, I'm the guy who's manufacturing space.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm the space manufacturing man.

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Well, so much for your monopoly thesis, Delian. There's another space manufacturing company in business now.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  They're using AI and blockchain technology to do solar.

• 2:08:02John Coogan?

  Talk about AI or blockchain yet at all. It's just missing from their thesis entirely. Wow. What a blind spot for Delian.

• 2:08:09Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny to feel like you need to send something to space to produce AI slop footwear designs. Anyways.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Good luck to them.

• 2:08:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's end on a, let's end on a positive note. Brad Gersner, I don't think this was a response to our, the socialist.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  No, but he was.

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  But he said, the answer to socialism is more capitalism, and the Invest America Act is more capitalism, Mr. President. It makes every child a capitalist from birth, sharing in the upside of America. Worried about what, what just happened in NYC? Help is on the way.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  I love this. Let's ring the gong for Brad Gersner.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Well, this is the shortest show we've done in a very long time, but fortunately, I'm sure we'll be back with...

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  But we're still recording. We're gonna be recording over the next few hours.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be putting up minutes.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  And then that will hit the timeline later.

• 2:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so thank you for tuning into the show. As always, leave us a five-star review on Spotify or leave us a written review on Apple Podcasts.

• 2:09:13John Coogan?

  Yes, please.

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  And we will read that on the show. So have a fantastic afternoon. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Bye.