Third Party Evaluators, Fed Hikes Rates, Zuck Pushes Back On AI Slowdown | Jeremy Allaire, Tomasz Tunguz, William Layden, Justin Beroz, Eli Wachs, Sean McCarthy, Tom Mueller

(00:52) - Third Party Evaluators (14:00) - Fed Hikes Rates (18:47) - Zuck Pushes Back On AI Slowdown (37:44) - Kalshi's AI Compute Market Closed (49:45) - Jeremy Allaire discusses Circle’s launch of Arc, a blockchain-based economic operating system designed for payments, capital markets, and trusted AI-agent transactions. The Circle co-founder, chairman, and CEO also explains how stablecoins such as USDC could reduce payment costs and expand global financial access, while addressing evolving U. S. cryptocurrency regulation. (58:29) - Timeline Reactions (01:05:21) - Tomasz Tunguz, founder and general partner at Theory Ventures, discusses AI regulation, liability, inference infrastructure, open-source models, and investment opportunities across the AI stack. He also examines soaring valuations for AI companies, agent economics and monetization, software acquisitions, and venture capital liquidity. (01:26:39) - William Layden discusses how Roon’s modular AI data centers convert surplus utility-scale solar power into computing capacity. He explains the technology’s rapid deployment, potential applications for wind and other renewable sources, and his belief that solar energy will power the future of computing. (01:35:25) - Justin Beroz, founder and CEO of Rainco, is a mechanical engineer and theoretical physicist developing mathematical tools to solve turbulence. Justin Beroz discusses the practical limits of the Navier–Stokes breakthrough, AI-generated proofs, and Rainco’s plans to commercialize more reliable fluid-simulation software and eventually turbulence-control hardware. (01:47:30) - Eli Wachs, founder of Footprint, discusses building an AI operating system that helps financial institutions detect, investigate, and prevent financial crime. He explains how Footprint uses AI agents, extensive data access, and case memory to investigate every transaction, counter increasingly sophisticated criminal networks, and reduce the multitrillion-dollar global impact of fraud. (01:58:31) - Sean McCarthy discusses his role as co-founder and CEO of Back Ops, an AI-native platform that automates supply-chain back-office operations. He explains how the company reduces operating costs, improves claims approval rates, integrates with systems ranging from spreadsheets to mainframes, and plans to use its $42 million Series B to expand across retail, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals. (02:05:52) - Tom Mueller discusses Impulse Space’s $808 million Series D financing, its Mira and Helios spacecraft, and growing opportunities in orbital transportation and government launch programs. The founder and CEO also reflects on SpaceX’s engineering culture, AI adoption, spacecraft reliability, and the challenges of hiring experienced aerospace and software talent. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TV again.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  It's Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. Here live at the TVP in Altria, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both these to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Jordy, is that even gonna happen?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  I don't think that's running into problems. Strip the years off that one. Uh, that's rough. Uh, well, we have a fantastic show for you today, folks. I made it to San Francisco and back since the last show. This is a new thing. I like this. Being able to get out from the show, go do something in San Francisco, get back. Very excited.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Why didn't you want to stay?

• 0:47John Coogan?

  I don't know. I like doing the show. Pretty simple. Uh, good to be here in the TVP in Altria. We have a great show. We have a bunch of great folks coming on the show. What was on my mind last night? I was listening to China talk. Jordan Schneider was talking about evaluators, third party evaluators. And I was noticing this discourse around like, it feels like we, we, we funneled into like very clear camps, super, super quickly. And it feels like, I don't know, too calcified for how fast it happened. Like the, the Dario essay comes out and, uh, you know, he throws out meter, says he's bringing in meter. And, and the backlash is like immediate. The New York Post is crashing out saying like, these are handpicked AI watchdogs.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Martin Casado, Martin Casado over at A16Z, he's pushing for the Department of Energy. He's like full nationalization now. And, uh, you know, both of those have their advantages, disadvantages. They both do good work. They are the extremes. And so I was just, I was just sort of wondering a few things like first is like, is like what other regulatory bodies can actually work? How do they work in other industries? It's very interesting because, um, like the revolving door is something that's common. Like, uh, in, in, in financial regulation, you get people that work at banks and then they go and work at the regulator and then they go back and forth.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  I mean, this is the, uh, this is the story of, uh, of the, like many people in the crypto industry where the regulators who are regulating it, they go back and forth, like revolving doors exist, but I think, uh, the pushback to meter is very much like, the door is like too revolving or it's too, it's too close, I guess. But the, but, but the more interesting question to me is, is, uh,

• 2:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the defensive meter is that I don't know many groups that are qualified at all.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  To even, to even understand what's going on at the frontier, right? And so.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Is that true though? I, I see, I, that's the thing I disagree with.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  I, I would say that there's, there's,

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  there are not that many groups that have been this invested in, in understanding frontier model behavior for this long.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  That's a separate thing.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  It's just a small group right now.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  That's a separate thing. So I think there's two separate things. There's one, which is like super forecasting, seeing the future, predicting what's going to happen. I think that's important. I think taking that seriously is important. But then there's the other side, which is like doing the work, reading the logs and being like, this violated this rule. This hack happened. Here's how it happened. And I think that those are actually two separate disciplines, two separate jobs. And you can just tell the regulator, if it's someone, you don't need to tell, like, if you hire someone and they are able to, to understand, like, like get up to speed on how these systems work and, and evaluate them and look at logs of different incidents, see what's happening, assess the risk level, assess the liabilities.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  If you can get those people up speed and you can just be like, it is your mandate to take this seriously. And, and the example that I'm pulling from is like, is like, you can be 22 years old, not graduate from college, go into the Navy, enlist in the Navy, not even in the officer's training program. And in 18 months, you can be responsible for the security of a nuclear power plant on a submarine. You do, you do six months. I actually looked it up. Like you, you, you do, uh, you do six months in nuclear field A school, uh, about six months of nuclear power school. And then six months of hand on, hands-on prototype training before arriving in the fleet. Nuclear power school covers math, nuclear physics, reactor principles, health physics, materials, thermodynamics, electrical systems and reactor technology.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  There's no part of that, that's like, you need to really at a deep level, understand that like nuclear annihilation is bad and could happen. Like the, you don't need to be able to forecast out like, well, what happens if China and geopolitics and Iran gets the bomb? And then these people, and then Pakistan, like you don't have to understand that to just know, like, don't let it blow up. That's your job. Here's how you don't let that happen. We've created a plan for you. You're 22 years old, but we know that you can do this job and you are enlisted to do this job. And doesn't matter if you think nuclear war is impossible, or it doesn't matter if you think it's gonna happen tomorrow. Your P doom on nuclear is completely irrelevant to you doing this job. Right?

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  And I think that that's something that is maybe being missed here a little bit. There's like, there's like, well, you have to take it seriously.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  You have to have seen it coming. And I actually think that like super forecasting, super important, awesome. Also just like fun read, really cool. And if you take it seriously, you make a lot of money, you work on interesting stuff, you get amazing technology. There's so many things that come downstream of that, that are really, really positive, really important. But I don't necessarily know that it's actually a prerequisite. And then the other thing is, yeah, Tyler.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  I mean, like meter, they're not the ones putting out those forecasts though. That's like, those are other groups. If you look at like meter research, it's like, uh, you know, very complicated benchmarks and like these kinds of things.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm sort of collapsing the meter criticism from like the New York Post perspective.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  And, and I think that is.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Overall, I think generally if people are gonna like, if, if, if there's a third party regulator, it seems like it has to be an entirely net new group because I don't think anyone has like, whether or not meter, meter could be operating and their actions could reflect that of a fully independent group. But the financing structure, the history of the, of, of the various parties there just makes it so that people don't have any trust that they would act like that.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  Sure. The, the interesting thing is that, uh, there is actually a distinction in the history of nuclear regulation, which is, uh, there's a difference between advisors in the, uh, before the NRC, it was the Atomic Energy Commission. And the AEC was created to oversee nuclear development. But, and many of the scientists who did forecast the importance of riskiness of the technology were involved. Interesting, like, like Einstein writes this letter and says like nuclear war, he basically, you know, uh, like, uh, describes like what nuclear annihilation could look like. There's a whole bunch of other scientists that actually run the numbers and they're like, this is what could happen if all the nuclear bombs go off. They do all the calculations.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  There's some that go a little bit too far, but, uh, in general, like the scientists were the ones who got to it earlier. But the scientists didn't actually wind up being the regulators. They wound up being the advisors. So they, so, uh, uh, Oppenheimer became the chair of the AEC's general advisory committee, which had enormous, enormous influence, but didn't actually issue licenses. So the actual work that was being done, it was like, okay. Oppenheimer in this advisory role says like, well, we need to have a security guard here with a gun that makes sure that no one can steal the nuclear material. Right? But he's not the one doing it. He's not the one actually hiring that person. That's just like an engineer who's qualified for that job.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  And I think that actually takes a lot off of it because you could say, oh, there's all these like conflicts of interest here or there or there, whatever. But if you just say, well, they're just putting, putting out a proposal, but then people are going to go and implement. But then the actual people that are doing the implementation are, are much less conflicted because they're just drawn from the broad pool of engineers and scientists and mathematicians and physicists and whoever else we have in, on, in, in America who can do this type of work. It gets a lot less complicated in, in my mind. There, there's a whole bunch of other interesting, uh, details from the AEC history. Enrico Fermi and Glenn Seaborg became the, became committee members with Seaborg later becoming the chairman of the AEC's, uh, AEC itself.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Of course Fermi from the Fermi paradox, uh, famous scientist, very interested in like forecasting, seeing the future, understanding the implications of things. But again, uh, becomes, uh, committee members, uh, not actual regulators, not actual licensors. And then Edward Teller is sort of like the most accelerationist because he was advocating for the development of the hydrogen bomb. But he ultimately became the chairman of AEC's reactor safety committee, talking about how to actually secure reactors in particular, but again, not actually on the team regulating staffing, working on this directly. And so today, the regulators, like nuclear regulators are talented and hardworking, but

• 9:19John Coogan?

  these are not like the most elite jobs. Like you can, you can just be a nuclear engineer, mechanical engineer, material scientist, physicist, health physicist, geologists, probabilistic risk analyst, cybersecurity professionals they hire for this, emergency preparedness, they hire lawyers, they hire inspectors, pay for some of these jobs ranges between 125,000 and 187,000 for many NRC technical staff roles. So like, like once the machinery, the machinery did have to get sort of described by the scientists, but then the implementation of that machine, of that regulatory structure is actually done by really hardworking, really talented Americans, but not head in the clouds, not thinking about the future in some, you know, bizarre way.

• 10:04John Coogan?

  That's enough to happen at the democratic level and then it gets implemented. And I think that that might, might, might eliminate a little bit of this like, okay, well, like this person is really tied to you is now like inside actually the one with the keys, the one with the, with, with the role overseeing you. I don't know. What do you think about this, Tyler? You have some pushback?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, like I, I know that Casey, the Center for AI Standards Innovation, like I think that they've had a hard time like staffing.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Getting funded, yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like, like they're having a hard time like finding people who will come like from the labs. Like maybe they should just broaden who they're looking for, but it seems like it's still like, um, the, the, like, the, the ways that we detect if a model is safe or not are not like set in stone yet. Like it's still like, that's what the role of meter, that's kind of what they're doing right now. So I, I think it is still different than like, you know, there are predetermined accounting practices and you can just kind of check the box and like follow the rules.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  Like there's still like, yeah, it's like a moving field, you know?

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there is, there is the question of like with particularly with like agent swarms perpetrating cybersecurity violations that don't directly cause economic harm. Like I didn't tell it to hack you. It hacked you, but it didn't knock your payment system offline. So you didn't lose a dollar of revenue. It's like very hard for you to prove that I acted wrong and then also economic damages. So there's a whole new level of like, you know, tort battles that need to be battled out in the court of law to see like, what exactly do I owe you? Because I shouldn't have done that, but what do I owe you? What's the damage? What's the, what's the problem there?

• 11:45John Coogan?

  And then, uh, and then you can go and say, okay, well, you know, how, how do we measure that? How do we prevent that? And, uh, how do we work through that? But, um, but the, the discourse is getting like, uh, more and more, more and more polarizing by the day. Uh, we'll see. I think there will, I think there will be the, the, the big sit down between the lab leaders. I wonder how important it will be to have Jensen with a beer alongside Sam, Dario, Elon with beers. Because the clear proposal, there's going to be beers involved. That's what we know from the interviews. Everyone's asking, why can't they just sit down and get beers?

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Six months of this could have been on the Cheeky Pine Podcast.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  It really should. That, that, that is sort of neutral ground too, because Elon's an investor in Stripe. What happened there? Elon's an investor in Stripe. He's a co-founder of OpenAI and Sam's, I think, an investor in Stripe. And then Elon's working with Dario on compute stuff. So maybe Cheeky Pine is like the perfect neutral ground. I think it'll probably be on, uh, national TV actually, but, uh, we shall see. We shall, we'll, we'll follow it here. Uh, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, services, data, data, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And we can, we can move on to the timeline. We can move on to other.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Quickly jumping in, we have a rate hike.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Yes. Tell me about.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Worscht hiked 25 bps.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  First time in three years.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  Priced in, Kalshi had it, I think at like 89% this morning, so not a huge surprise. I wanted to head over to Joe Weisenthal's feed and just kind of read his reaction if he has one.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Well, you pull that up. I'll give you the highlights from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, the, the NASDAQ react positively up, uh, six point, uh, 0.67%. This is the Wall Street Journal. They need, they need a JavaScript plugin that changes it to 0.669 or something. Most officials penciled in one more increase this year and energy shock and a surge of AI investment have reshaped the inflation outlook. We talked about the Fed interest rates yesterday a lot, but, uh, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates Wednesday for the first time in three years, a sharp reversal that began taking back cuts as it made last year implicit, and implicitly undercut the White House's insistence that inflation is not a concern.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  The Fed is saying, eh, it kind of isn't a concern. The increase approved unanimously will raise the benchmark Fed funds rate by a quarter point to between three and three quarters point and 4%. Uh, the vast majority of officials penciled in more, more, uh, one more hike this year in interest rate projections released after their meeting. So they think there's going to be more rate hikes. Uh, Chairman Kevin Worscht vowed shortly after taking office in May to end, uh, an overshoot of the Fed's 2% target now in its sixth year and followed through with an increase that had been widely anticipated in recent days. The rate hikes scrambled an account, uh, of the White House had offered of the man tapped by the president for the, for the job in January.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Trump and his allies had cast pressure to raise rates, uh, as coming from a committee hostile to Worscht, who last year said he would have cut rates sooner than the Fed ultimately did. It also followed a lost year in the Fed's inflation fight. Um, the central bank has made no progress towards this 2% goal since mid 2025, including after cutting rates three times last year to guard against labor market slowdown. Instead, the Iran war has lifted energy prices and the AI boom has driven an investment surge that has buoyed the economy and markets today. Policy action will support a timelier return to the committee's 2% goal. The rates that the committee said in a policy statement, analysts said that despite intense

• 15:42John Coogan?

  focus of late on monthly inflation data, the biggest change to the outlook has come from a run up in energy and commodity prices. It's the fact that the war in Iran has re-intensified and the energy price shock is getting bigger again, said William Dudley, the former New York Fed president. Uh, what you got for me, Jordy?

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I was just reading through a bunch of different reactions on, uh, Bloomberg itself. Let me pull them back up, but they have a live blog. Uh, some people are saying this is more hawkish than expected, given that the Fed took away next year's cut. Um, what else? Big changes in the dot plot line, the Fed's September dot plot. We now have four officials expecting to raise rates two more times.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Two more times?

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  It had previously just been one at that level, a whopping 12. Policymakers see rates going up once more before the end of the year and the remaining two see holding rates at their new 3.75 to 4% level. Uh, reminder that in June, the last time we got these forecasts, half of the committee expected the Fed to hold or cut rates. And again, it looks like Worscht did not submit a dot, so he's going dotless here. Um, uh, kind of a statement in itself. Uh, yeah, it's so, I mean, so far the AI trade, the build out, everything has been overwhelming, even in the face of, of headwinds like rising rates and.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the, the mood from Silicon Valley was like, ah, we're definitely not booming until we go back to zero interest rates. Like this whole tech thing, it only works when the interest rates are zero. So like, we'll just wait it out and.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the reality is there was a bunch of ideas and investing styles that only worked when rates were near zero.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, but yeah, it was specifically when you look at the companies that, that really boomed in that era, there wasn't a lot of net new, like really truly innovative stuff outside of financial products, which benefited from, from low rates.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Some of them benefit from high rates though, right? If it's like a savings product, the spread's higher.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  But if they have to borrow a lot of debt.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, but again, I'm thinking of like lending companies like Pipe, right? Pipe was a company that at the time went from, you know, incorporation to billion. I forget what their peak valuation was, but.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  And it makes a lot of sense because they're basically borrowing at 0%, then they're lending to a company at 5% or something, you know, whatever their spread is like, it's actually justifiable to a, to an earlier piece of the market, but that's what it breaks down when you have to go to a company and say, hey, you want, you want money at 12% or something like that for an early stage company?

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's head over to Who Man, who's.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on market places, and now with AI agents.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  Who Man says, Daria, we should pump the brakes on the frontier. Sam, yeah, let's all slow down together. Meanwhile, Zuck.

• 18:56John Coogan?

  The, the funny thing is, yeah, I mean.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's talk about what Zuck wrote. He said, last month I wrote about how we can build a positive and safe future for everyone. This is when Zuck said, I really want people to understand my values before we come out with our most powerful AI ever. And I at least felt like we, we already had a good understanding of Zuck's values, but he wrote yesterday, every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its model safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. The reality is people don't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and don't do what they ask. So labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Right away, you know, starting out with this point, it's like, this is not the, this is not the, no one, the safety debate has not been like around the idea of, oh, they're going to create personal agents that are going to be misaligned to the users. Like this, this is not at all, it's just, this is just a point that doesn't matter.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, there is, there, there is a, like, it's not the safety crowd, but the whole like social media is brain rot addiction. And like, like that is something that, there is a separate crowd that does critique that and says like, I don't want the addictive flywheel of, of maximizing screen time to be brought to AI.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  Totally separate debate.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. It, it's not, it's not the, the, the true AI safety debate.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  But it is.

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  There is a lot of debate about slowing progress on capabilities until alignment catches up. My view is that trust and alignment are quickly becoming the most important capabilities that will differentiate. Again, like this is not relevant to the current safety debate. Obviously, people want to make products that do what their customers want them to do. No one has been worried that you can't make a model that in the near term, or in the medium term, or even over long running tasks can generally do what the user wants. The concern is that if you leave models and, and give them a task that, that is more expansive, that they can start to do things like hacking Hugging Face, right? So again, nobody is sitting

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  here saying.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  The main thing is that this, this is talking past the X risk question. It is completely dismissing.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Discussion, which, which Daria is like laser focused on. And so this feels like it's a rebuttal, but it's actually like talking past it in the sense that he's like, labs face significant liability. And it's like, well, in the X risk scenario, the liability doesn't matter. That's the whole point is that like, no one's going to come and.

• 21:39Jordi Hays?

  And here's, here's the best, here's the best line. Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety and security.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  That's actually very rational and important because.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Every company delays their products for months. That's just called building a good product.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  To make it safe and secure, like period. This is what Meta has been doing forever. You have to do it. You have billions of users. You got to make sure they're safe and secure. Every single product. Again, I, I, I felt like he was.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  But you, so.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of things in here that are rational.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  He's taking a victory lap on not taking a victory lap. Don't you realize that? He says, we didn't call for everyone else to do this before we would. We just did it as part of our day to day work because it was clearly the right thing to do.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  And again, every single company already does all of these things. Every single company that makes AI products already does.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  While they're doing it, he's taking a victory lap for not taking a victory lap.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  It's not that complicated. He says, everyone else says like, we're taking safety seriously. We want a pat on the back before we delay the product. And he's saying, I want the pat on the back after I delay the product.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I just think it's, I just think it's very.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  A lot of back patting going on.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's, I think it's, I, I just think it's very funny to, I, I think it's funny how much, all these points are, are fine. They, they generally are rational and they make sense.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's funny that people are giving him so much credit for this note, given that he's totally missing the main point that everyone else is focused on.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  X risk?

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Like intentionally missing the point.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Because he doesn't believe it. He is.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  In order to get, in order to get, in order to get brownie points from people that don't even understand the current debate.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  No, to get brownie points from other people that have a P doom of zero, who are like, yeah. And, and you can see who's, who's supporting this. They're like, yeah, thank you. Like just put, put the, put the agents in the bag, you know, make the tokens free and, and just make the products. Like, I'm not worried about that at all. And for that crowd, they're like, thank goodness. You didn't like fall in the hole of like stooping to this P doom debate that I don't take seriously. That's the side.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  I just wish that he would come out and say, I have a P doom of zero.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  That's what he's saying.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  No, he's not. He's not. He's trying to position, saying, my, like.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  That's what he's saying.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  That's not, that's not, he's not being explicit about that. He's trying to let people say, we care a lot about safety. We slowed down our development because we care about safety. Trust and alignment are important.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 24:15John Coogan?

  He should definitely come out and say, P doom zero, because if it's not zero and it happens and we all go extinct, no one's going to be able to dunk on him. Right?

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  So it's actually all pure upside.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Pure upside to be P doom zero guy. Why has no one considered this? The aura game is so high.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would be, I would respect it a lot if he just came out and said what he actually thinks, which I, I do believe you're right.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  P doom zero.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Which I, he has a P doom of zero and, and his P abundance is.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  High. I mean, that's what he said in the, in the, in the previous essay. He was, he was basically like, I don't think the, he, he even, he even was gesturing towards like the, the fear based marketing, the doom based marketing is just a marketing tactic. I don't think it's rational. And also I don't think it's good for people to be in that headspace.

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  And it's like, info.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing. One of, one of the last lines, committing the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards recursive self-improvement is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Meta has made this commitment and other labs can do this as well. Look, like you, you, there's absolutely zero shot that Zuck walks into MSL and like gathers the researchers and says, look, I don't want to make models that make our models better. I don't want to do it. I want you guys just focus, like that there's zero, zero chance. So again, like this to me is just like, he is being disingenuous with his positioning of almost every single point here.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  I don't know. I do think that there is a trade off right now between making models good at things that are not on the RSI path and those that are. And so like the, the, the race to become really, really good at coding is super aligned with RSI. The race to do image generation is not. And image generation does not seem to be on the RSI critical path, although I, I think DeepMind put out something where they're using world models and they think they have a breakthrough there. I don't know if I, if I saw it accurately, but, but maybe they're wrong, but at least like the bet at, at least Anthropic has been

• 26:27John Coogan?

  like, we don't need to be world class at image generation to get where we want to go because we just need to be really good at coding. Coding teaches us, teaches the model how to train new models and then we get, you know, and then, and then, and then that, that final model, we can ask it to spin up an image generator if we want. Zuck is saying the opposite. He's saying like, yeah, we will actually go and try and build a tool just to help you book a dinner reservation. And that's a good use of compute, probably not on the RSI path. And, and that's like a reasonable trade off. That feels, that feels real to me. I don't know. What, what do you think about engaging independent evaluators? Is this like?

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and again.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  He says it's already industry best practice. Is he talking about benchmark stuff? Or is he talking about like actually like the, you have Slack access, you have a desk, you have a badge, like you don't work here, but you're allowed to just go wherever you want. I think that that's the next step. And I think he's maybe talking past that a little bit.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And he's talking past this again, engaging independent evaluators and advisors is industry best practice. MSL already does this today in several areas because it helps produce better work. Other labs can just do this too. It's like, other labs also do that too. Also do that already.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Well, as of last week, Anthropic does this with Meter. Like they said that they were going to do that immediately. So they were doing badge and Slack access.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  He's not, he's, he's not saying that he's doing that. He's saying, he's saying that he's doing the thing that every. Group that's making model has been doing for the most

• 28:01John Coogan?

  In the prior era.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  For a long time.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  But the new thing is badge and Slack access and desk, even though you don't work at the company. And that's what everyone's like, whoa, that's crazy because these organizations are very, very secretive. And you're really going to let this nonprofit come in? It's like sort of a wild move. And that's why people are like, oh, wait, like, how aligned are they? And like, what is the, what's the knock on implication? Like, can these people not leak? Can they not, can they be trusted? Are they going to go to a cocktail party and be like, oh, yeah, the new model is actually really bad or whatever. Like, there's so many things that are like, like Meta deals with leaks all the time. And so the prospect of bringing in a non-employee who is there explicitly to whistleblow effectively

• 28:45John Coogan?

  and like, is allowed to talk about anything and like, is, is, you know, third-party evaluator? Like, that is a huge step. And I think that's why people are like, whoa, this is a big deal. This is a big proposal. Like, if this was not a big thing, if Anthropic was just like, oh, yeah, we're going to do a benchmark with Meter. Everyone would be like, yeah, that's fine. Cool. Do that for sure. Awesome. But like, people are like, wow, okay, like, Meter's going to have a Slack access at Anthropic? And you're asking other people to do that? Like, that's, we got to know who these people are. We got to make sure that this is like the right team for this. This is sort of a crazy thing. This is sort of unprecedented. This doesn't happen a lot. Like, this is new. And, and so, yeah, the newness is not fully embraced here.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  And I think, I think that's a little bit of like, okay, you're not really engaging with like, what's coming down the pipe, which is like, maybe a government employee in your building? That's not happening right now. Maybe, maybe nonprofit from Berkeley? Do you like that, Mark? How do you feel about that? Are you cool? It seems like you're cool with it, but I don't know if you're actually going to be cool with it. Because it is a little, it is a little wild, right? It's a different thing. It's a new thing, but it's, it's a modern, it's a modern.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this image.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  What image are we pulling up?

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  I want to see John's reaction.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  While we pull this up, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  Here we go, John.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Let me see. Boom.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  This, this meme's been applied to like seven different people this week.

• 30:17Jordi Hays?

  I know, but I think it's, I think it's particularly relevant because you have, you have Elon, Demis, Dario, Sam, all, you know, all these people from different factions that are at or

• 30:32John Coogan?

  I've seen this applied to Theo. I've seen this applied to Coher. I've seen this applied to DeepMind and Gemini. I've seen this applied to MSL. People are just, whatever shot they want to take, they're applying this. It's not, it's a, it's too broad of a point.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  There's people.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  I think it's the inverse. It's all clowns and there's one tactical soldier.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  There's groups that are at the frontier. They're on the battlefield and they're deeply concerned.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  And you have Zuck coming in here saying, yeah, like, I, I built a cool personal agent. It's, it's aligned. What's there to worry about? Nothing to worry about.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  It's just, you're not really, you're not really in, you're not really on the battlefield yet. And I'm not saying with Watermelon, they can't get there. And Muse seems like it's, Muse is getting amazing reviews. It's, it seems like an amazing product. And that's very exciting. But I think it's just, again, I, I thought the whole post was silly, just like I thought the last post was silly.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Nick Carter liked the post. He said, Zuck pretty handily dismantles Dario's talking points here. People want models that are aligned with them, subtly punches back at Anthropic's normative constitutional approach. Labs already face liability if they screw up, so incentives to release aligned models is already baked in. Meta delayed Muse for alignment reasons, subtly questions Anthropic trying to king make Meter. Implies Meter isn't Anthropic patsy. Meter, Meta doesn't need to coordinate with anyone to work on alignment. Just something labs should naturally do. But Mark Chen from the top rope, according to Kevin Roos, says there aren't race dynamics off the frontier. And, yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a war on the timeline.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Again, it all comes down to like, there is absolutely zero shot that Zuck doesn't want to get to RSI yesterday and is doing.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  I thought he said that they were working on RSI. I thought that was like announced as like a explicit goal, maybe three to six months ago. It was, it was like, this super intelligence, RSI.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  And again, like, I, I just feel like

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  it's not unique to Zuck. Many, many, many leaders operate like this, but he's, he will say whatever the pick me thing is at that time.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  It would be more aggressive to be like, I'm P Doom Zero and I'm racing to RSI. Like, I'm P Doom Zero and I'm racing to RSI. All these other, all these other people, I'll see you on the other side, brother.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Meta, he said in August 10th, 2026, Meta must, must build out a sufficiently large amount of compute that we can allocate enough to recursive self improvement.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're doing RSI. They're doing RSI. Everyone's trying to, I mean, RSI can also mean so many things. It could mean, yeah, you, you, you looked up the, you summarized some archive papers for new strategies. Like, the, the automated research intern is in part an RSI initiative. It's not the final RSI loop, the closed-loop RSI that people are, are really worried about. But it, it's, it's all gradations of this. What does David Sacks think about this? I imagine that he's a fan. He says, Mark Zuckerberg, he just quotes it. He says, Meta delayed shipping Muse for several months to focus on safety. Yeah, Sacks is very much like, if you want to slow down, go right ahead. And so he is, he is, he's, he's fine with that.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Anyway, the reviews for Muse are really good.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Let me, let me say, let me say this, because I've been, I've been a little harsh.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  The people, people genuinely love Muse. I think like, it seems to be a great product. The, the race between Muse and Instinct is already, already quite exciting. Niraj says, my wife tells me Muse is good and quote, for the girlies.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's extremely bullish.

• 34:27Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, I mean, insane distribution advantage. I think it's.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's see where it's at on the charts. Number three, some, we got it, Nick. We got to get this company Vinted on here. I just do not, I've brought it up like a million times. It's like, you have the most insane AI race, gambling race, short-form drama race. And Vinted is always in the top five.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Just like a secondhand clothes retailer competing with like a million other secondhand clothes retailers.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they're dominating. Vinted, there we go.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Like, Meta is like pouring every, pouring, pouring billions of eyeballs into growing Muse and Vinted is.

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Didn't, wait, didn't Gemini and Google announce a personal agent at I O this year? Where did that go? Because that, it, it's, it's very odd that, that Gemini has so, like, uh, like, yes, the distribution advantage from, from meta platforms is significant, but a lot of people are on Android. A lot of people already have Gmail and Google Calendar. And they have Google Maps and they have the phone number of every business. And so when you think about booking restaurant reservations, doing all this different stuff, they, you would think that that product would have gotten more traction.

• 35:57John Coogan?

  But I feel like Gemini personal agent did not go through the same hype cycle that, that Muse is currently on.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Gemini Spark, it died on the vine. Yeah, what happened with, wait, they call it Spark? Is that, but isn't it Muse Spark?

• 36:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Dylan in the X chat.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  And Codex Spark. Everyone's calling.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  She uses it.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  It's mostly just using Gemini and toggling.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. It hasn't had the most breakout things. There, there are some killer Muse use cases. I mean, everyone's talking about booking reservations.

• 36:33Jordi Hays?

  As I asked him at I O, and they couldn't describe what it did. No one knows. It's the world's most mysterious, it's the most mysterious agent yet.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  But they got to have something soon coming. And I, and I, and I do feel like the, the Gemini distribution, like, they still have a pretty significant share of the chat market. Pops up in your email and it says, oh, here, you can just email this thing. And, you know, maybe another Gemini tab that I can open. Because I can open three if I'm in Gmail on Chrome and pull them all open. I don't know.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  What happened to the, to the, to the Kalshi AI price tracker? Do you see this? We, we talked to Tarek when this launched and I was like, oh, this is cool. This will allow you to understand like, you know, basically a proxy for the AI build out. Like, how are, how are GPUs trading? Banned, apparently. Before we get into this, I'll tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the Candace. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. So this is from Semaphore. And the, uh, do we have this open here?

• 37:47John Coogan?

  The US Commerce Department last month ordered CallShe to take down one of its products, tracking the price of AI compute, the crucial power from data centers that's driving the artificial intelligence boom, if you didn't know what AI compute was. The Commerce officials cited national security concerns, and that's what stuck out to me. I was like, there's so many different prediction markets that I can easily trace through, like, oh, you have a flight delay one, and you could have somebody that calls in and tries to get the flight delayed, that could be very disruptive, FAA could have a problem with that. But this one, I wasn't worried about at all. We talked to Tark about it, and we were like, yeah, this one seems sort of informative

• 38:31John Coogan?

  and interesting. So the product pulls together data from several markets that allow users to bet on the cost to rent Nvidia chips to create an overall picture of where AI compute costs are heading. CallShe quietly complied, though many of the underlying markets remain open for trading. Separately, Commerce has pushed the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which oversees prediction and future markets, to effectively freeze approval of new compute contracts for 60 days. And so even though some of the contracts are still open and will close, maybe in 60 days, there won't be any compute prediction market futures, which is very interesting. CallShe declined to comment, while a Commerce spokesperson said the department, quote, "has never once asked CallShe to take down this market or any other markets." Interesting.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  So the Commerce spokesperson said, "This story is false to Semaphore," so lots of people going back and forth. "It's unclear why Commerce is worried about the nascent market, which aims to do for AI computing what oil futures do for crude, let buyers and sellers of compute lock in prices and give traders a way to bet on where those prices go." Now, the markets were always a little thin. You know, these new markets, they tend to be sort of thin, and they tend to be more speculative, just people that are trading them on vibes or news, not necessarily used by the actual companies. Like, you know, oil futures, those will be actually employed in treasury strategies by like airlines, and like big, big firms will trade those in size.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  But that's what CallShe and Tark were pitching, is like where this all goes. I was a little skeptical that it would wind up on CallShe. I thought that they could have a decent chunk of the market, but I thought a lot of it might just go to insurance companies and reinsurance companies, and sort of like the traditional financial rails that do these types of deals. But nevertheless, it's going away, and let's figure out why. One potential reason floated to Semaphore by market participants is that compute futures could be manipulated to show a sharp drop in the cost of older chips, which might destabilize AI stocks and debt markets. Some of these markets are thinly traded, which could lead to volatility even without bad actors.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  So you're trying to wipe out situational awareness, you're short the CallShe prediction markets on AI compute futures. Everyone thinks, oh, AI's bust, the market trades down for a couple of days, you clean up, and then you buy back in, or something like that. I guess that's what the rumor is here that Semaphore is reporting on. The cost of compute has become one of the most important numbers in the US economy. One side of the debate fears that older chips, which serve as collateral for billions of dollars but borrowing by NeoClouds. NeoCloud, fun fact, coinage by Semi Analysis. I didn't know that's where it came from, but they actually, they didn't just rank them all with Cluster Max, they actually coined the term NeoCloud. It had a rude name beforehand, which I didn't realize. You can go look it up, I'm not gonna say it.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  But on the other, on the other, are concerns from big companies adopting AI that shortages of power and infrastructure will send prices of tokens soaring. That uncertainty has given rise to futures market that was starting to take off this summer. The CFTC's 60-day pause could delay plans by exchange operators like CME and NYSE, parent Intercontinental Exchange, along with upstarts like Architectural Financial Technologies, to list two-sided betting parlors. Interesting. Well, let me tell you about Cisco, and Jordi will pull up the next story. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Where do you want to go next?

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Zach.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yadigari.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Is back.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Where do we know him from?

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Says CalAI.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  CalAI.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Been on the show.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Everyone's been asking what's next after selling CalAI, introducing Persona. Others couldn't figure out the interface, we did." Let's pull up the video. We gotta ask Zach how his deal worked to sell CalAI, because he seemingly had to stay for like a week. Like, however he worked it out, he basically just got to fail.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  You can't keep this guy out of the arena. You can't get him on the sidelines, it's impossible.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and CalAI is the number four fitness app, still.

• 42:45John Coogan?

  Cooking. Yeah, so good. Yeah, let's play this video.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  Every major AI company is racing to build the best assistant, but they're all building within the same two-by-six-inch rectangle we wear in our pockets every day. We believe AI is supposed to free us from our screens, not make us use them more, so we built a new interface, introducing Persona and the Persona Band. To talk to your Persona, simply flick your wrist or hold down on the face, then ask anything. Hey, can you ask Matt how many pre-orders we got today?

• 43:20Speaker 04

  Sir, I just emailed Mac. I'll let you know his reply.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Your Persona will proactively learn your habits to make your life easier. For example, when you get off a flight, it should know to get you an Uber from the airport to your hotel. Reactively, it will be able to help with all kinds of things like canceling subscriptions, negotiating bills, or even doordashing your usual Chipotle bowl, knowing exactly what you like.

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  Elite.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Persona is also the only AI assistant.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  It's the predictive burrito. It's what the doordash guy was talking about. They ordered the burrito before you even know.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  He's actually building it.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Privacy for your and those around you's data. This isn't a continuous listening band, the microphone will only activate under your control.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Oh, and you turn it off.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  We are launching with three different materials and four different colors. Preorder your band and start texting your Persona today.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  I've seen enough time for Zach to come in with the final offer.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, pretty good pitch.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Little bit harder to get people to install it, right? Because they gotta buy it, wait for it to ship, little bit of a barrier to entry, but also I just love these AI devices.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  Look at Pocket.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Cool, yeah. Pocket really worked. Yeah, I don't know, this is, he's gonna, he's gonna really blow this thing up, I have a feeling, this is gonna be big. That's cool. What did prompter say? Never bet against a guy who managed to sell a calorie-tracking GPT wrapper, which in no way could have possibly been accurate at calculating macros for 100 million. No, he is a master of

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Growth.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Growth and scale, and just like

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  So if you look at, if you look at the charts right now, CalAI is number four. The company that bought CalAI is number nine.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, I mean, that's a good, that's a good example, it's a great growth team. Doesn't he also have another company, EcoGPT or something? Is that not him?

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  No, no, that's his co-founder.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  Got it, okay. Yeah, this is a good company.

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I'm still, yeah, Tyler, preorder one of these.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Definitely do that.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Put it on the ramp.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I'm excited to check it out. I'm still not, I'm still overall not convinced that I need a new device. Like, there has to be something.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  Like, a lot of the demo was screenshots of the phone.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  And so, and I do spend time away from my phone, but I'm typically in the water.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Is it waterproof? Can you wear that while you're surfing? You said you had a brilliant idea while you were surfing, needed to hold it in your head the old way, before you got back to your phone.

• 46:01Jordi Hays?

  Like an idiot.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Like an idiot, using your brain. No, it really does feel like a wave of new devices is coming online, and the war for the home device, I mean, you can see, you know, the battle between Apple and Meta reemerging with Muse, like, how deep will they be able to go before Apple pushes back? Every other firm is working on hardware, the Meta glasses. The Meta glasses with Muse should act very similarly, right? You have an agent, you can talk to it, you can do some of the similar actions. The trick is like, people don't wear the glasses all the time, whereas a wristband, like a whoop, people wear that all the time.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  And it seems very in tune with, I don't know, just like, the obvious pushback, like calling out that it's not listening all the time.

• 46:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Like, there are just people that would just like, forget about that, and it's like, it's very

• 47:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just using the burrito, using the burrito example, I'm struggling to see when I would need a burrito, but wouldn't be near my phone.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  It's more just like if you don't, if it's faster, like people will just do anything that's faster. That's how we got to phones. Like you used to, you, you, there was a time when it was like,

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  I know, but anything but fast, you could just say,

• 47:20John Coogan?

  If you're gonna shop online, go on desktop.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying like the overall form factor is bad, but if you had the ability to just hit a big button and talk to the Persona app and say, order me the usual from Chipotle. It's not like the band is necessarily faster if your phone is sitting right there.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder how fast they're gonna update Siri because it feels like,

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  No, it is, it is so funny to me that Apple's finally coming out with their

• 47:45John Coogan?

  Knowledge retrieval.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Like knowledge retrieval, L L M chat app and right, literally right before they could really get it out to the public. There's like a whole new paradigm of agents that are, you can just tell it's gonna take Apple like two and a half years to get a beta out.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  And so again, like right as it felt like they were, oh, we're gonna catch up, you know?

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Will it, will it, will it? Is there a way that, that the next version of Gemini is so good? It, if, if you've, if you've talked to Gemini in Gmail, it links it. And so when you talk to Gemini through Siri, it knows that it's you and it, it can go in your email and it can email people and, and, and text that restaurant to get the reservation. Like, is that a, I'm always interested in like, how much innovation will Apple get for free because they're partnered with Google? Like if Google advances the model, does that advance automatically come? Or is Apple like, we're buying Gemini 3.1 flash from you? Thank you. We'll let you know if we want the new thing.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Because if they just want Gemini and all the progress, like there's going to be progress there, there's going to be new capabilities. The models are gonna get better, the functionality is gonna get better. I would bet that even though people were sort of,

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Google has just really, really, really struggled to make good AI products.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know. I, I would be surprised if they can't figure out a way to order you a burrito in the next six months. Right? Like, that's not some like R S I critical thing. It's like,

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. You think they, you would, you would think that, uh, having spent billions of dollars of, uh, buying windsurf, that they could have a competent code gen product.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I haven't seen, yeah, it's tricky. I don't know.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Like there's small companies that have made good coding harnesses.

• 49:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Uh, we have Jeremy LaRue from Circle. You want to talk about Sam first?

• 49:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's bring, let's bring,

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Let's bring Jeremy LaRue from Circle, co-founder, chairman and CEO back on the show. Welcome to the show, Jeremy. How you doing?

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Uh, crazy week, tons of news. Let's start with Circle. Let's start with, uh, what's new in your world.

• 50:02Jeremy Allaire?

  Yeah. Well, so we turned on a new global operating system today called ARC. It is an economic operating system, uh, that we've been building for two and a half years. Hundreds of companies launch their apps and services on it. Um, it's being run by, uh, not just Circle, but like many of the biggest financial infrastructure companies in the world, the people that clear the securities of the world, run the payment networks of the world, manage the assets of the world. Uh, and so it's got everything from social trading and DeFi to major payments firms and capital markets and, um, you know, we, we built this, uh, for AI first. Everything is AI accessible, all the builder tools, everything. But also we, we built services so that AI agents can use this themselves as an economic layer for, for transactions,

• 50:46Jeremy Allaire?

  for contracts, for coordinating. And it's a, it's a big milestone. It's the biggest, um, really the biggest platform launch in our history. And, and we think it's a, it's a big, uh, it's a big upgrade for the internet too.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  A lot of people, six months ago would be like, awesome, it works with AI agents. But today they'd be like, definitely don't make it work with AI agents. That's not what we want. Uh, how do you think about the risks and the rewards that come from enabling a platform to be AI agent accessible? Sometimes they'll access things that aren't even accessible.

• 51:17Jeremy Allaire?

  I mean, this is the key, right?

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Jeremy Allaire?

  The, the biggest challenge with this explosion in agents is basically trust.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Jeremy Allaire?

  And verifiability.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:25Jeremy Allaire?

  And so, um, you know, it turns out that cryptographic computing and these, these, these networks, these network operating systems of cryptographic computing are built for that. And so we've, we've kind of created the most trusted dollar, uh, on the internet, U S T C. And the, these operating system layers actually have features that AI can build on top of. So you can basically have proofs of the, of the entities and identities behind agents. You, we're actually demoing today something called ARC Agent Sector, which actually allows you to have an AI agent prove the work it's done, the data it's used, how it's done its work, and then provide that in cryptographically provable way to the, to the internet.

• 52:06Jeremy Allaire?

  And so you can have more trust and verifiability around what actually AI is doing. And right now, the black box issue is the scariest thing for people out there, whether it's inside the labs or it's actually just out it with the agents that we're building. And so it's this convergence, like, you know, I talk about the agentic economy. It's this convergence of these operating system for intelligence and these operating systems for economic activity rooted in, in cryptographic computing, which is what these blockchain networks are. And so we're building a layer, um, that is able to begin to provide that trust and verifiability to the agentic world. And so that's how we get comfortable with, with, uh, with it. We, we need this. Uh, we can't move forward in the agentic economy without technology like this.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Are you, uh, are you equipped to explain to me the history of Walmart's misadventures in payment infrastructure? I was reading on Stratechery that they were trying to push people to debit card and A C H rails for years. And then they finally sort of succumbed and went with a different one. And I, and I guess I'm just interested in like, is like, is this a transformative moment for any particular sector of the economy? Where you're like, oh, someone's gonna be saving half a percent now or some big pool. Yeah.

• 53:21Jeremy Allaire?

  I mean, for sure. I mean, look, when, when we started Circle, right? We had this basic idea that there could be a protocol for dollars on the internet, that the marginal cost of storing and moving value, just like the marginal cost of storing and moving data and information and communications went to zero. That happens with, with the movement of money. And, and now we have that, like stablecoin, digital dollars are now, as of January of this coming year, like legal digital dollars in the financial system. You can move them programmatically, instantly, anywhere in the world, uh, uh, in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent. And so payments and settlement becomes commoditized. And so as you get the proliferation of, of wallets that can talk to these computer networks, which is now everywhere, like from Cash App to Revolut, to all these wallets around the world can talk to these networks.

• 54:04Jeremy Allaire?

  Well, now you can directly settle. So if I'm a business, I can just say, you know, pay me, pay me over this rail. And I get it as basically cash instantly and, and it settles, uh, it, you know, like a cash transaction. And so, um, over time, basically that compresses out this rent extraction that's existed, uh, for a very, very long time. And all kinds of other things like time delays and, and the like. But, and so, yeah, I mean, it's, it's purpose built for that world. And a lot of stuff is converging all at once. Uh, operating systems like ARC, the legal frameworks for digital dollars, the people getting comfortable that they can like use this in, in their, in their businesses, know how to operate it, et cetera. And so it creates a huge opening for, you know, the Amazons and the Walmarts.

• 54:47Jeremy Allaire?

  And, and really you talk, talk to any major retail basing CEO and, and they'll tell you how much of their margin goes to processing fees. And so I, I do, I do think it's, um, it's significant. But the, the whole utility model of payments is gonna change, um, very, very significantly. That, that's a, a big part of, of what we see happening here.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  You mentioned,

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  What's the most boring payments happening on, on ARC? Like, uh, the agent stuff's awesome, but I imagine you have a bunch of different partners. I'm assuming some of it's just,

• 55:16Jeremy Allaire?

  The boring stuff is, is like, you know, there are businesses that have to move money around the world. And, and they're finding that they can do it better. And they, you know, if there's a, someone who's importing from Asia in Latin America and they need to do that and they, and they wanna like have that done quickly. And they don't wanna have a lot of intermediaries and they wanna just like directly do that. And so volumes of, of kind of how, how people need to move money around, um, is, you know, it's boring to, to all of us. But to those, to those people in those countries and, and to those suppliers and those other people, it's actually really significant. I mean, other boring stuff is like, hey, I have a, I have a tokenized version of a stock. And I'm someone in an emerging market that wants to own a stock. I can now do that.

• 55:59Jeremy Allaire?

  And I can, I can purchase it and trade it instantly. I can take out options on it instantly. And I don't have to be in a US brokerage account. I can just be on the internet with a wallet that connects to these networks. And so, you know, from, you know, from the average individual who just wants to participate in capital markets in, in simpler ways to these businesses that, you know, have to move stuff around. That's really important to the, you know, the, the kind of, um, efficiency and cash efficiency of their business. Um, yes, agents are exciting. That's frontier, uh, uh, so to speak. Yeah. And then even, even simple things like people love to watch memes on TikTok. They also like to trade memes. Uh, and so if you want to trade memes, go for it.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  Sprinkle some of those in.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  I want to talk legal. You mentioned that these are now legal US dollars. But yesterday, CoinDesk reported Crypto Clarity Act flames out in failed US Senate vote. The years-long effort to set US regulations for crypto markets couldn't muster enough support to make the leap over the Senate's final 60-vote hurdle. I would love your reactions, context, history, anything you can do to get the audience up to speed here.

• 57:10Jeremy Allaire?

  The key thing is that a year ago, there's something called the Genius Act, which did become federal law with massive bipartisan support in the Senate and the House. And the Genius Act makes digital dollars legal in the US financial system. The Federal Reserve, the US Treasury Department, all the regulators have made the rules. And as of January 2027, stable funds like USDC become legal digital dollars in the US financial system and in the global financial system. So, a lot of our work is done. Like, blockchain's running this new money, being able to support it with all these markets, that's here. We've got that, which is great. Clarity is about like, how trading venues get set up. You know, who can fit in a trading venue? The digital asset trading and market side of things,

• 57:52Jeremy Allaire?

  there's other pieces to it. Clarifications around like, how DeFi is sort of treated and stuff like that. But that's like, it's market structure, which has to do with like the capital markets. And so, I think, you know, there's still a lot of desire to have like, good regulations there. But at the same time, I mean, essentially, the agencies that regulate these things, like the CFTC, the SEC, even the bank regulators too, they're all just going to move forward and regulate it themselves. And then eventually, we'll get additional laws passed through Congress.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Got it. Jordy, anything else?

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Not for now. Congrats on the launch.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Congrats on the launch. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Let's talk about Sam Parr. He was offered $600,000 to sell his company's data to Micro1. He's not doing it. 100% not doing it. He turned it down. He says, "It does interest me like crazy." What a crazy business model.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  He's tempted. He's tempted.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  So, apparently, let's finish this post. He says, "If you don't know, here's all I know about them. They go to private companies. They ask for your Slack, Notion, email info, offer you six, seven figures." What are we doing here? "Some how anonymize that data and they sell it to OpenAI, etc." And the interesting thing is that I've been getting these Instagram ads, and they're trying to get me to sell the OpenAI data to Micro1 to sell the OpenAI. And I think I could maybe, one hand washes the other on this one. Yeah? No, I would never, to be clear. Seems like Micro1 has grown to nine figures in revenue

• 59:35John Coogan?

  very fast. The ad on Instagram that at least I'm getting targeted with is one to $2 million offer. But maybe that's how they get you in and they work you. "Look, you are a podcast. You only need this much." I don't know. But he says, "What else am I missing here? I get the value of this, but doesn't seem right to me." Interesting. For some companies, I would imagine this being super valuable. The range seems really, really wide. I don't know. But what do you think about data brokerage in the modern era? Are you selling your data?

• 1:00:08Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's, you know, in our team chat, like, you got a few people working back and forth on a meme, a bunch of crying emojis, some laughing emoji.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  We know, we know that the models are bad at humor. How will they get funnier? If not, training on our internal message data. They need to see, "Oh, that one got five crying emoji reactions." Reinforce that. That's what happens. This is how we create comedy superintelligence through acquiring the Theo Von Datatrove.

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I think it's quite interesting to look at how projects and tasks get completed in organizations, how products get launched, how, how deals get done, all these different things. It's just like...

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, wait, I have an interesting question for Sam. We'll have to follow up. Which company? Because he is, of course, affiliated with many...

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  I would assume Hampton.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  Hampton would be the one that, yeah, that actually makes sense. Because again, you wind up in the situation that it's like, "Oh, we'd like to buy your data from my first million and everything HubSpot has as well." You know, just, just give us access to the HubSpot Slack, right? Like, I don't think that's going to happen. They probably don't use Slack there, right? CRM competitor? Probably use something else. Anyway.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's, we can ask Tomasz what he thinks about selling your company's data.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video of PT talking about why the name of your startup is predictive of success or failure.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Oh, did you notice what Jeremy did there? Jeremy, a layer. He was like, "We built a layer for transactions." Yeah, now I'm going to determine this in action. I caught it. Did you? Let's play the video.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  Sort of like a slight aesthetic thing, I believe in very strongly, is that the names of companies are often very predictive of future of failure or success. So, I'd say PayPal was a, was a very friendly name. It was the friend that helps you pay. Napster was a bad name. It was a music sharing site. You nap some music, you nap a kid, that sounds like sort of a bad thing to be doing. And it's no wonder the government then comes in and shuts the company down within a few years. So, you want to be very careful how you, how you name companies. In the sharing economy context, I like Airbnb way more than Uber. Airbnb sounds like this very innocent, virtual bread and breakfast, this very light,

• 1:02:35Speaker 06

  non-threatening sort of company. Uber, that sort of sounds like a bad name from Germany sometime in the 1930s. You know, what are you exactly above? Maybe the law? And, and this is probably something that, again, from a government regulatory perspective, I think Airbnb is a vastly better name than Uber. And on the social networking side, I would say that, that I actually think Facebook was a very good name. I think MySpace was sort of a more problematic name. You know, Facebook was, you can say that all these social networks involve both reading and writing. Unlike real life, you learn to, you have to write before you read. You first have to write some things about yourself,

• 1:03:20Speaker 06

  then you read more about other people. Over time, reading dominates writing. Facebook was about learning about people around you, about the real identities at Harvard. MySpace started among wannabe actors in Los Angeles, and it was about them coming up with fictional narratives around themselves. And then sort of a lot of other people in LA who are generally like that.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  That's fire, always.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  And, and because reading dominates writing, Facebook would ultimately dominate MySpace. So, I think you could sort of, there's a certain version where the whole arc of the company was, the whole product arc was implicit in the names.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Interesting. How important do you think naming is?

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Extremely important.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  TBPN.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm overly obsessed with dot-coms at the inception stage of companies too, because there's, there's, one, they go hand in hand, but names are, names are important. Names are, I feel like names and dot, and dot-coms are, are maybe, maybe name, the name itself is like 70%, and actually having your dot-com and owning that is like, maybe 30% over time. But when I see founders that are super ambitious, and they plan to build a really big company that millions of people are going to interact with, and then they build, they pick a name where they will never, ever, ever get the dot-com unless they can, unless, like, we

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  actually just saw Runway, the AI company, bought Runway.com from Siki's.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. Yeah.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Siki Chen's company. And again, I expect that Runway had to pay like, an insane price because, you know, Siki had, had a well-funded company himself and...

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Leverage.

• 1:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, important. Bending Spoons.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Great name. We do have our next guest, though.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Bending Spoons. We can get into this next.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Consol while we bring in our next guest. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have Tomasz from Theory Ventures back on the show. It has been way too long. Thank you so much for taking the time. I've read a bunch of stuff that you've written, seen a bunch of stuff, and I'm so excited to get into this talk. How are you doing?

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back on the show.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Good to have you.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  Are you thinking about AI regulation as much as everybody else?

• 1:05:46Speaker 07

  It seems like it's the topic of the week, that's for sure. You know, we saw Zuckerberg tweet yesterday, I thought with actually a very sanguine view, probably one of the most level-headed views.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Debate Jordi thought it was talking past the x risk discussion that he wasn't engaging with the real discussion Dario Amade is putting out.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  No one.

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  If you think.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Let me pull up the post again. My point of view, like totally level headed, totally rational saying like if if Zuck had a leading model and he was talking like that, it would be everyone, it would actually truly be incredible. The the reality is that his the the sort of bright spot with MSL right now is Muse, which is a great product, people like it. And literally, no one is worried about like personal agent app safety. And so when he says people don't want to use agents that are misaligned with them and that don't do what they ask. So labs have a strong natural incentive to make their models more aligned. My point of view is like, no one, of course, people don't want to use products that don't

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  do what they want them to do or do things that they don't want them to do, right? But that is not at all like the debate right now. And so I feel like he came and made a bunch of points that like sound good if you don't fully understand the debate. Like later on, he says, committing the the significant majority of compute towards serving people rather than racing towards RSI is one of the best ways to ensure we develop this technology safely. Literally, about just over a month ago, he was saying like, we need to have a lot of compute so that we can keep up and get to RSI, right? And so I feel like he's consistently been focused on saying the thing that will make him sort of popular in the moment that sort of misses the bigger picture.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  But overall, our takeaway from all of his actions is that he actually has a P doom of zero, and he just thinks the technology is cool and wants to build like successful products. Like that is what that's what I consistently consistently take away. And I I like, respect that point of view. I'm I'm glad we have someone in the arena that's like playing at massive scale that has a P doom of zero. Hopefully, you know, it doesn't increase x risk.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think?

• 1:08:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, you know, he, I think he echoed a couple of the thoughts that Lina Khan put out, which I thought were excellent, right? Which is there's an existing regulatory framework for companies having responsibility for the products that they develop. I thought that was extremely like it was right on point. And so I think he's arguing for control systems in a way. I think the the debate of AI safety is really focused on alignment, not really touched very much on control. And how do we build the guardrails around these models for them to be effective? I think that's where this all needs to go.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  The the liability question, I think, makes so much sense. Are you are you grappling with any of the questions about like, does liability apply if no one, if no human says to go do an action and there's no economic harm related to the action that's taken, but it violates something in a cybersecurity context? Like, I I just tell my agent, go solve math problem. It hacks into your system, shouldn't do that, but I didn't ask it to, and it didn't take down your e-commerce site, so you didn't lose any revenue.

• 1:09:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, we haven't seen it across company boundaries so much, but we have seen it within the within a company. So let's say I have an agent and it does something bad, right? The initial challenge, I think, is primarily just spending a lot of money. And we see that a lot of executives are worried about blowing past their AI budgets as a result of unprecedented agent expend. And this is probably the first instantiation or first case within an enterprise where an agent does something that's really not supposed to.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 07

  And I, you know, you receive a warning, I think, most of the times you might be fired for that. So in that sense, you're really responsible for the agent.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:46Speaker 07

  I do think if it starts to span across companies, there's law, and I think you will ultimately be responsible for the agent that you that you start.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is it is it fair, the the conception of just collapsing the debate down to the P doom equals zero versus P doom equals greater than zero crowd?

• 1:10:07Speaker 07

  No, I think, I mean, you know, we've had a lot of conversations about this. I think whenever you talk about doom, okay, let's define doom, let's figure out what all the conditional probabilities are.

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:18Speaker 07

  The reality is like doom exists in a car, doom exists in an airplane.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:22Speaker 07

  And so we accept some probability of failure in those. But I think the conversation, I think the Dario letter did a really wonderful job of taking the conversation of pro AI, anti AI, and then stepping it forward into, okay, what is it that we're talking about? And the way I read his letter is, there's action that needs to happen at the individual company level, there's action that needs to happen cross company, and then there's action that needs to happen at the international level. And that increase in resolution allows us to have the next step of the next or the next step of the conversation.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it feels like we're stepping through those pretty efficiently. It feels like the first step of company regulation and independent evaluators. All the companies have sort of taken various levels of steps to either agree or promise or make current commitments around that. The national conversation is happening right now. There are some bills, there are some politicians that are weighing in. It feels like that is progressing, it's going to be slower, but it is happening. Is there any hope for international collaboration? Demis and Sebastian Malabai were talking about, hey, I think that the Chinese are open to something. I've heard other people that are like, this is crazy, there's no chance that there's any sort of international cooperation here.

• 1:11:39Speaker 07

  It's really tough. I mean, you have a lot of geopolitics here at play. Clearly, you know, for the US, this is probably the defining issue of the midterm election. You have data centers contribute two thirds to US GDP growth. We just saw the Fed raise rates just a couple of hours ago. And so, you know, I think, at least within the world of the United States, the one of the most important topics of conversation is the the economic one.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 07

  And first, we need to reconcile what happens internally, and then maybe perhaps we'll pursue international.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you investing? Where are you thinking of opportunity? It feels like there's sort of, you know, a lot of people have made bets on the Frontier Labs, a lot of venture capitalists are sort of like happy with where their positions have have, you know, or like the ship has sailed on those, the IPOs are almost imminent. But then there's, there's so much work to be done in diffusion, there's a ton of application layer, applied AI, working to actually create legal software engineering work, there's so many, there's so many opportunities there. And then there's also folks who are going deeper in the stack on semiconductors, Neo Clouds, inference engines, there's a whole bunch of other plays that go way deeper down the stack. Has have either of those appealed to you recently?

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  Do you think they're equal opportunities? How are you shaping those?

• 1:12:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the single biggest market in software today is inference. It used to be the database market, now it's inference, just the way the database market's segmented, and you have fast databases and slow databases, image databases, video databases, you have the same thing for inference. And so we've invested in one company called Sale, that, you know, you can save a tremendous amount of your inference if you're willing to wait five, five to 10 minutes on that inference. Today, most of the AI that we use is instant.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:23Speaker 07

  And we all pay a premium for that, but a lot of business use cases are are slower, like data bricks.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:29Speaker 07

  And and then we've been researching categories around like voice inference. When you chat with a voice AI, it's actually very different optimization. What you care about is how quickly the AI responds to you, robotics. And so we've been splitting that up, and we're also investors in a company called Ollama, which is about 10 million people using it initially for local. So you can actually run a lot of AI on your computer. Sanford released a study about three or four weeks ago showing 90% of white collar AI use cases can be solved on your MacBook. And then also, if the AI needs more, go to the cloud.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think is key in voice AI? Because that can be done on device in many ways, but it can also be done on the edge. We've talked to Matthew Prince, CloudFlare, about putting GPUs on the edge. Then there's also just inference optimizations that even if you're pinging to a data center that's 100 milliseconds away, if the inference is fast enough, it doesn't really matter. Have you consulted that or thought about that trade off?

• 1:14:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So there's four different layers of the AI stack. One is you have a phone, goes through Tuleo, then you need to convert that phone call into digital.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:38Speaker 07

  Then you need an AI model to process it. There are three different steps there. Where the inference happens matters a lot. The edge definitely makes a lot of sense. And then there's also time zones, like customer support, you'll have different time zones coming up. You want to make sure that the AI systems are ready for when those loads come, that's called KV cache warming. But so I think ultimately, it is a really important category where latency matters a lot, the optimization of those systems is pretty materially different than the way that we use a lot of large language models, and it will likely start initially in the centralized data center, but very likely pushed to the edge.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  What, how are you seeing Chinese open source fit into the current AI build out AI story? Are enterprises actually deploying them at scale? Is it more like there's an intermediary where an American company will fine tune or serve that model? Like, how many layers of abstraction are are most of the companies away from the Chinese open source models, which have been doing incredibly well in benchmarks and seem to be very capable, but haven't been eating a lot of AI spend that I've been seeing in panel data at least?

• 1:15:53Speaker 07

  Yeah. The Chinese models, I think, are some very large companies are using them in production.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:00Speaker 07

  You'll have different perspectives, particularly from the chief information security officer.

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:04Speaker 07

  Some people will not use Chinese models at all. Most of those Chinese models are typically run on US inference, Neo Clouds, and they're incredibly capable. We use them internally, we have backed companies that are using them. We think open source is an absolutely essential component of the of the of the ecosystem going forward. I'm excited to see, you know, the meta models, the GMA models. Clearly, Nvidia is pushing quite a bit with the Nematron and the acquisition of Hugging Face Plus, the poolside semi acquisition, let's call it.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 07

  So it's it's essential. I think one key question that hasn't yet been answered is, if an American company fine tunes Chinese model and runs it on US infrastructure, does the market perceive that both like economically and politically as a US or an American model or as a Chinese model?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Depends how American the CEO of the company is, I guess. If they announce it on Joe Rogan, I think it'll be well received.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  How, walk me through how.

• 1:17:03Jordi Hays?

  How you think that platform VCs are justifying, you know, doing some of these vertical AI companies at like 50 times, you know, 50 to 100 times revenue today? It feels like a year ago, a lot of the conversation was around like, these aren't software budgets anymore, they're capturing some amount of labor spend. Unclear how true that is today, even if you're not, you're not seeing a correction in the labor market, but, but again, maybe firms are just hopefully doing quite a bit more. And so that you are actually getting into labor spend by just, you know, replacing like an incremental hire or something like that.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  But comparing some of these vertical AI companies to, to the prices that bending spoons has been paying, it just feels like incredible, incredible disconnect unless, unless these vertical AI companies like, like you just look at them and, and I'm, I'm wondering how they get into the billions of dollars of runway, run rate, which I think right now, the industry is sort of pricing them, that, that at least some of them need to hit that for the category to work out.

• 1:18:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're right. I mean, we've benchmarked the, you know, AI harnesses are now, the fastest growing ones are trading between 100 to 150 times current ARR, which is an enormous multiple, particularly at that level of scale. Sometimes it's subsidized with lower gross margins and the idea there is primarily just, let's get the product out as far as possible and then ultimately we'll improve the economics. In their favor, I will say, we made a prediction at the end of 25, that we, 2026 would be the first year where employers would pay agents at market level for a person or more. And that happened, the first time we noticed that was actually in March or April of this year.

• 1:18:58Speaker 07

  So we have a portfolio, a company that charges at par and it will likely charge at a premium to a person. And so if that's the case, and it's not necessarily human replacement, it is more augmentation, is the ability to do more, process more. But if that's the case, and you could argue economically, there's no management, there's no healthcare. And so you should actually pay a premium to a human.

• 1:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's always been that like hiring a freelancer, like an expert freelancer is always more expensive on a per day basis than, than a long-term hire, right? Cause you just want to be able to get that expertise immediately, but then not pay for it when you don't.

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  It's super hard to get 10 freelancers to show up for one week and then go away for two weeks and then two of them come back for one week and then two days over here. And obviously a lot of services, depending on how.

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, uh, do you think we'll get an American bending spoons? I've had this idea recently of like, how many, how many companies need to be acquired at like, you know, two to five times revenue for American VCs to say, well, why don't we put a few billion dollars into a firm that does at least so we can monetize the way up and the way down? Do you think that'll happen? Because it feels like, I look at some of these acquisitions and, and again, these are not companies that people are generally excited about, but I think they're going to be pretty, pretty durable for the most part. And I think part of the reason they're getting such good pricing right now is no one else has basically the stones to go out and say, yeah, I'm going to buy air table, right?

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, I want to, I want to be that, I want that to be my problem, you know? Like, but a company set up entirely to do that, and that's the core bet, I think could, could make sense.

• 1:20:41Speaker 07

  Oh, absolutely. I think the multiples for some of these companies are really quite small. The key metric there is just net dollar retention and gross dollar retention. So some of, some of the legacy, we'll call them legacy software companies for a second. Their revenue retention rates are still phenomenal. And so there's a multiple arbitrage opportunity. There are a handful of companies that have been, or investment firms that have been doing this for a long time. And I'm surprised we haven't seen them be more active. And then you also have holding companies that have bought a lot of these businesses, like Danaher would be a publicly traded example of a kind of a holding company. Constellation Software would be example of another one. And so I would expect them to be pretty active, just given, I haven't looked at, at their activity in a while, but I would expect them to be pretty active, just given how attractive

• 1:21:26Speaker 07

  the, the multiples are.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Is there demand or at least like gesturing towards demand from LPs for VC firms with companies from that vintage, companies in that position to like get cleaned up? Like, you know, that, that's something that bending spoons offer is like, there's a, there's a, there's a logjam, maybe you still have a board seat and it's like, hey, we actually want you to maybe realize not a great return, but then you'll be focused on the next era. You can be a hundred percent in on this wave, which we still want to back you on. Is that something that actually will come from LPs or is that just a separate calculus?

• 1:22:07Speaker 07

  No, I think that's right. I think GPs and LPs definitely want to, I mean, in certain many cases, move on from those positions, just because the industry has changed and liquidity is absolutely important. Although 26 is a monster, like monster year for liquidity. But just cleaning up those fund, vintages and migrating those companies to the next person who, you know, most interested in managing them, the way that you talked about is a big part of the industry. It's in every LP conversation that we have, managing liquidity is, is among the top two or three topics.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  What, how do you expect the economics of the personal, sort of new category of personal agent companies to evolve? I'm thinking Instinct and Muse. A lot of people are using these agents to just say like, hey, go buy this product on this website, right? There's no like discovery happening, there's no, it's, it's truly like the, the end customer just telling a piece of software, go buy this thing. And so I think Instinct has said that they, they don't want to do, they don't want to charge for it. Muse clearly is going to just try to make it free effectively forever. But I think both of them, it's hard to imagine like ads and like an Instinct workflow right

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  now, given that, just thinking about the, the surface area. I don't, I'm sure Meta will figure out a way to put, to put ads in it. But when you think about like affiliate and taking cuts when the intent is just coming from the user, like if I'm a retailer and an agent comes to the website and buys something, but I know that, that the individual just directed the agent to do it, I'm not exactly sitting there being like, thank you, now here's your cut, because you didn't actually drive the demand. Like other marketing or other things were happening in the world that drove that person to decide, hey, go buy this thing. So I'm wondering like, how the, the sort of economics of, of this new category will, will evolve?

• 1:24:01Speaker 07

  I think it breaks down into two phases. The first phase is really about data acquisition. The most, the most valuable data, I think the estimate was about 10 billion in data is being spent this year to train some of these models. And so as we think about like what Cursor has done or what Meta is doing, with Muse, they very likely want to develop very specific models that are incredibly efficient to serve. And to do that, they need the data acquisition, makes sense to subsidize it for a while, until they get enough trajectories to be able to fine tune and serve a very efficient model. So I think that's probably priority two. Priority one is distribution. Priority two is scaling the cost. And then, and then third is monetization. And just given like, you know, Google's distribution and consumer, Meta's or Facebook at the time's

• 1:24:45Speaker 07

  distribution and consumer, Snapchat, same thing, Pinterest even, the ultimate monetization can be very powerful when there's a new data set to monetize. It's Google's with search, clearly Meta's with social, Snapchat, Pinterest, new targeting mechanisms. I used to, was a product manager on the ad team at Google. And so every, this is the way I think about that ecosystem. Anytime you have a new targeting criterion, you can have a multi-hundred billion dollar company. And these trajectories are unbelievably valuable. Average user on Google in the US generates about a hundred twenty dollars in ARPU. It's very easy to see a doubling or tripling of that with these agentic systems. And so I think a lot of us in venture markets are willing to take that on faith.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. No, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:25:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wish we had more time.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so much more we could talk about, a million more questions. But our next guest is in the waiting room. So have a great day.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's see, wait, wait, last, final, final question. Final question. Have you ever seen Spencer surf?

• 1:25:45Speaker 07

  He's incredible. Yes, he has a.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  He is like, I would go out on a limb and I would say he's the, probably the best surfer in tech, period.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I, I don't know of anyone, I don't know anyone that would actually be able to go head to head with him and come out alive. He's an absolute animal. It made, seeing him surf made me want to do a TVPN surf invitational at, at the, at Kelly's Ranch.

• 1:26:17Speaker 07

  The Surf Ranch. Yeah. Yeah, he's incredible. He has this video inside of a barrel. He's just an exceptional surfer. So he's definitely the best one I know.

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Surfing the capital markets with you though.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:26:29Speaker 07

  Thanks guys, great to see you.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Have a great one. We'll see you soon. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. So let's bring in William Layden from Rune, co-founder and CEO. Building the modular data center that converts unused solar power directly into AI compute. How much unused solar power is there? I feel like we'd be using it all.

• 1:26:55Speaker 08

  Hey guys, that's, that's the trick, isn't it? Yeah, over 50 terawatt hours every year in the United States alone.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  And, and is that residential? Is that just solar farms out in the desert? Like why, why did we build it if we're not going to use it?

• 1:27:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think, I think, so we're exclusively focused on utility scale solar farms, which is the, you know, large assets, think 50, 100, even 400 megawatts of installed capacity. And I think that abundance or excess is actually a feature of renewable energy and not a bug. So you typically build a power plant to meet the highest hour of demand. But you know, solar, it's, it's relatively cheap to build, the sun's zero cost fuel. So we tend to, to overbuild and as a result, there's a lot of excess power.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Interesting. So are tokens going to get cheaper in the summer, in the long term?

• 1:27:51Speaker 08

  Well, if we get big enough, then sure, maybe we'll have seasonality on impact on tokens.

• 1:27:57John Coogan?

  Okay. What? Talk to me about the importance of modularity because you mentioned like a few different scales of industrial solar farms and it feels like those would require, those would support very different configurations of, of, I imagine inference GPUs, right? So you have to be able to show up and you can't show up with a gigawatt worth of compute for a solar farm that can only at max put out 100 megawatts, right?

• 1:28:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's right. So we are deploying what's called, you know, our product is called the relic. It's essentially a micro shell that has a server inside of it. And we deploy many of these many of these data centers, couple them to create a large cluster size, basically the largest,

• 1:28:49Speaker 08

  as much of, as large a cluster size as the solar farm can tolerate, we will deploy. So we're working with like a 400 megawatt solar facility. We think we can probably put, you know, 100, 200 megawatts of solar there or of a data center capacity there.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  What's the go to market like? What? Who do you actually have to negotiate with to A, get space and supply and actually deploy these? And then is it as easy as just hooking the system up to open router and serving up tokens? Like, is it, is it if you build it, they will come at this point?

• 1:29:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, I would say so. So, you know, we manufacture, as you said, modular AI data centers and we use power electronics to plug them into these facilities. We can deploy, you know, a unit in about 60 minutes. So we have a guy with a forklift come, drop it down. There's no concrete, there's no construction, there's no modifications. No, we drop it right on the ground. There's no concrete, no modifications. We take two wires and plug it in. And it is the truly the fastest, least expensive, least intrusive data center out there. And then in terms of our customers, we're actually selling.

• 1:30:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no noise, no noise, no pollution. Like, it feels.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  This seems popular. Somebody was asking me yesterday, last night, like, what does it take to make data centers popular? And I was like, solar for sure. And it seems like you've been obviously ahead of the curve on this. What if you go more modular? What if every solar panel came with a GPU attached to it by default? It could always be in inference mode and flip over. Is that the future? Or do you think that this like, you know, mid-scale modularity, like there's some economy of scale that comes from like marshalling a lot of energy together, or maybe even not a lot, but like some threshold amount?

• 1:30:44Speaker 08

  Truly, I think every solar power plant is a latent data center and we can convert it with our technology. The same is true for wind. So I can see a future, exactly like you said, where every solar plant, every solar module, every wind turbine comes with a Rune data center. And that's how we power the future of compute.

• 1:31:01John Coogan?

  So I imagine that although you're focused on solar, you're already thinking about wind, as you mentioned, hydro and other places where there might be some latent energy, but it requires the modular solution that you're building.

• 1:31:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, the modular solution, the power electronics, these are absolutely kind of our secret sauce to make this work. You know, solar is the most abundant energy source we have, and it's the one that we are the worst at using. And Rune is designed to make it, you know, make it useful. Let's, let's make this on power the future of compute.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 1:31:38Speaker 08

  I started my career working for President Obama in the White House. I joined a hydropower company and then was most recently at SB Energy.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Nice. Why?

• 1:31:50Jordi Hays?

  Feels like the, the, the most perfect entry point.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  Overnight success. Why? Is it the, what was the chart that we were pulling up from the IEA? Was that right? The International Energy Association or something like that? Agency? The IEA, every year they predict how much solar we're going to build and every year they get it wrong? What's going, what's going on with the IEA? Why can't they forecast accurately?

• 1:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's, it is Paris based. I don't know.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Have they never heard of exponentials or something? What's going on?

• 1:32:21Speaker 08

  I think that's the power, you know, you guys were kind of focused on modularity and that is the power of modularity. We're a product company. Solar is a product. It's not a construction project. It can scale much faster.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Okay. But why, why haven't they internalized that yet? I feel like at this point, it's like just fit a different curve. If like the linear line is not working again, let's go with an exponential this time.

• 1:32:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, we'll have to make it a pit stop in Paris and talk to them.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  But separately, like, do you have any, do you have any worries about us hitting a ceiling on deployed solar? Because I see that curve and I'm like, this is amazing. This is the ultimate technology white pill. I've never met anyone that doesn't really like solar. It's nuclear. I still get people are, oh, what if it blows up? You got to work through that. Obviously, natural gas and oil, there's a whole bunch of complaints there. But solar's really, really popular. But at the same time, I know that there's a complex supply chain. There's geopolitics. Is there any risk that that curve might bend?

• 1:33:26Speaker 08

  I think geopolitics is always a challenge, particularly in today's environment. But truly, I'm a solar maximalist. It is the fastest and easiest way to create energy. And even now, you're seeing companies that use robots to install solar power plants. And when you go to these sites, you know, you go to Texas, you go to Nevada, you go to Arizona, there's so much unused land. And we can really use that land to create abundant energy via solar. We're nowhere near saturating the solar market in terms of how much we've deployed.

• 1:34:03John Coogan?

  Last question, and if you don't have a strong answer, you can just email us. But I've been on the hunt for like the Elon Musk of solar. You know how there's like the Palmer Luckier defense tech who makes, you know, big waves and like.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  This guy could be looking at the Elon Musk of solar in the eyes and not even realize.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  Maybe, but, but I'm talking about someone who's specifically focused on building a company that will deploy the most solar panels, build the panels, really be like the, the mega winner, the public company, the voice of the industry. I don't know if that person is on the tip of your tongue or someone you need to think about, but, but I'm really, I am hungry for that person. So if you know them, let us know. I'd love to have them on the show.

• 1:34:44Speaker 08

  You know what? I've always been an admirer of Sheldon Kimber. He built Intersect Power. And I think he's been a visionary in the solar space.

• 1:34:54John Coogan?

  Amazing. Thank you for the recommendation. We're definitely.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Who did, uh, who did the round?

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, let's hit the gong.

• 1:35:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. Spark.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Just needed one word. Very cool.

• 1:35:09Speaker 08

  Yes, sparks.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  Forty million. Congratulations.

• 1:35:13Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad you're doing this. Great to meet you.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than that? AI, market your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform. That powers it. Our next guest is Justin Burrows from Renco. He's the founder and CEO and he's here to talk about Navia Stokes. What? Does it matter? Does it, does it not matter? We were having this debate. Seems like a cool demonstration for the power of mathematical models and artificial intelligence. Great benchmark. Clearly, everyone was trying to do it. So it's cool to be first. Controversial among mathematicians. But my question was like, this is fluid dynamics. We all want planes that use less, you know,

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  gasoline or diesel to get around, jet fuel to get around. We all want more efficient wind energy, all the different things that you can get from understanding turbulence. Does this have any real world application?

• 1:36:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, man. Well, first of all, thanks, Foles, for, for bringing me on. It's certainly a pleasure to be here. So, so regarding the practical aspect of this, so I should, short answer is no. Long answer is let me tell you about it. So, you know, oftentimes the way I view this is there's kind of three hierarchies of, of, of theory. So there's mathematicians at the top, the pure mathematician, and what they say, that becomes the applied stuff for the theoretical physicists, which then becomes the applied stuff for the, the engineers. So I should describe, what is this open question? It's really about a particular mathematical aspect of the Navier-Stokes equation. So what, what's been a long running problem is, you know, can, can we, for instance, can you come up with any scenario in which

• 1:36:59Speaker 09

  you, you start with a physically meaningful initial state of the flow and then can it time evolve to do something that's not physical? So in particular, what the worry has been is, is there any point in the flow that, that can attain infinite velocity? You know, obviously that doesn't happen in real life. However, we don't have any, any firm mathematical proof whether that can or cannot happen. What, what OpenAI has done is they've essentially found a counter example. So they constructed a specific example where you do in fact get blow up, you get a certain point within the flow that attains an infinite velocity. And so if this proof holds up, you know, first of all, it's important to mention that they've submitted a proof, but you know, it may take years for the actual experts to review this thing and figure it out. But, but essentially what it does is, this is putting a guardrail

• 1:37:42Speaker 09

  on, on the Navier-Stokes equation as far as its applicability. So you can imagine that if you have a, well, in any real flow scenario, obviously you don't see this, right? But, but it is hard guardrails in the sense like, you know, if you're running a simulation and if it's not converging, you know, this is another thing to add to the checklist. Like, you know, maybe there might be a singular, excuse me, a singularity developing flow.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  Sure. So there are, at the same time, on the opposite side, the engineering side of the world, there are lots of companies that are trying to develop supersonic airplanes, hypersonic airplanes, drones, all sorts of different things that need to do CFD and model fluid and turbulence. There's real world work to do. What is that community clamoring for? What do they want to be advanced? What, what are their biggest problems?

• 1:38:33Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I'm reminded of the quote mathematicians can tell you if a solution exists, they don't tell you what it is. And that's kind of relevant here. So, you know, the proof that Navier-Stokes did, you know, it's a point in terms of a specific mathematical property, but the real world problem of give me a flow scenario and tell me what exactly is going on, what are those dynamics? That is still a wide open problem. And I should mention that this is one of two big problems related to Navier-Stokes. So there's the million dollar math clay institute one, and then the other one is called turbulence problem. This is more of a physics one. So, you know, so what's known, you know, the difficult thing about fluids is that typically they destabilize and they make these complicated swirling flows. So we've probably all seen smoke coming off of a cigarette and then it starts tumbling around.

• 1:39:18Speaker 09

  That's an example of this phenomenon of turbulence. And having a complete mathematical framework to describe that, that is also an open question. And that's been around for about 200 years. That's actually the one that we're working on as a company. So I should mention my background. I'm also a theoretical physicist and we're working on coming up with the general computational and mathematical tools to solve real world problems.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  And are you trying to build deterministic tools? Or are you trying to build AI tools that will just approximate turbulence at such a reliable level that the engineering will be advanced?

• 1:39:50Speaker 09

  No, yeah, so this is all pencil and paper, man. You know, we're mathematicians, you know, we're working out the general mathematical framework. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, I should mention that the current state of the art, you know, because we don't have the general method to solve this equation, if you actually look at the kind of simulations we run, you know, it doesn't matter what the example is. Maybe this is aerodynamics or hydrodynamics, it could be weather and climate modeling, heat transfer, chemical mixing, these are all examples where fluid flows are really core to the industry. The state of the art is, you know, the simulations are really not predictive. So if you peer under the hood, what you see is, we actually don't know what the equations of motion should be that we are solving. So, you know, for the technically minded audience, I should mention that, you know, these are called the so-called closure equations.

• 1:40:32Speaker 09

  But basically, we have, when we run simulations, you have a bunch of free parameters. So you need to start by doing experiments and you take measurements from the experiments to inform what these free fit parameters in your simulator are. And as you can imagine, you know, having physical prototyping as part of the iteration design loop, that's the most, that's the most expensive way to do it.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  So, step back a little bit, we jumped straight into this, but give me a little bit on your background and then I want to walk through to today and the actual structure of the organization and, you know, the plan for what you're building.

• 1:41:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, I guess, you know, quick background on me. So I started out as a mechanical engineer. I have a bachelor's, PhD, MECI primarily focused in precision mechanical design. And so originally I was one of the guys who was designing building stuff in the machine shop. And evidently I went through some sort of quarter life crisis and ended up picking a second, picking up a second PhD in theoretical physics as well. And really, the company that we're, that I'm building out is the out product of that work. So, you know, as I mentioned, you know, this problem about solving turbulence, this is a longstanding open problem. And I got interested in this a few years ago. And after plugging away at it for a while, I actually penned that closed form framework. So essentially what we're doing, what we're doing as a company is, we're hiring a bunch

• 1:41:49Speaker 09

  of PhD and postdoc level theoretical physicists and applied mathematicians. And we're taking this new theoretical framework for Navier-Stokes and we're, you know, basically going after everything that relates to, you know, things that move essentially.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  And how do you plan to productize this? I mean, it is a business, it's not, it's not a nonprofit research organization. I imagine that there's a different, different path that you could have taken, but you chose to build a business. How do you see that developing?

• 1:42:16Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I guess a couple of things to say. I mean, one is, you know, that my engineering background has, has given me a very good sense that we really, really struggle when it comes to engineering fluid systems. So, you know, I'm well aware, like, you know, the market need, the market need for a solution to the turbulence problem has been here for like 400 years. You know, that, that hasn't gone anywhere. The way we're thinking about it is essentially breaking this down to three steps. So as I mentioned, the first thing we're focused on is better computational software. You know, I mean, step one is you want to be able to simulate something in a computer, know that you're getting an answer that you can trust and do the design and optimization in the computer first, and then you build the one prototype at the end that confirms that things are right. So I should mention, like, this is what's done in every industry, except, or every

• 1:42:59Speaker 09

  engineering discipline except for fluids. It's really the one holdout where you're, you're really wedded to experiments. So we're essentially, the company's going to develop in three stages. So we're starting first with better software. We're a couple of years away from, from, from releasing our first commercial product. But afterwards, there's a couple of things we're going to do still. One of course is modeling. So there's a number of examples of industries where there's important hair on fire turbulent flow problems and, and the most important ones, we want to go after ourselves. And then long time, long term, we want to get into hardware. So think hardware, software control algorithms to control and mitigate turbulence in a number of canonical flows. So this will take us like way into the future. I mean, you know, it's kind of like, if you solve the turbulence problem, you've just

• 1:43:43Speaker 09

  opened the, the doors to the playground, but there's so much to do and explore and so many ways to add value.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  So is the team right now all focused on that phase one, all sort of theoretical physicists and, and scientists effectively? And there's no sales guys running around just yet?

• 1:43:58Speaker 09

  Well, yeah, so as far as the technical team, yes, it's, it's.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  So you got some sales guys. I'm hearing.

• 1:44:06Speaker 09

  We did. That was actually our most recent hire.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  There we go, you got a sales guy, yeah.

• 1:44:10Speaker 09

  We're a small startup out of the Brooklyn Navy Yards. So we're a team of eight. Our most recent hire was in fact our chief commercial officer, and he's absolutely fantastic. So, you know, I would say like, the, the primary thing is the technical people, the engineers and the physicists and mathematicians, but then there's the glue that's holding the company together. So my COO, myself, we have our, our chief commercial officer and our administration person.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  Very cool. I'm, I'm interested in, one of the critiques that I heard on the, on the Navier-Stokes solution was that it sort of like ripped the problem apart into such an extreme position that it was like, it was sort of impractical, or it was not like the most elegant or revel, or, or like, it wasn't the way you would expect a mathematician to solve. It was sort of brute force. And I'm wondering, just, I'm sure you're using different AI models. Is it accelerating your work? What part is accelerated the most? Are you running into any guardrails or any, any hurdles as you try and collaborate with artificial intelligence? Like, what's your experience been?

• 1:45:18Speaker 09

  Yeah, that's a great question. So, so first of all, I don't know who you heard that from, but that's exactly right. So when I read the proof from OpenAI, I had the exact same feeling, you know, I, I was kind of naive and I kind of assumed that the PDF write-up, you know, had some sort of human involvement. And after the first two pages, I was like, wait, this doesn't sound like something a human did. And, and it's not. The whole thing is AI generated.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I, I mean, from, you know, it's not elegant, but if it's right, it's right.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:45Speaker 09

  You know, one, one of the big things, and I'm sorry, I'm taking a lot, a long circuitous route to answer your question, but, you know, you know, to me, I see, I see an analogy between what AI is doing for math and what, for instance, we do by running experiments in, in more applied fields. So in some sense, you know, up, up until this result, the idea of proving something and understanding something have been synonymous. And there's an underlying assumption that it's really human beings who are jumping in and putting the proof together and developing the understanding along the way. But what we're seeing here with, with AI is that that's no longer the case. You can actually produce a proof that may in fact be correct without understanding anything about it. Right? So the way I see this is this is sort of like running an experiment where you can

• 1:46:28Speaker 09

  observe the right result, but, you know, the, the whole process remains in front of you and how do you actually understand it? And, and, you know, and, and this is, you know, part and parcel in, in engineering and, and physics, right? You run experiments and you get results, you know that they're right, but you don't understand it for a while.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Well, good luck and thanks so much for coming on and giving more context about it. I love that you're, you're thinking in multiple acts, you're thinking in applications here. It's going to be exciting to follow your journey. So have a great day and thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:46:58Speaker 09

  Thanks.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Jordy, why did you put on that Tyler mask? It's so, it's so photoreal.

• 1:47:15Speaker 09

  Does it look realistic?

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  It looks extremely realistic, you know, through the power of, of, of switching technology and cutting camera angles. Tyler has subbed in for Jordy because Jordy has to get out of here early. We have a bunch of, we have three more great guests, so stay with us. Thank you so much for tuning into TBPN today. Up next, we have Eli Wachs from Footprint, building an AI operating system for financial crime compliance. This is going to be important for you to pay attention to because I know you're thinking about doing something. Tyler over here, he's one step away from committing some heinous financial crime. So how can I keep an eye on him? Do I need to pay here?

• 1:47:59Speaker 10

  It's a great question. Look, we are at a time where bad actors are using AI far quicker than any bank or a financial institution. And it's become the fourth largest economy in the world.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:48:10Speaker 10

  There's four and a half trillion dollars moved to list each year.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait. So like, financial crime, it's like, US, China, I don't know who the third is. Is it Japan?

• 1:48:20Speaker 10

  Germany.

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Germany. Okay, Germany. And then financial crime. Wow.

• 1:48:24Speaker 10

  Like the Sanloach cartel and their friends.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  And that probably also includes like crypto heists, North Korean hackers, that type of stuff. But then also just like little phone scams trying to get grandma to send you a hundred dollars of gift cards, that type of thing?

• 1:48:37Speaker 10

  Exactly. So you have them on one hand.

• 1:48:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:48:39Speaker 10

  Using AI since GPT-3. And then the other, you have one and a half million people who are supposed to by hand investigate any suspicious wire that comes across their desk.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:51Speaker 10

  In days or weeks. It's a system that's been very unprepared.

• 1:48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:56Speaker 10

  And the gap's only growing.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  Okay, so how broad are you focused? It seems like AI operating system, I imagine you're plugging in deep into financial rails and trying to at least set your system, your operating system, your company up to both be able to handle the, the big sophisticated crypto heist and also the, the fraudulent bank wire for a couple hundred bucks?

• 1:49:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, so we work with some of the largest fintechs, crypto companies, financial institutions. The idea is at both the second line of defense, which are core compliance use cases, AML, transactions, sanctions, sexy stuff. And then the other one would be called first line defense. So payments, ATO, any other type of fraud scheme. The idea is that we are giving these customers essentially infinite time and infinite memory. So it used to be cartels winning numbers, similar to how you ship drugs across the border. You put cocaine on enough trucks, some of them are going to get through. You create enough shell companies, enough of them are going to receive money.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:59Speaker 10

  And people didn't have the ability to investigate each of them. So the first thing we do is we give them the compute to investigate every case that comes across their desk. And the second is very neat to footprint, we give them the ability to remember every case that they've seen. So that way they're able to essentially compare vectors and prevent financial crime before it even happens.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  Okay. You said you give them compute. If we were talking a couple of years ago, I would be thinking, this is an annual contract, this is like a SaaS product almost, but it feels like the business model for this business might be a little bit different in the modern era. How are customers actually compensating you and, and, and working with you in an elastic way that allows them to scale up and down?

• 1:50:46Speaker 10

  We charge by usage.

• 1:50:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50:48Speaker 10

  It's essentially credits based off of the complexity of the case. So you may have the same genre of case, but one, we're only looking at a couple of pieces of information. Let's say we're investigating a fraud scheme, maybe one's very cut and dry. Versus there may be one where we actually want to have recall and go through embeddings of thousands of similar cases.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08Speaker 10

  And we had a case where there was a flagged Russian individual and our agent went back into Ukrainian newspapers, read the initial Cyrillic, because Cyrillic can be translated improperly. Then tracked down this person's wife to a home in New Jersey and found a real estate listing in their name. So you can also get into much more complex things that you never expect a human to have done before.

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:31Speaker 10

  So we charge to try and cap like that. We also have our own model routing internally.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  Okay, so yeah, on model routing, it feels like some of the work that you do, it's going to wind up looking like fraud because you're, you're, a lot of the prompts are like sort of sketchy adjacent, even though they're the opposite. And you're actually fighting the financial crime. Your prompts are going to look financial crime related, you might get flagged, you might get, you know, refusals. Have you solved that by fine tuning models using open source or partnering with labs and doing deals to get whitelisted? Like what is your strategy for maintaining access to effective intelligence to fight these crimes?

• 1:52:10Speaker 10

  All of the above. We have really good relationships with the Frontier Labs. Yeah, I, I think that we all view this as one of the most important use cases of AI, I'm very biased. But I think that we either, if AI grows the economy by 14% by 2030, that means we either add $600 billion into the pockets of the worst people on the planet, or we bring that down to zero, which I think is possible. So you're right, our prompts do look interesting.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:34Speaker 10

  Because we have to think like financial criminals to do it. And then we do some of our own model hosting, but we also have routing in that some banks may only want to use two models.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:44Speaker 10

  We also, we may take, we recently at a bank put in a 150-page policy document. That's taking thousands of rules that have to be followed. And each of that essentially is getting its own subagent in its own environment. That's why I think compliance AI is two years behind legal AI. Because there's so much more regulation and such a higher barrier of trust to overcome.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Do you, uh, uh, I guess, um, I, I, I'm thinking if like, do you have either benchmarks as your fine tuning models, testing models? And do you notice anything particular about models where you're like, oh, it's spiked on this particular vector of like fraud detection? Do you notice like the spiky intelligence behaving differently? Because, you know, the, the X algorithm will be obsessed with a particular model typically by like how viral the creation can be. So if it's like a Blender 3D model or a video game, everyone crowns that the best model of the day. But no one's really like, wow, this model is incredible at detecting financial fraud.

• 1:53:48John Coogan?

  Because it's probably just collapsed into some sort of score. But what are you doing on actual model benchmarking evaluation? And then how do you communicate that to your customers?

• 1:53:56Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think evals are pertinent to any vertical line company, but especially us in that we need to make sure that when a new model comes out, it's not spinning its wheels.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:05Speaker 10

  And it's actually getting to the right answer that we expect.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:08Speaker 10

  So we have a huge library of synthetic cases that are based off real cases that we're leveraging to understand. I think one of the powerful things about footprint versus, you know, like an AI wrapper is that we are built with access to hundreds of databases around the world to fact check the open source research of an agent. So we have cases which may involve an agent going and verifying a business in China as part of an investigation. It used to be in this space, you had ML-based detection tools that would flag an alert and humans would investigate it. It was like a very cowardly industry of vendors in that we're saying all of the tough stuff people actually have to figure out. And what Footprint's done is we've essentially taken AI, we let AI orchestrate those initial detection tools and databases

• 1:54:52Speaker 10

  with AI on top of it to essentially make this a dynamic process of detection and investigation.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  What about, uh, sort of like benchmarks or like KPIs for the overall fraud industry? How accurate are you on that number of, uh, the fourth largest economy? How, how, and how rigorously is that tracked? Like in a couple of years, we'll be able to run this interview back and say like, okay, yeah, it's like the ninth biggest economy now. We're making progress. Uh, because that's what success looks like here, right?

• 1:55:22Speaker 10

  Hundred percent. That's the goal. Fraudsters are really smart. If the cartel has five million of cash in the US, 70% of the time that goes to a Chinese money broker because you can only get out 50K of Quay a year. And then the cartel sends 10 million of dishwashers to the cartel in Mexico, they charge them 5 million, they sell the dishwashers. Really good operation. I would love to invest. I would love to buy away. I think that it is possible for us to go down. I think when you look at benchmarks, it, it may sound ironic, but you're often hearing DSA officers say, 95% of our AML heads are false positives, 75% of transactions are false positives. We actually want that to be 99.999% because we're only looking at what's flagged as the highest risk transactions.

• 1:56:03Speaker 10

  In the future, we want to look at every case because you don't want an agent to have memory of every transaction that's ever flown through, every account that's ever been open. And then you can compare those. That's what we've built with trust fabric, with memory footprint. And that recall, yeah, ideally we go from four to 40th. I, I say our mission's to topple cartels and corrupt regimes. So look, I don't think we're going to start with, with Russia, but maybe Turkmenistan or, or someone out there.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Do you expect, do you expect any cartels to spin up, uh, you know, clusters somewhere, start doing pre-training? You know, completely build their own.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Cartel meow lab?

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  Fraud models, you know, fraud on SI.

• 1:56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:42Speaker 02

  Do you expect this to happen?

• 1:56:43Speaker 10

  I think they would do well on Sand Hill Road. Um, I'm not sure. What I will say is they're sophisticated.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 10

  So you have the cartels, the most sophisticated is the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia, where you essentially have these multi-thousand person factories. It involves human trafficking. At one point, China, if you look at the rise of pig butchering in the US, it's essentially because Xi Jinping sent in a junta, or sent in essentially like funded a junta to go and destroy one of these centers in the Golden Triangle. Because all pig butchering going back like early in 2020, 2021 was targeting Chinese nationals because of the language. So it essentially struck a deal.

• 1:57:16John Coogan?

  Wait, it was targeting Chinese nationals who live in America?

• 1:57:20Speaker 10

  No, who live in China.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Oh, who live in China. Okay. So he was like, you're attacking me, I'm going to go after you. Interesting.

• 1:57:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, and he said, look, if you want to keep these centers open, you got to go after somebody else. And then you see a massive spike in pig butchering in the US, you know, 2023, 2024. But this is all geopolitics coming together.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Uh, anything else?

• 1:57:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  That is great, yeah.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great day. And I, we, you raised some money, $25 million, right? Series B?

• 1:57:46Speaker 10

  Yep, we did. Series B.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for having me on the show. We will talk to you soon. Have a good day. Goodbye. Quick hit on the news, breaking news. Chipotle has partnered with Palantir. The burrito chain has enlisted Palantir for a platform that monitors pest incidents, employee illnesses, and other factors. The partnership comes after a nightmare summer for food safety across the US. Good news. Good news for both companies. We want safe food. We want burritos that don't make us sick, especially if they're coming before I even think to order them with burrito superintelligence from one of the companies. It feels like it's a race now. The DoorDash guy was talking about building it, and then

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  the other entrepreneur just did it. Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Sean McCarthy from BackOps. How are you doing, Sean?

• 1:58:42Speaker 11

  I'm great. How are you?

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  I'm great. Welcome to the show. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:58:50Speaker 11

  Yeah, I'm Sean McCarthy. I'm the co-founder and CEO of BackOps. BackOps is an AI-native resolution layer for supply chain. So we target companies that make or move physical goods. You can think as a consumer, something goes wrong, you order something, it's broken. What happens behind the scene? That's going to be us. So happy to chat a little bit deeper into what we're doing, but looking forward to it.

• 1:59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the median back office supply chain tech stack look like these days? Has everyone moved off of pen and paper? Have people moved off of spreadsheets? Are they at least in legacy ERP systems with green screens?

• 1:59:27Speaker 11

  You would hope. You know, that's where we started. I was at Amazon prior to, and spent a lot of time in customer warehouses. And you, we started around the consumer side, you know, more like you or I order a lamp and it's broken again if something happens. And now we really service the enterprise, but it's the same thing throughout from the mom and pop shop to the large enterprise. So some do have, you know, SAP and Oracle and some of these other, you know, common systems of record, but the Excel, I don't think we've met a company that doesn't use Excel spreadsheets, at least pre-BackOps.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, it's good that the, all the models are getting really good at speaking Excel. Is it easier to build integrations? Did you have to sort of like pick a landing zone where you're going to be really great at SAP first? Or are we actually in an era where you can sort of go customer by customer and say, look, I don't care if you're using Excel or Google Docs, like we will build the integrations that we need in a weekend and we're good to go?

• 2:00:26Speaker 11

  It started more, so we started in 2024. When we started, it was more the former. So you really had to kind of pick your lane. We started in the warehousing space, and so we picked kind of our top 10 integrations. I think a lot of it was just that the browser integrations and just weren't quite there, right? And a lot of times, folks were also hesitant to give API access or just didn't have it. And so you kind of were pigeonholed. And in that sense, now, you know, we're at a point where it really doesn't matter. We have customers that have mainframes all the way through, you know, all the common systems record. So that is a good thing because I think prior to that was a big hindrance in just like getting something live.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  Are you seeing receptance or pushback around computer use agents being deployed by a third party? Like if I have a, if I have a computer in my warehouse with some, you know, bespoke piece of software, and you say like, hey, let me install something that's just going to move the cursor and type stuff in and use it remotely, that could be awesome. It could also be sort of weird. How are customers like ready to have that conversation?

• 2:01:37Speaker 11

  Yes and no. There's kind of two frames to that, right? Like you have the internal side of, and normally we're asking them to provision us like a contractor login, so they're not necessarily seeing it in front of their face. The other side of that is when you look at terms and conditions across like third parties with bot detection and things like that, that's getting much better. And so we kind of have a two-fold hill to climb there. But I think in general, when you look at the first problems we're solving for customers, it is a lot of the stuff that the team doesn't want to do. So they are happy to like hand it over on a silver platter to us. But luckily, they're not necessarily watching a screen look like the mouse moving and clicking into their portal.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the, what's the killer sales pitch to someone? Is it, is it cost savings on the back office supply chain? Are you actually able to drive incremental sales or revenue? Or are you selling it as like you'll be able to scale your business more with less headcount? Or is it like, we'll actually just save you a couple extra lamps that didn't make it back onto the shelf? So you're going to be saving cost of goods? Like, how are you pitching the value?

• 2:02:51Speaker 11

  It could be, it's a combination of all of the factors. I think the biggest thing that we see is an opex reduction. So where you might have had multiple folks that needed to be hired to fulfill like a large claims team as the business grows, you don't have to hire those folks. On just the approvals, we're talking about claims alone, we see at least a 13% higher approval rating in the system filing versus a human, right? So that is actually money back in their pocket as well that they would have missed. And then I think that obviously the customer experience-

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Really quickly, approval rating, is that like someone sent back the lamp, you can actually restock it because in this case, it's not broken. It was just the wrong lamp. So restock it as opposed to send it to the dump?

• 2:03:35Speaker 11

  It's more of, let's say you order the lamp, it's delivered, right? You call and you say, hey, send me a new one. They're going to send you that new one, but then they're going to file a claim with FedEx or UPS, whoever broke it, right? And a lot of times, a human's filing that. If it gets denied the first time, they'll just say, it was denied. Well, we'll try three times. And so a lot of times on the second or third, we're getting it through. And/or you can think of, what if we have to reach out to you and ask for a picture of the damaged lamp? Or, you know, on, you know, one of our largest customers is one of the biggest grocers in the United States. A lot of times, the complexity of the things like, let's say it's a cold temperature breach, that we have to go find from just the fact finding and the documentation is pretty deep. And if they forget some of

• 2:04:17Speaker 11

  that, technically, it might not be approved. And so it's more on the approval side.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like insurance adjuster work, inspecting like what went wrong and creating like a chain of responsibility. Do you have anything? Because I have another button.

• 2:04:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you raised some money, right?

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. How much did you raise? You want to hit the gong?

• 2:04:36Speaker 11

  We did today. We announced our $42 million Series B today.

• 2:04:46John Coogan?

  What's, what's next with the $42 million? I like, what is the, what is the gating factor on growth? Where do you plan on deploying the most capital? Is it hiring people, Salesforce? Just, just top of funnel, awareness, brand, advertising? What are you thinking?

• 2:05:03Speaker 11

  You know, I think for us, we want to go wide and deep at the same time. We have customers that are adding flows daily, and a lot of that is just that these things compound, right? Like in the simple scenario, we talked about it was customer service and ops and finance in one lamp. And at enterprise is much, much more complex and higher scale. So we want to go deep, but we also want to go wide. You know, we're currently servicing across retail, manufacturing, getting into pharma, because we can reuse a lot of this infrastructure, like cold chain across grocery also applies to pharma. And so we really want to expand the, the scope, and this will help us hire some folks that are domain experts. And that's the second thing. When we're applying this to customers, we're going with like, hey, we know you have this problem. This is what we built to fix it. And this is why

• 2:05:48Speaker 11

  you should pick us.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  That makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations, and thank you so much for hopping on the show and breaking it down. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:05:55Speaker 11

  Thanks for having me. Thanks, guys.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your week. Goodbye. Up next, we have Tom Mueller from Impulse Space, the founder and CEO. Keeps putting up huge numbers. We'll bring him in from the waiting room in just a minute. Tom, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Hey, I'm good. Good to see you again. Always a good day. You too. When there's good news in Impulse Space. I want to hear the news. I want to hear the progress. And then I want to, I want to zoom out and just talk about a little bit about your journey because I think it relates to the current moment in some interesting ways. But let's start with the news today. What happened?

• 2:06:32Speaker 12

  Well, we did our Series D round earlier this year and raised 500 million and we've added another 308 million to that round for a total of

• 2:06:45John Coogan?

  Eight hundred and eight million dollars. That is incredible. Congratulations.

• 2:06:49Speaker 12

  Thank you.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  Why the extension? Is this about production? Is this about hiring? Is there a talent war going on? Or is this related to the SpaceX IPO? What's the rationale? What's driving the market?

• 2:07:02Speaker 12

  Probably all of the above, John. Certainly, you know, we're seeing a lot of demand. Our customers really love what we're doing, orbital transfer, orbital maneuvering. Our investors love what we're doing. You know, there seems to be a lot of excitement in space these days for many reasons. And we seem to have been the right, you know, the right type of company in the right place at the right time. So I'm really happy with what we're achieving.

• 2:07:33Speaker 12

  So we need the money right now to, you know, to build out, to continue hiring at all levels of the company and to continue to build out our facilities here to get ready for a higher production rate.

• 2:07:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you refresh everyone on the core product, the capabilities? And then I'm interested in hearing about how this fits into the modern trend. The data centers are going to space. It was controversial for 2025. People were debating it and now I think everyone's come around and said, okay, maybe it's not this year, but it's going to happen at some point. There's going to be a lot of attempts and there's probably going to be some compute in space sooner than later. So how does Impulse fit into that?

• 2:08:15Speaker 12

  Okay. Well, first of all, we do, we take over where launch leaves off. So basically we get to, we get to space on an existing launch vehicle. Typically it has been Falcon 9, but we're going to be on new vehicles in the future. And then we have two products. We have Mira, which does precision maneuvering. And that's the one that just did a flyby here that we just announced, came within 200 meters. Mira 1, or I'm sorry, Mira 2 and Mira 3 came not pretty close to each other. And then we have Helios, which is basically, we call it a rocket on a rocket. It's an upper stage that we add to a launch vehicle. It goes in the fairing and that can, it can take basically

• 2:08:59Speaker 12

  a lot of cargo to very high energy places like geosynchronous orbit or, you know, out beyond earth gravity, out to the moon, out to Mars. So we have, so either precisely move around or just move big distances fast.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  So, I mean, I'm like, it seems like with orbital compute, not necessary that it's in geostational that I'm aware of, but super valuable to keep it in orbit longer. And because you paid to put the chips up there, you probably don't want them burning up. Is that how this might play out? Or have you thought about how these two technology trends fit together? And only if you're willing to disclose anything, but.

• 2:09:40Speaker 12

  You know, it's speculation. I don't know if there's a big fit right now. You know, most of the people that are doing orbital data centers are just need the rocket to get to where they're going, taking a whole bunch at once. If that changes, we're glad to help. Certainly SpaceX, you know, pretty much keeps everything in-house and does everything themselves.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:03Speaker 12

  Others that I've seen plans, I think are going to just go up to LEO on existing rockets, you know, on a rideshare many at a time.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:14Speaker 12

  So.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  So what else is exciting to you on the near term in space? I mean, we all watched the moon mission. It feels like we're closer than ever to economic activity on the moon. There's also so much happening in aerospace, defense, imagery, communications. But where are you seeing the most near term opportunity for Impulse?

• 2:10:42Speaker 12

  Near term, like for Mira, we just, we just signed on Victus Solo follow-on. So two more spacecraft for Space Force.

• 2:10:52Speaker 12

  We have, we just got onboarded to NSSL for Helios, which is the National Space Launch Lane, which allows us to fly the US government, which is, you know, the biggest customer in the world for launch. And we'll be the only upper stage that's on that program now. So that's, you know, that's a huge opportunity for us. But going further than that, you know, we're building Moonbase Alpha and hopefully Impulse can somehow be involved in that awesome project.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's very cool. As you think back to your time at SpaceX, I'm interested in the parallels between the existential risk question that SpaceX was in many ways founded to resolve the making life multi, making humanity multi-planetary. That was a very animating force. And today with the AI lab leaders, they are similarly animated by existential risk. And I'm wondering about like, what was the mood at the time? What was, what was, how much did that? Was that a motivating factor? Just what was the color of the mission to make life multi-planetary?

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  How did that play out back when you were at SpaceX?

• 2:12:15Speaker 12

  You know, it was, it was the core vision and I think that's why a lot of people were excited to be there.

• 2:12:22Speaker 12

  But we were mostly just head down, just trying to make the rocket work and be reliable, especially us guys in propulsion, which is always the thing that seems to break.

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  Just focus on the engineering. Have you been able to maintain that culture? Is that the main thing that you want to take forward to Impulse? Like, how has the culture of Impulse changed or remained the same? What have you pulled? What can you share about how the team operates?

• 2:12:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's very similar. I mean, I think, I think, you know, myself and my team had a huge effect on how the culture at SpaceX was formed. And I brought that culture here for the most part. You know, very merit-based, very ownership of the company. Everybody gets, you know, equity ownership in the company. So we're all pulling towards a common goal. And also we want it to be, we want it to be interesting and fun. So, you know, like we work hard and see the results of it and it's, you know, we're stoked. It's pretty cool.

• 2:13:27John Coogan?

  How has the team embraced or even just dealt with the diffusion of AI tooling? Like, we're seeing these incredible mathematical results. A lot of them don't immediately apply to, you know, specific engineering problems. AI has hallucinated a lot less, but the tolerance hallucination is basically zero when you're launching rockets. But how have you integrated or paced the adoption of AI tooling at Impulse?

• 2:14:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, I have a little anecdote on that. I think it was about a year ago, I was trying to do an engineering problem, actually a propulsion problem using chat. And I think I mentioned that I kept telling what I was doing wrong and I kept doing it over again. And I said, if this was my intern, I would fire it. Now it's a lot better. Now I'm finding just in a year how much it's improved.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:25Speaker 12

  We're a little bit choked on what we can use here just because we do classified programs and we have ITAR issues. So we can't just like use the latest model generally, but we try to use as much as we can. I'm, as you know, as a founder and CEO, a little worried about us getting left behind because we have these restraints on us where many other tech companies don't. So it's, you know, we got to figure out how to wade through that.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It does seem like AWS has done some FedRAMP stuff and is really moving on the ITAR stuff. So good luck there. I'm interested in your, do you think as CEO, you're more uniquely equipped to evaluate these tools? Because maybe you're not actually deploying a propulsion problem that you're sort of, you know, sketching out with an AI system, but because you'll have a team actually go and finalize everything, but you can sort of take an idea halfway and communicate in a fuller way with your team? Is that how you're using AI these days?

• 2:15:28Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think mostly I use AI a lot just to ask questions, you know, just answer, just, I'm working on a design and I want to know like, like one of the ones recently was like, what's, what would be a good baseline seat pressure for a Vespel seat, like a valve seat? It's just like, it's out there and I can go find it, but all I do is type it in Grok and you know, seconds later, there it is between, you know, 3,000 to 5,000 PSI, like they're got my answer. So that's how I use it a lot. Then like our guys doing coding, we'll use it. I think that's where probably the strongest use within the company might be.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there still, I remember hearing all these stories about like NASA, everything on,

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  like the space shuttle having these like switches and everything built with like double or triple backfall, fallbacks and risk tolerances. Is that culture still there? Or when you don't have a human on board, that level of engineering is less relevant?

• 2:16:38Speaker 12

  Yeah, and this is something that we went through when we started flying humans on Falcon, you know, back at SpaceX is like we had to increase our level of, you know, of backup of fail safes. So it adds complexity and adds cost and adds mass. So if you're trying to, if you're trying to develop a low cost vehicle that you're going to make a lot of, you might not put that many, you'll figure out the things that are likely to break and to have some backups, like we have dual computers or even on Helios, we have triple. So two agree and one doesn't, it's out. For Mira, we have, we have two and if one, if one goes out, we can, even if both go out, we can reboot. You have time. On a lot of

• 2:17:22Speaker 12

  vehicles, you don't have time. You know, when you're in orbit, you're in a stable orbit, you can reboot everything and turn it back on. But so there's critical places like that that you'll have redundancy, but like in many cases, you'll have one engine like we do on Helios. You might have dual igniter to light it, but you just put all your effort to make sure we get that thing lit and running because it's the only engine you got. If that engine fails, mission's over.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's really cool. Tyler, do you have any questions? I have one more, but No, you got it. I'm interested in the talent wars, the hiring market. There's two effects. One is like AI is so hot, everyone wants to go work in AI. The other effect is that everyone's worried about AI taking all the jobs. They want to go and work on real things. Have you noticed anything out of the younger generation, the shape of the type of person that you're trying to hire? What does it look like to make a career at Impulse these days?

• 2:18:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, so hiring, we're hiring like crazy right now. And I think we're doing pretty good in this environment. There's a lot of startups around here that have really drained the talent pool. It's a little harder to find more seasoned people, experienced, like at the senior level where it's, it's more difficult. We're getting a lot of smart kids right out of school or people from other industries that are moving to our exciting industry. The hardest place, of course, is in the software and coding, that there's so much competition for those guys that that's always been from when I started the company, it's always been you pay a premium to those guys and, you know, it's just, it's just hard to get them because there's, you know, AI is like the, you know, the big moneymaker.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's a crazy time. Are you relocating people from the Bay area or pulling from universities that are outside, everything, all of the above, wherever you find them?

• 2:19:14Speaker 12

  All, all over. You know, as you know, we have an office in Colorado. There's a lot of talent out there. Our guidance, navigation and control is out there. So we got quite a, quite a bit of software people. We actually put a machine shop out there because we got some, some really good machinists out there. They're making precision parts for us. So, you know, yeah, we're expanding to other areas where the talent is.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's really exciting. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the extension.

• 2:19:41Speaker 12

  Thank you. Great talking, guys.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Very, very glad to see it. I can't wait for more progress. Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:19:47Speaker 12

  You too.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Goodbye. And with that, that's our show. Is there anything else that we didn't talk to? Any breaking news? We know the Fed hiked. We know that Palantir partnered with Chipotle. The two most important stories of the day, apparently. I think we've gotten through everything. If we didn't, we'll get to it tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Get that flashbang ready. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow. Throwing flashbang. Throwing flashbang. Boom.