Ellison's Media Empire, Ken Burns Joins, Cursor Mic Drop | Matthew Belloni, Gokul Rajaram, Nik Seetharaman, Raj Rajamani, James Everingham, Dr. Felix Ejeckam

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:47) - Ellison's Media Empire (18:06) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (21:21) - Cursor Mic Drop (26:16) - Zuck's $170M Mansion (29:29) - Matthew Belloni, a former entertainment attorney and editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter, is a founding partner of Puck, a digital media company covering Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York. In the conversation, he discusses the significant changes in Hollywood over the past five years, including the end of the peak TV era, the Netflix correction leading to a content recession, and the impact of the 2023 labor strike, all contributing to a period of uncertainty and disruption in the industry. He also highlights the trend of productions moving overseas due to aggressive incentives, such as the UK's 40% incentive on above-the-line costs, which substantially reduces production expenses. (01:00:33) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:39) - Ken Burns is an acclaimed American documentary filmmaker renowned for his in-depth explorations of U. S. history and culture, with notable works like *The Civil War*, *Baseball*, and *The American Revolution*. In the conversation, Burns reflects on his early inspirations, including the profound impact of his mother's death and his father's emotional response to a film, which led him to pursue filmmaking. He discusses his commitment to public broadcasting, emphasizing the creative control and time it affords him to produce comprehensive documentaries, and highlights the importance of embracing technological advancements while maintaining narrative integrity. (01:49:45) - Gokul Rajaram, a seasoned technology executive and investor, has held pivotal roles at companies like Google, Facebook, Square, and DoorDash, and currently serves on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk. In the conversation, he discusses the evolving landscape of software, emphasizing the need for companies to adapt to AI advancements, the challenges of building liquidity in marketplaces, and the importance of effective board composition and engagement. (02:11:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:21:11) - Nik Seetharaman, founder and CEO of Wraithwatch, has an extensive background in cybersecurity, having served as CIO at Anduril Industries, led cyber defense teams at SpaceX and Palantir, and conducted advanced cyber warfare operations with the U. S. Special Operations Command. He discusses the challenges in cybersecurity, emphasizing the need for autonomous defense systems to counter rapidly evolving AI-driven cyber threats. Seetharaman highlights Wraithwatch's recent $30 million federal contract to deploy its AI-powered cyber defense platform across multiple U. S. government agencies, aiming to provide continuous defensive counterpressure against emerging threats. (02:35:30) - Raj Rajamani, co-founder and CEO of JetStream Security, recently announced the company's emergence from stealth mode and its successful $34 million seed funding round led by Redpoint Ventures and the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. JetStream aims to address the AI trust problem in enterprises by providing AI governance tools, including AI Blueprints, which serve as operational contracts for AI workflows to ensure transparency and control. Rajamani emphasized the importance of understanding and managing AI systems to scale their adoption responsibly, highlighting that the company is already engaging with Fortune 500 clients and plans to expand its team to meet growing demand. (02:44:04) - James Everingham, CEO of GIL AI, discusses the challenges of managing proliferating AI agents within company infrastructures, emphasizing the need for governance, control, and observability to prevent operational chaos. He highlights the importance of cost management, citing instances where uncontrolled agent usage led to budget overruns, and notes that both small and large companies are rapidly adopting AI agents, with tech-forward industries leading the charge. Everingham also introduces Agent Hub, a platform for sharing and deploying agents, and announces GIL AI's recent $44 million funding round led by Google Ventures. (02:55:59) - Dr. Felix Ejeckam, founder and CEO of Akash Systems, discusses the company's development of diamond-cooled servers designed for AI and cloud service providers. By integrating synthetic diamond, the most thermally conductive material, directly onto GPUs, Akash's technology reduces temperatures by 10-15°C, enhancing performance and lowering cooling costs. This innovation allows servers to operate efficiently even in ambient temperatures up to 120°F without the need for liquid cooling or air conditioning. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVN. Today's Tuesday, March 3rd, 2026. We are live from the TVN Ultra Room, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about Ramp.com. Time is money saved. Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And you know who's gonna need a Ramp card? David Ellison, because he owns Warner Brothers now. So David, if you're listening, just, just do it. Just onboard to Ramp. We have a fantastic show for you today, folks. Let's pull up the linear lineup, because we got, it's Hollywood Day, basically, on TVPN. We got Matthew Belloni from Puck. He's the founding partner, coming on to help us understand David Ellison's mission with Warner

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Brothers Discovery, Paramount, HBO, CNN. He's got CBS. He's got everything now. Then Ken Burns is coming on to talk about his whole career in filmmaking. And of course, we have a fantastic

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  And explain film. Film, yes. For anyone listening that might be like myself.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  Quickly, linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise work is based on linear using agents. Film is the process of capturing images digitally or using celluloid. Do you know about celluloid?

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  This is right, right? The filmmaker's in the back, no. So you used to, you used to need a specific chemical process. You'd probably be very hands off on this process. But you used to create a strip of film, the thin, clear, and you put some chemicals on it. And then when light hits it, it, what, what does it do? It makes, if a lot of light hits it, it makes it black. And then that's the negative. And then they flip that around by shining light through it to then expose the final picture. And then you get a beautiful movie that you get to watch at the cinema. Interesting to know how Netflix will change their tune on theaters. So Ted Sarandos has been

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Basically trash talking movie theaters for a long time, being like Netflix is the future, tech is the future. He hasn't been super rude or anything, but he's been like, it's not really key to our strategy. Then as soon as he was in the deal for Warner Brothers, he was like, yeah, the theater's amazing. It's not going anywhere. Like, we're, we're excited to invest. And we will, we will talk to Matt Belloni about how long that lasts until he starts talking trash again. But he's already-

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Netflix is up 22%.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. The stock, the shareholders hated the idea. They hated the idea.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Loves getting your enemy to overpay for a handful, a basket of legacy assets.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  There is another thesis on why Netflix stock has mooned. And it's, it's mostly around this concept that Ted Sarandos just stunned in a pair of jeans at the SAG Awards. So look at this. I mean, you see this, how can you not want to buy the stock? This is not financial advice, but you see a guy pull up in a fit like that, you're like, this is going to moon. I gotta get in. I'm going turbo long. I'm top blasting. You're, you're buying the dip.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Top blast.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  You're top blasting and you're buying the dip. When you see a man pull up in 2.8 billion dollar jeans, because that's the amount of money that Netflix got wired because of this deal. That was the breakup fee. For some reason, I had it in my head that the breakup fee would be the other way. But-

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  Not too shabby.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  In fact, Netflix got paid and Matthew Belloni got a thousand likes on this post. So my question is, is, there's a ton of debt going into this deal. Will I be able to watch The Sopranos on Netflix? Will I be able to watch The Dark Knight on Netflix? It's a complicated question because content licensing deals are not, they're not one size fits all. They're, they're subject to windowing and certain markets. So if Netflix has really high penetration in Germany and HBO doesn't, it might make sense to license it there, but not elsewhere. But I just want to know broadly, like, what, what do we expect from Paramount, Skydance, Warner Brothers, Discovery, CBS, CNN? Like, what is their-

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  TNT.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  I think they have Shark Week now, right? It's in Discovery. They got the Food Network, HGTV. You can watch the Property Brothers, maybe on Netflix one day, who knows? But-

• 4:12John Coogan?

  This is like the most extreme scenario. We talked about a post where someone was like, "Oh, like, you know, masterful 3D chess. They got, Netflix got Paramount to overpay for this. And now they're going to be so indebted because the deal got so big that they're just going to have to come to us and license 100% of the catalog on day one." I don't know if that's true, so I wanted to dig into it. Let's talk about it. So, just to recap and set the table, David Ellison, who is the chairman and the CEO of Paramount Skydance, agreed to raise his offer for Warner Brothers Discovery to $31 a share. A lot of people, myself, someone included, thought that Netflix was at least going to counter a little bit, but they folded immediately. And so the co-CEOs, Ted Sarandos and Greg

• 4:55John Coogan?

  Peters, they didn't counter. And they said, "You got it? Why are us the 2.8B?" And they did. So the result is that David Ellison is handing over $111 billion in exchange for Warner Brothers, HBO Max, CNN, and the other cable networks. There was this whole political angle in DC about how interested would Trump be in the deal. And apparently, as soon as he found out that Netflix was not interested in the cable TV assets, he became less interested in the deal. Because I think he watches a lot of news, but he probably doesn't watch a lot of Batman reboots and doesn't really care what happens there. And so, you know, it's just like a different thing. It's like, you know, he's not turning on the latest DC cinematic universe film and be like, "They're taking shots at me."

• 5:39John Coogan?

  But if he turns on CNN and they're taking shots at him, he's like, "I care about that." Right? So, in terms of the financial situation, they're levering up. They took our advice. When we started the show, we told everyone, "Rule number one is lever up." And they did. So Paramount has already levered. $10 billion in net debt.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  To the gills.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, to the gills. $10 billion in net debt. It's like $13 billion, but they have $3 billion in cash. So $10 billion in net debt, $3 billion of adjusted EBITDA, with which to service that debt. Reasonable, but still pretty high leverage, 3X. Paramount will be adding 60 billion of debt. So all combined, the company will have something like 70 billion of net debt, 79 billion of total debt with roughly 12 billion of adjusted EBITDA. And so when you're operating north of 6X leverage, that leads to different decision-making. Higher discount rates, higher interest rates. It can shift the focus to near-term cash. So Netflix is a logical counterparty here because it can pay. It has the cash. It has a lot of cash flow to pay for global rights at scale

• 6:44John Coogan?

  and is, has a long history of paying top dollar to deploy capital to known franchises. And also Netflix is in a particularly interesting financial position. So they've been an incredible case study for operating leverage, a true overnight success, something like 20 years grinding up, grinding up the subscribers, grinding up the revenue, investing more and more in content. And if we can pull up the chart, either scrolling down on the tbpn.com newsletter or going to the third post in the timeline, you will see the small bars, the red bars are the revenue and the, and the little dots that have the numbers on them,

• 7:26John Coogan?

  which you can't really see, show how much they're investing in content. And so for a long time, for something like almost from 2002 to 2018, so 16 years, Netflix was like, we made 100 million? Let's make 100 million dollars with the content. Let's buy 100 million dollars with the content. And then they were like, wait, we made a billion dollars? You're never going to guess what we're going to spend on content. Exactly 1 billion dollars. And then they were like, okay, we made, we made 10 billion dollars? This is going to shock you, but we're spending 10 billion dollars on content. And so they would just spend exactly what they made on content. But that changed. That changed in 2019, 2020, COVID.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  The amount of, the amount of subscribers spiked, the amount of revenue spiked. Then they launched the ad model. Took them a while to figure that out, but eventually worked. And the business kept growing, the top line kept growing, but they ran out of stuff to buy. They ran out of stuff to make. And even though they were paying, you know, top dollar for all these different assets, they sort of held their content budget flat. Their revenue went up and that's of course, operating leverage. So profits, profits to pay for Warner Brothers Discovery assets potentially. And so they have the money to spend, but also they're direct competitors in streaming with Paramount Plus and HBO Max. And so there's a question about how friendly will they be? You know, if you license all the good HBO stuff, people will unsubscribe from HBO.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or Paramount.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  Or Paramount. Yeah, exactly.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  It just, it just makes the Paramount subscription offering less competitive.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. So it's this delicate balance. There's also, potentially, and this was from the president of Fox, there's potentially this idea that regulators might attach a condition to the deal, or at least signal or put pressure that the combined entity should maintain its tradition of licensing and selling content.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Lachlan, yesterday said, this is Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch, expects that regulators will impose a third-party content licensing condition on Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery's $110 billion merger. He said, "We wish them the best of luck. We've seen this regardless of whether it was Netflix acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery or Paramount acquiring Warner Brothers Discovery. There will be conditions put on this transaction which would require a producer of that size to continue to sell their content to third-party platforms." This was yesterday up in SF.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I, I ballparked it at like maybe 70% chance that in the next two years, there's some sort of meaningful content licensing deal between Paramount, Warner Brothers Discovery, and Netflix. And so, but I do think that there will be limited windows, some selection in markets where content is available, and pretty much everything will be non-exclusive. So if, if, you know, some, you know, like the original Dark Knight trilogy goes on Netflix, it'll probably still be on HBO, on Paramount Plus. The real key brand assets like The Sopranos and the DC Universe properties, those are much less likely to be, to be licensed.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  And there's basically no world where Netflix gets the first streaming rights to like tent poles. You want to maintain those. You want to give the super fans a reason to stay subscribed to begin a subscription on your now two streaming platforms. There is a lot of potential upside for the Ellison empire. I think of this like buying a house and then getting a roommate. Like you, you, you, you're levered up. You got a crazy mortgage.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  That's such a good example.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Right? You, you, you buy a house.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  Living large, but.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  But you got a roommate.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  And the roommate's Netflix and they're paying the rent to you. You pay the mortgage.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  And you kind of hate your roommate.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  You kind of hate your roommate, but.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  You're long the real estate market and then as you get promotions, as you get more cash flow, as you get more adjusted EBITDA, you can pay your mortgage. And as you pay your mortgage down, you wind up with a really cool asset, which is this nice house that actually has the extra bedroom.

• 11:32Jordi Hays?

  They're like, look, we had a good run. I really love the way you would put dishes in the sink and not do them. I really love the way you would watch movies loud into the night.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:41Jordi Hays?

  And yell.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I think it's time.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  It's time for you to move out and I'm, I'm going to take the mortgage myself. I'm, I'm going to, I'm good for the full, the full, full bill every month. I'm good. Uh, but, but there are a lot of similarities, right? Because what are you getting with Warner Brothers? You're getting a whole library of, of IP that's very valuable, potentially for like a hundred years. Porky Pig is from 1935 and I still know this guy's name and I know like, I, I could draw a picture if I needed to. Um, and so, and so if you believe that intellectual property will have a very, very long life time, lifespan, and it's, and it's incredibly valuable, but you, but you have to finance it with debt. You have to work, work really hard to pay the bills in the short term. You could wind up with a really great asset, even if you have that roommate for the short

• 12:26John Coogan?

  term. Um, the other interesting question was, what does this reveal about the Ellison family's worldview for the future? Because on, on the one end of the spectrum, you have Larry Ellison, who seems incredibly AGI pilled. He's going crazy into AI data centers. You, you disagree with this?

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, I think, remember, I think we did like the, the chart of who's the most AGI.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Needs AGI versus AGI pilled.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  So he, he needs AGI, but he's not AGI pilled.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Why is he not AGI pilled? Oh, just because of his rhetoric? And he, he just doesn't do any podcasts. Get him on Dora Cash.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  We'll see what he says. Maybe his timeline's like ASI next month, you know? Who knows?

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  I, I, yeah, his actions.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  You need to sit down your family today.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  He's obviously very AGI pilled.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Does he have a Mac mini? That's the real question. Um. Funding data centers is generally aligned with a future where AI is an important technology.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, levering up massively, right?

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yes, levering up.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  He believes that AI is gonna be big, right?

• 13:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. He believes AI is gonna be big. But then he also believes, or, you know, in concert with David, his son, believes that that AI will not destroy legacy Hollywood assets. That like, no matter how mu- no matter how many dollars you have, no matter how much compute you have, no matter how many generations you can use the latest video model, you will not just to be able to create a, you know, a superhero that kids will dress up as at Halloween. And I think that's true. And I believe both of these. You don't? You're gonna be dressing up as Slotman next, next-

• 13:55Speaker 02

  Slotman.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Next Halloween.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Look, it's Slotman.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  You're gonna be like, whoa, you don't know this superhero that I prompted myself? And, and no one knows but me? It's a, it's a highly, don't you know the, the internet's highly personalized now?

• 14:08Speaker 02

  No, but you can dress up as like, a superhero who, who has like, these black ears and like, looks very similar to Batman, but it's not Batman.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Not the non-IP infringing Batman?

• 14:19Speaker 02

  I think the, yeah, the criteria is pretty big.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Literally describing Slotman.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, Slotman. You're gonna dress up as the knockoff Slotman. I don't think anyone's gonna do that. I think, I think Batman, Superman, Porky Pig-

• 14:28Speaker 02

  I think broadly, media becomes like, every piece of media, that the audience gets smaller and smaller, everything becomes more, more and more personalized.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  Ah, I don't know.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Like, maybe, yeah, like, I think AP, uh, IP still has like, a fairly big role in that, but you wanna be on the cutting edge.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  I just think, I just think you have like, shelling points and like, things that, like, yes, I can have a video that's perfectly tailored to me, but I like talking about movies with Ken Burns.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  They're calling you Timu Batman.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, Timu Batman over here. Get outta here, Timu Batman. Uh, I don't know. But, but, so maybe that's not your worldview, Tyler, but it's clearly the worldview of the Ellison family. Because they believe in this barbell effect. They believe in the value of-

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would, I would, I would, you know, another way to look at it is like, you could get this hyper-personalization, but it could be around existing IP.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  It's licensed.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  So you get to-

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  Watch a personalized version of Batman content.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  That's targeted just for you individually, but the kids are still dressing up as Batman.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  And we've already seen a glimpse of this with with video games. There are video games that leverage existing intellectual property, but allow you to customize your character in some way. Put more skill points into intelligence and cast spells versus strength and use a sword, right? Like, like, you can have your own experience if you play, even like, the Arkham Batman series. It's pretty linear, but you can play it more aggressively. You can play it more stealthily, and you can experience a Batman world that is more stealth-focused or more fighting game-focused, and and that allows you to experience something that is unifying. And we can discuss, okay, you played the you played the same game as me, you understand

• 16:09John Coogan?

  the same character as me, but we had a different experience. And I think AI accelerates that and makes it more, more, more valuable, not less. I don't know. I I'm somewhat pill on this, but I respect your your differing worldview that you will be enjoying Slotman. Enjoy. So, by the loosest counts, this is the ninth or 10th time that Warner Brothers has changed hands since it became an independent movie studio in 1923. There's some of those acquisitions that have been like divestitures or reorganizations within other companies, but but just like a fascinating thing. And and I do, I do think that David Ellison is

• 16:53John Coogan?

  going to go the long distance with this. I think with a little careful financial management, and probably some few, a few content licensing deals, like this might be the last one. It might, it might, he might, he might be running this organization for his entire career. He's been working in in Hollywood since he was a kid and has been very dedicated to this particular industry for a very long time. And so, I don't think he's going anywhere. And so, get ready for a whole bunch more content. Apparently, they're going to make like 30 movies a year, like, which is a dramatic step up. I think that they're going to try and actually ramp up the production.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Are you sure that's not per day?

• 17:28John Coogan?

  I hope so. With AI, it's totally possible. As long as Tyler over there is buying tickets to see Slotman number 17. Revenge of the Slot Man. I think that there's money to be printed. Let me tell you about

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Revenge of the Trough.

• 17:41John Coogan?

  Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference with scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  Slot Man 2, Revenge of the Trough.

• 17:50John Coogan?

  Revenge of the Trough is gonna hit like a ton of bricks, for sure. Let me also tell you about vibe.co, where DTC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales, just like on Meta.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  And if you are inspired by the whole Netflix Warner Brothers saga, you should head over to the Goodwill in downtown Brooklyn. Tom from Vanity Fair says for $14.99, you can Zaslov Max this spring. They're selling a nice Port Authority puffer vest from Warner Brothers Discovery. That is a good pickup.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Zaslov is a deals guy, Hall of Famer, for sure. He was involved in launching CNBC. He also helped create MSNBC, became the CEO of Discovery in 2006, and just a whole bunch of other crazy deals. Love to have him on the show. Once all this settles down, like his full career is fascinating. And he's been, he's been loved, he's been hated, he's been everything in between. Lots of people have opinions, but there's no way to be unhappy if you've been riding with him as a shareholder, because he got every penny out of this thing.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  He certainly did. According to the Washington Post, there was a researcher skeptical of Havana Syndrome. So he tested a secret weapon on himself. In 2024, Norwegian researcher skeptical that pulsed energy weapons could do damage to human brains built a device and tested it on himself. It didn't go well. So he built, built it, tested it.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Working in secrecy, working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy. And in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans in 2024, he tested on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of Havana Syndrome, the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of US spies and diplomats around the world.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to make scientists like this anymore.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  This is extremely bullish for the tinfoil hat industry. Because I believe that the actual underlying basis for the idea of a tinfoil hat, of course, we use it somewhat sarcastically here when we're discussing hypothetical conspiracy theories. But the tinfoil hat is supposed to eliminate microwave radiation and various EMF pulses. And so if you're worried about getting Havana syndrome, maybe pick up an EMF-proof tinfoil hat. Or maybe just some sort of other, there's probably a better way than just tinfoil around a ball cap. But startup idea, startup idea. Build a real tinfoil hat that actually protects you from Havana syndrome.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  That's the real American dynamism. Startup. Thomas Maxwell says, "We have to stop this. I'm not eating a, quote, Jacob. Eat a Jacob." I haven't seen this one before. It's 20 grams of grass-fed protein, no seed oils, nothing artificial, sweetened with organic honey. This definitely resonated. 24,000 people agree. But I think there's, Tyler, you should do a taste test of all the different protein bars named after just regular dudes. David Barr, the Jacob Barr, there's probably more. You gotta get on it.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  There are a lot of these. The, yeah, the name, I mean, Lucy, named after a person. It was a whole trend for a while.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  It was. Cursor, would like a word.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  This was great. They, they came out yesterday. They had heard the FUD on the timeline around Cursor. They came out yesterday and Bloomberg got some of their data. Their annual revenue topped $2 billion in February, according to a source, a figure that underscores the fast growth of the coding assistant. Sasha summed it up well. He said, "Cursor sees the timeline turning against them quietly give Bloomberg a $2 billion ARR press release. No post from the company or founders. Haters squashed. True comms. Masterclass."

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Michael Truel actually did come out this morning and says, "We believe Cursor discovered a novel solution to problem six of the first proof challenge, a set of math research problems that approximate the work of Stanford, MIT, Berkeley. Cursor's solution yields stronger results than the official human-written solution. Notably, we used the same harness that we built the browser from scratch a few weeks ago. It ran fully autonomously, without nudging or hints, for four days. This suggests that our technique for scaling agent coordination might generalize beyond coding." So, very, very cool to see the progress from them and clearly doing something right in the enterprise, right?

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  Just because like, everything that you see on the timeline is like, so many enthusiasts.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  One of my buddies is Kyle Russell. I worked with him like a decade ago. He's at a company called Valen, and he posted, so Valen, they make SaaS for mortgage services. He says, "It's very boring, but we're basically getting them all to flip from legacy software and are rate limited by biz ops people being able to onboard them. So we're going to try instead to think about it in terms of what tokens do we need to extract from the org in order to deploy fast." So he's in this like AI deployment lead role, and he went, I think, pretty viral, saying, "This morning, one person of his team said, 'Hey, can you unsub me from Cursor?'" And somebody says, "Done."

• 23:39John Coogan?

  And then a bunch of people said, "Same, same. Like, I don't need it. I'm like, I'm happy with another program." And Kyle said, "Today, we announced we're removing 90 Cursor seats because they haven't had any use in two weeks." And it is like, it's flipped from like, the most cutting-edge thing to, like, it's clearly very sticky because you see the ARR numbers, that this like ultra-frontier, coolest, hottest thing is getting some like FUD. And then Sasha broke this down where he was like, "The timeline's turning against them." So you have to provide some evidence that like, you're not cooked, because like, the timeline is very much like, "Oh, well, like, you're not the hottest thing anymore. You're not the coolest little..." The little thing for like the people that are on the most frontier.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  And so no, you know, just squashing the haters with a 2 billion ARR number, which is fantastic.

• 24:29Jordi Hays?

  Up from 1 billion in Q4, which is, which is just insane.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think like there's just something about the, it goes back to diffusion. We were, I was debating this with Tyler last night about, um, you know, how much of, how much of AI adoption is just actually getting the forward deployed engineer in, actually getting people to change their workflows, onboarding, like there are, there are certain people that will just bounce from the most frontier thing. Oh, this model is better. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude. I'm on Codex. I'm on Claude, back and forth. But for a lot of companies, they need a little bit more handholding. And so, um, there's a whole massive chunk of the economy that can be transformed by developing great products and then actually getting them in the hands of businesses.

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  Arfa Rock is hearing cursor maybe in the midst of a new raise at 50 billion.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Which would be a meaningful markup from 30 where they were sitting, uh, again in, in Q4.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what, what does Dee Dee say? Everyone in the tech X bubble thinks they are wholesale ditching cursor, but enterprise diffusion is glacial. Most of the world just got a hold of it. It's a good point. It's a very good point. Well, in sum, good news. Mark Zuckerberg has purchased a mansion in Miami for $170 million. This was such big news that we had to pull it forward from the mansion section on Friday to talk about today. But there is a little bit of a black pill here. We can go into it. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  And let me also tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Seamless, unlock seamless, real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  So of course Mark got this because of California's wealth tax, which if it goes through, he would still be subject to at least a one time.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Payment, you know, which, which would get litigated, of course. What we need now is a picture of him in his backyard recreating the Ben Affleck smoking meme.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Why?

• 26:37Jordi Hays?

  Because there's this new national wealth tax.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  That Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are pushing. So he's like, he just, he just moved, he just got this new place across the country.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  Probably overpaid to, to a degree.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  People are just gonna be like, actually, I live in international waters, full time. I don't live on, I don't live in America. I don't live in any country, actually.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:58John Coogan?

  I live in space. I live, I live on the International Space Station or something. Uh, very, very tricky. Uh, a hundred and seventy million dollars sounds staggering. Buy a five percent tax on Mark Zuckerberg's wealth, over eleven billion dollars. That shouldn't have been his shopping budget because in, in dude math, if you save money, you just have a free license to spend it. So you're like, by moving to Florida, I'm, I'm effectively saving myself eleven billion. I can spend that, right? Isn't that how that works?

• 27:27Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have paid one hundred and seventy million dollars for an under construction mansion on Miami sought after Indian Creek Island. The deal closed Monday. The purchase set a record in one of the countries most expensive to date. The current US record is held by billionaire Ken Griffin. He spent two hundred and thirty eight million dollars for an apartment. That is a crazy amount of money for an apartment, but I guess it's in a good building.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of apartments.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  The Florida record was set last year when a waterfront compound in Naples traded for two hundred and twenty five million. I feel like this isn't counting Ken Griffin's, uh, compound that he's building because he's built.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it's multiple properties.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  He's bought multiple properties.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  Okay, here's where it gets crazy. The sellers are Dr. Aaron Rollins, a cosmetic surgeon to the start, and his wife, real estate agent, Maureen Rollins. The Rollins's paid more than thirty million for the roughly two acre site in twenty twenty.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Wow, flipping.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Not a bad.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  Real estate agent, don't want to go up against them. They know what they're doing.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Plans called for a nine bedroom home measuring about thirty thousand square feet with a dock and a swimming pool.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  Amenities were to include gym, hair salon, and massage room, as well as a fifteen hundred gallon aquarium and library with a secret passageway.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Zuck does need a hair salon in his house because he's always changing his hairstyle. Sometimes he's got the Caesar going, something, you know, he's got the fro going. So this is.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  The Gen Z.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  This is elite for him. Who knows what'll go next? Maybe he'll have long flowing locks like Fabio. That would be, that would be the good next move for him, I think. How, how many gallons is the aquarium? Fifteen hundred. Is that a lot? It doesn't seem like that much. What can you put in there? Can you put a shark in there? No way. Some fish? How big is? No way. How big is Keith's? Keith's aquarium is massive in Miami. Uh, you can, you can scuba dive in it to clean it up. Uh, anyway, congratulations to the Zuckerbergs on their new property. It looks beautiful and without further ado, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we have Matthew Belloni from Puck. How are you doing?

• 29:33Speaker 03

  What's going on? Doing great. Thanks for having me.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Have you a great to me.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Um, uh, I enjoyed, uh, your, your podcast with Dylan earlier today, and I wanted to dig further into the actual, uh, merger. I mean, it seems like we're sort of done now. Um, but, uh, how, how, how is, how is the process of covering this been for you? Uh, what were the key turning points? Like, what was most exciting for you?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Well, I'm learning a lot. Certainly didn't know what a ticking fee was until covering this deal. Uh, learning a lot about the debt market, learning a lot about, uh, the contours of raising money in the Middle East, all sorts of fun things. Um, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's been a wild moment in Hollywood for the past five years, basically. It's, it's a time of tremendous change, tremendous disruption. A lot of people are really scared and don't know what's going to happen. So it's, I mean, it's been, it's been interesting for sure.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Is that, uh, is that just a combination of like COVID plus streaming, plus consolidation, plus AI? Or is there like one story that sticks out to you?

• 30:47Speaker 03

  If, if you can throw in a pretty crippling labor strike in the middle of that, and, uh, it's been one thing after another. About five years ago, the end of the peak TV era, the Netflix correction, where the market decided that Netflix had to make money. Streaming subscribers was not the end all be all. That created a, an absolute correction and pretty much, I would call it a content recession within Hollywood and that's trickled down throughout the industry. Fewer jobs, fewer productions, you add that in with the flight of productions overseas. The, everything from the strike that happened in 2023, which gave these companies an excuse

• 31:31Speaker 03

  to really reevaluate the level of production. Throw in the LA fires that disrupted so many different people. And it's, you know, you guys are in LA, it's, it's, it's a really interesting and, and for many people scary time.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, explain the overseas thing because I, I'm, I'm familiar with Atlanta and I believe Toronto, uh, but are productions really moving to other continents now?

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I mean, the UK has been extremely aggressive. They have for many productions, a 40% incentive and they're willing to give you incentives on what's called above the line costs. Those are the actor, director, writer, those are the main talents in the film. That is a huge incentive because it essentially subsidizes you for Tom Cruise's salary, Ryan Gosling's salary. And even in some of the more aggressive US states, you won't get that in California. So, you know, it, it just, it's a game changer when they are doing the line. I just reported on this movie today. Project Hail Mary, an Amazon movie that's coming out in two weeks.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  The gross budget for that movie is $248 million. The actual net budget is a little under 200.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  So you're saving 25% by shooting this movie overseas.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Interesting. And, uh, and do those come as like tax credits upfront or is it more like a tax deduction on profits where if the, if the movie costs 250 to make and it makes 500, then I'm saving 25% or do I just get the money basically upfront?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  It's a rebate. I'm actually not sure. I think it depends on when you actually receive it.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  But it's a rebate for the qualified spend in the jurisdiction that is giving the incentive.

• 33:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  So if you are going to get an incentive from the UK, you actually have to have the work done in the UK. And that means hiring local crews. It means using a soundstage in the UK.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 03

  And having, you know, the production actually shoot there. And you could have films with multiple incentives from multiple jurisdictions for multiple aspects of the production. Everything from the post-production to visual effects, those can be subject to incentives for doing the work in a particular jurisdiction.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Really quickly, I think we have the wrong mic selected. Would you mind adjusting it?

• 33:56Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  Because I think we're on your laptop mic and I'd love to get that Shure SM7B working because I know it has higher audio quality if you can switch it. And while you look at that, I will tell the audience about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Any?

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  How are we doing?

• 34:20John Coogan?

  There.

• 34:21Speaker 03

  Is that better?

• 34:22John Coogan?

  No.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  No?

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  Almost.

• 34:25Speaker 03

  Uh, almost better?

• 34:27John Coogan?

  You're flipping.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  It's okay.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  How about?

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Same as?

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Any luck?

• 34:36Speaker 03

  How about this? Is this better?

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Oh, that's much better.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  There we go.

• 34:40John Coogan?

  I really did that. Okay.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  Wow, you have sound effects. I'm very jealous.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  I wish I had an air horn.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Some of these are not sound effects on a soundboard. Some of these are real folks in the studio clapping with their hands. We have both. Next to us. There we go.

• 34:52Speaker 03

  I can't be trusted with an air horn.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we had a lot of fun. So, uh, talk about the reaction. I know that, uh, we, we talked to Ashley Vance, who's a documentary filmmaker, and he was voicing a little bit of worry that if Netflix acquired Warner Brothers Discovery, that there would be one less buyer. And is this any better for the average filmmaker who wants to go out and get the best price for their product, for their, for the film that they've been working on? Are we still telling the same consolidation narrative or is this somehow structurally a little bit different?

• 35:24Speaker 03

  It depends who you talk to, but I would argue that this is actually worse for creatives. Because this is the actual smushing together of two legacy studios.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Speaker 03

  When you talked about Netflix buying Warner Brothers, Netflix is not in the theatrical movie distribution business currently. They do not do movie theaters.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  So there is a certain class of movie that was going to remain a Warner Brothers movie. Now Netflix makes a lot of movies on its own, but those are often smaller. They are not, they don't have as much ambition as the big theatrical movies. They do some of those too. But Netflix was at least positioning it as we are going to leave Warner Brothers alone. They also were not in the production business in television for other buyers. Everything that Netflix made was for Netflix, whereas Warner Brothers makes shows for its own platform HBO Max, but also for Apple and for Netflix and for many other different platforms. So they claimed that that would be at least another opportunity for buyers.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  Here with Paramount buying Warner Brothers, this is going to be the combination of two television studios, the combination of two film studios. And ultimately down the line, that is going to mean fewer jobs. Now, if you talk to the Paramount people, they say they are committed to making 15 movies for theaters for each Warner Brothers and Paramount. That's 30 movies a year, which would be an escalation for both of those companies. So they're saying there are going to be more, but the history of the movie business has shown that when two studios merge, ultimately the output is reduced and that trickles down to creators.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  What do you think about Netflix's future theatrical plans? Ted Sarandos was talking about the future of movie theaters, painting a more optimistic vision. Do you think any of that sticks?

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  He's got 2.8 billion burning a hole in the bucket.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  I don't think Ted is gonna use that 2.8 billion dollars to all of a sudden make movies for theaters.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  I just don't think so. I think it's gonna be a continuation of their current model, which in many ways is designed to put the theaters out of business. It's designed to give you first run A-list filmmaker, A-list star movies at home. Even 10 years ago, a movie like The Rip with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, that would have had a nice, robust theatrical run before hitting home video. Not true with Netflix. Now, what Ted is saying is that they have had some constructive stunt experiences with theaters lately. They put K-Pop Demon Hunters in theaters. They've done a couple of other things. They did Stranger Things in theaters. And I could see Netflix doing more of that, using theaters essentially as a marketing device for Netflix.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  But I don't see Ted all of a sudden saying, "Oh, you know, through this process of looking at Warner Brothers, we have determined that the theatrical model is a good one and we're gonna all of a sudden give our movies a 45-day theatrical window." Don't think that's happening.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  And do you think, uh, how much of that do you think is Netflix, uh, just, "Well, if we have the, if we have a crown jewel asset, we want people to go subscribe to Netflix and see it there first", versus a lot of times, they don't know what's actually gonna work? And the beauty of the Netflix model is they can stuff something like K-Pop Demon Hunters on there. It can effectively like go viral in their algorithm. And they don't need to do the billboard campaign, the theatrical rollout, and take all that risk. So focusing more on like downstream, "We got something that's already working. Let's make a musical sing-along version or a promotional version for theater."

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is absolutely the benefit. And Sarandos has said multiple times that the best marketing platform for Netflix content is Netflix. Now, I I recently had the head of Sony Pictures on the town. And he, I think correctly said, you do not make stars on Netflix. You do not make franchises that last for decades on Netflix. And the way you do that is in movie theaters with a big, robust marketing campaign that tells the world about the product so that even if you don't see the movie, you're at least aware of it. So that when a sequel comes out in four years, maybe you see that one. But if a sequel to a Netflix movie comes out, nobody except the people on Netflix know about it.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw Ryan Gosling on the Hail Mary billboard and I was like, oh, like, we should go see that. And somebody was like, well, what is it? And I was like, it's a Ryan Gosling movie.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Right. And that's a, that's a perfect example. I mean, Amazon had the choice whether to make movies just for Prime Video or to do theaters. They are going big on theaters this year with a full slate of theatrical releases. And they and many others in town believe that the best way to create movie franchises and to create demand is to first put the movie in theater and then debut it on the service.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It reminds me of like apparel brand doing pop ups specifically, not, not as like a real revenue driver, but to just deepen relationship with their.

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Now, don't get me wrong, these traditional studios, they need these movies to make money in theaters. That's their whole business. And the reason you are spending fifty to a hundred million dollars on a marketing campaign globally is to generate profitability in theaters. And then you get the waterfall, we call it in Hollywood, the waterfall of revenue that first you go to premium video on demand, then you go to subscription video, then you go to TV, then you go to free TV, then all of a sudden you're syndicating the content all around the world and it's in your library forever. The reason why Warner Brothers is going for a hundred and eleven billion dollars is not because they had a nice run in theaters last year or because HBO has had some hits lately.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  It's because they have a one hundred year old library of films that is incredibly valuable to exploit across all platforms and because HBO has an amazing brand.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  So talk about content licensing at the new entity, the combined entity. It feels like with $79 billion of debt, cash flow is going to be important in the short term. What's the probability that we're watching Sopranos on Netflix or watching something from the catalog on Netflix in the next couple of years?

• 41:46Speaker 03

  It's funny because Sopranos has been the one title that Netflix has not gotten.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  And HBO has kept that. Not the, not the one, but the one big one that everyone's waiting for.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  And this is, the debt issue is not new. The Warner Brothers Discovery transaction, putting those two companies together, that created 50 something billion dollars in debt. And they needed to make money fast. And the past three years have largely been about servicing that debt and bringing it down. So you've seen tons of Warner Brothers shows and movies on Netflix and they do it because they have to. I mean, at one point last year, I looked on the Netflix top 10 and six, I believe of the 10 movies in the top 10 were Warner Brothers titles.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  And they do it because they need the money. I mean, we know Sony Pictures just did a re-up of their pay one deal. We call it pay one because it's the first pay platform for subscription viewing of these movies. They got $7 billion out of Netflix over a long period and globally. But that is for the first run pay one window for Sony Pictures movies to go to Netflix. Incredibly lucrative. That's what Netflix was buying when they wanted to buy Warner Brothers.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  So Sony and Netflix already have this relationship. Is there any chance that Sarandos goes shopping with his 2.8 billion bonus? And all the cash flow that he has, he's sort of, you know, kick the tires on one big deal. Is Sony Pictures in play at any point in time?

• 43:17Speaker 03

  The Sony Corporation in Japan has said that they are not interested in selling Sony Pictures. It would seem to be the obvious choice because Sony is the one Hollywood studio, the traditional studio that does not have a general interest streaming platform. They chose not to enter the streaming wars.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And that would make it an attractive buy for Netflix because Netflix doesn't need a global streaming service. They already have one. They could pick off the Spider-Man franchise. They could pick off, you know, all the production and distribution capabilities that Sony has for theaters. Would seem to make sense for Netflix, but there has been no. Indication that Japan is willing to sell.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is any part of the Ellison's strat is does AI kind of factor in at all? I've had this kind of like, uh, uh, loose theory that, uh, this, this IP Warner Brothers IP, uh, could potentially be more valuable as AI gets better because you can create so many different variations on top of that IP, uh, but.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  It's also unique. It's not replicable.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  That's it. That's it. It's like you have a monopoly on the IP. And if it becomes substantially less expensive to create, uh, new film and television, you know, uh, TV shows, movies, et cetera, maybe the IP is more valuable, uh, but, but what's your take?

• 44:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have always thought that one of the reasons why Netflix wanted Warner's was because they saw what's going on with YouTube and the volume of content that YouTube is soon going to be able to host and eventually create themselves. And Netflix is saying to themselves, okay, so if anything is possible in streaming and with AI, you can create AI generated shows, music, content, movie stars, whatever, what are we doing? What do we have that is defensible here? And they're looking at Warner's and they're saying, okay, well, we don't have a Batman. We don't have Harry Potter. We don't have, you know, this hundred year old library of

• 45:24Speaker 03

  known quantities that cannot be replicated by AI, at least not yet. So we need that. And Netflix has had a hard time creating franchises. If you can count on one hand, the Netflix franchises, the things that they own that are meaningful in the world. Stranger Things, they own. Wednesday, they don't own. Amazon actually owns the Addams Family because they bought MGM. There are not that many franchises. You guys probably don't even know what they are.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. Can you take us on a tour of who is actually involved financially in this deal? You mentioned that it was sort of like a whirlwind tour in the Middle East, a lot of different funds coming in. I imagine that it's some overlap with the tech investors that we typically talk about on this show, but.

• 46:13Speaker 03

  There are, Apollo is in this. I believe Blackstone is, I'm not 100%. There are three big PE firms that are providing a lot of the debt financing here. And then there's an interesting question of whether the Middle East money that was initially floated as being part of this deal is still in there. There was a Saudi fund, there were Qataris, there was one other fund, and they were not in the press release. So I actually need to ask Jerry Cardinale of Redbird whether they are still in this deal, because Redbird has been kind of the big financial backer and consultant on raising this bid together.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  And obviously Larry is backstopping the whole thing. We would not be having this conversation about a company with a $15 billion market cap, which is Paramount Skydance, acquiring a company like Warner Discovery in $111 billion deal, if not for the backstopping of Larry Ellison himself. And that was the key factor. He didn't want to personally backstop it, and then once he did, the levers started moving.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is Larry Ellison's history with investments in Hollywood? I know it's not just David that's been involved. He's invested before. Obviously David has almost multi-decade career at this point. What's been Larry's strategy? What can we learn from his past adventures in Hollywood?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  It's a good question because people think this is out of nowhere. And it's all of a sudden Larry Ellison deciding to dip his toe into Hollywood. Although if you can call over a hundred billion dollars dipping your toe.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Big toe. He's dipping the big toe.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Right. But Megan Ellison, David's sister, she had a very artistically successful production company called Annapurna, which she still has. But there was a period in the 2010s when she was the dominant producer of so-called art house and, you know, independently financed auteur-driven movies. And she actually got two Oscar nominations in the same year for herself for Best Picture. When she had, I believe it was her and the master in the same year. And she's done, I mean, she's done a ton of movies with big-time auteur-driven filmmakers. And then the wheels came off. She just lost too much money.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  And Larry basically had an intervention with her and said, the money's not coming in anymore. You're done. I'm not doing this anymore. And he had his people step in. They pulled way back. They downscaled the company and Annapurna still exists. They had a, they had a big Sundance movie this year directed by Olivia Wilde and starring Seth Rogen. But they're not doing a whole lot. So if we learn from this, it's that Larry is happy to indulge his children, but there is a limit on what he's willing to do. And she hit that limit. We, you know, we'll see what happens with David.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, is, uh, sorry, Jordan, you can go. If you. Just, just, I'm, I'm curious if, uh, if, I mean, it sounds like Annapurna had a very different, uh, just financial underwriting strategy in the sense that Warner Brothers is very much like this basket of assets that are so proven. Yes, it's high leverage. Yes, it's expensive. But it's this mortgage on land that if you pay the bills on time, you will get the value of, because there's this catalog value that you can license. You can continue to merchandise these assets. So it feels like a different financial strategy.

• 50:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, there are not, there are not a lot of legacy studios with 100-year-old libraries sitting around. It is a pretty unique asset, whereas Annapurna was creating its library from the ground up, which is a much more difficult business. The, you know, the corners of Hollywood are littered with the corpses of companies that tried to take on the studios and do this on their own, because you have to have that 100-year-old asset to float you when you have bombs, because this is a portfolio business in the sense that if you release 20 movies, 10 of them probably not going to make money, if you're lucky. And it's, you gotta make a lot of money on the ones that do make money, and those will make money forever.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Can you bridge that to A24? We're more familiar with that because there's some tech investors involved. I personally like a lot of the movies, but what is the strategy of A24? How do they fit into the modern Hollywood landscape?

• 50:57Speaker 03

  A24 has been incredibly successful on the low-budget model. They, they are one of the few film studios that have created a brand for themselves. I would argue that the A24 brand is more meaningful to moviegoers than the Warner Brothers brand. I mean, everybody knows what Warner Brothers is, but what does Warner Brothers stand for? What is that brand? You don't really know, and you never had to know, because that was just the, it wasn't a direct-to-consumer business. They put their movies on other branded platforms, whether they are theaters, or whether they were television, or now streaming on HBO Max. But A24 has

• 51:41Speaker 03

  created a brand. They sell, you know, branded candles, and hats, and things that are meaningful to their fans. But they succeeded, they succeeded on

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Betting small on on specific auteur filmmakers and they had a nice run. They also raised a bunch of money, as you mentioned, and they have recapitalized a couple of times now. And because they got, well, I believe it was a three point five billion dollar valuation a couple of years ago. They have essentially now been forced to go bigger. And they are releasing movies. Marty Supreme cost seventy million dollars. Uh, The Smashing Machine with The Rock. That also cost a lot more than their typical A twenty four movie. And they're still buying the small movies at festivals and releasing smaller movies. But they now have more of a portfolio of bigger budgeted movies.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  And the jury's out on whether that model is going to be successful for them. Because again, once, there's many companies that have had small level success in Hollywood. And when they try to scale up and compete more directly with the traditional studios, they've faltered. And we'll see if A twenty four is able to pull it off. They got really smart people there, so I I would hope so.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  What is actually, what is Hollywood actually doing with AI today? Not like, what do they want to do? Not what are Silicon Valley companies pitching them on doing? But how is it actually being used today?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Well, there's two answers to that question, because there's one in the general, what is AI doing for all businesses? And that is, you know, streamlining processes and, you know, creating faster workflows. That's all the boring aspect. What you're probably asking about is how is Hollywood using AI to create content?

• 53:33Jordi Hays?

  Instead of, in place of a camera is.

• 53:35Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. And there it has been much more limited. The the toe is in the water and each of these companies has a an initiative to incorporate more AI specifically. And and more and more aggressively in the animation divisions. The goal is to bring down the costs of animated movies significantly. And you do that by using AI to automate a lot of different functions. And they're being coy about exactly how, but I have heard like the storyboarding process. And the physical production of the animated images, once the artists have have done their work to create the character design. And the movements they want, AI can be used to.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Essentially effectuate a shot. And you're seeing more and more of that. Where they're treading a little bit more cautiously is where the traditional labor unions are involved. Where actors and directors and writers are involved. You're not seeing studios greenlighting scripts that are written by AI. You're just not. Screenwriters are using AI as a tool.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  That they know of.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  That they know of, sure. But they are, screenwriters are using AI as a tool. And they will freely admit that, much like they were very happy to use Google when it first came about. And they didn't have to have a researcher that would go to a library and tell them what the interior of the FBI looked like. They don't have to do that anymore. And with AI, they can create scenarios or create drafts or create things that they, that will help them. And the, all that the guilds want is for their members to get paid. So the studios are not allowed to buy a script or greenlight a script without paying a human writer. And that's a big deal. It's the same for actors.

• 55:25Speaker 03

  You can use AI to accentuate or to, you know, do a, a, a quick reshoot shot, but you have to pay the people involved. And we're headed into a new labor negotiation where the studios will try to chip away at that. And the guilds are going to try to be more aggressive and make sure that their members are getting paid for any use of AI here.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where do you think AI, what kind of scenes do you think AI will end up coming for first? Is it the, the?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Animation.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  The stunt, well, animation, but then what, what about stuntmen? I feel like there's a, there, there's a.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Transformers level CGI where it's so expensive.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Visual effects.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Visual effects.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  Is, do you think that the dynamic between the studios and the guilds could allow kind of like an entirely alternate kind of, uh, like industry to form that, that is sort of broken away from, from traditional Hollywood norms? Like, you know, uh, you could imagine a group of, uh, people and, you know, uh, some suburb of LA that, that aren't a part of the guilds that have never, never engaged with the unions in any capacity, just decide we're going to start making movies ourselves and kind of just ignore uh, the legacy process.

• 56:41Speaker 03

  I think that's already happening, right? I mean, you see it, but the difference is, I mean, we all went nuts over that uh that seed dance video of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting. Um but that's because it was Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  If it was two dudes fighting, nobody would care. If it was two AI-generated dudes that did not look like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 03

  And that's the power that the Hollywood people have.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I mean, there's going to be, I think what's gonna happen is there is going to be a class system of AI-generated content that will live and have an audience and generate revenue at scale, but it will be perceived as lesser than the more professional and union-supported Hollywood-style work. And I could be wrong about that. It could just bowl over everything, but there's still value in Ryan Gosling's face.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  And for now, the unions and the Hollywood studios have been able to protect that from AI.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can imagine, you know, the the luxury houses versus fast fashion, like a similar dynamic playing out where like, yeah, you can get a jacket that like functions in the same way as something that Gucci made.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's the same even material, but it costs less and it has obviously much less prestige.

• 58:03Speaker 03

  And and I think that there there will be a middle ground too, where movies, the the cost of movies are is brought down because of advances in AI where things can be done without, you know, outsourcing something to five artists to work on at a visual effects company for two months. It could be done in-house for less money with an AI tool. I think that's that the that's already happening and there are much lesser guild protections for that aspect of the business.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Uh, post the OpenAI Disney deal, I was expecting to see another deal of the similar shape happen. It hasn't happened yet. Are you hearing rumors? Do you think other studios with big intellectual property uh and and character libraries will take a similar approach?

• 58:54Speaker 03

  I think that there are a lot of talks going on.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  And they're trying to figure it out. Disney was in an interesting spot there because it was, that deal with OpenAI was as much about putting pressure on Google to come to the table and to not go rogue as Google has been doing.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:12Speaker 03

  As it was to do OpenAI.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  Also, there was a pre-existing relationship there. Bob Iger, the CEO, was, he worked for Thrive, which, you know, is a big investor in OpenAI.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  And Disney is, you know, if you're going to go after one company, that's the one to go after because they have the best characters. And if you know about that deal, that deal does not include any voices or any likenesses of real people. Even the Luke Skywalker is the animated Luke Skywalker.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  So it's a lot less compelling for people to play around with. If you're playing around with Lightning McQueen or Yoda, and they don't sound like Lightning McQueen or Yoda, it's a lot less compelling than if they did.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, that'll be interesting to see how they roll that out. Uh, maybe that happens down the, down the road. Uh, Jordy, anything else?

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was great.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally meet.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Great to finally meet.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Come on anytime.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic reporting.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Come in, in person next time.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to have you here since we're all in L.A. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  You can listen on the town, or you can read me a puck.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, sir.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:00:16Jordi Hays?

  More soundtracks.

• 1:00:17John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  One more airline.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid Powers, the app you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely, connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI. And Chris and Kyle has a post here. Credit where credit is due. China really nailed the Bonvillan aesthetic with their Antarctic research base. Quinling? Chinling?

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, these are just renders, though, correct?

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  These are renders. This is what they're thinking about building.

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Because if it was real, I'd be telling Tyler to get a boat immediately.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Tyler was in Arizona over the weekend and sent us a very cool picture of him out at TSMC.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us a review. Did you feel the power? Did it feel like visiting Arrakis?

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was like 91 degrees, extremely hot. It is massive, massive facility. They're still building. Like, there's like, there were two kind of main sections. I couldn't actually tell like what parts they were. There were signs. There were a bunch of fabs. I think I took a picture next to like Fab 21 or something.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  But there's like, there's so much building going on. And it's just like, it's basically north of Phoenix.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  And so there's like 10 mile radius where it's just like basically just empty land. They're flattening the desert.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  But yeah, very, very cool.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Gift shop?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Really fun to walk.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Any gift shop?

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  No, they didn't let us in. There's a ton of security around. At every gate, I wanted to like go in and like take a tour or something.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  I want to get, I want to get a wafer that didn't make it through quality control and, and get some of the chip, the chip CEOs to sign those. I think Alyssa Su signed TSMC wafer would be amazing, or Morris Chang signed wafer. That would go pretty, pretty hard. I would love that.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Moving on, the, what is it? The billionaire tax has gone national. It's gone national. Bernie Sanders is proposing bringing it to the United States broadly at the federal level. Bad news for everyone who migrated to Miami or Florida because it is going to follow you wherever you go. Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders are proposing a national wealth tax on billionaires, going even further than California. They want 5% unrealized wealth tax to be annual.

• 1:02:38Jordi Hays?

  Every year.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  Every year. That would be serious capital erosion.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  And I've seen some people running the numbers on, on like, oh, if Jeff, if this tax had been in place since 1999, Jeff Bezos would still be worth 61 billion and he could still afford his 500 million dollar mega yacht, just like not actually like processing all the negative externalities of something like this. So, yeah, I just, I just.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Turns Amazon into like a, like a PE-backed like shell pretty quickly because you lose control, right?

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that or Amazon never even gets the the level of investment that it got because of capital flight. I would be so much more sympathetic to Ro Khanna and Bernie Sanders on this if they had like, here's five case studies where wealth taxes worked and like, they can't come up with a single one. And so it just feels like.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Fifty percent over 10 years. That is a lot. But the implementation of this tax would ultimately create wealth flights, as Chris withins. The wealthier wealthy because they fight to preserve their wealth. So in year one, the base is already decimated. Then every single year afterwards, the remaining billionaires leave or hide their assets. Meanwhile, the markets are all declining all this time because they see that America has been infiltrated by wealth destroying communists. Chris is not a fan.

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dave Friedberg has a bunch of kind of good, good content around this, talking about how there's something like eight trillion of billionaire wealth and 160 to 170 of middle class wealth. So that is the real prize pool. And, and again, hopefully, hopefully, our lawmakers and voters process how ridiculous this is.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Find another way.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  And reject it.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Write the balance sheet of the US government. Let me tell you about Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on give up ship higher quality data, higher quality.

• 1:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Clueshow Investments says, her, the market is only down 0.08% year to date. Things must be really calm, right?

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  This is actually crazy. If you asked me whether the market was and I hadn't looked, what is this from? What movie is this? Is this AI or something? This is a crazy scene. I really like, this is a good, this is a good meme template. I haven't used this before. Just RPGs flying around.

• 1:05:12Jordi Hays?

  All out war.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  It is all out war. I mean, a lot of stocks are down like 50%. Other stuff's way up. Things are all over the place. And it has been absolute turmoil. A lot of, a lot of red, red days in our favorite companies.

• 1:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Is it from Maze Runner?

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Oh, maybe Maze Runner. Okay. GoPro is one of the stocks that is particularly far down. We did a deep dive on GoPro very early in this show's history. They are now at a $150 million market cap. Josh Wolfe has a quote here. GoPro's global market share of action cameras dropped to 18% as of September 2025, compared with 84% in 2022, according to Beijing-based consultancy Meritigo Services. At the same time, DJI's share rose to 66% and Insta360 is up at 13%.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  This is even count Meta Ray-Ban.

• 1:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Just out-executed on the product side, but cellphones are probably even a bigger factor here, kind of capping the overall TAM. Cellphones at some point just got really durable and the video quality got really good. I remember back in the day, skiing or snowboarding, I was a little bit more hesitant to be like, I'm gonna take my iPhone out and use it while skiing and just because it wasn't waterproof. And then they got waterproof, they got really durable, and most people aren't good enough at what they do to actually warrant needing, like, effectively bulletproof.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  The dust collection problem is very real with action cameras. You buy it thinking you're gonna be shredding, going downhill, you're gonna be surfing, and then you go for a hike once, the video's kind of underwhelming, and then it collects dust. Skiing this weekend, a friend of mine, I didn't see any GoPros among my friend group. One friend of mine was wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Vanguards and enjoyed taking videos and images with those. I've been seeing a lot of Meta Ray-Ban content on reels. It feels like they're promoting that. They have a little tag, and it feels like that's getting a little boost in the algorithm. So if you're a reels creator, maybe go pick up a pair and then post some

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  stuff on the algorithm because you might get a little boost. But should Meta buy GoPro? 150, that's like, what, one tenth of an AI researcher and you get a whole suite of products? And I have, I just have no idea if they would get anything through approval. Like, it just feels like this is a company that you can't do a zombie acquisition with. Because you need the assets, you need the IP, you need the supply chain, you need the products, the distribution, you need the whole company. And Meta can't acquire like a VR fitness company without getting disapproved. Granted, it's a different FTC, so who knows? But if you were Mark Zuckerberg and you were trying to get into the action camera market broadly

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  with Meta Ray-Bans, would you buy GoPro for 150?

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Absolutely not.

• 1:08:17Jordi Hays?

  You partner with, you partner with Oakley.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Partner with Oakley?

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a better, it does exactly.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  It's just the future.

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's just, they made a pair of Oakleys.

• 1:08:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  The action sunglasses that function just as well as a GoPro for 99% of people.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:33Jordi Hays?

  And it's integrated with your phone.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  And you can watch Instagram reels while you're backflipping off of, in the, in the terrain park. But the crazy thing, GoPro still did somewhere around 670 million of revenue last year. So trading at, at less than a quarter times revenue. But absolutely brutal out there. Some other people were suggesting like a foundation model lab should acquire the company for like, and that, that felt like a.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  It feels like a stretch.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  A silly, silly idea.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:09:09Jordi Hays?

  Dumer says, "The past looks more like the future than the present does." Let's pull up, let's pull up this. What is this? PM's Phoenix, "An expandable van you can build for $2,000."

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  This is sick.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  What company is this? PM's? How old is this? Is this AI generator or something? This looks like incredible. Most companies and most campers in vans these days that are roomy enough to live in are too large for comfortable driving. Conversely, the compact, fun drivable rigs are usually too small to live in. And no matter what its size, the seller will probably want all the money you have now, plus most of what you'll make in the next five years. This is a good copy.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  So this was in Popular Mechanics in 1978.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  This is a good daily. Someone should pick this up.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Built on a Volkswagen minibus chassis.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  I like that they restyled the the front cab as well. Someone's someone's mentioning that the Cybertruck camper back end looks pretty similar. But it still feels odd to take an electric vehicle into the wilderness. I don't know why, because it's not like you're bringing a bunch of, not like there's a gas station out in the middle of nowhere. But I would, this would give me range anxiety, even though I think that's deeply fake at this point.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  New model alert.

• 1:10:35John Coogan?

  New model alert. What we got?

• 1:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Introducing Logan's introducing Gemini 3.1 flashlight, a huge step forward on the boundary of intelligence, beating 2.5 flash on many tasks. Tyler, you should try to do a speed check. OpenAI also came out this morning with 5.3 instant.

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Touting increased accuracy.

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Is this in, is this in chat GPT? Because I feel like I've had 5.3 in Codex, but not in, but not, oh, I got, yeah, I have 5.3 instant in chat GPT.com now. Interesting.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  I do not yet.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:11:19Jordi Hays?

  And then they're also teasing 5.4. They say 5.4 sooner than you think. So.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  5.3, it's designed for very, very low latency. It, it, it still feels slower than the Cerebrus response that I got from 5.3 Spark. Because I think that the Cerebrus chips, although they are, although they are faster, they're probably in more limited supply, more relevant to the long-running coding agent models. And so they are still rolling that out, but I'm excited for Cerebrus in, in ChatGPT as a product. And, and yeah, 5.4 sooner than you think with a capital T.

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Very fun. Interesting. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma may clog code. Codex are a sketch. The Figma canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Kalshi partnered with Bezel.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  To allow people to trade price movements of iconic watches. So we can pull up this video here. This basically allows you to trade on what the, on the prices of Rolex's for the month, month of March. Basically, is price going to move up or down? So Quaid over at Bezel has been telling us about this one.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  So you could, you could in theory buy a watch on Bezel and then take out a short position on Kalshi and have a market neutral submariner or something, right? Because if the price goes up, you own the watch.

• 1:13:07Jordi Hays?

  It's a market neutral sub.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  It's market neutral. Because if the market crashes, you make money on Kalshi, but you lost money on the watch and you're neutral. So you can hedge yourself now? That's very bizarre.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw somebody, I saw somebody pushing back and being like, oh, you can, this is silly. You could just buy the watches and actually trade them. But obviously, it's, it's quite a bit more complicated.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Well, you can't sell one that you don't have. Now you can short watches effectively. Let me tell you about AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get over to hit access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And I believe we have Ken Burns in the restream waiting room. So we will bring him into the TVP and Ultra. What's going on? Ken, thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. How are you doing?

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  My pleasure. I'm great. Great to be with you.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  I would love to start with the first project you worked on ever. Because I'm fascinated. Your career has such clarity, but finding a life's work is often the hardest part of going on the type of journey that you've been on. And I'd love to understand who you were as a child, where you found a love for filmmaking, for documentary work, for history, and sort of go through from there.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Well, I was born in tragedy. My mom had cancer almost all of my life and died when I was 11. And a few months later, when I was 12, my dad, who had a pretty strict curfew, would allow me to stay up late at night on watching TV shows, even on a school night. And he started to cry at an old movie called Odd Man Out. And right then and there, I'd never seen him cry before, not when my mom was sick or not, you know, when she was, when she died and not at the terribly sad funeral. And all of a sudden, I said, I want to be a filmmaker. That meant Hollywood, but I ended up going to Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. A brand new and experimenting, still there, still experimenting school. And most of the teachers were social documentary, still photographers and reminded me there

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  is as much drama in what is and was was. And all of that sort of combined by age 22 to realize that I had a latent and untrained interest all of my life in American history. And 50 years later, I'm still doing the same thing.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Walk me through your process. Do you have a list? Has your filmography played out the way you would have predicted a decade ago? How many twists and turns have you run into in your career?

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  Zero. I mean, obviously, life throws a lot of stuff at you. I live in rural New Hampshire. That's when I made a decision to leave New York City because I thought that becoming a documentary filmmaker, strike one, in American history, strike two, on PBS, strike three, meant I'd taken a vow of anonymity and poverty. And I moved up here, finished the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, got nominated for an Academy Award, and everybody said, "You're coming back." They'd warned me that if I went up there, I'd die. If I stayed, I would die. And I listened to neither, and it's made all the difference. So I've been able to, working in public broadcasting, where I couldn't have made any other films, any of the films, any place but, one foot tentatively in the marketplace, the other

• 1:16:29Speaker 04

  very proudly out, that I've been able to have directors cut for the next 40 films, all of which have been broadcast first on PBS, streamed on PBS. So it's been good. So you might have a 10-year plan with lots of different projects. Sometimes you may, before you'd really gotten into something, switch one subject to another. But we've been hitting the marks for a pretty long time. The real struggles are within these, and you want to leave the kind of room to experiment, to be thrown a curve, and to figure out how to do it. The recent film on the American Revolution, which now has over 4 billion minutes of watching, the first time PBS ever entered the top 10 of streaming programs

• 1:17:12Speaker 04

  at the end of November with what I thought was a ridiculous number, 565 million minutes, is now over 4 billion. So there's some pent-up curiosity about who we are, where we've been, particularly what our origin story is. So it's been a long, interesting thing, but every single one of the films is a director cut, and that's only possible because I've stayed in public broadcasting.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  And then in public broadcasting, I imagine, we were just talking about some of the changes that are happening in Hollywood, and how there's often a pressure to go bigger, and that usually means bigger budgets. Okay, you made a $20 million film, your next one's going to be 70 million. How have you thought about... Where the business changes, what more money means, what more success, what more confidence means, are there, how is the business side of your work evolved throughout your career?

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Well, we've tried not to let the technological tail wag the dog to pick up one aspect of your excellent question. You know, we waited 10 more years when many of my colleagues had already switched to digital editing around 1990. We waited till 2001. We didn't stop film until 2009 and then switched to digital stuff because we didn't want that tail to wag the dog. At the same time, our model is, you know, an interesting one. It's all grant funded. We don't have investors. So you write a budget, it pays for your salary, there's no profit margin, there's no contingency, and you empty that bucket. The film's either got to be done or you got to be raising more money. So they're very expensive. These are

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  labor intensive things, particularly when you take, you know, 10 years to do something like the Vietnam War or this American Revolution. So they're pushing $30 million. At the same time, I raise it all so I retain that creative control and I relieve PBS of the burden of having to fund more of it than they already do. And so it's a kind of a good situation that to be in and it's really outside of the pressures of the marketplace. So I don't think about increasing budgets. I can go from a $30 million budget to a 10 million and I'm still, these budgets are high for my contemporaries, but they don't get to spend. And look, I could have gone, save myself all the trouble of raising, say, $30 million

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  for the Vietnam series that came out in 2017, 10 and a half years. I spent 10 of those 10 and a half years raising money for it. I could have gone into a streaming service or a premium cable and gotten all that money in one pitch, but they wouldn't have given me 10 and a half years. And that's the point. I can't tell the story that I want to tell with the depth and complexity. I mean, that film is now... Let's do the math. That is nine years old. And it is still probably one-stop shopping even among scholarly works to aggregate all of the new scholarship into one place. And nothing certainly replaced it in film and nothing that I know has replaced it in scholarship. So we're feeling pretty good about that.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Has fundraising gotten any easier? Is it just as hard every time? Did you ever, did you ever kind of, did you ever kind of hit a moment where you decided to maybe pick up, return the calls from people that wanted to be more traditional financial backers in a particularly hard fundraiser?

• 1:20:37Speaker 04

  No, no, because the sacrifice and control is it. You know, so we, as the films got longer, you know, in the beginning, the first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, because $180,000, I probably made two cents an hour over the five years I did it. So there are more zeros on the other side. So I guess it's proportionally harder. I do have a good reputation, one I wish to maintain. And so we're not looking for compromises or ways to sort of get that cash in hand. You sort of, part of the duty of running the marathon is to run the marathon. And the reward is in not only crossing the finish line, but every single moment along the way, the million steps that you take where one part of you is saying no and another

• 1:21:20Speaker 04

  part, maybe weak voice, is saying yes. And so these are often really complex, you know, struggles in which the analogy of a million problems is not an exaggeration. You just can't see a problem as pejorative. You just see it as inevitable friction to be overcome, like picking up that step and making another step.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  After the adoption of digital editing, what was the next technological advance that you found useful?

• 1:21:50Speaker 04

  I don't know, I'm a Luddite. I don't know what I'm doing on your show, but I'm really glad you reduced it to initials. Because, you know, there's nothing... People say PBS, nothing could be less sexy than that, but Technology Business Programming Network? I mean, KFC has behind it Kentucky Fried Chicken. You know, I knew all my life, or most of my life, what it was. Now it's KFC and I gotta be like, "But this is a really good move." No, I went reluctantly to digital editing because during the 90s, a lot of the interns that would come and work for us, they could see working in analog as some sort of badge.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  But about halfway through the 90s, I realized, "These kids want to be race car drivers and I'm telling them how to shoe a horse? It just doesn't make any sense." And so eventually, almost for them, we switched to digital editing. It's been incredibly interesting. There are still some things, you know, stuff I might tell my editor that I knew would take two weeks, now take, you know, two days, and things that took two days, take two hours, and things that took two hours, now take two minutes. And you think there's salvation in that way, running to daylight there, but there are as many traps, as many places of quicksand. So you just want to be sort of careful about how you approach it.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  What is your opinion on digital restoration of archival footage, archival imagery? Technology seems to be advancing there, and yet there's risk...

• 1:23:24Speaker 04

  It's terrific. There are a lot of risks. You know, a lot of filmmakers are going back to original film masters. They are taking a digitized thing, and one of the reasons why is that you may have a one and a zero, which is absolute in one way, but as you change the programs, you need to have the machine that did the original thing, and now they're not there, they're in a museum someplace, and you have to go get that thing and figure it out. So I know some filmmakers that are, I can't do it just economy-wise, because I've got 250-plus hours of programming.

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  You know, and then it's reels and reels, every half hour is about a reel, um, you know, of, of stuff. You can do the math yourself. There's probably, you know, you know, five hundred hour, five hundred reels in all of this. So it's almost a prohibitive expense. And so you're hoping that your next iteration of masters will be able to read not only the contemporary films that you're working on, but the ones you made 20 years ago and updated. But the restoration part of it, to be able to painstakingly do that sort of stuff is, has been really terrific. Can you tell me the story of the Ken Burns effect? Yeah, sure. It's pretty, it's pretty interesting. I got a call in November of 2002 from a guy claiming to be Steve Jobs. Okay.

• 1:24:42Speaker 04

  You know, and I went, okay, yeah, right. And then I realized very quickly it was Steve Jobs. And he said, I live in rural New Hampshire. I said, okay. Uh, he said, would you come and visit me? And I said, yeah. So a few weeks later, in early December of 2002, I visited him, um, in Cupertino at Apple headquarters. And he ushered me into a room with two engineers and he showed me this stuff. And as I said, if I'm a Luddite now, you can imagine what I was like in 2002. You know, I could barely do word processing. And, um, he said, so look, we figured out a way to download or upload whatever it is, your pictures that you take and that we can do all this. And he showed it to me and I was kind of like,

• 1:25:23Speaker 04

  okay, a fairly superficial version of what I've tried to do to wake up the past, not just, you know, visually to explore energetically the surface of the, of the, of the photograph you're doing. In a way, the feature filmmaker I used to want to be has a master shot, a long shot, a medium shot, a close, a tilt, a pan, a reveal, insert of details. But here was just a very simple sort of panning, zooming through stuff. You could add it, you press a button and add a music thing. And, and I said, you know, okay, cool. You know, whatever. And, and he said, well, you know, Next month, in January of 2003, every Mac computer from now on will have this. I said, "Okay, cool."

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  And then he said, "And we want to keep the working title." And I said, "What's that?" And he goes, "The Ken Burns Effect." I said, "I don't do commercial endorsements." And he went, "What?" And the two engineers kind of blanched. I think they were, you know, aware of this Titanic temper, which I never saw. And he said, "Come with me." So we go back to his office. We talk for a while, and we end up becoming friends till the rest of his life. And when I was in the valley, I'd stay at his house on the futon above the garage and the flats at Palo Alto and knew his wife and his daughter. We even gave an internship to his daughter Lisa, the famous Lisa. And, you know, it was a terrific friendship.

• 1:26:50Speaker 04

  But what I did is I walked out an hour later with about a million dollars worth of hardware and software, which I turned around and gave to nonprofits. Usually, final cut pro to schools that needed it, you know, computers that nonprofits needed it. I think a couple fell off the truck because we needed a computer. But 99.9% of it went to a good cause. And I think he was intrigued that somebody in a world in which it was all a one or a zero for him, or somebody would say, "Okay, you should charge." And the world tells me, "Oh, you should have charged him for this." And I said, "Then he called the Pan and Zoom Effect." I wasn't interested in having my name on it insofar as it could help other stuff.

• 1:27:32Speaker 04

  And it ended up, you know, giving me, and I'm way too short in that regard, a really good friendship with, you know, not arguably one of the five most important people in the United States in the last 150 years.

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  That's remarkable. What is your process for truth-seeking and understanding history?

• 1:27:59Speaker 04

  So I have in my editing room, and I've had for years and years and years, a lowercase neon sign that says "It's complicated," in cursive. And that can mean a lot of things. One is, when a filmmaker has a scene that's working, you don't want to touch it. But finding out new and destabilizing facts obligates you to do that. It's not true of every place, but it does in our shop. And so I think pursuing truth isn't the question. It's there. You can find out the facts. You just have to wade through a lot of shit. Because today, everything is just dump-trup after dump-trup of manure, dumped on top of other manure. And it's just hard. It's one of the reasons why, mostly it's to manage a complex narrative with lots of

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  different balls in the air and hundreds of characters, in the case of the American Revolution. Not just the bold-faced names who are, you know, just statues, you know, out in the park collecting pigeon shit and not real, dimensional, complex human beings. We try to do that, but introduce you to scores of other characters and set a narrative in motion that's, at its heart, a military one, but is also adorned with very complex political and social and geopolitical and economic sort of factors. And so that takes a while, but also making sure you're right. I mean, we lock the film, meaning we're not going to do any more work on it, we promise. We promised the sound editors. And we unlock it, because we found out that word "16," battleships, deaths, months.

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  We've got a little footnote, and it says, "Two scholars of repute said that that," you know, I'm making this up, "said that that was right." And then you find out a third scholar who says, "We're not sure it's 16." So you scour, the narrator's already read and gone home, and you're not going to get him back. So you scour all of the written stuff, you know, hours and hours of stuff, and you find a "perhaps." And you copy it, and you move on to "perhaps 16," and then you sleep better. Like, that's the kind of level of truth-seeking, as you put it. And I don't know any place else that kind of is that kind of... Concerned about that level of accuracy.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  But if you add that up a billion times, then all of a sudden you have something, get ready to blow your whistles, that has four billion plus minutes of watching.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Another sound effect. Thank you. Can you help me understand some of the through lines, emotional elements, or takeaways, or the fingerprints that you try and leave on your work across the, across projects? Not just within single projects.

• 1:30:41Speaker 04

  That's a really wonderful, thank you. That's a very thoughtful question. When I was working trying to raise money, and I looked like 12 years old, and I was trying to get people to buy the Brooklyn Bridge. I remember writing a sentence, is that I was not interested in the mere archaeology of dry dates and facts and events. I was interested in an emotional archaeology. And now, I didn't mean sentimentality or nostalgia, that's the enemy of good anything. But I'm looking for that thing that animates art, that animates faith, that animates a lot of the most intimate stuff that we care about. And that's where you say the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, but you never ask yourself, what's that difference? Where one and one, always in your work, has to equal two. In my work, you want it to equal three. You want to have that unknown factor.

• 1:31:26Speaker 04

  So I guess, once when we were working on our jazz series, the trumpeter and composer Wynton Marcelle said, sometimes a thing and the opposite of a thing are true at the same time. I'll relate it back to the revolution. George Washington, you know, is the indispensable man. Without him, we don't have a country, period, full stop. And in a world in which we're more interested in bottom up than top down, it's exhilarating to be able to resurrect somebody. But he's also deeply flawed. He owns hundreds of human beings in his lifetime. And as the writer Rick Atkinson says, you know, you can't square that circle. He is rash on the battlefield, risking his life and therefore the entire cause.

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  He also makes some pretty bad tactical mistakes at the largest battle, Long Island, of the war, and then later, the same tactic, leaving a flank exposed at Brandywine, which the British take full example of. But, and this is the biggest but I know, he's able to, he's able to hire subordinate talent that's better than him and he's not threatened by it. He's able to inspire men in the dead of night to fight and to remind them that they're not from New Hampshire or Georgia, but they're a new thing, Americans. He knows how to defer to Congress. He has incredible humility. And more than anything, he just waits it out. He understands he doesn't have to win, he just can't lose.

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  And he does that successfully and defeats the greatest empire on earth. And even more than that, he gives up his power twice. The second New York is the British leave New York in November of 1783. That is like eight and a half years after Lexington and Concord. He goes to Annapolis where the Congress is meeting and resigns his military commission. He's brought back out of retirement to run the Constitutional Convention and then is unanimously made president. And after two terms, he walks away from it. And as George III, the King of England, said, if he did that, then he's truly the greatest character of the age. And so you can have both. And a problem in a binary world, in both computers and media, we want to have a black hat and a white hat.

• 1:33:33Speaker 04

  We want to say good or bad. And you can't do that in our own personal lives and we ought to extend that to our history.

• 1:33:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, the dialectic, I love it. You have been very fortunate in that it feels like there's no project too big for you to undertake. And I'm wondering if there's ever a desire, how you balance going big with a massive story that everyone has at least some conception of versus going back to something like the Brooklyn Bridge and refocusing on something very narrow? Is that something that appeals to you? Do you feel like you've graduated, you've done that, you never want to go back? Or is there something? Talk about the tension there.

• 1:34:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's another excellent question. I mean, within these big, huge epic series are all the intimacies that were contained in The Brooklyn Bridge. And we do have a kind of exhalation. They're big series. We could just say Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, World War II, National Parks, The Roosevelts, Vietnam, Country Music, and now American Revolution. But within them are, I think that's fewer than 10 films, there are at least 30-plus films that are shorter than that. And so they experiment more with what you're talking about, that earlier experience. But again, the more important point is that any given minute in a film, say a series, a lot of people would say, okay, you're the director, but you'd assign a different producer for each of the, in the case of

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  The Revolution, six episodes. We don't do this. We all do work on all of them, and they all are shaped. Same with the editors. They cross episodes and they do more than one. And so what happens is you have a kind of unity of presentation, but within each scene, you have the same kinds of intimacies, the same kinds of small moments that you would find in Brooklyn Bridge. And you're also elevating not just George Washington to a more dynamic and complex and understandable and real, truer version of who he is, but you're introducing people to scores of others that you've never heard of, because I never heard of them. You know, a 10-year-old girl named Betsy Ambler, who's a refugee most of the war. We don't think of Americans as being refugees unless you realize how bloody

• 1:35:51Speaker 04

  this was, what a civil war as well as a revolution it was, what a global war, and you're dealing, that involves more than two dozen nations, European as well as Native American. And when you say Native American, you don't say "them." There are all these nations to our west that are as distinct and separate culturally, economically, diplomatically, militarily as France is from Prussia at that time. And if you think you're going to just make it "them," and not say "French, Prussian, Delaware, Lenape, Cherokee," you've made a huge mistake and left out an important dynamic. Or take half the population, women, and say... Yeah, we don't really care about that.

• 1:36:32Speaker 04

  Or the 500,000, 20-plus percent of the population that is enslaved or free Black Americans. All of that makes an unbelievable dynamic. And if you add the violence to something that we say is, you know, this sort of bloodless, gallant myth that attends the revolution, just guys in Philadelphia thinking great thoughts, and they are great thoughts, as great a thought has ever been thought, but it ain't the whole story. And when you try to integrate that whole story, man, you start to have something that fires on all cylinders. And, you know, that's what wakes me up every single morning of every day.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. When I think about, like, what has changed in America throughout my life, I go to Apple, I go to technology, I go to business. And your work has focused, you know, you've obviously touched on business, but you focused on politicians and generals and athletes and musicians and artists. And I'm wondering about your perception of the business community, the technologists over the history of America, their interaction with your other subjects, how you want to integrate them into the stories that you tell.

• 1:37:44Speaker 04

  Well, you know, I've done four wars. It seems disproportionate because they're all big, long series. But wars are huge sponsors of technological change. All you have to do, I made a film on the Second World War called The War, and it ends because of one of the greatest technological changes that you could possibly imagine. But the Civil War happens because back in the 1700s, an industrialist, Eli Whitney, who will invent the kind of exchangeable parts in the beginning of an assembly line thing, goes down and sees a cousin who's lamenting how long it takes her enslaved people to card a pound of cotton, and he invents a cotton gin which revitalizes cotton and slavery

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  and set in motion the wheels economically and technologically that will sponsor the Civil War that's upcoming. So it's all the way through that, and we're constantly thinking about and dealing with those changes. And, you know, one of the stuff in the... My head full of ideas, you know, if I were given a thousand years to live, which I won't, I won't run out of topics in American history is invention and technology. And I'd start with, I'd start with Eli Whitney, you know, because there's an underbelly to it. And I'd go to Steve Jobs, because there's an underbelly to it. You know, I got kids, I am, you know, we're all addicted to this and, you know, I mean, my new statement is, and it's such a luddite statement, I apologize in advance for offending

• 1:39:11Speaker 04

  your sensibilities, but I say, social media isn't.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:16Speaker 04

  And artificial intelligence is.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:39:19Speaker 04

  They're not social.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:22Speaker 04

  Ever been in a room of people, or a subway car, or a block where everybody's on their phone? That is not social.

• 1:39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  And artificial is artificial is artificial.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I'm sure you get asked this question all the time, but what, walk me through some of the advice that you give for aspiring documentarians.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  It's really so bad and platitudinous that I'm embarrassed almost to repeat it. Because there's no laws, and everybody I know that is a working documentary filmmaker, meaning they don't have a side teaching gig, you know, to pay the bills, that are actually making, you know, living, supporting their families, have all come at it at different ways. And so I realize that there's no set career path, the way there might be for a feature filmmaker, or a doctor, or a lawyer. And so what I tell them is, one is Socratic, you gotta know yourself, right? Who am I? Film is intensely glamorous for teenagers, and at a college level, the first, you know,

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  the introductory classes are jammed with people, and then all of a sudden, next year, it's pretty winnowed down. And there ought to be a mechanism within us, this is the Socratic dimension, that says, you know what, I don't think I have something to say. I thought this was going to be easier than it actually is, I see how difficult it is. And then the other one has to do with that difficulty, that there's way more talented people than there are possibilities of making a film in this economy, even with the explosion of documentary films now, and some of it quite drecked. So obviously, some of those people who didn't deserve to get a budget got one. Is that you have to persevere. I mean, I used to keep on my desks two three-ring binders

• 1:41:04Speaker 04

  filled with hundreds of rejections, just for that first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, just to remind me, you know, that it doesn't come easy, you know, and that was sitting juxtaposed from a little thing on my door, a quote from a theater impresario in Minneapolis Globe Theater named Tyrone Guthrie said, "We're looking for ideas large enough to be afraid of again." Not a very good English sentence, but it just means, just bite off more than you can chew and learn how to chew. And a lot of that is what I try to impart when people ask me the questions, and I warn them in advance that it's just gonna sound like, I'm sure I've just described things that you guys know about what you do, and I'm sure everybody who's listening knows, yeah, those kind of apply to what I do. And so, I think there's,

• 1:41:48Speaker 04

  basically, in his essay on self-reliance, Emerson says, "Do whatever in Lee rejoices." You need to actually figure out what this thing is that is, you say "I" to, of which there are millions of "I's," and which one is the authentic, and how do you proceed to do whatever in Lee rejoices, as he said.

• 1:42:09John Coogan?

  Is it refreshing to change centuries? Do you think your life would be different? Do you think the projects, the quality, might suffer if you had, at some point, when you realized that this was gonna be the career, you had started linearly and done American Revolution, Civil War, World War II, then Vietnam, and you just go year by year, as opposed to bouncing around a little bit?

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not even bouncing around, because only in retrospect can you do that.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  I just, my best friend was a book salesman, and I was sick, and he threw on my bed a paperback, a trade paperback version of David McCullough's The Great Bridge, the epic story of the building of the bridge. I read it in one gulp, I said, "We're gonna make a film about it." And then, you know, we're thrashing about to what to do, and my future wife and I are driving through western Massachusetts, and we pass a shaker village outside of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with this beautiful round stone barn, slammed on the brakes and said, "Who are these people who made these buildings?" That was the second film. Another guy was trying to convince me to do a film on Huey Long, the turbulent southern demagogue. And someone else said, "Boy, you know, you did a great film on the Brooklyn Bridge, you know, the Statue of Liberty's 100th birthday is coming up, why don't you do something on that?" And I said, "Yeah, but I'm not gonna make your film."

• 1:43:25Speaker 04

  And so, you know, if you give me the money, I'll do it, but I'm not, you know, so Liberty Mutual, you know, insurance, before they got the fucking emu, gave me money for the whole thing. And I made a very complex film, which also got nominated for an Academy Award. But each one of those first four films come from different things. And so you begin to sort of make choices. So at any given moment, you know, and I didn't think until I was in the middle of Vietnam, not the middle, at the end of it, we were locking it. I was looking at a map we made of the Yedrang Valley in the central highlands. And you could see the positions of the Viet Cong and the NVA and the Americans. And I thought, boy, this could be the British moving west on Long Island towards Brooklyn. And I looked up, I said, we're doing the revolution.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  So they come, everything comes that way and it's much better, you know? It's like, it's like, you know, a batter, you know, you just kind of read the pitch. And at that given moment, it's a fastball, so you're gonna hit it this way or, or, or hit it to the opposite field, or you're gonna try to choke up because he's throwing junk and you gotta figure out how to respond. I mean, it's, it's literally, I'm so glad there's not a plan, you know? Or chronological stuff. And, and, and, and you can do is take those 40 films and then put them in chronological order. And, you know, that wastes so much time.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  I, I just have to pass something along. A lot of people in the, in the chat are saying that they love your work, obviously, but particularly that they became much closer with their fathers through watching documentaries.

• 1:44:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is true, and mothers too. I mean, particularly with regard to baseball, I don't know how many people come up and said, I've seen baseball more than you have. And I go, what are you talking about? They said, well, every single January during the Hot Stove League, my dad and I would watch it. And my dad just passed away, but my son is old enough. You know, I mean, I've had so many moving things about that, or, or mothers taking kids to, to baseball games or going over battlefields. So there's a nice, you know, we talk about how divided we are right now. All you have to do is look at my films and see we're way more divided at other times. And what brings us together are stories. The power of stories. And neutralizes that dialectic that you were mentioning. Yeah.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Neutralizes this false notion that there is a simplistic binary that we can impose on everything and figure it all out. You can't. Yeah. And the complexity of us, in the end, reminds us that there's only us and no them. So I make films about the US, but I also make films about us. You may.

• 1:45:58Jordi Hays?

  The chat also wants us to ask about AI. I already have an idea of your reaction. I appreciate your approach of not letting technology guide the work. But are you at all excited at some point in the future of being able to recreate a scene from history using

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  image or video generation tools?

• 1:46:26Speaker 04

  Not really. I don't, I don't think so. I think every once in a while, when you're trying to run down a portrait of Benedict Arnold, who's not a popular person in the United States, so there's no real visual evidence left of him. AI can be helpful in locating that. You know, I use it when I Google a question. I notice how quickly the AI answer comes up. I have to take it with a grain of salt right now. It's not that it's wrong. It's just you may not be offered all the nuances and possibilities. That's going to change and whatever, but not to write a thing or to generate an image. There's a sanctity. I mean, if you say a picture is worth a thousand words, then if you make it up, then what is it? I mean, when everything is permissible, what's true?

• 1:47:11Speaker 04

  And I just, I mean, that goes back to your question. You know, what is true? And I think it's really important to at least have, you know, it's like a kid. You remember this when you're young, four or five years old, and your mother or your dad's sitting on the bench at the park and you're playing, but every once in a while, you gotta go and touch home base. I want to be that person. Yeah.

• 1:47:34Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:47:35John Coogan?

  You mentioned McCullough, and I'm a fan of Robert Caro.

• 1:47:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, we just interviewed him for a film we're doing on LBJ and the Great Society.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  I can imagine. Are you excited about where that genre of historical writing is going right now?

• 1:47:52Speaker 04

  Oh, God, yes. I mean, there are so many heavy hitters. I've been out on the road for the last year, a lot of it with Rick Atkinson, who's two-thirds of the way through his trilogy of The American Revolution. Is the first talking head you see accidentally in our film, but no accident. And the last talking head you see, there's Doris Kunz Goodwin. David McCullough has left us. Stephen Ambrose has left us. But I was just on a podcast with Ari Emanuel and Walter Isaacson yesterday, talking about, you know, what the Mount Rushmore that was when a president would look like, and having great arguments with him and his friend Ben Persky, and the four of us, you know, arguing and fighting for now the fastest hour that I've spent. So there's so many, there's so many good writers.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  Walter's influenced two of my films, you know. He's one of the biographers of Benjamin Franklin, and he also did our, he also wrote a biography of our first non-American topic, Leonardo da Vinci.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, Ken. This was very informative.

• 1:48:52Speaker 04

  This is really.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John has done a great job keeping it together, but I think he's definitely one of your biggest, biggest fans, and you've come up, you've come up a lot. Oftentimes, when I can't get a hold of John.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  My mom is probably watching, and, yeah, we watched so many documentaries together.

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  Together. What's her name?

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Marjorie.

• 1:49:13Speaker 04

  Marjorie, thank you for watching. Good job.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Ken. Thank you for joining.

• 1:49:19Speaker 04

  All right. Be well.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 1:49:23Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about Gemini, Gemini 3.1 Pro. We're gonna have to update this soon. With a more cable based baseline, it's great for visualizing super complex tasks, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And without further ado, we have Gokul Rajaram from Marathon Management in the studio. How are you doing?

• 1:49:54Speaker 05

  What's going on?

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:49:56Speaker 05

  Great to see you, John.

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Is software dead? First, introduce yourself. Sorry.

• 1:50:05Speaker 05

  Hey guys, I'm a huge fan, a long time fan and listener to you guys, to TVPN. I'm Gokul. I've been an operator and investor for 25 years in the valley. And yeah, excited to be here with all of you.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  So yeah.

• 1:50:18Speaker 05

  It's about time.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, long overdue. Yeah, walk us through how you have been processing the SaaSpocalypse, the Citrini article, all the different narratives that have kind of shaken the tech industry, both to the upside in many cases, and also to the downside and others throughout the start of this year.

• 1:50:39Speaker 05

  Look, I think software is going through a change. I don't think it's dead. Software is still going to be around. In fact, every industry is going to use software at its core. I think what is going to be challenged is companies that are surface level, where they're going to be light, which are easy to rip and replace. I think of, I think of software as two kinds. One of them are lightweight, seat based, easy to rip and replace. A good example, I always say I don't want to pick on them is Zendesk. Zendesk is customer support software. They sell on the basis of seats and use it for delivering outcomes for customers. The problem with Zendesk is that if I'm a customer of Zendesk, I'm buying 50 seats, I could reduce it to 20 seats and use 30 seats for AI. In the same budget, 30 seats,

• 1:51:24Speaker 05

  I can use AI. So I can literally Compare Zendesk's performance to AI agents in parallel and Zendesk won't even know this is happening. So you might be running an A B test and you can literally run Zendesk in parallel. And that's a challenge for a company like Zendesk because it's not deeply rooted. Can use it part time for only part of your employees or part of your customer service request. The other kind of software is stuff that is not outcome based, that is truly running your company. That's truly running a process. A good example is NetSuite, which is an ERP, which is literally at the core of your general ledger. It's running your accounting. A lot of your business is running off it. You can't really run another version of NetSuite in parallel to NetSuite. You've got to run. And so NetSuite is in a much better position than Zendesk.

• 1:52:08Speaker 05

  Now, at the highest level, the reality is every piece of software has to reinvent itself over the next. But the timeframe, it's much more urgent for Zendesk to do that in the next six to 12 months. While something like NetSuite probably has years, three to five years to think about it. So why would NetSuite not I would do? I would create AI agents, which I'm sure they're already doing, and I would, as I say, commoditize my complement. I basically make it free to actually have a bunch of interesting workflows which are offered to AI. And I would basically still charge for the data. Very, very different and.

• 1:52:45Jordi Hays?

  How did you, how did you, there's, there's a whole new class of AI native ERPs that have come online and raised over the last one to two years. Is, is, how, how did you process them? There's certainly like a long graveyard of, of, of startups as well. But part of the challenge is there's just so much software to build with a system like that. And, and maybe now is the right time, given that we can create software a lot faster than we could historically.

• 1:53:16Speaker 05

  Right. I think the, I, I've, I know many of those companies. I think they are great entrepreneurs. I think the challenge for them is that there is no. Pressing, burning reason for somebody using a Netflix or NetSuite, I should say, to rip and replace NetSuite. So what you have to do is you have to go with a company that doesn't have an ERP today and get them to start using you as a soft, as a software company, as a vendor, and then grow with them. And so I think it is, so that's the strategy. Build your customer base from net new companies which don't have an ERP today. I think going to somebody who's using a, a large ERP and saying, well, throw out your ERP and replace it with me is hard. So you've got to either come with a very, very, very narrow wedge where you can inject

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  yourself in and then use it to over time take on NetSuite. But more interestingly, I think, go after younger, fast-growing startups which will need a NetSuite or an ERP system in a few months. Offer it to them for free. Some of them actually, some of these ERPs have been saying, if you're funded by one of these VCs, you can use the first year of my product for free. Sure. And that's a smart idea because you use it for free, you're not going to generate much revenue, but in exchange, they become sticky. And when you actually start generating revenue a year from now, they're there for you. Yeah.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  Um, what, what do you think is happening in the private markets for software companies where their public comps have declined by 50%? There, we, we sort of went through this and I'd love to know how you process the, the end of Zerp. I remember reading Logan Bartlett on this at Redpoint a lot. He was pulling public comps and seeing how multiple compression had happened in the public software SaaS market and the effect that that was happening in the private markets. It feels like the private markets haven't fully digested the SaaS apocalypse in the same way because a lot of the startups in the private markets that are going after

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  those comps were sort of AI native or earlier on the AI narrative. But at the same time, there's like a bigger question there.

• 1:55:22Speaker 05

  That's right. The way the private markets work is what can the private markets do? They can't re-rate the company on a daily basis like in the public markets. So what they can do is they can

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  That term sheet I signed is due for a wire at what valuation? But I'd like a 50% discount please because the comp is down 50%. Yeah, you can exactly do that.

• 1:55:41Speaker 05

  You know, that happened in 2008 where you did see when the 2008 Lehman thing happened. You did see people pull term sheets right after that happened that outstanding. But those kinds of things that happen on the edge. But the biggest thing that's happening is that there's certain classes of business models that have maybe raised a C or an A. They are now unable to raise a B or will be unable to raise financing. And those are business models that are primarily application layer. I think if you're just doing workflows, it better be a deep and complex workflow that is deeply, deeply, deeply embedded. Because now with OpenClaw emerging, you guys might have seen this. Open actually does the work. It's not just kind of workflows. It actually goes and does the job. So we're just putting software workflows that's enabling other people, but not doing the job yourself. It becomes harder to justify that you will exist.

• 1:56:24Speaker 05

  Because remember, the VC timeframe is not a year. It is five to seven years. And if you think about confounding over five to seven years, that's insane. Why? Because the capability to these models are doubling what once every six months, say. And if once every six months, it's quadrupling every year. That means in five to seven years, it's two to the power of 12, which is a thousandfold better than what it is today. And my human brain is unable to comprehend what it means for these models to be 500 to 1,000 times better than they are today. What it means of software. So I think everybody's trying to figure out over the venge timeframe, what this is mean if you extrapolate the power of these models and make them 1,000 times better. What survives and what doesn't? What survives?

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

  Things that are deeply rooted, that have atoms. We think as software investors that things that have atoms, yes, there are humanoid robots. But I personally feel general robots, humanoid robots, there are machinists or HVAC repair people, whatever the case is. That's going to be slightly further. So things that have atoms are generally protected over the five to 10 year timeframe. Things that have regulatory moats are protected. Things that have money flowing through them are protected. So there are a few classes of things that are protected.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  If somebody came to you and wanted to vibe a code DoorDash, what advice would you give them about the challenges that they might face on building a competitor?

• 1:57:45Speaker 05

  You know, I'll give you a, I'll give you a story. I'll give you two stories, actually. Assume it's June twenty twenty eight, right? Which is what I think Citrini had for thirty percent drop in stock. Assume you're hungry. You open your phone. You ask Claude, say, or whatever your new startup is, the food ordering startup, to order your sandwich with gluten-free bread. It routes you order directly to the restaurant because it's figured out how to connect to all the restaurants and it saves you two dollars. But it takes an hour and a half to show up. It was cold and they forgot to make the bread gluten-free, so you can't eat it anymore. Who owes your refund? Does Anthropic have a customer service number? No. So basically, you open DoorDash. The sandwich is the first recommendation. You tap on it, ninety minutes later, you're holding your sandwich, still fresh, and guess what? They remembered the gluten-free bread.

• 1:58:29Speaker 05

  So that's one story where if something goes wrong in the physical world, who does, who, who takes care of it? DoorDash is a managed marketplace. I'll get back to that. The better, more pertinent story is run to twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen. Google launched a product called Google Food Ordering. You might have seen this Google Foodordering. You can actually order from a restaurant. And it literally, it was driving at that point multiples of traffic to any restaurant compared to where DoorDash was driving. Because Google still massive, back then was massive. You could search for a restaurant, you could order from a directory from Google. However, the retention of people who ordered Google Foodordering was basically zero. It was, it was negligible. Why? Because after you place the order, there are tons of things that go wrong in the physical world and you couldn't really call Google. And the restaurant didn't take responsibility either.

• 1:59:15Speaker 05

  So that product doesn't exist today. And I think that's the fundamental reason. There are things that happen in the digital world that are not enough to replicate something like DoorDash. DoorDash manages not just aggregation and supply of restaurants. It manages everything afterwards. It manages figuring out how to get you out of the right, right dasher. It manages how to basically refund if there's something that goes wrong. It manages customer support in case you want to use it. There's a collection of systems that work together. Discovery is something that I think Agentic will do well. And hopefully, DoorDash will incorporate many of those. But discovery is not enough. If you think about Google. And what did Google disintermediate? What do we use Google for today?

• 1:59:57Speaker 05

  It did really well with Expedia and flights and hotels and also things like mortgages. So the types of marketplaces that Google has been able to disrupt our search are things that are more lead gen or just I would call light marketplaces where payment happens to Google. You can book hotels or flights to Google.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:14Speaker 05

  You don't have to take care of what happens afterwards. But a managed marketplace in the physical world is the most durable thing. It is not a piece of software. And this is the thing I think people get wrong about DoorDash. DoorDash, the first piece of software they built after the website, if you remember, DoorDash had Spalwal to delivery. It had this website with a PDF. The first piece of software they built was not a consumer app. It was a dasher app. It was the app for dashers because that was what was needed to get the food properly, to make sure the dasher got the order, accepted the order, picked up the food, delivered it before the consumer.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about what it takes to build liquidity on a marketplace? It feels like that's also underrated if you're, if you need to spend billions of dollars to actually create the scale of a marketplace, that that's something that can't necessarily be vibe coded.

• 2:01:04Speaker 05

  Exactly. So it's the biggest mode here, one of the modes is density. Density leads to liquidity, which means the more orders you have in a given geography at a given time, the better you can batch deliveries, which increases driving utilization and reduces cost per order. And that's what you have to do. If you were to actually pay the actual, pay the actual cost of delivering, it would be ten, twelve, fifteen dollars. The reason you're only paying two dollars or three dollars is because these orders are batched and you're basically not having a single person. You're basically batching it to the best dasher driver. That's why you might see in, in busy, busy times that there are drivers waiting outside certain restaurants

• 2:01:46Speaker 05

  because they literally know that that order, they can get, pick it up and there is massive density of orders. So density and liquidity, that's what drives marketplace economics. And so whoever wants to replicate DoorDash doesn't just need to improve aggregation at the consumer level, but build a massively dense geography by geography marketplace in every city that, in every suburb that DoorDash operates in. And that's a massive endeavor. That's what DoorDash spent a few billion dollars building.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, just a few. What does it take to be a great public company board member?

• 2:02:22Speaker 05

  It's interesting. I think, you know, it has changed over the last several years. I think a few years ago, decade ago, say, the profile of a board member was quite uniform. It was people from the finance or corporate worlds. And that's still important. I think you need a finance person who runs your audit committee. You need a CEO. I think every public board member, if you would go to any public CEO and say, what is the archetype you want in your board? Most of them want CEOs. They want a CEO on the board because you want a CEO you can confide in and you can ask for help from. But there are new archetypes that have emerged over the last few years. One, product engineering leader, someone who's led product and engineering at a company. Why? Because every company, like I said, has become a software company, a technology company.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  So every public company wants someone with product engineering chops. Second, you want someone who represents your customer. At DoorDash, for example, sorry, at Square, we had the CEO of Shake Shack. And why? Because Shake Shack was a prototypical customer for Square. No, Danny, it was Randy Garuti. Danny was a chairman. So Randy was, Randy was a CEO. I mean, yeah, Danny was a founder and Randy was a CEO. So he was excellent. He always, he would really assume. And then typically what happens is, especially if it's a company that came through venture capital, typically one or two of the VCs that have been early in the journey of the company stay with the company and the CEO trusts them. In Square's case, it was Roloff Botha at Sequoia. In DoorDash's case, it's Alfred Lin, ironically, again from Sequoia.

• 2:03:49Speaker 05

  But at Pinterest's case, it was Jeff Jordan from Andreessen. So each company has one VC probably, who, and then in Coinbase's case, it's Fred Wilson and Marc Andreessen from, from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. So VC, product engineering chops, voice of the customer, CEO, finance person. Those are the five archetypes. One of the best practices today that I've seen companies using is the notion of a board buddy. What it means is Every exec at a company should actually be paired up with a board member who's an expert in the same area. So for example, I typically will work with the head of product and the head of engineering at the company, so I'm on the board of, and I meet with them once a month outside of the board meeting. Those meetings are actually really good. I am essentially

• 2:04:31Speaker 05

  listening to them in a judgment-free zone and trying to be helpful and getting feedback on them. How can we be helpful? And the same is happening with the finance person, the finance-oriented board member, they meet with the CFO, the customer-oriented board member, they meet with the CRO, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that board buddy system I've seen helps dramatically because that's what your board member should be helpful, not just the CEO, but the exec team. It also helps get exposure for us to the exec team, who they are. And as we think about succession planning and stuff like that, we can evaluate who these people are and who should succeed the CEO, what the people.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  What are your forecasts around M and A in 2026? Last year was the year of the licensing deal.

• 2:05:14John Coogan?

  Zombie acquisition with the Ghost Ship.

• 2:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Ghost Ship acquisition, but it still feels like we could see a lot of activity this year.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  There's a lot of cheap companies out there. GoPros at 150, there's a lot of stuff.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, in the public markets, but also, but also, public companies that want to bolt on fast-growing teams.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 05

  I think there's going to be both. I mean, you saw, for example, MyFitnessPal.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:37Speaker 05

  Bought this company, Cal AI, and I think it's 18 months old, right? 50 million. And so I think there's going to be a tremendous amount. Why? Because, like you said, there's a few things happening. One, software companies are valued, and the valuations has gone down. And so I myself in a portfolio have seen, if the CEO has courage, they can actually, the stock market is already telling you that the terminal value of a business is zero. So there's really no downside to burning the boats and going all in on AI.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:06Speaker 05

  And I have a company, Podium. I mean, you should actually get the guy, he's amazing. He's similar to Intercom, very similar to Intercom.

• 2:06:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:06:12Speaker 05

  He had a business that grew to 200 million, was kind of growing very slowly. And he said, you know what? I'm going to go build an AI agent. I'm going to, it's basically a product for SMBs. And he's basically gone from 0 to 100 million in 24 months and is accelerating. By just saying, you know what? I'm not going to worry about the legacy business, where's our new business? So I think. But the assets are there. These companies have great assets. Yeah. They need they need that. And so it might be PE buying these companies for cheaper. But the P can no longer have the playbook of we'll operationalize. It's not about operationalizing or improving costs. It's about building a new product, a net new product, an AI needed product. And then, like you said, I think there's a tremendous number of. For example, inference clouds are a new thing.

• 2:06:56Speaker 05

  Fireworks, Model, Basecamp. There's multiple five to 10 billion dollar companies. I have to assume the hyperscalers are not sitting around saying. Inference in AI is happening on these completely different cloud platforms. Yeah. Different. What the hell am I? I'm going to be a commodity cloud platform. Yep. So almost certainly, I think you're going to see one of the hyperscalers buy one of these Neo clouds. I think Corvii was one kind of cloud. But there's together, there's like six or seven different next generation cloud companies. So cloud. Software, you saw chips with Nvidia buying Grok. There's a bunch of next gen. I think you're going to see, and of course. The whole Warner Brothers thing at the application level or consumer side. It's a tremendous amount now that I think we are in an administration which is much more.

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  Open to this. For lack of a better word, you're going to see, I I I think there's going to be amazing activity next year.

• 2:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that the Square, you were at Square for almost six and a half years. Do you think the Square? Riff from last week will be an anomaly or are you expecting? Forty percent to be the new 10% riff?

• 2:07:59Speaker 05

  The latter. I'm almost certain there's going to be multiple 20 to 30% cuts, maybe even 40. The reality is, nobody's hiring. I think almost every public company. Has basically net new hiring is almost zero. Why? Because you can do much more. Every function can do more with AI. So it's equaling to a 30% boost in productivity. And that's the first. Next year, if you get another 30% boost, you need 30% fewer people. So over the next 18 months, almost certainly. Every public company is going to have a 30%. If they don't, I question, I question the leadership.

• 2:08:32Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, so a lot of the, so so a lot, a lot of people's reactions to the the Square riff was. Okay, AI is just a convenient excuse. It it it kind of is a narrative that the market will be able to process. You think there's more, you you think they're actually getting, seeing the efficiency. To be able to make a decision like that and it's not just marketing.

• 2:08:54Speaker 05

  One hundred percent. I think they realized that they could basically do the same job and probably more efficiently with fewer coordination. The fewer people you have, the easier it is to coordinate, as you know. I mean, the two of you run the show. Assuming you had four hosts, how hard it would be like some of the ESPN shows, right? It's just the two of you. Every time you add a person, it's M times N. It's like, like it's, it increases exponentially the coordination problem.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:15Speaker 05

  So I think that twelve thousand person coming or six thousand person coming, night and day, I bet they're going to move faster, be more innovative and drive more productivity than they were doing before.

• 2:09:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's, what's the update on Marathon? Uh, like, uh, where, where are you guys focused, uh, in Q1? Uh, what, what's most exciting for you?

• 2:09:33Speaker 05

  We are an early-stage software and fintech, uh, focused firm. Uh, we focus, it's all the best companies you do are the intersection of the two. But in software, we look at infrastructure, security and application. Uh, I think the themes we're looking at are some of the themes that we talked about. One is what are durable companies at the application layer? Uh, there are lots of interesting and, and, you know, things on the security side we're looking at. For example, phishing is something which is going, I mean, I have been phished now. I mean, I feel almost on a daily basis, I'll get an email that looks like it's coming from a, uh, coming from a human being, but it's actually AI.

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:08Speaker 05

  Uh, and then, uh, the third area is around infrastructure. Like I said, there's a lot of new infrastructure that has been built because every piece of infrastructure that existed till two years ago was built for humans. Every piece of infrastructure has to be rebuilt for AI agents.

• 2:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:23Speaker 05

  On fintech, uh, you know, stable coins is just, I think I, I'm, I'm in love with stable coins. I think USDC, uh, I have so many people I know outside the US now, who basically want all their money to be not in their local currency, but in USDC, a stable coin. Because it's back to the US dollar, it gives the opportunity for everyone in the world to not suffer a ten percent daily inflationary, basically reduction in their purchasing power, but to hold money in, in, in a, uh, in a, in a way that prevents, basically it's back to the US dollar. So I think, uh, stable coin is another, you know, so far, I think it's the best real world, outside of tokenization. It's the best real world application of, of, of the crypto industry in some ways, and I'm extremely bullish on it.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

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

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on the show. It should have happened a long time ago.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, always been a big fan of your hosts. Keep it up.

• 2:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yep, always welcome.

• 2:11:19Speaker 05

  It's been amazing. It's been two years since you started. It's been incredible.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  One year. Isn't that crazy? Yeah.

• 2:11:25Speaker 05

  That is incredible. Congratulations, guys. Huge fan.

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Gogo. Great to see you.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 2:11:41Jordi Hays?

  Board member Coinbase, board member Pinterest, board member The Trade Desk, spent four and a half years at DoorDash, six and a half years at Square.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 2:11:50Jordi Hays?

  Three years at Meta.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Let me tell you.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Four years at Google.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Fin.ai. Wow, Google. That's insane. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin.ai. There is a talent shakeup going on at Quen, at Alibaba's AI lab. I want Tyler Cosgrove to take us through it, but there are a number of posts. Junyoung Lin says, "Me stepping down by my beloved Quen." And another individual highlighted by Zephyr says, "Bruh, Alibaba, Quen, disintegrating in real time."

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 2:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of unclear, right? The Chinese labs are like very not open about what they're doing. Also, it's not like an independent lab, right? It's under Alibaba.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:40Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, Quen has like recently has been like kind of the main, they're the staple in open source. And like in Chinese open source, but in open source broadly, right? Even the American open source labs are still like pretty far behind Quen. So yeah, it's very interesting. People are saying that there was like new leadership. They apparently Alibaba brought over people from DeepMind. And then maybe they're just like completely transferring the leadership there. And then some people are saying, "Oh, these guys are all gonna come to the US. Maybe they're gonna go to XAI or something like this."

• 2:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's, I mean, definitely very interesting.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Do you know where these folks are located physically? I believe they are in mainland China, correct?

• 2:13:24Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, I think that's.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  That's reasonable to assume because there is a world where there's a whole bunch of AI talent that's missing or, you know, looking for the next gig. You sign up for some golden visas, even at $5 million a pop, that's completely affordable for an AI lab these days. It'll be interesting to see where these folks land. Yuchin Jin says, "The end of an era. Qwen lost its tech lead when we launched the Qwen 3 next endpoints on Hyperbolic with Junyong and his team. They were still online at 6:00 AM Beijing time. They were grinding. Thank you for pushing open source AI forward." Do you think they were caught distilling other American models and then they were fired?

• 2:14:08Speaker 02

  I mean, I.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  Busted.

• 2:14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think that's like a fireable offense, right? That's the best way to.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  That was probably the top-down mandate. Please, spend as little money as possible.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they were fired for not distilling fast enough.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Nathan Lambert has an extra take here. He says, "The gaping hole that Qwen imploding will leave in the open source research ecosystem will be hard to fill. The small models are irreplaceable. I'll do my best to keep carrying that torch. Not that I've reached the level of impact of Qwen by any means, but every bit matters." It will be interesting seeing how DeepSeek responds to this, whether these folks go to DeepSeek, whether DeepSeek adjusts their strategy. When it comes to small models, that feels like something that High Flyer could potentially fulfill. But also, who knows? We don't know how large the Qwen team, how sizable this is, what they have planned. Sometimes there's large departures because there's a whole bunch of new people coming

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  in, and so they might have just hired a ton of people that just haven't announced. It also will be interesting if this is one of those situations where it's clear that there is a raid going on, but people aren't announcing where they're landing for another couple of weeks, and so they just announce their departure. We see this a lot at the American AI labs where people will say, "It's my last day." And then two weeks later, they'll be like, "I joined the competitor." And then two weeks later, they'll be like, "I'm back at the original company." And they'll go back and forth all day long. Anyway, let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. I want to talk about fast food CEOs.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull up this video of McDonald's CEO.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  We never watched this all the way through. I want to, I want to see for myself. This is McDonald's CEO, Chris Kepenzinski. He went viral after seeming reluctant to eat his own burgers. Takes a tiny bite, looks uncomfortable and calls the food product. That's the size of-

• 2:16:07Speaker 06

  With, you've heard about it.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  The Big Arch.

• 2:16:09Speaker 06

  Here it is. The Big Arch.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  This is pretty good.

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  This is something that we have tested already.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  On humans.

• 2:16:15Speaker 06

  Germany, Canada.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  On animals.

• 2:16:17Speaker 06

  I love this product. It is so good. I'm going to do a tasting right now, but I'm going to eat this for my lunch, just so you know. So here we go. First, holy cow.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  If I can survive a single meal, it's good enough for you.

• 2:16:28Speaker 06

  We've got a very unique kind of sesame poppy sort of bun on it.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  Public presentation, in my opinion.

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  We've got two quarter pound patties, a delicious Big Arch sauce.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  It's probably his first TikTok, but he's doing okay.

• 2:16:42Speaker 06

  Oh, there's so much going on with this. First of all, let's try to get this thing, I don't even know how to attack it. Got so much to it. Oh, there's also some crispy onions on here as well. See those kind of coming out?

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  He's stoked.

• 2:16:55Speaker 06

  All right.

• 2:16:55John Coogan?

  I met the CEO of McDonald's, the previous CEO at South by Southwest in like 2013.

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  That is so good. That's a big bite for a Big Arch.

• 2:17:04John Coogan?

  That's a huge burger.

• 2:17:05Speaker 06

  It's distinctively McDonald's.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  No, undeniably not that big of a bite.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, not that big of a bite.

• 2:17:11Jordi Hays?

  He just kind of-

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  But eating on camera is so hard. If you just start housing that thing, there's going to be a whole different set of backlash.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  It definitely looked like his first ever bite of a burger.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's not a strong performance. Lulu said layup opportunity for the number two ranked fast food chain CEO to film a brutal-

• 2:17:31Jordi Hays?

  And I think somebody did. We can pull up another video here.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Someone did. Someone, someone did it.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  There's someone saying, "Japanese manga writer trying to write Americans. The CEO would perhaps compete over who would take the manliest bite of a burger." Oh, that's ridiculous. Surely, America could not be like that.

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  Okay, but watch this. Burger King? Oh, that's a real bite. That's a real bite.

• 2:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  I'm a Burger King guy now. He won me over very, very well. It's, this guy seems like he, he can flip burgers. He can- He can take bites of burgers.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  I saw another video of Chris, the McDonald's CEO, coming out on his personal Instagram saying he eats, he wanted to clarify that he does eat McDonald's three or four times a week, he said.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:18:15Jordi Hays?

  So he is defending his honor.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  McDonald's is great. I'm, I'm, I'm a fan.

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, saying Gabby, Gabby Goldberg called it out, the, I love this product.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  I love this product. That's what every, that's what every chef says, you know, after they, after they, uh, you know, bring out a meal, they say, I love this product. I think you will too.

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  He's a business guy. I don't have a problem with that. Refer to it as product. Go off. It's, I, I, I, I stand by it. I think it's great.

• 2:18:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I just think, even though it technically is a product, I think people want their food to be food.

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Probably should just use food next time. Well, good luck on the comms front. Uh, what is happening with Claude, their, their, the, the traffic is spiking due to all of the news and, uh, people are having fun with, it, it hasn't actually been going down? I haven't, I've, I've been seeing mixed things. I checked, uh, Claude to see if it was down. It was, it was fine for me, but, uh, people are having fun.

• 2:19:14Jordi Hays?

  It went down last night for enough time for people to pay attention, but.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  To the tune of 4,000 likes. I, I do wonder if there's a, if there's like the, the, the, the compute debate over, you know, how many servers you need, how many chips you need to marshal, how many, how much investment do you need from various hyperscalers? Uh, does that equation change if there's a new sudden influx of consumer adoption? It's unclear that consumers are, are driving, uh, you know, insane inference loads compared to, you know, your, your open claw folks who might be firing off 12 hours of agentic programming. That feels a lot more, uh, inference, uh, heavy than, uh, people that are like, yeah, I'm, I'm replacing my daily driver LLM app.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  And then they like fire off the usual, like one query a day. Um, that's maybe not, but at the same time, lots of people coming in, scaling, scaling challenges comes for us all. Uh, we need a new whale for AI. You remember the Twitter whale, the fail whale? Twitter had such a funny whimsical culture. There was this thing, when Twitter was scaling, they had this monolithic Ruby on Rails app, I believe, and they couldn't scale the app fast enough because. Things would go viral, big moments would happen in the news, in the media, basketball, NBA finals would happen. Everyone would get on, be talking about it, and the site would just go down for everyone. And so, therefore, a four-page, their page

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  that you would land on when the service was not responding, or populating tweets, or showing you any content at all, had a fail whale, a whale that was being lifted up by some birds, if I remember that correctly, and it became like loved by the Twitter community. And the rest is history. Eventually, it would scale. Our next guest is here. First, let me tell you about Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And without further ado, we have Nick from Wraith Watch. He's the founder and CEO. How are you doing, Nick?

• 2:21:21Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 2:21:22Speaker 07

  What's going on, fellas? Good to be here.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:21:25Jordi Hays?

  We have a big gong. You've got a big deal.

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Kick us off with that.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  No, introduce yourself.

• 2:21:31John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself first. Tell us what the company does.

• 2:21:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, thanks, guys. Well, I'm Nick. I'm Wraith Watch's CEO, one of the founders, former CIO, Chief Information Officer at Anduril. Joined Anduril when it was about 100 people, scaled it through when it was about 4,500. I think they've doubled since then, since I left a couple of years ago. SpaceX and Palantir before that, leading cyber defense teams at both companies. And then, prior to entering the private sector, was responsible for pre-assault, electronic warfare, and cyber warfare in support of United States Special Operations Command, so.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  But you worked at Palantir, SpaceX, and Anduril?

• 2:22:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  That's insane.

• 2:22:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:22:14Jordi Hays?

  And served.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  And served. Wow. Well, thank you for your service.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  So it was really hard to raise, it was really hard to raise your first round.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Thank you for, thank you for your service to the venture-backed defense tech industry and the LPs. Thank you, MBF.

• 2:22:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. It was tough. Sprinkled some AI in the, in the deck, and it was a lot good.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  The rest is history. So, yeah, where is the product today? What are the key, like, landing zones that you're going after? Because cybersecurity is pretty broad these days, right?

• 2:22:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, so fundamentally, what Wraith Watch does is we build autonomous cyber defense systems for the United States government and its allies. That includes private sector and Fortune 500 as well. So we're deployed today to Fortune 500, commercial nuclear, aerospace defense, manufacturing. But the byline on the screen is our recent announce with the federal government where we just landed a $30 million deal to deploy Wraith Watch in parallel. Clean hit. To deploy Wraith Watch to almost a dozen federal agencies in parallel.

• 2:23:27Speaker 07

  So, pretty exciting time for us. And ironic time, given that we're in the middle of a shooting war with Iran, which is known for its offensive cyber warfare capabilities.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you explain to me cyber defense? I mean, you can go and look for holes in systems and scan code bases. You can also be rerouting, dealing with firewalls if you're getting DDoS. What's the nature of the threats that you're seeing? What's in the wheelhouse? What do you leave to other cybersecurity firms at this point?

• 2:24:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, so just to set the stage here a bit. So historically, cyber is kind of the last mover when it comes to any kind of advance in software engineering or tech in general. Like, we're always the last to adopt stuff, for whatever reason. Maybe it's because we're just, at the end of the day, a bunch of skeptical neckbeards. I don't know why.

• 2:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, is that because, like, basically, people want to develop a new capability, and that's really exciting, and then people realize, okay, now we need to defend against said new capability?

• 2:24:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, now we need to secure it. And so it definitely... The Gartner hype curve applies to the cyber adoption curve, I would say. And it's precisely because of what you just said, like Open Claw is a great example, right? There was all this excitement around it and then two days later, it's like, well, shit, this entire ecosystem is open to attack. There's API keys floating around in the wild. There's people injecting prompts. There's all kinds of stuff going on. And so what you'll find is just a default sense of skepticism across the industry when it comes to anything new. And AI is no stranger to this. Makes sense, right? But what we're seeing is that the attackers on the attack side of the equation have no such compunctions.

• 2:25:19Speaker 07

  They are generally willing to try and take on any new technology that comes on board. And they certainly have adopted AI in order to industrialize and weaponize their exploits and their attacks and campaigns in general. And they're moving at warp speed. Like when we started the company a few years ago, you know, we were met with, you know, skepticism like, you know, are you guys really think this is a thing? No one really knew what an agentic workflow was with AI, like to everyone who was still a chatbot. Now everyone knows what an agent is. Everyone knows you can string them together. And the adversaries have been kind of one step ahead of everybody and they've been wiring these things up to offensive frameworks, offensive tools.

• 2:26:04Speaker 07

  And now you're seeing this kind of asymptotic attack pressure that's targeting organizations and that's just coming up with novel new exploits, attack techniques and so on every single day. Now, the problem is there's no corresponding defensive counter pressure. So you have this mounting attack pressure on the outside and then organizations and their cyber defenders are still moving at human speed on the inside. It's like, what do we do? Every six months, a red team comes around, tells us, you know, how screwed we are and then we scramble around and then deploy a bunch of controls. Okay, what knobs do I have to turn over there? And as this is happening out here in the attack landscape, moving at human speed in here just isn't sufficient.

• 2:26:44Speaker 07

  So what we intend to do is essentially drive a similar asymptotic curve for defenders internally. Yeah, that's ultimately, you know, what the strategic landscape is. And the way that that needs to happen, and I don't care if it's us, I don't care if it's another company, essentially the same problem that Palantir set up to solve.

• 2:27:09Speaker 07

  And we can get into the reasons why cyber resisted it for so long. Is that the data lives in silos, it doesn't talk to each other, the tools don't like to talk to each other, your crowd strikes don't like to talk to your octas, don't like to talk to your splunks. Splunk in general is like an old model of let me just send data there and then worry about it later. And so splunk to me is where data goes to die. And so what we do is tackle multiple things in parallel. Number one, break down all these silos, force these tools to talk to each other. Number two, for any dead data sources that are sitting around your organization, whether it's splunk, whether it's data in S3, all right, let's light those things up. We can dispatch swarms of agentic whatevers to get in there and start asking questions

• 2:27:53Speaker 07

  about, okay, what kind of data exists in here? What kind of aggregations can we do? What kind of, let's just build swarms of these little mini data scientists and throw them at these dead data structures, light them up, and then bring them into the greater cyber defense ecosystem. So you can almost think of the, the thing that's necessary as we move forward into this future is like the cyber version of JATC2 essentially. For anyone that's familiar with the defense tech ecosystem, JATC2 is Joint All Domain Command and Control System, and it was an initiative by the US military, still is, to tie together sensors, use that sensor telemetry into a common cohesive command and control layer, and then allow the warfighter to make decisions at speed against it.

• 2:28:36Speaker 07

  And cyber defense just has no analog to that capability, and that's, that's the capability that, that we're bringing to the table for, for our USG partners.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Very cool. Walk me through a little bit more of like why I would want to investigate dead data. Is that like if I'm a business, I have a bunch of data in S3 and it happens to have customer credit cards, if that got hacked, that would be bad, and so maybe I want to lock that down, delete it if I'm not using it? Or, or is there some other shape of like the threat of this like dead data concept?

• 2:29:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, so data exists in one of two dimensions. So the data exists in the sort of pre-attack dimension of, okay, there's data that could tell you about latent risks in your organization. So I'll rewind you guys back to 2019, and there was a massive malware attack called Triton against oil and gas facilities in the Middle East. And the reason that attack was able to go down is because no one put the pieces of the puzzle together that, hey, we've got a senior engineering dude with a system that has weak controls applied to it that also serves as a jump-off point into the OT or critical infrastructure sector of the network.

• 2:29:49Speaker 07

  Now, to put those four pieces of data points together, you need a board security engineer, you need a red team to come in and find it for you, and they might not ever find it, even though they might spend three months trying to look for it. So, you know, that could be one of 100 attack pads that exists in your environment. So that's kind of the pre-attack latent risk piece. And then on the post-attack side, you've got data that's just being emitted from everyone's devices inside these environments, and what that data can tell you is, all right, all this latent risk back here, is anyone actually taking advantage of it or exploiting it? This is where, the second half of the equation is where you discover that. But what we've done over the past 20 years, because, I don't know, the big four consulting

• 2:30:33Speaker 07

  firms of the world have told us to do it, is we send data to these data stores, like S3 or Splunk or what have you, and then we just don't have the bandwidth to come around and then do something useful with it. You know, you need some kind of sophisticated data analytics people that think along the lines of how to make use of this data appropriately. You need to think along the lines of joins and tables and, you know, objects and ontologies, and that kind of skill set seems to just not be there when it comes to cyber defense. You know, Palantir, I think, was the first one to kind of break through and show people that this could be done for cyber defense as well. And there's a multitude of reasons why it didn't work. Like Foundry was early at the time when we were trying to break cyber.

• 2:31:19Speaker 07

  And so what we're trying to do is close the gap and just have a turnkey solution and say, "Okay, you've got dead data here. You've got dead data here." So you don't even know what, where the adversary is going to come from. Like, we can't predict the next breach because no one's looking at it. We can't tell you whether a breach is actually underway because no one's looking at it. So let's break all of this down, fuse it into this cohesive layer, and then we can tell you where the next breach is going to come from, and we can tell you if it's actually going down right now as we speak. So that's where we view the kind of like lighting up these dead data structures, because otherwise you needed a person to kind of sit there and come up with, "Okay, what queries are we going to ask? And what automations are we going to put into place?" And it's like, dude, when

• 2:32:00Speaker 07

  the dimensionality of some of these attacks is so large, you can't predict what queries you want, right? Like, you don't know how that attack is going to go down. You don't know how it's going to manifest itself until it does. And so the only way to solve it is by generating and evaluating those queries and their results at machine speed.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us a brief history of cyber warfare with Iran?

• 2:32:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, the Iranians have a long history of executing advanced cyber warfare attacks against the United States and our allied partners as well. So, you know, the cyber companies love to give the Iranian cyber warfare groups all these cute names like Hydrokitten and all this shit. But at the end of the day, they are a well-known, you know, advanced nation-state cyber warfare outfit. Like, on the same level as kind of Russia GRU or PLA cyber warfare units, DPRK cyber warfare units. They were really not happy when Stuxnet was a thing. So back in 2010, for anyone who doesn't know, Stuxnet was kind of the first, "Hey, let's have a cyber thing that can be implanted in a physical

• 2:33:14Speaker 07

  system and then have kinetic effects in the physical world." So that thing went into the nuclear enrichment facilities and...

• 2:33:23Speaker 07

  Or the one facility that it was targeting and then made the centrifuges rotate to the point where the the hardware just broke down, right? So that was the first equivalent, that was the first kind of example of that. The Iranians took that as an inflection point, kind of ramped up their offensive cyber capabilities. And, you know, for the past, I'd say 15 years, they've been, you know, on a, on a campaign to kind of bring those capabilities to bear, targeting US government and, and private sector entities, pretty much across the board. So, you know, all of that happens, and it not only happens with Iran, it happens with Russia, it happens with North Korea, it happens with China. It kind of all happens as this like cosmic background radiation against which like the regular commercial

• 2:34:07Speaker 07

  industry and private sector operates. And there's very few people that actually realize that, you know, there's all these nefarious characters in the background that are continually targeting our organization, whether through external cyber attacks, whether through trying to flip insiders, you know, corporate espionage or what have you. And so there is a cyber Cold War going on. Iran has been a key player in it. And, and despite, you know, decades of trying, you know, it took, you know, let's call it for what it is, an administration that said, you know, enough is enough, and we're going to put some bombs on target. So hilariously, the Cloudflare founder tweeted out a few days ago that basically the Iranian

• 2:34:46Speaker 07

  cyber warfare outfits, activities have ceased completely since the strikes have gone down. So we'll see what happens.

• 2:34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, good luck out there. And

• 2:34:59Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the progress in the business.

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 2:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Nick.

• 2:35:07John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And let me also tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we will begin the Lambda Lightning Round. Let's see that cloud in all of its glory. There we go.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  That is the moment that we've been building towards all year.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  We're doing live TV. And we have our first guest of the Lightning Round. How are you doing?

• 2:35:42Speaker 08

  Raj, good to meet you.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  Good to meet you, John. Thanks for having me on your show. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Since this is your first appearance, please give us an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:35:53Speaker 08

  Sure. My name is Raj Rajamani. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Jetstream Security. We just came out of stealth this morning, so super exciting times. And we are building an AI governance platform to help companies scale their enterprise AI adoption.

• 2:36:08John Coogan?

  Okay. How much did you raise?

• 2:36:12Speaker 08

  Thirty-four million dollars.

• 2:36:15Speaker 08

  In a seed round? Yes. Seed round led by Red Point Ventures and the CrowdStrike Falcon Fund.

• 2:36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, so tell me about how this fits in with CrowdStrike, Okta, Wiz. You have a lot of experience at those firms, some investors in common. How do you see yourself fitting into the market and going to market?

• 2:36:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, we think we are building something very unique and differentiated. And this is something I've discussed with both George and Mike, who are the CEO and President at CrowdStrike. So before starting Jetstream, I was leading the products initiatives at CrowdStrike for the last three years or so. And we had a lot of discussions about AI adoption and adoption challenges. And at Jetstream, we believe companies have an AI trust problem more than a technology problem. And by that, what we mean is with AI being probabilistic and being able to create compilers, their own social networks, and even deleting the odd email or two without being prompted, we have serious trust issues.

• 2:37:23Speaker 08

  And we think there are certain tools that you need in order to know what type of AI products you are using, understand them, and even control them. And once you have all those in place, you are able to trust it and move it into scale production. That is what we are trying to help customers do.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  So yeah, what's an example of this? Because if you build a tool in-house using AI, you probably know exactly what model you're using. You might not have the weights, but you have, you know, you can read all about the various model, the capabilities, the context, window size, everything else will be, you know, made available to you in the API. Is this more for SaaS products that are vending in AI features that you might have less insight into? Or more interpretability of the models themselves?

• 2:38:15Speaker 08

  I would say the the number one casualty in AI adoption is institutional wisdom. By that, what I mean is documentation is never anyone's priority. It's seldom accurate or up to date, which means that we have subject matters matter experts within companies who are responsible for understanding how these systems operate. Frequently, what happens, especially with AI adoption, is that everyone's role and responsibility is going to be much larger. And what that means is that the institutional wisdom gets diluted. And the way we counter that is by delivering what are called AI blueprints. These blueprints are the operational contract of an AI workflow.

• 2:38:57Speaker 08

  They define what AI is supposed to do and flag any deviations from the intended purpose. They also track all the runtime activities, the permissions they are using, the data touches, the services and tools it calls, and so on, so forth. So you have everything that you need in one single place. And just like blueprints, like the ones that we use for building homes and other buildings, it helps you see things that are not obvious to the naked eye. It helps you understand the specifications and tolerations that you, as a company, are willing to agree or use within your enterprise.

• 2:39:33John Coogan?

  Will you be learning to drive a Le Mans prototype so you can hang out with George Kurtzmore?

• 2:39:39Speaker 08

  I'm afraid I'm more of a swimmer than a driver. And the last time I was on the track with him, he chided me for driving a Ferrari the way I drove my Prius. I've been driving a Prius for the last fifteen years.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  You're a swimmer, though? You're a swimmer?

• 2:39:55Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:39:56John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:39:56Speaker 08

  I try to get in at least two or three times a week. So I had a swim yesterday and hopefully one later this evening as well.

• 2:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Open ocean or are you more of a poor guy?

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  Twenty-four hours of the Pacific Ocean.

• 2:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Twenty-four hours of Alcatraz.

• 2:40:09Speaker 08

  It's more like twenty-four hour fitness lap pool.

• 2:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:13Speaker 08

  You have to start somewhere.

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Yeah, how how big is the team? How quickly do you want to go to market? How are you seeing enterprise versus the mid-market, small startup adoption? Where do you see all this going?

• 2:40:28Speaker 08

  We are about forty employees now and the interesting thing is almost every last person has worked with everyone else for an extended period of time. So this is a team and crew that knows each other really, really well. And we are open for business, the priorities and P O Vs already. We were doing demos and I was getting texts from some of my investors saying, hey, I want to introduce you to these accounts.

• 2:40:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:40:53Speaker 08

  We are obviously targeting the large Fortune five hundred accounts initially, but we think this is a universal category in the sense that regardless of geo, region, vertical, or even the size of the company, everyone will need an AI governance platform, much like how everyone uses an E D R product today. And if we are able to solve it in a graceful and elegant manner, I think there is a lot of room in this market for both large enterprises and SMBs.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the fundraising round and say hello to George.

• 2:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Sure, he'll be back on soon.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, thirty plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to restream.com. Jay Bhutard on Twitter or on X says, there is a zero percent chance regime change is accomplished in a short timeframe, referring to Iran, but there is a one hundred percent chance Trump quits this war ASAP if Intel keeps gapping down six percent a day and the Dow Jones stays losing a thousand points per day. We have priorities in this country. And so watch the stock market if you want to know where the war goes, I suppose, is Jay

• 2:42:08John Coogan?

  Bhutard's point. Trump said that you'll be finding out very soon who's in charge of Iran. And of course, Ani Ayengar said, I'm a cheer, the brief CEO of OpenAI, which would be, of course, the funniest outcome. So never write it out. There is another big story in the technology and venture world. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz are leading a four billion dollar round into Anduril. Uh, very exciting and congrats to everyone over at Anduril.

• 2:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Still in the works.

• 2:42:43John Coogan?

  It's still in the works, but uh, there Bloomberg is reporting Josh Kushner's Thrive Capital and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz are co-leading a funding round for Anduril that could nearly double the defense startup's valuation. There had been rumors about this round, this round, it's 50 or 60, correct? Uh, so the fundraising is-

• 2:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Anduril is finally going to be worth more than figure.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  That's right. And, and they're getting up into the defense tech prime territory. Uh, it was a big moment for Palantir when they passed um, the, the sort of the legacy primes on market cap, so.

• 2:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, still got a ways to go with Lockheed Martin sitting at 150.

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  150, but within, within the, the sights. I don't know. Uh, Josh, uh, Anduril seeking to raise about four billion. The fundraising expected to value the startup at 60 billion. The company is raising capital as it pursues projects, including a facility in Ohio to mass produce aerial and maritime drones and other products. Um, there was a piece in the New York Times about Palmer Lucky that was uh, going back and forth, kind of digging into honestly, just a lot of history on the company, but also sort of, you know, trying to understand how deployed the different uh, the different products are, where things are going well. Um, I don't think it was the most friendly piece, but uh, certainly

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  uh, painted an interesting picture of Palmer and uh, a nice graphic in the header. Well, without further ado, let's bring in our next, next guest. We have James from Guild. How you doing, James?

• 2:44:16Speaker 09

  What's happening? Doing great. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Since it's your first time, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:44:22Speaker 09

  Sure, sure. I'm James Everingham, the CEO of Guild AI, uh, you know, building a agent control plane.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, walk me through-

• 2:44:32Speaker 09

  This is important because my agents are out of control.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I was very interested-

• 2:44:35Speaker 09

  They're going to get worse. We're here for you.

• 2:44:37John Coogan?

  Yes, I was very interested in orchestration, what's happening with Gastown, some of the stuff we've been seeing with Open Claw. Um, what, how long have you been working on this? And then where do you think, uh, like what do you think the correct user interface, the correct user experience paradigm is?

• 2:44:54Speaker 09

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, I think you just wrote, yeah, I was reading your post about the 2026 being the year of agents and orchestration. And first off, completely agree with that. And what we're seeing, though, is once you start getting these agents in your infrastructure, and they're starting to come in pretty, pretty heavily into a lot of companies, the next problem becomes controlling these things, you know, it's like, it's like gremlins, you know, the first one's fine until they start multiplying and taking over and pulling levers in your infrastructure, you know, they can cause a little chaos. So what we have built is an infrastructure layer that provides governance and control around these, you know, you can centralize them, you can run them efficiently, you can give them and control

• 2:45:36Speaker 09

  what they have access to and what they don't. You need observability in order to figure out what they did, what they touched, and, you know, who can get access to configuring them. So that's where we're coming in. We ran into this problem, a lot of us came from Meta, we were working on the developer infrastructure teams, and we were working on getting the engineers to use agents to embed into the infrastructure. And well, we got that to work, and that basically highlighted the next problem is like, okay, now you have lots of these. We think there'll be more than 10. We think you'll have thousands of these in your infrastructure at some point. Then suddenly, you know, security pops up, and if you're in a regulated

• 2:46:18Speaker 09

  business, compliance pops up, and you need, you need a layer to control this. Agents are non-deterministic, and you need a deterministic layer if you're going to have a stable infra-layer.

• 2:46:30John Coogan?

  How much is just cost benefit important these days? I've seen crazy bills from people that are orchestrating a ton of agents, and, you know, it starts to creep up on you, like, wait, you spent how much on tokens for that to-do app? Like, I don't know if that was a good trade. And I imagine that in the enterprise, if you're talking about deploying fleets of agents to hundreds or thousands of employees, you could be looking at a really big inference bill, and monitoring that seems important, too. But is that something that is just too abstract for clients to demand at this point?

• 2:47:04Speaker 09

  Not at all. That's actually one of the top requests we're seeing. Like, you know, some of the customers that we're engaging with early, like, literally, one of them had this problem, is they had a monthly budget, and, you know, it's built for single players, so that engineers are off running these on... On, you know, on a separated server or on their laptop, one engineer blew through their entire budget in 12 hours and they didn't know. So, you know, building a centralized place where you can put circuit breakers and say, hey, you know, like, turn this thing off if it gets too hungry or, you know, be able to report and understand where your spend is, but not just like, where the spend is, is like, what am I getting for that spend? And like, you need to be able to measure the impact of these as well.

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  I feel like you're at the tip of the spear. What type of companies are being most aggressive about adopting fleets of AI agents these days?

• 2:47:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's, the timing is really interesting because we're seeing like many of the customers are now just leaning into it. It's like, you know, last year it was like experimentation. We've got one agent. It's a really interesting, uh, uh, you know, demonstration or example, but now they're all starting to scale. So we've been talking with small companies and large companies. And interestingly, they all seem to be at the same phase where we've now figured out that, you know, the models are powerful enough to operate tools and to be able to like be part of our infrastructure. So, um, we're seeing it across the board. It seems to be hitting all these companies at once.

• 2:48:34John Coogan?

  Okay. So evenly distributed across scale and stage. What about industry? Are there particular industries that are more rapidly adopting fleets of AI agents?

• 2:48:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that there is some little bit of differentiation there. Of course, you know, some of the more, you know, the companies that are a little more tech forward, you know, they map up to what we traditionally would look at as the early adopters and the laggards. It's the same. So the highly regulated businesses are slower by design because they, you know, they can't take risk. And one way to think about it is the, the companies that we see really leaning into this is, look, you know, there's a lot of pressure for competition and being able to, uh, to, to move faster right now. So I think that the, the, the calculus between risk and the consequences of failure has changed. People are willing to take on a little more risk and try these things.

• 2:49:28Speaker 09

  But, you know, our aim is to allow them to move fast while still reducing that risk in their infrastructure.

• 2:49:35Jordi Hays?

  What kind of tension is there between, like I can imagine a world where Guild provides all of the enterprise infrastructure so if somebody can just bring, somebody can create an agent and, you know, effectively give it access to Guild and that gives it access to the enterprise, but a lot of companies will want to actually own the full stack. How do you think about that tension as well as opportunity?

• 2:50:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think, well, one, I think it's an opportunity. Right now, what we're seeing is that a lot of companies are off building sort of like, sort of small versions of this internally and it's not their core competence. They don't want to build it. They don't want to maintain it over time. It's not going to get better. They don't have the specialized expertise to do it well. So what we think is that companies are really open to using this as a service. And one thing that's important is that, you know, being vendor neutral and, and, you know, model neutral is also important because people don't want to be locked into one vendor because the competition right now is things are, you know, they're leapfrogging

• 2:50:47Speaker 09

  each other and they're hopping from model to model. So, you know, vendor neutrality is also important here.

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  What about the types of activities, the types of use cases for fleets of agents that you're seeing? I'm interested to know about this. There's a lot of, there's a lot of narrative around like, oh, you're just going to like go vibe code your CRM and like rip out that legacy software. But it just feels like with, you know, agents, you're so much more likely to just go pull your roadmap forward and go deliver more value for your customers. Maybe you'll go ask for a contact renegotiation, but what are you actually seeing?

• 2:51:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, sure. So the interesting thing is like people, we're seeing the most innovative agents come from our customers and not ones that we thought of. I like some of the favorite ones that I've seen so far is this onboarding agent. There was an agent that made the code base sentient. And so instead of saying, hey, I want to check out these files, you could say, uh, check out this feature. And it would say, oh, that's these files. Would you like a system diagram?

• 2:51:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:51:50Speaker 09

  And we'll paint you a system diagram. Do you want to know the history? And you could have a conversation with it. Um, another one, or we're seeing these agents. And by the way, agents can get executed not just by a person, but by a tool and by an event. So, uh, we had a risk analysis agent that when it gets pulled, like when a the C I C D system pulls from source, it would analyze the risk to have how likely is this diff going to take the system down. And it can let low risk diffs go through and and high risk won't stop. So things like this can help eliminate holiday code freeze of the code base. Um, there. So those are a few, um, and they can expand way outside of just

• 2:52:31Speaker 09

  development. They can go into all of these, uh, different workflows. Uh, anywhere where there's an integration prompts and evals, you can, you can make use of this. We have one in ours that like doesn't allow duplicate bugs to happen. So hooks into Git, fires an event, the agent goes and says, this is a duplicate bug already. It'll just mark it. Um, with the Guild system, though, we were able to just go in and natural language interface, just say, hey, don't make it, make it so it's not possible for duplicate bugs to exist in our company. And it just went and did it behind the scenes, installed the agent, set it up right. And boom, like that wasn't possible for any engineers in the company.

• 2:53:11John Coogan?

  Talk to me about where Guild sits in a world where I build a product that is effectively a fleet of agents. Maybe you call me a rapper, whatever, but my customers love the product, which is heavily agentic. I'm using Guild, your product, to orchestrate. And then I want to then that into a company. Am I like white labeling you? Am I using you internally? And then my customer doesn't know? Are they going to be wanting to use Guild on their side? Like, what's the, where do you fit in that stack?

• 2:53:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, so one of the things that we found is that like a way for these agents to be for engineers and for companies to learn how to use these is by like looking at them and seeing it. So like we have something we call Agent Hub.

• 2:53:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:56Speaker 09

  An Agent Hub will be a public service. So companies can have internal agents that are private, but they can also push them externally and they can be a series of agents that work together.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:54:07Speaker 09

  We look a lot like GitHub in that way where you can go, you can find agents right on the surface that might work for you. These could be distributed by third parties or people that are building agents as products.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:54:18Speaker 09

  And within minutes, they can just authorize, set up a workspace, click and boom, have these things working in their in their workspace. So we're big open source believers. We've been in that space our entire career. So, you know, there is an aspect of that that we're bringing to this agent marketplace.

• 2:54:37John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, we want to ring the gong for you. How much did you raise?

• 2:54:42Speaker 09

  What's the news? Oh, thank you. Yeah, we, it's kind of tough following that $4 billion win that you just announced, but you know, we will go, we raised 44 million.

• 2:54:50John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 2:54:51Speaker 09

  It's our second, it's our second round. Apologies. It was 30 million plus 14 in our seed. We raised both these rounds within four months.

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  That's incredible.

• 2:55:02Speaker 09

  And who participated?

• 2:55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, any like companies I might have heard of involved?

• 2:55:06Speaker 09

  Um, uh, yeah, sure. Like, uh, our lead investor was Google Ventures.

• 2:55:10John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:55:11Speaker 09

  There we go. So GD, they, we have NFX involved. We had, uh, Cosla Ventures came in this round.

• 2:55:20John Coogan?

  We love Cosla.

• 2:55:21Speaker 09

  Scribble Ventures.

• 2:55:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:55:23Speaker 09

  Accrue Capital, Web Investment Network.

• 2:55:26John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:55:27Speaker 09

  I think I got them. I think I got them all. You will, you will have missed one and that one person will hold a grudge against you forever. Of course. That's a great, that's a great lineup. The rule of lists. You always forget one. It'll probably be the most, the biggest one too, right?

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

• 2:55:42Speaker 09

  Awesome. Great to meet you, James.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55:44Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me. Congrats, team.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Cha-ching. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. And without further ado, our final guest of the Lambda Lightning Round, we have Felix from Cash Systems. How are you doing Felix?

• 2:56:11Speaker 10

  I'm good. I'm good. How are you?

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  We're good. Good to meet you. Since it's your first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:56:18Speaker 10

  Sure. My name is Felix Drachum. I'm founder and CEO of Akash Systems in the Bay Area.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Amazing. What do you guys do?

• 2:56:25Speaker 10

  We are a venture backed company that makes diamond cooled servers, 4K I and cloud service providers.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:33Speaker 10

  Diamond business.

• 2:56:34John Coogan?

  Yes, very exciting. So I'm familiar with air cooling. I'm familiar with water cooling. What is diamond cooling?

• 2:56:42Speaker 10

  So diamond is interesting because it is not only a very beautiful material, but it is also the world's most thermally conductive material. It is extremely thermally conductive. If I held a stick of diamond in my hands, it would take the temperature of my body and move it very quickly through the entire material and propagate it to whatever is on the other end of that material. What we do with Akash is we take that diamond that's very pretty, but also very thermally conductive, and we place it right on the GPU. So a GPU, for those of you who don't know, is the hottest component of a computer or server.

• 2:57:23Speaker 10

  So the thing that answers your questions on ChatGPT, on Claude, the very essence of the thing that does those questions is the GPU. Gets very hot. You've probably heard people talk about that. And cooling it down can be very expensive if you use liquids. But what we do is we take synthetic diamond grown in the lab with thermal conductivity. We put it on the GPU. It reduces temperatures by 10, 15 degrees Celsius. That reduction causes an acceleration in the inference of the GPU. It also reduces the cost of cooling the entire data center.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:00Speaker 10

  So.

• 2:58:00John Coogan?

  So, once the heat's transferred from the GPU die to the diamond, it's gotta get shuffled away at some point.

• 2:58:08Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:58:08John Coogan?

  Is that air or water? How is it getting moved away?

• 2:58:12Speaker 10

  So, yeah, so we're compatible with liquid cooling. If you wanna have, if you already have an infrastructure of liquid cooling,

• 2:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:18Speaker 10

  we're totally game for that. But if you don't have the cap- To invest in a liquid cooling infrastructure, then you don't need it because you've got diamond

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:26Speaker 10

  That we provide on the GPU.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:29Speaker 10

  So it goes from the diamond to the heat sink.

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:58:32Speaker 10

  And then that goes to air.

• 2:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:33Speaker 10

  And so.

• 2:58:34John Coogan?

  People that might have done a, built a gaming PC, you put something directly on the CPU. Is that copper typically? Like what, what?

• 2:58:41Speaker 10

  That's typically copper.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:43Speaker 10

  And by the way, with a diamond cool server, you don't need to have your air conditioning on. You can literally turn off the AC in the room.

• 2:58:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:58:50Speaker 10

  And the room can get as hot as a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. And the server's literally like.

• 2:58:56John Coogan?

  Because it's shuffling it away so fast.

• 2:58:59Speaker 10

  Correct.

• 2:58:59John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay.

• 2:59:00Speaker 10

  It gets so fast into the ambience and.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:02Speaker 10

  And you'd be fine. We just released today a server made with an AMD chip.

• 2:59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:07Speaker 10

  Uh, that is cooled by diamond and that can operate at a hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit. And you would not need any liquids, no air conditioning, and it would just be, the computations would still be fine.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:18Jordi Hays?

  What, how much, how much actual, uh, diamond is, like, what is the cost?

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  Is it like one very thin diamond or are we talking about something that like could fit on a ring?

• 2:59:29Speaker 10

  I love your questions. Um, yes, it is a very thin layer of diamond that you place on the material, on the GPU.

• 2:59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:35Speaker 10

  And to your question about cost, so the effect of this diamond cooling is that it generates about a million dollars by our conservative calculations. About a million dollars of revenue and some cost savings to the operator of the GPU. And that's over typically a life, lifetime use of around three to four years.

• 2:59:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:55Speaker 10

  So we're not just giving you compute, we're giving you cash. So roughly about a million. And so we take a slice of that to add on to the cost of a traditional server.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:07Speaker 10

  So our servers are, the cost of our servers don't compare to the million dollars that you would get back in, in returns.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I imagine.

• 3:00:16Jordi Hays?

  You're literally, you're icing out the GPUs. I love it.

• 3:00:19John Coogan?

  So I imagine you, I imagine that a diamond cooling system has got to be more expensive than the legacy system, but you're saving money on the, on the, on the energy cooling, the, the AC, the water flow, all of that, right?

• 3:00:33Speaker 10

  That's correct.

• 3:00:34John Coogan?

  So less energy intense.

• 3:00:35Speaker 10

  That's correct. And we're talking, I'm going to give you some numbers here. So a typical server, maybe like 250, 300K.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:42Speaker 10

  Ours would be on the order of, let's say, 400K.

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:45Speaker 10

  So, but on the other hands, over the three, four years of use life, you're going to get a million dollars.

• 3:00:51John Coogan?

  And then also, I imagine that you're on sort of a Moore's Law-esque scaling curve of your own costs, because lab-grown diamonds have gotten dramatically cheaper over the last decade and you expect that to continue? Okay, explain that.

• 3:01:04Speaker 10

  That's exactly right. The cost of making diamond has literally collapsed through the bottom, through the floor. It's so low and that's just improved our economics.

• 3:01:12John Coogan?

  Okay, so for, for actually making the diamonds, you're working with a contract manufacturer who also makes diamonds for saws or jewelry?

• 3:01:21Speaker 10

  We source, we source diamonds from all over the world. We buy diamonds from wherever we can get them very cheaply.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:28Speaker 10

  We have ways of growing them ourselves, but the interest of scaling rapidly.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:33Speaker 10

  We buy diamonds from everybody. As long as you can meet our both quality and cost requirements.

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:40Speaker 10

  We're happy to buy from you.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember seeing the, I remember seeing the first lab-grown diamond, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago. And it was basically like a massive like dome that was putting in an immense amount of pressure and it would come out with a, with a diamond-shaped diamond. It was something that would belong on a ring.

• 3:01:59Speaker 10

  Now, I imagine as wafers and GPU dies have gotten bigger,

• 3:02:04John Coogan?

  you need to make a bigger lab-grown diamond and then slice it. Can you walk me through like, how are, how are you dealing with like the, the size of the GPU die that I would imagine is bigger than like a one-carat stone?

• 3:02:16Speaker 10

  Yeah, so you're, you're very perceptive. The, what you described is the old-fashioned way of making diamond, where you try to replicate the conditions of the core of the earth.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:02:26Speaker 10

  Very high-pressure, high-temperature.

• 3:02:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:02:29Speaker 10

  What we do is something called chemical vapor deposition. It's a more advanced way of making diamond where you don't need to get a massive thing to recreate the core of the earth. These reactors that we use are very small typically and the amount of diamond that we need is relatively small.

• 3:02:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:02:47Speaker 10

  So it needs to be cost effective and it needs to fit into the traditional size of a server.

• 3:02:52John Coogan?

  Folks who have purchased a diamond, maybe for a loved one, might be familiar with the four Cs. Do any of those matter to you? Can you use a lower quality diamond? Or is there a benefit to heat dissipation if you have a particularly clear diamond?

• 3:03:08Speaker 10

  Great question. The answer is yes. We don't quite use gem quality, beautiful, spectacular, twinkling little star diamonds. Diamonds that we use are actually what we call industrial diamonds. So they're not pretty, but they do have an extremely high thermal connectivity and that's the thing to care about.

• 3:03:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:28Speaker 10

  And so we use that for our work.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  Are diamonds forever? Do you need to replace these at some point?

• 3:03:35Speaker 10

  Diamonds are forever. We actually reclaim the diamonds. So at the end of the life of the server, we're happy to take the server back and pull the diamond out and reuse it for our needs. Yes.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  Talk about flexibility of integration. Congratulations on the AMD deal, by the way. But it feels like it's not rocket science to get this working on a different chip. Walk me through that.

• 3:04:02Speaker 10

  It's not. So it is, but it isn't. It's taken us a long time to get here. Actually, this technology that we've deployed with the AMD chip actually started off in space. So we actually started off doing diamond cooling in satellites. In fact, last year, we launched about a half a dozen satellites with diamond cooling. But then when we saw what was going on in AI and that the power densities in a GPU are actually a lot less than what we deal with in space. And the fact that in space, the conditions are much more harsh. We're talking about solar radiation, space radiation that's a lot more difficult and challenging to work with. And when we have on a terrestrial, we said, wait, if we can address a problem in space, we can definitely address a problem in a GPU.

• 3:04:46Speaker 10

  And so that gave us the confidence to replicate what we now have on grounds. So and getting to space took us a long time. And we're leveraging all of that to do this. So we are, the technology that we've deployed here is covered by dozens of patents. There's a lot of material science and device physics. But in the end, we're able to do it cost effectively and scale rapidly for our customers.

• 3:05:14John Coogan?

  Amazing. I heard that there was a secret shopper who stopped by the diamond store, placed an order for a huge amount of your product. How much is the deal? I know you can't tell us who it is with, but I'd love to know the size.

• 3:05:29Speaker 10

  It's a $300 million deal.

• 3:05:36Jordi Hays?

  You said the biggest.

• 3:05:36John Coogan?

  Congratulations. That is amazing. This is amazing. What a remarkably sci-fi.

• 3:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, incredibly sci-fi.

• 3:05:46John Coogan?

  Product. I love this and thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Do you have any other questions?

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  This is great.

• 3:05:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are there any other interesting applications for diamonds that you can think of? I've heard of the diamond drill, the diamond saw. This was not on my bingo card, but should we expect big things from diamonds in the future if they get really, really, really, really, really cheap?

• 3:06:11Speaker 10

  Definitely. I mean, we get calls all the time. People want to put our stuff. I mean, because we have the space heritage as well as now servers and GPUs, people want to now do data centers in space.

• 3:06:23John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:06:23Speaker 10

  So that's super sexy, amazing. To be honest with you, just trying to execute what we have in front of us

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:30Speaker 10

  is already quite a bit of a full plate. But yes, there are applications in space as we discussed. Applications in other areas, industrial areas, such as with Bitcoin mining. That's something that requires a lot of compute. And so we do get pings, but right now we're very focused on just getting compute to data centers and cloud service providers and AI companies.

• 3:06:59John Coogan?

  Well, Felix, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This was very fascinating and good luck to you.

• 3:07:04Speaker 10

  Thank you.

• 3:07:05John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  The Germinator says it's official. Apple launches the M5 Pro and M5 Max, MacBook Pro, M5 MacBook Air, new Studio Display and new Studio Display XD.

• 3:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Are.

• 3:07:32John Coogan?

  This is what I always say, it's not official until Mark Gurman writes about it. I don't actually go to Apple. It's not official when they post about it. I like that he's like, he's got the scoop. Uh, but I believe him and this is exciting. Um, uh, the M5 Pro, M5 Mac, M5 Max, Macintosh Pro.

• 3:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, so apparently there's still re- uh, redesigned rumors for the MacBook Pro.

• 3:07:56John Coogan?

  I might, I might jump at this.

• 3:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, 6:15 AM Pacific tomorrow morning. You can order.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. The Studio Display XDR is gonna be, is gonna be awesome. The, the Pro Display XDR has been dominant for like a decade. And you will go on YouTube and look up, should I buy an Apple Pro Display XDR in? And it will just autofill 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026. And the answer is always yes. Like it's still a great monitor. And so it's always, the only problem is just, it's been really expensive. And it hasn't been refreshed in so long that, uh, a lot of Apple folks that want a beautiful display, high refresh rate, they, there's really like no trade offs with it. Uh, whatever they have planned there, I think will be very, very exciting. So buckle up, Apple fans.

• 3:08:47John Coogan?

  There's gonna be a lot of good news tomorrow to react to. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full tech search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Uh, the last thing I think might be worth mentioning is that Ted Mayberry over at Palantir is issuing a call to former Palantirians, former hobbits, as he says, if you've ever considered returning to Palantir, this is the week to do it. The world is demanding every last unit of creative energy we can muster. If you return, you will be on a plane one day and committing code that matters within hours of getting your laptop, uh, from the foxhole to the factory floor, to the, uh, the surface area to support something incredibly meaningful immediately is immense. I promise you nothing other than a sense of satisfaction that comes from the purpose

• 3:09:30John Coogan?

  and intensity of the most intense deployments you've ever worked on. If you have been chasing that spark, come find it again. The Shire is calling. Saying come back and work at Palantir. Very fun. Anyway.

• 3:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well.

• 3:09:41John Coogan?

  Time to plant the bomb.

• 3:09:42Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 3:09:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Actually, let's not plant the bomb today.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, thank you for, uh, being with us. We will be back.

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, 11 a.m.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  I can't. I cannot wait.

• 3:09:53John Coogan?

  I cannot wait.

• 3:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, have a wonderful evening.

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter, tbk.com.

• 3:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Call your parents.

• 3:10:02John Coogan?

  And we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:10:02Jordi Hays?

  You love them.

• 3:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tell them you want to watch Ken Burns with them. See ya.

• 3:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 3:10:06John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Bye.