The AI Cold War, Odyssey Rips, Tyler Cowen Joins | Danny Yeung, Connor Love, Kahlil Lalji, Tarek Mansour, Tony Zhao

(01:35) - The AI Cold War (33:40) - Odyssey Rips (44:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (55:54) - Tyler Cowen is an American economist, author, and professor at George Mason University, known for his work in cultural economics and as co-author of the blog Marginal Revolution. He discusses the inevitability of open-source AI, emphasizing that attempts to ban it are futile due to its global proliferation, particularly from China. He also highlights the challenges Europe faces in competing with Chinese industries, suggesting that imposing tariffs may not be an effective solution. (01:31:26) - Danny Yeung, CEO and co-founder of Prenetics, discusses the rapid growth of IM8, a health supplement brand co-founded with David Beckham, achieving $100 million in annual recurring revenue within 11 months and projecting over $200 million in its second year. He attributes this success to a global launch strategy, shipping to 31 countries from day one, and highlights a $1 billion growth commitment from General Catalyst, emphasizing the importance of strong retention cohort data for predictable future revenue. (01:37:48) - Connor Love, a former U. S. Army Captain with a deployment to Northern Iraq in 2019, has transitioned into venture capital, focusing on frontier technologies such as defense, space, manufacturing, and autonomous systems. In the conversation, he discusses his new role at Andreessen Horowitz, emphasizing the firm's commitment to supporting entrepreneurs in the American dynamism sector, and highlights the significant growth potential in defense and space markets, underscoring the need for substantial manufacturing capabilities to meet future demands. (01:51:57) - Kahlil Lalji, CEO and co-founder of Natural, discusses the company's $30 million Series A funding led by Forerunner and its mission to build payments infrastructure for agents. He explains that Natural enables agents to store balances, make payments, and perform transfers, with plans to expand capabilities like collecting card information over the phone. Lalji emphasizes the potential for agents to handle a majority of global payment volume in the next decade, positioning Natural to become a comprehensive financial platform encompassing banking, payment processing, and networking services. (02:00:06) - Tarek Mansour, co-founder and CEO of Kalshi, discusses the platform's significant engagement during the World Cup, noting it generated more brand impressions than major companies like Coca-Cola and Adidas, and even surpassed ChatGPT and Instagram in search volume. He attributes this success to a dynamic, adaptable strategy executed by a lean team, emphasizing rapid response to unfolding events. Additionally, Mansour introduces Kalshi's launch of GPU futures, aiming to establish a forward curve for compute resources, enabling stakeholders to hedge risks and make informed investment decisions in the evolving compute market. (02:20:12) - Tony Zhao, co-founder and CEO of Sunday Robotics, discusses the company's latest advancements in household robotics, highlighting a 99.1% success rate in folding laundry across 785 autonomous attempts. He introduces the concept of "Large Laundry Models" (LLM), emphasizing the robot's ability to generalize tasks and learn new folding methods from a single demonstration. Zhao also addresses the importance of defining performance metrics in robotics, distinguishing between success rates in controlled environments versus real-world applications. (02:31:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, July 20th, 2026. Let's go to the fans at home. We're live from the GBN Ultra Dom, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We had a fantastic talk with Eric, the co-CEO of Ramp on Thursday, but we are excited to be back. It's Monday and there's a lot of news, the big stuff, Kimi K3 drop, but first we should recap the weekend. How was your weekend?

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  The elephant in the room, that I'm wearing a suit.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Yes, the elephant in the room. Did somebody say that? The elephant in the room. Jordy's suited up. He's feeling good. He's refreshed.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, refreshed. I, uh, yeah, was in, was in the elephant of the weekend.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Dragged to the old country.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, exactly. Uh, really fun time. Glad to be back. Uh, very, very, uh, refreshed.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Very fun. I was at a Caruso property this weekend and I gotta say, being there, being at the, the Miramar, Rosewood, uh, I, I can never vote for him for public office ever again.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Why? Because you want him to develop more properties like that?

• 1:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want him laser focused on resorts and malls.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't really hold up because the whole, the whole point was that he could, there was some possibility that he could make greater Los Angeles, something like his incredible property.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  You gotta go to Rosewood and every city in America and, uh, maybe all over the world.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Or take private of, of the city of Los Angeles, turn it all into a Caruso property.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Potentially, but, uh, it was, it was a good weekend. Glad to be back. Uh, the timeline was burning up over the weekend over, uh, the AI Cold War that's breaking out between the US Frontier Labs and Chinese open source. Uh, there's been a whole bunch of new Chinese open source models that have dropped with some, uh, promising benchmarks. Uh, the latest one that everyone is up in arms about is, uh, Moonshot's Kimi K3. Uh, it was unveiled last Thursday. Now they aren't actually.

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  I kept opening X and thinking, looking, scrolling a few times, thinking, oh, I'm happy for you or sorry that happened. I put my phone away. Uh, I feel like I missed a lot.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, it's gated behind a, uh, behind an app right now. Um, the waits are not actually open just yet. That should happen Monday if things go to plan, but of course there's a lot going back and forth, uh, with the administration. People are, uh, you know, uh, weighing every possible consequence of this. Um, it's a, you know, the classic, it's over, we're back. Is this good for semiconductors? Is this bad for semiconductors? Is this Jevons paradox? Is it the counter example of Jevons paradox? Um, it's all very interesting debates and everyone's, uh, coming out with their own opinion. Dean Ball was going back and forth with, uh, two people, uh, David Sacks and also, uh, Amiel Michael

• 2:57John Coogan?

  were duking it out on the timeline, fighting it out back and forth. Um, but you know, decent takes on both sides, lots to chew through. Um, the headlines for Kimi are impressive, um, but not wildly surprising based on the current trend lines and model progress. Um, but it does seem to invalidate, uh, the thesis that open source would start falling behind, which was something that was start, there, there was that chart from the government, I believe, that showed, uh, closed model progress was, you know, accelerating and on this particular exponential and, uh, open models were falling behind. Uh, this seems like a proper catch-up, something that was predicted from, you know, many lab leaders that, you know, the six-month gap, three-month gap, nine-month gap, it will remain just

• 3:42John Coogan?

  that gap, um, for the foreseeable future. But there are of course a bunch of other nuances here. Um, in, uh, in the most above board scenario, sort of here's what happened. Like the Moonshot team, it's just a bunch of highly talented AI researchers who marshaled enough compute to release, to release a great model. Uh, open sourcing Kimi is a great way to grab attention, attract talent, drive demand for hosted API services, uh, that are more turnkey eventually. There's a very reasonable business model behind open sourcing. Uh, Red Hat Linux, of course, is an open source company, uh, owned by IBM now. And I think the acquisition price was in the $30 billion range. And at any point you could just say, I'm just doing Red Hat on my own, but a lot of companies pay for, uh, you know, consulting,

• 4:27John Coogan?

  hosted and all sorts of different, uh, services around the open source piece of software. Uh, and so, uh, that's sort of like the, the, the, the bull case. Like, you know, everything's going well. The more skeptical folks on the timeline are pointing to, uh, you know, ideas such as, uh, maybe the compute was smuggled into China against chip controls. Maybe the data was exfiltrated from Frontier Lab APIs routed through wrapper companies. Maybe this is a distillation attack. Um, the open source strategy is a deliberate attempt to destroy American companies. It's geopolitical warfare. It's the AI Cold War. Um, and there might even be spies inside companies stealing IP directly. And so that's sort of like the bad version. Uh, the reality is probably a mix of both, but we'll know more over time

• 5:12John Coogan?

  and we'll hear more statements from the labs and from all sorts of different, uh, participants to understand. There are people going back and forth on, you know, if you ask Kimi its name, will it just say it's Claude or GPT? And, uh, there were some examples of people doing that. Seemed like it was photoshopped. Seemed like, that also seems like the easiest thing to fix possibly. It's just put it in the, put it in the prompt, put it in the fine tuning. Never say, can, you know, find and replace. Seems pretty easy.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they were showing it in the reasoning trace.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you know, I, I, I don't know. All these things are hard to, hard to assess over time. It takes time to actually work through what's real, what's fake, what's a hallucination. You know, they all, they all make mistakes from time to time. But, um, there are bigger questions about AI safety in a world of powerful open source AI. Uh, I haven't seen a ton of takes from this crowd, but you have to imagine that they aren't happy about it. Uh, maybe the, uh, the Stop AI protests will head over to Beijing next and beat down the, the doors of, uh, Moonshot directly. Um, but it is an odd thing because even if you're not worried about the fast takeoff, you know, gray goo, paperclip monster, uh, from a cybersecurity's perspective, like things are going to get more complex.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  There's reasonable solutions to all of this, but, uh, it is a more powerful tool in the hackers or the attackers tool chest. Uh, fortunately defenders have had roughly six months of frontier exclusivity with GPT cyber and Mythos for a while. And so there's been a lot of preparation. We've talked to Nikasia at Palo Alto Networks and George at CrowdStrike about this. Like they have been aware that this is coming for a while. And so a lot of systems have been patched. Uh, but at the same time, you can just imagine now anyone who's a hacker can spin up a very, very intelligent model and start sending a bunch of spam emails or spam text messages that stop seeming so AI and they're not as clockable

• 7:07John Coogan?

  because it's just another level of intelligence and it can do, uh, reasoning traces and research. And, and so, you know, the, the, the, the spammer or the phishing attack can actually know what insurance you have and then pose as your insurance agent and actually know a little bit about your insurance agent instead of just sort of sending you a generic spam text. Your, things are going to get more customized, more personalizable. Of course, there will be more advanced defense layers, but the war is continuing. Um, there, there really is no debating that open source is just cool. Like open source AI, it just feels punk rock to me. It feels like Napster, like as a kid, the idea of just like liberating all the information.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  And it's culturally aligned to the internet itself.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just a cool thing, even though you do have to grapple with all the different problems that come from it downstream. Uh, like the, there's something just deeply satisfying about the idea of, uh, of like a solar powered server rack, serving you up unstoppable intelligence, which is another good name for a NeoLab. Um, I don't know if there is one, but, uh, you know, a country of geniuses.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  It feels, yeah, in some ways to me, it feels like aligned to America's ideals.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. It's like.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  It feels like, like very empowering.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  It's total second amendment. Totally second amendment.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, I should be able to go off grid and have, uh, you know, not a country of geniuses in a data center controlled by a corporation, but just like my own genius who's riding with me no matter what in my basement, you know? And it's like, and, and, you know, even, even if you're not thinking like nefarious, it's like this, it's this idea that, you know, uh, I like to have a copy of a movie in case like the grid goes down, you know, the, the, the more like, you know, apocalyptic thinking. This is a very general thing that I think a lot of people align to, especially if they're at all crypto native. It's like, why do you want Bitcoin? Well, it's unstoppable money. The government can't take it from you in certain scenarios. Of course, like there's a bunch of ways that they can, of course, like anything else. Um, but, uh, there, there

• 9:11John Coogan?

  is just something very, very attractive about having just a machine with all of human knowledge on it. It's like a, it's like the, you know, you, every house used to have the, the full encyclopedia Britannica and you could just look up anything. And now you have the LLM that can solve, you know, any math problem for you. But you know, the US government is going back and forth on this issue, how to handle the situation. And I imagine we'll see developments this week. The KIMI K3 weights drop next Monday. And so this is the week where if the government wants to do something one way or another, they have the opportunity to do that. There were some back and forth on like, would there

• 9:51John Coogan?

  be a direct ban, a hard ban, a soft ban, maybe just some like messaging around, hey, like, please be a patriot, don't use this foreign product, you know, there's all sorts of different ways, like the original like buy made in America, buy American, that's just marketing, but it does have some effect. It's not enough to make GoPro a, you know, $10 billion company, but it is enough to, you know, cause a little bit of motion in the, in the, in the economy.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  One thing that was notable over the weekend, KIMI on X said that KIMI K3 has received far more love than we expected and our GPUs are feeling it over the past 48 hours. Demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity to protect the experience of existing subscribers. We're temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritizing compute for current members. We're adding capacity as fast as we can and we will reopen new subscription spots in batches. So again, KIMI and the world more broadly are quite supply constrained. And yeah, just showing our compute constrained and showing that

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  the other dimension of this whole geopolitical battle is around the hardware side. So.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in general, I think my, my takeaway was, and Tyler, I'd be interested to hear how you process this, but like, I just don't see this as a black pill, even if it's like a deep seek moment and the markets sort of bounce around for a little bit. It seems like there's still a lot of demand for frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for near, near frontier intelligence, a lot of demand for really cheap older models that have been baked down to basically intelligence too cheap to meter. And we are going to be in this process of go and find an actual use for something and then bake it down to be really, really cheap so that it can be offered.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And in so, so many moments over the last two years, we've, there's been a company that's come out, maybe they've raised some money, you maybe forget about them for like six months. And then they pop up and it turns out, even though they're the number 10 company in their category, they're still growing faster than almost any company that existed like six years ago.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And a lot of it goes down to deployment too. There's like certain companies, if they're in consumer, like they just have a really good go to market motion. Like they're just able to get customers to subscribe or use their product. Or if they're in enterprise, like they just have a great like forward deployed motion to actually do the change necessary as opposed to just like, here's an API law firm, like they could have done that. And yet you have legal AI companies that have done a great job of coming in and actually creating a product that works within the confines of the, the broader organization. Well, what are your KIMI K3 reactions, Tyler?

• 12:47Tyler?

  Yeah. I mean, I think it was definitely like a surprise and update. Like this is extremely good model. The idea that open source is falling behind seems like very much.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  We sort of got a preview with GLM 5.2. Like people were already saying like, oh, GLM 5.2 sort of catching up. So.

• 13:01Tyler?

  Yes. But even, even that, that was closer to, you know, maybe a year, maybe a little less than, than a year behind. It seems like much closer.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 13:10Tyler?

  But I think I broadly agree. Like, you know, we have, okay, there's this great open source model. And now we have, okay, the Jacobian, you know, conjecture, like this, this kind of storied math problem.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll have to see.

• 13:21Tyler?

  And so like, yeah, there's just going to be a lot more use like everywhere. I expect, you know, these kinds of models to, to be used.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  It seems like a lot of hype is around like specifically the parameters, the size of the model, the way it was trained, it'll be, and then also it did very well on the front end arena, which was interesting because that's, I mean, it jumped ahead of everything there. And that feels like a particular, like it's, it'll be interesting to see because you see more and more taste going into these models, like OpenAI is really big into the math stuff and Anthropic was really big on code early. And there's all these different, like you can just tell that like, oh, this lab cares about chess now. And now the model's good at chess or the model got better at writing because like they, they took the time to spend a month sprinting on that. And it'll be interesting to see like, where did they sprint? If anywhere, where didn't they sprint? And it's sort of lagging. And then what harness it works best

• 14:13John Coogan?

  with? How, how, how important is the harness relative to everything else? But will be, will be interesting to, to continue following. There's a whole bunch of great reactions. Semi Analysis, it breaks down the architecture. Where should we start here? Let me tell you about Cisco first. So critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's a, there's a long post by.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  KIMI achieved another pretty meaningful benchmark.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 14:45Jordi Hays?

  On the Belgian Grand Prix.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Is there anything these Chinese models can't do? Says Alex Conrad.

• 14:51Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good.

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Kimi Antonelli, of course, of the, of F1.

• 14:55Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, over to Semi Analysis. What do they have to say?

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Where, where are they here? Semi Analysis said, similar to the panic over deep seek R1, some uneducated people think KIMI K3's use of linear attention, KDA, is bad for Nvidia HBM DRAM and networking because it has relatively lower KV cache requirements. The opposite is true, and they'll explain. KIMI K3 is actually quite positive for Nvidia as large model inference is where the NVL 72 shines because K3 has more than 2.8 trillion parameters. It requires a large scale up domain to store its weights. Secondly, although KIMI Delta attention has up to 10x lower networking requirements for KV cache transfers, its large weights require even more network bandwidth to implement an optimization called

• 15:39John Coogan?

  wide EP, which spreads weights across different GPUs. It is interesting that, I mean, it feels like if, like, is China getting TPUs? Those have to be chip export restricted and probably more difficult to get into the country because there's less resellers. And in order to set up a TPU based data center, you probably have to work very closely with Google, whereas Nvidia GPUs are sort of going to like all sorts of small Neo clouds. And there's a lot of places where seven steps of what down the chain, it can wind up in a suitcase with a, with a hairdryer, removing the label or something like that.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's not even that. You can imagine like if you were a Chinese lab and you wanted to get access to compute, there would be a number of ways to like set up US entities that then basically get compute through a variety of different sources here in the US.

• 16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  And you're, you're just getting it remotely.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. CK Capital says, the hottest model in the world just started turning away paying customers because there isn't enough commute, compute to serve them. This is the NeoCloud thesis in one post. And the, the NeoClouds were sort of getting beat up. Was it last week or the week before? And, and it seems like they should be back. I don't exactly know what, what's CoreWeave.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Iron is up 21% today.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Whoa. I mean, CoreWeave was only up 2%.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  They've been sort of a laggard.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  And down over the last five days and the last month. But yeah, if you're, if you're flexible and ready to serve this the day it comes online, that's probably profitable very, very quickly, even at, you know, lower than expected margins. Nicholas Bustamante at Microsoft, who is working on AI for knowledge workers, says, guys, the world is so compute constrained. I honestly don't understand how anyone thinks otherwise. Almost nobody is seriously using AI today and we're already hitting capacity. Everything is a bottleneck. Land for data centers, permits, electricity, grid connections, chips, construction, cooling, demand is growing far faster than supply and expanding supply is insanely expensive

• 17:50John Coogan?

  in this game. The best positioned companies are the ones with massive net income from non-AI products. They can fund hundreds of billions in capex. He's given a little bit of a bull case for Microsoft.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Guillermo over at Vercel says, KIMI.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Tested it.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good to hear.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. KIMI K3 is top tier at cybersecurity. That will, that will be interesting as the, as basically the weights are released. Do we see an uptick in tax?

• 18:23John Coogan?

  And it's also sort of a refutation of like the, it's just distilled because the models that you would be distilling from are pretty severely nerfed on cybersecurity, at least in theory. And so it's like, you would need to distill on the non, the non-nerfed model, which is probably way harder because those are much more restricted. And so it does feel like there's a, there's a little bit of a refutation of the idea that these are purely distilled.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Sol is a leap ahead in cyber capability at a significantly higher cost, but quite remarkable still. Fable refuses everything. We couldn't get it to complete the run at all. What is interesting is that Sol in comparison was much more open to helping with defensive cyber hardening. TLDR Frontier Open Weight Cyber Capability is here. And yeah, they have their own product for defensive cybersecurity over itself. This was good. Harry says, RIP the bear case, July 16th to July 19th. Perfectly coinciding with my trip, which is, which is nice.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Dean Ball was going back and forth, oh, some deleted posts now. But his, his observations were getting taken to task going back and forth. He says, it's a very good model. I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that in agentic coding sessions. It seems pretty much on par with the best public models of Q1 2026. In my fairly limited use, it also seems very token hungry. There was some interesting back and forth around the pricing because it might not actually be that cheap,

• 20:16John Coogan?

  at least through Kimmy's API or Moonshot's API, but.

• 20:20Tyler?

  Yeah, I think the, the input per million was like $3, output was 15, which is like cheaper than Frontier models, but like it's certainly not at like.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  It's like 20% cheaper or 30% cheaper.

• 20:30Tyler?

  Yeah. And if, if, if it's like more token hungry.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Tyler?

  Yeah. Token efficiency is not very good. That's actually can be much.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  But you have to imagine that if it's open weights, then, then companies bring it in. They start quantizing it and distilling it and tightening it up and optimizing it. And then there's probably a whole stack of like Neo clouds that will be competing for, well, you know, we have this cheap energy over here, or we have some older chips that it can run on, or do whatever they can to, to bring down the price. So. Dean says, I am personally surprised the Chinese state continues to allow the open sourcing of models this good, giving potential risks. Now, it seems like the, that is very much like from the top. They are pro open source right now. Dean says, to be clear, I myself might be fine with models presenting this level of marginal risk being open weight, but I'm surprised that China is fine with it. I suspect the reason is that they, they are.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Is 75% explained by strategic blindness, lack of AGI pilledness. The CCP is very Jan LeCuny in its view of AI. The other 25% or so is their lack of compute for customer inference, making China's open weight strategy an unintended byproduct of US export controls. That's interesting. And the normal Chinese strategy of aggressive exports for the companies as opposed to the government. The decision to open source is partially ideological and partially because they are behind. And they know that very few people would pay for sub Frontier models from China. Yeah, you have to imagine that it like the idea of sending, I mean, people are having discussion over like, should you send your corporate data to, to an American Frontier lab?

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Imagine that, that same level of, should we upload our entire code base to the Moonshot API? Because we've gone all in on, on Chinese closed source, which seems like that's a very, very hard sell. So there is a world where there's like no money to be made in America. I don't know. Maybe there's some American businesses that would just be like, yeah, I'm cool with it. Take my, take everything, take all my IP, like I, I'm, I'm, uh, uh, what's the phrase? Like anti fragile. I'm anti fragile. I can't be, like, you can't clone me. So, and I have no IP. So just upload it all.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if you're a local plumbing company.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Probably in a good spot.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe. He, this is where he gets a pretty, this is a pretty hot take. Dean says, open weight models are inherently decelerationist. And Tyler and I were debating this before the show. He said, I'm continually surprised to see the so-called accelerationists so excited about open weight models. I suspect the reason is that they know open weight models are effectively ungovernable. That's correct. And they simply like the overall cloak of ungovernability open weight models create over the whole of AI. It's not a bad strategy. It reminds me of James Scott's recounting of the Hill people in The Art of Not Being Governed. Still, in the end, open weight models deter further AI capex.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  And this is the debate that we were having was like, how capex intensive are these Frontier training runs? Because Moonshot's raised, I think a billion dollars recently. And, and it just feels like even the, even the latest labs, like there's a lot of cost, a lot of researchers, and they do a lot of experiments, but the, but the core run might not, we might not be talking about 50 billion yet. Maybe in the future, like you, you need to accrue towards that. And maybe people wouldn't fund it if they're like, oh, you're only going to be able to monetize this for, for like three months because you're going to get distilled so fast or you're going to get copied so fast. That is tricky. Like it is nicer when you have a monopoly or oligopoly for some period of time to, to actually earn profits off of what you invested against.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, if anyone listening to this is over at Kimmy or Moonshot.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  Come on the show.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  No, don't come on the show. Just feel free to let us know how, how you made it.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  Feel free to, to leak the secret sauce.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  On the show. Come on the show.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  On the show, yeah. Yeah. If you're so, if you're so open, why not?

• 24:35John Coogan?

  So Gronk Daniel was, was calling this dumping. He said, what China is doing in AI is called dumping. They do it in literally every industry they enter. The goal is to kill all local competition by subsidizing their own industry so they can produce at a loss. Then, once all competitors are dead, they can charge profitable prices and control the market. In steel and automobiles, this is just as, just bad. In AI, it's potentially fatal, fatal to our country.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  It's interesting. It's like, I, there's a deeper AI supply chain across data centers and fabs and chips and energy that you could potentially have a lot of GDP growth and a lot of industrial AI capacity on an open weight model.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  So it's not like you're losing everything, but it does feel like a little bit of a slippery slope where you're like, sure. Like, well, if you let China win the, the, the model layer, then you also are like, sure, they set up a fab. Like, let's start buying the chips from them. Sure. Like just put the data centers there, put everything there. And then all of a sudden you've lost like everything potentially, and you're just in that consumer mindset. And then you're back to, well, how, how hard is it to make a T-shirt in this country? Is that a problem? Not if we're friendly and we're trading and we have something to offer. But if we don't have anything to offer, then we can't buy anything and then we become a poor country. I don't know. It's a, it's a tricky back and forth. People like cheap stuff, like they like cheap TVs and they don't like pollution associated with TV factories.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  So you send them abroad and then eventually you're like, wait, what do we make in this country? Anyway, we have Tyler Cowen joining at noon. We can break down all the economics of this and other topics in just a minute. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Gronk Daniel says, unfortunately dumping, unfortunately dumping is the very common argument for rent-seeking domestic firms who want protection. So even if you're in just a normal competitive industry, if you're an electric vehicle manufacturer, you're going to claim dumping, even if it's just fair competition from BYD. Even if there's no government subsidies, they're just making great products and they want to send them here.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Dean's position here seems to be a Jones Act of sorts, and this has famously not saved our shipbuilding industry. And I suspect it won't save our AI labs. Stopping open weights is virtually impossible. So our only other option is governments taking stakes in labs and subsidizing our own industry. If you scream and yell about either Jones acting, AI or subsidizing GPUs, then you should also explain how we will escape the dumping trap China is trying to push on us to destroy our labs and leave themselves with the only functioning AI industry in the world. That is a, a take. Dean Ball says, I know, I've said this a bunch, but I wasn't proposing a Jones Act for AI as a good thing. I was saying that if USG feels pressure to do something,

• 27:27John Coogan?

  the likeliest thing to land on would be soft law discouragement of Chinese model use. China does the same to our tech. Yeah, that is true. There's a whole bunch of, I mean, even with the Nvidia chips for a while, there was rumors that Beijing was recommending that tech companies in China not buy them, even once they were like approved. And so the soft power of the government happens all over the place.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  LeBron chimed in, Augustine LeBron, that is, former guest of Dwarsh Patel. I really like him. He says, there is no predatory dumping trap to escape. Keep thinking it through. One, China subsidizes open weight models below their costs, taking big losses in the process. Two, say they put Anthropic and OpenAI out of business. Three, they start charging monopolist prices to recoup losses. So now there's room for new entrants and perhaps government support. The monopolist prices era will be short-lived. All these complaints about unfair competition are BS. If you don't want to be serfs to a more competitive rentier class, then go compete. The more I think about the China dumping open weight models at a loss to hurt the US idea, the stupider it sounds.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Now, you can lose the industrial capacity over a generation. Like if you, if you truly like lose all your AI researchers and they go off and do biology research or they, they just go do something else, and this is what happened. Like, we just don't have that many nuclear engineers in America anymore because nuclear engineering was seen as like a dead end. And so they all went into computer science and now we're really strong in computer science and that's great. But if you, if you lose all of those people, eventually you can't just like flip the switch and recompete. But I, I take his point that it is difficult to, to, like, you do create a market incentive. It's like, wait, there are Chinese companies that are charging us 99% margins on intelligence? Like, any venture capitalists want to fund something, a Neolab perhaps?

• 29:22John Coogan?

  And people will just be like, absolutely. I would love to compete with China. Like, people do this all the time.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're doing this in, in manufacturing.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're literally doing it right now. Now it is slow.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the automotive example is interesting. In, uh, over the last few days, I saw a ton of BYD cars.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Just all over. And it's interesting because they were, I saw, I would say like less than I would have expected based on what a lot of people say on X, for example. They're like, I was in Europe and there's Chinese cars everywhere. I saw, I saw plenty, but. What's really hurt the European auto manufacturers is not that the Chinese companies are selling into Europe. It's that Chinese consumers are just buying Chinese cars, right? And so you look at a car like the Porsche Cayenne, right?

• 30:13John Coogan?

  That was a big seller.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Huge seller in China, probably still they still sell a decent amount. But people are very frequently choosing local options and they have a lot of national pride in China around buying local at this point.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like this final post from Augustine LeBron. He says, "The SFAIC needs fewer philosopher kings and more CEOs laser focused on serving the best possible tokens at the best possible price. Your margin is my opportunity. Less Marcus Aurelius, more Ron Vacris. Costco CEO started his career as a forklift driver." Can you imagine if in a decade we have a frontier lab CEO who's like, "Yeah, I started digging ditches to build data centers. Like I was racking GPUs when they were fighting it out over who was on the frontier. And now I got the cheapest models in the business. I got the cheapest intelligence."

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  I got the best value in the industry.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  I mean, for like 99% of businesses, they just want tokens that are good at the right price. Like, but maybe if Costco is the model, there will be an LVMH of AI. Something that really says your company takes luxury tokens seriously. It's like, I'm happy to pay 99% margins. I don't even think.

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  These aren't just tokens. They're a statement.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  This is a statement. At this company, we use premium AI, luxury AI. Ju Khan is sharing some news, "The US is tougher curbs on Chinese AI." Now, there are like logical curbs, right? Like distillation attacks and IP theft should be investigated. And I don't know what resources there are to fight that. But I mean, like the FBI busts people all the time. There was a spy at Tesla a couple of years ago who was like just straight up like saving the files, sending them to China. You know, like that happens and they bust those people. And so there should be like an effort there. I'm sure there already is one.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  But Ju Khan says, "Damn, this is exactly what Dean Ball said, isn't it? And here's the news from Axios, "The big picture, the administration wouldn't need to impose an outright ban to get US companies to drop those Chinese platforms." Quote, "What's actually happening is slower and more durable." One source familiar with the government decisions said citing procurement rules, "Entity list threats and public pressure campaigns aimed at US companies using Chinese models." Instead of a ban, another source familiar with government discussions described a push to highlight potential backdoors and lack of security with Chinese models. It feels like it should be pretty doable to hunt down backdoors and deal with security risks of Chinese models,

• 33:06John Coogan?

  especially if they're being run in American data centers and the governance issue that brings. It's an offensive approach where the administration encourages a more innovative US open source ecosystem, the source added. So this will be playing out.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Token Atelier."

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Token Atelier. I like that.

• 33:26Jordi Hays?

  And they.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  We'll take your token atelier over to Codex. It's a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  The Odyssey is up to 264 million. Biggest non-animated opening of the year until Spider-Man in two weeks, according to Lucas Shaw over at Bloomberg.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  For reference, $375 million budget. Production was $250 million. They recoup that immediately. 125 million in global marketing, apparently. And looks like a big financial win, but very much, you know, priced in. Like, you know, the base case here, the film will make a little bit over a billion dollars. The cash flow to Universal and Comcast, who are the studio behind this. You're looking at $250 million in pre-tax lifetime profit. That's 0.2% of Comcast's market value. So it's not like this crazy thing for the corporate entity, but it is exciting for the film.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  And it's exciting for Christopher Nolan, who's in the Journal today in the Business and Finance section. Because Nolan's The Odyssey shows directors are franchises now. They have an interesting statistic in here that 53% of Odyssey attendees said that the director was their number one reason for attending. Not the actor, not the fact that they loved the book and they were waiting for the IP to get adapted. Not that it's a, you know, oh, they like Sword and Sandals, they were looking, or that it was IMAX, they wanted a Nolan film. And that's, I mean, everyone knows this intuitively from talking to everyone. Everyone's like, I want to see the next Nolan film.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  But it's just interesting that there has been this huge shift towards franchises built around particular intellectual property verticals. Marvel, Star Wars, Disney stuff, Pixar and whatnot. But now people are saying, "I'm just going to ride with this director and whatever he does. And he can take me to the past. He can take me to the future. Wherever he goes, I'm riding with Nolan."

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  I had a funny run in with Christopher Nolan. I was walking on the beach and Christopher Nolan was walking in front of me.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm not hitting any sound effects now, to be clear. And he's walking with his dog. I don't know who he is or what he looks like. Someone else who I'm with says, "That's Christopher Nolan." I said, "Who?" And then, and then it came to me. But then this dog ran up behind us. He was walking his dog. Another dog joins and is like really messing with his dog. And so I had to be like, I just had to say, "Hey, man, it's not my dog." Because it seemed like my dog was off.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  You were getting framed.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  I was being framed for having a poorly trained dog that was harassing his dog.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  But he was pretty unbothered. Let's head over to this picture from Goutier. He had the best seat in the house.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  This is, is this a real photo? Or do you think this is like, take a photo and then put it in AI and say like, make it even more distorted? Because this is what it looks like to be truly in the front row of an IMAX showing. People were really, were really crazy about like, the IMAX looked way better. I think some folks on the team saw the film once, twice, three times. Who saw it in IMAX? Okay, we got some IMAX chats back there.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Mike's seen it twice.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Give us a review. You liked it? How many thumbs up out of 10? What do you got for me? Tyler, you can chime in too. What do you think?

• 37:22Tyler?

  It was fantastic.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  It was fantastic.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Were you taking, were you taking notes the whole time? Like, did you have a notebook?

• 37:29Speaker 03

  No, mentally, mentally. No, but it's great. It's an amazing accomplishment.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  You're like, shoot the next movie in IMAX.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Dude, I mean, it's one of the best looking films, I think, ever. I mean, the quality is just like unmatched.

• 37:44John Coogan?

  You did 70 millimeter?

• 37:45Speaker 03

  70 mil IMAX. It's incredible. It's incredible.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  How many times do you think, how many times do you think you'll see it in theaters?

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, I'm already scheduled for four total.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  Four total? That's crazy.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll see. We'll see how that goes.

• 38:00Tyler?

  I was slumming it in normal theaters. I don't want to spoil it in case you haven't read it yet.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, thank you.

• 38:05Tyler?

  Just, yeah, but I think.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  I'm really excited to find out if he gets home.

• 38:09Tyler?

  Yeah, yeah, we'll see. My take, I posted it was missing some hijinks and some gas. There are a few scenes missing from the actual poem that I would like to see.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Are there hijinks in the poem that you didn't, that didn't make it in?

• 38:22Tyler?

  Yes. Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  It was low on hijinks.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  We should do an episode on IMAX.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we got to film this show in IMAX. How would you rank it in the Nolan canon? Top five, top two? What are we doing?

• 38:38Tyler?

  He's thinking.

• 38:40Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was, I thought it was fine. It's not top three for sure.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Not top three. What are you putting above it?

• 38:45Tyler?

  He's not going to beat The Dark Knight.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dark Knight.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Dark Knight's better. Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, obviously.

• 38:51Tyler?

  Wait, Mike's coming back.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  I love Tenet.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  I think it says a lot about the filmmaker. If this film doesn't make his top three for some people, that says a lot about, or top five, just with like his filmography.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Top five right now. Top five Nolan films, go.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Inception, Dark Knight, Interstellar.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Oppenheimer Odyssey's got to be up there.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Okay, Odyssey's in the top five. There you go. Well, hopefully Jordy can take a look at it.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll wait till I can chime in to solidify that top five.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Public. Investing for those who take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Yeah, the Wall Street Journal has this article, "The Odyssey Proves Hollywood Top Directors Are Franchises Now." Every Hollywood studio wants its own Christopher Nolan. And I'm interested to know, like, how locked in is he with Comcast, particularly? Like, Universal? Like, it feels like it's this huge asset, but it's wildly different than, you know, when you're Disney and you just own Marvel and there's absolutely no key man risk. But it's clearly worked out very well. The Odyssey was written and directed by Christopher Nolan. It opened

• 40:06John Coogan?

  to an estimated $664 million worldwide. Domestically, its $124 million debut was the third biggest for any film this year. So it's not that huge. It didn't beat Toy Story 5, didn't beat Super Mario Galaxy, but it does feel like it'll have a longer run of people seeing it multiple times, paying more for IMAX. And it is just a breakout for an R-rated historical movie. That's a niche that typically doesn't put up massive numbers, like a Toy Story, for example. The opening was higher than many 2026 releases based on current, more current intellectual properties. It smoked Star Wars, The Mandalorian and Grogu, smoked Supergirl, and it also beat Scream 7. Nolan's brand power and commercial track

• 40:51John Coogan?

  record got Comcast Universal Pictures to say yes to a roughly $250 million R-rated adaptation of an ancient Greek poem shot across Europe with largely practical visual effects, including a 35-foot-tall Trojan horse. According to data from RenTrak, 53% of the Odyssey attendees said the director was the number-one reason for attending. "It's not often you see that," said Universal President of Domestic Distribution. Chris Nolan has earned the audience's trust and respect, and that's completely true. Tenet had a very, very weak box office opening. Oppenheimer did quite well. Dunkirk did well. I recently

• 41:33John Coogan?

  rewatched Dunkirk. That's a great one. That needs to be up there in the top 20. They're all good. In the late 2000s and 2010, franchises dominated the movie industry. Studios hired directors who could pump out sequels, spinoffs, and remakes as efficiently as possible. Nolan was the most successful and prolific among a tiny number of filmmakers who still called their own shots. Along with the hugely successful Dark Knight trilogy, he made his original hit movies like Inception and Interstellar. But Marvel, Fast and Furious, and Transformers have all stumbled at the box office recently, as audiences have grown tired of them. Gen Z, in particular, appears skeptical of the industry's reliance on aging brands and

• 42:16John Coogan?

  technology-driven filmmaking. They're more drawn to stories told by an authentic, recognizable filmmaker with a point of view, says the Wall Street Journal, like Currie Barker, director of surprise horror blockbuster Obsession. Though that film was one of the several new-to-the-big-screen director-driven hits this year, including Project Hail Mary and Backrooms. In response, studios that used to obsess over franchise management are devoting more energy to signing the most promising filmmakers. So you can imagine a 10-movie deal. I think Currie Barker already has a multiple-movie deal just on the back of Backrooms, even though it's his first film, because it was so successful. Studios are lost as far as knowing what works

• 42:55John Coogan?

  and what doesn't, said Byron Lord, CEO of CIA. Things have generationally changed, and individual, singular voices are taking advantage. Warner Brothers gave Black Panther and Creed director Ryan Coogler an unusually generous deal to the rights to make his own original horror movie Sinners, which became a hit last year. Weapons director Zach Krieger is helming an adaptation of the video game Resident Evil for Sony Pictures this fall and was part of a recent multimillion-dollar deal Warner made for a new horror property. Barrie, director Greta Gerwig, used her clout to convince Netflix to make her adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. Interesting, they're rebooting that. Resident Evil has

• 43:39John Coogan?

  had a rough go. They've done a number of movies, but never really major breakout beyond the core fanbase. Was there a movie that paired? We were so close to getting another Barbenheimer with The Odyssey. Was there another movie that people could go see at the same time for the double feature? They gotta do that. It was that Citizen one, Tyler? No? Just kidding. I don't know. It would have been good. It made the whole Oppenheimer weekend so much more enjoyable, having, like, the contrast there. Nolan should have almost...

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you do the Barbenheimer same day?

• 44:13John Coogan?

  I don't think I did it same day.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Same weekend, though.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  LARPing over here.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  But it was fun. It was a good movie.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  Netflix disclosed it has used generative AI in about 300 different productions this year already.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  People are gonna love this.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  "Across the production lifecycle, from concept and pre-visualization through post and delivery, Gen AI utilization by our creative partners is scaling quickly. In 2026, Gen AI workflows have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration of work in post-production. We are increasingly leveraging these tools to deliver higher-quality output more quickly and at a lower cost than traditional methods."

• 44:54John Coogan?

  One of the clearest examples came from The American Experiment, a docu-series about the American Revolution. Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said the series included 17 minutes of AI-enhanced footage that explained the scale of the project, and that expanded the scale of the project, and would not have been financially feasible using traditional production methods. The company insists that AI is not being introduced to replace writers, directors, actors, or other creative professionals. Instead, Netflix is positioning the technology as the next evolution of filmmaking software, allowing productions to create shots and sequences that would previously have been impossible or overly expensive. Very cool. I don't know.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  I think if used tastefully, it can be good. I saw the designer behind Quarter, those quarterly earnings posters, put together a number of Odyssey film posters, and immediately got community noted, because his post was like, "I went and saw the movie, and then I made these posters." And a bunch of people liked them. And immediately got community noted, "He used Midjourney." And, you know, he's just like...

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  All right, here's a question. Is this AI? Honda Canada posted an ad for The Odyssey, starring your son, your son's BFF, you, your daughter, backseat snacks, and your dog.

• 46:20John Coogan?

  That's pretty good.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a good ad. Might be. Could be AI.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Could just be Photoshop. I mean, they just have a picture of a car.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no. I was, like, genuinely curious. Is this a... Did Honda actually post this? Like, you'd never know at this point.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. I think they did. I think because it's Honda Canada, it's a more regional account. They can be a little bit more...

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  No, they did. They did. They did post it.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  I would believe that it's real. Plus, Trunk Fan, he knows when to flag things with real or AI.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  They say the cast of characters that have been in the backseat of your family's Odyssey could make a movie of their own.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  Man, the last drive in your Honda Odyssey was a motion picture.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  The Honda Odyssey.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy and disgusting and disappointing. Apparently, trial lawyers are lobbying against self-driving cars because they're too safe. They need people to be killed and injured so that they have material for lawsuits. So with thousands of lives annually in the balance, who is against autonomous vehicles? Trial lawyers. Remarkably, the trial lawyers saw the writing on the wall very early and have been lobbying against AVs for nearly a decade. The American Association for Justice, the trial lawyers lobby.

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  Has been a prominent opponent of AV legislation. It's crazy that on my drive to work, at least 80% of all billboards that I see are for personal injury lawyers.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  Big business. Yeah, the Morgan and Morgan founder is a billionaire off of it. I mean, he scaled that business and I saw some viral clip of a guy who just does lead gen and makes 30 million a year. And doesn't actually, he needs to be a lawyer to put up the ads, but doesn't fight the cases. Just finds the clients, finds the plaintiffs, vets them, and then passes it along to another lawyer who actually will fight the case, get the settlement. And so there's a little bit of back and forth about this. It might've just been that they're lobbying to hold the automaker liable, so there's still someone to sue and that might be a little less of, a little less egregious, but

• 48:38John Coogan?

  it is, if, if, if that's what delays the rollout of self-driving cars, that would truly be disappointing. Nick Carter says, my jaw dropped reading this. Who is the most opposed to self-driving cars? Ambulance chasing lawyers who sue over car accidents. They are explicitly on the side of preventable death. Not, not, not good. Oh, that's really, there's some really dark potential secondary effects. It fully rage baited Alex Tabarrok, who wrote about it at Marginal Revolution, and we can talk about, we can talk about it with Tyler Cowen in just a few minutes when he joins. There were people going back and forth over Brian Chesky. Was his account hacked? Was it not?

• 49:23John Coogan?

  There was a AI-generated quote slop thread about crypto or something like that?

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  I think it was about, yeah, real world assets.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, real world assets, which could be something that he gets excited about. It does feel like a little bit off topic right now in a world that is so AI-dominated. No one really wants to hear about that.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's in the mid, like the rumor, there's been reporting that he's in the midst of raising for a Neo Lab, focused on design.

• 49:52John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, why would he be posting about that? And so he, he told Fortune that his account was hacked and a lot of people weren't buying it, but Max Sparrow, the, the king of slop detection, the slop janitor over at Pangram says, I keep seeing people skeptical that Brian Chesky's AI slop crypto thread was not written by him, but to me, it seems like the most likely story. My guess is that the hackers were trying to warm up his account before dropping a pump and dump coin, but the actual scam post got flagged before it ever went live. And so that's, that's sort of an interesting twist because people were saying like, well, he might've just decided to post it because he thought it was good content or whatever, could get some, some virality.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  And the fact that it didn't have an address or wasn't immediately like the obvious scam, that was evidence that it was in fact, just him slopping it up on the timeline, but this, this warm-up thesis does seem more likely to me.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and if you had access to Chesky's account, you probably would think like, okay, do the warm-up post and then do something related to like real estate on chain that is monetized.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta bridge them. You can't just immediately be like, I'm giving everyone Bitcoin, like send me your address, like send me one Bitcoin, I'll send you back two. Like, like that, people that probably don't even fall for those scams anymore, hopefully. I don't know. People were going back and forth on this. It was, it was a fun time on the internet. What else is going on? The Jacobian conjecture was solved. Another math problem falls.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  If, if, if this is surprising to you.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  If you needed this explained to you.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  If you needed it explained.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  Or you're surprised that it fell, that you're telling on yourself.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you are telling on yourself. I like this from Benito Tortellini. They just created a million Jacobian conjectures. You have no idea what's coming. But no, it's a, it's a very exciting, another math problem. Also, an interesting full circle moment because the, the, the mathematician who solved the, the Jacobian conjecture had been working on it, I believe, for like a decade. So he's a, he's an AI researcher at Anthropic now, and he, you know, was able to use Fable to, you know, prove this math problem that he had been struggling with for a very long time. Was it him or was it his advisor? Like he had worked on this for a while or been exposed to it at least.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think loose, like same area of math. Also, he didn't prove it, he proved a counter example.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, a counter example.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, for everyone who's like, oh, do I really need these data centers? Like, I don't like AI, like this should swing them. Like, put this on a billboard. Like, I, I, I gotta send this to Saagar and Jetty and let him know, like, hey, this is, this, this populism's gonna swing around on this now.

• 52:49Jordi Hays?

  Was this conjecture on Saagar Bet?

• 52:52John Coogan?

  I don't think it was. We gotta get it on there.

• 52:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's kind of asleep at the wheel if he, if he wasn't, you know, trying to make him.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Now he's in charge of this thing?

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, you know, on Saagar Bet, he should've had, he should've had a market for, for this.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. What else is going on in the timeline right now? Five cups of coffee. You gotta be drinking five cups of coffee. This is the new meta. This is what everyone recommends. The Wall Street Journal has an article here. Gotta pull it up. Where is it? WSJ, five cups of coffee. How many cups of coffee do you do per day? I do one cup of coffee, but then I do two Uromatix and three Diet Coke, which I think is around five cups of coffee in terms of caffeine. How much, how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee?

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  I do a Cometier on the way to the gym.

• 53:44John Coogan?

  Oh, you drink caffeine before the gym? That's smart.

• 53:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. I have to.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Cometier on the way to the gym. Regular coffee during breakfast. And then two of these.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Okay. And then you're done for the day.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  Then I'm done for the day.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Five cups of coffee a day is fine for most adults, the Heart Association says. Tyler, did you get me? What's, what's in a cup of coffee?

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  Around 95.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  95. So, so putting up 500 milligrams a day, so that's like two Celsius? Two, maybe one and a half, depending on which, how strong it is. They're between 200 and 300, right? Celsius?

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  I think they're.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  I think they get up there.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  200 is the max. I think.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  No, I think 200 is the min.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  I thought, I thought, I thought beverage companies.

• 54:30John Coogan?

  Base Celsius is 200.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so beverage companies start to get.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Performance Edition, and it goes up to 300, because they have a bigger can. Celsius max.

• 54:37Jordi Hays?

  And they have Celsius heat, which is 300.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Heat?

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  Is it spicy?

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Who's to say?

• 54:44John Coogan?

  Spice up your mind. Anyway, research has been mixed, but association says evidence of coffee's safety and even benefits has been growing over time, this is from the Wall Street Journal. This is important for everyone listening. There's good news for coffee drinkers. Good news for coffee drinkers. Up to five cups of the brew a day are safe for more, for most adults and may even have benefits for heart health. That is crazy to hear. It always seemed like it would be a Faustian bargain, at the very least. Like, you know, worth it in the short term, but at some point it's gonna come back to bite you, but not in this case.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  I mean, like famously Voltaire would drink like 40 cups of, cups of coffee a day.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  No Voltaire?

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  I don't even know this stuff.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, I have like a.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, I mean, he did pretty well, I would say.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  If you learned that Voltaire drank 40 cups of coffee a day from Tyler right now, you're telling on yourself. You're definitely telling on yourself. Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And without further ado, our first guest of the show is in the waiting room. We have Tyler Cowen, the American Economist, to talk to us about all things. How are you doing, Tyler? Good to see you again.

• 56:00Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, how are you? I don't drink coffee.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  I was about to ask. I have to ask every guest of the show.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna start?

• 56:06Tyler Cowen?

  I've only had coffee twice in my life, both times in rural Ethiopia in a coffee ceremony. And it was amazing, but I thought this is the peak. I can't beat this.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Is that because you'd become too powerful or do you see it as a Faustian bargain?

• 56:21Tyler Cowen?

  I see people getting addicted to it, and if they can't get their morning coffee, they have headaches. I don't want to be there.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does become a new supply chain.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  How often are you somewhere where you can't possibly get a coffee in the morning?

• 56:37Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know, it can't, but you have to go out and get it or go to some effort. Or you're in a hotel room and you make a crummy coffee there and then you don't really enjoy it. It's just simpler not to have that addiction, I think.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  What's very interesting is that coffee, caffeine pills are incredibly economically efficient. It's like one cent for the equivalent of a cup of coffee if you buy them in bulk. And yet absolutely zero adoption. People love a cup of coffee, even if it's a couple bucks. It's like a simple pleasure. It's a joy. People just can't stop paying for them.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  Do you do anything in the morning, any type of ritual that you feel like you have to do to be yourself?

• 57:15John Coogan?

  He's like Celsius.

• 57:18Tyler Cowen?

  I get high from mineral water, but if I don't have it, I'm fine. I'm not craving it.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Addicted. Okay, okay. Well, let's talk about artificial intelligence. How are you thinking about the latest debate around KIMI, K3, open source AI? Where should we begin the discussion? And then I'm sure we can narrow down a bunch of different ways.

• 57:41Tyler Cowen?

  Open source is coming and is here, whether we like it or not. Of course, a lot of it will be from China. We should allow American competitors to proceed on an even footing. But basically, the attempt to outlaw it or ban it or use sanctions against it is going to fail miserably. Like, what about multinationals? What about companies whose affiliates use open source? What about all the major US companies that use open source Chinese products right now? I hope, I plead that the Trump administration gives up on this crusade.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:13Tyler Cowen?

  It cannot work.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Okay, so I want to push back on it cannot be banned because I, at first blush, I agree with you. Like, it is software. It is something that can just be downloaded. You can download the weights and just have it. Anything that's replicable infinitely should just proliferate across the world very quickly. But the fact that you need an NVL 72, you need a whole server rack, you need equipment and infrastructure. That acts as a point of leverage. I'm not saying that we should ban it. I'm just saying, if you put me in charge of banning it, I think I would have an easier time banning open source AI than banning music distribution, for example.

• 58:55Tyler Cowen?

  What will you do when it's on device? How long is that from now, right?

• 58:58John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 58:59Tyler Cowen?

  Why go down the path at all?

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a good point.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what lessons are there from the automotive industry for this moment? Just given, you know, the use of tariffs and how those have worked and haven't worked. And we were talking, you know, earlier about how Europe's approached the problem. You see BYDs all over Europe now. But at the same time, many of the manufacturers have been hurt most by just losing the Chinese market, right? Or not losing it, but having declining sales there because of local alternatives.

• 59:40Tyler Cowen?

  I think if Europe starts a major trade war with China, Europe will lose. This is a sad reflection on Europe. And it's a sad reflection on Europe that they can't just say, oh, we'll make fewer cars. We'll do five or six other great things that we're readily positioned to shift into. They're not really there. But simply putting up big tariffs isn't going to help them get there. It actually will postpone it. And those tariffs over time end up applying to the inputs for your other sectors and it makes them less competitive. So Europe's really in a pickle. There's no good way out, but I don't favor the tariffs either.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  How do you think about the open source models in terms of like the broader AI stack? Like, is it important that America have some position in energy, data centers, chip manufacturing, networking? There's this whole stack and I've been surprised that we've been building as many data centers as we have in the United States, given all the pushback. That feels like something that could have gone to at least other Western nations, energy-rich countries. But that's been fairly centralized. But there's clearly, it feels like there's a potential slippery slope for, oh, well, if China's handling the open source models,

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  then maybe they should have the data centers. Maybe they should also do the power generation over there. It's dirty. We don't like having data centers here. Put them over there. And then at some point, it feels like you could lose leverage, but I don't know how risky that actually is.

• 1:01:12Tyler Cowen?

  I live right next to all the data centers in Northern Virginia. It's great. They pay for half of the taxes of their county. The energy, the YIMBY, all that, I'm completely for it. The chips, bring it on. But at the end of the day, people are afraid that the American models can be yanked from them.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:28Tyler Cowen?

  That's partly our fault.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Tyler Cowen?

  And if there's open source as something in the background, people are more willing to lock into our systems to a partial extent. So the two are complements, in fact. And again, there's all these major American companies that don't typically advertise it, but they use a lot of Chinese open source right now.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:47Tyler Cowen?

  You're just gonna pull that out of their guts?

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, both enterprises actually deploying these models for cost savings. And also, I mean, we saw with Thinking Machines, they use the Chinese open source model to bootstrap a step in the process of building their latest product. And so it's a whole supply chain. Where do you think the data center pushback comes from? If you are there and have a positive experience, it's polling very poorly. Is it all fear around job displacement? Is it anything particularly on the ground? Like, where did this come from?

• 1:02:22Tyler Cowen?

  I think right now, people are just negative about many, many things. They're negative about their country. They're negative about social institutions, except the military. There are very low levels of trust. They were told during COVID times, during the great financial crisis, everything's okay, when it was not. So you can't completely blame them. But look, as you know, this country has 50 states. And if Mark Zuckerberg needs to pick up the phone and call the governor of Louisiana, thank goodness that can work here. And I think we're going to do it.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  What is it about this, we're in this like counterintuitive vibe session moment. Kyla Scanlon sort of written about it, coined the phrase. This idea that when you poll people on how are your neighbors doing economically or financially? People say, they're doing fine, but I'm doing terribly. Or the economy will grow, the job market will be stable, but people will report the consumer confidence is very low. I'm wondering if you've reflected on that more generally, and then I do have a follow-up question. But what is the state of the vibe session? Is it just continual? Is it permanent? Is it getting worse?

• 1:03:30Tyler Cowen?

  I call it negative emotional contagion. And you see it in many other eras of world history. It feeds on itself. I'm not sure we know what starts it. Maybe it is some negative events, but once it gets going, it's hard to reverse. Sometimes you need actually a war or some kind of catastrophe. I hope we do not. But if you look at wealth accumulation, the job market, stock prices, real wages, many other indices, they're doing like okay to fine. They're just not doing terribly.

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I completely agree. And so I had this idea, I don't know if you'll agree, but maybe the fact that we're in this vibe session and the vibes are so bad and there's so much negative emotion around the economy, that if we actually were to go through a brief recession or a market correction, we might be a more resilient country, sort of ironically because of that. Because everyone would look around and be like, well, I already thought it was bad. It got a little worse, but I'm ready to reinvest. Maybe this is what I've been waiting for. Finally, I'm justified in thinking things are bad.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  And so I can get out of this and do whatever's necessary because I am, there's no longer a cognitive dissonance between what the market is doing and how I feel.

• 1:04:51Tyler Cowen?

  One hopes, yes, it could be a bullish signal. But then again, if something terrible does happen, everyone says, I told you so. And maybe we get stuck in the mire.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  About a year ago, you had a blog post, if I remember correctly, one of many, of course, that was something to the effect of like, AI is real and it's amazing, but the economy is still going to just sort of generally continue growing as it's grown, maybe a little bit faster, hopefully. Are you seeing anything that could update your worldview on that? Because so far, I feel like you've been pretty vindicated.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Deserve a victory lap.

• 1:05:29Tyler Cowen?

  Well, I'm seeing a lot of confirmation. There's so many people, they will say to me or say in chat groups or on Twitter, my goodness, if we had Fable 5, I would have thought the world would be totally different and it's not.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41Tyler Cowen?

  And that's my view. But look, you go back to 1995 through 1998. We got half a percentage point of extra growth out of those advances. They, to me, seem less impressive than AI. So I think over time, with some slowness, we'll get that and maybe a bit more, which is great.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Interesting. Have you seen The Odyssey?

• 1:06:03Tyler Cowen?

  I have seen The Odyssey.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Can you give us your review?

• 1:06:07Tyler Cowen?

  Well, look, compared to other movies, it's fantastic and it's dreamy and it's impressive. But mostly, I was disappointed. I thought the dialogue was lame. The casting, I don't mind the cross-ethnic casting at all. I just didn't think they were the right people. Matt Damon is not Odysseus. He's just not impressive enough physically. The woman who played Calypso just seemed like a suburban housewife. I love Zendaya, but she didn't have any real role. So they screwed up many things. It didn't quite cohere. I'm very glad I saw it. Everyone should see it. It's worth the three hours. But relative to expectations, I suppose a disappointment.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Do you think it's, do you think classicists are satisfied with it? Do you think it's good for the field?

• 1:06:54Tyler Cowen?

  They're delighted to have any attention at all. And the different translations of The Odyssey are now on the bestseller lists. So what's their alternative, right? They shouldn't complain too loudly.

• 1:07:07Jordi Hays?

  Do you think technology is making soccer worse?

• 1:07:13Tyler Cowen?

  I don't watch soccer, but I think technology in some ways has made basketball worse. And I wouldn't be surprised if the same were true of soccer, that it homogenizes things and everyone chases after the same targets, the same players, teams have less individual style. But to soccer, I cannot speak.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Fair.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  What about AI maniacs? Take me through what defines an AI maniac, why it's important. And I have some, some pushback and follow up questions.

• 1:07:44Tyler Cowen?

  I spoke to two teenagers this morning. One was 13, one is 17. Abu Dhabi, Finland, they're AI maniacs. They spend their spare time mastering AI. They know way more than their so-called teachers. Their starting companies are building models. They realize this is the future. You're going to have a large number of companies with quite a very small number of employees, but pretty high revenue. And I think AI maniacs will compete in medicine, law, business consulting, banking, wherever it is we let them compete. So this to me is the future. Like if you're asking, will the UK recover? I would rephrase it. Is the UK going to encourage its AI maniacs?

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  How can they encourage these AI maniacs? It feels like AI naturally lowers the barrier to entrepreneurship. And so there's not much encouragement that's necessary. I mean, as long as the models are available and affordable for young people, they will do things with them.

• 1:08:45Tyler Cowen?

  Young people should be allowed to rise to positions of authority. They should be respected. They shouldn't be looked down upon. They should have the chance to buy computer, get grants. It's not automatic. So you look at the United States, we do great on all these metrics. Estonia is a country that does pretty well on these metrics. A lot of parts of the world are too small C conservative. And we'll see where different countries are going to fall on this spectrum. But they're not all going to do it automatically, just like not all countries have made great rock and roll. Though, the technology is pretty straightforward.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Estonia is famous for major government investing in, in high-speed bandwidth. Is that correct? Is that the, is that the rough story of Estonia?

• 1:09:31Tyler Cowen?

  Yes.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  And, but I'm interested in what that would look like for AI in America or the UK. Like, it feels like many of the models or application layer companies, they have sort of a free tier that gets someone potentially from zero to close to AI maniac. And then at some point, they can go and find a customer to help pay for their compute bills. But is there more the government should be doing?

• 1:09:58Tyler Cowen?

  But as you know, with venture capital, there's a valley of death. I don't know that the government should be making grants to 16-year-olds, but someone should. I'm doing it. Other people should as well. So this is really the province of youth. There's nowhere you can go to learn this stuff, other than say, some of the major AI centers and companies. So you've got to teach yourself. And is there the support in your environment for that? We will see.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Give, give us an update on how you're thinking about grants. Are you going younger, broader, smaller, different partners? I mean, there's been some folks who have been able to do compute grants and then they sort of cap, they sort of, the dollars go further because of the implicit margin.

• 1:10:42Tyler Cowen?

  With AI maniacs, I'm going younger and weirder. And I've also noticed Europe is doing pretty well on the AI maniacs metric. We'll see how it develops as the costs rise. But I've been pleasantly surprised, and I'm now more optimistic about Europe than I was six months ago.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  How does that, like, where did that come from? That feels like a come from behind story for Europe. I feel like the, for the longest time, the, the brightest technologists in Europe have gone to America to start their companies. The Colisons, famous example, there's many others, with the exception of like the Swedes and Spotify, I suppose. But in general, it feels like many people have come. Are they staying more frequently? Like, what's happening?

• 1:11:28Tyler Cowen?

  Well, these kids may yet go to America. They're too young to be going now. Maybe it's that, you know, chatbots didn't interest the Europeans that much. They seem to like compete with culture. Agents are a chance to do something. Now, American kids have had opportunities to do things for a long time. But for the European kids, this is something new. So I think at the margin, you'll see more extra activity there. And a lot of new companies from quite young people, coming out of all of Europe, including Eastern Europe.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Do you think young people are better at avoiding the fake work trap that happens with some AI users? You know, the person that just builds an automated workflow to, you know, check, summarize every meeting, and then they never look at the notes, and it's just endless token consumption in service of like, creating the ultimate second brain that they never actually refer to. And it's, it's ultimately a lot of make-work, but it feels very productive, sort of the tool-shaped, shaped objects formulation?

• 1:12:29Tyler Cowen?

  I think the young people are more playful with it. They take more chances. In the aggregate, they might even do worse. But in terms of coming up with the new things that really matter, I think they're going to win.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  What do you think about the, the risk of, of the one-shotting from AI? People that go so deep in it, they lose, they lose their grip on reality?

• 1:12:51Tyler Cowen?

  It happens with everything, you know? When I was a kid, people one-shoted on baseball. Can you imagine that? Or like drugs. AI is one of the better things to be one-shoted from, I would say.

• 1:13:04John Coogan?

  No, I was laughing about, I know some guys who've been basically one-shoted by golf. And they, and all day, every day. Like, reading about golf, studying golf, trying to improve their golf game. And it's the same thing as AI. Yeah.

• 1:13:17Jordi Hays?

  What, if a billionaire came to you and said, Tyler, it seems that my type is very unpopular right now. What should we do to, to try to shift public opinion? Right now, there's a, I think, an $80 million campaign being spent to block the billionaire tax here in California. But it seems like there are other things more broadly that billionaires could do to shift public perception. But what do you think?

• 1:13:52Tyler Cowen?

  I would say, don't apologize and keep on going. I hope the billionaire tax fails. It will wreck California. If it passes, it's already harmed California. Even a lot of the Democratic Party politicians don't support it. I think, again, there's just this negative sentiment about many, many things, including billionaires. You might say, some of them deserve it. Fine, like with all humans. But at the end of the day, I'm reminded of the old saying from Jonathan Swift, and he said, "Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for the privilege of being eminent." Unquote. If you succeed, people will hate you. Online,

• 1:14:33Tyler Cowen?

  you saw this, you know, wasn't Malcolm Gladwell, Steve Levitt, Paul Krugman, whoever did well, got hated.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's right.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  At the same time, would building some massive, you know, parks and/or, you know, any, any type of, of public work?

• 1:14:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:14:55Jordi Hays?

  Be, be worthwhile?

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  The interesting question is, is there, is there some sort of like, greater leverage from having like, the library that you walk by versus like, 1% lower levels of malaria? That's like this abstract thing that you don't see? Like, there's something about building like a monument as a wealthy person, as opposed to having an abstract, diffuse impact on humanity, even if the reduction-

• 1:15:23Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the modern version of a park is just like owning an NFL team?

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  It doesn't really feel the same because the NFL team-

• 1:15:30Tyler Cowen?

  President Obama just built a monument. Does anyone love him for it? Now, I'm all for today's billionaires doing more to support art, music, libraries, whatever we all might come up with. But I don't think it's going to make them loved.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, maybe not. What about religion and AI? There were, Anthony Levandowski was working on an AI religion way before it was cool. I think 2017, he was thinking about this. Where, it feels like we're maybe behind the curve on a true AI-based religion. It feels like, based on the capabilities of the models, you could have something happening. There's little pockets of people that are obsessed with certain models, but I haven't seen anything formally being built out. Where do you think that goes?

• 1:16:17Tyler Cowen?

  I think it'll be more like sects than new religions. So you could write your own version of Hindu sacred books, or your own version of Shiite Islam with your own, you know, slate of who the true imams are or should be. And we're just going to see proliferation. Like, for a while in history, we had a proliferation of different versions of the LDS church, different kinds of Mormons. A lot, some are still around. And using an agent, you'll be able to whip up your own religion, I don't know, in less than a day, with rituals, sacred books, practices. Most won't catch on, but a few will. They'll have a few hundred, a few thousand adherents. That may sound trivial, but if, you know, half of 1% of

• 1:17:00Tyler Cowen?

  the population does this, and some of these get some number of adherence, over time, the whole religious landscape looks quite different. I think it will be more diverse and feel weirder and be less centralized in religious authorities.

• 1:17:13John Coogan?

  Where do you think the Amish will be in 200 years? I saw someone try and use one of these AI models to project out, project out the human population in, in 20200. And the prediction came back as like, America will be 34% Amish. And I think it was just extrapolating, you know, linear trends of their birth rates versus everyone else. But it feels like the idea of the Amish lifestyle is actually becoming in vogue in almost popular culture with, don't use screens as much, try and put, limit your Instagram usage,

• 1:17:55John Coogan?

  you need to log off and touch grass. All of these memes are sort of, you know, the, the potential gateway drug to the Amish lifestyle.

• 1:18:04Tyler Cowen?

  I've visited the Amish many times. I admire what they've done, but it's possible because the surrounding society cross-subsidizes them. So you can't have a third of America being Amish. And I think they keep people in the fold because it is pretty small and tightly knit. And were there, say, three or four million Amish, which we're very far from, the rate of leaving would be much higher. So I think it's bounded on the upside. But I'm glad they're there. They've done a great job. Their communities are quite interesting and pretty prosperous. They have a lot of kids. Good for them.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Do you agree with Jeremy Gaffon that people are constantly looking for a priestly class and in recent years it's moved from the billionaire class to the online poster?

• 1:18:53Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know, maybe online posters peaked five or 10 years ago and now there's a lot more video and just the AI itself competes against the online posters.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:05Tyler Cowen?

  I liked his dialogue on that topic, but I don't exactly agree with what he said.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  I'm interested to know what level of entrepreneurship you think is reachable? Can every young person become an entrepreneur? Or are there some people who are more interested in just finding a stable job and then they need to figure out how to navigate changing jobs in the future?

• 1:19:35Tyler Cowen?

  Most people cannot become entrepreneurs. They're not ambitious. They should not be ambitious. You could argue the numbers, but it's a small percentage and other people want to work for them. So people like working in large institutions. Large institutions pay better. It's lower risk. I don't think that feature of the world is going to change.

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  So advice for someone who's in an organization, they're seeing things change because of artificial intelligence. Maybe they're not set up to be an AI maniac, go out and start a company, but should they be trying to find a role that is messier in their organization?

• 1:20:16Tyler Cowen?

  Absolutely. Follow AI, learn how to work with the leading models. It's a big time investment because everything changes so quickly, as you know.

• 1:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Tyler Cowen?

  But if you don't, you're left behind. And for all this talk of the leisure dividend from AI, right now we're still in a setting where most people have to work some amount harder.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:33Tyler Cowen?

  That will change, but it's not about to change. Time to work, get to work. You do. Doesn't it exhaust you? How many new and different things happen in the world of AI and you've got to stay on top of them?

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is a lot.

• 1:20:46Tyler Cowen?

  Where's your AI leisure dividend?

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:49Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  But at the same time, I don't know, learning about AI, I see as different as actually learning AI. Like there are a lot of, there are a lot of facts around, there are six AI tigers in China and like I just need to memorize what those six companies are, their histories, if I want to understand.

• 1:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can follow it like a sport and not learn really anything at all about how, what the models are.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  But that's different than using the models, which the models are so good. It feels like it's, it's less of a learning curve and more of just the volition to just go and do it because even when someone says, oh, well, I haven't tried the latest coding models. And I'm like, oh, well, they can do a lot more. Like at the very basic, like if you wanted to ask chat GPT for one image, you can now ask Codex for 100 images and it can just go and do it in a for loop and it can write a little code for you and do whatever it needs to, to get you your answer that's more robust and hydrated. But also you can just ask chat GPT, how do I do that? And it will tell you how to do it. And so the learning curve, this is Joe Weisenthal opinion, but he, he says that like there,

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  there is no learning curve because the AI is good at teaching you how to use it. But there is something there where you talk to people all the time. They're like, I haven't tried AI yet. I gotta check that out.

• 1:22:12Tyler Cowen?

  It can tell you what to do, but if you're always chasing it, waiting for it to tell you what to do, you're not on top of it. It's not really the way to excel in the area. So I think you do have to stay on top of both like the baseball team side of it and the how do you do this side of it? Again, it's hard.

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  How big can gambling get?

• 1:22:36Tyler Cowen?

  It's already too big. I don't know how we pull it back in.

• 1:22:41Tyler Cowen?

  It's a problem. Now, people must enjoy it, the people who don't wreck their lives with it, or it wouldn't be that addictive, but it is fairly addictive for many people. And I don't see how we turn the clock back.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's telling is even people that lose a lot of money gambling, I've noticed that they don't hate their like bookie or the app that they use to lose money.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  They seem to have like, you know, maybe, maybe it's like a toxic relationship, right? Where, where.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  No, no, a lot of times people will hate like the player that missed the field goal and they will be cyber bullying the particular athlete that lost them the money and they won't be mad at the platform.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Their account manager at DraftKings or whatever.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, isn't.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  But how would, what, you know, if you have a big red button that the ban, you know, sports betting or gambling, do you, do you hit the button? Like what, what would be your practical solution for reining it in?

• 1:23:41Tyler Cowen?

  I wouldn't hit the button. Banning it would not rein it in. We know that already. You hope norms change. It's a bad thing to be one shotted by. That said, I'd like to see a cost benefit analysis, all the people who enjoy it and add them up and see how that compares to the costs. No one wants to do that for obvious reasons.

• 1:24:03Tyler Cowen?

  Just say no.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, but it, but, but right now.

• 1:24:06Tyler Cowen?

  Amish, don't do it.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess, I was watching the latest UFC event and almost every single ad is a gambling ad. Certainly reining in advertising for gambling would probably.

• 1:24:25John Coogan?

  We have a playbook from the tobacco.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think it's in like Australia.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  Advertising, you can restrict, you can add taxes on a state and local level as well as federal taxes and you can sort of try and internalize the negative externality.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was that law that said you could only write off like 90% of your losses, which, which for, you know, which is really bad.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  If you're, you know, a sports book or.

• 1:24:48John Coogan?

  The problem is, is that I don't think the, the impact of gambling, the negative impact has been fully quantified in sort of a soundbite yet. Like with cigarettes, it's like cigarettes kill millions of people every year. 50% of smokers who smoke a pack a day will die from cigarettes or a cigarette related illness. There isn't that for the gambling industry. It's just like a lot of people lose money, but you technically lose money when you go see The Odyssey. You just get the enjoyment of a three hour film. You lost money and people get the entertainment of gambling. And so that, like, that's the same trade. It doesn't hit as hard as like you will die if you smoke cigarettes.

• 1:25:26Tyler Cowen?

  I think the campaign against smoking worked because people like me hated it when someone next to them would light up or on a plane or in a movie theater. If someone, if my next door neighbor gambles, whatever, on their phone.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, really?

• 1:25:39Tyler Cowen?

  On the airplane, I don't care.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  No, you used to, yeah.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  On a commercial plane.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  If you're on old commercial planes, they would have a cigarette, an ashtray in the armrest.

• 1:25:51Tyler Cowen?

  I suffered under that for years.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:53Tyler Cowen?

  You'd try to not sit next to the smoking section.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:57Tyler Cowen?

  But again, if there's like a no gambling section on the airplane, it's ridiculous.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Tyler Cowen?

  The guy next to me could be gambling on his phone.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, you wouldn't even know.

• 1:26:05Tyler Cowen?

  Oh, yeah, exactly. Let it be.

• 1:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  That is shocking to me.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  I like that you just learned that. When did, when did smoking on planes end? Eighties? I feel like it was not fully around.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  Maybe like early nineties at the very, very latest.

• 1:26:21Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah, I recall celebrating, but I don't know the year.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  Celebrating, yeah. Anyway, what, what have you been reading into the jobs numbers that have been coming out? Like the overall unemployment rate seems to be holding steady. It seems like it's buoyed by healthcare hiring. Yes.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Smoking was banned in 1988 on domestic flights lasting two hours or less.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  They're saying you can go two hours without a smoke.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  We know you can. And then eventually they expanded it.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  They expanded it.

• 1:26:53Jordi Hays?

  To all domestic flights in 1990.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, 1990. There you go. Jobs data, hiring, it feels like there's sort of stagnation everywhere except healthcare, which is sort of the messy job thesis playing out. But what else is going on in the hiring market that you've noticed from the last couple of releases?

• 1:27:11Tyler Cowen?

  Well, the unemployment rate for eighteen to twenty-four year olds, it's back to where it was before we had good large language models. So AI is not destroying that market. It seems we're not going to have a recession anytime soon. That's good news. Labor market has slowed down quite a bit, but that's to be expected. And some of the reports sound less impressive because we have fewer immigrants. But overall, I've been pretty happy. The economy hasn't crashed. It's kept on going.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Uh, then what are you attributing the like the vibes around like? Young people entering the workforce. Everyone says it's so bad. Is that just the really cushy tech jobs are sort of a little bit belt tightening there? They're not hiring as much. And so there aren't as many of these like really nice laptop jobs or? What do you think's going on there?

• 1:28:01Tyler Cowen?

  I think there are big sectoral shifts going on and the new jobs being created. People who think of themselves as educated and high class may not want or may not even be good at. And they complain and they're vocal and they have the ear of the media. It is a problem. I wouldn't deny that. But in the aggregate, a lot of other people are doing better.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Tyler Cowen?

  And the AI maniacs are about to take a huge leap upwards.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:24Tyler Cowen?

  And there'll be this massive reallocation of status.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:27Tyler Cowen?

  It'll be very hard for our politics to handle that.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, uh, wow, wow. Um, uh, yeah, I, I, I saw some stats around like, uh, uh, new grad computer scientists from Stanford, uh, not getting as many job placements. And Tyler on our team was saying like, that's a skill issue. If you're, if you're a Stanford graduate with a computer science degree, like you can get a job or you can start a company, you can do something, but you might need to think a little bit differently because the track might be slightly different. Uh, but I don't know if you agree with that or not.

• 1:29:02Tyler Cowen?

  I agree with that.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, and it also just feels like that one of my latest, uh, like thesis is, uh, that a lot of these CEOs who are doing like AI based layoffs, the optics are just terrible. And if they actually have a good business, they should be going on the offensive. We, we, we love that Matthew Prince hired, I think like a thousand interns or something like that. And it feels like young people who understand AI coming into an organization that has some sort of moat, some sort of durability, some business, like the leverage is just going up. So you should be hiring more instead of doing layoffs if you actually understand what's at stake and how big your business can be. But if you just went through a hiring glut, maybe you do need to, uh, sort of retool.

• 1:29:48Tyler Cowen?

  The AI companies themselves are hiring plenty, as you know, right?

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, can you recall a point throughout history where the majority of people, uh, there, let's say their, their sense of like self-worth and identity was not tied to their employment or their job? Because that's a big, that's a big-

• 1:30:13Tyler Cowen?

  Women are a whole separate issue, but obviously that's a major qualifier.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:30:18Tyler Cowen?

  Uh, medieval-

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Medieval times? I think we lost him.

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  His internet went back.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  To nineteen eighty-eight.

• 1:30:29Tyler Cowen?

  Growing food, but in a very different way from how things work now.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. It's always a pleasure to go all around the world.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  Topics. Uh, have a fantastic week and a fantastic summer.

• 1:30:44Tyler Cowen?

  Catch you all next time. And like I said, work harder.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  When you're, next time you're in California, the three of us, a cup of joe. We will try to, we will try to create an experience.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Third cup of coffee in history.

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  That would be-

• 1:30:58John Coogan?

  Do a four hour show.

• 1:30:59Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  The wired Tyler Cowen.

• 1:31:01Tyler Cowen?

  Get me to do it.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Let's see. We'll peer pressure.

• 1:31:03Jordi Hays?

  We'll try very hard.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  I don't think it'll work. Anyway, thank you so much, Tyler.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:31:07Tyler Cowen?

  Bye.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Um, we have a picture here of the smoking section on a plane if we want to pull up, but we also have our next guest. Um, we have Danny Yeung.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  That is absolutely insane.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  Uh, this is like blowing Jordy's mind. Biggest update to your world model. Uh, let's bring in Danny. He's the co-founding partner and CEO.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  We got questions for you.

• 1:31:38Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me on.

• 1:31:39John Coogan?

  We, before we even get to introductions, how many cups of coffee a day do you drink?

• 1:31:44Speaker 05

  Only two IM eight.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  What? Oh, wow. Oh, yes, of course.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Wow, oil.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, do you guys have caffeine in the product?

• 1:31:53Speaker 05

  There's no caffeine in the product. Zero caffeine.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  So, so you're just going through life, no caffeine.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  Tyler Cowen doesn't do coffee either. Maybe, maybe there's a secret second tier. There was a new study in the Wall Street Journal that said up to five cups of coffee a day is okay. People are celebrating if they've already been fully addicted. But, uh, anyway, enough of that. Introduce yourself in the company, please.

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  Sure. My name is Danny Yeung, CEO of Pranetics and IM eight. Um, you know, we started a brand IM eight about nineteen months ago, and now we're the fastest growing supplement brand ever recorded in the industry. Uh, of course, you may know David Beckham, uh, yeah, no introduction. Uh, co-founded IM eight with him nineteen months ago. It's been a crazy journey ever since. We hit a hundred million ARR within eleven months. We hit two hundred million ARR within eighteen months.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  What stopped you from hitting a hundred within, let's say, six months?

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  That's hilarious, but actually a good question. Wait, wait, yeah. What was the constraint?

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was the constraint?

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Supply chain? Was it distribution?

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Just not enough products or figuring out?

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Advertising?

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  No, it's just, um, you have the scale, right? And then you can't scale so fast, even in eleven months. Yeah, we're the fastest ever, right? Typically at a hundred million for supplement brands.

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08Speaker 05

  On average, it takes roughly three to five years to hit a hundred million. So for us to be able to do in eleven months, um, is, you know, quite amazing.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  What, what would, do you, do you remember what you were modeling for? Like where, where you wanted to be after the first, let's say, twelve months?

• 1:33:26Speaker 05

  Yes, and the model was very different than reality, right? So I think our first model, full year revenue was approximately thirty million USD. And that was already quite high for a new brand out of the gate in this very competitive category, right? So our first full year revenue, we ended up doing sixty million.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:45Speaker 05

  This year, we'll, well, we'll do well over two hundred million, um, in our second year of full operations.

• 1:33:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Uh, okay, so what? Like David Beckham, I think of him as a very like global star. Did you, is part of the growth, did you guys go global early? What did that strategy look like, uh, compared to, let's say, a traditional like US economy?

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

  Hundred percent. Uh, traditional DCC company in the US, you probably way to go global two, three, four, five years out, right? For us, day one, global, uh, day one meant thirty-one countries shipping. Uh, so we did that from day one last year. And then so US is our number one market. Canada, number two, UK, number three, Australia, number four, Singapore, number five. Uh, now we ship to forty-three countries. We're delivering two hundred thousand servings daily. We've now delivered fifty-two million servings in the last nineteen months.

• 1:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Uh, talk about the latest round. You raised a billion dollars, but, uh, what does that look like? Who participated? All that stuff?

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Sure. So, uh, not many people know IM eight is actually part of a public listed company, Pranetics, listed on the NASDAQ under the stock ticker P R E. And then so with that, again, the brand's so new, we've gotten a one billion dollar growth commitment.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you said growth commitment from?

• 1:35:17Speaker 05

  General catalyst.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Right. And is this their new, is this their, their program that helps, uh, basically finance, uh, customer acquisition?

• 1:35:26Speaker 05

  Correct. So it's from their CBF fund. And then so they typically work only with multi-billion dollar companies, right? So they did this with Lemonade. Again, Lemonade was a public company as well in twenty-three. Market cap was one billion. Now today they're five billion. They did this with, generally, they gave them billion dollars to scale up as well. So this only works if you have great retention cohort data. Now, because what they're doing is they're underwriting the risk of predictable revenue in the future. So what they're doing is that, for example, for every dollar that we're spending on marketing, they're giving us seventy percent or seventy cents.

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:00Speaker 05

  And based upon our gross profits, then we pay that back over, you know, the next, you know, two, three months. And they charge a percentage, interest rate roughly three point five percent. If that payback period is under three months.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Yep, I'm on, uh, the board of a, of a company that is, uh, in that program as well.

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I was, we had a board meeting last, uh, Thursday. I was in Europe, so it was like two AM, but we, we spent, uh, spent quite a lot of time going over all that data in the program. So very cool. What percentage of, uh, IM eight does Pranetics own?

• 1:36:37Speaker 05

  Hundred percent.

• 1:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. So you guys are, you guys are going to do two hundred million this year? You're, or you're projecting two hundred million, sitting at a market cap of, of, uh, three hundred and fifty-four million?

• 1:36:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and we have roughly about 140 million in cash, even without the general catalyst. Yeah, and so I think there's a big disconnect between private markets and public markets. And to be fair, yeah, we had a lot of legacy in the past. We had diagnostics business. We grew very fast during COVID. Yeah, during COVID, we're doing 40,000 PCR tests. You know, post-COVID, I had the opportunity with David and then we got along really well. We're like, hey, what if we did something together? What would that look like? And then we recruited, yeah, some of the world's best doctors, scientists and professors on board. And yeah, and so it's been crazy.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you. Really, really impressive. And come back on soon.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:37:37Speaker 05

  Appreciate it.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Danny.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Let me tell you 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. We have our next guest already in the waiting room. We got Connor Love from, it's Andreessen Horowitz now. Connor Love, welcome to the show. Congratulations on the new gig. How are you doing?

• 1:37:59Connor Love?

  Thanks, guys. Appreciate it.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  First question, how many cups of coffee a day do you drink?

• 1:38:03Connor Love?

  Oh, gosh, uh, four?

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Oh, you're, you got room to run. Cause there's a new report.

• 1:38:09Connor Love?

  I'm a zero Celsius guy, too. Zero Red Bull. Back when I was in the military, I would pound Red Bull and then, you know, the stomach gets all messed up. So I gotta de-clinch. So I'm on a journey. I'll come back to it.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Well, the American Heart Association says you're well within the limits. You're healthy. Congratulations. You're doing it right.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. I had seen a study showing that you could basically coffee max as of like two years ago. So I've been on that, I've been basically on that, on that program.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Okay, well, Connor, you were early.

• 1:38:41Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I gotta just say, since we're on the topic of caffeine, I found out Austria has like glass, you can get Red Bull in a glass bottle, just at gas stations.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it's from there, right? I almost went to headquarters when I was there.

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I gotta import, I gotta import this stuff.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we're not here to talk about glass bottle Red Bull. We're here to talk about you.

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Caffeinating the capital markets with new American dynamism investments. Talk to me about the journey. Talk to me about what you're excited about to be doing at Andreessen Horowitz now.

• 1:39:16Connor Love?

  I mean, look, I've known the folks at AD for a while. You know, we all know four years ago, they didn't just, you know, point to a category and think it was cool. I mean, they, they helped create the category. Both branding it, but also, you know, backing some of the, you know, earliest, most interesting companies in this ecosystem. So it's been a relationship that I've had for a long time. And when I got approached with the opportunity to join the team and help lead the team here. And a lot of ways, it's one of these things where, you know, our job as VCs is to sit behind entrepreneurs and put them in the best position to succeed. And this platform offers you, you know, a really good place to do that. And, you know, it's, it's kind of one of these things where it's a good fit for me. Let's just say that.

• 1:39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think so. So take us through the structure of the team now, because you're, you're saying you're help leading it. It seems like you're in a GP role. Does this mean Catherine's running? Is she, is she on the way out?

• 1:40:06Connor Love?

  Catherine's part of the team. She's kicking it. She's, she's doing amazing things. I think the beauty is when, you know, like we all know, when you grow the fund, then, you know, there's more opportunities to invest. It means you need to kind of, you know, push it to the next, your next version. And so, you know, we got 1.2 billion dollars of fresh capital to deploy into a category and kind of supercharge in a way. So, you know, it's kind of us four GPs, you know, operating as a team. And, you know, this is the beauty of venture is there's individuals that have good backgrounds and good beliefs and good, good views of the world. But, you know, I think in the end, like venture should be a team sport. And yeah, you gotta put one individual ahead of the other, you know, every now and then. But look, I mean, when you look at the platform and you see kind of what's been built so far, I mean, I'm excited to, to help take it to the next step in the future.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  And the structure of the fund, I mean, I imagine you're still going to be focused on like the earlier stage. You obviously have enough capital to lead follow-on rounds, but sweet spot, series A, B. I'm interested in like the health of that category because it feels like there are many category defining companies and all, like when I look at a market map, I'm like, are we good on A, B? And then I find like the whole next turn of like, oh, we didn't think about this whole section of the economy.

• 1:41:17Connor Love?

  Yeah. All right. I'll give you two perspectives here. The first is, and any new category that is going through a tectonic shift like this category it is, you are 99% wrong about the size of the category when you start investing. Like just go back and look at anything. I mean, the nature is this category is going to be far bigger than we all think it is. With that being said, I do think you're right. There have been a, let's call it a, you know, neo-primes in the defense base or kind of neo-manufacturers, whatever you want to call them elsewhere, that have clearly pushed themselves into, hey, we are a real player. We've raised real capital. We have real customers. The question is, you know, how many people are going to be at the table? And, you know, I'll answer that question two ways, which is not all of them, number one. And the second one is, as I said before, it's going to be a bigger category than we all think.

• 1:41:59Connor Love?

  So what I love doing, and maybe this is a little bit controversial here, but it's like, my favorite type of investing is really at that inflection stage where you're potentially writing a growth check or a growth size like check. But the company is still early in terms of the product market fit. And in my view, especially in AD where these companies take a lot of capital to grow, that's how you return funds. I mean, that, that is, that is the exciting place to invest, in my opinion.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy, I want to give you a second. If you have something, or I can go.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, update on, I want, I want the update on the deals you did while at Lightspeed that you're most proud of. Cause I'm assuming you're gonna, you know, first day on the job, you got the new email, you, you hit them up. How, how would you like another 100 mil?

• 1:42:41Connor Love?

  I mean, I mean, look, this is another thing about venture is when, when these, when these companies raise a lot of capital, there's a lot of the same people around the table over multiple stages. So, you know, I've had the privilege of investing in a lot of businesses, everything from Castellia into Androl, to K2 Space, to Amca, a lot of other things. And the beauty is Andreessen has actually been an investor in a lot of those businesses already. So it's a relationship that I get to kind of carry over now from a different side of the seat. But I think, I think you're right. I mean, look, there's going to be, there's going to be many new entrants. I am very happy with those investments that I've made. Have a great relationship with, with, with Ravi Matre and the rest of the folks at Lightspeed. I mean, they're going to keep doing amazing things and investing in this category. But

• 1:43:23Connor Love?

  yeah, I just think it's still early. I mean, again, like nine, nine times out of 10, you were wrong about the size of this market. The space market's going to be massive. Defense market is definitely not spoken for yet. The industrial base of manufacturing, we haven't even really talked about in touch. Like we're talking trillions of dollars of industries and we, you know, look at great companies like Hadrian or Amca and we think, oh, the market's been solved. No, like it's, there's, there's a ton of room left, left to run, in my opinion.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the financing side, we just talked to the CEO of IM8, which is doing a new sort of billion dollar financing with GC, I think through their customer value fund. Is there anything like that emerging in, in defense? I'm, I'm assuming a lot of your portcos are using venture debt or maybe getting financing against some of these bigger contracts. But what are you seeing?

• 1:44:16Connor Love?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think first of all, if you look at what the federal government's doing, the federal government's stepping up in a real way. I mean, there's been a long office called the Office of Strategic Capital that has SBA, Small Business Administration money that can put towards these companies and their growth. There's also a new unit formed called the EDU, the, I believe it's the Economic Development Unit within the Department of War. The idea is that if you can look at these industries that either have a supply chain, a problem, or some misimbalance with China, there's not free debt, but close to free debt of capital that you can receive from the federal government. And in the end, it's like, when there's such a, you know, misimbalance for, you know, in, in this case, like the Chinese supply chain versus ours,

• 1:44:55Connor Love?

  it is only in America's best interest in order to do this. And in the end, there's equity capital sitting behind it. What I will say though, is like, debt is not an answer to your problems when you're a company. I mean, you need to obviously create real value and have real kind of, you know, and in my view, some type of technology uplift of what you're doing. But in the end, I do think that, you know, if you look at oxygen capital, like I said, if you even look at what private equity is starting to do in this ecosystem, they're entering an ecosystem and saying, hey, I don't need to control a company. I don't need to, you know, flip the entire management team. It's just a different, you know, type of risk asset and they need to enter at the right time. But again, I think the capital markets are super rich here. The world, you know, I won't, I won't break any, anyone's mind here, but

• 1:45:37Connor Love?

  the future of returning venture funds is investing in AI and it's investing in American dynamism. And, you know, again, the beautiful thing in Andreessen, we have both of those things. And now I get to, you know, do it in a different way.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Aren't they going to collide really soon? If not already? I'm just thinking about like, there's a bunch of great defense companies. A lot of them have already been started. The defense budget is growing, but a few percent a year run rate. And then you have like AI capex, which is like tripling every year. And so a lot of the same motions of like, we have a machine that makes a product that does a thing. It feels American dynamism-y, but then it plays in the AI boom. Is that going to be a bigger trend?

• 1:46:17Connor Love?

  I mean, I mean, again, I think, I think you're right. They're, they are colliding far quicker than you think they were, they will collide. I think to some extent though, that is a good thing. I mean, again, if we, if we look at what's happening and how AI is transforming other software industries, it's going to look different and hard work for sure. I mean, there are different barriers that you need to overcome with, you know, you know, again, let's talk about putting a fully autonomous robot with the weapon in the hands of the military. There are layers of kind of integration and policy and all these other things that need to happen. So it's not going to happen overnight, but I will say it will happen. On, on the competition piece, which is a slightly different, you know, answer to your question is,

• 1:46:55Connor Love?

  again, I, I, I think you're right. There's a small percent of the budget that has gone historically to these neo-primes. If you look at what this administration has done, that those numbers are changing on an order of magnitude. And if we also want to take a step back and look at Europe, look at Asia, look at other places. I mean, literally markets are being created overnight. So I do not think the problem is, hey, is there a budget or is there ability to capture? I actually think the problem is, and this is what not enough people are talking about is will these companies actually deliver on the, you know, massive solutions that they're, you need to build, I mean, I'm serious. Like you need to, we need to have 40 Tesla factories. We need to build thousands of these things. I mean, it's not just defense, but it's like the folks at Base Power and, you know, kind of everyone in the manufacturing ecosystem.

• 1:47:39Connor Love?

  Will we have companies that can produce not thousands of things, but tens of thousands or hundreds? Like that is the question. And if that doesn't happen, it doesn't matter how big your market is. It doesn't matter how much AI pixie dust you throw on top of it. If you can't build real hard stuff, you're not going to have lasting value over time, in my opinion.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I saw a video last week of a, of a drone that was designed so that the entire body of the drone spins and it makes the whole structure almost invisible. It was very, very scary looking and, and the person posting it was saying that.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Drones are currently like in their sort of World War One era of evolution of warfare. Is that, uh, how does that track with what you're seeing?

• 1:48:24Connor Love?

  I, first of all, I love this comparison. I always use the World War One comparison when talking about what's going to happen in space, but I actually think that the drone comparison is better. And don't quote me exactly on these numbers, but if you go look at the amount of manned airplanes that we in the West had in World War One, uh, it is roughly the amount of satellites that we as a nation had up in space, you know, call it, you know, three or four years ago. And now if you flash forward and see the order of magnitude amount of more manned airplanes we have, I mean, you literally have like, you know, it's a, it's a hockey stick like growth. So to your point, you know, we have what, you know, thousands of tens of thousands of drones that exist in the DOD today. I mean, we're, we're literally buying millions of them. And yes, they're tradable. So like they will, you know, kind of decline and go away.

• 1:49:07Connor Love?

  But I just think people have not wrapped their head around the sheer number of these system on systems. And I think a drone specifically to your point is like, it's always going to be this cat and mouse game. So just because you've built, you know, a million of these things that are tradable, it can do these things, the enemy is going to adapt. And then all of a sudden you're going to have to build a new version that's EW resistant that can go further, that can do. So it's not a one problem, you know, one time you just solve the problem and you buy a million of them. I mean, this is decades long that's going to be happening from our, from our federal government.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the new gig. Look forward to talking again soon, chopping it up.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  Looking great in, looking great in the suit.

• 1:49:44John Coogan?

  Look fantastic.

• 1:49:45Jordi Hays?

  Looking great in the suit.

• 1:49:46Connor Love?

  Well, I always like to wear suit ju- ju- just for you guys. And hey, anything that gets me on the pod to, uh, to, to talk with Delia and more, I'm, I'm always about that. I'm just trying to elevate my media game just so, you know, Delia and I can, can riff with each other some more. So that's what I'm here for, guys.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Fully elevated.

• 1:50:01Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Connor, and congrats on the move.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:50:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:50:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 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. Before we bring in our next guest, we got to talk about the Aston Martin SUV. Is this really a collab with Call of Duty? You got to pull up this image. You, uh, you, you think this thing is a little ridiculous? You think this isn't, uh?

• 1:50:28Jordi Hays?

  I, I love the way it looks.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  I see this as like the new Model Y. I think like this will be the car that's on, like you're just seeing so many of them get bored.

• 1:50:36Jordi Hays?

  And this is what you've been asking for because it is a V12.

• 1:50:39John Coogan?

  It's a V12.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  So first of all, let's go with what's amazing.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:50:44Jordi Hays?

  The name Dreadnaught.

• 1:50:46John Coogan?

  What is it called? The Dreadnaught? That's a good name.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so I, yeah, so here's the thing. It's digital only.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  What do you mean?

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  A digitally own, a digital only military spec vehicle designed exclusively for the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  So they will not be making this physically?

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, which is the lamest part about the whole thing.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  There's no, there's no V12 if it's not, if it's digital, that doesn't make any sense. I thought this was a real car. They're not even making this?

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  A lot of like, it, it spreads so quickly around that I think a lot of people thought it was real. I think they should have made at least a few of these one-off.

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, make it like a Valkyrie.

• 1:51:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about the Call of Duty partnership in general. I just feel like, I feel like it cheapens the brand. And I feel like Aston is trying to appeal to a younger audience, but having a made up car, I don't know if it really does that.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  This is, yeah, this is a very weird partnership. Uh, no, you imagine you, you're, you, this is what you have to tow your Valkyrie to the track, like that.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:51:42John Coogan?

  Like you could sell one of these to every Valkyrie owner in theory because it's so, so unique.

• 1:51:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it reminded me of the, the Rambo Lambo a little bit, sort of a modern take on that.

• 1:51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so make the car.

• 1:51:54John Coogan?

  Make it.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  Aston, just do it.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  And we will just bring in our next guest, Khalil from Natural, the CEO and co-founder. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:52:06Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me. I don't know how I'm going to follow that Aston Martin launch.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Would you buy that if that was a real car? Would that, would, uh, are you in San Francisco?

• 1:52:15Speaker 07

  I am in San Francisco.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So people.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  It's a no brainer there.

• 1:52:18Speaker 07

  It feels like an LA car though.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was like the wrapped Cybertruck era for startups.

• 1:52:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  I like to see it wrapped Dreadnaught era.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  It would work, it would work. Anyway, uh, enough to talk about.

• 1:52:28Speaker 07

  Did you see the, the new BMW car?

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  No, what's that?

• 1:52:31Speaker 07

  The predecessor to the XM.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Predecessor?

• 1:52:33Speaker 07

  That might be more.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Or successor.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Successor.

• 1:52:36Speaker 07

  Successor, successor.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  The XM did not sell well. That was a widely panned, that, that's their luxury performance SUV, right?

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, this is, you're talking about the new X5?

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:52:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's like a G-Wagon look-alike.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Uh-oh.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I don't think that is actually, I don't think that's actually released. I think it maybe they'll tease it at, uh, Car Week in a couple of weeks, but I don't think, I think every, every render so far has been just like fan made.

• 1:53:03John Coogan?

  Oh, just fan made, okay. Well, we'll keep tracking. Anyway, enough about cars.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude. How are you doing? Thanks for joining us on a big day.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11Jordi Hays?

  Introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:53:13Speaker 07

  Sure. Uh, I'm Khalil. I'm the CEO of Natural. Natural builds payments infrastructure for agents. We're announcing today that we raised a $30 million Series A led by the Microsoft.

• 1:53:27Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Um, payment rails for agents. Uh, what does that mean today? And then I want to talk about where this is going in the future.

• 1:53:40Speaker 07

  Today, that means that agents can store balances, they can pay and request other agents or businesses or consumers. They can do transfers from external or internal accounts. Shortly, they'll be able to collect card information over the phone, make payments. Uh, it's a bunch of different payment primitives.

• 1:53:57Jordi Hays?

  And so those use cases rank them from, uh, by traction. So like what, what agent payment use cases have the most traction today? Because this feels like one of those things that, uh, people have been talking about for a long time. It's a great venture bet because if, if, you know, if this category pans out the way that a lot of people have been theorizing, there's going to be some great big companies built. But I haven't used, I haven't used any of these, um, like I haven't had an agent pay for anything on my behalf quite yet outside of, you know, using traditional checkout flows. Maybe I'm a boomer laggard.

• 1:54:39John Coogan?

  I sent like a hundred K to Claude, uh, but it turned out it was this guy named Claude. I just sent it to him on WhatsApp and.

• 1:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know if I'm getting that back. So need this.

• 1:54:47Speaker 07

  You go, you can try your first agentic payment today. If you sign up, uh, and request our agent, we'll send you back between five and $10,000.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay. That's a steal. I love that.

• 1:54:57Jordi Hays?

  Variable reward.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  That also sounds like a scam. Like send me five and I'll send you 10. This is like a classic.

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, are, are people not already using agents to create millions of accounts?

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Uh, but, but, uh, I, I do think there's, uh, there's a very interesting opportunity. I'm wondering how you can like walk me through this particular problem that I've seen. So, uh, there's a really interesting AI YouTuber. His name's Ben, Ben Awad. And he's been doing this series of like, I tried to use a frontier model to like make me money. And he went to Fable and he did GPT Soul and he gave it like a week and he was like, just do whatever. And, and it, and it does a bunch of stuff and it's very, it's very impressive. He makes like five cents, but it's like, you know, a demo. But everything that he's doing is like the reaching for the high shelf. So he's always, it's like the genius model that can solve the IMO gold medal goes to him and is like,

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  it's time to buy a domain for $10. And he'll be like, okay, I did that. And then, and then it'll like go off and write the beautiful code and then it'll come back and be like, I need you to go set up an API key here. And so what I'm interested in is, is there a way that I, you know, soon I will be able to safely upload some sort of credit card payment balance and then give that to an agent and say, look, I want you to go deploy a website on this technology, on this service, use this API, go to 11 Labs, grab their voice agent and go and actually set up the accounts, do the payments, and then just, here's your budget. Don't go over, but go crazy and do whatever.

• 1:56:33Speaker 07

  You can do most of that today with Natural and the parts of it that you can't should be out at the end of Q3. I'd say the way we think about the world is agents execute a majority of global payment volume over the next decade, that that world is monopolistic or duopolistic in nature because payments are a highly network effects driven business. And that that world is determined in the next like 12 months. Um.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  High stakes. Good luck. You're like.

• 1:57:00Speaker 07

  I think, I think whoever is like the default developer choice in 2027 is likely to be the default developer choice in 2028 and 2029 and 2035. And so if it doesn't feel like a land grab market, it very much is about to be.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, uh, a company called Stripe, uh, is, uh.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Couple of Irishmen.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  Couple of Irishmen. Uh, they, they're certainly not asleep at the wheel, uh, with AI by nature of being like very developer friendly with their products overall. I think they ended up being like accidentally really well positioned.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  For AI because agents can really easily understand their products. I'm wondering, have you figured out anything where like they are at some type of structural disadvantage because of their existing business model or things that they can and can't do that creates an opportunity for Natural? Or is the bet that the market is just going to grow so quickly, there will be a lot of land to grab over these next, call it 12 to 36 months?

• 1:58:06Speaker 07

  Uh, I'm a big fan of Stripe. I think that agentic payments is actually much larger than Stripe. Like when you think about how agents are going to interact with the world, the way I frame the opportunity is like, we have the chance to build what looks like a bank, a PSP and a network all at the same time. So it's like JP Morgan and Stripe and Visa is the TAM, not just Stripe. Uh.

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So right now, if I go to, if I go to Codex and I'm like, go build me an app and deploy it and pay for a bunch of things, it might pull Stripe off the shelf as payment infrastructure, but I don't really have a Stripe balance that's sitting there necessarily that it can deploy from. I could give it my credit card, I guess, but that's a little bit different than having a wallet.

• 1:58:50Speaker 07

  You might have a Stripe balance, but I'd say, you know, the magical experience about with AI is like you think of something, you say, can you do this? And the answer is yes. And then you think bigger and you go, can you do this? And the answer is yes. And I think the same will be true of agentic payments, which is like, uh, there shouldn't be a limit in terms of number of financial flows your agent can accomplish. And that is much easier to do when you're building ground up and that new stack with all of the primitives an agent might need under one unified architecture versus trying to re-architect an existing payment system to do everything that you need to do.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. A hundred and ninety-three days old when this round was done. What a, what an overnight success, truly.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  That's right. And we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna have you back on hopefully this year, but certainly July twentieth next year to talk about your prediction of a, of a fast take off in agentic payments. Look forward to following along and, and congrats to the whole team on, on the new capital, all the progress.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:59:56Speaker 07

  Really appreciate it.

• 1:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. And up next, we have the CEO and co-founder of Kalshi, Tarek Mansour, coming back for the third time with a bunch of exciting updates. Tarek, how you doing?

• 2:00:17Tarek Mansour?

  Hey, guys. How's it going?

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Taking a little, a little nap there. You had a long, long weekend.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Well, he's launching GPU futures, right?

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, before, before we get into that, let's, let's talk about, uh, let's talk about the World Cup.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Because, uh, every time I like to, I like to check the, the App Store rankings, uh, just to get a pulse on what are, what are consumers doing? And Kalshi's consistently been

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Crushing.

• 2:00:47Jordi Hays?

  at or very near, near the top over the last month, but, um, break down what you guys feel like you did well.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Didn't do well.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  What'd you do differently next time?

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  How you kind of approach the whole event in general.

• 2:01:01Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, I mean, there's like a lot, a lot to unpack there, but the, I mean, a few things, yeah, we've been pretty consistently top of the App Store for, throughout the month. But the other interesting things and some of the sort of leading indicators, um, that, you know, yesterday I was looking some of the data roundup, but in terms of number of impressions and trends on search, uh, we ended up being, I think, we're basically still confirming data, but it looks like we were number one. It looks like we essentially generated more impressions, um, as a brand than essentially all the other consumer brands that were going pretty hard, uh, at the World Cup. And I'm talking about Coca-Cola and Adidas and some of the others.

• 2:01:38Tarek Mansour?

  And, um, and yesterday in terms of search volume, it looks like we spiked above, uh, uh, you know, ChatGPT and Instagram and some of, I mean, obviously some of the biggest consumer brands on the planet. And it really goes back, I mean, obviously there's a chunk of people that are trading, but the majority of our users are actually looking at it as a mechanism to figure out what's happening.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56Tarek Mansour?

  And, uh, uh, as a mechanism to engage with the sort of underlying event. And so in these peak moments, whether it's an election or like a Fed decision, obviously the World Cup final, uh, you see a massive spike, uh, in the prediction markets. In terms of strategy, I mean, I think it's multipronged, which is go very hard, maximally hard, uh, you know, pretty much max out all types of channels. Very small lean team and, you know, idea to sort of execution within forty-eight hours, just be super adaptable. So there was no strategy going into it. It's like all dynamic as things were coming and as things were happening.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Uh, really quickly, the video got a little blurry. Can you like refocus?

• 2:02:32Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, let me.

• 2:02:32John Coogan?

  Just give us a second. And, uh, I will give everyone an update that the, the Jensen jacket sold for nine hundred and sixty thousand dollars, twenty times the estimate. But you had it priced higher. You, you, you, you predicted the million dollar sale, like roughly.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, roughly a million.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Because I think a previous one had sold. Anyway, uh, maybe, uh, any future market on Kalshi.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  He's back. Were you the buyer of the Jensen jacket?

• 2:02:59Tarek Mansour?

  I was not.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, let's, let's talk about GPU futures.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  GPU forward curve, the market implied forward curve. What is the actual product? What's the launch been like? Can you actually read into the data yet or is it still, uh, rolling out?

• 2:03:16Tarek Mansour?

  Uh, we could definitely read into the data yet and you can find it on Kalshi. I mean, you know, that maybe just some based on a forward curve is something that's very common in traditional commodity markets or rates market or any real traditional financial markets. And, you know, it's, it's actually pretty simple. It's a curve of what, uh, the, uh, underlying, whether it's, uh, oil or metal or interest rates or, um, compute will transact at, at a, uh, at various points in time in the future. And it's a very useful indicator because obviously as you, as some of the, let's say, grain farmers or, or, um, oil refiners are figuring out their yearly planning, they're basically, you know, look at the future, the market price is going to be to basically manage their risk, make, uh, you know, investment decisions and allocations, uh, of resources.

• 2:04:02Tarek Mansour?

  And so it's inevitable that compute, as it becomes a core part of our economy, um, uh, will require a forward curve. And then soon after, futures and derivatives market on top of it. And, uh, we want to lead with that and because we feel that prediction markets are very uniquely suited to get that answer, to basically help build the forward curve. You know, what we've done is essentially listed a number of prediction markets that go all the way to future. So every week for the next four weeks and then every month thereafter to create four curves, um, on a few, uh, uh, um, kind of compute, like on a few GPUs.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  So, um, yeah, where are you looking for, like, uh, to sort of verify pricing data? Because, you know, you're going to see wild differences between, let's say, like a Neo cloud that has, you know, incremental capacity versus a deal between, you know, a meta and a big AI lab.

• 2:04:57Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah. So it's, it's a very interesting question, right? Because, um, the answer is not clean yet. And this is, I think there's a bit of a disiterative process that usually goes on in the early days of, of building a derivative market or set, which effectively standardizes the underlying, um, uh, commodity. So right now we're using an index from, um, this, uh, company called ORN and they've done a great job at aggregating transaction prices from a massive number of nodes. And, and we're seeing how it goes. So we're going to build a number of, uh, uh, forward curves, see which ones consumers basically trust and abide by over time. And, and then, you know, as we, as that sort of consolidates, we're going to basically go harder on the one that, that emerges as victorious.

• 2:05:40Tarek Mansour?

  There's kind of something a bit self fulfilling with these things. So the reason why we look at WTI or Brent is because we started looking at those. It's not that they were intrinsically the right, uh, uh, kind of measure of where oil is at. But as people started looking at it, it became the thing.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Because we could be trading derivatives based on the price of gasoline, but we've chosen Brent just because of that, that's the market that got traction. Interesting.

• 2:06:03Tarek Mansour?

  That's exactly right.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  And so this product, is this something that, you know, you expect the vast majority of volume to be these sort of, uh, institutions? And or like Neo, uh, sorry, Neo clouds themselves or like, who are all the different types of, of players in this market? And then, um, maybe tie that back to like traditional commodities. Like I don't even know, in, in oil and gas, I can imagine a few different types of players that would be, uh, wanting to hedge, uh, hedge their exposure, but, but within, uh, the overall market for compute,

• 2:06:39Jordi Hays?

  who are you thinking about, um, all the different potential, um, uh, types of people that are going to want, uh, to be able to sort of hedge or, or trade these markets?

• 2:06:50Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it really is anyone who is basically a natural long or a natural short on compute. So anyone who naturally benefits from compute prices going up and anyone who naturally benefits from compute prices going down. So a producer versus a consumer, which is usually how, you know, a producer of commodity versus consumer of the commodity. And for both of these cases, what we're starting to see is, you know, for the first time in the last year, compute is not in this sort of, uh, uh, continuously decreasing trend. It is actually perked back up and then we're starting to see this sort of natural volatility and cyclicality to compute, which is like, there's going to be times where demand is going to, um, outpace supply and vice versa. And that's kind of a healthy dynamic to build a derivative market on top.

• 2:07:31Tarek Mansour?

  And so anyone who's a natural long over time, want to take a short position and vice versa to manage the risk, right? So if you have essentially a certain amount of budgeting for how much compute you're going to basically, um, uh, how much you're going to spend on compute in the next year, which is now becoming an increasingly bigger part of, uh, you know, the, the line items and, you know, public and private companies, uh, financials. It becomes natural for you to basically want to smooth out some of that exposure by hedging it, um, on the forward curve and over time on the futures curve, which becomes sort of overlay on top of the forward.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  Do you have an idea of the, of the TAM like, uh, for this market? Like how big? Because obviously you're going to build liquidity over time, but when I think of like the natural longs, I'm like, yes. So hyperscalers with a trillion dollars of CapEx are going to be taking out a short position on the order of a hundred billion dollars or something. Like, how, how, how do you think about sizing the market over time? Obviously it's not going to materialize instantaneously, but it could be very big.

• 2:08:30Tarek Mansour?

  You know, it's interesting. So I was, you know, I wrote about this last week, but you know, the rule of thumb is every time you have an underlying market where people are transacting the spot, which is buying and selling the thing.

• 2:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:42Tarek Mansour?

  When you overlay a derivative market on top of it, historically, if that market has any degree of success, it ends up being at least 10 to 15 times the underlying market.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:53Tarek Mansour?

  Right?

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  That's insane if that happens here.

• 2:08:56Tarek Mansour?

  I mean, this is the opportunity, right? I mean, it looks like, you know, we're all sitting on a trillion dollars of spend by now on compute, right? And by 2030, that number is going to 10x.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:06Tarek Mansour?

  And so you're talking, I mean, yes, it is an incredibly large market.

• 2:09:12John Coogan?

  10 trillion in derivatives potentially, just stabilizing the market and hedging various things and ensuring different projects and whatnot.

• 2:09:19Tarek Mansour?

  Because, you know, the way that these markets evolve is obviously you get the exact insurance use case, the hedging.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:25Tarek Mansour?

  But that tends to be usually like 5% of the entirety of the liquidity in the market. The rest is speculation and people arbitraging and doing a lot of other things. And so those markets tend to be very, very large.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Tarek Mansour?

  And I think the compute as a commodity is going to probably be the largest commodity on the planet. And so the derivative market for it will probably be the largest derivative market on the planet, outpacing treasury futures and a bunch of other things.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does this mean for the for the customer base? It's interesting to me is when I think of Call She, I think of the first era, the act one sort of political markets, the people that were actually participating in that market were, there were some sophisticated Wall Street investors, but it wasn't like the daily sports better. It was a more like, like, you know, somewhat sophisticated, but sort of like mid-tier investor trader. Then you get to sports betting and that's very broad, very general, just like average Joe watching sports. Of course, there are larger firms that are participating. But then this market feels like something that would be the domain of almost entirely sophisticated

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  hedge fund investors. Is that where you see this going? Do you think this will be a broader product or it will maybe open you up to a new class of investor or trader?

• 2:10:41Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, I mean, the way I've thought about our business and it's been, one of the things that's been interesting. So we have a core set of users. I think of the forecasters, like people that like stats and analytics and predicting things. And that's a skill and people get better at it over time. And those are a big chunk of our volume. Those are the same people that are doing it on predicting elections, predicting who's going to win an Oscar, predicting the inflation next month and predicting sports. And over time, these are the same people that are predicting the compute prices for us.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:11Tarek Mansour?

  For the forward curve. And that's why it becomes so accurate. And, you know, we've put out a lot of data on why the calibration, like the accuracy of these markets and these people is actually the best in class. There's nothing better than it. Now that enables a lot of other use cases in different areas, right? In sports, it could be people that are passionate about the sport and want to engage with it. In politics, similar or people that like campaigns that want to follow it. And in compute, once we have that sort of layer of pricing liquidity, we can essentially enable, you know, hedging from this, you know, super scalers, hedging from consumers of compute, you know, ponting and speculating from people that basically want to arbitrage compete with other markets. But we see, I mean, it's a marketplace at the end of the day, you need a vibrant set of participants for it to get liquid. You know, if you just bring hedgers and you don't have anyone on

• 2:11:52Tarek Mansour?

  the other side, it doesn't quite work. You know, and so, so in some ways, kind of we build on the success of some of the other products or every other product to build some of the new products that we've been doing. And that's why I think we're going to be very successful in the forward curve. And that's why we already have a forward curve. If you look at CASH today.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  I'm looking at the forward curve. I pulled up the one for the Nvidia H200. I sent it to the team. They can pull it up. The hourly price on July 24th is up there the week of 30. And I see this very flat forward curve. And I'm wondering, just because I feel like there's a huge benefit for people in AI, just to be able to look at this and get, even if it's low volume now, like get an idea of like, what is the market thinking about GPU pricing over time? It's pretty flat. So is my read on that, that the market is basically saying GPUs will continue to be about as useful as they are today for the next year?

• 2:12:48Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, I answer market and, you know, these markets move with obviously new information, et cetera. So there's obviously what it looks like, but there's also how it moves based on new information.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:57Tarek Mansour?

  Where I think markets really shine. It's like, okay, how do I really price this? When someone launches a new GPU and a new model.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:05Tarek Mansour?

  What is going to be the impact on the prior models? So that type of thing.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:13:07Tarek Mansour?

  But right now, it looks like it seems that the innovation space is going to be sort of on pace.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:13:12Tarek Mansour?

  With the consumption, which I think we're seeing some stabilization.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And we see that a lot where there's a new model that comes out, but a lot of businesses keep their agentic workloads running on the older GPUs, the older models, because they have found an economically valuable use case. And if it takes an hour to do a bunch of inference, they get more than $5. So they're happy to pay that. Very, very interesting. Yeah. I mean, also like people have been reacting to this like second deep seek moment, Kimmy, and what that means for, for, for chips and GPUs. And it feels like at least in this curve, like it's pretty neutralized. I'm interested in, in the, the risk associated with this market. There's been these like viral stories about certain

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  like small markets where someone gets an edge, they do some sort of manipulation. This one feels more resistant to that. How are you thinking about just avoiding market manipulation broadly right now? How are things going on that front from either a regulatory or an internal policy perspective? And then is this a step forward into a market that's even harder to have market manipulation happen?

• 2:14:29Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah, I mean, the manipulation risk exists in all commodity markets, really any markets. I mean, it's always been the case. Now, what prediction markets have shown themselves to be is pretty resistant to manipulation. And we put out actually a research piece a week ago about someone who tried to manipulate the price of Spencer Pratt winning in the California election. And they put $2 million to move the price up. And, and you know, that price move lasted nine seconds only.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  They got destroyed. Yes, because I've thought if you're a long shot, if you're a long shot political candidate, there was at least a thesis, I think you just debunked it, but thesis that you should put your, a bunch of your money on yes, then you, everyone's like, wait, this person just spiked.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  You create the perspective.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  And then you go and do the podcast circuit and you're like, I'm not that much of a long shot. Look, I'm at 10% on Call She because, and it's like, I put in $10,000 to move the market. But you, but you say that someone just got wiped for that?

• 2:15:24Tarek Mansour?

  Yeah. I mean, because you now have created a massive arbitrage opportunity for people that are pricing the actual thing. I mean, that's why markets are beautiful, is that they give an incentive to always correct the price of the true thing.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:35Tarek Mansour?

  And so it went back in and then, you know, so if that person had taken the $2 million and, you know, put it to commission some polls that are going to be biased or

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:41Tarek Mansour?

  Spent it on ads, they would be much more effective. It'd be actually put to much better use. And in many ways, actually, people do that in polls. You know, polls come out left and right and they're all biased. And so I always tell people like, look at prediction markets in conjunction with everything else, right? And right now in compute, a lot of what we have is people just saying things, people that are often self-interested saying things. And so it's good that you have a market-based approach where you know that the incentive in the market is, is very clear. It's people make money if they're right and they lose money if they're wrong, which is, I think, an elegant way to put it.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  There was a lot of drama around onion futures back in the 50s. That resulted in the Onion Futures Act, which banned all futures for onions. It's still in effect today. Do you know if there's something about, is there something, is there something intrinsic to onions that make it a market that's easier to manipulate? Or is it maybe time to let, to let markets flourish around onions again?

• 2:16:40Tarek Mansour?

  It just tells you sometimes, you know, policymakers sort of overreact or underreact. And, and at the time, you know, because, you know, two people basically cornered the onion market. And at the time, people were like, well, the problem seems to be the vegetable, the onions, not people. And, and, you know, there's nothing endemic to onions. I mean, you know, you could manipulate any of these markets. There's nothing special about onions. We should have, you know, futures on onions. And I hope that one day we get, we bring those back. But, you know, these things tend to be, you always have to take a delicate approach to regulated, regulating things, right? Otherwise, you're either undershoot or overshoot. And, you know, the job is not, not easy, as we see in many industries, AI, crypto, prediction markets, self-driving and all of that. And, you know, and this is part of why CASH has been so proactive in, you know, self-regulating and being very

• 2:17:25Tarek Mansour?

  vocal about, you know, banning insider trading, how should we do it? How it should be done? Because we want to, we want us to land, we want to help the industry land in the right place when it comes to regulation.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. We will be, we will be tracking the GPU markets. It's cool. It's, it's, it's going to be cool to have another place where, yeah, as these, as, as news drops, like, you know, Kimmy.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  It's going to be deeply underwhelming because you go on X, you get crazy hot takes, you get it's over, we're back. It's going parabolic. We're in the AGI future. Everyone's going to be a trillionaire. And then you're going to look at this and be like, ah, like mild productivity and continued performance in the GPU curve. It's going to be like much less exciting than watching a hot take.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's good.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  It is good. Yes, of course.

• 2:18:12Tarek Mansour?

  That's the whole point. That's the point of, it's like depolarizing the narrative around politics and all these different, I mean, around compute. It's like things tend to be a little less, you know, aggressive and extreme and, and, you know, I mean, the extreme makes for a good tweet.

• 2:18:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a counter.

• 2:18:28Tarek Mansour?

  Not, not a good trade.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a counter force. It's a counter force to algorithms because like the algorithm feeds on the most, the most viral take of the moment. Like it's over, we're so back. And yet, and yet people don't bet their money on the most viral narrative. Like sometimes just betting on.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so many times, especially in politics, where you'll just see some minor news breaks or some new political attack ad comes out and everyone who's a fan will be, it's, oh, they're running away with it. It's, they're trying to convince you and you check the market and you're like, okay, 1% bump today. That's exciting. Good for them.

• 2:19:09Tarek Mansour?

  I mean, when it's skin in the game, right? Like, you know, there's the whole markets online, like when there's skin in the game, people get much more careful all of a sudden.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:16Tarek Mansour?

  And that's kind of the beauty of prediction.

• 2:19:17John Coogan?

  How is tracking the midterms going? Is, is, is, is politics still like a driver of business? I know the, I know the sports market became so large, but is there still a very healthy business there?

• 2:19:30Tarek Mansour?

  It's always about what's top of people's minds. So you have to look at it on a per day basis, figure out like, okay, what are the things that are top of mind? The things that you would be covering and talking about more frequently than other things. And those would be where the volume will aggregate in prediction markets. So we're starting to see the ramp up for the midterms. Obviously, come October, November, that will be a very, very big set of markets for us.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you, you're in the same exact spot that you were the last time you called into the show, but I'm sure the team is like three or four X. Are you guys running out of space in that office? What's going on?

• 2:19:59Tarek Mansour?

  We're actually moving pretty soon, but yeah, I don't really move much from this spot.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  We appreciate you hopping on the show.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Yeah. Great to get the update.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Tony Zhao from Sunday Robotics. He's back on the show with an amazing update. Some remarkable benchmark 99.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  There they are.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Zero shot success folding laundry across 785 autonomous attempts. They're calling it laundry superintelligence. How's it going? Is it solved? Is it, is laundry solved?

• 2:20:38Tony Zhao?

  Yeah, we call it LLM, which means large laundry models.

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 2:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Move the goalposts.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  No, give us the broader update. Like what, what is act two? And what, like, is this a discreet training run? I mean, where are you in actually commercializing this? How much is in the lab? Like, give us the broader update and then I'm sure there's a bunch of places we can go deeper.

• 2:21:02Tony Zhao?

  Yeah, I think this is actually a really packed update with many things that we want to share. I think the first thing is this is the first time we can train a policy, a model to both generalizable and reliable. What it means is that by generalizable is that what you see is what you get. The performance you are seeing will be the same if we deploy the robot into your home. Because this has been tested in places that are unseen that the model generalizes into. And what we mean by reliable is that like after filling like close to a thousand garments, the success rate is like 99.1%, which is very, very reliable and is the most reliable one to date. And it's handling like very diverse amount of garments.

• 2:21:45Tony Zhao?

  So this is kind of the more, the most literal part of the update. But I think there are also many like new ideas that we introduced. One of them is that it turns out that when we scale up pre-training, you can do one-shot learning with these models. And what we mean by that is that you can teach the robot to fold your shirt in a new way with one demonstration. And the model can extrapolate that to an unseen shirt on an unseen bed. It actually like understands it. So this is something that is like really, really surprising that just emerges from like scaling up the training, the pre-training, both the data and the compute. The other thing that we are like really deep into is to introduce the idea of a solve.

• 2:22:29Tony Zhao?

  So I think this is, there's been like a huge amount of confusion around like, what is 99% this, 99% that? But 99% can mean very different things when the scope and the adaptation budget is different. Let's say if you're doing 99% folding one shirt in one room. This is very different from being able to fold any shirt in any new places it deployed into. So what we're trying to distinguish here is that the performance, let's say success rate, only matters if you very well, like very nicely define the scope, which is like, what is a long tail of things you want to handle? And the adaptation budget, which is another way to say like, am I allowed to train on my test set?

• 2:23:12Tony Zhao?

  Am I allowed to train on the deployment situation that I'm going to do? And only after these boundaries are established, does a success rate make sense. And one example of that is if you think about self-driving, doing 99% in a closed course versus on highway versus on city streets, there are like very, very different challenges. And so I think we as a field in robotics are at a point that we want to clarify these to like better be able to track the progress in the field.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  What does prompt engineering look like as this gets deployed? Like I can imagine, you know, you go to chat GPT and you say like, write me a blog post and it'll be like very mid. And then you give it an example of how you write and it gets a lot better. And, and there's a lot of, you know, style transfer examples. You feed in an image to mid-journey and say, I'm looking for generally like this, but use it, make it a dog. And I'm wondering if there's a pattern where at least in the, in the interim, in the midterm, you, or in the medium term, you will say, okay, you know, best practice is when memo comes to my house. Give it a couple of examples of how you like your socks folded.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  You know, show it the long socks and then also show it the short socks to give it a couple of reps and then you'll be good. Is there sort of, even though obviously you're doing a lot to make the product just work out of the box? Is there going to be some sort of like last minute ad hoc, you know, on the fly, fine tuning that's essentially happening in the home?

• 2:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, a good example is like folding all the clothes is one challenge and then putting them in the right places is another.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Which, yeah, everyone's had the experience of being like, okay. Well, not, not everyone, but like, I'm not home, I'm not home when my, when my laundry, when my laundry gets folded. And sometimes it gets put somewhere. I don't know where it is. I want it to be put in the right place at the right time.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:25:10Tony Zhao?

  Yeah, I think what you guys are highlighting is really the, the need of personalization for homes. And that's actually a hallmark of intelligence, right? Is that if you're so smart, you should be able to learn from one single example, which is what we thought for like the prompt engineering side.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:24Tony Zhao?

  I think this is something, not something we're going to roll out this year, but maybe like either super late this year or like early next year. Of like, how can we allow users to customize the behavior of the robot? Let's say I just want my laundry to be done this way, or I want it to be placed into the cabinet in that way. I want my home to be organized in this way of like, a specific way of laying out the living room. And can you do that just by one video, one photo or like one demonstration? This is actually what this research update, the one example, one-shot learning is about. That it turns out as we scale pre-training, that capability just emerges. And of course there are work that needs to be done there to make it a actual shippable feature. But it's really, really promising to see that it's even possible.

• 2:26:10John Coogan?

  How do you think, if you're really successful, if there's a, a fast take off of, of this product category broadly, hopefully you, with you at the forefront, how do you think it will change the design of American homes? Like I can imagine, some people have laundry rooms on the first floor, bedrooms on the second floor. You don't have the ability to climb stairs. I could imagine people saying, maybe I'll remodel and put a laundry room upstairs. But have you thought about the knock-on effects of like, if somebody really leans in, you know, they're getting the electric charger for their car? They're modifying their home for the best experience in the future. How will things change?

• 2:26:53Tony Zhao?

  Yeah, I think there are a couple of things that are really interesting here that you mentioned. One is that I think we're definitely in a period of time that the capability will take off. In the sense that like when we work on this laundry task, we didn't make any assumptions about laundry. The recipe itself is extremely general. So there's really no fundamental reasons why we cannot work on a thousand of these skills in parallel. And which means that, you know, the capability is only exponentially growing scale as if we can scale data and compute accordingly. And I think as you said, like the derivation of this is that if the robot can do so many things in your home, a lot of them are like maybe across different floors and across different places.

• 2:27:38Tony Zhao?

  Is there ways to modify the environment? Is there ways to modify the robots? And I think this is also where our technology comes in, which is the way we designed a data collection device is agnostic to the hardware. That the same data set, the same model can be used to control memo as it is right now, but maybe it can control a legacy version of memo in the future.

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:28:00Tony Zhao?

  We're actually super open minded about form factors, but within the ecosystem that we're going to build, which is going to be beautiful, high quality hardware.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Got it. You said there's a thousand tasks you could think of. I can think of like four things that a robot could do in the house. It's like laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning generally, maybe like gardening, but like there's gotta be a power law. Locking the doors at night? Yeah, I guess there are some more, but how long is your task list? Obviously laundry really stands out as like something that very few people enjoy. It's very obvious and it seems very unbounded. So if you can solve that, you can imagine it also being like, I would trust that robot right now to throw a lock. That seems easier than than folding a shirt. But how long is the list of of tasks that you want to that you want to knock down over

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  the next couple of years?

• 2:28:53Tony Zhao?

  I think there are almost like two parts of this question. One part is that what is the minimum number of tasks that a robot needs to do to justify its own existence that people love having in their homes? And as you said, I actually think the list is pretty short because the annoying chores are just that many, right? They're pretty repetitive. You just need to learn it and you know, you just keep doing that over and over again, like folding shirts or like loading dishwasher. But I think I think that's one part of the equation. But the other part, which is what we noticed is that I think we're also having this longer term goal of can we get to the general intelligence? Can we solve the quote unquote physical AGI? And what that entails is a way longer list of tasks.

• 2:29:36Tony Zhao?

  And what we are seeing just like, I think home and this objective actually aligns quite a lot. We call like research market fit, that the research that goes into the product also advances on a general intelligence side. So overall, I think the there are like obviously infinite amount of manipulation skills, even for one task, you can do it in many different ways. And I think we'll first cross the boundary of making a product exist, but we'll keep going towards the North Star of being able to solve any task with like very, very few demonstrations.

• 2:30:10John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:30:12Jordi Hays?

  I can believe the scenario where a winning robotics company starts off by just doing something cute like folding laundry and and then, you know, 10 years later, it's doing everything.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, it's a good place to start. I love it. Well, congratulations.

• 2:30:29Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your, what's your, your cooking timelines?

• 2:30:33Tony Zhao?

  I think cooking is such a fantastic task. Like imagine everyone can have Gordon Ramsay level of cooking in their homes. That would be like crazy, like people pay like so much money for it. But at the same time, I think laundry is also one of the tasks that are like difficult, right? Like if you like accidentally mess up, you need to clean up after yourself, which is okay. So I think we think about laundry as this almost like, like a final boss that the upside is so high.

• 2:31:04Jordi Hays?

  But you think laundry is harder than cooking?

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  I would say the opposite because

• 2:31:07Tony Zhao?

  Oh, sorry.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  You can't shatter. Yeah, cooking feels like the final boss because you can break glasses, there's heat involved. There's like

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  You come back into your kitchen and it looks like

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  Whereas like if I have a shirt and the robot messes up and and gets the shirt all bundled up, it's just a messy shirt. It was already a messy shirt.

• 2:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Not if it's Chrome Hearts.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess. But if, but if you come back and it's like, okay, you actually like broke a glass of wine and you like, you broke a glass of a bottle of olive oil.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Dozen eggs on the floor.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little bit riskier, so. But it seems like it will transfer pretty well, at least in

• 2:31:40Jordi Hays?

  I think you should go lock up all the great chefs and lock up their IP and say, I'm going to give you a little bit of money now to have the right to like offer the Gordon Ramsay as a service in, you know, five, 10 years.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it.

• 2:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for the update.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 2:32:00John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:32:03Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, Tony. Congrats.

• 2:32:05John Coogan?

  Did you hear that the founder of DeepSeek turned it down? He had the opportunity to go to DJI and he turned it down.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  He was so younger.

• 2:32:15John Coogan?

  He was so younger, like then came

• 2:32:18Jordi Hays?

  They wanted him to, they wanted him to go for a decade.

• 2:32:21John Coogan?

  That would define everything by what he refused. In his college years, DJI founder Wang Tao asked Liang to join as co-founder. He was going to be the co-founder of DJI. Wow. Liang declined the invitation to pursue artificial intelligence methodologies in financial markets. He said, I gotta, I gotta go to Wall Street.

• 2:32:44Jordi Hays?

  I gotta make markets efficient.

• 2:32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wang Tao was

• 2:32:47Jordi Hays?

  Bullish for Wang to

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  Identify great talent. Yeah, you imagine that the rest of the team is going to too. Building flying devices in a small Shenzhen workspace at the time, the venture would become DJI, a drone company now valued in the tens of billions. Liang said, no, he turned it down. While pursuing his graduate studies at the university, Liang was convinced that artificial intelligence would change the world, a belief dismissed by many in 2008. That's a long time ago. The certainty was not performative. It was the kind that makes a man pass on a lottery ticket because he has already decided where he is going. You know, people have been debating the the turned it down guy. He's been viral many, many times. And the general consensus of the joke is that it's funny because of course he was not

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  offered a $5 million scholarship to drum. That's something that's impossible, that could never happen. I dug into it. It is possible. You can be offered a $5 million scholarship. It's very difficult. There have to be like 10 things that go right for you to actually be offered a $5 million scholarship, but it is possible and I, and I have it for you today. So the mathematically correct version of the $5 million scholarship, this is the low end again, he did start with 15 million, but without, without pretending. So the key is that it needs to be a privately endowed 10 year fellowship.

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  It actually has to be a decade, but a decade is possible if you are pursuing a 10 year dentistry track where you become a medical doctor as well as

• 2:34:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  as doing many different fellowships.

• 2:34:27Jordi Hays?

  At a big, big school.

• 2:34:29John Coogan?

  Craniofacial reconstructive surgery, clinical oral and maxillofacial surgery residency. So this could actually happen in Jacksonville. It's possible.

• 2:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep, Jacksonville University, they have a master of science in dentistry.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Yes, so you do your bachelor's, then you do your master's, then you do a DDS, DMD program. So you're getting a medical doctor. It can actually take 10 years to become a dentist, but then you are of course also there on a drumming scholarship. So it's a requirement that you drum, but they are paying for your school.

• 2:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're not on the drummer track. You're just drumming to to grind for

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  And this happens all the time where someone gets an athletic scholarship, but then they study history. And the history degree is a normal price. The dentistry degree or the series of degrees that would be required, but there's more because that alone is not, is not 5 million for 10 years of dental school. You also need an incredible amount of dependents. If you had, if you had seven children who are all minors, two adult relatives who require supervised care and maybe an elderly parent who requires daily assistance, legally, a scholarship can cover your dependents.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  And so that's adding another, you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in dependent care. Then the last thing that really adds up is housing and food. With all those dependents, you could be looking at a budget of $85,000 annually, so almost a million dollars over the 10 year program for something that's, you know, you need that you need a nine bedroom rental if you have 10 dependents at this point.

• 2:36:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:36:13John Coogan?

  Transportation. It also helps if you require wheelchair accessible accommodations because that can drive up the cost of everything if you require a wheelchair accessible dental studio for everything. And then lastly, study abroad can be included in in scholarship. So if this, if this 10 year dental scholarship that requires you to play drums at a big, at a big college in Jacksonville, also allows you to do craniofacial reconstruction in Switzerland, then implant dentistry in Sweden. These are all the most expensive places where you can go abroad. Robotic oral surgery in Japan. So you're constantly touring the globe, doing the most expensive study abroad programs.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  That could add another $600,000 to your decade in school.

• 2:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Cooper's calling it the perfect storm.

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  All the perfect storm, all for a total of $5 million.

• 2:37:08Jordi Hays?

  And I have confirmed that Jacksonville University has its advanced special education program in orthodontics and dentofacial orthopedics, which started in 2003. So the timing does

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:37:21Jordi Hays?

  line up. This program would have sort of been hitting its stride

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  as Big Boogie

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:37:26Jordi Hays?

  would have been, you know, his drumming talent was emerging. They knew they wanted to sign him. And Jacksonville University also has the notorious Rip Current marching band, plus a pep band.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Wind ensemble, jazz ensemble.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  It's possible.

• 2:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Orchestra and they have some smaller chamber groups. So it's possible they, it was this perfect storm, right? Where they wanted him to not only go on a

• 2:37:51Jordi Hays?

  Go on an orthodontics global tour, but also participate in all the different musical groups on campus to get to that 5 million, which he's still, in the end, even with that perfect storm, he still may have decided to turn it down because he has gone on quite a run in the music industry, John. If you look at his songs, he's putting up, he's putting up some big numbers.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Absolutely. Yeah. So the key with a scholarship is that in order for it to be a donation, so legally a scholarship, you can't just pay someone to go play in the band. It needs to be a scholarship, so it has to be for tax deductible expenses, which is why the number is so big, because it's, of course, sounds like he's thinking of a name, image and likeness deal that college athletes are able to get now, but that's a separate thing. But a private individual, private donor-

• 2:38:43Jordi Hays?

  But here's the other thing. Here's the other thing. Part of this whole thing, they could have been saying, hey, we think that NIL is actually going to become big in, in sort of, in, we think it's going to be a thing in college.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:56Jordi Hays?

  It's going to start in sports, but it'll, it'll sort of expand into musical pursuits. So that's where he could have had the 10 or 15 or 5, right? Which is like base case, this is a $5 million deal, but-

• 2:39:10John Coogan?

  If NIL comes to band, we will extend you, we will be the first check in the door.

• 2:39:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll help facilitate, you know, $5 million extension.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  Yes. So a private donor could commit $5 million to cover 10 years of dental education, family care, disability accommodation, international training, housing and taxable living support on the condition that the recipient remained active as a university percussionist. That would be legal. It could happen, and maybe it just did to Big Boogie, but he turned it down.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Jack in the chat says, dare you say he turned it up. He really did. The line is he turned it down.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:50Jordi Hays?

  But in some ways, you know, going on this run-

• 2:39:52John Coogan?

  You know, the beautiful thing, the beautiful thing would be him to go viral, make a ton of money in the music industry, and then go and endow a $5 million scholarship at a big college in Jacksonville for the next generation. The Turned It Down Scholarship.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  My problem is-

• 2:40:10John Coogan?

  If he makes so much money, he should do it.

• 2:40:11Jordi Hays?

  My problem is like, why is he not taking advantage of this? Like, he should, he should have-

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  A song. He called, I turned it down. Yeah, for sure.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  He's only released one track that I can see this year, which is 2 minutes and 56 seconds. We'll have to listen after the show. I don't think it will be show appropriate. But that is our show today, folks.

• 2:40:36John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 2:40:37Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to be back here in the Ultra Dome.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  With you all-

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpi.com. And we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.