Eddy Cue Joins for Apple's 50th, Artemis Launch, Jamie Dimon's Plan, Save Snap Now, SpaceX IPO | Aaron Terrazas, Pratap Ranade, Abhishek Das, Garry Tan, Brannin McBee, Sam Yagan

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:18) - Artemis II Launch (10:50) - Jamie Dimon's Plan (14:20) - Buffett's Protégé Joins JPMorgan (20:10) - Save Snap Now (31:10) - The Artemis II Launch Technology (38:35) - The Great KitKat Heist (45:25) - Microsoft Eyes $7B Texas Power Plant (54:19) - OpenAI Preps "Social Contract" Push After $122B Raise (01:00:37) - Timeline Reactions (01:10:15) - Eddy Cue, Apple's Senior Vice President of Services, joined the company in 1989 and has been instrumental in developing key platforms like the iTunes Store and App Store. In the conversation, he reflects on his early years at Apple, his admiration for Steve Jobs' innovation, and the challenges of launching the original Apple online store amidst concerns from traditional retail channels. (01:32:53) - Aaron Terrazas, an economist at Gusto with prior experience at Glassdoor, Convoy, Zillow, and the U. S. Treasury Department, discusses the unique advantages of being an in-house economist, emphasizing access to proprietary data that offers real-time insights into economic trends. He highlights the importance of adjusting internal data to reflect the broader labor market, ensuring accurate analyses. Terrazas also notes that, despite prevailing economic uncertainties, small businesses created approximately 120,000 new jobs in March, marking the strongest growth since 2022. (01:46:40) - Timeline Reactions (01:56:36) - Pratap Ranade, CEO and co-founder of Arena Physica, discusses the company's evolution from integrating AI into hardware engineering to developing Heaviside, the first foundation model for electromagnetism. This model, akin to a large language model but trained on materials, geometries, and electromagnetic fields, aims to address challenges in designing software-defined hardware by creating a data factory to generate the necessary training data. Ranade highlights applications in satellite communication, radar, and data centers, emphasizing partnerships with companies like AMD and Anduril to democratize advanced electromagnetic design. (02:19:00) - Abhishek Das, co-founder and co-CEO of UTOTI, discusses the development of web agents designed to autonomously perform tasks on the internet, envisioning a future where AI agents handle web interactions on behalf of users. He elaborates on the multi-layered architecture of these agents, including a core language model for web navigation, an agent harness for persistence and task management, and a user-friendly product interface. Das also highlights the company's focus on serving prosumers, such as small to medium business owners and individuals in larger companies, and mentions that their in-house model is as accurate as leading alternatives but operates faster and at a lower cost. (02:33:30) - Garry Tan, born in 1981, is a Canadian-American venture capitalist and the CEO of Y Combinator, known for co-founding Posterous and Initialized Capital. In the conversation, Tan discusses the transformative impact of AI on software development, emphasizing the need for developers to embrace rapid iteration and leverage tools like his open-source project, GStack, which turns AI assistants into virtual software development teams. He highlights the importance of structured workflows and the potential for AI to significantly enhance productivity in the tech industry. (02:56:21) - Brannin McBee, co-founder and Chief Development Officer of CoreWeave, discusses the company's innovative financing strategy, which involves combining GPU infrastructure with long-term contracts to secure investment-grade financing at competitive rates. He emphasizes the importance of market validation in reducing capital costs and highlights the sustained demand for older GPU models, attributing it to the diverse needs of AI workloads. McBee also underscores the significant engineering efforts required to build large-scale data centers and the necessity of aligning with clients to support the rapid evolution of AI technology. (03:09:07) - Sam Yagan, co-founder and managing director of Corazon Capital, is an American entrepreneur known for founding SparkNotes and OkCupid, and serving as CEO of Match Group. In the conversation, he discusses the transformative impact of AI on consumer technology, emphasizing the need for startups to focus on achieving product-market fit and highlighting the importance of adaptability and strategic pivots in entrepreneurial success. 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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 and today is Wednesday, April 1st, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dump, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  The 50th anniversary of Apple. We're very excited. Eddie Q is joining at 1210. We're going to go through his.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Has to be one of the most elaborate April Fools jokes.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Building a company for 50 years.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  That is incredible.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  It's a really good bit.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  It's a hilarious bit. Just create trillions of dollars in shareholder value like.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  Just kind of as like a bit with your voice.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Yeah, I can actually hear you really well on this because the I have three sets of headphones on now. I have headphones.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  You can't even tell that I've got these new AirPod Pro Max.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  The Pro Max, AirPod Max. Anyway, we are very excited that Eddie Q is joining. We're also excited about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Well, we're also excited about the rest of our linear lineup. So let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear forces the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspace on linear are using agent.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  We have Eddie Q at 1210.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Gary Tan's coming in.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  We have Aaron Tarazas using fresh data signaling. He's got fresh data signaling a rebound in small business hiring and labor market activity.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:18Jordi Hays?

  We have.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  From Gusto.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  For a top from Arena Physica.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  Oh, we printed on both sides.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  Abhishek Das.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Got a new product turning web agents from monitors into autonomous task executors. And of course, Gary Tan.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  As John said.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Closing out with a new.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  Line of code world champion.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, line of code world world champion. I think a lot of people have questions about, you know, how much is Gary doing himself? What does he think about the future for YC companies? I think no one really disputes the question that in the vibe coding world, the the role of a startup changes, the roles change, everyone's sort of coding, pushing code. Very interesting to hear, you know, YC's typically, you know, gone after teams that are like highly technical. Does that change in the future? There's a lot to answer. And of course, we'll be digging into G stack and Gary's list and then trying to understand what the goal is there, what's real, what's a meme. He's obviously trolling people. He's he's a master of the timeline. So that will be fun to dig into, but.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  We got to kick it off with this video from NASA Administrator and more importantly, former TVP and guest Jared Isaacman. He says, "Tomorrow, we launch at sunset. Tonight, Artemis 2 waits on the pad, ready to carry astronauts potentially farther than any humans have traveled in more than half a century." The next era of exploration.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  And we have the countdown here right next to John.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yes, so it is about four hours and 20 something minutes until the launch starts. You know, they might delay by a few minutes. Who knows? They might crash entirely. But if things go to plan, the official NASA stream is up now, but stay with us. And then once we wrap in about three hours, head over there and watch NASA take you through the final stage of the Artemis 2 launch. But let's play NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's video, because it's very exciting. This is what I lived for as a young child and what I live for to today.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  Kennedy Space Station is on for the first human moon mission in more than 15 years.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  50 years. Very, very, you know, a lot of people have been going back and forth SpaceX versus SLS. I think it's more rockets, the better. More space launch capacity, the better. I want 10 of these companies. I want them all to be successful. Very exciting. Well, we will be following it closely throughout the day. We might get updates. We might have breaking news. Apo Structure Us says, "You can hate SLS for being obsolete, massively late, and over budget." I certainly do, but you gotta concede, it looks incredible. And I couldn't agree more. Importantly, some people were joking around saying the space shuttle is launching today. They're not using the space shuttle because they're going farther than they normally go with the space shuttle. And the space shuttle

• 4:08John Coogan?

  was decommissioned. So then the astronauts will be in a pod on top, in capsule mode. Exactly.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  Blake Scholl shares, "I'm genuinely excited to see America headed back to the moon, back around the moon. But Artemis is a moon dog."

• 4:21John Coogan?

  That's a good wombo. That's a really good wombo. Wombos are the new meta. We'll be breaking it down soon.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  You don't even need to Lorraine it.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  You don't.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  It's just plainly, Lorraine is lore.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Lore plus explain.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Remember that Apollo did not result in durable progress in space. It marked a literal high point for more than half a century. The cost of space access remained prohibitively high until we had a rebirth of space entrepreneurship. Thank you for showing the way SpaceX. Apollo was history's greatest tech demo, the moon landing. This is inspiring. It shows the triumph of ingenuity, science and reason. But also Apollo led to half a century of stasis and regression.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, complacent.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  It was fundamentally uneconomic, contributed to creation of cost insensitive, of a cost insensitive space agency and supply base, all more concerned with perpetuating their own existence, more concerned with make work jobs than accelerating human progress. Now we're going back to the moon, essentially the same way we did in 1969. Again, uneconomically, again with central planning. A disposable rocket, no answer to how we create a self sustaining lunar economy. Again, we're taking communist approaches in competition with the communists. Communism didn't work for the Russians and it won't work for America either. The sooner we can get done with this moon doggle, the better. But there's also reason to be optimistic. This time around, there's a nascent commercially led vision for the moon.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  Lunar hotels, mass drivers, data centers in space, helium three. The commercial programs that gave SpaceX an early assist show a different and better path forward. This is where the better future lies and this is where America should be focused. America should take the moon and we should take it the same way we took the American West. Let's encourage and protect lunar value creation. How about a homestead act for the moon? Most important, let's stop dumping money. And more importantly, the time of our engineers and scientists on glory project that will never lead to a better future. It is indeed time for another space race. Last time we fought communism with communism. This time, let's remember what made America great. This time, let's fight communism with capitalism.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, there's some good points in here. I think the, the flip side of this is that we are in a wildly different position than 1969 in terms of the maturity of this lunar economy, the space ecosystem. We have SpaceX filed for IPO today. You're looking at a trillion dollar company. It will instantly be one of the largest companies. In the world, it already is, but in the public markets when it goes out. And so you have a lot of companies and startups and venture capitalists that are fully ready to commercialize any findings that come out of this and see this as an inspirational moment. And overall, it just feels like 1969, the capital markets, the entrepreneurship,

• 7:06John Coogan?

  the capitalism was not quite ready for, okay, let's take this to the next step, let's privatize this, let's build businesses around this. It was, it was much more of a, of a science experiment that went off into, you know, its, its corner and then was, you know, not immediately capitalized on. But I think this time could be different. At the same time, I do understand what he's saying.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ryan, Ryan and Hunter over at Pirate Wires shared, they, they wrote about this mission in Pirate Wires today. And they shared a quote from Jared last week saying, this time, he said, "The goal is not flags and footprints. This time, the goal is to stay. America will never again give up the moon." So I think generally, generally aligned with, generally aligned with, with what Blake is saying.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's your take on this?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, I think Blake is kind of underestimating the value of just like vibes. Like people have been like pretty blackpilled on, on the moon.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  I think for the la, I mean, basically, since the, like, everything kind of stopped.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  So if you can just have like a white pill, everyone's like, sure, like, maybe it's not a good idea to continually launch these to the moon. They're not economical.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  But if you can just get one and say like, yeah, we actually, we can still do this.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  It's very much possible.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, it's, it's over budget, but as a percentage of GDP, it has to be a fraction of what we spent in 1969. So on a relative basis, it's a, it's a, maybe a better investment. And yeah, I, I do think that there's something that's just inspiring about being able to do something like this and prove that we still got it.

• 8:42Speaker 03

  I, I also like from Hunter and Ryan's post, that, you know, they're dropping the article, it's just moon, right? It's not the moon.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  I like this idea.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yes, we only got one, so we can just say moon. It has its own name. You know, you don't say the California, the Texas, the Florida, you just say moon. You say, okay, Texas, Florida. Let's watch this video of Neil Armstrong ejecting just seconds before his lunar trailing, training vehicle crashed.

• 9:06Jordi Hays?

  Space cowboy.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Space cowboy, true heroism here. This is such a crazy video. I had no idea this happened.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Good music too. What is this, Interstellar? Yeah?

• 9:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Like, how did he know? It was not gonna go, "Oh, it's tipping." Okay, I would definitely know. That would be very obvious, that you would want to get out of there at that point. Wow. And he gets out in the parachute. I wonder, I wonder how much of that was like, planned to be, "Okay, we're testing the ejector seat," or he just knew, "Okay, I gotta..." Yeah, "Why haven't we, why haven't I seen this video?" It's been available on the internet for a long time, it just doesn't get a lot of views. Well, it is getting a lot of use today. It was called, nicknamed Flying Bedstead, for good reason. It looked like a bed frame and it flew like one too. Yeah, flying that on Earth, it's not exactly the most aerodynamic, aerodynamic vehicle. But, call she has a market on when will Artemis 2 launch?

• 10:04John Coogan?

  It is soaring. We are now at 89% before April 2nd. So, 89% chance it launches today, basically. 92% chance that it launches before April 4th. And there, there's more information there. So, in general, like, even, even if it scratches all the way to May, to the end of April, you're still looking at a 95% chance. So, everyone is very optimistic that this launch will happen, and we're excited to keep following it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use to keep their apps working.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  So, Jamie Dimon's been on an absolute tear. He is hiring people, he's restating his vision for America. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. He has a plan for JP Morgan to rescue the American dream. That's a very exciting, exciting idea. And it is in the Wall Street Journal. I think it's in the print edition, maybe today. Which I'd love to see. Jamie Dimon, is he in here? I don't know. Where are you? Anyway, let's run through Jamie Dimon's plan for America. He's running. I think he should. Jamie Dimon thinks the American dream is on life support and he is planning JP Morgan Chase to step in. The nation's largest bank announced the American Dream Initiative on Tuesday, a commitment

• 11:30John Coogan?

  from JP Morgan to support small businesses, homeownership, access to healthcare and other economic priorities that Dimon believes are crucial for the well-being of Americans. The bank already finances all of the above and says it's ready to put more resources into the effort. Dimon, 70 years old and CEO of JP Morgan since 2006. What a run. Has long worried about the future of the American economy and wealth inequality. More recently, he has warned that the country is sleepwalking into economic stasis, thanks to bad policies and rules that make it hard to invest in new ventures and run companies. "I am deeply frustrated by our own policies in America," he said last week at the Hill and Valley Forum, which we covered. "We've become like Europe. We're unable to move and change." That's strong words.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  JP Morgan hasn't been slowed, bringing in more profit than any bank in the US history, in US history, but it reaches across Main Street and Wall Street and does better when the whole economy is chugging along. Dimon has a habit of making big commitments. I'm taking this off there a little bit. It's a big commitment, having that on. Dimon has a habit of making big commitments. In tune with the zeitgeist, JP Morgan announced a $1.5 trillion investment platform focused on national security and supply chains last year, just as the federal government started to invest in critical suppliers. It made a $30 billion racial equity commitment after the murder of George Floyd and a $2.5 trillion climate change plan in 2021. Now, the bank is committing to adding 3 million new small business customers on top of 7

• 12:59John Coogan?

  million today. They want to get to 10. I want to get to 10 million and it wants to lend them up to 80 billion over the next 10 years through loans and support for community oriented banks and investment funds. The bank reported 33 billion of loans to small businesses and other customers at the end of 2025. So they want to expand significantly. It's just a 30% bump in total number of small businesses, but they want to basically triple the amount of the loan book broadly. The American dream means you can buy a home, start a business, you can build wealth and you can afford healthcare for your family. JPMorgan's head of corporate responsibility, Tim Berry, said in an interview, "We want to bring our capabilities and make that more real to families and customers."

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Berry, the chief operating officer, said they're helming the new American dream initiative and acknowledged that a lot of it isn't really new. JPMorgan has been looking to grow deeper roots in the cities and towns where it does business, rolling out specialty branches focused on community education for years. It has invested big in cities where it has found business friendly leadership, including Detroit and San Francisco. The initiative and ambitious goals are supposed to jumpstart JP Morgan bankers and employees to do more. When we think about the impact that we've had locally in a place like Detroit, we know that success can be replicated in other places. So they are opening up the pocketbook to spur small business. Very exciting. In other

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Jamie Dimon news, he just hired or recently hired Warren Buffett's protege. There's a profile in Barron's by Andy Serwer. JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn't usually make high-profile outside hires for his senior executive team, preferring instead the homegrown variety. That makes Todd Combs, formerly a top investment manager at Berkshire Hathaway, poached and brought in to head up JP Morgan Chase's new 10 billion strategic investment group, an exception, except that Holmes is hardly a bolt from the blue. I like that. That's a good turn of phrase. Having served on JP Morgan's board since 2016. Okay, so he's a board member.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  So he clearly knows everyone already. He says, "I know the company well." Barons in his first interview as a bank employee. I know everyone from Jamie to the operating committee and the next layer of management. I'm well aware of the balance sheet, the excess capital and how Jamie and the team think and operate. Like the bank's other top executives, Combs, who's been CEO of Berkshire Geico Insurance Unit, is still settling into his new office on the 47th floor of JP Morgan's new Manhattan headquarters. I hope you don't mind the warm office, says Combs. A tennis-playing Florida native, I don't like the cold, he says. Combs mapped out his new gig, which began in January on a two-column chart he sketched on a notepad. Interesting. He's old school, old school. Powerful.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  He's not, he's not creating a second brain. He's just ripping it on a notepad. On the left are five rows of industries such as defense, supply chain, reindustrialization. On the right are their future manifestations, such as defense tech, US semiconductors, respectively. The plan is to invest in everything our country has outsourced and abdicated over recent decades. Combs says, "We want to invest in places where the puck is going so that America can control its own future." That means deploying the group's $10 billion into middle-market and large companies in US defense, aerospace, healthcare and energy sectors to help them grow. Recent investments include mining company Perpetual Resources and defense tech startup Shield AI.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Combs, who reports to Diamond, will also act as a special advisor to the CEO. Combs' endeavor is part of the Security and Resiliency Initiative JP Morgan announced in October, in which the bank will commit to facilitating 1.5 trillion in investments for companies deemed critical to the national economic security and resiliency. He joins the Initiative's External Advisory Council chaired by Diamond, which includes Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell and Condoleezza Rice. What a stacked roster. Combs says investments come to him directly. Or through Jamie or other senior bankers, what about the Trump administration? There are times that they'll reach out and look for our help, like Intel, I can imagine. We want to be a good partner to the government regardless of who's in charge.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  It's the GOP now, it can be someone else in the future, we're trying to let capitalism send the right signal. We'll look at every opportunity on its own merit, we want an impact and a return. Highly regarded as an investor, Combs is a boyish looking, 55, he helped return GEICO, which was burdened with outdated technology and bloated costs to profitability. Berkshire watchers thought he might play a role in the company's post Warren Buffett era, either overseeing its multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, or its massive insurance operations, or he could have been up for other high-profile jobs. But why this one? It's a unique opportunity with both Jamie and the institution and the mission of the job. Combs says, "This is critical to the future of the country. You want to find things in life that are big and important, that are worth doing and doable."

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Combs has an anti-bucket list for his new role. "I had about 10 or 12 things that I didn't want." The anti-bucket list is sort of underrated. Your anti-bucket list is just, "Never go skydiving. I don't want that to happen." Never buy a supercar.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Never visit 30 countries.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Become supercar-less. It's the dumbest thing. He says, "Jamie and I would talk every day after he brought this role for me. I didn't want to be measured on VAR, which stands for value at risk, a statistical measure that quantifies financial risk. I didn't want to get bogged down in bureaucracy. None of that occurred. In fact, it's better than I could have imagined. I'm sure there will be rough spots, that will happen when I make a bad investment, which is invariably going to happen." Was jumping from board member to management awkward? No, he says, "I'd like to think that there's an implicit trust factor because of the decade of relationships. I don't need years of random interaction getting up to speed." He talks about riding the subway with Lori Beer, the bank's global chief information officer, back to our respective residences the other night and talking about our tech roadmap for a specific vendor.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  We're being pitched on a $500 million deal and walking it down the hall to Troy and Doug, the co-CEOs of JP Morgan's Commercial and Investment Bank. As for Combs... Role as a strategic advisor to Diamond, he says that's about looking at the bank's operation from an outside perspective. It's a kind of investor mindset you see, you see fail, you're everywhere all the time. Whereas maybe inside a firm, you can have an insular view. He didn't talk much about his time at Berkshire. He said, I was back and forth from Omaha to DC for six years running GEICO. That was a long time. I'm very proud not to go down that rabbit hole of what we accomplished at GEICO. Berkshire is an animal unto itself that is completely unique. I like that he's probably just saying like, it's a unique animal, like it's a unique species,

• 19:52John Coogan?

  but I like to think that he's like, it's an absolute animal.

• 19:54Jordi Hays?

  And I'm an absolute dog.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  And I'm an absolute dog. Well, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Those are the first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Why is no one talking about Snapchat?

• 20:14John Coogan?

  Explain.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Irenic Capital came out.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Save Snap Now.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  With a well-executed activist campaign. Let's see, I'm pulling up there.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  It does feel like there's a big opportunity with AI, better targeting. Like, I'm receptive to this pitch, but I want to hear it from Irenic. I know that this is an activist, an activist shareholder. This could be very, very confrontational.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yes, they come out with a website, savesnapnow.com. You land on the website, they hit you with Snap Back to Reality.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  So, taking a fun approach here. They say Snap has the potential to be a great company and a double AI winner through meaningfully improved operating efficiency and monetization. Irenic has outlined six steps to 7x Snap's share price to $26 per share. They put together a presentation as well as a letter. I'll kind of read through some of the highlights. They say it snaps crucible moment. AI creates a dual pronged opportunity for significant cost cuts and accelerated product development. So they go into cost improvements, monetization, governance on the cost side. They want to spin or shut down specs. I'm sure Evan is not

• 21:30John Coogan?

  Like already happening, right?

• 21:31Jordi Hays?

  The spin, the spin is seemingly in the works. There were some leaks over the last six months around that. So I would expect that to happen. They want to rationalize cost. AI can and should replace many existing roles. Now, remember, the, the constant criticism of Snap has been the stock-based comp. If you actually look at it, they, from, from the kind of rough math we were doing, like every 10 years, they're basically giving the entire company to, to the team. And so investors, long-term investors have been very frustrated by that.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  And it, it, it always has been weird because I understand that, like, back in the day when they were competing directly with Twitter and Meta and Instagram and Reddit and all these different upstart, high-growth, social networking companies. I, I believe the talent war thesis, it makes sense that they would have to probably pay top dollar. But you have to imagine that as the business has stabilized, there are people that would come into the organization that would be happy to just have a salary and just do the work because it's better than working at another company. It, it, it's not necessarily like the AI talent war, or that, that, you know, the

• 22:48John Coogan?

  social media talent war that I'm sure happened, you know, back 10 years ago. It's a different time. So maybe different structure.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, uh, SaveSnap now is recommending a thousand-person riff to get fit and competitive and to empower your highest performers.

• 23:05Jordi Hays?

  It's again, if you're Evan reading empower your highest performers, you're probably thinking like,

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh geez, I never, I never thought of it, but again.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  They do have 5,261 employees as of late 2025. So this would represent roughly a 20% riff, not block level cuts, but more in line with what we're seeing at Oracle, Meta, some other tech companies that are going through a transformation.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  On monetization, the recommendation is to improve monetization.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  I think is a good idea for any business.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  It's a hot thing.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  But they say AI will massively accelerate product development and enhance advertising monetization tools. Again, you know, everyone by this point should be well aware that Meta has done a fantastic job in leveraging AI, ML to just make a better and better and better ads product.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  And they say product led improvements across users, advertisers and subscriptions to break out of Snap's monetization ceiling. Then they say deploy AI properly, monetize Snap's proprietary AI data sets. And then concentrate AI partnerships on clear winners like Gemini, OpenAI and Anthropic. Again, Snap partnered with Perplexity and it seemed like Snap got a fantastic deal out of that. It was something like a $400 million deal, if I remember correctly. Some of it was stock in Perplexity.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  But there was a huge cash component.

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:38Jordi Hays?

  And unclear if the other companies mentioned Gemini, OpenAI or Anthropic would have been able to match that, how aggressive Perplexity was getting. And so it's possible Snap's logic was, hey, we can, we can do this deal with Perplexity. And then it's, it's, it's native in our app. It's easy enough to swap it out at a later date. It's like basically take the cash while we can get it.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw this post from Sean Frank that somewhat relates. He, he was talking about one of our sponsors, AppLovin, which I will tell you about in a second, but. He said, in less than 12 months, I've spent 2,872,000 of my own money profitably on AppLovin'. I don't own the stock. I don't trade the stock. This is the net amount that left my bank account. And he shares a couple of other points and he says he's spending 17,000, so 2.8 million on AppLovin', clearly like a scalable, large platform. Spent 17,000 on Pinterest, 266,000 on Reddit. You have to imagine that Meta Ads are up there, but the question is like, for a lot of advertisers, Snap has not become this like, oh, sure, maybe you don't get, maybe it's not going to be your number one platform,

• 25:46John Coogan?

  but it's like in the marketing mix very regularly. And I think a lot of that should start working.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Even if the pool isn't super deep, even if you don't have 99% of your customers there, maybe only 20% of your customers are there. But even if they're there, you should be able to find them and AI can help that. And so I would expect that if this works, you'd see like really solid data from Ridge saying like, oh yeah, we're spending on Snap.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And they've been experimenting with Snap as far back as 2018.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 26:14Jordi Hays?

  When I was hanging out with Sean and Connor back then, they were, they were, they were getting results on Snap, but there was a ceiling.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  So then finally, they want to, on the governance side, commit to investing in safety and capital return, use newfound cash and profitability to further invest in privacy, safety and parental controls, and allocate new cash flow generation to capital return and demonstrate conviction in Snap's creation. Yeah, it's interesting on the parental control and safety side, I don't think, I think Snap has been able to stay out of the, at least, Lanier's targets.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  They settled. Oh, they ended up. Yeah, they settled before it went to trial.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Meta and Google fought it.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, I'm not exactly sure what that, what that means, but I think that they've been trying to sort of like step back from all of that.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then on the corporate governance side, giving shareholders a vote can unlock a multiple rerate through broader index.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  Illusion.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  And enabling one vote per class A share still preserves Snap as a founder controlled. Companies.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it probably has like 10x voting power or something like that.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, there is a 70-page slide deck that they put together with all these different recommendations.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Well, the market's reacting really positively to this, and I think Evan Spiegel has shared some some statements that sort of mirror this, actually. It seems like there's maybe a little bit more reception than you might expect. The stock's up 14% one day after publishing this piece, says Bose Weinstein. Adam is a rock star in the making, so smart, definitely worth a follow, and that's Irenic Cap.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Carrie No Interest gave some feedback on Irenic. He said, "A few critiques feedback. Daily opens are not equal to time spent on app. AppLovin' and Meta clearly have higher time spent on app, and therefore parity on monetization is flawed. Arguing that Snapchat can hit targeting levels of Meta is farcical. The amount of data that Meta has on me versus Snapchat is astronomically different. I guess I'm open to being proven wrong since you compare it to AppLovin', who IMO has always used other targeting sources."

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:21Jordi Hays?

  "Three proprietary data slide is a one-time flash-in-a-pan moment. Sure, some companies are selling deranged amount of data, but that's not lasting MRR, ARR monetization, although it is fair to call them out on it. I like the monetization per user slide. I think my feedback around Snap's ability to monetize relative to those peers stands. Literally, screen time is much lower and you don't have data for targeting the way peers do."

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  And what else was relevant? "Calling out the founders' net worth growth was either god-tier petty or brilliant, or some combination of old fun presentation."

• 28:54John Coogan?

  Presentation. Well, you can go check it out. Irenic Capital has posted, "Save Snap Now." You can listen to our interviews. I think a TBPN slide or quote made it into one of these presentations.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where was it?

• 29:10John Coogan?

  I think we're in there.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was on the slide. "AI should be an accelerant for Snap's core ads business," so Zach had said on Q4 earnings. He said, "We're also working on merging LLMs with the recommendation systems that power Facebook, Instagram threads in our ad system." Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business, but we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon. Adam at AppLovin said, "If we believe that AI technologies are going to be two times more efficacious in five years, just based off of that, if we do our job right, our system is going to be two times more predictive for its task, the sequence of problems that it's predicting in five years." And Evan said, "Our smart campaign solution suite, including smart targeting and smart

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  budget, uses AI to identify incremental high-value audiences and dynamically allocate spend across objectives, reducing the need for manual setup and ongoing optimization." And then in our interview, they highlighted Evan saying, "As you look at glasses in the near term, I wouldn't expect AI to be a major accelerant."

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Well, since we mentioned them, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System Context. It's in beta already.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so anyways, closing this out, Irenic is clearly thinks that he says specifically Snap is a special asset. He thinks it has a ton of potential. He's overall positive. He just thinks like, you know, he really wants them to get in the game. And I think that honestly, a lot of people have felt the same way over the years, but have just ultimately been frustrated because some of these things that seem somewhat straightforward just haven't been done.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Okay. I gotta go back to the moon. We're going back to the moon. I'm going back to the moon because Artemis 2 is launching in 3 hours and 52 minutes and 4, 3, 2, 1 seconds. Because Brandon Gurrell wrote the op-ed today in the TBN newsletter about some of the technology that they're using to document the trip, and it's a very different take, very livestreamer coded of us. We only care about the camera equipment that's on board. Obviously, there's a lot more that goes into it, but it's a fascinating deep dive. So let's read through this so that everyone has the update on. How you can actually experience this because there's a bunch of interesting deals that went into documenting this. So as you know, today, the NASA Artemis 2 mission will launch, sending the Orion spacecraft, carrying a four astronaut crew

• 31:46John Coogan?

  on a high-energy, free-return trajectory to get to the moon and back in about 10 days. It's longer than the Artemis 1 mission, which was six days.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  By the way, can you imagine the

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Uncrewed, yeah.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine the stress when you're just like being sent straight out into space? And you know, there's a big turn coming up and it's pretty important that you actually

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Don't miss the off. Yeah, you can't be like texting and like miss the off ramp. If you miss the off ramp, you're going to Saturn. It's over for you. Orion will enter a 24-hour, highly elliptical orbit with an apogee 44,000 miles above the surface of the Earth. For context, the ISS orbits at 200, 280 miles in altitude, so way, way higher. 100 times higher, 200 times higher. During the first day, the crew will test critical life support and communication systems. After reaching its apogee, Orion will essentially fall backward towards our planet. This will cause the craft to start picking up massive speed. If you, if you scroll down, you'll see that the path is a little fishy. And I think a lot of the tinfoil hat crowd are going to be suspicious about the path

• 32:53John Coogan?

  that the rocket will be taking because it's fishy. It's fishy if you scroll down. Don't you think that's fishy? That's a fishy orbit. That's just a fishy orbit. I don't know. I don't want to be too conspiratorial about this stuff, but like

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  It does look like a fish.

• 33:07John Coogan?

  It's a fishy orbit. It's fishy. Anyway, as it approaches its perigee, for those who are just listening on audio, it literally looks like a fish. As it approaches its perigee, or the lowest point in its Earth orbit, the crew will conduct a systems review, wake up the main engine system, organize the cabin to make sure radiation shielding bags and water supplies are positioned to act as shelter in case of a solar flare. Put on their survival suits and strap in. They're locking in. So. Brendan said it's shaped like a figure eight. I think that's very generous. I think it's shaped like a fish and I think you should have just said fish. There's a little bit of truth zoning that needs to happen right now, but it's not bad. It is, it is, it is a figure eight. It is elliptical, but I'm going to still, still say it looks like a fish.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  After the burn, the crew will take more than four days to meet, to reach the moon. The craft just coasted there. A lunar, the lunar flyby where it will orbit the moon at a maximum altitude of 6,000 miles and minimum altitude of 60 to 70 miles from the surface of the moon is expected to happen Monday, April 6th. It will probably end up being the farthest humans have ever traveled from Earth due to the high altitude at which they'll orbit the moon.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  And remember, we still don't know if this is like Apple, another elaborate April Fools joke. They could, we could get to the countdown here and Jared Isaacman could say April Fools. But let's continue.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Imagine if that giant rocket, they cut it, it's just cake. That would be a good one. NASA is essentially aiming for a Netflix quality live stream on the flyby and this is what the video creators, the content creators, the live streamers, this is what we care about. It will feature 4K UHD video streams that beam back to Earth with a three second latency and some additional latency from encoding and terrestrial distribution. Using a frontier laser communication terminal that can transmit data at 260 megs a second. The stream will probably be compressed to 1080p for live video, but it will be saved in 4K. The craft has 28 dedicated cameras onboard externally mounted and astronaut handheld externally, externally mounted cameras will be on the tip of each of Orion's four X shaped solar arrays.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  And they can rotate, which will allow them to take selfies of Orion with the Earth or the moon in the background.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  We got selfie sticks in space.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Space selfie sticks in space. This is sci fi now.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  These specific cameras will be heavily modified versions of the GoPro Hero 4 Black. Which is interesting. The GoPro Hero 4 is a pretty old camera, but they probably had to start working on this. You know, it's a nine year, it's a nine year old project. So they probably locked in the specs a long time ago. And then of course they started ruggedizing them. So that camera on the left.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  Making the GoPro even more rugged.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically, they actually have to. There's a lot of radiation, there's a lot of pressure and, and obviously no pressure, uh, when you're in a vacuum. Uh, the, uh, which uses a 12 megapixel CMOS sensor can shoot 4K at 30 frames a second. NASA contracted red wire space. So it's not all communism over here, Blake Scholl. There's some privatized companies involved in the process. Give us a

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for government contractors.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for red wire space. They ruggedize the cameras to protect them from the vacuum, extreme temperatures, and intense radiation of deep space. Uh, some of the external cameras won't even generate imagery for the public. The optical navigation camera, for example, is a high-re, high-res monochromatic sensor that feeds image data of the moon and earth against background stars to Orion's central computer, which runs machine vision algorithms to calculate the craft's exact position and velocity. They're doing slam in space. Uh, inside Orion, astronauts who use a tricked-out Nikon Z9s handheld cameras that can shoot massive 8K video at 60 FPS. NASA actually entered into an agreement

• 36:51John Coogan?

  with Nikon to develop these for Artemis II. Astronauts on the ISS use unmodified Nikon Z9s, but because Artemis is going into deep space, the cameras needed to be, uh, ruggedized for the conditions out there and power optimized for the huge data transfers the cameras will need to make on the ship, which can be incredibly power-intensive. Nikon even wrote a dedicated operating system for the cameras for this. Wow. Finally, NASA partnered with National Geographic to essentially record the footage for a documentary during the mission. Uh, the launch is expected no earlier than 6:24 Eastern Time, 3:24 Pacific Time, on NASA's YouTube. They are already broadcasting the livestream. The main program commentary

• 37:30John Coogan?

  starts at, uh, 12:50 ET. So they'll, they're gonna start talking and, uh, that'll be a lot of fun to follow along with. Uh, throughout the course of the mission, National, NASA will broadcast real-time coverage from Orion's cameras as bandwidth allows. This will be on the agency's YouTube channel. So they're gonna just like really embarrass us with this. Cause 10-day livestream, we've been talking about, we, we will say, "Oh, we're doing a gig a stream. We're gonna interview a bunch of founders from YC." And it's like a four-hour, five-hour, maybe a six-hour show. They're like 10-day, 10-day livestream.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Nice try TVP. Yeah, it'll be rough for us. Anyway.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's still it's still almost unfathomable unfathomable the amount of risk that these astronauts are taking on.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  And my thoughts are with them.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. And let me also tell you about vibe.co where DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. So the Kit Kat heist. This is the story you all have been waiting for. Kit Kats, the candy bars were stolen and in massive quantity. The Wall Street Journal has a story of how the company reacted, how they turned a massive Kit Kat heist into crisis PR gold. We've seen this before. People were talking about Tucker Carlson having his nicotine pouch shipment stolen

• 39:02John Coogan?

  and how it sounded like the plot of a new Fast and Furious or zoomer Fast and Furious movie. Well, something similar happened to Kit Kat and they took advantage of it and made the best out of it. So Kit Kat, of course, is owned by Nestle, but let's dig into what the Wall Street Journal had to say. Just how much are 12 metric tons of stolen Kit Kat bars worth? A lot of promotional gold, it turns out, says the Wall Street Journal. It was the brazen it was the brazen chocolate heist heard around the social media world. Oddly, this is the first time I'm hearing it. I don't know why. I don't know how I missed this. Had you heard of this before?

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  You had? Okay.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've seen this.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  I literally found out about this in the Wall Street Journal. I don't know why. I only heard about this in the reaction. But anyway, it's an interesting story. So over the weekend, Nestle confirmed that thieves had swiped 413,000 units of Kit Kats somewhere along their way from a factory in central Italy to Poland. Both chocolate bars and the truck carrying them remain missing, though no one was hurt in the theft, it said. But the Swiss company lost in chocolate, though it gained back in a public relations coup. As did multiple other companies, quick to hop on the meme bandwagon. We need to pull up some of these memes. I haven't seen any of them.

• 40:23John Coogan?

  We've always encouraged people to have a break with Kit Kat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate, the company said in a statement.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  I don't get it. You have to, they would have had to steal the truck, too?

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they stole the truck. I mean, it sounds like Fast and the Furious. It sounds like they stuck it up. And you said, get out of the truck. You gotta call a cab?

• 40:47Speaker 03

  The truck is missing.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  The truck is missing.

• 40:48Speaker 03

  They took the truck. They took the truck.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  Wow, they took everything. Yes, it really happened. A spokesperson confirmed that it wasn't an early April 1st joke. Taking their cue from Nestle, other companies soon joined in with some social media spoofing. "We would like to share our thoughts and condolences with Kit Kat following their sad news," the account for Domino's Pizza in the UK posted Monday morning. Then it added on a completely unrelated note, "We're pleased to announce that we'll be selling a new Kit Kat pizza." It's very silly. Charlotte FC, the major league soccer club in North Carolina, jumped on the same riff a couple of hours later. "On an unrelated note, we are happy to share that we will be offering roughly 413,000..."

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about you, John, but I love when large corporations can just jump in on the fun.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  It's extremely millennial. This is like, this is my culture is not your costume. If you're not a millennial and you're the one posting this, like, stop. This is only a millennial has the right to post jokingly as a corporate account. The discount airline Ryanair, meanwhile, simply posted a cartoon of, photo of one of its planes with a face in the jet's mouth are five bitten off Kit Kat bars. Not long ago, most companies would have said little, leaving it to law enforcement authorities to disclose such a potentially embarrassing revelation. Now, any bad news is good news, as long as a corporate brand can turn it into a viral meme.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder if this is a global crime ring that also came after ALP.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  The nicotine, the nicotine box.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's possible. Or it's possible that they're gonna try to combine them, you know, kind of one plus one equals three type situation where they think that. You know, merging Kit Kats and nicotine could produce, you know, incremental value.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Who knows? Who knows? Typically, nicotine products are much more economically dense. So a single can of pouches might retail for anywhere between like six and $10, whereas a Kit Kat might be the same size, but only retail for a dollar. And so stealing a truck full of nicotine products is typically like 10 times more economically valuable than Kit Kats. But who knows? Maybe the thieves weren't thinking about economic density when they chose to stick up this particular truck. What do you think about this, this take? It's a masterclass in public relations. Like, I, I agree with your, your intuition that, oh, this is not that funny. Like, this is sort of just like corporate cringe. It's a little rough.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Like, some of these, like, I'm not getting belly laughs out of this, but just in terms of corporate comms strategy, this feels like the best of all possible worlds.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 43:24John Coogan?

  I think it's like a reasonable thing.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Am I entertained? No. Do I think that it was worth doing? Yes.

• 43:34John Coogan?

  Yes. It's, it's like, it's like the least bad way to deliver this news.

• 43:38Jordi Hays?

  Does it make me want a Kit Kat? No.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Also, no.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, like, I was not thinking about Kit Kats and now I'm thinking about Kit Kat.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  And, and I'm thinking about the-

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, now I'm thinking, I just think, I think I've never really, I've never really had a Kit Kat and thought, oh, that, that was, that was so good.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  And so now I'm just remembering that why I don't care.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. I think, I think that, you know, the, the two options were, you know, put out some sort of like serious sad statement about how you got owned, basically.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  I think that could have been funnier.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  That might have been funnier. It was just, uh, yeah, the, the, maybe a CEO viral video would, would have done the trick that kicked off. This, this reminds me of that McDonald's burger thing, that sort of all the-

• 44:22Speaker 03

  They talk about that's-

• 44:22John Coogan?

  All the brands. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Where, where, where does that go? Nowadays, other companies want to profit from potential buzz from a rival's misstep, too. After a video of McDonald's CEO polite bite into a burger went viral this month, top executives from Burger King, Wendy's, and Wendy's pounced with similar videos in a lighthearted dig at their competitor. McDonald's said his new burger, the Big Arch, got a sales boost for all the attention, too. So. It worked.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they got a sales boost from having the CEO?

• 44:50John Coogan?

  They claim, they claimed that getting dunked on, all press is good press. That's their claim. I don't know. Uh, it, it, it doesn't seem, doesn't seem crazy. Like, you know, we, we found out about the big arch. We talked about the big arch. We, we, we, we sort of, uh, processed the value prop at least.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I keep catching you leaving early. You're like, oh, I gotta, I gotta get home. I gotta pick the kids up from school. And I just, I drive by the local McDonald's and John is there. He's got in the passenger seat, 20 big arches. And you're just plowing through them.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I don't think so. Not for me. I'll, I'll, I'll stick to the other.

• 45:28Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft is in talks with Chevron.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  Engine number one over $7 billion Texas power plant.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  That's good news.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  Exclusive talks.

• 45:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  An investment fund, uh, with Chevron and Engine One over a long-term deal for a giant power plant in West Texas to provide electricity to a large data center campus. The proposed natural gas-fired power plant is projected to cost just $7 billion and initially generate 2,500 megawatts of electricity.

• 45:54John Coogan?

  2.5 gigs. 2.5 gigs. That's a huge campus. Wow. That's really, really good. Chevron, Microsoft and Engine One have entered into an exclusivity agreement related to a proposed power generation and electricity offtake arrangement. Uh, Chevron and Engine One had previously discussed some details of their proposed power, power plant. Um, but not the end user of the electricity. A deal with Microsoft would secure a long-term customer for the plant's output and help finance construction. The project, which could be up and running before 2030, still requires tax and environmental approvals as well as agreement of commercial, uh, commercial terms. Um, Microsoft is a longtime backer of chat GPT maker OpenAI is doubling down on constructing data centers.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  The pause is unpaused. This is fully, we are in unpause mode. Satya is going all in on AI. Uh, access to reliable baseload power is emerging as a key challenge. One of the Chevron and Engine number one partnership expects to address, given its extensive natural gas production in West Texas and contracts for.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Large turbines. What is LNG doing right now? Is natural gas spiking? It spiked in November and December, but it is actually fairly low and is down since the start of the geopolitical conflict in the Middle East. So it at least, it at least does, you know, Chase Lochmiller from Crusoe was telling us that the, although the energy markets are somewhat intertwined, oil and natural gas do not move in lockstep because of the production, supply, consumption. Are you a net exporter? Are you a net importer? So the pain at the pump does not always translate into pain at the data center,

• 47:42John Coogan?

  which is, I guess, good for data center operators. The Permian produces so much natural gas, a byproduct of oil, that it often overwhelms pipelines. As a result, some gas has to be burned off because it can't be transported where it's needed, making the region an ideal location for power plants. I believe these are called peaker plants, where the offtake, you know, normally it's just getting flared off, just going into the atmosphere. You capture that and turn that into energy there, but then you're stuck with electricity, maybe at some weird mining plant where there's no houses, so there's no one to power. So the next thing you do is you build the data center there. And that's sort of the, that's sort of the, the, the, the quechtlaren of why,

• 48:22John Coogan?

  why Crusoe started mining Bitcoin at peaker plants, at natural gas plants. They, you know, had extra natural gas, they flared it off, use the, use the very cheap or almost free energy to mine Bitcoin.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and of course, quech is a wombo for quirky and niche.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Quirky and niche. When you're trying to explain the lore, you say you're, you're Lorraine-ing something. And quech Lorraine is the quirky niche lore explained.

• 48:48Jordi Hays?

  Apple just removed anything. A hundred million dollar vibe coding app that lets anyone build iOS apps with prompts from the App Store, also blocking updates for vibe code and replit. The founder tried moving code execution to a web view, still rejected. The walled garden versus AI builders war is here. So Apple has been saying, according to some reporting in the information, that they don't have anything against vibe coding specifically, but the apps still have to adhere to guidelines.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, and this, and this particular policy has been in place since. Like the start of the App Store. I remember Facebook, you know, dealing with this when they launched their initial mobile app, which was, it was, it was an app, but it would load a lot of HTML. And it was like, and that was sort of slow. They went back and forth, but there was always a question about like, how much could, how much custom code could Apple's, could, could Meta or Facebook at the time, serve within the Facebook app? Like, could you have Farmville exist as its own app on the Facebook mobile app platform? Like it did in the Facebook desktop app? So when you loaded Facebook on desktop, you

• 50:03John Coogan?

  could load Farmville basically as like an iframe and, and the Farmville developer, Zynga, could change Farmville, add upgrades, do whatever they needed to, and that would all be vended through Facebook. And of course, your internet browser doesn't care what you're loading, but the App Store is a different, is different and has had different terms of service for a very long time. Mostly because Apple's, one of their primary pitches to customers is that, hey, we review all the code that will run on your phone. And so, we don't want that code to change after we review it. And so, we have a process for reviewing it and that reduces the risk of, of bloatware or crypto mining behind the scenes, or spam,

• 50:45John Coogan?

  or, you know, viruses, all sorts of different stuff that is the value prop for why people choose to buy iPhones. And so, Apple has maintained that for a long time. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. And let me also 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 agents.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  Specifically mentioned guideline 2.5.2, which is the rule, anything apparently violated, app, apps should be self-contained in their bundles and may not read or write data outside the designated container area, nor may they, nor may they download, install or execute code, which introduces or changes features or functionality of the app, including other apps. Educational apps designed to teach developer allow students to test code may in limited circumstances download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes. Such apps must make the source code provided by the app completely viewable and editable by the user. Anything launched on iOS in November with no issue.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  And the tool has apparently been used to publish thousands of apps in the App Store. Yeah, you can imagine Apple being like, this app is pushing so much, so many other apps into our review process. We gotta, we gotta make it stop. The app lets users create and preview vibe code apps on the iPhone and it raised 11 million at a valuation of 100 million back in September. Apparently, Apple had been blocking updates to the app since December. So it's been basically a full, full quarter that it was frozen. But clearly, users are excited about the product, so I hope they, I hope they can work something out quickly.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Well, global venture capital dollar volume has incredibly spiked. Look at this chart, a bunch of interesting things about this chart, so.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  Indeed, it's pretty loud. So Ryan Hoover shares the chart from Crunchbase here. Q1 2026 was absolutely massive with global venture capital dollar volume spiking from just over $100 billion to almost $300 billion. So a massive, massive growth. A lot of this is OpenAI and Anthropic, but even, even if you remove those two rounds, it's still up 40% quarter on quarter. What's interesting to me about this is what has been happening for the last 10 quarters before Q1 2026? Like, it's felt like a funding boom.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  It felt like we had the ChatGPT moment at the end of 2022. 2023 was the start of like, okay, let's, you know, lick the wounds from the Zerp era and start ramping up venture capital. We saw new funds raised. We saw more deployment, tons of up rounds, we're always hitting the gong. And yet, that, the, the prior trend line was pretty flat.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Prior to Q1 2026, it feels like venture is still in this like K-shaped dynamic. I don't know.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the the answer here is that this is not venture at this point.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  It's a big factor, right? You have these, the biggest companies in the world investing tens of billions of dollars into single companies.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  And so, of course, the chart looks insane, because this is the largest, you know, the largest private financing ever.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is Julie Black getting the scoop of the day? She says, new funding, new model, new policy push. I think it's a scoop. She says exclusive, exclusive.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  Hold it up, Tyler.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Policy push. She says, OpenAI will begin releasing a series of policy proposals next week meant to spark conversation about how to rethink the social contract. It's going to be an interesting year. Yeah.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  Is Oprah, she asked the question, is OpenAI's chief futurist prepping for a major breakthrough or just another hype cycle? And you can go and read this on Vanity Fair.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  Vanity Fair, the tech publication?

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Yes. I mean, Julie covers tech very well.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Very, very well.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  There's a lot of good stuff.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  Metab over at at OpenAI says, we are excited to share a new paper solving three further problems due to air dose. In each case, the solution was found by an internal model at OpenAI. Each proof is short and elegant, and the paper is available here. So there's a breakthrough for you.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, Prinz asks, would you be able to comment on the delta between the unreleased model and GPT 4.5.4 Pro? I'm reading correctly, you tried fewer than 10 identical prompts for each of the three problems with GPT 5.4 Pro. And then GPT 5.4 Pro got the first problem correct twice, the result, which you link in the paper, plus one other similar solution. The third problem corrected twice. Interesting. I I saw another interesting paper from Google that apparently just repeating the prompt twice improves LLM performance. Did you see this, Tyler? So if you say like, if you say like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Because of the way the tokenization works, like when it first processes that you, it doesn't, it doesn't know, uh, it like it doesn't, it, it starts thinking and it doesn't necessarily know what's coming, right? It doesn't know that Shakespeare's coming. So if you just repeat the prompt, the exact prompt twice, it improves performance on a bunch of different benchmarks. And it's this funny paper because it's like something that anyone could just do at home. It's like the classic like prompt engineering thing.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you, you would think that wouldn't work, right? Because like still, like, you know, you, you like attend to all the previous tokens at the same time, right? This is the whole thing.

• 56:45John Coogan?

  You'd think so. I don't know.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. But I remember like early on, there was all these things where, yeah, you would prompt like, you are Shakespeare, write me a poem. And it'd be way better poem than if you said, write me a poem, right? Or like pretend that you're Terence Tao when you solve this math problem. Way better, right? Whatever. In the training data, you know, you know, whatever.

• 57:02John Coogan?

  It just knows to go down that path as opposed to like the other paths of like, oh, it, it, it doesn't pull any April Fool's jokes because it's not being an April Fool's jokester.

• 57:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's these, uh, you know, basins or whatever. If you can, like the personality basin where you can get the model to act like a certain thing and it does much better on that.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  At the same time, I think this, I think this paper was specifically on like vanilla L L Ms. And I think reasoning like, like solves that even more because you're, you're, you're basically repeating the prompt a bunch through, you know, unpacking it, compressing it, doing whatever you need to do to actually set the L L M up for success in answering the question. Um, and so, uh, it might, uh, sort of hydrate through that process into something that, that yields those results. But, uh, interesting how simple some of, some of these, uh, some of these hacks are.

• 57:48Speaker 03

  Well, in biggest number news, yesterday, OpenAI announced the closing of their latest funding round, 122 billion. Yeah. Hit the, hit the gong. It would be, would be an honor, John. Boom.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  Probably the largest gong hit.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  A hundred and twenty hits.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Hundred and twenty-two hits.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Oh, a hundred and twenty-two.

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  They upsized the round, remember?

• 58:13John Coogan?

  They did upsize the town.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so take him, hold out some of the highlights.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Post-money valuation of eight hundred and fifty-two billion. Nvidia remains the foundation of our infrastructure, our training fleet, and the majority of our inference stack to continue to run on Nvidia GPUs. We are now generating two billion in revenue per month, raising over three billion from individual investors. ChatGPT is the overwhelming leader in consumer AI with more than nine hundred million weekly actives and over fifty million subscribers. Our ads pilot reached more than a hundred million in ARR in under six weeks. Momentum is just as strong on the enterprise side, which now makes up more than forty percent of our revenue and is on track to reach parity with consumer by the end of twenty twenty-six. Codex now serves over two million weekly active users, five X in the past three months, with usage growing more than seventy percent month over month.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  And they talk about the vision for a unified AI super app, one app that lets you basically access every product that OpenAI is making.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  ChatGPT, Codex browsing, and other agentic capabilities.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm very excited about linking Codex to ChatGPT in some way because right now, there's really, I mean, you can sort of set reminders, but there's very little that you can do if your question requires building some sort of like small system. Like, the textbook case that I'm thinking of is like, if I want to be, if I want like a deep research report of, you know, how the Artemis mission did when it's, when the astronauts land, I'm probably going to see that on social media, but what about just

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  automatically letting me know one year from today? Remind me that the Artemis III mission is coming. Give me, you know, an estimated, are we? On track, pull all the news that I probably won't be following that closely because I'm not like a daily consumer of space news, but I might be interested later. There's all these different things where where you could track things, but you need to build something that just sort of runs.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Entering a new era. Our astronauts are now Twitch livestreamers.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Are they on Twitch?

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  YouTube, but it's fun. It'd be fun. It'd be fun to to to get over on Twitch.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's some other news. Apparently new iPhones are being packed into the suits of the Artemis two crew. Owen Sparks says there's something very familiar about the iPhone look that will make the moon feel accessible. We are going to see the lunar surface through the same lens we use to capture our own lives every day.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  Oh, that's cool. Take some phones. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal about smartphone proves too big for most. We were debating this earlier and I'd like everyone else to chime in too. The original iPhone, launched in 2007, had what was considered the largest smartphone screen at the time, 3.5 inches. The biggest iPhone now is more than double the size of the original. That's 6.9 inches. Or is, yeah, is more is now more than double. Wow. In 2019, in the 2019 introduction of Samsung's Galaxy Z Fold, introduced foldable devices to the masses, opening up like a wallet, has a 7.3 inch display.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  And Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold in 2026, when fully opened, unfurls to roughly the size of an iPad. Ken and and the journalists in the Wall Street Journal asked the question, can a smartphone be too big? Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I I'm in favor of, you know, a smaller phone.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  I have, this is a 16 Pro.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  16 Pro.

• 1:02:01Speaker 03

  It's not Max.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  But it's not Max. It's the normal one. And why, why, why don't you want a bigger phone?

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  It's just too much.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  What if you're on a plane and you want to pull it out and like watch a movie or something?

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I feel like if I want a bigger screen, I have a laptop.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  It works great.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  I like there's.

• 1:02:18John Coogan?

  But you don't always have the laptop with you or I mean, you always have in your backpack? Like, what if you're like on a train or?

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  You've never thought about getting an iPad with a cellular connection and then maybe like a strap on the back that you could hold and have and be able to hold it up to your head and use it like a normal phone?

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  I was, I was seriously considering the iPad mini for a while, just as an everyday carry phone. You could do it. I, I don't know if you can get a phone number on it.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  It's like, is that even gonna fit in my pocket?

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  It would fit in my pocket. I tested.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Does it fit like in your suit pocket though? Maybe you?

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  It would definitely fit in the suit pocket. You should get all of your suits custom tailored so that you can fit an iPad mini in here. I don't know. Um.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the chat confirmed.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  What they, what they confirm?

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  Z Y T says.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  They're restreaming.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Is on Twitch.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  They're restreaming. Let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream NASA, go to Restream.com. Hopefully they're on Restream.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Ryan Peterson.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, what'd he say?

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, is joking around. He says Elon filed for an IPO on April Fool's Day. Uh, and apparently they, they filed last night, so off by just.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  A little bit according to.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  They filed last.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Love, but uh, but yeah, on.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  But the news did go.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  June, on, on pace for the kind of June listing.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  June listing. Okay. Um, yeah, we'll have to track that. That will be, that will be fun. I think a lot of people, a lot of people are really excited. Uh, should be good.

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Austin Larson says, our team at Google is releasing more details on the recent NPM Axios supply chain attack. Notably, we now attribute this activity to UNC 1069, a financially motivated North Korean nexus threat actor active since at least 2018. We made this attribution based on their use of Wave Shaper V2 and updated backdoor previously used by the group alongside clear overlaps in C2 infrastructure. Check the blog and they wrote, um, they wrote, uh, more about it on cloud.google.com.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  And yeah, we also have, uh, we also have an expert from CrowdStrike coming on the show tomorrow. Adam Myers is going to come on and help us break it down, which we're very excited for.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  In a note to staff this morning, shared with Max Tani over at Semaphore, Business Insider said it is giving out a new quarterly AI award for best use of AI at the company. The winner gets $400. As soon as we talked about this this morning, Tyler asked us to create a similar award, seemingly signaling that he's quite confident.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  You think you can win this one, Tyler?

• 1:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Take it home every quarter.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  I'm feeling pretty confident right now. We'll see, you know, once the incentive goes out, right? You know, show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. We're gonna have a lot of people in the office gunning for this.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  I still do want to run that experiment of like the race to see the true leaderboard of how long it takes everyone at our company to generate 10,000 lines of code as fast as possible. Because there's a bunch of shortcuts that you can take. Tyler thinks he can do it in like five seconds, but for other people, it's going to be a lot of copy paste. It's going to be figuring out how to open a text editor. Like, everyone's on a different learning curve here. So I think the results will be interesting.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm feeling pretty good about my odds there.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, well, head over to Business Insider.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I think this is smart. I would say that maybe, maybe add a zero to the, to the number. But given, given that the AI is, you know, a massive, massive company, right?

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Matthias Doffner knows that money doesn't grow on trees, okay? He's running that thing as a real business. He's a businessman.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Rebecca Torrance is scooping.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Scooping.

• 1:06:04Jordi Hays?

  The scoop is that Valor Atomics, a nuclear, nuclear energy startup backed by Palmer Lucky, PL backed by PL himself, has raised 450 million at a $2 billion valuation. There's no investor named here, so that's still

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  unclear, but Isaiah and the Valor team have been

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  On a tear, they're talking about building clusters of small nuclear reactors to power data centers.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  And they got some access to some government programs and government resources. And it seems like there's been a bunch of blockers that have been knocked down one after another. He's been on absolute tear. We'd love to have him back on the show to chat more. Augustus D'Arcos is having fun with it. Ooh, ah, ooh, ah, I'm gonna invest in another energy company besides Valar Atomics for boo ba boo ba boo ba reasons. That's what you sound like. Do you see how far they've come? Do you understand that they will make the world's energy? I love that he's pumping up his buddy, always riding with the crew. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  And let me also tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 1:07:24Jordi Hays?

  In other nuclear news, apparently Utah is going nuclear to keep ski runs cold for the 2034 Winter Games.

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  How does that work?

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  State says new, this is in townlift.com. State says neutron-based atmospheric technology could lower ski run surface temperatures by up to 20 degrees and offset drought impacts through enhanced snowpack retention. Interesting, because when you've given your case for Alaska historically, you've talked about how with abundant nuclear energy, you could take an otherwise cold area.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you warm it up.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  But they're thinking about cooling things down. State officials confirmed Wednesday that Utah has entered a $1.2 billion agreement with a Vienna-based energy consortium to install three micro nuclear reactors along the Wasoc mountain range as part of an unprecedented effort to stabilize snow conditions on Utah ski slopes ahead of the 2034 Olympic Games. The project designated the Wasoc Atmospheric Retention and Mitigation Initiative, or WARMI, could make Utah the first state in the nation to deploy nuclear-powered atmospheric cooling infrastructure at altitude.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Utah is not going to sit back and let the climate dictate the terms of our 2034 legacy, said a spokesperson for the governor's Office of Economic Opportunity.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Who confirmed the project has received preliminary approval under SB 114, the legislature's infrastructure acceleration statute, which removes local government approval authority over projects designated as state economic priorities. So apparently, Juniper Peak selected as the first nuclear test site. I'm sure everyone at Juniper Peak will be thrilled about being able to ski around a nuclear test site. The three microreactors are proposed at elevations above 9,000 feet in what project documents describe as thermally neutral subterranean containment pods. I like the sound of that.

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Designed to blend with the natural terrain. So anyways.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Well, we have some other news. Will Depew, I think he won April Fools with the joke that he says he is joining DeepSeek. He says, like many of my friends, I set a goal at the start of 2026 to become more Chinese this year, and I plan to fully follow through on it. After nearly three years at OpenAI, I have decided to leave and pursue new opportunities after much deliberation. I'm thrilled to announce that effective today, I'll be relocating to Hangzhou to join DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., LTD, dedicated to building Chinese-style AGI. I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity to become a billionaire in RMB. He had a lot of fun with it. We had fun putting up a card, and we're big fans of Will Depew.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Well, without further ado, we have Eddie Q in the restream later, and let's bring him in. Eddie, how are you doing?

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  What's going on? It's great finally to be here.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  I wanted to be on this show, and I got to tell you, I have gotten more text messages from friends about being on here, including my kids, than probably anything I've ever done, so it's great for you to have me.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  That's amazing, and what a special moment, what an amazing time. I would love to just start with some reflection. I want to hear particularly about your first decade at Apple. What was that like, leading, you know, what led you to the company? What were some of the first projects you worked on? Sort of take us through some of the early history.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was lucky. I was a junior in high school when the Apple II was out and I wanted to be an architect and when I discovered a computer, I realized I wanted to be a programmer and engineer. And I said, there's two things I want to do. I want to work at Apple and I want to meet Steve Jobs.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  And dreams come true. Here I am 38 years later at Apple. I came in as a programmer and was working on HyperCard and sort of the precursor to Blue Links with lines underneath linking. And I've been done so many things here at Apple. I've had an amazing team and continue to have. I'm working with the best people in the world at what they do.

• 1:11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the lore of Steve Jobs like when you first sort of heard about him? Because, you know, my generation knows like the iPhone keynote. There's videos online. There's interviews. There's the whole books. There's multiple books written. But what was your experience learning? What drew you to Steve early on in your career?

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  I just think it's the innovation of creating these products that let people do amazing things. And I felt that way when I was using the product. The attention to detail of those products, there was a connection that you could just feel.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Speaker 04

  And so it was more than just what you could see. And then it let me do things that I couldn't imagine doing before. And I think that's something that we've continued over our 50 years.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about the launch of the original Apple online store? I feel like a lot of people assume that this always existed. No, it was a Herculean effort, I'm sure. What was the inspiration? What was the backdrop there? What was the mood like as you entered into that market?

• 1:12:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was a crazy time because people forget, but in those times, we sold all of our computers through channels like CompUSA and local computer stores. And the idea of building an online store and selling direct, there were a lot of people inside of Apple even that felt like if we did that, the channel's gonna walk on us and they're gonna stop selling. And Steve and we wanted to move forward and be able to do custom configurations so people could order exactly what they wanted. And we thought it was something that customers, you know, it was just beginning, but it was something that customers really wanted. And Steve and I and a small team worked on it and built it and launched it at the same

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  time that one of our, you know, best products we've ever done was the iMac. The Bondi Blue one with the clear. And so we launched the store and the Bondi Blue iMac at the same time. And I remember at the end of the day, we were wondering, you know, Steve, I came by his office and he's like, well, how did we do on the first day? And we had sold a million dollars worth of iMacs and we were high-fiving each other and going, this is amazing.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  How did you drive people to the, did you just have apple.com or people already typing in apple.com? Like, how do you tell people that a website is launching before you can go viral on social media or do live interviews on, you know, how do you promote this?

• 1:14:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, we were lucky and then we had apple.com already. And so some people were coming from that. And so it was, that part was a little bit easier. And in those days, you relied a lot on press interviews and print.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  And so we did a lot of, you know, you'd wanna be on the cover of, you know, a magazine and the front page of the newspaper. And so we had all of that pretty well. And I think our design, when we did this, it was called Good Better Best. You could buy different configs and change them, but our design for shopping. For a computer and a Mac at that time was something no one had ever seen. It was, it had all of the things that we cared about. The simplicity, really easy to check out, easy to buy, all of the, the specs and the questions you would have. Things that were difficult when you went to other sites, I thought we did a great job and, and it really resonated with customers.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you, can you help me understand, like, the services division of Apple is, is massive. It's a huge growth engine. There's so many interesting pieces of that. I want to go into a lot of those. But when was the first time in your career that you realized that there was something that you could sell or, or actually turn into a business line that was not a physical product and would live in this services category? When did services even become like a division or a concept or an opportunity at Apple?

• 1:15:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we started as a hobby. You know, there wasn't a lot there. It was very early days of, of the internet and doing things like email and things like storage in the cloud. But it was very, very early. The, the thing that was a big change for us was really music.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  And it was iPod plus iTunes. And that was something that was, it truly revolutionized music and it really gave us a whole different perspective of what services can do when you take the hardware product, in a sense, the operating system and the software and the services and you tie them together, which is something I think we do better than anyone.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  It really showcased when we did iPod plus iTunes. And so, all of a sudden, we did that. Not only did we do it for the Mac, but we also did it for Windows.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  And so, it opened Apple to a whole new ecosystem of customers that had never used our products before.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  But were using iTunes and iPod for the first time.

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  That was my first Apple experience, was iTunes and iPod on, on a Windows PC.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And now I have 25.

• 1:16:54Jordi Hays?

  My first is I was so, I was so loyal to Apple products that I refused to get a game, like, a PC for gaming. And so, I worked, I probably reffed like 300 soccer games, like some absurd amount to get the maxed out at MacBook Pro at the time.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Because I was just so, so loyal that I was like, I'm not, I've got to, if I'm gonna play video games, I'm gonna do it on, on, on Mac.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  You know, when we launched, when we launched iTunes on Windows, I remember we did a poster and Steve called it on the presentation. It was like hell froze over.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  What was actually getting iTunes off the ground like? And how was it different than the other just motions that Apple had developed? Because it's not only a software product, but it's deeply linked to rights holders and agencies and musicians. And you have to get so many different groups. It's, it feels much more permissioned than just building a computer and selling it. Of course, you need manufacturers and you need a lot of people on board to build a computer. But it's a very different go to market or building motion. Like, how was that different?

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was painful because I think there were three, three pieces. You had us, you had the label and you had the artist.

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 04

  We were really good with artists. So, which is something we've always been about, the creators. And I think when we look, when you look at all the things that we've done, the two primary people that we focus on and think about are people that are the end customers that are using it and the creators that are creating all these incredible products. So we had a good relationship with musicians at the time, but we really didn't have any relationship with labels. And ultimately, they did control the environment. And at the time, they had a different perspective. You know, it was really the beginning of Napster and piracy.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 04

  And instead of thinking about, you know, how to move forward into a future, their view was to lock things down and really stop it. And as you know, when you have something that's better like that, there is no stopping it. And so we went to the labels and we had this idea of selling songs at 99 cents. And they kind of told us to go pound sand. They weren't really interested in us at all. And their idea was they were going to build some music services. So there were five or six major labels and they built two music services. And we told them like, What you guys are doing is not gonna work. They had different pricing for each song. They had different rules. Sometimes you could buy-

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  So they would like price a hit higher than like some random song on an album?

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean it was all over the map. Yeah.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  And part of the pushback against like just ninety-nine dollars a song-

• 1:19:38Speaker 04

  Ninety-nine cents.

• 1:19:39Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-nine cents, I mean, is like, you know, typical Apple style. It's just like, let's just make it simple, easy to understand. But was their pushback like kind of concern that people would, you know, hey, we're used to getting people to just buy an entire album? And maybe what's gonna happen if people just buy, you know, a song here or there? Like-

• 1:20:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, the problem was whether you sold it at a dollar twenty-nine or seventy-nine cents, that wasn't gonna change that. The key to it, there were two keys to ninety-nine cents that we really believed in and people didn't see. There were two primary things. Number one is, at night, when the price is ninety-nine cents and it's consistent, you never have to think about price. And so you would preview a song, decide whether you like it or not, and if you did, you bought. And so there was never any transaction, a billing transaction, that you had to think about. Because you knew it was ninety-nine cents, it's not a lot of money at the time, and it was really easy to do. The second thing was that people could never do that because at ninety-nine cents, if you're charging a credit card,

• 1:20:44Speaker 04

  you would lose money. Because credit cards have a fixed fee and they have a percentage that you pay. Well, the fixed fee and the percentage on a ninety-nine cent song was like a quarter. Yeah. And the vast majority of the money went to the labels. So every time we'd sell a song, we would lose money. And so, nobody wanted to do that, and so no other service did that. What we decided to do is, as we were building this, and I remember it was a huge discussion, because we would lose a ton of money, obviously, if you're losing on every song. We said, "Look, this thing is amazing. You're not gonna buy just one song. You're gonna buy a lot of songs when you go on there." Yeah. And when you do that, instead of closing the transaction on every single one, why don't we just combine them over a period of time?

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  So let's keep the, you know, let's keep the transaction open for a period of time. Let's call it twenty-four hours or eight hours. And everything you buy, we're just gonna give you, and then we're gonna charge you at the end. And so therefore, that's exactly what happened. Very few transactions were just ninety-nine cents. Most of the transactions were multiple dollars, and the fixed fee didn't matter.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Interesting. How important was it to position iTunes as sort of a step up from the status quo from like the Napster era and a positive? Because I feel like anytime the economics of an industry change, there's natural uncertainty from artists. And iTunes did represent a change in the economic structure, but it was such a great countervailing force. How, what were discussions like at that time about positioning the economic opportunity that artists would have in the new regime?

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think we wanted, during that time, the music business was cratering.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  From an economic point of view.

• 1:22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 04

  And our feeling has always been, the vast majority of people want to do the right thing.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 04

  And they want to pay artists.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:42Speaker 04

  And so, but what they don't want is they don't want to be forced into something that doesn't make any sense, or isn't really friendly, or isn't the right way to do it. And so, we were, that's part of the 99 cents. It was part of like, you can, in those times, you were burning a lot of CDs. They had limitations on the number of burns. We didn't want any limitations because that's not something a customer would understand. And so, our feeling around this was if you let us do this, you're going to grow again, as opposed to cratering. And I remember Steve asked me once, before we had launched, he says, "Well, you know, what is success around this?" And I said, "You know, honestly, I don't know. You know, I'll go ask."

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  And so, I went into Universal Music and I asked them, you know, "What's success for you guys in this business?" And they said, "Well, if you could sell, you know, a million songs in a month, anytime in the first six months, that's success for us." So, I came back, I said, "Okay, that's the goal then." We sold a million songs in the first six days.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  That's amazing. I love it.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  And so...

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's like that. That's what we, you know, obviously it surpassed even our expectation, but it was an example of if you give people the right way, people are willing to pay, but it has to, it has to be done well.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  So, so talk about the, the shift to subscription because it feels like a much more natural experience for all the Apple service that I subscribe to. What was the thinking? How long, like, what were the hurdles along the way to get to the, the, the, the, the current situation with Apple TV Plus where you can, you know, consume everything? Was this just a market dynamic? Was it something that you saw in the future early on and it was more of how do we get there smoothly? What was the process?

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, the key, the key to this is it's, it's hard to remember this now because we're so used to it, but it's having internet connectivity anywhere you are.

• 1:24:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  And all the time and, and, and pretty much almost, it's, it's almost impossible now to be anywhere and not have, you know, actually fast internet.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  And so that allowed a whole different thing because before that you didn't have, one, you either didn't have it or two, you were paying by usage in a sense. So you wanted to limit the amount that you actually used. And so things like downloading and, and, and keeping things on device all the time was really important. When you have unlimited in a sense, internet access or a network access, then you can provide all these capabilities and not have to worry about whether you have it downloaded or not. It's now invisible to you. You don't even think about it. Most of the time we, we put things on device just to cash them or whatever, but we don't, you don't need to worry about whether it's on your device or not.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. We, we have a question from the chat. It's a bit random, but I'd love to know your, your favorite keynote moment throughout your career.

• 1:25:47Speaker 04

  That's great. I'll say, look, there are two. There's a personal one, which was the first one when we launched the iMac and the Apple Store, because that was the beginning of turning Apple around. And it was a big moment for Apple. We were, it's hard for people to imagine this, but Apple was going bankrupt at that time. And Steve came back, and that moment was the beginning of a change where you, at least we knew now that we weren't going to go bankrupt. And so it really gave us life. And so it was an incredible moment. And I remember going backstage with Steve after it was done and, and, and hugging, actually, because it had

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  gone so well, and we knew that was a big step. The second one, and honestly, now in hindsight, I was, I completely underestimated it, was the iPhone launch. It's the only time I made my wife and my kids, my two kids, come to the event. They were eight, eight years old. And I was like, this is a historic moment, because I had had the ability of using the iPhone for a few months before we launched and played with it. And, and it was just amazing to, it's, it's the coolest, best thing I had ever seen in the world. And so I thought, ah, this is going to be amazing. Now, I completely underestimated it, because now you look at it and go, it's like, I don't even know what the world is like. What would

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  we, what would you do without an iPhone?

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  What, what lessons from Steve, or kind of memories, do you find yourself coming back to, to the most in, in, in the present day of Apple?

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Well, I think something that, you know, people take for granted, but nobody worked harder than Steve. Um, you know, and these things don't come easy, and he was the hardest worker of anybody I know.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  How did that manifest? Like, long hours? Just deep focus?

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's focused, because it's focused and long hours. What it was, was there are only two things that mattered to Steve. And I think, when people ask me, what's the difference between Tim and Steve? The reality is, that's not the right question. The question is, what's the same things between Tim and Steve? And, you know, their work ethic, they worked harder than anybody. They were completely focused on two things, their Apple and their family. Those are the only two things that mattered. And the third thing was the attention to the products themselves. It was about the products and what we delivered to customers. Believe it or not, not the financial results. That was a secondary function that you obviously needed to keep going, but it was never the primary

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  thing. And so those three things are something that I still, you know, take to heart and I feel I, you know, that's what I try to do and how I feel.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Can we talk about F1? I love that there's a movie and also you can watch the, you can watch the actual races. This feels deliberate. What's the strategy? It seems to make a ton of sense, but how long has this been cooking? What's the thought process?

• 1:28:52Jordi Hays?

  I remember it must have been last year, John, John had talked about this on the show, wanting this to happen, to see it come together the way it has is amazing.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it seems like soccer or football sort of faced a similar strategy, but I'm very interested in how you see different media properties connect together.

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, the F1 thing is, is personal. One, I've been an F1 fan for a long time. You know, my, I learned about F1 by going to the library and reading magazines because it, believe it or not, F1 just wasn't televised at all in the United States. So you didn't know anything about it. So I knew a lot about it. Stefano, who's the CEO of Formula One, is somebody who was at Ferrari and then later on at Lamborghini, and I've known him. So when he took on Formula One, I remember meeting with him in London and saying, you know, we're not quite there yet, but someday I hope we can be working together on F1. And so I always envisioned that there was things that we could do that no one else could do. The movie came about separately,

• 1:29:54Speaker 04

  not kind of related, but this, this idea of doing a movie and Jerry and Joe Kozinski, it was really Joe's idea, and I just love the idea because there hasn't been a, a huge racing movie. Most racing movies have not done that well.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  And I thought there was a real opportunity with F1 to tell an incredible story and Brad Pitt and the cars and the excitement and that we would, for the first time, had enough technology to show what it was actually like to be in an F1 car. Because when you watch on TV, it kind of looks like they're on a Sunday drive. You don't get the G-force and so we had these ideas of taking the iPhone camera and putting them in all over the cars and different ideas that we thought would give that experience. Now, the movie took a lot longer because we had to go through COVID, strikes, all kinds of things. But it turned out spectacular. And when we would show the movie, one of the questions we would ask to people in the

• 1:30:56Speaker 04

  US is how many of you have seen an F1 race? And the truth is, very few hands were ever raised. And then after the movie, you asked them, how many people would want to see an F1 race? And, you know, every hand went up. And so we thought, wow, if we did this together now and these ideas of how we can really innovate on the whole experience of what it's like to watch an F1 race, we really could make a difference here. And it's been great. We've done three races so far. The ratings are way above what they've ever been in the US. And so, and we're just getting started, but things like multi-view, 30% of the people

• 1:31:36Speaker 04

  watching F1 races are watching with multi-view so they can get different cameras, see their favorite team. So it's definitely changed a lot of how people are experiencing it.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Apple, Apple Racing SIM. You'll have two buyers.

• 1:31:53Speaker 04

  We just did Vision Pro with SIM racing, so you could do that.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  We got it for you.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the racing in the automotive world has a man on the inside, so.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  I'm the strongest supporter of the Vision Pro. I watched another movie in it this weekend, Jordy.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  If I call, when I call John at 10:00 PM on a Friday night, he's always, he's always.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  I love the product. I'm a huge fan. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:32:25Jordi Hays?

  It's truly, truly been an honor.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  It's truly been an honor. Congratulations on 50 years. What an amazing accomplishment. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:32:31Speaker 04

  I appreciate it. Thank you.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  Thank you. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me also tell you about Finn. The number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And without further ado, we have Aaron Terrazas from Gusto coming into the restream. We're now in the TVP in Ultra. Aaron, how are you doing?

• 1:33:02Speaker 05

  I'm doing great.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time. We were very excited to dig into some of your research and reporting. But since it is the first time on the show, would you mind introducing yourself, some of your background and what you do for a living?

• 1:33:14Speaker 05

  Sure. No, I'm an economist by training, currently working with Gusto. Previously been through the tech industry at Glassdoor, at Zillow, at a company called Convoy. Started my career at the Treasury Department.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  Okay, so maybe, maybe start with like, what, what is unique about being an in-house economist? What, what data do you have access to that others might not? What data is anonymized? Like, how do you do your job? And what are you actually looking for? What are the questions that you're trying to answer?

• 1:33:46Speaker 05

  So, most economists play with this public data that the government produces. That's great. It's been around a long time. The really exciting thing about being an in-house economist is that there's all of this data behind this private walled gate. We get to understand what is happening in the economy. You know, sometimes we pick up on things before the official data say. Sometimes we pick on trends that the official data aren't necessarily showing kind of what's happening beneath the surface. So it is this really exciting place to be as an economist.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Okay, let's go into some of the findings. But first, I want to know about like, data skew and how you account for the type of customers, you know, Gusto is a sponsor. We talk about small and medium sized businesses. So I imagine that you have some sort of calibration step where you're adjusting your internal data to some sort of benchmark to make sure that you're not biased towards your particular sample set, right?

• 1:34:39Speaker 05

  Absolutely. Such an important point. Gusto is like a small business payroll platform. We do reweight our data so that it reflects the broader labor market, the broader small and medium sized business ecosystem.

• 1:34:52John Coogan?

  And how do you do that? Do you have ground truth data that's public that you can that you can reference against?

• 1:34:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. So, you know, the government produces this census of all small businesses based by an industry and size. And so we take that distribution and match our internal data to that distribution.

• 1:35:10John Coogan?

  That makes sense. And then, so, I mean, the big question is, the Small Business Jobs Report, what is the health of the American economy? What is the health of the small business community? What questions were you trying to answer? And where did you where did you wind up?

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  I mean, every month, we get this headline jobs report from the BLS. We're watching for this Friday. I think what we're trying to do with this Small Business Jobs Report is get a much firmer pulse on what's happening with small businesses, in particular, some businesses with less than 50 employees. You know, that is the majority of businesses in the American economy, but just a small minority of total employment. So it often gets buried in the headline jobs report numbers. And we know it. They're they're a driver of job growth, they're a driver of innovation, they're a driver of kind of the bread and butter work that gets done in our economy.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And where where does net hiring stand? Give me some of the headline numbers. What are expectations? What should we what should we by default assume is happening? I mean, there's a lot of doom and gloom in the economy, honestly, broadly, because of geopolitical conflicts and nervousness around AI. But what are you actually seeing?

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  You're right, there is a lot of doom and gloom. Our headline jobs number for March showed that small businesses created about 120,000 new jobs in March. That's an exceptionally strong number. That's one of the strongest numbers we've seen since 2022.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 05

  And, you know, I think it's important to note, that's not an outlier. Other kind of payroll providers are showing similar strength. So I think this narrative that we all have in our minds of the great freeze, kind of businesses paralyzed by uncertainty. That's in some ways last year. I think 2026 is shaping up to be the great unstuck after being stuck last year.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  That's amazing news.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Do you have any, do you have any thoughts on, you know, I can throw out a bunch of random theories off the top of my head, but you know, this is paired with just yesterday Oracle slashing staffing over costs, like there are big headline attention grabbing job cuts that are happening at name brand companies and those, that news will fly very far because everyone knows Meta, everyone knows Oracle. And maybe they don't know that the small business just down the street actually increased headcount by 20%, but they only added two people, so it's not going to be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. But is there some sort of, you know, how crazy, how crazy is, am I to think about, you know,

• 1:37:38John Coogan?

  the large companies maybe being overstaffed and maybe changing their business model so they need to recalibrate? Whereas small businesses, small businesses are benefiting from artificial intelligence, maybe do, trying to do more, trying to expand, trying to compete, and so they're actually expanding their labor force, even while the bigger companies have like much larger questions to ask about, you know, what happens over 20 years?

• 1:38:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, big business grabs, big headlines, and you think about the shocks that our economy has experienced over the past year, the past few years. Big businesses are kind of, I say like a big freighter, they, you know, they're a little bit more resilient to the tsunami, but they have a really wide turning radius.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:21Speaker 05

  Small businesses are like a schooner, kind of they're, you know, they have to adapt and pivot really quickly in response to shocks, and I think we saw that, you know, business, big businesses are just catching up. Whereas, you know, all these shocks we experienced last, last year, small businesses are already ahead of the curve and are thinking about what comes next.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you were tasked with doing job reports for the federal government, how would you approach it, given your exposure to having access to data sources like Gusto? You know, everyone by now is kind of used to seeing a jobs report from the government and then, you know, a few months later or six months later, you get these massive revisions and it's sort of confusing and it feels like we have all this real time data and like the data of people like adding an employee to Gusto and starting to pay them is like much, much more obviously accurate, real time. And so it feels like the process could evolve, but what's your view?

• 1:39:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was a government economist. I have enormous respect for government economists. They have a big job. Their job is to look at the 40-year trend in the economy. These are tools that were designed over multiple decades. The reality is, there is so much data exhaust, real-world exhaust right now in our economy that we can capture, and companies like Gusto are, you know, we don't have data from 1963, but we have much better data from what's happening right now. And so I think the two go hand in hand. They complement each other. One's going to give us that longer, more stable view of the economy. The other's going to give us these deep windows into what's happening in different parts in real time.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Do you have any insight into subcategories of jobs, how job titles are changing? I keep using this example that we're a small business. We have 10 people on staff. And we have Tyler, our intern, who's basically a full-time software developer, as well as a co-host of the show, in a hybrid role. We have other folks who have vibe-coded whole systems. But in a previous business, if I was building a media company, I would have had to think extremely hard about developing a software engineering organization. And I would have assumed that would have been extremely costly, a very big build-versus-buy decision. Instead, it was just, oh, we hired Tyler because we liked him. He can do a bunch of different things, and he starts vibe-coding,

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  and all of a sudden, we have six systems, and they all work really well. And so we've become like this hybrid tech-media company. We're developing video games now, too. That happened randomly. But we're not a game studio. And so I'm wondering about, are you seeing any data that suggests that more people are picking up hybrid technology jobs or software engineering jobs? Or even if the titles are changing yet, anything you're seeing on that side?

• 1:41:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, everything's in flux right now. Kind of, I think all the traditional lines that that used to be bright lines of businesses are being blurred. People are taking multiple hats. You know, founders are doing more things. You raise a really good point. You know, you think about how does a big business hire? You know, you ask for a head, the head goes to your manager, the manager sends it to finance, the finance sends it to recruiting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's, you know, a week here, a week there. You're talking about months. When the small business hires, when you hire, they decide, oh, we need someone yesterday. Let's hire them next week or the week after.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What economic data points are you tracking that are potentially upstream of small business hiring in particular? Because, you know, we all know, you know, gas prices surge, consumers feel pain at the pump, they cut back on travel, the economy potentially decelerates. There's these like logical chains and then, you know, in the big companies, it might be like interest rates or something geopolitical risk or tariffs. So there's all sorts of things that could drive, you know, hiring at the large scale. What are the biggest needle movers that you would watch that might lead to some expectations about what might happen over the next couple of months in the small and medium sized business market?

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you look at things like kind of hiring and job openings, that's plans that are already in place. But almost more important than that, I think is sentiment, you know, expectations, particularly among decision makers who have the power to shape the future. So, you know, things like kind of CFO expectations, CEO expectations, that's how business leaders are thinking about the future. And, you know, future is partly prediction, future is partly creation.

• 1:43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. How good are those surveys? I feel like I've been a hiring manager for maybe like 15 years now. I don't know that I've ever answered a survey. Maybe I just didn't and I forgot about it. But is it broad based? Are you confident that enough CFOs are actually picking up the phone or answering the survey? Because you could imagine that some of the most high performing managers are too busy hiring people to answer questions about whether or not they're going to hire people.

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  Totally. And this goes back to the conversation we're having about the strengths and weaknesses of different data sources. When the government goes out and surveys people, there's a lag in response, bias in who responds. When we're looking at payroll data, that's not responding or not. I see what you're doing. So in some ways, that just gives, particularly for smaller businesses where people are busy, they're not picking up the phone, they don't have time to twiddle their thumbs, responding to a government survey, that's capturing a real phenomenon.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about feeding that into Gusto's actual product offering? Because I could imagine if I'm in there hiring someone and I sort of get like the survey after I hired one, I plan to hire more people next quarter and it's just to, like, leave a five-star review type thing on an e-commerce website, that would probably have very high survey completion rate. Are you looking at doing more to get qualitative or quantitative data that's more optional from the user base?

• 1:44:29Speaker 05

  That's a really cool idea. I certainly have not thought about that.

• 1:44:32John Coogan?

  You gotta pitch it.

• 1:44:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. Surveying people in the platform, that's something we haven't really done a lot of, but a cool idea.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  I would love that. Because even just more qualitative, with LLMs, there's so much that you can do to compress down qualitative data and whatnot. Like, there's so many interesting things you could do.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  How is AI changing your approach to work?

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  It's a great question.

• 1:44:52Speaker 05

  Yeah. Obviously, it's completely transformative. It's transforming the way, certainly, I work as an economist, I think it's transforming how everyone works, it's transforming how businesses start and hire. I think there's just a growing body of evidence that AI is making it a lot easier to start a business, to incorporate, to do all of that front leg work. And on top of that, it is changing the skill profile that you need when you hire. You need more of these people who manage processes, particularly at the start.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then day-to-day, I would randomly predict, like, iPython notebooks a few years ago, is it all like command line prompts today? How is that changing for you?

• 1:45:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, kind of, I still work a lot in Python, but you know, I'm doing more things at once. And I think that's true for most economists, kind of anyone who's, you know, kind of in some ways has lowered the barrier to getting that data. And that's great because that accelerates decision making. That helps these businesses adapt in real time and pivot to a rapidly changing world.

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very cool. What a fun position to be in. Congratulations on the success.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm sort of laughing in my head about imagining you if you had like a secret LLM subscription back when you were working as an economist for the federal government. They're like, how is Lisan Al-Gaith, how does Aaron do what he does?

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And let me also tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  Scoop.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Scoop?

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  From Charles and Business Insider, Meta is forming a new elite AI lab.

• 1:46:54John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  The tech giant quietly reorganized its recommendations division.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Rexus, it formed a top AI team run by TikTok's former head of growth. Rexus has been luring OpenAI, Google, and Amazon talent. So just one more lab, one more lab would fix me.

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  That does seem like a great place to apply AI. So yeah, I feel like the recommendations on Instagram are pretty good these days. I do feel like I get caught in, what's that called Tyler, like the local minima or like the basin or whatever?

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  Basin, is that, is that the term you used?

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  I said basin.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  Basin, yeah. Like, I feel like it's like, okay, yeah, I watched like a few snowboard videos. Like, it doesn't need to be all snowboard videos. We can go back to some Vibrales about, about airplanes or something like that. It goes back and forth. But in general, I've had a good experience and I expect it to get better. Let's pull up this photo from Kirk Evans showing an advertisement for Tiger Woods. It says, step into the mind of Tiger Woods. And Kirk Evans says, I think I'll pass. Very, very unfortunate situation. Anyway, we can move on. What else is going on? Let's see. There's news from perplexity.

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't find any, I can't find any actual reporting on this. Zero Hedge said perplexity was accused of sharing information of its users with Meta and Google, but there's zero source.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that might be within the terms and conditions. It could be anonymized, the sharing personal information. I mean, I guess it's personal if it's de-anonymized. The quote here from the All In Podcast is, "Every single penny we make, we make profits on that, but the overall company is still yet to be profitable." So.

• 1:48:45Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other thing that's kind of a question. The way that's phrased tells me we make money on subscriptions. Saying for every single penny we make, we make profits on that.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Jordi Hays?

  To me, kind of ignores like free users potentially, right? Because they've tried ads and they killed it.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  So, so they're basically saying like, on our consumer subscription business, we make money.

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Jordi Hays?

  But the overall company is not profitable.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you would expect that, like free users, if there's not ads, like it's going to be negative margin on those. You just hope that it's not that bad. And you hope that it all blends out across your subscription profits.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Well, new job alert for Omar Shaheen. He says, "A new job at Microsoft. He's bringing open claw plus personal agents to Microsoft 365. My goal is to help usher in a new generation of workplace proactive assistants, ones that lighten your load by taking on tasks end to end, and that can also step in proactively when they can help." Interesting that this, to see this like counter position against like the, the Facebook Manus deal, where, isn't Manus open source as well? Is it? I don't remember. But, you know, it's like every company will need to have, you know, a partnership or an in-house LLM to vend into every service.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  It does feel like the next couple of years are going to be, just like the chatbots popped up in every single app with varying degrees of success. Some of them are great. Some of them I wind up using and I'm actually glad that I didn't need to export the data. And I can just ask the question directly in that app and I have faith that they're using a good model and so they'll give me a good, a good result. And mostly I'm, I'm happy that I know that the data is going to be clean and also secured in that app, in that ecosystem, in that walled garden. I'm fine with that. It does feel like the, the open claw agents actually build some software to answer a question is going to be vended into

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  another box or another button with a star or something. Maybe it'll be a claw. Just like how every, every app got a star during the AI boom or the, the chatbot boom. Now the agent boom will need a claw next to the star. Star will be chatbot. Claw will be, okay, you want to do something where it actually goes and works through this. I feel like Google launched something similar. Not necessarily a, a full like open claw personal agent, but they did announce something along the lines of like an agent for your inbox that processes all your emails. They said goodbye inbox zero. Was, was that the news? I don't know if we have it pulled up. I can search for it. Was it Sunday or who posted it? Goodbye inbox zero. Let's see if this pulls anything up.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  I saw a friend of the show posting about it, but I will try and figure it out.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Open claw setup that just deletes every email as soon as it arrives in your inbox?

• 1:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  The archive all you know when the way did were you ever an inbox app user?

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  This was like the pre superhuman era. It was like the hot email app that a team of software developers, iOS developers in particular, built a very well-designed email app for iOS. And this was at a time when a lot of the other native iPhone apps for popular email services were still a little clunky. They didn't have all the great features. And the inbox team sort of went and reimagined it using inbox zero as this philosophy. And so if you're not familiar with inbox zero, basically it's the idea that at the end of the day, you should have nothing in your inbox, which to some people sounds impossible because they have like 50,000 emails in their inbox. How many emails are in your inbox right now? How many?

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Name every email.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  You're you're a 10,000 text message guy. You don't even do inbox there on your text message.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  I have 20,000.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  20,000 in the inbox.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't have 10,000. I have 5,750.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  That's really close. That's closer to 10,000 than zero. Anyway, the the whole idea is that email is a metaphor for a literal office. It's supposed to be a desk and you receive mail that comes to your inbox. If you want to send something, you put it in your outbox and then your team will send that out. But once you've actually taken something out of your inbox, read it, processed it, you can physically throw it into the trash, or you can physically file it in a cabinet, or you can physically write a response and put it in the outbox. Like this is the way people did business back before email in like the 60s, when they were just sitting at their wooden desks, their mahogany desks. And so the inbox team said, let's copy that paradigm.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  And this was popularized in books and management philosophy for a long time. But let's copy that and have the idea that you should get to inbox zero by the end of the day. And so they made it very easy to inbox, to basically archive all your emails. Like there was this big, long waiting list. It took like months. It was really, really hyped in Silicon Valley. They eventually sold a Dropbox. It was a very good outcome, but. It became a very popular product that everyone like had to install because it allowed you to get through your emails much faster. So the main feature that is now in basically every email client is that you could just swipe and archive the email, which does not delete it. You can always search for it later, but it says, it's just a way, if you're in a to-do list, it's saying that this email, I don't need it, like, I don't need it on

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  my to-do list. Like, the inbox is your to-do list. If you archive it, you can always search for it later. It's not deleted. It's there. You could also shuffle it away in a folder. You could delete it. But then they also had a snooze functionality where you could swipe to the left or to the right or something and say, "Hey, I'm not ready to deal with this email right now. I'm not responding to it right now, but I, you know, this is a receipt or a ticket for a flight, and I want this to come back into my inbox the day before the flight," or something like that. And so they made it really easy to both archive and snooze. And when you archive and snooze every email, you can very quickly get to inbox zero by the end of the day. They did a bunch of gamification stuff to make it fun and be like, "You got inbox zero? Like, take a screenshot of it." People were

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  sharing the screenshots of their inbox zero lineups.

• 1:55:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, update.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  What's the update?

• 1:55:10Jordi Hays?

  From NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  What's happened?

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  The Artemis 2 crew is boarding Orion.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  They're boarding. Okay, good news.

• 1:55:17Jordi Hays?

  I love this video.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  I'm on the edge of my seat. I didn't know what you were gonna say.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Can we turn up?

• 1:55:25Speaker 06

  ... or Jeremy. So it looks like Andre is with Reed.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  This is the locked-in image. This is the fully locked-in with 25,000 buttons.

• 1:55:36Speaker 06

  While Andre is buckling him in, it's a five-point harness.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, would you stay in a little box that small for...

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Two weeks.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Eight days?

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Ten days.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  For...

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  $1,000.

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  If I went to the moon, then, for sure. What if you're just sitting here in the UltraDome? You have access to a laptop, but you cannot move out of.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should we do a simulated moon mission where he has to live in a pod for 10 days in solidarity with the astronauts?

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  That's good.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  That's good. In solidarity, in solidarity. You will, wait, we can send you to the moon in VR. We can't afford to send you to the moon, but we can send you to the moon in aggregate. Well, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. First, 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. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And without further ado, we have Pratap from Arena Physica. He's a CEO and co-founder. How are you doing?

• 1:56:52Pratap Ranade?

  Hey, Jordy and John, great to see you again.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Good to see you again.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:56:56John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 1:56:57Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, it's been a bit.

• 1:56:58John Coogan?

  It has. Please reintroduce yourself. Give us a little backstory and then we'll go into the company.

• 1:57:04Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, perfect. So yeah, Pratap Pratap, CEO and co-founder of Arena Physica. We were on your show announcing some fundraising about, I would say, just about a year, a year and change ago, maybe a year and a quarter. And companies evolved a bit since then. We were, you know, started with bringing AI to hardware engineering. So yeah, hardware engineers. That's evolved actually quite a bit as we've seen the whole AI space evolve, which is what is, you know, if we're thinking about modern hardware, it's software defined, right? That's, that's happening everywhere. But software defined hardware is really like electromagnetically governed. Like the key problems are it's the electronics interfacing with the firmware, interfacing with the mechanics.

• 1:57:43Pratap Ranade?

  And it needs to obey physics and behave well. And it turns out humans can really use one of those forces of physics really well, electromagnetism. And it's a rate limiter for progress. And so what we released yesterday is the first foundation model for electromagnetism. Think about it as a, a large, similar to a large language model in architecture, but the training tokens, they aren't words. They're materials, geometries and electromagnetic fields. So learning us, helping us speak another language, basically the kind of language of the universe.

• 1:58:13John Coogan?

  So what's the data set for that? Like is there's the all the website?

• 1:58:18Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, for sure. So the.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  April Fool's, it's actually digital channels.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  April Fools, it's a new LLM.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  It's a new chat box.

• 1:58:28Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, no, for sure. The data set doesn't exist.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:58:32Pratap Ranade?

  Which is why this has been hard.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what did you do? Was this simulated or did you have to go collect this?

• 1:58:37Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  How does that work?

• 1:58:38Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, that's a component. So, so the reality is like what we've, what we've done is basically build a data factory. Spent about a year and a half building that. And, um, you know, how do we, how do we get all of the data that a model of this sort of architecture transformer type model needs?

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Pratap Ranade?

  So it starts by creating random patterns. So that's layer one of the cake, if you would, is large amount of random generation. And that's different geometries with different material stackups, uh, and then running them through simulation to see how they behave. So that's sort of think about it as layer one of the cake. But, you know, the number of possibilities here explode. You add more layers, you think about modern design, it's happening on silicon. How does, you know, how, how do they actually behave in the real world? You can't explore that whole universe. You can't randomly explore it. And this has been one of the big bottlenecks is there's very few of these experts in the world. You know, I think Starlink is a great demonstration of what you can build when you've actually mastered such capabilities. But few people, uh, you know, have achieved that outside of SpaceX and it's bottlenecked by experts and simulation.

• 1:59:37Pratap Ranade?

  So the second layer of the cake is our experts have been creating designs that work. And then the final step is we actually fabricate those designs and then we pipe that back into the system. And so I think you guys might have something over there.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  We do, we do. We received something in the mail, but we, we have some weird news because it was intercepted. Somebody opened it and stole maybe half the package. I don't know if there's two things. I only have one, but I do have a screwdriver and this metal box.

• 2:00:06Jordi Hays?

  Presented in quite an amazing way. I think somebody basically was like, okay, this, this looks valuable. I gotta figure out what this is.

• 2:00:12John Coogan?

  So, so I will, I will open this. You can tell me what this is. And then, uh, if the other piece of the puzzle is missing, you can break that down and we can go, uh, find the thieves. At some point.

• 2:00:24Pratap Ranade?

  I will talk through the other piece. That is a booklet that describes the background of what you're opening.

• 2:00:28Jordi Hays?

  They stole the booklet? They stole the booklet?

• 2:00:31Pratap Ranade?

  I know, weird.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  That's extremely weird.

• 2:00:33Pratap Ranade?

  I wouldn't go for the metal box.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, the metal box feels like.

• 2:00:35Jordi Hays?

  It's probably a nation state.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  I have no idea. That's just so weird. We're not making this up. Like, we opened it. We received it and it had been ripped open and the booklet had been stolen. But, I mean, I hope that's not like intellectual property or something. But inside it says, "Caution: electromagnetic superintelligence handle only if you are ready for the future."

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Love it. There we go.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  And so let's open this up.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  All right, so break it down.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, break it down. What is this?

• 2:01:01Pratap Ranade?

  Okay, great. So I'll flash through a bit some of the booklet for background and then I'll tell you what that is. But if you look at what the booklet is focused on, so what can we do with electromagnetic stuff? What can we do with structures like the one you're holding? What you're holding is an RF circuit.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:16Pratap Ranade?

  So a circuit used for radio frequency communication.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:20Pratap Ranade?

  And if you think about what's happening right now, communication and sensing is kind of the big bottleneck for robotics, for satellite communication, for a lot of the bottlenecks in data centers, and that's gated by this small group of experts and these really slow simulators from about the 80s, right?

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Pratap Ranade?

  And so what we've done here is actually create a design from scratch from nothing but a prompt. So the way it works, and it's actually live on our website, on our research page, arenaphysical.com/research, you can read the technical blog and you can play with the product, you can literally type in a prompt and that goes to an LLM. And then the LLM basically passes it to our foundation model. So the LLM interprets the prompt. It's like, oh, John's trying to build a 10 gigahertz band pass filter for his new satellite company. And it passes off to our model.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  You guys sort of like hydrate the prompts to make sure it's structured and has like the necessary information? Or what does that pass off look like?

• 2:02:23Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, it's a great question. So the prompt, that's where we actually will rely on the LLM. So let's say you give an incomplete description. You're like, hey, I'm trying to build a space antenna, but you didn't specify that it's a filter. The LLM, you will make some good assumptions and say, are you looking for this? And then that prepares sort of the inputs that we need. And then it calls our model. So in a way, what I'm really excited about is I see a future where you have multiple AI foundation models working together. And, you know, we've got one that speaks English really well, which is your interpreter, which is your front door. But now it needs to go and create a structure. Which is physically valid. So that's where it calls Heaviside our EM foundation model. And so what you're holding is a 10 gigahertz band pass filter,

• 2:03:06Pratap Ranade?

  which is one of those key components inside a modern phased array system, which is used for radar, for satellite communication.

• 2:03:14Pratap Ranade?

  And so you think about, there's a lot of conversation about data centers in space. We're not going to fiber optically cable them together. You know, you're going to need to transmit that data again between them wirelessly. And so that that industry basically started off in about the the sort of 60s with with phased array radar, actually, I think the first one was back in World War II. And so what you've got in your hand is like, if you look at it, it's an alien geometry. It's a strange structure. You know, it looks, it doesn't look like something that came from a human brain, right? It's like, it doesn't look like a nice geometric pattern. It's not a line, it's not a coil. The crazy thing is that it works.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  And Jordy, just to be clear, you're not supposed to touch that with your bare hands.

• 2:03:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's over.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  It's highly radioactive.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  I'm kidding.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not convinced this is an alien technology.

• 2:04:03Jordi Hays?

  But cool story.

• 2:04:06Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:04:08John Coogan?

  So I mean, I appreciate the example of like the like connectivity in space data centers. Obviously, that's like frontier. But walk me through the actual like market map industrial scale of like, I imagine there are like certain power law buyers of of RF equipment. Like, it's in everything from like that Bluetooth connected toaster to your phone, to your car. It's everywhere. But what is the actual shape of the industry? Where, when I'm thinking about like subdividing the industry and getting down like the satellite industry is here, the smartphone industry is here. Like, walk me through the map of the like the potential customer set.

• 2:04:51Pratap Ranade?

  Totally. Yeah, if you think about that, there's a few different buckets. So if you can harness electromagnetism in RF, which is let's say, application one, you've got satellite communication, so phased arrays for a satcom. So that's your user terminal, your satellite. So if you think about a Starlink satellite, I believe, it needs to track sixty-four different locations on the ground, so make sixty-four different beams. Sure. You have to do that with a phased array. Okay. So anyone launching, anyone in the space industry, which I think is exploding right now, Yeah. needs communications between Earth and space, so phased arrays are key there. Yeah. Radar, radar is another really big one. So if you think about that, you know, we've also got Raytheon as the incumbent here. But if you think about advanced radar, they're incredibly expensive today, and we have few of them on ships.

• 2:05:36Pratap Ranade?

  You know, we should have backpack-based radar for soldiers, for counter-drone, we should have a whole variety. This, this, we want to debottleneck this field and basically democratize it, almost like AWS-ify that for companies building for space, for radar makers, also for companies. You know, if you think about data centers, chip-to-chip communication, so these channels that let chips talk to each other are incredibly difficult to get right. In some way, you're trying to build a very bad antenna there, because you don't want it to pick up random interference, you want it to send the signal you want. So just those alone are massive markets. Actually, we looked at the forecast for the phased ray and RF components, and it looks like this line, and I feel like it's something I would have done right out of school.

• 2:06:20Pratap Ranade?

  It's, oh, great, let me take the historic numbers and propagate them forward. But it doesn't seem to account for the fact that we're expecting a boom in space. We're expecting growth in AI data centers. Yeah. And if you think about imaging, you know, I heard something from our chief scientist here that blew my mind. I always thought about radar as detection, you're trying to detect something, right? Yeah. And he said radar is an imaging platform. So as you get to higher frequencies, you know, like LiDAR, you've got this high-frequency beam that's echolocating things like a bat, and it's useful for all weather imaging. So when light's getting blocked, You can actually use a radio wave to kind of create your LiDAR map. So if you think about that being used for robotics, which is another application.

• 2:07:02Pratap Ranade?

  So each of these pieces, we feel haven't been sized into the forecast. And so that's, I think, where a lot of the opportunity lies. And when we talk to customers, so, you know, we work with AMD and Anduril as examples. So our mission is partner with companies at the frontier that are trying to challenge existing cost models and push frontier technology harder. Those are sort of the places where we're seeing early adoption.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  And do you want to be like selling intellectual property like ARM or software for chip design or the actual finished chips? How vertically integrated do you want to be?

• 2:07:38Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, I would say like realistically as of where we are today, our model is closer to the model of like a Palantir or an ARM. Obviously, by own heritage, last company was bought by Palantir. And so partnering with companies using our whole tool chain. So this is the latest product, Heaviside, the EM Foundation model. But Atlas, our current product, is an agentic product that lets you use LLM agents to debug parts of the hardware process. So that plus our FDEs that are not just software engineers, but also electrical and RF engineers for deploy as partners to drive major outcomes. What we are seeing and what you're holding as a piece of this is, you know, the existing IP industry is let me license you IP. And this is where it's an open question. We haven't figured it out.

• 2:08:23Pratap Ranade?

  But you now have an IP generator as a machine. And so we're really excited about the ARM kind of model as I think probably the most proximate to where we are today and our way of having the most impact because we can empower more teams. Like our mission is to empower more teams to build more advanced stuff. If we think about a lot of the AI doom and gloom, we're like, where did the jobs go? You know, the conclusion we come to is companies just need to be more ambitious. Like that's how we create jobs. Let's assume we're working with AI. How do we enable you to do that? How do we enable others and more companies to do this? The last thing I want to say on that is if you look at what happened with language models, it was all possible because of scaling laws. And like, you know, before language models, there was a lot of machine learning where we were trying to go and solve problems at that use case level, right?

• 2:09:08Pratap Ranade?

  We were solving like language translation, summarization, spam detection separately. But once you pointed a huge model at language as a substrate and OpenAI published that seminal paper in 2020 on scaling laws, you could scale it up and it started to generalize. Now these things can do remarkable things. We believe we will see, and we're seeing early hints of scaling laws for electromagnetics. And this might be true for physics in general. Electromagnetism being one of the four fundamental forces here. But that's sort of what we what we think is possible. So each of the industries you talked about doesn't need a specific solution, we think, in the future. As you scale this up, the central brain could power any industry that's bottlenecked by electromagnetism. You know, phased array radar, satcom and data center interconnects being a starting point.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, wow. What's the reaction been from the experts that you've mentioned? Are they experiencing a chat GPT moment with the new model yet? Or you still need to iterate? How are people responding?

• 2:10:06Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think their reaction's definitely been really positive in some pockets and deeply skeptical in other pockets. As you can imagine, getting this stuff right is really difficult, right? We're, I would say we're at like a GPT one moment here. We're not at a chat GPT moment. We have about, you know, tens of millions of data points in the training set. As I mentioned, this data doesn't exist. We had to make it all in the data factory. So that's sort of one of the keys. And so we're finding as the models get larger and as the data set gets bigger, they're capable of more. But today, what you're holding, a human could design an equivalent component, like what you're seeing, with a normal structure, and it would work. We're not yet at a superhuman point with the model, but what we are is transforming the cost structure.

• 2:10:51Pratap Ranade?

  This is 800,000 times faster than a commercial solver, for instance. And the expertise is not locked up in an expert. You could go and just, you know, get that kind of on demand from the AI. So that's what we're seeing today, and I think it will take some time to move up that that stack. But that's why I'm super excited about the scaling laws. And I think from, you know, as I mentioned AMD and Andrew, I think we're fortunate enough to get partners and customers that I think are really on the frontier, that are leaning in and believing in this. And so we're super excited about that.

• 2:11:23John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the FDE model in this case? I mean, I feel like a lot of people don't even understand the typical engagement of having Palantir FDEs inside of an organization. They might be more familiar with like McKinsey coming to the organization, doing a delayering or some management consulting engagement. Like, how long is a product life cycle, development life cycle? How long do you imagine that a typical engagement with FDEs might be? Is it going to be the same as Palantir, different? Like, how is this unique?

• 2:11:56Pratap Ranade?

  Yeah, so right now, we definitely see the engagement models being, you know, you're partnering on an array of problems. So we'd start with one, for example. Let's say that new product innovation cycle is, you know, for something like a new chip or a new data center, that might be in the number of like a year. It might be a couple of years. But what we're seeing is then those architectures are used across multiple product lines by a lot of these companies. And so could we become a partner long-term across all of these electromagnetically limited products? That's sort of where we see sort of that outcome driving, you know, that driving really big outcomes across the stack.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, congratulations, Jordy. Anything else?

• 2:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing progress. We will put this to use.

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  We will.

• 2:12:37Jordi Hays?

  As many of these as you send to us.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  The entire show will run through that. We'll figure it out.

• 2:12:42Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  It might take a lot of queries for us.

• 2:12:45Jordi Hays?

  Incredible progress.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  We might get an FDE. You have to send one over next time.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  And let's have you back before another year passes.

• 2:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:12:54Pratap Ranade?

  Awesome. Thanks, guys. Great to see you.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 2:13:06Jordi Hays?

  FaZe Clan.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers with training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And I think we're in the Lambda lightning round now? Or are we in something serious?

• 2:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Close.

• 2:13:22John Coogan?

  Let's fire up the Lambda lightning round. We love the Lambda lightning round. The cloud is working overtime.

• 2:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Kik.

• 2:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's going on with Kik?

• 2:13:29Jordi Hays?

  Has acquired FaZe Clan.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  And now has a strategic acquisition of FaZe Media.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:34Jordi Hays?

  A globally recognized, greater-than-media brand.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Was FaZe a public company at some point? There was some plan that was public.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  They were. They were public.

• 2:13:41John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  And private.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:44Speaker 03

  Are we sure this is real? It's not April Fools?

• 2:13:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm just throwing that. I don't know.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  Oh. Okay. Yeah. Kick. I don't know. Can we dig into this? Is this an April Fools joke? Somebody already asked Rock? Yes. 100% it's an April Fools prank prank. The press release is dated 4/1/2026. There's zero real news of confirmation of any Kick Phase deal, and it fits the classic nostalgic streamer org acquisition troll vibe. Nice catch.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  I'm so unk that I didn't realize this was. Is this supposed to be funny?

• 2:14:12Speaker 03

  It's on their Wikipedia, though. So I don't know, actually.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  I think this might be real. I don't know. I mean, it seems like it seems like if FaZe was taken private and is looking for, you know, a new home integration into Kick, like this doesn't seem like that crazy. It's not like if it is, if it is an April Fools joke, it's not like hilarious. So I'm like, oh, wow. I never would have imagined that Kick and FaZe teamed up. Like, that's, there are people that are making that joke. There was a, some company, a high frequency trading firm that was joking about being acquired by Anthropic or something.

• 2:14:42Speaker 03

  It was like a crypto wallet company.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Crypto wallet company. Like, that feels a little bit more non sequitur, right?

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, Adam FaZe has a good story. He says FaZe Media owns the trademark for his born last name FaZe and sent him a cease and desist in 2023 when he originally named his production company FaZe World. Says, I want my last name back.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  Hmm. I'm rooting for you. I'm rooting for Adam FaZe to be able to use the brand.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  You should have bid on the IP, buddy. You should have. You should have bid.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  I mean, also, what were your parents doing? Not trademarking your name in every possible category as a child. This is just deep alpha. I need to lock up Coogan's reson later.

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Tony on a roll today says, it's never been a better time to be in the fake wood panel industry. If you sell fake wood slats that can be quickly installed in a room somewhere, business is booming with no signs of slowing down.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  I love the slot walls. We got to get one in here so we can just like step back and go and hang out and do a little slot wall podcast.

• 2:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Wait, that, that would have been.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  That would have been April Fools. Oh, what were we thinking?

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  You know, we struggled with April Fools this year. We think it's a little bit overplayed. It's not that. It's, you know, it's not that funny. And kind of every single day is April Fools for us to some degree.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  And so it's a good day for us to just get serious, right?

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Get the white dudes. Focus on the market. The market's up. We're in white suits.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Dylan really

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Serious, but you know, the, the, the actual play would have been to rebuild like the typical podcast set with like the bookshelves, the slot walls, but then make it miniature, right?

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  And so we're sitting there, we're sitting there, we look like, you know, giants.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Giants of the industry. Uh, do you know why the slot wall is so popular?

• 2:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it, uh, Huberman?

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, but do you know why he selected it?

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  I do not.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  So when you are recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don't want reverberation. You don't want a lot of flat walls that will bounce the sound back to you and create echo and distortion and hollowness in the sound. You want a nice bassy response. You need a nice microphone, but you also need a sound treated area. In the Ultra Dome, we have some sound treatment over there. We have some sound treatment over there. We do have a hard floor. Maybe that would make the audio quality better. Who knows? But we, uh, uh, for a long time, people would put up that sort of, it's a egg crate style. I don't know if we have a camera,

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  maybe the, the reverse PTZ would, would do it, but, uh, the egg crate style, uh, soundproofing works incredibly well. And if you're ever in a professional recording booth as doing voiceover for a film or recording a, a song, uh, you will be in a booth that has a lot of spike, yeah, it has a lot of spiky. Yeah. You can see it right here. So this sort of egg crate, it creates a lot of little holes for the, for the, for the sound to get caught in effectively. And, uh, very fun, Jordan. And, uh, and, and the problem is that that makes it look like you are in a sound booth. It's not very aesthetic. It doesn't look like a natural environment. And so there were companies that said, let's

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  get the best of both worlds, something that's aesthetic, but still sound treating. And so they launched these wood slot walls. Of course, the space in between the wood captures the sound a little bit, acts as a little bit of deadening. And then of course you can also hide, um, you can also hide soundproofing material behind the wood slot. Wall and so it was a very logical way to have an elevated aesthetic while still getting the benefits at least some of the benefits of sound treatment then Andrew Huberman did it went mega viral and everyone sort of copied it over and did the same thing and it's become a huge trend he wound up painting his black I think and who knows now they got sick of being

• 2:18:34John Coogan?

  now you know if you're in the black paint industry that's where the money is is because everyone with the fake wood panels is going to be painting it black we have yet to do this I've looked at this in the past but I've never I've never actually done it anyway

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  do you have the right person guys I believe so are you sure

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  sorry we are figuring out who oh yes okay got it sorry I'm I'm thought it was uh yeah I thought we were jumping ahead to Gary Tan I'm sorry uh anyway without further ado let's run it back let's run it back Abhishek I messed up Abhishek great to meet you thank you so much for taking the time I got a little mixed up on the schedule but it's great to have you here with us today anyway please introduce yourself in the company

• 2:19:20Speaker 08

  hey uh thanks for having me I'm Abhishek Abhishek Das I'm the co-founder and co-CEO of tutorial and introduce the company what are you building yeah so tutorial we're building web agents so agents that can take actions and complete tasks on the web so we think that the future of interacting with the web is going to look quite different than it does today where we're not manually navigating webpages clicking buttons filling forms etc we're going to be operating at a slightly higher level of abstraction where we have AI agents who we delegate tasks to that carry on a lot of these tasks in the background on our on our behalf and does that

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  mean like virtual machines loading the full webpage and clicking on it like a mouse and keyboard interaction or are you interacting with the APIs and reverse engineering the the the routes to sort of just build CLIs on the fly like what are the different strategies that are working and not working right now

• 2:20:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, so it's it's everything you mentioned, basically.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  Okay, both.

• 2:20:18Speaker 08

  We should probably think of it in layers.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:21Speaker 08

  So there is the core L L M that's looking at how webpages are laid out, how to click buttons, navigate websites to take a task to completion. Uh, then there's the agent harness, which surrounds that L L M.

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:34Speaker 08

  So but on the web, we have A P I's available. They make use of A P I's where there's no A P I's. Uh, use this kind of a visual linguistic model.

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:44Speaker 08

  Uh, and the agent harness takes care of things like persistence. So if it makes a mistake and it has to backtrack and try something else, that it knows how to do that. The agent harness would take a memory orchestration, breaking a task down into subtasks, all of that. Um, and then the third layer is putting all of this together. What does the product experience look like? Where uh, uh, this works for everyone.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  Makes sense. How are you thinking about the divide between uh, consumer versus business to business, enterprise? Uh, who, how do you see the customer mix evolving?

• 2:21:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, most of our users are prosumers. Um, so individuals who are using it for work. Um, so like small to medium uh, business owners.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:22Speaker 08

  Or individuals working at at bigger companies.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:25Speaker 08

  Uh, the model layer that I talked about, we do train our own model in-house. It is uh, uh, as accurate as Opus four point six and and G P T five point four. Uh, but is but is two to three X faster and much cheaper. Wow. So that we make available as an A P I as well.

• 2:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Sure. What was the process? What was the process creating the model? Did you take an open source model and?

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Tune in?

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:48Speaker 08

  Exactly, exactly. Um, so most of our focus is on mid-training and and post-training. Uh, with a mix of S F T and R O. Uh, we started off of an open source Quen-based model. Um, and we collect our own data, both in simulation and actual websites, and we train on those.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  So. The big labs don't scare you. Uh, talk about, talk about how you see the the competitive kind of environment evolving. This is something that uh, I think everyone should assume that all the different kind of consumer, prosumer in enterprise products uh, do maybe not super well right now, but will do. How do you see the market evolving?

• 2:22:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think the market for non-coding knowledge work, digital work is massive. There's a lot of work to be done there. It hasn't quite hit the kind of inflection point that coding agents have. So yeah, there's a huge opportunity there. The area that we do peak on and we care about is tasks that happen on the web. So browser use capability specifically. Anthropic, OpenAI, et cetera, have models for computer use, which is more general purpose. But for browser use, currently ours is the best model that's out there, both for accuracy and latency.

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  How do you think about like the textbook use cases? I'm sure you get asked about like booking a flight. That's more of like a Gentic on the web, go do something for me. I can also imagine there's a huge value in just, you know, monitoring websites, scraping data, putting things together. We were talking yesterday about how, you know, will we see an explosion of token consumption among financial professionals like we've seen among programmers? And my bull case that we will is that, yes, you're just maybe building one financial model. You're not necessarily building a thousand financial models a day,

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  but that one financial model might interact with thousands and thousands of webpages to collect every possible data point to create aggregated data sets that then can be compressed and compressed down into, you know, a 12-tab Excel sheet that eventually results in, you know, should you buy the stock or not, or whatever, whatever the financial analysis is.

• 2:24:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, so there's a lot to unpack there.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:13Speaker 08

  The first thing you mentioned, where like logging into a website and booking a flight or like ordering food or something. We actually shipped a bunch of a big upgrade today and it's basically possible today. Like you can connect your favorite websites and apps to our product, which is called Scouts.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:30Speaker 08

  And you can just give it a task. Like a bunch of us internally have been using it to automate like our Phil's orders, Instacart orders. We've had people externally try it out as well for LinkedIn, other websites as well. But a lot of that is possible today and it makes use of like our code model, the agent harness, everything, like all the tech components coming together. Now, in terms of how I see the token consumption and usage of this going forward, I think it's still. Quite early in this space, like a lot of non-coding digital work hasn't quite gotten the kind of attention and hit that inflection point yet.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:08Speaker 08

  So the cheaper and more reliable and more accurate it gets, I think we're just going to see an explosion of usage of this technology.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like there's a little bit of a capability overhang, like you can do really deep research and you can do deeper research with a coding agent in many ways, but that workflow and that just it just hasn't broken through to everyday consumers that they should even think about, you know, asking an L L M or an agent a question like, you know, build my financial profile from every data source all over the place and analyze everything. They come to it with like, you know, how much should I invest in the stock market? Like a basic question that's basically just web web search.

• 2:25:53Speaker 08

  Yeah, so there's, there's two or three aspects here. One is that we actually had someone try this recently on our, on our product where they gave, gave it access to their email and they had a bunch of expense reports that had come in on their email and they asked the agent to prepare sort of a nice categorization and spreadsheet of all their expenses and they were able to one-shot it.

• 2:26:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:26:16Speaker 08

  So that's one part of it. The other part of it is that the previous version of our product was primarily meant for agents that can monitor anything on the web. So kind of like Google Alerts, but on Sero, it's like an AI native version of it. But with today's release, one of the things we released is the capability to build live artifacts. So now these agents don't only, don't just monitor, they can prepare a single sort of spreadsheet or a website or a dashboard that stays updated as new information comes in. So like if you want to track anytime a startup comes out of stealth or like a startup announces a fundraiser, you can now use scouts to make a single, maintain a single spreadsheet for it.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  How, where's, where's the company at? When did you start it? And what were you doing before this?

• 2:27:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we started the company in 2024. I'm, I'm an AI researcher by background. I grew up in India, moved to the US in 2016 for my PhD, that was at George Tech. After that, I spent some time at, at Meta as an AI researcher. Both, there's two other co-founders, all three of us are AI researchers by, by background. We're about 15 people. We're a little beyond our safe zone. That's where we are.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  Are you compute constrained at all?

• 2:27:36Speaker 08

  Massively.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  Massively? Well, I mean, what's the plan? Is, is the best practice just like hunt around for cheap GPUs? Or slide around different services like?

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Or, or use, use your product to monitor when, when availability online on, on the Neo Labs?

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, Neo Cloud, yeah.

• 2:27:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we, we definitely do a lot of that. And we are, I think, quite compute efficient from that, from that point of view. But compute is one part of it, the other is data, right? For a lot of tasks on the web, it's not easy to collect and generate data. As, let's say, computer use tasks, where you can just hire a bunch of annotators to like, let's say, simulate certain tasks on their, like Microsoft Office apps and so on, right? Like on the web, many of these are irreversible actions. Like if you actually buy something,

• 2:28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:30Speaker 08

  then there's a real cost associated with it. So it's not as easy to collect data.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:35Speaker 08

  Do a mix of like simulation and sort of using our product to visit webpages, especially websites where there's a few clicks and navigation steps in boards. So you can't like index or crawl them in a naive manner.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  So are you building RL environments for particular websites? Is that programmatic or are they like handcrafted? Like how many, like what's the scale? I imagine that you, like you need to build a lot of these for generalization. That's very cumbersome and there's going to be like flaws with every single different system that you try and build.

• 2:29:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we vibe code a bunch of like simulated websites and use that to generate data and like evals. There is a good amount of in category generalization that we see, like for example, if you imagine how Amazon is laid out or how any ecommerce website is laid out. There's not that much variance between them, but if you compare that to, for example, how Zillow or Redfin is laid out, there is a huge difference in what the URL looks like. Yeah, so just being intelligent about like how we're sourcing data.

• 2:29:38John Coogan?

  And then are you like stack ranking those, like is Amazon more valuable than Zillow because consumers will demand that or prosumers will demand that over Zillow or vice versa? And how do you evaluate that?

• 2:29:51Speaker 08

  I think it's a, it's a mix. We do keep a close eye on making sure that mix looks good and like as we want it to be. A lot of our users use it for more work-related things as opposed to in their, in their personal life. So we, we keep a focus on that.

• 2:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's login to my ERP, my payroll system, pull stuff from all different dashboards. I can imagine us pulling analytics from all the different analytics providers and they all have separate websites, but they all like have some similarities in the design philosophy and the best practices and where, what the, what color the CTAs are and whatnot. Anyway, that, yeah, this is fascinating. Congrats on the progress and thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.

• 2:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for breaking it down.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:30:35Speaker 08

  So happy.

• 2:30:36John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about a very related company, Labelbox, RL Environments, Voice, Robotics, Eval, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And we should have Gary Tan joining us in just a minute, but we can go back to the timeline.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  We can pull up this post from Mark Hazan. He says, "We just rebuilt every startup in YC's latest Demo Day batch. Here's what our Agentic founders pulled off and what it means for the future of startups. Fully usable products at the bottom of the thread below." He's like, "I one-shot all of your companies."

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  I built everything. What a crazy time.

• 2:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this video.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play this video.

• 2:31:27Speaker 09

  Every startup in YC's latest demo day back. At Felt Sense, we build agentic founders that source ideas, build product,

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Source ideas from the YC Demo Day page.

• 2:31:37Speaker 09

  Could our killer agents compete with these cracked founders? On Demo Day, our agents swarmed the YC website, found every startup in the batch, and locked in to reverse engineer each build. They reconstructed their own PRDs based on public product specs and started to rebuild each application. When they hit snags or needed input, they called in a human to help resolve every problem. Core technology that took founders months or even years to create was rebuilt, rebranded, and ready to go to market within 24 hours. So what does this mean for YC and the startup ecosystem more broadly? It means AI replication risk is becoming more and more of a threat to every business. So what makes a startup more or less replicable?

• 2:32:22Speaker 09

  This is what we learned. Several obvious protections exist for startups. Building things in the physical world and owning data that others simply can't get to are a few examples. But there's a third one that caught us off guard, and it's more interesting. Most people think the best protection in an AI world is human creativity, meaning or ingenuity, the positive parts of humanity. But that's not what we're really seeing. The real protection seems to come from the messy stuff. Industries filled with politics, lack of trust, turf wars, and bureaucracy, markets that are painful to work in due to complex or even failing social dynamics are exactly the ones that are hardest to deploy into and, therefore, the most protected.

• 2:33:06Speaker 09

  A company that has learned to pick apart that mess and embed their solution has something few competitors can copy overnight. Difficult markets aren't bad markets. In an AI era, they may be the safest ones to spend your rare time and resources on.

• 2:33:20Jordi Hays?

  Hard companies are hard.

• 2:33:22Speaker 09

  Full analysis, company by company.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  This is sort of a cool launch video. It feels like a blog post as a full video. Like, it has a lot more. There's more of a thesis and meat on the bone.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  He ratioed himself in the video. He got way more likes in the video than... Well, we have Gary Tan here. We can ask him.

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:33:43Jordi Hays?

  If all of these.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  Let's bring Gary Tan into the team. Gary, how are you doing?

• 2:33:48Garry Tan?

  Doing great.

• 2:33:48John Coogan?

  Is it over or are we back? Is it over or are we back? Everyone's saying it's over. We're back. We're back and forth. How are you feeling today?

• 2:33:56Garry Tan?

  Oh, we're so back.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Okay, break it down. Well, how are we back?

• 2:34:00Garry Tan?

  Oh, my God. How can we not be back?

• 2:34:01John Coogan?

  Okay, explain. What's exciting?

• 2:34:04Garry Tan?

  We are at the dawn of like being able like software is totally fungible now. And then basically the tricky thing now is like you just got to spend the money on the tokens. And that's like one of the things that I think people are very, very afraid to spend money on tokens and the things that you can do right now, like you can literally make OpenClaw.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:27Garry Tan?

  And the reason why Pete could do that was he's actually like really, really successful previously.

• 2:34:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:34:33Garry Tan?

  And he could let it rip. Like, I think one of the key things that people have to understand about like the current moment is you cannot be precious about your like Claude Code Max account. You have to like really just let it rip. And when you let it rip, you can create like these things that like set the world on fire, actually.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  What about all the other things? I mean, so YC is interesting because there was a, you know, for a long time, it was about technical founders, you know, writing code oftentimes. Still is, right? But it was like, okay, you're technical. You are, you're, you are going to write code while you're here, but also you're going to talk to users. You're going to figure out a go to market motion. You're going to find a hard problem. You're going to figure out, you know, secrets of how this business works, what makes your moat deep and whatnot. And it feels like, is AGI capable of that? Or are we in like the software on the singular?

• 2:35:28Garry Tan?

  We still need people. I mean, like this stuff is, it's like a, you know, it's like Jiminy Cricket, man. But you still got to be, you know, Jiminy Cricket's got to stand on someone's shoulder and it might as well be yours.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Okay, so don't be precious about tokens.

• 2:35:41Jordi Hays?

  So, so.

• 2:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, if somebody sent you an investor update, a YC port co and said, and the only number they shared was how much they spent last month, based on what you're saying, you might be like, okay, you're on the right track, but that's clearly not a metric to optimize for how, you know, what should founders be optimizing for, you know, when they're locked in for 18.

• 2:36:06Garry Tan?

  Making something people want, right? It's crazy. I don't know. I mean, I've been, I feel like I'm at the center of a lot of like weird controversy, like, did the guy lose his mind? What's going on? I've been thinking about it and it's like, it's not actually about me. It's about like people's relationship with their craft and that has to change. And so I think my response to the haters is like, have fun coding at 1X speed, bros.

• 2:36:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't know, I don't know that the, I don't know that the haters are not also using the tools and not, and not generally excited about it. I think, I think it's just primarily.

• 2:36:40Garry Tan?

  Like, I'll give you a concrete example. Please. Like, I noticed yesterday, I had a throwaway comment because I created Gstack, it's got 60,000 stars now, like, I'm actually growing faster than OpenClaw by stars on GitHub right now. And, you know, I mean, they had their moment and like, I'm, you know, on my way, right? About 30,000 people use Gstack every single day. I've been getting emails that are pretty awesome, actually, like, people trying to start consulting firms and they just want to like, you know, feed their kids and maybe they lost their job and then they literally are like, starting this consulting firm, I've never done this before, I like sit down with a client, you know, I just open office hours

• 2:37:22Garry Tan?

  with Gstack and as they talk, I type in, you know, what, what we're talking about and then I'm like live talking to, you know, and they sign a customer on the spot within like 20 minutes of talking to someone because of the Gstack like open office hour skill.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  To build custom software for that?

• 2:37:39Garry Tan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:37:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:41Garry Tan?

  Yeah, and then maybe, you know, the thing is custom software, you know, I was at Palantir when, you know, Stephen Cohen and Shyam Shankar basically invented the idea of.

• 2:37:53Garry Tan?

  Your forward deployed engineer.

• 2:37:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:54Garry Tan?

  Right?

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  So everyone's an FDE now.

• 2:37:56Garry Tan?

  That's what you're doing. Everyone can be an FDE.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:37:58Garry Tan?

  And the thing is, like, if you don't know how to do it, like, this thing is like the training wheels that will teach you. And then, you know, it was the training wheels for me as I was learning how to do it. Like, the original prompt I had posted on Twitter, uh, right when I was working on Gary's list.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:14Garry Tan?

  And, like, those things, like, both, both my, uh, engineering prompt to, uh, like, shake out all the bugs and get to 100% test coverage, that was my Plan Eng review that is in GStack today. And then the other one was, uh, Plan CEO review. I call it my Brian Chesky review.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:32Garry Tan?

  Like, it's like having Brian Chesky sit on your shoulder and be like, I mean, that would be a heavy person to sit on your shoulder.

• 2:38:37John Coogan?

  But like, he's gonna ask you, are you in founder mode? Are you moving fast enough?

• 2:38:40Garry Tan?

  Yeah. It's like, what's the 10-star experience?

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:38:44Garry Tan?

  Right?

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:44Garry Tan?

  If you've ever seen him talk about the 10-star experience, like, that's what having CEO, Plan CEO review in the GStack skill feels like to me.

• 2:38:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:38:52Garry Tan?

  And, um, I really think that that's awesome. Like, I want everyone to have that.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Garry Tan?

  And, uh, so I, I was like, having a throwaway thought, like, you know, one of the core things I made was a browser plugin.

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:04Garry Tan?

  That, uh, wraps Playwright. And so, uh, then, you know, the reality is, like, I'm just solving problems for myself. Like, I was building, um, Gary's list, and I found myself, you know, the Plan CEO review worked well, the Plan Eng review worked really, really well, and then I found myself, like, uh, you know, I'm using Conductor, I have, like, six or seven windows open at that time, I'm up to 20 right now. And, um...

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:29Garry Tan?

  I, I found myself, like, running between windows, uh, just doing manual testing. And I'm like, great. Like, I worked so hard to, like, build all these skills to, like, get way faster, and then now I'm just a black box QA engineer for the robots. Like, this is so boring. How terrible. Can I, uh, automate it? So I opened another Conductor window, and I was like, man, why does Claude in, you know, Claude in Chrome MCP sucks so much? I don't know if it sucks now, like, it's been a month or something. Maybe they fixed all the bugs, but it literally couldn't do it. It's like, two or three seconds, five seconds, crazy context bloat. It was unusable. And I said, okay, like, well, I know Playwright exists, can we make a CLI that's like a thin shim over what Playwright does? And then, basically, it did it.

• 2:40:14Garry Tan?

  And then that was what the first V1 of GStack was. It was those two scripts and, uh, like, a Playwright browser. Plugin that like allowed me to not QA anymore. Like I could just say, okay, now slash QA. Like you know what we did in this branch? We have all these plan files, like go line by line and act like my QA engineer and it did it. And like the first time I used it, it was like 100 milliseconds. It was doing it. It could log in. It could like click on things. It like took screenshots of things that were broken and then it would fix them immediately. I was like, oh my God. This is how to do it. Like this is how you build a software factory. It's like I automate each of the steps. Like I've built so many pieces of software over the years and I've helped so many people do that.

• 2:40:58Garry Tan?

  And it's like, this is the process. And so now there are 30 of these skills. And then, you know, now you still like, I think we're still in manual mode. Like I built an auto plan. So that now like all of these different pieces, like there's a recommendation in each of them. And like, if you really want to be in the weeds and understand what's happening, you can just like, read the recommendation, you can talk with it and be like, well, I like option A, but like option B sounds better for X, Y, and Z reason. Like, let's talk about it, right?

• 2:41:26Garry Tan?

  So yeah, it's interesting because like I'm arriving at similar things to what I think like Devin or other automated software factories are doing, but I'm doing it in the open, open source MIT license. Like anyone, like if you don't like something, just fork it, man. And like, you know, yeah, just make it yours. And I have like 200 PRs I have to look at right now. You know,

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  Well, PR review, .md will take care of it. What was the, is Gary's List more of just an experiment to put this to work? Because it, I mean, it's

• 2:41:59Jordi Hays?

  Because in some ways, like you didn't have to build Gary's List. You could have used like

• 2:42:04John Coogan?

  Substack or WordPress. Or fork something that's already open source, but building it from scratch, like are there clear benefits where you're like, I'm really happy? Or was it more like the processes?

• 2:42:17Garry Tan?

  I'm having right now that you can't, you know, if you use packaged software, you can't do is All the emails come from me directly. Oh, okay. Like, the from line is from me. Okay. And when you reply to it, so I don't send, you know how like you sign up for New York Times or something like that? You get an inbox, like a daily digest, the same digest that you, everyone gets? Yeah. You get a personal one. Oh, okay. You know, you do have to apply to get into Gary's List. Okay. And you have to like, sort of tell me what you're into and... Interesting. But, you know, all the emails come from me directly. And I don't write them, the AI writes them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do read them. Interesting. So, everything that, and you know, when you reply, you're, it's going to my own inbox. Wow. And AI is helping me read it. Yeah. And it's like going into the personalization system I built so that we can send you things

• 2:43:02Garry Tan?

  that are more relevant to you, but like, in some sort of weird parasocial way, like Gary's List is my experiment and, um... Like, communication at scale, personalized communication. Like, I can be your personal assistant on like, hey, I'm mad about politics. Or like, my kid's getting, you know, can't get a good education in school, what should I do? Yeah. And like, obviously, I have a chat and it's like, you know, state of the art, like Opus 4.6 thinking, like, all that stuff, like, you know, it has data sources, you know, there have been users on there that have, um, gone online who are like, just engineers, like, living in Pleasanton, like, there's this one guy who, uh, never got involved in politics before, and he's setting, sending letters to all of his, uh, representatives

• 2:43:44Garry Tan?

  based on the policy things that are like screwed up in his life, like, his kid, you know? Yeah. His kid's school is messed up, like, there's all the, you know, and, you know, he's having, you know, a hundred conversations a month with, uh, our agent about like, you know, and then he emails me about it. I'm like, oh, cool, well, I like this, and maybe you should send this email to, you know, such and such person. Um, and so, I don't know, this is, I, I think all of these are just fun experiments. Yeah. But I'm learning a lot, uh, you know, it's, it isn't, you know, I am trolling on people about the lines of code thing. Sure. But I will say that there's a, uh, a grain of truth here where I am not about lines of code, I don't work for anyone, like, really, you know, I, I work for the, uh, institution

• 2:44:27Garry Tan?

  of YC as the steward of it, but aside from that, like, I'm not here to like, max lines of code to like, you know, for, to good heart law something, you know? Yeah. What I've learned is that like, the machines don't, aren't good heart lawing, like, lines of code either. Hmm. Uh, so that means that if you're, a hundred percent of your code is written by, uh... You know, the machines and you are earnestly trying to solve the problems of your users and yourself, like I am with G-Stack in the open. Like you can look at it and I'm doing 36,000 lines of code a day and not a single one of them is like for me to be able to say that. It's actually like I'm just having the time of my life.

• 2:45:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:06Garry Tan?

  Building software. Like we're about to launch something really awesome at YC.

• 2:45:10John Coogan?

  Oh, I was about to ask. Can you tell us the story of Bookface and then where you think software development will go at YC?

• 2:45:17Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, Bookface, we have, I mean, we have, you know, 20 engineers at YC and, you know, Book, one of the funniest things we, we found out was like, actually, a lot of people seem to have access to Bookface. Bookface is this internal social network used by, we have about 16, 17,000 people who are YC alums now who have access. About 40% of them use it every single day.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:45:38Garry Tan?

  And I've started to realize, actually, anyone who has a friend of someone who works, who, uh,

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  Went through YC.

• 2:45:45Garry Tan?

  You know, yeah, like people basically share their logins.

• 2:45:49John Coogan?

  They share their logins.

• 2:45:50Garry Tan?

  So, I mean, which is cool, actually. Like, the reality is, we should probably open it up. Like, we probably should have a, like, if you're a builder, I don't think I want absolutely anyone. Like, I, I want, like, techno-optimist people who are psyched about making the future. And like, I think Bookface should be open to people. You know, that might be one of the things we work on this year, you know?

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so much interesting, like, wisdom and stories in there. Some of the stuff is maybe private and people don't want it to be screenshotted and shared, but, but there's definitely a process to open it up.

• 2:46:21Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, how are YC founders in the, in the latest batches adapting to the change of pace of software development? There was a guy yesterday who made the claim that he rebuilt the whole batch with, with agents.

• 2:46:37Garry Tan?

  Congratulations. God bless.

• 2:46:40Garry Tan?

  Big respect.

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  And of course.

• 2:46:42Garry Tan?

  Incredible troll.

• 2:46:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm not sure he made anything that people want.

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  He did a good demo for his product.

• 2:46:47Garry Tan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Got some attention.

• 2:46:48Garry Tan?

  I love it. Shout out to Tim Draper, you know, big respect, man. Like, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do. I love it.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, but in a world where a YC founder might have in a previous era been very proud of the system that they built, the code that they wrote, even if they're not tracking lines of code, they're said, "Look, this piece of software did not exist. I spent three months grinding with my co-founders. We built a piece of software that solves that problem and now that's, you know, five minutes of work." Where will the moats come from in the future YC companies?

• 2:47:24Garry Tan?

  I mean, basically, the future, like, what's funny is basically all the people who already did that, like, you gotta speed up. Like, it's time to let it rip, guys. Like, software is too, uh, we treat software like it is so precious. And in the new world that we're going to, it is, it is going to be much more fungible, but that's the good news. Like, that's where taste and agency and trust matter a lot. This is something that only crystallized recently. Like, we've been talking about agency and taste for the longest time. Agency is being able to prompt and taste is being able to do evals, right? And then the third part that I only started thinking about, I think there was a tweet I reposted today that, like, said it really, really well, that, like, trust is the third

• 2:48:08Garry Tan?

  thing. And so, you know, that, I mean, that's probably the thing that's the most important. Like, when you have an enterprise company that is selling to real businesses and they're relying on you, like, that's your moat. Your moat is actually trust. Like, they went to the effort to try you, to get you onboarded and to incorporate you into how, you know, you, they work. And then, you know, I think that either you can hold on to that and that's a real moat and you can build something over the long haul, like, someone gets promoted or someone avoids being fired because you exist. And they're never going to switch and they trust you like that's like even more important than those other things. And so, you know, yeah, like, what is this story about?

• 2:48:51Garry Tan?

  It's not about like, is someone going to try, like, if someone came along to you like this, you know, this impressive like Draper company like troll on Y C companies is a good case study in that, right? Like, I'm impressed by the volume of software and they clearly built a software factory. But, you know, maybe you should open source it like that would be cool. Aside from that, it's like, are people going to trust things that are like trolls? Like, I don't know. I mean, I hate to bring up, you know, if, let me, let me state plainly like, I actually really respect Roy. He's always been really cool to me on the internet and I feel like I've been unfair to him. You know, I think that clearly legit is like, we're talking about it at Y C partner lunch today.

• 2:49:36Garry Tan?

  It's like, oh, yeah, like, the guy actually has real revenue and the idea is good. Like, not, you know, the troll marketing part, like, you know, we have problems with, we talked about that a lot.

• 2:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the interesting thing with, with the product from the beginning, I think some of the criticism was, okay, if this product works, like, there's going to be some big companies that roll it out. And so that's like this other question, right?

• 2:49:59Garry Tan?

  And That's the trust thing again, right? It's like, there are things that you can get you here, but they're not going to get you there, right?

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Is sleep, is sleep overrated in the, is sleep overrated in this moment? Is it, is it a waste of time? Are you adapting?

• 2:50:16Garry Tan?

  No, sleep is great. I'm starting like last night around, I don't know, two, 1:30 a.m. I was like, getting foggy and I probably could have kept going, but I'm like, let's go to sleep, man. Like, I'm going to wake up in the morning and I'm going to dream about a bunch of the things I want to do. And then I'm going to wake up and I get to wake up and go to my computer and go to Conductor and Claude Code and. You know, let's see what the workers are up to.

• 2:50:41John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. I have two, uh, two questions. One, uh, what was your stack like back when you designed the Palantir logo? What was the, was that a tasteful exercise? Was that, like, what went into designing the Palantir logo?

• 2:50:55Garry Tan?

  Yeah, I mean, basically what's funny is, um, yeah, that was such a weird formative year. Like, uh, I'll paint the picture, like, we're in Page Mill Road in, uh, Palo Alto, like, the iconic, um, downtown Palo Alto office. We were a year away from even moving into, uh, this was like, um, across from where I think Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto is now on Page Mill. We only were twelve, maybe ten or twelve engineers at that point. And, uh, I was working on the hiring site for palantir dot, you know, palantir tech dot net or something. I think we didn't have the dot com yet. And, uh, the original logo was created by my high school buddy, Stefan Cohen, who's still at Palantir and a billionaire many times over.

• 2:51:37Garry Tan?

  And, um, you know, basically I was like, how do I get engineers to want to work here? The logo kind of like, it was like six hexagons, I think, and people came and they thought it was like a biotech company or something.

• 2:51:50John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:51:51Garry Tan?

  And then we just basically, I took maybe, I don't know, a week, it wasn't more than a week of like working on it. But, um, we made like a thousand different versions of it, um, which is really funny because like. And that was pre-G stack.

• 2:52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:05Garry Tan?

  Yeah. Now in G stack, you can go slash design dash shotgun and you can say, design me a hundred of these things. And then it'll pop a window, it'll use codecs and generate.

• 2:52:17John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Wait, so, uh, yeah, I mean, how do you think, do you think, uh, AI is changing design? Do you think there's still room for taste in this world? Do you think that all the same, uh, rules apply or is it somehow different?

• 2:52:30Garry Tan?

  Oh, no. I mean, the machines don't have a point of view. Like, they'll give you lots of options. And, you know, I think if you don't have taste and you're using these tools, you'll make something that's like marginally better. But it'll still just be like, you know, marginally better than average. Whereas I think it's clear that like, you know, I mean, there are tools like Variant UI. It's like a YC company that we funded. It's like, awesome. Like, you just go and then it's like, that's the real version of Design Shotgun. Like, you know, you can't, you will have design tools that have taste. And if you use those, you will have, you will have a leg up.

• 2:53:04Garry Tan?

  But I don't know. I guess it just goes back to the agency part again. It's like, you know, one of the principles I built into GStack recently that has served me really well is before you start coding or before you start making technical plans at the engineering level, I tell it, always search the web.

• 2:53:22Garry Tan?

  It's like, figure out what's, you know, you want to, someone else has figured it out. Like, there's something open source. There's something that's out there. Go all the way to the edge and then, you know, basically, don't, don't try and reinvent the wheel. Right?

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:53:38Garry Tan?

  So, yeah, I mean, I think then it's prompting.

• 2:53:40John Coogan?

  Is there a world where it re-implements Gary's List in Jekyll or something?

• 2:53:44Garry Tan?

  Who knows, really? I mean, we'll see. It might, it might.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  I mean, it's using a lot of open source software. Obviously, it didn't write its own programming language. It probably didn't write its own database. It's using off-the-shelf tooling there. But the core app, I mean, I guess with the right flexibility and the tools that you wanted and the features that you wanted, like, it makes sense to, it, we're, we're almost, it's not build versus buy anymore. It's like, it's like fork versus inference or something like that. There's like a new trade-off.

• 2:54:12Garry Tan?

  I mean, increasingly, you don't even fork. Like, I mean, you know, it's funny, like, all of these things are very strange. We're in Bizarro Land right now. Like, we're in mid-transition. And like, all of the transitions are not in distribution yet. Which means, like, if you try to make a product right now and you ask it to estimate how long the agent is going to take to make it, it says human terms. So, it'll be like, it'll take a human a month to do this. And, and then you have to ask it explicitly, well, how long is, are you going to take? And it's like, well, I'll probably take like 15 to 20 minutes. And it's like literally across the board, like I am coding 90, like my output in terms of like real products, not just lines of code is like 90x that of what I did when I was in

• 2:54:57Garry Tan?

  2013. I made Posthaven that year. I made Bookface that year. And it's, you know, I was at a CEO conference last week at JP Morgan 100. And I was talking with a bunch of like former tech, they, you know, very technical CEOs who like now are full manager mode. And like, I was like, good news, man, it's time to come back. Time to, you know, you're Peter Parker right now. Time to put on the Spider-Man suit because this is the time. And I was blowing their mind. And I'm like, they're like, oh no, like, I shouldn't do this. It's not worth my time. I was like, dude, it is worth your time. Like, you can still be the manager during the day, but by night, you can be Spider-Man or Batman. Like, you can don the suit. Pull out the G stack.

• 2:55:43Garry Tan?

  Yeah, pull out the G stack. And you, you know, and my pitch to them was like, look, I am 90 times, I am 90 of myself. Like, Manipulating time.

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's remarkable.

• 2:55:55Garry Tan?

  And you, you know, you could have 90 of yourself working on things like tonight and be the CEO, right?

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Well, you want a ton of people over in the chat. They were skeptical and they're, and they're very fired up. So thank you so much for coming on, trolling the haters. Keep building, keep shipping those lines of code. And we will talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye.

• 2:56:22John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI. And we are running over time, but let's bring in our next guest, Brandon from Core Weave is in the restroom waiting room. Sorry for keeping you so long. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on TBPN. How are you doing?

• 2:56:43Speaker 11

  I'm doing great. Thank you for having me on today.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Of course. And could you introduce yourself and kind of take us through some of the news? I mean, there's so much going on, but I know that there's some big announcements more recently.

• 2:56:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, absolutely. My name is Brendan McBee. I'm one of the co-founders of CoreWeave. I'm the Chief Development Officer. So I lead all things debt, equity, M and A, ventures for the business. This is where all the money is raised within the organization.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and this new, uh, this new project, this new vehicle, how are you positioning it? How are you explaining to people who, uh, are familiar with CoreWeave as a stock that they can buy? And they understand that you might use, uh, debt to finance, uh, you know, the purchase of, of a facility. They're familiar with the mortgage. How are you introducing this product?

• 2:57:27Speaker 11

  Yeah. So that this product is one that we brought in the market about three years ago.

• 2:57:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:32Speaker 11

  And it was with our first facility, DDTL1. And what we've introduced today is the continuation of just continuing to build upon and execute within that original product. We're effectively taking this GPU infrastructure along with revenue associated with the GPU and these long-term take or pay contracts, put them together and then take them out into the debt market and finance them. And I would say it's a financing strategy that has occurred across many different sectors, right? Like this is how LNG facilities or power plants get financed, right? You have the infrastructure on one hand, you have these long-term contracts on the other hand, and put them together, marry them, and you can stand up very scalable financing mechanisms around it.

• 2:58:17Speaker 11

  Uh, what's really important about the one that we announced yesterday, uh, this is our largest transaction at 8.5 billion. Uh, and it's our first transaction being done. Thank you. Yes, it was awesome.

• 2:58:30John Coogan?

  It's a big moment.

• 2:58:31Speaker 11

  Um, huge number, massive. But you know, sometimes like forget the numbers that were working sometimes. Um, and it was done at an investment grade cost of capital. So this was done at SOFR plus 225 for, you know, approximately 5.9% cost of capital, which is incredibly important to us, uh, given the capital intensive nature of our business.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  And what, what, uh,

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  What gave the market, what gave the rating agency or you the confidence to put this in the investment grade bucket? How are you, how are you providing the data in the back and like the backbone of that strength?

• 2:59:10Speaker 11

  Yeah, to your point, this all comes down to market validation. The clearest signal out there is pricing and confidence grows as cost of capital comes down, right? Doesn't really work the other way. So being able to drive down cost of capital here just shows the amount of demand there is for the core weave credit product in the market.

• 2:59:33John Coogan?

  How much of this is, how important was sort of beating the depreciation gate allegations, to put it sort of silly, but a lot of people were wondering like, oh, those those H100s, they're not gonna, they're not gonna age well. And what we've seen is that there's a lot of data points out there that seems like older, they're aging like fine wine from what we've seen. But take me through your, do you always know that that was going to play out the way? Was there any unexpected surprise to the upside? And then how important has it been to have more data about how these GPUs monetize over a longer length of time?

• 3:00:10Speaker 11

  The depreciation subject has always been very interesting to us. We've been very consistent. Six years is the appreciable life of this infrastructure. And I would say if anything, we're expecting for the infrastructure to have useful life beyond six. I mean, you see that today and like late 2010s SKUs that are available in market on clouds. Like they're, they're not running that infrastructure unprofitably. Right? And it means that there's client demand for it. But as we look towards like Ampere and Hopper generations, you know, I think in our last earnings, we even noted that our pricing on Ampere went up during 2025 and our pricing on Hopper stayed within 10% or so where we started the year. Why is that happening? I think it's largely driven by inference, right? And ultimately, this

• 3:00:55Speaker 11

  concept that not every workload only needs the latest, greatest piece of compute, right? Which we're incredibly well known for running, but you know, there are Different types of workloads that need different types of infrastructure. And the market is simply efficiently pairing the right compute with with the workload that they need. So we see incredibly robust demand all the way back to the Ampere generation, which I believe is six years old at this point, from its original SKU launch date. And we're really not seeing any deterioration of these older SKU demand profiles, while also seeing accelerating demand for latest generation infrastructure as well.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  I think everyone's heard the stories of electricians being flown around in private jets and and kind of the chaos of of actually, you know, building out data centers over the last two years. Any any funny stories from from the CoreWeave team recently around around?

• 3:01:54Speaker 11

  Around builds.

• 3:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on on all the effort going into, you know, building out these clouds.

• 3:02:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, it would take a lot of private planes to to fly all those electricians around. I mean, we're talking hundreds to thousands of engineers on these sites. And, you know, I think that's it's a great point you raised because I believe it's an underappreciated aspect of what is being done here and the true scale of the engineering effort out there in market. Like, you truly just have to go see one of these sites, right? They're massive, massive engineering feats that are being executed on with an incredibly intense supply chains, all the while moving in a extremely high velocity technology sector. It it really boils down to risk management, which is the DNA of our management team.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  It feels like in terms of inference demand, we've seen a number of sort of exponential jumps when we went from LLMs to reasoning models. The number of tokens generated to answer a question increased exponentially. Saw something similar with agents, coding agents. Are you guiding or expecting for just a smooth trend to continue? Are you thinking that this is more discontinuous? Is there some sort of next next generation that you're already looking forward to in terms of increased inference demand?

• 3:03:17Speaker 11

  It's it's really hard to predict where the technology goes since the technology itself is meant to be so disruptive.

• 3:03:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:03:26Speaker 11

  Uh, I think what's super important for us is our client base and our clients represent the um, the organization that are at the front lines of pushing this technology as far as it can go. And we're consistently supporting them and it gives us this really interesting information flow, understanding where they're going in their organization so that we can be orienting ours to be moving with them in lockstep.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  What do people misunderstand most about CoreWeave right now?

• 3:03:57Speaker 11

  Um, you know, I I would say there's three real pillars to our success. It is having the best product in the market for running this infrastructure. Um, our product is purpose-built for AI and supports today the leading AI organizations on the planet.

• 3:04:16Speaker 11

  You have to have the right physical infrastructure capacity, the ability to navigate the supply chain. Right? And that that is not something uh, anyone can just stand up and do. It's incredibly challenging and detailed, but today we have over forty-three data centers in active operation. Um, that that's a key component of how we've been able to pull down our cost of capital so aggressively is just simply through execution. And that final piece is financing. Right? You you can have pieces one and two, but if you can't raise the capital needed to uh, to bring that infrastructure online, it's it's sort of meaningless.

• 3:04:57Speaker 11

  And so we've spent an immense amount of time focused on the credit market and driving an ability to navigate it effectively and scalably while driving down our cost of capital. And thus why this instrument that we announced yesterday is so incredibly important to us and will serve as the blueprint for future transactions.

• 3:05:20John Coogan?

  Are you in a rough agreement with the broad consensus that I'm feeling in the AI industry around a chip bottleneck being more of a gating factor in scaling AI progress over the next four years than power constraints?

• 3:05:39Speaker 11

  You know, I would qualify it as cloud-connected infrastructure, incredibly important. So it's really marrying power with chips, getting them online, delivered to clients. That bottleneck within there is delivering powered shell capacity, at least within our business, right? We can bring online more capacity to our clients as we have more powered shell within the market. So we're consistently scouring the market for incremental capacity to be able to market to our consumers.

• 3:06:10Jordi Hays?

  How have the sort of mom and pop data centers done over the last two years? I'm talking about people, maybe like 18 months ago, that were realizing, hey, this AI thing's going to be pretty big. We can find some power here. Let's throw up a shell. Let's get some GPUs and try to bring it online. How have they fared? Because I think there was a lot of, there's obviously so much demand, but a lot of, there were a lot of question marks.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Post-neo clouds or like micro-neo clouds.

• 3:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, just somebody saying like, hey, we can get some power here. Let's jump on this. How have they fared? I imagine some of them end up being kind of rolled in to, you know, a platform like CoreWeave or the other neo-clouds or they end up. But how have they fared?

• 3:06:58Speaker 11

  You know, it's really tough to comment on their businesses. We don't see them in market too frequently. I think our product looks a lot different than the other offerings that are available out there.

• 3:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and these people were like, oh, it's like, it's like real estate. You just like put up a box, throw some GPUs in it. And I would say like, no one, no one, none of the leading neo-clouds are saying like, oh, it's just like real estate. You just like throw up a box. So there was that disconnect there.

• 3:07:25Speaker 11

  I would agree with that. There is a chasm of execution between, you know, signing a contract to deliver infrastructure and actually bringing it online and making it revenue generating. And that's where the CoreWeave product sits.

• 3:07:41John Coogan?

  Well, it's fantastic progress. Thank you so much for coming and breaking it down for us.

• 3:07:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 3:07:46John Coogan?

  Uh, congratulations on the deal. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. Uh, Tyler, do you know how to count cards in poker?

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  In poker?

• 3:08:07John Coogan?

  In poker. Do you know how to count cards?

• 3:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  You have exactly one day to learn because you have to go to Sam Blon's Monaco Invitational. You have to bring home the $100,000 cash prize.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  You gotta win.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  There's a, it's a no buy-in poker tournament. Founders from all-

• 3:08:23Jordi Hays?

  Is counting cards a thing in poker? That's for blackjack. No? Am I-

• 3:08:26John Coogan?

  You're going to learn how to apply counting cards from blackjack to poker? You're going to invent new, new card counting technology? I think it, I think it does work in, oh, maybe you're right in blackjack. Maybe it doesn't work in poker. I think it does work in poker. Anyway, you're gonna learn, you're gonna cheat and you're gonna win. That's the plan. You're gonna cheat, you're gonna win, you're gonna get thrown out of, uh, Monaco, you're gonna get thrown out of San Francisco. Sam Blon will be putting hands on you, but it'll be a good time.

• 3:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Put out an article that says the Artemis Moon Base Project is legally dubious.

• 3:09:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:00Jordi Hays?

  Kane says, "Oh no, someone call the moon police."

• 3:09:06John Coogan?

  Uh, well, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Let me tell you about MongoDB first. MongoDB, what's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build it, own the data platform that powers it. And without further ado, we have Sam from Corazon. Welcome to the stream. Thank you so much for taking- Hey guys. How you doing? All right.

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Great, great setup here. Great mic, great background, great polo. Nailed it across the board.

• 3:09:31John Coogan?

  But we'll let, we'll let you introduce- I don't look like you guys. Huh? Well, white, white, markets up.

• 3:09:36Jordi Hays?

  So we're all in white.

• 3:09:38John Coogan?

  We're, yeah, we're happy. Uh, how are you doing? Uh, please introduce yourself and, and, and the group. Fun.

• 3:09:44Speaker 12

  Hi, I'm Sam Yagan, co-founder of Corazon Capital. I spent most of my life as a founder, Spark Notes, OkCupid.

• 3:09:52Speaker 12

  Involved with Tinder, Grindr, so you know, hopefully got you through school and hopefully got you some dates. And now investing in the future of consumer AI.

• 3:10:00John Coogan?

  Do you want to focus on the dating market with this fund? Do you think that there's opportunities for new platforms in AI?

• 3:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest question I have for you is, are you surprised that we're, you know, a few years into the AI boom? And when you look at the top 25 chart in the App Store, it's still like pretty much just LLMs and incumbent, you know, consumer products.

• 3:10:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:24Speaker 12

  Yeah, that's going to change. I think the entire consumer stack is going to get rebuilt. That I think the incumbents, most of the consumer incumbents are at risk.

• 3:10:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:34Speaker 12

  I do think dating is a pretty protected category because you need liquidity.

• 3:10:39Speaker 12

  The big apps are always the big apps. Yeah. But I think for almost everything else, I think the way we message each other, I think the way we connect with each other, I think the way we find jobs, the way we find friends. I think all that's going to change and it's going to be AI powered.

• 3:10:52John Coogan?

  At the same time, so on a relative basis, isn't there maybe counterintuitively more opportunity if you're building in consumer AI? If you go into something that needs a liquidity pool like the dating market and you can maybe use AI or just come up with a unique wedge, get over the cold start problem, get some liquidity on the platform and then maybe you're better positioned because you can't be fast followed by a copycat. That's just like cloning all your features because they won't have liquidity, but you do.

• 3:11:20Speaker 12

  If you can get past the cold start problem, that's right. But I actually think in the case of dating, I think the incumbents are much better positioned.

• 3:11:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:11:28Speaker 12

  To leverage AI. But I think there are lots of other places where, and I'm surprised so many VCs are running from consumer right now. But I think AI is going to change, transform the way consumers interact with technology in a way that, you know, has never happened since the dawn of the internet itself.

• 3:11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, so talk about some opportunities.

• 3:11:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I wanted to ask like, what are you actually looking for in an early stage consumer founder? Cause it's very rare, you know, your case, you've had like multiple. Big hits. It's hard enough to have one. In my consumer, you know, the random consumer tech investments that I've made. Doesn't matter if I'm investing, you know, pre-product or after they've gotten to a million users. They usually end up as zeros. So it's a, it's, it's, it's an absolutely brutal game.

• 3:12:17Speaker 12

  Welcome to venture capital.

• 3:12:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, and I would just say like this, like, you know, the handful of zeros that I've had of like, you know, concentrated, concentrated in consumer.

• 3:12:28Speaker 12

  Yeah. I do think consumer tends to be much more variable than B2B businesses. You tend to either get, find product market fit and find a way to scale or you don't. It's very hard to end up, I think, in the middle range in consumer businesses, which I think is why it's so attractive as a venture capital investment. If you can get them right, you get them really right. And that's what we're looking for. You asked about founders. I think AI founders are no different from your previous types of founders. In the early stage, we're really looking for founders who understand the process of finding product market fit. That's all that matters in the early stage. And I actually think AI can be a little bit deceptive that way because you can get the first few users to adopt because people are so curious right now. But I don't think that means you've necessarily found product market fit that's scalable.

• 3:13:13Speaker 12

  In the way that it used to be much harder to get that first million users. And I think it's a little easier to do that now.

• 3:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Yeah. The, the, just in, just this year, I've seen like the exciting, kind of one aspect of why now is, I think, exciting to make a consumer fund is you're just seeing like thou, you know, a thousand X the number of apps. I'm, I'm talking to a family friend later today that's like, you know, built, built their own, built their own app, right? They're very excited about it. They want to, they want to get my feedback. And I just think there's so many people that were kind of gated by not having access to engineering talent or didn't know how to code themselves. And now they're building apps. So I think like the bar, the bar is going to go up pretty dramatically. I wanted to ask, like, do you think there is room for, like,

• 3:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Taking like the capital intensivity of deep tech and bringing it to consumer because and I'm specifically asking because of like TikTok. TikTok spent how many billions of dollars on customer acquisition? They had a product with product market fit. They did some interesting things around kind of juicing engagement from, from at least my, my point of view, but then they also spent like hundreds of millions or billions of dollars on acquiring users. Is that something that you think, you think you'll see in the fund in, in some kind of breakout companies?

• 3:14:32Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think that's a, that's a great and very nuanced point that you make, which is are AI companies going to be more effective at acquiring customers or not? And I think AI hasn't really, you know, your, your example earlier about an AI based dating app, you just kind of assumed you'd get over the cold start problem, but you didn't really explain how you were going to do that. And so I don't think, I don't think, other than there's a little bit more word of mouth early on because people are so curious about any new AI app. I don't think any, you know, they've really figured out how to leverage AI differently to scale these apps. And so I do think your point about bringing some of the capital intensivity, I do think that'll all be reduced, but I don't know if it's going to be reduced on the marketing side specifically, for sure on the engineering side.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  Okay. So yeah, does that change anything about the investment strategy when I hear 100 million fund? I have some conception of the type of checks at various stages that you might write, but do you think there will be anything about running a $100 million fund in 2026 that will be different if I just look at the size of checks and spaces that you're occupying versus, you know, five, 10 years ago?

• 3:15:39Speaker 12

  Yeah. I think people are going to have to spend a lot less of that early capital building the infrastructure.

• 3:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:46Speaker 12

  Getting the code written. I mean, when I started Spark Notes, we had to go lease servers and plug them in in, you know, colo facilities back in the 1900s.

• 3:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:53Speaker 12

  Right now you just, you know, you're going to be able to get, you're going to get your app into the app store so much cheaper. And the real, the real separation among founders is going to be can you really figure out product market fit? It's not going to be about writing the code. It's not going to be about doing the marketing. It's about can you actually build a product that consumers love? And that's really what we know how to underwrite here at Corazon and what we've, what I've done throughout my career.

• 3:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Consumers love and has positive unit economics because we're seeing this whole other dynamic right now where there's products that people love, but if they were actually charging as much, you know, I'm thinking like image, image and video gen products where, you know, if you actually price it the way you would need to, to be building a business, you know, would, would the demand still be there?

• 3:16:35Speaker 12

  And if you think about, you know, when the internet started, the beauty was that everything became free to publish. And so you had all, the, the first business model that came out was like Spark Notes, just take Cliffs Notes and make it free. And, and tons and tons of companies did that. And now you actually have marginal costs associated with, you know, the tokens and, and the, and the, uh, the AI that you're using. And so now all of a sudden, uh, for the first time, you have cost of goods sold in a consumer tech business, which has really never happened before. And so that's one thing that founders aren't necessarily thinking about so much is what the end unit economics are. But I don't worry about that early stage. I worry about let's make, let's make a product people love and let's figure out the business model later.

• 3:17:12Jordi Hays?

  What have you learned about pivoting?

• 3:17:16Speaker 12

  That all the best founders have to pivot multiple times. Um, it's, you know, it's very rare that you hit the product on the, on the head, you know, the very first time you do it. Um, and I think that's why.

• 3:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Any memorable, any memorable pivots, you know, across your founder journey?

• 3:17:32Speaker 12

  Uh, yeah, I mean, we, you know, the original idea for Spark Notes was a, a humor site that was very much like the Onion. It's probably, probably older than you. Yeah. It was called the spark.com. In fact, the corporate name for Spark Notes was the spark.com. It was a humor site. Um, and then we kind of realized that that was a.

• 3:17:48Jordi Hays?

  We made a website for humor.

• 3:17:50John Coogan?

  Jokes. I love the Onion and I love Spark Notes.

• 3:17:53Speaker 12

  Yeah. So we basically tried to knock off the Onion first. Uh, we realized that was a really crappy business to be in. And then, uh, we pivoted to do study guides and that ended up being the business.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  How did you think, this is an odd question. I'm not trying to be aggressive because I, I loved, uh, Spark Notes. It helped me through the high school. Um, but how did you think about like the moral implications of potentially like helping you cheat? Because we just went through this like moral reckoning in Silicon Valley last year around Cluley, this company that was like very, very. You know, in the marketing, like cheat on everything, very aggressive about that. I don't remember Spark Notes ever marketing to me as like cheat. It was very much like supplemental, additional. Sometimes, you know, I'd read the Spark Notes chapter instead of the full chapter. If I was running late or late on sleep or wanted to hang out with some friends. But how did you process like the trade off or like the impact of that business?

• 3:18:44Speaker 12

  That's such a funny question. Here's the thing. People who want to cheat are going to cheat.

• 3:18:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:49Speaker 12

  And so what we focus on is let's make the best product, both for the people who want to get A's because they're doing the work. And if you're going to cheat, you might as well actually learn something in the process. And so we didn't give you the paper that you could turn in. We gave you the best path to learn the material. And honestly, you know, if you didn't read Romeo and Juliet, but read the Spark Note, you probably understood the book.

• 3:19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 3:19:10Speaker 12

  And so that's probably better rather than, and I think CliffsNotes never really did that. CliffsNotes was always about just try to get you through. And we really tried to make sure that you learned what you were doing.

• 3:19:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Did you ever, did you ever think about like deliberately how you position it in the marketing? Because you clearly had that philosophy, but you could have had the, the choice to like flyer every college campus with like cheat. And like, maybe that would draw people's attention. Did you ever think about like click baiting, rage baiting, any of that?

• 3:19:37Speaker 12

  No, no. In fact, our approach is the opposite, which is try to actually get the teachers to recommend us as the preferred study guide. So there were a bunch of teachers who would write us and say, hey, I've told my students, you can't use CliffsNotes, but you can use Spark Notes.

• 3:19:48John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:19:49Speaker 12

  And then all of a sudden, you've got the teachers endorsing you because you've made the better product. And so what seems like a cheating product gets repositioned as a study aid. And that's really what we wanted to.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And now teachers.

• 3:19:58Speaker 12

  But look, there are moral, there are moral questions. There are moral questions in every business. I mean, how do you think about?

• 3:20:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:03Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about investing in, in anything kind of education focused when it feels like L M's are just naturally quite good at that. But still, there's possibilities to build harnesses and stuff, the application layer.

• 3:20:18Speaker 12

  No, no. I actually think, I think AI is going to transform the way we, the way we learn for sure. There's a company we're invested in called Brilliant, which is an AI, a native AI tutor. You know, in the 1900s, you had a graphing calculator, you know, that was your like, you know, to get through high school. And I think the next generation of kids, you're going to have your personalized AI tutor that's going to get you through school. And, you know, we're funding that in our fund.

• 3:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's very funny. I completely agree with your intuition that like, oh, AI has already solved education. But then you look at like, Andre and Karpathy is building something in that space, which is just like fascinating because like, he has the most insight and has worked at OpenAI and Tesla like.

• 3:20:58Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder if there's, I wonder if there's actually like an AI hardware device specifically for learning, because like, think about the chat, like if a kid is sitting there and they're like, trying to use their phone to learn.

• 3:21:10John Coogan?

  But I could ask it about anything.

• 3:21:11Jordi Hays?

  But then you're getting a push notification from your friends, right? You know, there's potentially some of these AI hardware devices that have flopped because they were trying to replace the phone, or maybe replacing it in the wrong context. And you should be thinking like, what is the next TI84 that every student has that they're actually, you know, learning with?

• 3:21:28Speaker 12

  That's cool.

• 3:21:29John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, congratulations on the fundraiser. We want to ring the gong for you.

• 3:21:33Jordi Hays?

  It would be an honor.

• 3:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Well, hopefully get many of your founders on in the coming weeks, months and years.

• 3:21:45John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 3:21:47Speaker 12

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:21:48John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Talk to you later.

• 3:21:52Jordi Hays?

  Deep into the fourth hour.

• 3:21:53John Coogan?

  Deep into the fourth hour.

• 3:21:54Jordi Hays?

  We got a one hour countdown.

• 3:21:56John Coogan?

  We're, we're, we're coming up on one hour, one minute, 14 seconds until the launch.

• 3:22:03John Coogan?

  We have an interesting post from Andrew Reid, sharing on the 50th anniversary of Apple, the investment memo. This is the victory lap of all victory laps for a venture capitalist, writing $600,000 into, into.

• 3:22:20Jordi Hays?

  On a real piece of paper.

• 3:22:22John Coogan?

  On a piece of paper. And there are some handwritten notes on here. It said, "Will be tough to do this deal. Small amount, miniscule, high price, second position. CMS wants to guarantee..." It's a very interesting document. "Proposed financing structure, 600K to A and 600K to AG, friends and company. 480 to one venture investor. Invitees, Venrox."

• 3:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Julian Weiser says, "600K buys 10%. Very rich deal." Like, "I'm used to buying 60%."

• 3:22:53John Coogan?

  It's actually, it's actually crazy, crazy lore. Well, if you need something to do, it's not out yet, but maybe tomorrow, if you need some, kill some time. Donald has made a documentary about a bunch of friends of the show. Will DePue and Riley Walls and the, and the creators of the J Mail, Mail Suite. It's an attempt to capture what it feels like to be a young person in San Francisco right now. He's dropping that tomorrow, so you can go check it out.

• 3:23:22Jordi Hays?

  We have one last video to play for you today. Let's pull this up. Production team.

• 3:23:27John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 3:23:28Jordi Hays?

  It is in the chat for you.

• 3:23:30John Coogan?

  We also need to send.

• 3:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Profanity warning.

• 3:23:33John Coogan?

  Oh, profanity.

• 3:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Apparently someone was swearing on CNN. Let's get the audio on.

• 3:23:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Cover your ears.

• 3:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Glad I warned everyone of.

• 3:23:56John Coogan?

  I'm glad. It was worth it. We don't normally do it, but we're in the fourth hour and we got to sneak one in because it doesn't hit without it. So, sorry for the profanity, but that is a fantastic moment and we're very excited for the launch, which is happening in just one hour. So you can head over to NASA's livestream, YouTube, Twitch, probably other places, and check it out. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m.

• 3:24:26Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 3:24:27John Coogan?

  Pacific. Goodbye.