AI’s Power Problem, Apple Goes Meta on AI Glasses | Pat Gelsinger, Josh Isner, Sheel Mohnot, Santiago Nestares, Austin Federa

(01:18) - AI’s Power Problem (22:04) - Andrej Karpathy AI Models Law of Diminishing Returns (35:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:18) - Apple Goes Meta on AI Glasses (01:01:31) - Josh Isner, President of Axon, has been with the company since 2009, starting in the Leadership Development Program and advancing through various roles to his current position. In the conversation, he discusses Axon's evolution from a hardware-focused company to a leader in software solutions for public safety, highlighting innovations like the Draft One AI product that generates initial police reports from body camera transcripts, significantly reducing officers' administrative workload. He also touches on the strategic acquisition of Prepared AI to enhance emergency response times and emphasizes the importance of open APIs to ensure interoperability with other public safety technologies. (01:19:31) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:30:12) - Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has been vocal about the critical role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the company's future and the broader tech industry. He emphasizes that as everything becomes more digital, the demand for semiconductors, which power AI technologies, will continue to grow. Gelsinger refers to this trend as the "siliconomy," highlighting the increasing reliance on silicon-based technologies in our daily lives. Under Gelsinger's leadership, Intel has launched an "AI everywhere" strategy, aiming to integrate AI capabilities across its product lines. (02:16:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:29:41) - Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures, announced the successful raise of a new $140 million fund focused on pre-seed and seed-stage fintech companies. He discussed the firm's broad investment approach, including vertical SaaS and B2B marketplaces, and noted the evolving fintech landscape, highlighting recent public offerings by companies like Chime, Klarna, and Etoro. Mohnot also emphasized the importance of resilience for founders during challenging periods and shared his perspective on the competitive dynamics within the stablecoin sector. (02:40:30) - Santiago Nestares, co-founder of Dual Entry, an AI-driven ERP company, discusses their recent $90 million Series A funding and the challenges of modernizing legacy ERP systems. He highlights their innovative migration engine that enables rapid, low-risk transitions, allowing clients to experience the platform with their own data before committing. Nestares emphasizes the importance of reducing repetitive tasks for finance teams, enabling them to focus on strategic decision-making. (02:47:35) - Austin Federa, co-founder of DoubleZero and former Head of Strategy at the Solana Foundation, discusses how DoubleZero is building a high-performance, permissionless fiber network to enhance blockchain infrastructure by increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. He explains that the current internet was not designed for high-performance systems like blockchains, leading to inefficiencies and vendor lock-in due to data transfer costs. By creating a decentralized network of dedicated fiber and subsea cables, DoubleZero aims to provide faster, more efficient connectivity for distributed systems, starting with Solana validators as their initial market. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, October 2nd, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, Temple of Technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. That's right.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  It is good to be back.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  That is a lovely fedora, Jordy, if I say so myself. A yellow fedora, celebating ramp.com.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Also.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  Time is money.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Looking good.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. If you've been sleeping under a pile of receipts, you probably haven't heard the news. Ramp is doing a publicity stunt in Manhattan, in New York, the Big Apple, the city that never sleeps.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  With Kevin from the office.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  From the office. Yes, he's going to be locked in a box, I believe. I don't know how much they've actually teased about this, but we obviously know a lot. But there are some billboards up and some out of home ads, and they look great. And the tagline that I did see on the timeline that is public says, "I'm CFO now." Of course, a reference to the social network and Mark Zuckerberg. And it's a lot of fun, and we will be tracking this stunt as it.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  That is right. I cannot get enough of this fedora. I might start wearing this every day.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  And I believe it might be streamed live. It might be on Restream, one livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  The top story today is, of course, about the slop trough. How are we going to keep the lights on at the slop trough?

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  The slop trough, it takes an incredible amount of electricity to keep the lights on for the piggies.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Everyone was worried about water.

• 1:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Turns out.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Electricity may be a bigger deal.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Data centers need water.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  They need water, but they recycle the water. They recycle the water. So the water isn't that big of a deal, maybe. We don't know all the data, but.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  But if you live next to a data center, get ready for your electricity prices to keep skyrocketing.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  And what in the, you know, among, you know, many of the issues with that. Is that it will just ultimately make huge amounts of everyday Americans genuinely hate AI.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Because ChatGPT is cool.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  They might use some other tools.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  But if somebody's sitting there watching their electrical bill just climb month over month, year over year.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  At some point, they're going to look around and say, I miss when I could just Google something and I didn't have to pay an extra hundred dollars a month for power.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Totally. So this is already hitting the timeline. It's clearly in the zeitgeist. This question of electricity prices, is it worth it culturally as a trade off? We get AI, but we pay more in electricity, whether or not using AI. This has been bubbling up for a long time, but the Sora thing seems like a big deal. I don't even know if this is a Sora video, but there's a post from September 5th. Oh, that must have been pre Sora. So this wasn't even Sora, but someone generated an AI video of a woman smashing.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  Play this video because there's going to be maybe one person on earth that thinks the, you know, massive increase in electrical.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Is worth it. Okay. So let's play this video. Oh God, not with the sound.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Okay. Horrific.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Worth it. Worth every penny.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  And clearly fake and weird and the glass flows through. Pretty interesting physics sim. Tyler's over there being like, we're going to train robots on that. We got it. It's an accurate physics sim. It's worth it. We're getting humanized.

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  This is, this is how we get to the Dyson sphere.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a critical path to the Dyson sphere, obviously. If you, if you're doubting that, you are so.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  What's notable here is that the guy, Chipotle Rowan.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Says, pretty cool that my electric bill has gone up 25% so other people can make this crap. And he gets 300,000 likes.

• 3:51John Coogan?

  Likes on X. Like, this is the

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  That's basically all the users. That's basically every user liked this post.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Eight million views, 17,000 reposts. It's a lot. And I wanted to dig into some numbers, so I did fact check that 25%. I think it's real. So in 2021, the average electric bill for an average American was $1,452. It's like a significant amount if you're an average American, you're making 60K or something like that, or 100K a year. And now that's up to $1,728. That's exactly 25% increase. So it does seem like electricity prices have gone up by 25%.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  And if you look at some of the charts, there really is a spike right after 2020, when AI investment started ramping, electricity prices went up. Now, some of this might be COVID, but it does seem like from 2010 to 2020, electricity prices were pretty stable, about 12 cents per kilowatt hour in the US city average on the St. Louis Fed. But then 2020 hits, AI comes, and things have been up and to the right ever since, and not in a good way. JP Morgan estimated that 70% of last year's increased electricity cost was the result of data center demand.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  And the flow here is, the logic is not quite perfect, but it's not great either. So it's that AI slop will be irresistibly dominant. We've seen this with everyone who works at our company, becoming entirely one-shotted by short-form AI video. No one can get anything done. It's a disaster. It's a crisis.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Of course, John's being sarcastic.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Somewhat sarcastic.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  There's a couple people that have been a little

• 5:49John Coogan?

  They're on notice. They're on notice. But yeah, so you have to assume Meta Vibes, OpenAI, Sora will be massive successes, and energy prices will skyrocket if humans spend all their time at the slop trough. I don't think personally that there'll be a fast takeoff in AI slop consumption. I think it will kind of grow slowly. I think this TikTok is just one of Of many that people will watch, but there's no denying that energy prices are rising. Per capita consumption, interestingly, in electricity has been down, flat to down, mostly thanks to efficiency standards, but also there's just not that many new things that require a lot of energy. So a lot of people are migrating from incandescent lightbulbs to LED lightbulbs, to more efficient cars, more efficient washing machines, dishwashers.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Everything's getting more efficient. So the use is actually pretty flat, but the price is going up because we haven't been building any new electrical infrastructure. But that is changing. So the good news is that American energy production is growing with tons more capacity coming online soon. Companies are working across all categories. And there's actually a bit of a fight developing between nuclear and solar maxis. Elon is a total solar maxi, but there are a bunch of folks who are going all in on nuclear.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Including Rick Perry.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Rick Perry.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Firmi IPO'd today at a $15 billion valuation. Not bad for a nine-month-old company.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  A land lease and not a lot else.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  And the hyperscalers are doing deals to bring decommissioned nuclear power plants back online. I see that as a very positive development. We've talked to probably, what, five different, 10 different nuclear CEOs on this company, on this program, from Radiant to Velar, to the nuclear company, to General Matter. There's so many companies in the space that are doing cool stuff in nuclear. And hopefully, all of that comes online, although the nuclear projects are very slow. But there is more capacity coming online. The, and,

• 7:57John Coogan?

  and, you know, the tech industry just has no incentive to become maybe more of an enemy of average Americans. They're not, they're not polling super great, but this could potentially make it worse.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the tech industry got through the, the social media.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Is terrible and bad crisis. Everybody's sort of, a lot of the people that were most negative around it are still power users of social media.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I mean, the, the social network too, like the, the leaked plot is about how.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  They were like meddling in all the, I think it was like election stuff.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:31Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know if people are fully over it yet.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, people are, people are upset generally. And that gives the tech industry an incentive to build more electricity so this doesn't become a bigger issue. Sam Altman's guided towards 250 gigawatts of capacity at OpenAI by 2033. That's an insane number. For reference, in 2023, 10 years before his prediction, America as a whole produced average power of around 500 gigawatts, 485. And so he's saying, I need half of the power in America currently for chat GPT and AI slot, right? And, and if he doesn't build more and doesn't justify more builds, that would mean way higher prices, right? Because OpenAI would be buying all of that electricity and selling it.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention, he'd have to choose between curing cancer, free education.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  Which he, he's effectively requested.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  No one wants to make that trade off.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Not make him choose.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  No one wants to make that trade off. So the, the, that 250 gigawatts will not just be pulled from the grid broadly. It will be built. There will be new builds and that's already happening. So AI companies, the problem right now is that AI companies are pulling forward energy way faster than new capacity can be built. Like, it's very easy to buy some GPUs, rack them in a tent and run the one gigawatt cluster. Like Colossus 2 is an example of that. Like build it and then pull the electricity from the grid. It's not as easy to build a new nuclear reactor. It's not, it's not that easy to build entirely new energy capacity. But there are certainly plans to do that. Back in the day.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  There's also, there's also some new, I saw a good post earlier from an account called Pantex Cap, talking about how power companies are overwhelmed and tired of a lot of the BS that's happening in some of these new data center build outs. They're putting up huge barriers to weed out the BS. If you want 500 megawatts from Georgia Power, you now have to put up. Six hundred million upfront.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Upfront.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  And it's held against a ten year power agreement and withdrawn monthly.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Alabama Power is making people to commit to a minimum of ninety percent of the power requested. So you can't ask for five hundred when you want two hundred and release it later. So a lot of people will be requesting a lot.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  And just not even necessarily confident that they're going to use it.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Understanding that it's an asset to have access to it.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes sense.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 10:54John Coogan?

  I mean, years ago, the hyperscalers, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, they were in a very stable place in terms of energy consumption. Uh, pre-AI boom. And it was so stable that they could basically promise to go all in on clean energy going forward. Uh, they made net zero pledges, they satisfied a bunch of ESG requirements. But now the AI, AI race is on. And so new, new data centers need to come online and we're seeing that, uh, with these new data centers in tents and all these new construction projects. Uh, natural gas, solar, recommissioned nuclear, anything's on the table. Uh, we've heard that quote before from Chase over at Crusoe. AI companies would burn whale oil if they could.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  The, the energy is so scarce, it really is the most important resource for all of this. And so, uh, data centers consumed about four and a half percent of US electricity in twenty twenty-three. And that number's going, growing quickly, could be six percent in the next few years. Um, by late twenty twenty-four, six point five gigawatts of new capacity was underway. That's actually not just for the data center world, but just in America, they're adding six point five gigawatts of capacity. Now, remember, we're almost at five hundred gigawatts. So that's like a one to two percent increase. It's like not that much, but, uh, there are now plans for up to a hundred gigawatts of, of new build out. Uh, over the next few years, obviously, a lot of that, you know, is up for, it's like still at the LOI phase.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  But that would mean a twenty percent, like, like twenty percent increase in energy production. Is sort of like being papered right now. You can think about it that way. Like, America and the business community and the energy world and the AI companies, they've all come together and said like, okay, let's sign and let's jump over the threshold and let's go build an extra 20% capacity, which would be incredible. Because if AI flatlines and people don't show up to the slop trough and they're just like, I'm good, just give me a database query, please. And then, and they go back to 10 blue links, who knows? Then, basically, you have 20% more capacity, price should fall, it's a basic supply and demand equation.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  On the, on the flip side, if tech builds the infinite jest ultimate slot machine, but nobody comes, you know, in that case, energy prices fall. On the flip side, if demand is certainly, demand is certainly there today. You can just look at Foundation Labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind. They're all seeing exponential growth in token generation. If it's an exponential curve, get ready for expensive electricity. But if it's a sigmoid curve, and we're on our sigmoid grind sets, America probably overbuilds and then prices fall. The internet overbuild that followed the dot com boom was pretty positive externality. It birthed a ton of new tech companies that were able to leverage cheap broadband and backhaul and internet services, once the application's actually caught up.

• 13:46John Coogan?

  It's even easier to imagine a positive scenario with excess energy lying around, because you can do even more with it than just fiber lines. But all of this is tight walking on a power line. And so, interesting to keep track on it, Sagar and Jetty had a good take. So Derek Thompson shared a series of charts in the first slide of our deck today. Derek Thompson, friend of the show, says data centers and AI are gobbling up electricity, but the share differs significantly by state. Between 2010 and 2025, data centers went from less than 5% to roughly 40% of Virginia's electricity consumption. Sweet Jesus. And of course, the, the city, the states that are not on here.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Like California. California produces an immense amount of electricity, doesn't have a lot of data centers. When we use Netflix in California, it goes, it comes out of Oregon usually. When you're on the East Coast, it's not, the energy's not made in New York state. It's made in Virginia and then you access the US East and AWS cluster. And we're seeing that, you know, with Texas and Mississippi and Alabama and all the new data center construction. Not really happening in the biggest states. And so you can look at this and see, wow, Virginia's at 40% electricity consumption. Well, nationally, we're still at, you know, 4%, 5% of data center consumption, but it's rising and it's a big deal. And it's gonna be crazy in those state legislations. So yeah.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  Saagar's point is that, you know, right now, effectively, single-family homeowners, businesses are subsidizing the, basically subsidizing the cost for these data centers that are coming online.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, yeah, he says, why should we be paying sky-high power bills for Sam Altman's AI slop video generator? And it's a question that tech will have to answer. And then also.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy because of course, Sam Altman, leader of OpenAI, you know, was a driving force in creating Sora. But he's also, videos of him are the ones, are some of the most viral videos created on the platform so far. So it really is, it really is him.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  But we are at this precipice where AI is cool and tech people are into it. But it's becoming a, it's becoming culturally, like the danger here is because it becomes like NFTs, right? I think you were saying this.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah, potentially hated.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:22Jordi Hays?

  Even faster than social media.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Yes, especially with the video stuff. The video stuff has the same potential for like, oh, this just bugs me in the same way that the expensive monkey picture bugged people. People weren't that annoyed by Vitalik Buterin building Ethereum and nerding out about secure blockchains. It was when it became, okay, wait, what? A celebrity is hawking a million dollar monkey picture on a late night TV show and I'm losing my mortgage off of it. Like, why is this happening? That's where people got really frustrated. And I think it'll be the same thing if people are like, okay.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't like this and it's increasing my.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's very different when it's like, like, I have a job and there was a little bit of a boring thing and now I use ChatGPT to summarize those meeting notes and it's delightful. And I'm okay with that versus like, this stuff is not good and I don't like it. And and also I'm paying for it. That sentiment that got 300,000 likes.

• 17:21Jordi Hays?

  There's also, there's also a growing sentiment around even the, the non-coding use cases, what the value is. We had, we had dinner last night with a very successful entrepreneur, who's not really, he's, he's, you know, built a widely known SaaS company, but not really in the Silicon Valley bubble, not kind of caught up in the AI hype cycle himself. And he said something, a line that stood out, which is, AI is really good at helping people do unnecessary work faster, right? It's like producing big reports, producing research, right?

• 18:02John Coogan?

  What was your example? It was like?

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  And and you gave the example of, you know, if you're prompting an AI and you're like, kind of bullet, bulging out, for example, an email or a document, you can kind of get, you could kind of just send, give somebody the bullet points.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  That's because I have ChatGPT running in my brain. Like, if you send me three bullet points and you just say, hey, John, imagine this is like five paragraphs. I can just do that in my head in two seconds. It's very easy for me to do that based on the facts.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Organic intelligence.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, you know what else I can do? I can imagine that it's being read to me by a monkey on a jet ski. I can just imagine that. If you tell me three bullet points, hey, today we're going to talk about AI, we're going to talk about crypto, we're going to talk about ramp. I can just imagine a monkey saying that to me. Like, you don't actually have to instantiate it. You can just share the, share the idea and I can instantiate it in my head. But.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, the example you had was was funny was like if you're going to a five minute meeting and you're like, I used AI to generate a fifty slide deck when in a four hundred page memo. And it's like, did that help? That seems entirely unnecessary.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, a while back, when when GPT psychosis was becoming, you know, more discussed, I was predicting that AI was going to go through a really, really rough PR cycle on par with what social media started to go through.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  I think that's generally happened.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  You correct in the macro, maybe.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, no, I actually think I think generally correct, right?

• 19:28John Coogan?

  There's an article today.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every legacy media company has been putting out articles on people that are, you know, using AI in weird ways and going crazy. Or talking about how, you know, chat, you know, chat GPT or another product is like mentioning, you know, the word suicide a bunch to to users. They it seems like they they release some pretty big updates.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  Recently, that basically take people from four O back to GPT five reality if they sense behavior that's that's unhealthy. But again, every legacy media company has been pushing out content around people going crazy through AI. Now you add in, you know, electricity costs going up. And I think it's just going to continue.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Well, the good news is that we've been here before, and there are two positive possible outcomes here. One is just that the tech community comes together and builds a bunch of nuclear and solar and just power gets cheaper. Like, that would be amazing. We need more energy production and clean energy production is kind of limitless. It's magical when it works.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Problem is, AI usage is exponential.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  Tokens.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  But maybe it's a sigmoid function and we wind up building even more and then prices do fall. It's totally possible. The flip side is that we've seen there are solutions to energy intense algorithms. We've seen this in past with crypto. So there was the same during the NFT bubble, there was a there was a huge push for, oh, Ethereum is using so much energy for proof of work. They were able to migrate to proof of stake. And

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:03John Coogan?

  You know, energy prices fell and it actually took a huge hit to Nvidia's sales that year because.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  NFT companies and blockchain companies didn't need to buy as many GPUs because they were able to do the same algorithm effectively on a more efficient.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying Jensen is Satoshi?

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. I mean, it was extremely bullish for him, for sure. But I do think that we have successfully moved past the crypto is using all the energy narrative, and that was a technological solution to that. What are you laughing at? The fedora finance.

• 21:42Jordi Hays?

  Fedora finance.

• 21:42John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of crypto, Privy, the wallet infrastructure for every bank, Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Official wallet infrastructure provider.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  And you're not going to be needing a gigawatt of energy capacity to spin up an application on crypto rails.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Great line, Pericles. The fedora finance.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yes, it's great. Well, Andrej Karpathy had some reactions to the Dwarakesh Patel podcast with Richard Sutton. He said his background, "The bitter lesson has become a bit of a biblical text in frontier LLM circles. Researchers routinely talk about and ask whether this or that approach or idea is sufficiently bitter lesson-pilled, meaning arranged so that it benefits from added computation for free, as a proxy for whether it's going to work or even worth pursuing. The underlying assumption being that LLMs are of course highly bitter lesson-pilled. Indeed, just look at LLM scaling laws, the Chinchilla scaling laws discovered by Google, where if you put, compute on the x-axis, number

• 22:49John Coogan?

  go up and to the right. So it's amusing to see that Sutton, the author of the post, is not so sure that LLMs are bitter lesson-pilled at all. They are trained on a giant data set of fundamentally human data, which is both human-generated and finite." What do you do when you run out? This is the data wall that was a popular point of contention for a while. How do you prevent a human bias? So there you have it. Bitter lesson pilled LLM researchers taken down by the author of the bitter lesson directly. Ruff, he says. In some sense, Dwarash, who represents the LLM researchers viewpoint in the pod and Sutton are slightly speaking past each other because Sutton has a very different architecture in mind and LLMs break a lot of principles.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  He calls himself a classicist and evokes the original concept of Alan Turing building a child machine, a system capable of learning through experience by dynamically interacting with the world. There's no giant pre-training stage of imitating internet web pages if you're a kid. Dylan Patel was on Invest Like the Best and he keeps talking about how he has like a baby cousin, I think, who learns by like, and he keeps using this example of like the baby puts the hand in the mouth or puts the foot in the mouth and like learns immediately. And it's not like the baby looked at you and saw like, this is what a hand tastes like. This is what a foot tastes like, or like, this is what a rock tastes like. The baby definitely learned that from first principles through exploring the actual physical environment and that's not what LLMs do.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  And so there is a good point there.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  So there's no supervised, there's also no supervised fine tuning at which point, at which he points out is absent in the animal kingdom. It's a subtle point, but Sutton is right in the strong sense. Animals may of course observe demonstrations, but their actions are not directly forced or tele-operated by other animals. Another important note he makes is that even if you treat, if you just treat pre-training as an initialization of a prior before you fine tune with reinforcement learning, Sutton sees the approach as tainted with human bias and fundamentally off course, a bit like when Alpha Zero, which has never seen human games of Go, beats Alpha Go, which initializes with them.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  In Sutton's worldview, all there is is an interaction with the world via reinforcement learning where the reward functions are partially environment-specific but also intrinsically motivated, e.g. fun, curiosity, and related to the quality of the prediction in your world model. And the agent is always learning at test time by default. It's not trained once and then deployed thereafter. Overall, Sutton is a lot more interested in what we have in common with the animal kingdom instead of what differentiates us. "If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done," he says. Well, speaking of agents, go check out cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So, Andrej Karpathy gives his take. If we understood a squirrel, we'd be almost done. Andrej Karpathy gives his take on the Dwarash Patel, Richard Sutton pod. He says, "First, I should say that I think Sutton was a great guest for the pod, and I like that the AI field maintains entropy of thought and that not everyone is exploiting the local iteration of LLMs." I completely agree. It was a great pod. "AI has gone through too many discrete transitions of the dominant approach to lose them. And I also think that his criticism of LLMs is not bitter lesson-pilled, is not inadequate. Frontier LLMs are now highly complex artifacts with a lot of humanness involved at all the

• 26:30John Coogan?

  stages. The foundation, the pre-training data is all human text, the fine-tuning data is human and curated, the reinforcement learning environment mixture is tuned by human engineers. We do not, in fact, have an actual, single, clean, actually bitter lesson-pilled, turn-the-crank algorithm that you could unleash upon the world and see it learn automatically from experience alone. Does such an algorithm even exist?" asks Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, head of Tesla's autopilot program for a while now, working on something new. Binding it would- What is he actually working on? He is working on education technology, correct? Yeah, it's called Eureka Labs, I think. They haven't released anything yet, though. He's in the trenches. Yeah, I think the question that I have is-

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Is, you know, Ilya has said broadly, they're focused on their own definition of superintelligence and that, and it seems like he might not just, it certainly doesn't feel like he's gonna launch a chatbot anytime soon.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Ad network.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Ad network or business process optimizer, enterprise software.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be mad, I wouldn't be mad at that.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  I would love that.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  But I would hope that he's working on something.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  Maybe just like an entirely novel.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, entirely novel. That he could unleash on the world.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it makes sense to give him the budget and time to go figure that out and explore. I love it. Two example proofs are commonly argued, are commonly offered to argue that such a thing is possible. The first example is the success of AlphaZero learning to play Go completely from scratch with no human supervision whatsoever, but the game of Go is clearly such a simple, closed environment that it's difficult to see the analogous formulation in the messiness of reality. I love Go, but algorithmically and categorically, it is essentially a harder version of tic-tac-toe owned. Sorry, Go players, stick to tic-tac-toe, buddy. The second example is that of animals like squirrels.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  And here, personally, I am quite hesitant whether it's appropriate because animals arise by a very different computational process and via different constraints than what we have practically available to us in the industry. Animal brains are nowhere near the blank slate they appear to be at birth. First, a lot of what is commonly attributed to learning is, in Andrea's opinion, a lot more maturation. And second, even that which is clearly learning and not maturation is a lot more fine tuning on top of something clearly powerful and pre-existing, the brain. For example, a baby zebra is born and within a few dozen minutes, it can run around the savanna and follow its mother. This is a highly complex sensory motor task, and there's no way in my mind that this is achieved from scratch tabula rasa.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  The brains of animals and the billions of, and the billions of parameters within have a powerful initialization encoded into ATCGs of their DNA, trained via the outer loop optimization in the course of evolution. If the baby zebra spasmed its muscles around at random as a reinforcement learning policy, would you, would have you do at initialization, it would not get very far. Similarly, our AIs now have neural networks with billions of parameters.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Andre goes on, he does give a summary. He says, anyway, in summary overall and actionably, I think this pod is solid, real talk from Sutton to the Frontier LLM researchers who might be gear shifted a little too much into the exploit mode and not enough in exploring. Probably we are still not sufficiently bitter lesson pilled and there's a very good chance of more powerful ideas and paradigms other than exhaustive bench building and bench maxing and bench pressing and animals might be a good source of inspiration. Just look at how a gorilla can bench press. That's what we need to do.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  Is anybody actually

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Working on that?

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  Working on getting gorillas?

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Come on. You got the robot Olympics. Let's see some Olympic lifting.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Intrinsic motivation, fun, curiosity, empowerment, multi-agent, self-play, culture, user imagination. I keep coming back to this idea of like, we're obsessed with this like agentic horizon, one hour, two hours. I'm like, my initialization prompt, humanities initialization prompt is like, be fruitful, multiply, right? That's Genesis. And I think there's something where humans, the goal that we seek is like, survive forever, reproduce forever. And so I don't really see my life as like a string of one hour tasks or five hour tasks. I see it as like a hundred year journey, potentially thousands of years when

• 31:14John Coogan?

  I think about my multiple generations. And so I, it just feels like we're pretty far from something that is satisfying, all the different criteria. And of course, you know we need smell-a-vision and we're not making any progress there. Tyler, what was your reaction to this?

• 31:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. I think like Sutton is very RL pilled. I think like

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, RL pilled?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Sutton.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Are we in the RL paradigm?

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's still, I mean, we're still on like very early days, right? I think Sutton envisions this thing, it's like, it's just RL, right? At its core, you start with nothing and you learn the world.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  Where the current paradigm is like, first you basically mimic the world.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Pre-training a bunch of stuff.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  And you're basically like, at first, when you're training a model, it's literally just like memorizing facts.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And then you slowly get it to generalize.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yep. So right now, the way I think about it is like, for a modern chatbot that I'm using, there's maybe like 300 megawatts of pre-training compute and then 300 megawatts of RL thrown at it. And it's like a 50/50 balance or something. And then maybe he's saying it should be like 100% balanced towards RL and like there should not be any of the.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, so to ground this in Sora.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Please.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Part of why this new app is strategic is they're generating an asset and then they get to immediately.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  See feedback.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  See feedback, basically. The reward is more engagement and, you know, watching it longer.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  If you see a Sora video and you just on X, OpenAI is not really able to leverage that.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Right? You could indirectly be like, okay, this went viral, like, maybe that's good there. But in the app, if you're in the trough, you're immediately, you know, the time that you've spent watching the video. Did you like it? Did you send it? All of that is providing feedback.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  For the model.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  RL, yeah.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I think if you look at just training, like RL is nowhere close to half of compute. It's like way less. But I think it is like, it is like a very cool idea to basically have this very like pure model in some sense. It's just like experiencing the world and learning from that.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  But I don't know, like, if you go to the Dylan Patel kind of example of the baby, like.

• 33:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Putting its finger in its mouth to like figure out where its fingers are.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Like, the baby is not just like randomly twitching, like its nerves are not just randomly firing. There's still some like prior that comes from evolution or whatever. But there is like, it's not just like purely experiencing things and then updating.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  That there's something there.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  I was thinking about it with the zebra example, like, that's true, but also like, the baby is kind of randomly twitching in the womb. And like, the baby, like, you can see on the, on the, what's it called, the oscilloscope or something? I forget what it's called. There's some sort of like device that you can like look inside and see the baby. And the baby's moving like very basically, but probably like. Doing some reinforcement learning essentially like like pre birth I think I don't know.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, on some level, like there is some encoding that is going on into the baby of like, this is how like you can walk around or something like that. There's some like I think if you just had a baby and like without any other people around.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Like maybe it could like learn to walk and stuff, but there's some like I think there is still some imitation going on generally like Sutton is saying that like none of it is imitation. It's all just like RL, your experiencing world, then you're updating on those on the actions you took. You have some goal, you either like complete the action or you don't and then you update.

• 34:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  I think I think imitation is like more important, right? There's like the kind of like the Girardian take or whatever is that like humans are are apes, right? To ape is to imitate.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  If you drop a baby in a prison cell from birth, it'll never learn to walk because it needs to see a human walk to learn that.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  I think they'd figure it out.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe not walking, but like doing, you know, useful things like it's not gonna.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  I think I think if I think if my son was born in a padded closet and just given food and an Excel sheet, he'd be writing VBA macros in five years with no external.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Well, maybe it's been encoded into your DNA.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Pure, pure reinforcement learning experimentation from first principles. I think it's possible. I don't know. Anyway, Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Hey, man, just wanted to say, I think we talked about this yesterday, but I love it so much. I put it back in. Hey, man, I just wanted to reach out and say I loved how much you drank at the networking event last night. There are a few of those. This is becoming a new meme format. There was another one.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  I'll find the.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Find the other one for me in the meantime.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Apparently there's a game that makes you a YC partner for a day. You watch old pitches and guess if they made the batch. I wonder where this data came from. Usually YC is pretty locked down with these with these old pitches, but this seems like a fun game. I went to the top of Hacker News yesterday.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Here's the other post. Hey, man, just wanted to follow up and say I admired your ability after three drinks to persistently ask who had a bag at the super serious networking event last night.

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Super serious networking event. Yeah, I could never. What do you think about, I was, I was texting with Tyler about this, like, uh, there's this post, Sam Altman is playing 4D chess, Sora 2 is about to take over social media, the virality is guaranteed once this scales, billions in ad revenue will flow straight into more compute, fueling the flywheel, in a year, Sora 2 will be so efficient and cheap that margins explode, you can't out accelerate Sam Altman, and I wanted to reflect on this idea that, uh, Sam said, it's way less strange to watch a feed full of memes of yourself than I thought it would be. Not sure what to make of this, and Gabriel.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's, again, my read on this is, I don't, uh, I don't fully believe that he actually, I, I don't know, I don't know how to read into this, other than he is very incentivized to normalize people being deep faked all the time, right?

• 37:17John Coogan?

  I mean, it's a crazy, crazy move, to just be like, my likeness, I'm going first. My li- I'm merging, I'm merging.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  So, him going first?

• 37:27John Coogan?

  Being on the first SpaceX rocket.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  Hey, it's not so bad, it's not so bad. I don't want to, turn, turn this off, I don't, I don't want to see that.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I don't like the Skibidi Tyler thing to begin with, and then you mash it up, and it gets even more horrifying.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, he, uh, he went first, he's, uh, very incentivized to get a bunch of other big names, personalities to, uh, agree to do the same thing.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  Did, is this an example?

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  I would imagine it's very weird to watch videos of yourself committing crimes, you know, there's a video of, I guess a video of him in blackface floating around. Um, there's a bunch of videos that I think would be incredibly strange to watch of yourself, uh, so.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  But stranger than your expectation? Because I would expect it to be weird, I, I expected it to be weird when Tyler sent me a deep fake of myself bench pressing and then turning into a golden retriever. I was kind of just like, eh, eh, this is, well, this is below my expectation. Like, it is less weird to me, I don't know. You haven't seen one of yourself yet, right? Has anyone made one of you? You have an upload.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I've done, I haven't.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  You haven't done the cameo thing?

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  I haven't agreed to do the cameo thing.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  What, what about you, Tyler? Did you expect it to be weird to see yourself in a Sora video? And then was it weirder or less weird than you expected?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't think it's that weird. But it's also like, it's still not like. That good where like it's kind of me, but it's not like all the way there.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  But I think, okay, Jordy, do you think that him basically releasing a social media where like half the content is just him, is that an aura farming move?

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  I think it increases his fame, which is a resource that he's able to leverage.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  But I don't know that it, it, you know, a lot of the videos that, that I've seen don't,

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  I don't think are necessarily good for the brand, but it's also just putting out so much stuff into the world that it's just all gets diluted and you don't read too much into any one video because it's not created by him.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Do you believe in Cosgrove's law?

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  That aura farming is all you need?

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, always be aura farming. Okay, I think I, I have a text somewhere, but um, yeah, okay, basically aura farming, right?

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  You can think of like, most things are, are on some level like based off like interacting with other people, like, like any kind of, if you're, you know, raising around, if you're gonna make some deal, right, it's based off like your interaction with someone else.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people raise, wanna raise from tier ones because every dollar is the same, but you get to aura farm the, you know, the, the GP.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then it's like, like in, like when you're raising around, you wanna be aura farming the VC, right, because they wanna be like, oh, this guy's like, pretty sick, like I wanna give him money, or something like this, right? So basically, the idea is always be aura farming, right? You always wanna be doing something that increases your aura, because everything you do, like any kind of interaction you have, will be influenced by like your personal aura.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yes, but stretch the analogy.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Like wearing a fedora of finance.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  But stretch the analogy to the absolute limits, sometimes when you farm, your lands grow fallow, and you have a, you have a, you have a failed harvest, and you can also salt the ground so that nothing will ever grow.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  No bounty.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  And so, there is a world where you go out to aura farm, you set up your aura farm, but someone has salted the ground and you don't grow a single crop.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's like, I mean, that's a failed aura farm.

• 40:55John Coogan?

  Failed aura farm. So the question is, is this, the Sora 2, putting yourself in the cameo, it is, it is an attempted aura farming. Was it a successful aura farm?

• 41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think most, like, I would say in most cases, aura farms, you can only tell the success of a farm in retrospect.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  If it's successful.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so it's like, in six months, we'll see. I think if people are still on Sora,

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  if, if the app is still like being used as a social media platform, not just like a creative tool.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Then I think it will be a successful farm because now

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Sam is just, you know, he's just everywhere.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It does, it does feel like there's always a winner and a loser in an aura farm. And like, if you are aura farming

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, VCs, VCs will do this. They'll, they'll buy secondaries in a company to say they're an investor, even though they didn't participate in a primary round.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  That's true. And then also, for every time, for every time a founder aura farms a tier one venture capitalist and then blows the company up in a major scandal, that reduces the aura of the fund that, that put the money in and they offend

• 42:01Speaker 02

  FTX.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  They got farmed. They got farmed. Yeah, it makes, if you backed FTX, you got farmed.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  You, you, you look bad.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, there's always two sides, right? Because in Jordi's example, the, the VC is farming

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  company. But when it gets, when it gets exposed that they actually bought secondary, that they weren't real investors, then

• 42:20John Coogan?

  It's a negative aura.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  the company is farming the VC.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  They're like, oh, we're so great that

• 42:24John Coogan?

  But there must be positive sum aura farms, where two people come together, they, they grow a beautiful garden together.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  When an emerging fashion brand partners with a legacy brand, let's say a streetwear company partners with Solomon.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  They can both benefit because the streetwear brand is getting new legitimacy and Solomon gets to be like culturally relevant and cool.

• 42:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:49Jordi Hays?

  And that is a positive sum aura farm.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Uh, Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle, positive sum aura farm. The stock's way up. Everyone's doing well in American Eagle world. Sydney Sweeney is back in the news and dominating. It seems like a win-win. They aura farmed each other successfully. They grew a new bountiful harvest together.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  It was more positive for American Eagle. It was more like net neutral.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  I think for Sydney Sweeney and that she got a bunch of blowback from it.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Did you?

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  She got a bunch of attention, but it wasn't all positive, whereas American Eagle, just the stock ripped and.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, I have, I have an interesting post here.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Please.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  That I wanted to throw in. It's from a guy named Robert. If we can pull it up in the timeline.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Let's pull that up and I'll tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Let's look.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  So this post went super viral. This is Robert says, good game, everyone. And he's charting total job openings versus the S and P 500.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  And he shows that when ChatGPT was released, there was this massive divergence. Now, a lot of people took this at face value.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  And they thought, okay, ChatGPT is just killing jobs.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  But I threw in another post here. Anybody that's used ChatGPT understands that it's valuable, but it doesn't replace them at work.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Like maybe, I, I, I don't, I haven't met somebody that's been like, hey, Jordy, like, I have to admit, I've lost my job because ChatGPT just does it for me. Right?

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  It's, there's certainly in key areas like Finn is like replacing like the need to add more CX reps. But, uh, but by and large, ChatGPT was not the catalyst. That's just like, you know, totally reducing the number of job openings. So there's another post in here from Simon Saris, uh, who says the zero interest rate era is going to become lost history because people want to make up a narrative around AI. The white collar bloodbath didn't happen because of a chat app release. It happened because of the end of Zirp, which occurred rapidly.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  In 2022. So literally when FTX, like ChatGPT was released when FTX collapsed.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Effectively during, you know, within like the same 30 day window.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, it really was a lot of CEOs.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  Woke up and said, we have to get a lot more efficient. We have to get more lean. Let's not hire, you know, a ton of new people. Let's do more with what we have. The AI narrative from a, from a, from a job loss standpoint has also, it's also in some ways, I feel like been a lot more narrative driven in that CEOs have a massive incentive to show they're getting more efficiency out of AI. And so they're just saying to their teams, like, I don't want you to hire more people. Just be more efficient.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  And even that by itself, just forcing people to say like, no, we're not expanding your team.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  Just do more with less.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was also a huge nomadic contagion from the Twitter buyout where X was able to run with like one fifth of staff and the service doesn't really go down in their shipping features. And so I think a lot of CEOs just kind of adopted a year of austerity, a year of efficiency and wanted to test what they could do with less. And so they pulled back.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, you have to look at, at the labs are scaling headcount rapidly.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic is, you know, hiring teams to, you know, you know, capitalize on all the demand they have. And they're some of the most, you know, AGI pilled of anyone, right? And so you have to read into what, what people are actually doing. And certainly there's been massive job, job creation in the kind of startup ecosystem broadly just because of, you know, we were talking yesterday with a friend. Seems like every, we've, it's become so normalized, but it feels like every day there's like, just on TVPN, like at least a hundred million of new funding announced. Usually like, you know, half a billion, at least, at least lately. And so all, you know, a lot of that is going to go

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  into hiring teams.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, this, this original chart, thought it was worth calling out.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's important to reality check the, put one chart over the other and see if they line up perfectly. We had some updates from Tyler Cosgrove.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was another chart. We, we were asking, somebody had made a chart tracking the NASDAQ dot com bubble to today. And this person effectively did graphic design to make them look like they match up perfectly.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  It looked so perfect.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  And it looks so perfect. And Tyler spent 24 hours this week trying to recreate it. And no matter which.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Index he was looking at.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through the thought process.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just sent it in the chat, but basically it's it's supposed to be NASDAQ from 1998 to 2001. And then overlay on top is 2023 to now.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, I mean, they just like, don't line up. Like, you can kind of see, like, there's a little spike, and then it goes down a little bit, and then it rises.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  So the person just like made up the data or something?

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  No one would ever do that.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  I don't know if it's like literally made up, but you can tell that it's like.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  This is the original post, right?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the time scales are are not lined up correctly.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:22Speaker 02

  And then.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Oh, so they compress time on one of the charts and not on the other?

• 48:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  Yes, and even when I did that, they still wouldn't really line up. So I think certain parts of the graph are more like compressed than others.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:35Speaker 02

  To make the kind of, you know.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's like a linear scale, then a log scale, then a linear scale. It's the ultimate chart crime.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, I think this is pretty bad.

• 48:43John Coogan?

  Do you have your actual overlay available? Can we look at that?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  Yes, let me, let me pull it up.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  I would love to see that. While you pull that up, let me tell you about Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 48:57Jordi Hays?

  I love that when I get that sound effect, I know you're gonna.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  Amp up the WWE.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Fire me up.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  While he's pulling that up. John Galt shares websites should be this again. Waiting for the first company to authentically do it. Everything looks like a venture capitalist yoga retreat website at the moment. It's from the Sony website in 2002. Web design history. We remember when we pulled up the old iPhone website on Apple in 2008? And we were like, oh, it's gonna be like all iPhone focused because it was the iPhone moment.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  It was the new MacBook.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  It was like the MacBook Air and like the iPhones off to the side and said, high technology is one of the features that you get with the iPhone. I like this. I wonder if this would, if this would convert, how bad this would be. I wonder if someone's actually gonna take this post and run with it and build a site that looks like this. We've seen some cool people do interesting things with web design. Post Hog had a very cool website. There's still room for innovation in the website. Have fun, do something different, don't just copy linear. Our sponsor, linear is the tool.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  It's a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product rules.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  All your favorite products are built using linear.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  So, do we have the actual Truth Zone edition of the stock chart? Okay, there's some overlap there.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they're both rising.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're both rising.

• 50:30Jordi Hays?

  They're both up and to the right.

• 50:32John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's a wildly different time scale. Yeah, and that little dip and then pick back up does not line up at all.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, now it's tariff-driven.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  You can line up certain parts of it. Yeah, that was the big dip. And you can line up certain parts of it, but then the rest of it doesn't work. So if you shift it around, like if you shift the actual time scales of certain parts of the graph, then I think I could get it to line up.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Yep. You need to copy the red line and make it a different color and just offset it by a little bit and be like, I'm going viral. That's the secret. That's the secret. Well, if you want to do your own analysis, head over to julius.ai, chat with your data, get expert-level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And so, back on Sora 2 and the question of energy. Zephyr says, "Pretty sure OpenAI made an algorithmic breakthrough. Sora 2 is a much smaller model." Tyler, I don't know what you think about this, but Andrew Mayne is saying, "Another interesting metric is that VO3 costs $3.20 per eight-second clip. You get three a day, that's $10 a day.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  I pay $2.50." So they're basically, if I use all my VO3 credits on Google's top tier of Gemini, I'm break-even. But Sora currently gives you 110-second clips per day. That's $320 of video generation per person for free right now, if that's what they're doing. I think they'd eat that cost all day long. What do you think? Do you think that they've actually brought the cost down to 32 cents per clip, to 3 cents per clip? Where do you think it's going?

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I would be very surprised if it was like the same kind of cost as a V O three.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Um, I would, if I had to guess, I would say maybe like 10 X. So maybe it's like 30 cents. But even then, that's like pretty steep. That's like pretty hard to squeeze that out.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  I just think like they gave me a hundred. I've generated six over three days. Have you generated 300? No way.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm at like five.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  You've done five and and we're like kind of power users, early adopters, really testing this for work. I am. And then they're also rolling out the invite slowly. I wouldn't be surprised if this is, yeah, it's three bucks a prompt. But like they're just gonna eat that for a while until it gets to scale where, I mean, if it's a million new videos a day coming on the platform, that's only 3 million bucks. That's only a billion a year. Like they can eat that, right?

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  It's only a billion a year.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  It's only a billion. That's really nothing for OpenAI. They're 500 billion dollar company that's raising tens of billions of dollars every second. And they, and, and, and what's at stake? Like winning the next social platform, like, like really eating.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  The trough wars.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  The trough wars. The trough wars are gonna be fought one 10 second clip at a time, no matter what it costs. Well, people are still doing things the old fashioned way. Ramp is doing things the old fashioned way. We talked about this earlier in the show, but Kareem says Sora 2 is insane, unbelievable. And he got a community note on it because Ramp, uh, published a launch video that it was shot with a real camera. And the community notes team put him in the truth zones and it was not created by Sora. It's a real commercial. I think that helps with the virality. And, uh, it helped Kareem got 400,000 views on this, 450,000 views.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what percentage actually just believed it was Sora 2.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  I, I, I saw someone in the chat saying, uh, they think it's Sora. I don't know if they were joking, but I, I, I do think some people, uh, you know, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell these days.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  Um, well, we have an amazing announcement.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Which is that there are 19,000 private equity funds in the U S and there are 14,000 McDonald's in the U S. We have more private equity funds than McDonald's and I just, I think it's important to, you know, recognize this moment, this milestone.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  I wonder how that's calculated. Is that like, does that count like, an LLC that holds a sports car in Montana is technically a private equity fund? Or are we talking like, there's a real office with a couple people that are buying companies with that equity? Like, is it a true private equity fund? Like, what's the scale? There's probably some crazy power law, right? Where like, KKR is like here, and then there's like, some company.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the?

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  Are they counting funds for ants?

• 54:55John Coogan?

  What's the median size of that private equity fund? I would love to know that. Anyway, we can dig into it more. Speaking of budgets, the government is about to shut down, and the polymarket.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it already shut down?

• 55:06John Coogan?

  I believe it did shut down. Not good. The parties fight to cast shutdown blame. You know, you know, do people like the government? I don't know. It seems like a mess. Delian was on the show laughing about like, how no other country just shuts down the government. Do you have the polymarket on when the shutdown might end? That seems like a useful, useful data point for us to track.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Hours into the government shutdown, the White House issued new threats. Congressional leaders were digging in, and some rank and file Democrats and Republicans were searching for a way out. Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Vice President JD Vance said they are open to talking to Democrats about extending expiring healthcare subsidies, but won't negotiate as long as the government is closed. Democratic leaders said they won't agree to reopen the government until their healthcare demands, at least some of them, are met. And when does polymarket think it's gonna end?

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Vast majority of folks, over 70%, think that it'll be October 10th or beyond. 44% believe.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  October 10th, that's our one-year anniversary, I believe.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Something like that. So, you know, hopefully the government reopens, and we can celebrate the one-year anniversary of this show. In other news, Apple is shelving development for the cheaper, lighter Vision Pro, the Vision Air, planned for 2027, and they're prioritizing a more urgent effort developing AI smart glasses to rival Meta.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  This is interesting. There's some debate over whether or not this is actually going to happen. Apple's a big company. They could just be working on multiple things. But the news from Mark Gurman is that they are reorienting. So the company, Apple, had been preparing for a cheaper, lighter variant of its headset, code-named N100, for release in 2027. But Apple announced internally last week that it's moving staff from that project to accelerate work on glasses, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Smart glasses have emerged as a critical arena for tech companies, which are racing to develop AI-centric devices.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy, that Meta's making them dance.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Making them dance.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  Duck's making them dance.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Tim Cook was watching our Meta Connect coverage and was like, I want to rip that gong with those guys. Let me do it. I gotta make some glasses.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  Someday, someday.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  I gotta get my own Rocco basilisk. I gotta get...

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  There's only one.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  My own Rocco. Yeah, what could they do? Oliver Peoples? Is that owned by Luxottica as well?

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  Also.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Also owned by Luxottica? Where will Apple go? I think Apple will not try and partner with a fashion brand. I would make that prediction, that they will do their own, and they will look like AirPods, and they will be mostly all white, and they will be a big status symbol to let people know that you have an Apple product on your face. And there will be a couple of different colors. There will be different colors every year. But Apple will try and own that design language. Apple has done a few partnerships. Didn't they do an Hermes band for the Apple Watch? I believe they did that, and a few other collaborations. But Apple generally has been pretty limited on the, let's partner with Nike. They've done a little bit there on the running side. But in general, they have

• 58:11John Coogan?

  not done a lot of like, this iPhone is co-designed with another brand. It's just, you can get a case from them, we'll give them the design, it's up to them to do whatever they want. You can get the Louis Vuitton, you know, colors and whatnot.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One more post before our first guest. There's a post from Modest Proposal, who's sharing a screenshot from a transcript of Patrick's... Interview with Dylan Patel. Patrick says, yeah, he's doing demand guarantees. He's doing all this crazy stuff right now. Of course, they're talking about Jensen and Nvidia. Dylan says, yeah, right, right. He's using his balance sheet to win. Try and win more, which is an interesting dynamic. I don't know if there's ever been anything this in terms of the anti-competitive nature of this, where you backstop clusters. CoreWeave recently got a deal with Nvidia where they backstopped a cluster, right? So that's saying like, if you buy this and bring it online, we will guarantee the demand is there.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  Dylan continues, now CoreWeave would have never built this cluster because it's for short-term demand. And renting GPUs on short-term is a terrible business model. You want to do long-term contracts and you want to do long-term contracts with people with balance sheets. That's the golden goose, but that doesn't exist so much. Important point. So you do long-term contracts with people who don't have a balance sheet, OpenAI. And if you can't do that, then you'll do short contracts with people who do have a balance sheet. There's this whole matrix of who you rent GPUs to. But from Nvidia's interest, it's, you know, what I really love is when venture capitalists fund a company and then 70% of their round is spent on compute. They effing love that, talking about Nvidia, right? And that's what's happening with all these companies,

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  whether it's physical intelligence, they're spending a lot on robot arms and SHIT, too. But they're also spending a lot on compute. Or it's any other startup that's raising cursor, et cetera. And even if it's not directly, it's indirectly going to GPUs. They love when people spend their entire round on GPUs. Would be really good if this wasn't a two-year deal or a three-year deal for that compute. If it was, you can spend 70% of your round on one training run, leave a company with these ideas, gather the data, do the training run. And then you have a product and you show how good the model is and try it and raise again. That would be really great for Nvidia. But no one wants to build a cluster who's predicated on that as a business model. That's crazy. So they have to backstop a cluster to do that.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Yep. Before we bring in our next guest, there's a related article in the Financial Times. One of Britain's best-known tech investors has warned of a disconcerting rise in artificial intelligence valuations, saying Nvidia's planned $100 billion investment in OpenAI brought uncomfortable echoes of the dot-com bubble. This is about James Anderson, who is at Baile Gifford. He had a massive position in Nvidia. He was the largest, that was his largest holding. He's now in Chinese battery maker CATL, Kettle. And he said, "I have to say the words vendor financing do not carry nice reflections to someone of my age."

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  And so, the, yes, the echoes of the dot-com bubble are growing louder. Well, we are pleased to be joined by someone who is building in a completely different space. We have the Chief Operating Officer of Axon.

• 1:01:32Jordi Hays?

  The President.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  The President of Axon. I was reading the chat, a little misinformation.

• 1:01:37Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, Josh? Welcome to the show.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  How are you doing, boys? Good to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 1:01:43Jordi Hays?

  What is this setup here?

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  This looks amazing.

• 1:01:45Jordi Hays?

  That looks incredible.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Space, virtual background.

• 1:01:48Jordi Hays?

  You're in the command center.

• 1:01:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, we have some folks at Axon who just on their own come out, they just churn out new Zoom backgrounds. So every time I open Zoom, there's like five or six options to choose from that I've never seen before. So this one looks pretty cool.

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  It's looking great.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Can you take us through kind of the shape of the business today? Maybe a little bit about your journey, just to kind of set the table for those who might not be familiar with the business?

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  Sure. At Axon, we make pretty much all the cool technology that police officers use day-to-day. Everything from their Taser gun, to their body camera, to all the SaaS software and digital evidence management, to all their reporting products, drones, virtual reality police training. We really believe that we can add a lot of value in a lot of different spots where really software and hardware intersect in policing. And so, I've been at the company 16 years, two years, or two months, sorry, two weeks after graduating college.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:45Speaker 03

  Drove across the country to... To join Axon and here I am.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  That's amazing. What's been the most recent transformation in the business? I was talking to somebody about this category and a very experienced investor. He was like, oh, no one's really made it work. And I was like, well, what about like Axon? They seem to be doing pretty well. And he was like, oh, it's not that big of a company. And then we looked up the market cap and it's a huge company and you've been massively successful. But what, what, what has been the ma- like the biggest transformative moment over the past five years for the business?

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Sure. I think really for the first 25 years of the company's history, it was really about hardware. And in the last five years, it's been far more about software. So we manage more than 40 times as much content as the Netflix library combined. So we're managing all of this police evidence in the cloud. And in figuring out how to make use of this mass- massive data set for our customers has been the name of the game. So most notably, a couple of years ago, we released a product called Draft One, which is a Gen AI product, analyzes the body camera transcripts and creates the first draft of the police report for the police officer. So cops spend about 50% of their time writing police reports. We think we can make that like 10% of the time.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Such a good use of Gen AI.

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  So is that something where the, an officer in the middle of an act? Let's say they're pulling somebody over for speeding. Do they talk out loud and say, all right, um, you know, how, how are you? How, where's that data coming in from? Cause I could imagine they're just kind of, John actively uses like transcription with ChatGPT. So we'll be like talking about something and then he'll, you know, be prompting it just with voice. I could imagine an officer does the same thing where they're saying like, eh, pulling this over. I'm at this, you know, intersection. I, you know, clocked him going 20 over and, and then that just gets built in. Or what is that workflow like?

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  Sure. So it's a great point. Cops are getting better at prompting the AI to, to, you know, improve the quality of the police reports. But even without doing that, just in the normal conversation, you can imagine that same incident when the cop walks up to the person's window and says, hey, you know, you're speeding, you're going 20 miles an hour over the posted speed limit.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  And still pick that stuff up.

• 1:05:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. And even just like, what's your name? And then the person says that. And then that's in the audio file. And then that gets transcribed. And that's just like, so much manual work. You're not putting anyone out of a job. You're just making their life better. It feels like a fantastic use of artificial intelligence. Very exciting.

• 1:05:21Jordi Hays?

  And you guys have been, you guys have been super acquisitive. I think you've done a number of acquisitions, but recently completed, it was an 800 ish million dollar acquisition. We got a gong here. We'd love to, we'd love to, you know.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was about 630 million. It was prepared AI.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Love that. We have a gong as well at headquarters.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  Big deals. You hit the gong. I love that.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:05:45Speaker 03

  We're excited about those guys joining the company. Their founder, Michael Chime, super, super talented, and very happy to have him as part of Axon.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Is, is the strategy with that deal to kind of diffuse the technology over everything you do, keep it as a separate business line, cross-sell it? How are you thinking about that?

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So our mission is to protect life. We want to keep people from getting killed in policing incidents, to include police officers. And the best way we can do that is shrink the time between the incident taking place and help being on the way. Right now, that's like a two-minute cycle. Someone calls 911, they talk to a call taker, call taker talks to the dispatcher, dispatcher figures out the right officer to, to send to the scene. And we think we can automate that entire process in partnership with Prepared. So essentially, call 911, based on the metadata of the call, drone is already taken off to head to the incident. You know, over time, we think we can route the proper police officers

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  to those scenes without a lot of human intervention. And so that's a lot of what we have to look forward to with, with Prepared moving into the future here.

• 1:06:56Jordi Hays?

  You guys are at the stage where you're a true platform, multi-product. I'm sure you started with, you know, I don't know the exact, the first product, but in this category, is it, how hard is it to get point solutions through? I'm at, you know, and if you're just building for other startups, like, you know, a typical YC company, for example, they can build a really narrow, simple point solution, sell that into somebody in their batch, it's pretty easy, you know, these aren't, you know, super sophisticated operations, whereas selling into police departments, I imagine just the, just, just the timeline alone of, of building that relationship is probably really hard for, for a young company.

• 1:07:40Jordi Hays?

  I guess like, talk about the different, maybe stages of the companies and getting to the point where you're truly a platform.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Sure, the, the biggest part is, you know, you have to recognize that US public safety is less than a million total users, so a lot of startups wouldn't even be able to get funding based on that TAM, you know, and so when you go into public safety or defense tech or, you know, this, this segment, you really have to be confident, you can build something for the long-term where you can win the majority of the users on your platform. That's really the only way you can have a viable business model in this space. And so, you know, we look at this like, hey, you know, there, we start with the most talented teams we can find, and then the most product synergy. And so with a company like Prepared or one like Fuses that we acquired last year, we

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  really believe we can help accelerate their growth by plugging them into our ecosystem and, you know, the products nicely play off each other. And, you know, with police, they want to outsource as much of the technology as they can. They don't want to build things internally to, you know, to, to capture their use cases. And so when we can show up with a really nice end-to-end workflow from what we call capture to courtroom, that, that really has a lot of value to our customers. And so that's part of our, our thinking and hypothesis as we look at M&A and which companies to partner with.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  In terms of that platform, is there demand from local law enforcement agencies for you to play nice with other companies, build some sort of open API? Is there another kind of enterprise resource planning backbone that they want you to plug into? What's kind of the software supply chain of a modern police department look like these days?

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. And the short answer is yes, you want to build something that's open. That at the end of the day, this isn't about trying to help people make more money or make more effective ads on the internet. This is about fighting crime and saving people's lives. So when you do those kinds of sketchy things where people don't have access to your data or you don't, you know, you don't work well with others, you're ultimately undermining the police department's mission of protecting their communities. And so for us, we try to look at this like, hey, we want to be the Switzerland in this space. And regardless of the hardware inputs or the software outputs, we want to play nice and leverage open APIs to help our customers achieve what they're setting out to do.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  What robotic form factors are you guys most bullish on over the long run? I'm sure you leverage a lot of drones. Is there any other? We had Tony from DoorDash on this week who built a really cute robot for delivery, L4 autonomy. What are you guys thinking about? Are drones enough or are there other things on the?

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Steves, we want.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  So the reason I'm smiling is I thought like I pitched our founder Rick on this idea like two years ago to do this big hugging robot, like the Michelin Man. Just imagine this thing kind of walks down the street. It's like Big Hero Six. Criminal and takes them into custody so people aren't as scared of robots. I don't think that one's in our future, but the thing I'm most excited about is.

• 1:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Bear hug.

• 1:11:00Speaker 03

  The ability to put less lethal on drones. So you can think of a school shooting taking place. And if you have drones in nests in the roof of a school, there's no reason those things can't be equipped with Taser technology and they can fly autonomously. They have targeting software. For us, a. End user, you know, a police department would always decide when to use force. That would not be autonomous. But this idea of finding ways where we can keep people safe in these mass shooting incidents before first responders ever get there, that's, that's very interesting to us. And over the, over the next few years, we hope to be playing in that space more and more here with, with some tools that can really, you know,

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  again, shrink the timeframe where these incidents are happening from when they start to when they're concluded.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  What about, somebody in the chat is asking about technology for, you know, firefighters, like specifically wildland firefighters. We're here in LA. As the fires unfolded at the beginning of this year, it felt like they were so, they, they had too little technology, at least that was the perception. We had firefighters relying on the nonprofit fire tracker that kept going down because they didn't even have capacity. What are you guys doing on that front? It's a tough market because fires are so unpredictable. But certainly feels important.

• 1:12:27Speaker 03

  Sure thing, sure thing. I think the most interesting thing I've seen in that space to date is these drones that carry thousands and thousands of pounds that can stay in the air for hours. And you can imagine, you could actually string those along with, you know, with very lengthy fire hoses, and fly out into the fire and try to contain the fire from within. Like those types of improvements through the air, I think will help. I think in software, it's, it's a little bit of what you said. It's predictive. It's based on the wind. I'm not sure that's like a major game changer. I think you gotta find a way to get water faster, more reliably

• 1:13:07Speaker 03

  into these fires. And it feels like drones over time, especially as they can carry more and more weight, will be, you know, a reasonable, kind of creative way to, to, to help there.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  What are your current thinking around facial recognition? Obviously, image generation or generative AI is getting so much better. But there's different parties. How are police feeling about it? How are different communities feel about it? Does it differ from township and city to city? How are lawmakers thinking about the trade offs there? It seems like one of those conversations that's like forever ongoing. And maybe that's the best process in a democracy. But how are you thinking about it?

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you characterize that well. You know, the United States is one of the few markets right now where facial recognition is not used in policing. And we haven't participated in that market yet. I do think we're more interested in it now. The thing we've been waiting for is to be able to demonstrably show that the algorithms are rid of racial bias. I think that is certainly something that is worth making sure that you got that right. And ultimately, you know, up until now, we haven't felt comfortable with the technology. But it is improving and we're seeing those improvements. And so as we start to kick the tires on what this looks like, ethical design principles and, you know, like we say internally,

• 1:14:32Speaker 03

  helping make the right things easier and the wrong things harder. But that's going to be kind of at the center of our thinking as we, as we think about facial recognition on fixed cameras, on body cameras and so forth.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, where's the, who has ball control on that narrative? Someone in the chat was asking about this documentary, All Light Everywhere. Very small box office. I hadn't heard of it until this person mentioned it. Are there other communities or nonprofits? Or, I mean, we talk about AI all day and there's this guy, Eliezer Yudkowsky, who's kind of like defined like the AI doom scenario of like super takeoff. And there's a couple of thought leaders. The Dwarash Patel Show is talking about trade offs in AI building. Who, who are the key thought leaders, influencers, groups, public groups, nonprofits that are actually defining the conversation there?

• 1:15:22Speaker 03

  Sure, I think a big piece of it on the policing side is major county, or major county sheriffs and major city chiefs, those are the large organizations that, that, you know, that kind of paint the path forward on what the priorities are for public safety. But I think ultimately, it's going to be very political. Like, we need to get to a place where mayors and city councilors and all, you know, the downstream folks they serve, the community, is looking at this saying, hey, there's far, far, far more good than harm here in this technology. And it's progressing, albeit slowly, but I do think we're getting closer to the point where we can say, hey, look, you know, there's, everybody should be interested in equipping

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  public safety with ways that you can reliably fight crime and keep constituents safe. And between mayors and city councils and the police chiefs and sheriffs, I think that's the key combination of folks coming together on this one.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  What about on the hardware side? It feels like that piece of the business is pretty stable, but is there anything interesting happening that you can share on, you know, there's this big American dynamism movement, make stuff in America, there's a trade war, like, has anything shifted your thinking about manufacturing just hardware devices in America or for, you know, your business over the past few years?

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. And as a company that's sold to not only US public safety, but the federal government and federal law enforcement for a long time, we've always manufactured in the United States. So Scottsdale, Arizona is where our headquarters is. Hopefully, it will be in the future, we got a lot of drama around that right now, but we can get past that, we'll keep building tasers and body cams in Scottsdale, and we're proud of that. You know, we're supporters of the Buy American Act, we think it's in the best interest of the company to have all of our defense equipment made here, and so we're happy to participate in that process.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  How crazy valuable is an individual person in the manufacturing process? There's been this debate going on in Silicon Valley about process knowledge. This idea that, I don't know if you've been tracking this, but Mark Zuckerberg has been paying hundreds of millions of dollars to people that know how to train just a very specific set of skills and how you train a large language model. And once they know that information, once they know how to do it, they're worth so much because they understand how to do it and no one else does. And there's been this debate about, well, could we do the same thing with semiconductors? And bring some people over from Taiwan and know how to make that, make it in Arizona, where their TSMC is already set up.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  But does the same thing exist in the world of like hardware manufacturing? Is that even something that exists or is it more diffuse?

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  It exists to some extent. I think, you know, for us, all of our cartridges, the things that go in the tasers that have the darts in them that fire out, those are all made by robots. They're all automated at this point. So, you know, we make millions of those every year. So the idea of people kind of hand winding darts and so forth, that gets expensive. And so, and robots are expensive too, but they scale really well. And so ultimately, we've really made a big bet on automation for taser manufacturing. And we think it's the right bet. We've had automation for years and years, but we continue to invest more in it. And frankly, the people who know how to do that really well, like you said, they might

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  not be, you know, as valuable as some of the folks on the cutting edge of LLMs right now, but they're very valuable to us. And got to make sure, you know, manufacturing automation is one of the things we continue to be really, really good at.

• 1:19:12Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, thank you for the updates and come back on when you guys do your next. Maybe the next acquisition will, you know, hit the $1 billion mark, but always welcome in the 600 million range.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  Sorry for keeping you overtime. Thanks so much for hopping on. This was great.

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Congrats on all your success and looking forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks a lot.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you, Josh. Cheers.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  You gotta look up the Axon Market Cap stock chart. It is, it's beautiful. It's a thing of beauty. Up 128,000% for all time IPO'd, according to Google, in 2001 and just went up absolutely.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I had no idea.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  It's a $55 billion company now. Yeah. It's really, it's really big. Well, back in the startup world, Deish Jain is announcing Mosaic, an agentic video editor. I definitely want to give this a try. He says, "In a world trending towards AI slop, create something real. There's no waitlist. There's a public..."

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  ...beta.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta pull up the video.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Let's pull up this video and see, is it slop or not slop? How are we feeling? Comment Mosaic. You can get some credits. Let's watch this launch video.

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  The real test, was this built in Mosaic or was this After Effects or Premiere?

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  I can see this being pretty good.

• 1:20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think, so node-based workflows are really popular like this, where you wire things together, because then you can repeat the process very quickly by just dropping in a new base clip and all the pro... So if you say, "I want to use AI to remove the background, add subtitles," we have a workflow for this that we've defined with, with clips in, in code, but oftentimes it helps to just be able to have a node-based workflow that you can just like wire up and understand where each piece goes to the next, overlay the text. DaVinci Resolve is doing this and a lot of other, like the next generation of Blender and Houdini have all moved to node-based workflows. Cinema 4D recently moved to a node-based workflow.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, I liked that. I thought it was a good video focused on the actual product, what you could do with it.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  It shows you how the UI works.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  I was worried because he was, the founder said, "In the era of AI slop," and then it looked like, like it was just gonna be a bunch of clips of...

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. This is very clearly stolen footage from Interstellar. I doubt that they license it, but that's fine for one second.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that isn't it legal to do use it for like.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Yes, it would be transformative, it would be fair use.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  Uh, probably, you know, and I wouldn't, you know, you gotta talk to a lawyer if you want to.

• 1:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dee Dee Doss is sharing some news from earlier. A lot of people have already seen it. Probably OpenAI wrapped a $6.6 billion uh, share sale at 500 billion. This wasn't primary capital. This was employees uh, selling into it. The sale fell short of the 10.3 billion that was authorized. Um, but uh.

• 1:22:21John Coogan?

  Does that mean it was oversubscribed? Does that mean that 10 billion of demand came in? They went to the employees and said, you can sell up to 10 billion and employees held. Is that what happened?

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  I.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  I'll have to dig into it.

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah. So it says with insiders seeing this as a sign of employee confidence and continued investor demand.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  I was hearing that people were getting cut down.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that could be, that could be a spin.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:45Jordi Hays?

  By being like employees don't want to sell, but I think a lot of employees at 500 billion are probably, you know, happy, uh, happy to, to, to convert a meaningful amount into liquidity, just given, just they'll, they're smart. They're running the comps. It's life-changing money. They can see like, you know, I'm sure you can, you can still be very bullish on the business and want to sell even half of your position, right? At 500 billion. Um, you know, many people weren't, weren't underwriting that when they joined the company, right? So it's eight and a half million per employee on average, apparently.

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, and so Dee Dee says, thanks Chat, ChatGPT for absolutely destroying the SF real estate market. So even after taxes, these employees are all going to be sitting there being like, it's time to hit market buy on Zillow.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Will they be buying in San Francisco? They might be renting in San Francisco and buying an incline village, getting those Nevada taxes going.

• 1:23:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. They're in, they're in office. I don't think.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  They might be buying, they might be buying in Menlo Park. You know, Atherton.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bay Area broadly.

• 1:23:50John Coogan?

  They might be, yeah.

• 1:23:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, the, the, the challenge is like, you know, hundreds of employees sold into this. And if you look at how many nice, single family homes that are move in, ready.

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Are available, I'm sure it's in the hun, you know, less than the number of employees, right?

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:24:06Jordi Hays?

  If everybody rushes to buy a home, it's going to really spike prices.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like it, uh, it's happened yet necessarily, right? It feels like, uh, there was, there was a time when SF real estate was really hot. And then it sort of sold off, I believe during the pandemic.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  You could buy.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Remember?

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  You could buy like a two bedroom condo in SF, you know, not in nicest area, but for like 600K.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  But that was down from like really elevated prices, right?

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  And so we went, we crashed and now we're, we're, we're predicting a resurgence and I mean, it feels like it will come back. I mean, uh, San Francisco has been, uh, you know, on a tear in, in a bunch of different ways. It seems like it's more, uh, like a better place to actually settle down. But still, there's always the pull of South Bay of, uh, what, what, what's up?

• 1:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting because it still looks reasonable, maybe because we're in LA. Obviously, uh, home prices are, are crazy here too, but you can get a four bedroom for 1.8 million. That seems, uh, reasonable.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Take the money and run to the, to the Ozarks. Did you see the story?

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:25:12John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. There's a very cool video that we are featured in that was generated on all that we will.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  I saw that.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Show later in the show, uh, we, but we only have five minutes until our next guest joins. But, uh, the, the article from Performative Mail says, uh, this is the biggest, toughest article I've done about so-called AI psychosis. It's the story of a man who committed a horrific crime in his youth, but served his time and against all odds, found love in a new life. One that swiftly unrattled after he started talking to a chatbot. He grew obsessed with an AI chatbot, then he vanished into the Ozarks. What a wild story. Gans submitted a terrible crime, very dark, always tough to read into these anecdotes and see like, how widespread is this? Would this have happened without AI? Would would this person be deranged by something else?

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  A book, did you get one shot at by Walden, the the book about going in, living by a lake? Who knows? But you can go read it on Rolling Stone if you want to dig into that piece.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Trini says, is highlighting or quoting one of his own posts, saying Korea's financial news is so ridiculously lit. It's a bunch of sad ants crying and the and the Samsung chart just going down.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Oh, that's hilarious.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  And Trini says this article was posted like 24 hours before the absolute bottom for Samsung.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  The ants are very happy now. Let's go.

• 1:26:48Jordi Hays?

  The ants are so back. I have never been a Samsung shareholder.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  No, but Samsung is, I mean, they did that big deal with Elon for Tesla AI chips, I believe. So, you know, they're certainly getting in on the AI boom. Well, econ econ kids will see this and think I should give this guy money to help me get rich. And it's two of the most crazy looking individuals. I don't recognize either of these.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  This is the guy on the left is a is a rapper. What's his name?

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. He was the basis of Spring Breakers. This is riffraff?

• 1:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Riffraff.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  This is riffraff. I don't know that he's actually done a get rich quick scheme or like a hustle.

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Now, they just, there are some guys out there that look like this that will try to sell you a course on how to make money.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  By Rob Froon.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  We haven't seen a course, bro, just sell a course called How to Make Money, just reasonably priced and just really breaking down. You know, here are the different ways that.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Econ 101, baby. Tyler Towne, Conversations with Tyler.

• 1:27:53Jordi Hays?

  You can sell services yourself. You can sell services that you deliver through a team. You can buy something for one price and sell it for a higher price. And that's pretty much it.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, Naval kind of one shotted that entire category with the how to get rich without getting lucky thread.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  He should have dropped a chord.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  He didn't need to because he summed it all up in a series of like 20 pithy tweets and you can just scroll and be like, yep, that's the algorithm.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Anyway, Mounted Cashflow says, always exciting when you see a new letter, get added to the end of EBITDA. What is he talking about? What's the latest one? Did a sale lease back?

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  adjusted was the classic.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  Community adjusted, what was that? EBIT CR CA EBITDA or EBITDA CA, I guess? EBITDA CA? I don't know. I haven't, I don't know if there's a new one that's going around because the AI companies aren't even talking about EBITDA yet. It's all ARR and LOIs and just top line.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia, only company with profits.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, so they haven't had to dip into some crazy EBITDA calculation. I don't know who is, but stay alert.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Talk about cash flow.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if you're diving into EBITDA numbers, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  Adam, Person of Swag, says you can just do things. Option on the left, quietly announce a $200 million Series A in a tweet saying, back to work. And the second option, get black cat drunk at Cheesecake after closing 120K pre-seed. Seems a little specific there, Adam.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  They think those are both great, great options.

• 1:29:37Jordi Hays?

  One more post from Bucho Capital Bloke. Most people think investing makes you rich, but that's wrong until you're making at least 500K a year. The best ROI is growing your paycheck, get the cash flowing first. Totally agree. We had this conversation with the team. No matter how much, how excited you are about investing when you're young, focus on developing the skillset that allows you to be more valuable to your market. So without further ado, I think we should bring in our next guest.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:30:11Jordi Hays?

  Man that should need no introduction.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Pat Gelsinger. He's in the restream waiting room. We will bring Pat into the TVP and Ultra Dom. Welcome to the show, Pat. Great to meet you.

• 1:30:22Speaker 04

  So good to be able to join. Thank you.

• 1:30:25John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:30:25Speaker 04

  We're so excited.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  I would love a little bit to catch everyone up on what you're doing today. Take us through the current project, the current business, and what you've been focusing on over the last few years.

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks, John. Thanks, Jordy. So since Intel, I've been focusing, you know, I've been wearing two hats. One is the deep tech investing hat with playgrounds. So the hard stuff, you know, quantum computer, super reducting, next generation light sources, new materials, you know, those types of things. And then my other hat is being the head of technology for GLU, a faith tech company. I've lived my life at the intersection of faith and technology. And GLU is building the platform for the faith and flourishing ecosystem. You know, from running IT all the way up through the latest and greatest trained models for AI services,

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  you know, for the church and the faith ecosystem.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm fascinated by GLU. We've talked to the founder of Hollow on the show, and it feels like an industry that is super ready to adopt technology, and yet there just aren't that many founders that are pursuing it. Would love to talk more about some of the findings that you put out when you investigated the foundation models. How did you process that information? What was the methodology for evaluating these models? And then I'm sure we can dig into more about the consequences of those findings.

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, maybe the first point is, you know, I've been driving benchmarks for 40 years.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:07Speaker 04

  You know, my name, you know, right? In fact, some of the benchmarks that are still used today have my code in them. It's sort of like, it's sort of embarrassing, like, you know.

• 1:32:18Speaker 04

  It's amazing. Yeah, you should have moved on by now, but anyway. My code is still there. So I've been deeply associated with, okay, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So, you know, this idea of measuring AI models and, you know, people are working on this today, but you know, we're also seeing that they're just measuring performance or cost per first, you know, time the first token, cost per token, right? You know, total token throughput. Those are great metrics, but it doesn't measure, is it good? Right? And to be, you know, the absence of bad does not demonstrate the presence of good. So what we did, right, is the second point is, you know, there's this body of work that was fairly recently released by Harvard, Baylor and Gallup,

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  measuring human flourishing, a five-year Lilly study that across 22 nations, across 50-plus cultural groups, what is human flourishing? So now we can answer fairly definitively across multiple dimensions, across, you know, relationships, character development, you know, finances, spirituality and faith. Is it good? So now we have, you know, a solid view for that. And then the final piece is, okay, let's create benchmarks for AI systems using that foundational research. And now we have, you know, a corpus of qualitative and quantitative results to measure good. So if you say, which is the better model

• 1:33:46Speaker 04

  for human flourishing, OpenAI, you know, Gemini, Anthropic, you know, Claude, I can give you an answer based on a solid corpus of data with the most rigorous of, you know, benchmarking experiences and numerical analysis sitting behind it. And we believe and our objective is, is the result of that is, we will make models better because they can start measuring not just first token time, but did I give a good answer that's aligned with human values?

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  How do you think about that benchmark of human flourishing? Like, when you go through your life, are you thinking about your finances, character, happiness, relationships, meaning, faith, health? Are you consciously checking in with yourself? Or is this something that's more reflective on your life where it all kind of rolls up into happiness or well-being? And then when you investigate your life, you realize that those are the things that you've done? How intentional have you been, I guess?

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I'd say it's sort of in two different, you know, dimensions there. I mean, hey, I don't go benchmarking myself all the time. But, you know, that said, you know, every time a major new model comes out, I want to ask the question, is it better?

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:06Speaker 04

  And on these dimensions, so, you know, we'll be producing these benchmarks on a periodic basis, every couple of weeks, you know, we'll be updating those benchmarks to say, okay, are we better? You know, which model is better? Is DeepSeek better than OpenAI, than OSS, and so on? I want that rigor to be in place, that everybody is, you know, okay, you know, are we improving in this area? Because you don't fix these things overnight. You know, it's a long trajectory of, you know, evolution and development of the technologies. Secondly...

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  You know, and then the second side is, okay, you know, you'll hear disastrous situations, you know, where we have kids committing suicide, you know, their best friend has become the chatbot. Wow, when those things come up, would our benchmarks be detecting those? Can we, you know, and then do we have to add more and make them more rigorous that those kind of things can now be avoided, you know, in a constructive way, you know, that we really are happy that we are making technology better? Or the language I like to use, you know, technology as a force for good. Technology itself is neutral. Are we going to bend that arc toward good?

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  How receptive have the labs been to, to the benchmark?

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

  You know, I'll say it's early at this point. And, you know, so, you know, we're interacting with all the names that you would like. And I'll say, hmm, you know, they're getting better. You know, their scores have improved somewhat. You know, so I do think we're having some influence with them, but it's still early. And, you know, as I would like to, you know, also say, I don't think the benchmarks are rigorous enough yet. You know, we gotta, you know, we have sort of, you know, an early version of them out there. These are good. You know, 1,230 questions or so are part of them as well. But I expect that becomes a bigger corpus, right, of questions. You know, also, we gotta go deeper. You know, for the most part, these are single shot, you know, questions. We gotta get into multi-turn conversations.

• 1:37:14Speaker 04

  We have to, you know, have more of a mixture of experts, you know, that you're testing different experts. Also, how do we test the safeguards? Right? You know, we're now at the sixth turn of a conversation. You know, this individual was clearly suicidal. You know, how do we go handle that?

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think a lot of the safety concerns that at least we have is when people are, you know, many, many, many, many prompts deep, right? In a, in a specific conversation, it could be thousands, right? Depths to which that personally I've never gone, right? I don't know how crazy it gets that far, but certainly the labs need to be thinking about all those extreme edge cases.

• 1:37:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think we have more work to do, you know, on, I'll say, multi-turn conversations and how we build more of that robustness into the benchmarks. But, you know, what we have today, and you can go to the Glue website, FAI, right? You know, and see what we have today. You know, this is a good start. But, you know, I do think in the speed of evolution of the AI technologies, we have a lot more work to do. And sort of excited now as we get some of that momentum underway. You know, really start crawling into, you know, just like you said, more of the multi-turn conversations. And we can be pretty aggressive in the questioning sets for multi-turn to drive some of those extreme behaviors. You know, because, you know, the first few questions is mostly driven by prompts, right?

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  You know, as you get deeper into, it's much more reflecting what's the underlying model weights, you know, themselves. So all of that, we have more work to do, but I'm excited to have this first version out there. And we're starting to get some impact and good results.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, there also seems to be some sort of unresolved question around alignment by default. How much do the models just reflect you? If you show up with a lot of negative energy, they can kind of become negative and it feels like it's a self-reinforcing spiral. If you come to it just asking interesting questions about the world and wanting to understand how math works. Like, you're gonna get a tutor if you come to it with something bad. So, a lot to sort out there. I have a question. One of my favorite quotes from you is from this talk you gave where you sort of lightly accused Silicon Valley to be a group of miserly pagans. It's a great quote. I think it's a very apt analysis.

• 1:39:40John Coogan?

  And when I look at the performance scorecard on glue.com/floreshinghubresearch, I noticed that the models seem to be doing very well at finances and very poor at faith. And I'm wondering if that's a reflection of the humans that train the model? Or the data set that's going into the model, or both? Or how intractable is that problem?

• 1:40:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, and I think that's great because, you know, I mean, where's a lot of the training data coming from?

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:11Speaker 04

  Right, associated with that? You know, and I view it as, hey, you put bad stuff in, you're gonna get bad stuff out. You know, you put good stuff in, you're gonna get good stuff out, you know, for it. And, you know, I mean, we're doing some work, you know, we glue, you know, we'll have our own values-aligned models, right? And part of the reason we're gonna do our own foundational training, you know, for those models is specifically, I'm not gonna put the bad stuff in.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Speaker 04

  I don't have to worry about it ever coming out because it was never in.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  You know, we can never probabilistically producing those things. So, you know, but, you know, getting more specifically to your question, I think a lot of it does have to do with the implications, right, of those training sets in the first place. You know, and every, you know, you've seen lots of conversations about the challenges of we don't have enough training data.

• 1:41:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, we don't have good training data, you know, the quality of synthesized data, you know, versus raw data, you know, associated with it. So I do think there's a valid problem, you know, and, you know, I'm always a bit optimistic on the individuals that their motives are good for it, you know, but we've clearly seen in the social networks, you know, the algorithms were bad, right? You know, it leads to more degrange behavior, right? You know, it's only about dwell time on sites, you know, and I think those same motivations would, you know, naturally drive the AI models if there wasn't further accountability.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:50Speaker 04

  And that's what leads us to saying we have to have better benchmarks that are rigorous and values based, that get the answers we want.

• 1:41:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the, even with, with human driven social media and, and how it can take people down these extreme rabbit holes, the, they're, they're not as worrisome as LLMs because LLMs can be totally private. They can go to these kind of dark places and it's just one human interacting with the model. Whereas social media, at least if somebody's on some crazy forum, there is a point at which they can say something that goes too far. People can say, hey, I think you should, you know, go out and touch grass, right? And I don't, I haven't seen a model tell somebody to touch grass yet. Maybe that's built in.

• 1:42:38John Coogan?

  Maybe that'll come in the next version.

• 1:42:39Jordi Hays?

  Somewhere. Did you, did you always predict, you know, feels over the last few years, Silicon Valley has a, you know, massively renewed interest in faith and religion. How, how much did you anticipate that? Clearly, you know, you never cared what the industry thought. You had your own faith, but is that something that you predicted? Did it come faster or sooner?

• 1:43:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, may, maybe three different dimensions, you know, there, you know, I mean, one is, there is, I'll call it a post-COVID and a post-success renewal, right? Where, you know, this is very endemic of Silicon Valley, but you see it in lots of other, you know, communities, New York, Austin as well. You know, people presume success.

• 1:43:31Speaker 04

  And now they're asking deeper questions like, is it significant? So, you know, there is this national, right, you know, shift in what's important. Some of that might have been driven and some suggest it was driven by COVID isolation. You know, some of it is driven by the success, success phenomena, you know, that we're in, you know, but it isn't just Silicon Valley, you know, there's a number of statistics, you know, those that, you know, believe in a faith view of Jesus Christ, the church engagement or spiritual engagement, you know, we're seeing very much, you know, 20 to 35 year olds, you know, is going up in very meaningful ways, you know, four data points in a row of rising

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  engagements or spiritual value engagement. So it's a national phenomenon at this point. Clearly in Silicon Valley, we've seen a greater willingness to talk about faith. You know, well, I started an organization about 12 years ago called Transforming the Bay with Christ, one of, one of my other hobbies. And that organization now is over 800 churches strong, right? You know, when I talk to people, they didn't believe we had eight churches in the Bay area. I have over 800, you know, participating in transforming the Bay. And I'll just say there is a renewal, a connectivity, you know, associated with that.

• 1:44:58Speaker 04

  You've seen other things recently, you know, some news and commentary about Act 17. Yeah. Trey and Michelle Stevens and, you know, Peter Thiel and Gary Tan, you know, friends, friends of mine that, huh, all of a sudden, you know, I mean, we're hosting these events, they're sold out events, right? You know, where hundreds of people are showing up, you know, asking life questions. You know, some of it's, hey, I want to come and hear Pat speak. I want to come and hear Peter Thiel speak. But some of it is they want to have life questions from someone they respect. So I'll just say, you know, there is this renewal going on, you know, and personally,

• 1:45:43Speaker 04

  I've been at it so long, people often say, well, do you feel more comfortable? Well, you know, I, I felt comfortably uncomfortable 30 years ago to speak about my faith in the Bay area, you know, 30 years later, well, I've been doing it so long, everybody expects me to do it, so it's not. As uncomfortable, you know, but in many regards, you know, it's like it's who I am. Right. And if you have a different faith or a different worldview, you know, everybody should be comfortable talking about that. And I'd say from my faith perspective, it's, uh, you know, like I spoke to a Baha'i woman recently. I don't know anything about Baha'i. Tell me about Baha'i, right?

• 1:46:21Speaker 04

  And the more I engage you where your worldview is, the more freedom I have to talk about my Christian worldview. And why I think that's good, powerful and meaningful as well.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  What do you make of, uh, it, it feels like an easy prediction to make that there will be religions. Built around AI feels like they're already emerging. Uh, if you go into the Reddit, uh, forum on chat GPT, you have people that, you know, worship. Four O, it feels, uh, scary.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Technology circles, people kind of joke, oh, we're building AI God or God in a box. It's going to be so powerful. It's super intelligence. It'll be above humans in some way. And it's a little bit tongue in cheek with some people, but some people seem to believe it.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I think there's a long history of Silicon Valley and, and, and even parts of the Bay Area trying to re recreate. Religion from first principles. I have, you know, my, uh, family has been in, you know, Palo Alto and somewhere or another. Since the early nineteen hundreds and I've heard stories of like cults emerging around Stanford in the sixties. Where people were basically creating a club that looked like a church. They would meet like a church, but ultimately were just basically trying to create new religion.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  And I think these, yeah, these conversations are uncomfortable, but they're important because they're, I, I think it's inevitable that they're gonna pop up and uh it feels like, you know, potentially can go to a very dark place.

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'd say, you know, uh, you know, ma- maybe three different comments there. One is, you know, technology's neutral. You can use it for good and bad, right? AI, most powerful technology, you know, that we've created yet, and no small part because it's built on the shoulders of all the other technologies, you know, connectivity, cloud, et cetera, right? You know, so it can grow and expand more rapidly. But our job is to make it good, right? Can it get used for cults and other things? Of course. Right? Just like everything, you know, what was the, you know, what was the early driving uh use case of the internet? Right? I think the number one websites early on were pornography. Not what we intended, but.

• 1:48:47Speaker 04

  Compared to that, you know, gambling and pornography is like, oh, man.

• 1:48:54Speaker 04

  Right? So I have no doubt, no hesitation that there will be, you know, these cultish experiences that emerge. Right? But again, our job is make technology a force for good. And where and how do we build safeguards and other into it? Second general comment is, you know, people talk about super intelligence and those, you know, and some of it is, you know, it's like, man, you know, the calculator is a super intelligence. It does math and better than I do. And, you know, my Excel spreadsheet, man, I ain't giving that up.

• 1:49:28Speaker 04

  And I don't want my accountant to give it up. Right? You know, and so on. And, you know, we think about L L Ms in the future, man, they're gonna become indispensable. Right? You know, because it is like the real time, contextually relevant encyclopedia of my life.

• 1:49:45Speaker 04

  Right? You know, it's got a better memory, better knowledge, better connectivity. I mean, we're going to use AI to conquer language for the first time in humanity's history. You know, I'm going to be able to teach every kid in their native language contextually relevant using the power of AI. And because of that, you know, almost all the people that live in poverty live in the fringe languages that are not conquered. Wow, you know, how exciting, you know, I mean, the extraordinary opportunities, you know, this is going to give us to truly improve the life of the planet. But, you know, ultimately.

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been interesting. I I've been debating with John, uh, how, you know, how bad would it be if I suddenly didn't have access to L L Ms? And we've gone back and forth on this. I personally would much rather live without L L Ms than a mobile device or the internet, right? I think some of these enabling technologies that we have that make L L Ms valuable and useful and widely available are feel today more foundationally important. But that is coming from a viewpoint where the most of the internet is English, most of the media that I want to watch is English.

• 1:51:04Jordi Hays?

  And so the point you made about, um, you know, being from a, you know, being from somewhere in the world that English isn't your native language, being able to educate yourself on on, um, you know, and and watch any content, you know, things like that are are pretty exciting. Where do you think?

• 1:51:23Speaker 04

  Anyway, and going back to you, the the core of your question, though, you know, will there be AI gods, right? God designed us as humans to be in relationship. And any technology that's driving us apart, you know, three teenagers sitting on the couch texting each other, right? How terrible. Talk to each other, right? God designed us to be relational, right? Individuals and, you know, a foundation of religion, spirituality, you know, isn't just the self. It's the community, right, that you're part of. So, you know, I fundamentally, you know, things that take us apart, you know, I think, okay, we have to build safeguards to have them be tools bringing us together. You know, I do not want my AI doing suicide prevention

• 1:52:07Speaker 04

  Calvinism. I want a real human doing those things. You know, I want a real human interacting with kids and teaching and learning, you know. I want AI agents that are helping the teacher do better education, right? You know, because, you know, of the modalities, the training and so on. But ultimately, these are very, you know, powerful, right, human experiences that we need to keep as human experiences.

• 1:52:37John Coogan?

  How have you been processing the dialogue around the Antichrist? You mentioned Acts 17, Acts 17's and Peter Thiel. It's something that's really sparked a huge discourse in Silicon Valley that I think a lot of people weren't even thinking about. Christianity's somewhat unique in the idea of the Antichrist, but how have you processed it through your life? And then how are you thinking about that concept today?

• 1:53:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I do think there's, you know, there was, you know, when I was in my, you know, whatever, twenties or thirties, there was a series called Left Behind.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 04

  It was like, oh, you know, and if you go back and read that, you know, and the late great planet, or, you know, there's sort of been this episodic flow of end times to discussions and discussions on the Antichrist and what they would be. So, you know, this topic has, you know, only persisted for about 2,000 years.

• 1:53:37Speaker 04

  You know, it just sort of goes. It's Lindy. Yes, it's been around forever. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I, you know, hey, having another cycle of that, great, because it causes people to ask deep questions.

• 1:53:51Speaker 04

  Right, you know, to me, that is a good side effect to it. Now, from a biblical scholarship perspective, you know, Antichrist is mentioned one time in the Bible and not contextually in Revelation, right? It's like, okay, this is a thin discussion, right? If you look at it theologically, you know, that way, you know, and most of the revelation and, you know, apocryphal conversations in the Bible are actually much simpler, right? You know, people of those days were looking at, they were seeing the Antichrist and his name was Caesar. Right, you know, in that sense.

• 1:54:30Speaker 04

  And, you know, the Bible was written to be, you know, I'll say eternal, but current at the same time. So I think a lot of this, it's this episodic flow of excitement on the topic. But I think a theological, you know, study of it would say, calm down a little bit, right? You know, we are living in the end days, meaning that, you know, right? You know, there isn't another expression of Jesus Christ coming until the end of time, you know, seen through scripture, you know, and because of that, you know, hey, if this causes people to be more interested in religion, yes. But at the end of the day, let's make sure we have good theology behind the conversation as well.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  What about millenarian thinking generally, apocalyptic thinking generally? It feels like, uh,

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Feels like it's a

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  Maybe I'm out of touch with what the vibe was in the semiconductor industry when you were active in it. But it feels like the semiconductor companies have not historically said, if we don't build this, the world will end. But we've seen a rise of entrepreneurs who have been talking about apocalyptic consequences to either building or not building what they're working on. And it feels like it's more in the zeitgeist, it's kind of the final conversation you can have about the impact of a technology. And it's, and so far, I mean, it's not just the AI folks. Even Elon Musk talks about the consequences of not becoming multi-planetary, being apocalyptic potentially. And so we have to explore the stars, which I completely agree with. I love space exploration.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  And, uh, and so I'm wondering about that as a, as a rhetorical tool in entrepreneurship. Is that something that you've noticed is on the uptick or has it always been this way?

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  Well, again, I think there's an episodic nature to it. You know, and let's, you know, when, uh, you know, go read some of the press. When Sputnik flew through the sky.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:23Speaker 04

  The Russians hear everything, right? Yeah, they can read my mind. I just saw it in the sky last night, right? You know, so my father, you know, talked to me about when he saw Sputnik in the night sky. Right, you know, so, right, you know, and I, so I do think there's somewhat of episodic nature. And when you hit these huge inflection points, right? Like AI that is just exploding in capacity and capability. I think, okay, yeah, we're in the next episodic discussion, right? Uh, as a result, you know, but I think if you look over history, we've seen that, you know, go through, uh, over time. You know, in the first days of the internet, uh, you know, my cell phone is gonna, you know, right?

• 1:57:08Speaker 04

  Turn my, my brain to Jell-O and, you know, all of these other kind of things to, you know, I just don't get too.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  We might have a technical issue. Let's give just a second. Hopefully we can get.

• 1:57:24Jordi Hays?

  Pat down. The deep state took down the.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  It was getting too real. It was a fantastic interview. We were enjoying that. Hopefully we can bring back Pat Gelsinger.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  I didn't get to ask him about AI capex.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  We'll work on, we'll work on getting him back.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Bring him back. In the meantime, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Head over to TurboPuffer and we have Pat Gelsinger back. Sorry about that.

• 1:57:58Jordi Hays?

  AGI is here, but the internet still doesn't work sometimes.

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I always get a kick out of this when the cell network, uh, here, let me close this as well.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we are.

• 1:58:10Speaker 04

  On the cell network or the internet, you know, uh, drops in Silicon Valley. It's like, man.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  What's going on? What's going on?

• 1:58:18Speaker 04

  This is the place we should get this right.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, I don't know where, exactly where we got cut off, but I, I wanted to ask you about, uh, there's been so many insane headlines this year around AI, AI capex, AI talent wars.

• 1:58:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, rewinding in your career in the 90s, early 2000s, like what of what parallels are you personally drawing?

• 1:58:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I do think, let me give two different answers to that first. Because, you know, I mean, you know, people are talking about these one, five, 10 gigawatt data centers. Right? Every time somebody says gigawatt, the image I want in your mind is a nuclear reactor. Because a new one nuclear reactor is about to gigawatt of power capacity. How many nuclear reactors has the US built in the last 25 years?

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  I think it's one or three at Votal, right?

• 1:59:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, remember China, I think China has 60 under, right, you know, construction today. Right? You know, and fundamentally, energy capacity, you know, we sort of lost a decade. Right? You know, as we were so focused on, right, you know, climate that we weren't building our energy capacity and renewables. Hey, I'm the biggest believer, but for the most part, they're not economic. Right? There's a lot of work going into making them economic, you know, some of the playground companies are working on that. Yeah, but for the most part, they weren't economic and they didn't add that much to the grid.

• 1:59:58Speaker 04

  Right? You know, so there's this craziness going on, right? You know, of that capex expectation and so on. You don't have the energy to do it. Now, you know, obviously, we're working on dramatic improvements to make inferencing 10 or 100 times more power effective. Right? Because ultimately, you know, I think the demand for inferencing capacity is nigh on infinite. Right? Jevon's law, the gas law, you know, it really should be permeating every aspect of what we do going forward. You know, but some of the crazy predictions associated with this, you know, it's not going to be chip limited. It's not going to be land limited. It's not going to be capital limited.

• 2:00:43Speaker 04

  It'll be energy limited going forward. So, and I do think it's inducing a lot of investment into the energy systems, which I view as very positive because our long-term economic growth as a nation will be energy limited. So even if we're quote overbuilding capacity, I view it as a super good thing.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:06Speaker 04

  Right? Because hey, whether I need that for my electrification, whether I need it, you know, for my quantum computers, whether I need it, you know, for.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Just make my power bill cheaper. If you have more energy to go around, the price is going to fall for average Americans. That's a win.

• 2:01:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, and I mean, the oil crisis.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Speaker 04

  Great. You know, it could become the electrification crisis in the future, right? If I don't. So I just view that as such a good thing.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:33Speaker 04

  Because if so mismanaged our nation's energy capacity. Going forward. Now, you know, some of these forecasts are just nutty.

• 2:01:44Speaker 04

  It's all like that.

• 2:01:45John Coogan?

  It's a hundred nuclear power plants next year. Who knows?

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, we did. We did have an IPO today.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  For me.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  That is planning to make a nuclear reactor by 2038 or something like that. They're they're they raise this money to try to bring it online. So I was poking a little bit of fun at that because the company's nine months old, they're valued at $17 billion, but maybe it will be net good.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  If we can bring, you know, a new nuclear plant or two online.

• 2:02:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, you know, by the way, you know, I just, you know, I just became the general partner, lead on investment that we're doing in the nuclear space at Playground. So I'm learning a lot about this.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:02:25Speaker 04

  Right? And a lot of the, you know, the small nuclear reactors, they're not economic, right? You can't connect them to the grid. You can't scale them, you know, the regulatory thing. So, you know, I do think it's a very fundamental problem, you know, for the nation and one, hey, I'm now diving into that problem as well. So, you know, we need to bring on many gigawatts of additional capacity for, you know, the future of our nation.

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 04

  Now, you know, some of the other, you know, projections there, you know, that people, you know, point to, you know, I think they're way over their skis, right? You know, not everybody's going to add 10 gigawatts of additional capacity. And I am excited that, you know, like one of our companies, Snowcap, you know, we're out to make AI 100 times more power efficient than it is today.

• 2:03:15Speaker 04

  Not 10%, not 10x, 100x.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:03:20Speaker 04

  Right? You know, as we move to superconducting. So instead of that gigawatt, you know, I'm going to have 100 megawatts of cryogenic capacity that produces 10 times more inferencing.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30Speaker 04

  Okay, that's industry reshaping. You know, and those are the kind of things that are truly going to, you know, say, do a better job of the energy capacity we have. And, right, you know, creating more ultimate capacity for the future.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  And what about, you know, is some of the vendor financing going on, some of the demand guarantees that that people have been making? Does that, uh, is that immediately worrisome to you because of some of the, the negative events that, that came after? Things like that in the dot com era? Or do you think it's?

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've kind of heard both sides.

• 2:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Part of the cycle.

• 2:04:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, we, we've seen this before. You know, look at all the optical companies, you know, in the early days of the internet, right? Well, you know, everything is up and to the right, you know, for, uh, you know, exponential growth for unlimited periods of time. You know? Okay, you know, I mean, it was, it was a stunning 10 years, but it didn't extrapolate to 30 years.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:29Speaker 04

  Right? And I see most of the AI thing, you know, I, I see, you know, fundamentally no change for the next two, three, four years. But by the end of the decade, some of these transformational technologies will be at scale. So I do see a real shift, right? Uh, and then before the end of the decade, particularly on, uh, inferencing costs, inferencing, uh, performance and power consumption for inferencing, which is sort of like the big one, uh, for a broad deployment of AI.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  How do you think about, I mean, there, there's a lot of, uh, founders in our audience who are, you know, it's, it's raining right now and they're, they're happy and everything's good. Um, but you've been through so many market cycles. Is there a story or advice that you give to entrepreneurs or founders who are going through a reset? In going through a bear market, uh, what, what, how do you think about getting through those hard times?

• 2:05:26Speaker 04

  Well, you know, so they're going to come. Right, right now, you know, as a CEO, right, your job is the high is never as high and the low is never as low. Right, you know, your job is to sort of, you know, cut the tops off of the crazy highs and, you know, manage through the crazy lows, right? That's your job. And if you're not ready to do that, you know, if you're the, you know, the super enthusiastic champion that everything's up and to the right, you know, for the next two, three decades, you shouldn't be in the CEO's job. Right? That's called a cheerleader, not a CEO. And, you know, we have way too many companies that are led by cheerleaders as opposed to CEOs, right?

• 2:06:08Speaker 04

  And we can go back over history and identify a number of those. Also, you know, like I say, I think the next couple of years, I think, are going to be just fine. But, you know, right, you know, as we get to the end of the decade, okay, things are not going to be just fine. You know, there's going to be fundamental shifts in the economics and the capacity. And a CEO's job is to, you know, get the balance sheet in place that they can navigate through those times, right? You get cash when you don't need it, because when you need it, you can't get it. Right? So you have to be managing thoughtfully, you know, about when those disruptions occur. So, you know, I do think, you know, particularly a couple of years out from now, okay, that's your job as the CEO, as the leader, as the entrepreneur.

• 2:06:53Speaker 04

  Do I have enough capacity to take a meaningfully negative time, right? And be able to go navigate through it?

• 2:07:01John Coogan?

  What about team building, leadership? How should you be communicating with potentially thousands of employees who are looking to the CEO for leadership, not just cheerleading?

• 2:07:10Speaker 04

  Well, you know, you're, you know, the first job of the leader is to represent reality, right? You know, where it is, and, you know, that is the first job. Here's where we are. Life is great, but it's not as good as that. You know, life is bad and here's the situation and it's not as bad as that. First job of a leader being that point of truth, that point of reality. You know, as I say, you know, the leader's job is to communicate the vision over and over and over again. To the point that you are absolutely sick and tired of it, right? You know, you think there can't be a single person that hasn't heard you communicate the vision.

• 2:07:53Speaker 04

  And just about the time that you're absolutely dreadfully bored by it, it's the first time it's really getting through. Right? It was just that hard. And about the time your organization knows it, usually one to two years. It takes another year or two for the customers to understand it. Yeah. Right? You know, and if you change, right? In less than three or four years, nobody understands it. Yeah. You know, so, right? That constancy of vision, purpose, mission is a super important thing, you know, for the leader. You know, preparing for the bad days, like we already touched on, there will be bad days. Uh, that, you know, you have to navigate to through.

• 2:08:36Speaker 04

  You know, and then when you have success, you give it all to the organization. And when you have failure, you claim it all. In a transparent, you know, uh, a facing way, you know, this, right? And that's how you build, you know, loyalty and commitment, uh, from your teams. You know, and being a CEO is not cut out for everybody. Period. Stop. You know, if you're not ready to take accountability, if you're not ready to make the hard calls. You know, if you're not ready to hire, but also fire, uh, at the same time. If you're not ready to demand your organization to excellence, you shouldn't be a CEO. At the same time, if you're ready to do that, it is one of the most fulfilling, satisfying opportunities of a leader's career.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:09:23Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Well, very well said.

• 2:09:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you have time for one more question? I know we're 10 minutes over.

• 2:09:28Speaker 04

  For you, absolutely.

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  I'm really enjoying this.

• 2:09:32Jordi Hays?

  We were talking with Brett Taylor of Sierra about kind of the SaaS apocalypse and how there's a lot of legacy enterprise software companies that are needing to react and respond and evolve as, you know, LLMs and generative AI sort of comes online. And he said something I wanted to get your thoughts on and maybe some examples, but he believes it's easier to change your technology stack than your business model. And he was saying in the context of it's great if you're a software company that started and is charging based on value, but if you have seat-based pricing today and your competitors are now selling,

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  you know, not trying to get you to scale headcount, but just trying to deliver more and more value, that can be tough. I wanted to ask if there was any notable kind of moments in your career where, you know, you witnessed a company sort of be able to effectively evolve their business model and or on the technology side and how those two things play together in your view?

• 2:10:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, first, Brett, you know, just he's a world-class guy.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:48Speaker 04

  So if you have the chance to bring Brett on or Pat on, take Brett.

• 2:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, we've enjoyed both.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Why not both?

• 2:10:56Speaker 04

  But Brett is great. You know, we took VMware through the transition from enterprise licensing to a SaaS business model. It is butt-ugly hard, right? You know, a business model is like a deep rut, right? You know, one of my favorite posters on this was, you know, it showed a deeply rutted Indian road and the caption read, right, you know, pick your rut carefully. You'll be in it for 100 kilometers.

• 2:11:30Speaker 04

  Right, you know, and there's sort of this truth to a business model because your competitors get used to it, your customers get used to it, your supply chain get you, you know, you just get funneled into it. And when you try to change your business model, man, it is dreadful. You know, the contractual, the legal, the renegotiations, etc., you know.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  The team.

• 2:11:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:11:51Speaker 03

  Team compensation.

• 2:11:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, everything is hard about it, you know, because, you know, you build it, you know, every aspect of the business around, you know, those business, the characteristics of the business model you've chosen. So, you know, Brett is right on, changing the technology is quite a bit easier than changing the business model. Now, you know, the masterstroke is if you can keep sort of that interface to the customer and the business model the same and do a major retooling, right, of the technology underneath it. Okay, now you win. Right. By the way, you know, that, you know, the first major success in the enterprise, the SaaS conversion, you know, my, you know, friends at Adobe, you know, they navigated

• 2:12:36Speaker 04

  through it, you know, I mean, that was, you know, you know, their masterstroke and many others followed in their footsteps after it, but that was hard, you know, for the transition. Now, as we go to AI, most are going to be in a SaaS-like business model going forward. You know, that said, the user experience in an AI-native application is dramatically different, right? You know, you, and if we think about it, you know, and I, you know, in very broad terms, the computer has, I have been adapting to the computer for the last 50 years. In an AI world, the computer adapts to me.

• 2:13:19Speaker 04

  Right? You know, if you think about the fundamental shift of that, where now I am speaking to it on my terms, it's hearing me in my way, you know, it's understanding my face, my recognition, my thoughts, right, contextualizing them, you know, in my language and understanding, you know, so I do think the idea of just flipping to a SaaS. AI business model, you know, versus an AI native experience that truly harnesses the full breadth of that power. I think many, uh, you know, people, as they talk about the AI conversion of their applications, wholly underestimate what will be associated, right? With truly creating an AI native experience for the future. Everything changes.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not just even business model going maybe from seat based and, and fixed contracts to value or selling the work, but it's even the entire user interface and the, the, the app, like what does the application look like? What does it feel like? Is it feel like firing and managing a team? Does it feel like hitting buttons yourself?

• 2:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  So doing both of those things at the same time.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  Actual last question. Is it true or do you still have a VMware tattoo on your arm?

• 2:14:31Speaker 04

  So, uh, no, I don't.

• 2:14:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:35Speaker 04

  And it was so funny because when, you know, my, you know,

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  But you did at one point.

• 2:14:40Speaker 04

  I, I did, right? But it was like one of those 30 day tattoos.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:14:45Speaker 04

  So, you know, and I came home from that trip and my, what, you know, somebody sends the video to my wife.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52Speaker 04

  Right? You know, the tattoo artist and everything like that.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:56Speaker 04

  And she says, you may not have that on your arm by the time I go on vacation with you.

• 2:15:02John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. People think tech, uh, tech people are hardcore today when they launch like a video or something, or they put up a billboard, like the, the 30 day, living with your brand for 30 days is a new level. And we thank you for your service to the technology industry, Pat. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

• 2:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the work that you're doing. It's very important.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  I'm very excited. We, I mean, we'd love to have you back, dive into all the different portfolio companies, also what's happening on the, on, on the glue side in terms of actual productization. I know we spent a little bunch of time in the AI world and talking about the other labs, but, uh, there's so much more that we could go into and, but we'll give you back the rest of your day. Have a great day.

• 2:15:39Speaker 04

  Thank you. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so much.

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Talk to you soon.

• 2:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video of the Meta Ray-Ban display.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  I will react to this. The Meta Ray-Ban display has a new video that we are going to pull up. In the meantime, let me tell you about Profound. You've heard that you can now buy products on ChatGPT. You're going to need to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. You send you can reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. We did this just yesterday. We found some new microphone stands. I took a picture of a microphone stand that I saw, dumped it in ChatGPT. What is this? Wound up, I didn't check out actually in the ChatGPT workflow, but we were pretty close to getting there and you're going to want your brand mentioned in ChatGPT with profound. Let's watch the Meta Ray Bans video right now. This is, we've, so we've demoed this, both Jordy and I have looked at this. This is the, what the heads up display looks like.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  It looks better when you're actually using your human eyes instead of trying to film through it. But the navigation, the heads up display, the COD minimap, I think they should give it much more Call of Duty aesthetics if they want it to really pop and go viral. Tyler, what's your reaction? Would you wear this?

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  So, so i- is it like running through your phone at all?

• 2:16:48John Coogan?

  So I believe, we, we were debating this with, with Simon on the show when he was here. I, I believe that almost all of the compute is done on the phone and it is serving up maybe like a small JSON file that it renders in, on the headset, or maybe it's even just streaming images. The image, it like the, the, the bandwidth over Bluetooth has to be limited. And then the compute on the device is also limited. So I would imagine that it doesn't have GPS. It's not doing any on-device inference. It's, i- i- it's really doing limited, just this is the graphics that I need to show, render that graphics and pipe it in there, but then keep that battery life going as long as possible.

• 2:17:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I mean, with these, these are the, um, the Oakley ones.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:34Speaker 02

  And these, like, when you set up, you have to connect to your phone. That's like the very first thing you do.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So these you definitely have to connect to your phone. They do not work without a phone.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Over time, you would imagine that they try and bootstrap a true platform on top of this and say,

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Hey, as soon as we have developer access to this, I'm going to add the sound effects. So it will, using the live AI feature, you got, you walk outside, you're walking down the street. The glasses are, you know, monitoring the situation. And you're getting, you're getting these kinds of sound effects.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  It would be electric, electric. Bobby in the chat asked, why don't we use lav mics? Well, we were discussing it. Turns out lav mics are complicated. We're figuring it out. We're gonna see some upgrades.

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Lav mics are coming. We want to be able to.

• 2:18:14John Coogan?

  Walk around, enjoy the horse. Enjoy the horse. Can we go to the horse cam? Do we have a horse cam today? I know I'm putting the production team on, on short notice with that one.

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Get the horse cam going. I mean.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Here's the wide. Let's go. We got the horse over there and the gong over here. We're filling out the studio. We're having a lot of fun. Zoom in on the horse.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  It has been unboxed. Some folks in the chat were asking, what's the genesis of the horse? There's a few things. We, we, we enjoy equestrianism. We enjoy polo. This was from the early brand exploration that we did. We found that there was a bit of white space there. People, a lot of people in tech are.

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Too many people in tech media were afraid to show their appreciation. And so in some ways, the horse is a monument to technology journalism.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, many technology journalists grew up.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:03Jordi Hays?

  You know, with a very equestrian lifestyle. And so we thought this was, considering the show wouldn't be possible without the brave reporting.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  From many technology journalists. We thought, why not put a horse?

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Also, I have a buddy, Truman Sachs. He's been on the show. He runs a company called Cubby and his, he's, he's obsessed with horsepower, horse metaphors. He's obsessed with the idea of channeling the energy of a horse, much like I channel the energy of a golden retriever. The horse is a very, it's a noble stallion. It, it has a lot of noble qualities that you should be emulating. And so the horse made its way onto the soundboard. And now the horse lives physically in our world every day at the TBN Ultra Dome.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Numeral Sales Tax on autopilot. It's a horse for your sales tax. Spend less than five minutes on per month on sales tax compliance. That's faster than a horse can run around the Kentucky Derby. I think I don't actually know how long it takes.

• 2:20:09Jordi Hays?

  Breaking some breaking news. Barry Weiss to be named editor in chief of CBS News.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:20:15Jordi Hays?

  People were predicting.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Trade deal.

• 2:20:20Jordi Hays?

  This is such a brutal deal. There's another post here. Paramount will announce deal to acquire Free Press and bring Barry Weiss to CBS News on Monday. I feel like this deal has been announced 50 times.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:31Jordi Hays?

  So that when it actually gets announced.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  I wonder why are media people obsessed with media people? Turns out, yes. People love reporting on this. You could never get this much press for a $250 million acquisition of your, you know, database ERP enterprise AI company. You'd be begging for Bloomberg and TechCrunch pieces. But when you're in the media, the media loves to tell a story about media. And so you get a lot of press. In other news, Arvind over at Perplexity is announcing the browser, which I think was teased earlier, but he said announcement in 3.5 hours. I'd love to get an update from Tyler on what this announcement was and how it's shaping up, what the timeline's saying. Do you know what's going on in perplexity world or are you perplexed?

• 2:21:15Speaker 02

  I believe that the main announcement is that Comet is just free.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  Okay. It was originally 20 or 200 a month?

• 2:21:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's two different plans.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  I think it was like usage based. And I think it was also, I mean, it was recently and it was in beta as of very recently.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:21:30Speaker 02

  And I think it was released probably to just the paid plans.

• 2:21:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:33Speaker 02

  And now it's fully free.

• 2:21:34John Coogan?

  Well, you should give it a try again. See if you churn, see if you stick around. Some people love it. Some people have just kind of stuck with Chrome. I'm kind of still living in Chrome world, although I do Chrome on desktop Safari on iPhone, which I feel like is the worst possible combination. Like I should have some bleed over, but I posted a screenshot of some App Store rankings for Sora and Microsoft Teams.

• 2:21:57Jordi Hays?

  So is this a mobile based browser? Can you get Comet in the?

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  Good question. Let's go to Tyler Cosgrove, IRL Cluley.

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about fin.ai while everyone looks that up. It's the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive backups, number one ranking on G2.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't believe Comet is available as a mobile app. Which, again, I, it's very hard to be a $20 billion company trying to grind to product market fit.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the browser company was working on something similar and there's news that OpenAI will be launching something as well.

• 2:22:40Speaker 02

  I mean, even Anthropic now has a extension, which is very similar.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, so it bends in Claude 4.5 into your browser, basically.

• 2:22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  And is it taking, do you know if it's taking, I wonder if it's taking screenshots or looking at the HTML and JSON as it comes in, acting at a lower level?

• 2:22:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know exactly. I don't think it's agentic, like Comet, one of the main things is that it can actually like make actions. I don't think the Claude one is actually agentic yet.

• 2:23:07John Coogan?

  Proplexy is a fascinating story. You know, we've had fun with the founder on the show, but it'll be interesting to see how it plays out. It feels like there's a whole bunch of big deals that need to be, that need to happen under the hood. Dance partners with, you know, they tried to buy TikTok and you could see partnering up with a, with another legacy tech company revitalizing them. We saw the browser company go over to Atlassian and there's so many different ways this could break, but good luck to the team over there. In other news, open source, Pantex Cap says, here's the thing on data centers. I laughed at all the dumb sell-side reports on data centers being canceled earlier this year. Remember those? People were saying, oh yeah, we're not going to build data centers. Turns out that was wrong, maybe.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Satya was pulling back. And I read, I read a little bit from this.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  He went back on pulling back. There's news today in the Journal that Satya said that, oh, where is it? It's somewhere in here amid a bunch of other articles we won't be reading. Microsoft CEO gives up some responsibilities. Nadella said in a note to employees that Judson Altough has been promoted to helm the biz, the company's commercial business in essentially overseeing a large swath. of the technology giants operations. Nadella is saying that he needs to focus on the company's biggest artificial intelligence bets. So he's going back in and and really doubling down on AI personally. And he's promoting other folks to take stuff off his plate so he can refocus on AI.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  So kind of a retrench into let's go big on AI.

• 2:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was. I was pretty. I got a little I got personally a little bit bearish when Satya was pulling back, right?

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  I respect him.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  He has more data.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Than almost anyone on earth.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Right? Very smart guy. He he was basically actively getting fit. They're they're doing rounds of layoffs. As he pulled back, a lot of other people, you know, have stepped up. Oracle has obviously seen a massive appreciation from leaning into.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Totally. And you could and you could see. And I saw feel like filling that gap if Oracle hadn't stepped up.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Totally. But what open source or Pantex cap.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Is saying, but he says. You know, I laughed at all the dumb sell side reports on data centers being canceled earlier this year. Made a ton of money going long against that nonsense and bearishness. But now we're on the other end. I don't think people understand the actual logistical hurdles in place for data centers now. First, power companies are overwhelmed, tired of all the FUD. They're putting up huge barriers to weed out all the BS.

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  You mentioned this earlier.

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Earlier. If you want 500 megawatts from Georgia Power, you now have to put up about 600 million upfront.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  That's just such a massive number to be locked.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Up. I'm sure people are also like lend it now lending.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Helping people finance that.

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  And he says, second, communities are pushing back more. Deals are getting canceled on it. The water, we saw that the Amazon data center was in Tennessee.

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:06Jordi Hays?

  Where was it? That just got canceled.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09Jordi Hays?

  He's saying water consumption is a real issue. Data centers actually help electricity prices go down. But overall rates are shooting up and they're getting blamed. So I want to.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  We need to dig into this more.

• 2:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Unpack this more because that's not.

• 2:26:22John Coogan?

  This was always my anti face, anti fast take off take, which was. Even in this world where the algorithms hold the scaling is all you need, the bitter lesson holds, it's like at a certain point, you're just moving like billions of tons of sand and refining it into silicon to make chips and like the laws of physics come into play at a certain level. If you're just moving an immense amount of equipment around the world and you need more boats to move the GPUs from one place to another, you need more energy, you have to build a new Hoover Dam every two minutes because you're accelerating so fast. And it feels like there will be some laws of physics that will kind of act as a drag. I don't know. Tyler, what do you think?

• 2:27:02Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, but periodic labs is kind of like the answer to that. I mean, obviously, like at some level, you always have to like, you know, conform to physics.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:27:11Speaker 02

  But I think we have a long way to go where like you can actually have the LLMs improving the chips.

• 2:27:16John Coogan?

  How many days until AGI on the, on the, on the day tracker?

• 2:27:19Speaker 02

  Right now, it's, it's 3,600.

• 2:27:21John Coogan?

  3,600. So that's what 12 years or something?

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think.

• 2:27:26John Coogan?

  So based on today, based on this week, based on Sora 2?

• 2:27:29Speaker 02

  It hasn't been updated since Sora. I think I need to kind of give a good think about this.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:27:34Speaker 02

  Figure out where I am, but.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  Well, what about you, Jordy? If the singularity is roughly 10 years away, does the Sora 2 news, does the, does the energy consumption news move your estimate out or move it forward? I think I'm moving a little bit out. I'd probably add another 100 days to the singularity counter personally, but feel free to.

• 2:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it signals, it signals. Yeah, this, this is a Will Monitis post from yesterday saying, is this the product you release if you believe you're three to four years away from super intelligence?

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you're looking for super intelligence for CRM, head over to Adio. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Get started for free. Also, another extremely AGI pilled news headline, Google Ads are now live in Gemini. Let's go.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  There we go. We love ads.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Where was DeepMind on your AGI-pilled category?

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Ads were always on the critical path.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  I think this is critical path. I don't think this is bearish. Let's take 2,000 days off the singularity counter. It's coming tomorrow. Considering Gemini is the only provider which doesn't allow users to opt out of training their models on their data, which I don't think is true because we just got news about the Meta team will be training ads and targeting ads based on your interactions with Meta AI chatbots, which makes tons of sense. Targeting here will be off the charts, as Wasteland Capital. Every data point about you, every question you've ever had, sold to the highest bidder. And so if you're just chatting with Gemini or you're chatting with Meta AI, you'll start seeing ads that reflect what you've been searching for in the chatbot

• 2:29:19John Coogan?

  or talking to the chatbot about. Makes a ton of sense. I'm sure there's going to be a bunch of weird things. It was already weird where people would say like, I talked about this with my, this product with my friend and then I saw a targeted ad. How did that happen? It was already feeling like creepily accurate and I'm sure this will make it way creepier. But it'll be good for the business probably, right? What do you think? Bullish?

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  I think it's pretty good.

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  You know we're bullish ads.

• 2:29:43John Coogan?

  Bullish ads. Well, we are also bullish. Sheel, a good friend of the show, he has some big news and we're going to bring him into the TBN Ultra. I'm from the Restream waiting room. Sheel, how you doing?

• 2:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:29:53Sheel Mohnot?

  Great. How are you guys doing?

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Fantastically.

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  It is great to have you back. It's been too long.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  Awesome chat with Patrick Gelsinger. Really went deep with him. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:30:02Sheel Mohnot?

  That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I feel like the only, like, like since I was last on, you guys have had like Zuck, Gelsinger, Mark Adry. Like a bunch of, I feel like the, the level getting on TBN now is a really big deal.

• 2:30:18John Coogan?

  Well, we're happy to have you. Give us the news. What, what, what's new in your world?

• 2:30:24Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah. So we just announced yesterday that we, we raised a new $140 million fund.

• 2:30:33John Coogan?

  Multiple time guest, massive new fund. Congratulations. One gong hit for every fund. You're on Fund.

• 2:30:40Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. I thought you guys were on, I would have, if I had to guess what fund you were on, it would have been like at least five by now. Maybe you're like, you got that wise unk status or something, but yeah, just, just getting started.

• 2:30:55Sheel Mohnot?

  I appreciate that. Yeah, it feels like we're still brand new though. Like it, I still feel, I still refer to myself as like a new investor, but we've been running BTV for six years now.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Any change in strategy with this fund? Or can you just restate the thesis for me?

• 2:31:12Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah. So the thesis is investing in the best pre-seed and seed stage founders, building fintech companies. We take a pretty broad view on fintech. So for us, there's a lot of stuff that you might not think about as fintech. Vertical SaaS is probably the main one. So if you look at Toast, Shopify, those kinds of companies, MindBody, those kinds of companies are actually largely fintech companies. So 80% plus of the revenue for those companies comes from financial services. So we invest in those kinds of companies. We invest in some B2B marketplaces, but primarily we're just investing in the future financial services.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  What's the mood on the ground with LPs? Like, is it easier than in past years to raise this fund? Is it, is it contrarian to be focused on fintech when everything's AI? Or were you able to kind of roll that into the narrative because every fintech company is obviously leveraging AI now? What, what talking points were you running through?

• 2:32:09Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, it was definitely, I mean, the mood on fintech is definitely not what it was when we last raised, which was 2021. Nothing could, could have been, I mean, in 2021.

• 2:32:19Jordi Hays?

  You were getting 200x revenue multiples for a team that had started two weeks ago and had like, you know, an idea of a customer. It was absolutely crazy.

• 2:32:30Sheel Mohnot?

  Exactly. We actually, we announced it yesterday and we haven't even started deploying from the fund, but we actually raised it a little while ago. I think now things are probably a little bit easier, but it was, it was a harder fundraise for us than, than the last one in 2021 for sure. But we'd actually, we actually are larger than we had planned for. We had planned to shrink our fund size and the idea was last fund took us three and a half years to deploy. This one, we wanted to go back to a three year cycle. So we were going to go from 150 to 125, but we ended up, ended up going to 140. We wanted to have, we had some LPs that we really wanted to have involved. So overall, it wasn't too

• 2:33:09Sheel Mohnot?

  bad and we're excited to deploy from it. But I, I think since we raised it and now there's actually, it's actually like the market is ripping. You had Chime, Klarna, eToro, GoPublic, Circle, and you have so many more coming. Wealthfront, Navan, Ethos in our portfolio. And so I think the market is pretty hot on fintech. So actually, I was just before this talking to another fintech investor who's, who's about to raise and I said, now's a great time to raise. The market's awesome for fintech.

• 2:33:44John Coogan?

  What, I mean, you've been through a proper cycle. What, what, what advice did you give to founders at that time? What are the stories that you share about like buckling up and getting through rough periods, rough patches as a founder entrepreneur?

• 2:34:02Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, it's just like do what you can to survive. And if you live another day and you're a smart team, you'll figure it out. And we've had that happen. Like some of our companies basically had no growth for two years and then all of a sudden the last year it had total inflection and.

• 2:34:21Sheel Mohnot?

  And I think 23 and 24, 22 and 23 were really hard for fintech. Because a lot of these companies are selling into other fintech companies. If you're an infrastructure company, you're selling into other fintech companies. And the funding completely stopped. There were all these, you know, neo bank for X that got funded in 2021, like way too many of them. And so you had, it was just so easy to grow in 2021. And then 22 and 23, you had to grow significantly just to tread water, just to stay like even. And then now we're seeing companies grow a lot. So it was really just stay alive, hunker down. A lot of our companies got to a point where they didn't need to raise money. And obviously, that's the best time to raise money now. Now investors are throwing cash at them.

• 2:35:06Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about stablecoins? I think we've talked about them, you know, before. It's such an, it's an interesting time to me because people are so bullish on stablecoins as a category. And yet it seems like the people, the companies best suited to capitalize on this opportunity are not startups. And I don't know if you feel the same way, but you see Stripe's launch of open issuance. You see, which was interesting to me because we had a company on like a week and a half prior that was building the exact same product. And then Stripe launches it and they already have, you know.

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  There's also a public company circle that like is mature in that space. And there's a tether.

• 2:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then it feels like also interesting because even the scaled stablecoins, the tether, USDT, USDC are now under attack from every institution on earth. And, you know, the pie will grow, but at the same time, it's going to get sliced up. So where are you thinking about the opportunities to deploy against this kind of technology at the early stage?

• 2:36:10Sheel Mohnot?

  Yeah, I think you're right. I think one challenge we're having right now is we're just seeing so, especially, we talked about last time I was on the Bridge acquisition. Since then, we've just been seeing so many companies built in every sector within stablecoins.

• 2:36:27Sheel Mohnot?

  And I haven't seen that many that compelled me to say, okay, this is, you're going to beat Stripe on this. Like Stripe is executing at a amazing clip. And I haven't found, the use cases I found are specific to a geo. So like you're solving a problem in Latin America. And I think you might be the best person for that. You might be able to get the license that you need in that region.

• 2:36:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have an investor in Mintea, which is doing something, you know, similar to Bridge, but just for LatAm, right? And so they've been building banking relationships for years now. And so they're, they're in a good position. But, but yeah, it's, it's, it's a weird thing for venture capitalists and angel investors to be, at least from my point of view, super bullish on the category. And it's like, it's hard to deploy against it other than just buying some Stripe secondaries.

• 2:37:20Sheel Mohnot?

  It's totally true. One thing that I, like a couple of days ago, Stripe announced that they were doing agentic payments. And obviously that was coming. But it's so hard, like I, I met at least a dozen companies in last year doing agentic payments. And I feel like as a VC, you're not supposed to say, you know, what if Stripe does this? But it was so obvious that Stripe was going to do it.

• 2:37:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but saying what if Stripe does this is very different than what if, what if Google does this, right? It's like Stripe.

• 2:37:49John Coogan?

  Or what if like Morgan Stanley does this, or JP Morgan, or like an older company that maybe isn't in founder mode? Maybe not in Silicon Valley, maybe not Sam Altman on the cap table with the company that's doing the thing. It's like, yeah, this is going to happen.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have one last question.

• 2:38:06Sheel Mohnot?

  Agentic payments are going to be awesome.

• 2:38:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08Sheel Mohnot?

  And it's, and like, so it's the same thing that you just said, Jordy, which is like, I believe in the category. I believe that I will be making purchases through, like through my chat interface. But I don't think that there's necessarily a lot of opportunities for new startups.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question from the chat. They're calling you the People's Mayor of San Francisco, and everyone wants to know, what's the best place to get Indian food in San Francisco or New York?

• 2:38:35Sheel Mohnot?

  It's a great question. Okay, all right. So, New York, my favorite restaurant in the country, in the world, Indian restaurant is, my favorite high-end Indian restaurant is a place called Ambassador's Clubhouse. It's, it's in London, and there's Ambassador's Clubhouse in Jimcana, and they're actually opening in New York next year. So, that's gonna be big.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Oh, lines out the door.

• 2:38:59Sheel Mohnot?

  Lines out the door. And then there's a, book a flight now. SEMA in New York is very good. I gotta say, in, in San Francisco, I don't think we have excellent high-end Indian food. There's a place called Etan in Palo Alto. And then, my best, my favorite spots are Udaquie Palace on Valencia Street, Cola Pasi, also in the Mission. And then there's a new spot called Jalebi Street on Haight, or in the Haight. So, those would be my three go-tos in San Francisco. All kind of hole-in-the-wall places, but that's the best Indian food.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for breaking it down and coming on the show.

• 2:39:38Jordi Hays?

  And excited to get a

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised if it's impossible to get a reservation at any of those places after this pod drops.

• 2:39:45John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:39:46Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Great to see you.

• 2:39:47John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficiency in this ad-buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. We will bring in Santi from Dual Entity, Dual Entry, sorry.

• 2:40:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's happening.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  How you doing? Sorry to keep you waiting. What's the latest in your world?

• 2:40:16Jordi Hays?

  Do we have video? Do we have sound? No.

• 2:40:21John Coogan?

  Well, we do have another advertisement. We got

• 2:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Don't tempt John.

• 2:40:26John Coogan?

  Get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  What did you call it yesterday?

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  AGI for your wrist or something. I don't know. It's probably on one.

• 2:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Out of home ads for your wrist.

• 2:40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think it was out of home ads for your wrist.

• 2:40:42Speaker 06

  Alright, it works now.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  Hey, welcome to the TBP and Ultra Dome.

• 2:40:46Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:40:47John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:40:48Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Sorry for keeping you waiting. We were going long with Sheel, but good to have you here. Please introduce yourself, the company. And what's the news today?

• 2:40:59Speaker 06

  Thank you. I'm Santi. I'm a co-founder of Dual Entry. We're an AI ERP and we're announcing our $90 million Series A.

• 2:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  I love ERPs.

• 2:41:10Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing like the feeling of coming out of Stealth with an AI ERP with 90 million of funding. It just doesn't. I don't think it gets better than that.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. None other than lights.

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  How long you been working on it? What were you doing before?

• 2:41:24Speaker 06

  We've been working for about a year. It does feel good. I will say it does feel good. But it feels even better to be able to run an ERP that doesn't suck like the 1990s.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:41:35Speaker 06

  And we've been working for about a year now. Under Stealth, we used to run a product company before and we suffered one of those legacy ERP migrations for over nine months.

• 2:41:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:41:43Speaker 06

  And, you know, as good entrepreneurs, whenever you have a problem, that means there's an opportunity to solve.

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  When, I'm gonna steal Jordy's question. When did you know you wanted to build an ERP?

• 2:41:54Speaker 06

  The first day we were out of the other prior company, we promised ourselves that was the day we were gonna do it. I'll tell you, it was a very unpopular, you know, we had, we had a ton of people saying, we'll back you guys for any other idea than that one, because that sounds like a very stupid one.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what is the traction? How are you, how are you, I mean, it's the hardest system of record to rip out. It's an enterprise. It's a company that is built on something else out there. They're maybe unhappy, but they're really stuck. Are you better at migrations with AI? Are you just better at sales? Like, how do you actually onboard customers? Because I have to imagine that you have some serious traction to hit this Series A so quickly.

• 2:42:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, we we understood from the very beginning that like a ERP is like having chronic back pain.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:42:41Speaker 06

  Right. It's sort of a pain that keeps growing with time. But if if you have to think about about back pain surgery, it's very risky, it's expensive, it might go wrong. And we had to fix that problem. And the back pain surgery in ERPs is the implementation process. It takes, you know, nine months, the failure rates are over fifty percent. It's very expensive at times, two, three times a softer fee. So we we fixed that with our next day ERP migration engine. So we actually plug into whatever system you're coming from, whether it's legacy ERP or Starter Cloud. And we and we actually have you live by the time that you're doing the demo in most cases.

• 2:43:13John Coogan?

  Whether they like it or not.

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Pull the data from their cold, dead hands. I love it.

• 2:43:18Speaker 06

  It's our it's our customers' data.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, it is. What what's the speaking of customers, what's the median size of a customer? Are you going mid-market to start? Are you going for the huge Fortune one hundred, Fortune ten? How do you see the market now and then where will it develop?

• 2:43:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we we're targeting the mid-market. We're starting with companies as small as five million. But we have publicly listed traded companies running on Jolyn today. They're full set of books, not not a subsidiary, not a, you know, not a department, just the entire company. And the most important thing for us is to give customers a certainty that this is the last ERP that they'll ever have to do.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:54Speaker 06

  You know, you you jump on, you you upgrade from Starter Cloud and this will take you all the way.

• 2:43:59Jordi Hays?

  Why? Why do you think?

• 2:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Why do you guys think you're having more success getting people to trust you, switch over? Is is a lot of it helping? I imagine agentically sort of do the migration or what's what's working now where? You know, some of the investors you talked to maybe a year ago were saying, I'd fund you, but do doing anything else?

• 2:44:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:24Speaker 06

  Well, I think I think AI is bridging that last mile in migration, especially when it comes to the mappings that need to be done. They're very tedious and they're conventionally done by overseas teams that, you know, it takes weeks and it's error prone.

• 2:44:36Speaker 06

  But I think, you know, the best thing is we don't have to ask our customers for trust. We just say, go use it, demo it out. You don't have to come with us with questions and think about all the hypotheticals. Because you also don't know how your business is going to evolve. And you know, it's we're the only ERP in the world that we know of that can actually give you a free trial that lets you use your data and consume it. And by the way, this ERP migration engine is perpetual. So like you can plug it in. And if it takes you a month to make that decision, the data will continue to flow. You can show your CEO your reporting. And you can really play around with it, test all the edge cases before you make a decision. And that's how we've won the trust of our customers.

• 2:45:12Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Are you, how are you, how are you actually? And feel free to pass on the question if it's too much detail. But are you basically saying like you have an existing legacy ERP? Finish out your contract, but you know, we'll start the migration over. You can start building trust with us now. And then when it comes up for your contract renewal on your existing ERP, you can make the call then. Do I want to stay with the legacy or do I have enough trust with you guys to just, you know, keep running here?

• 2:45:39Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. And we send you a link, you click on it, we authorize the connection and the data is flowing within 24 hours. And then, you know, at times people like it so much more and they realize how much time they're saving that the actual, you know, starting to, starting to pay for dual entries is not even the biggest issue or the biggest part of the budget is the fact that they're saving, you know, two or three people doing manual categorizations and the same journal entries every single month. And accounting is a very repetitive task by nature, but every accountant doesn't want to be bucked down into repetitive tasks. Every finance team member wants to be forward looking and thinking, you know, sitting down with the CEO and saying, these are the areas where you should be investing more, this is the areas where you should be cutting back, not, not chasing invoices, we categorizing transactions and we're drafting the same journals over and over.

• 2:46:23Speaker 06

  So, so oftentimes they see that and they make the jump even, even before the contract elapses.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. What's, what's the go to market going forward? You guys have been obviously in stealth. You're out of stealth now. Are you going to get loud? Are you going to buy up all the billboards on the 101? What's the next move?

• 2:46:39Speaker 06

  Well, we like to get referrals. That's the best, that's the best way. So far, we've gotten most of our customers through referrals from existing customers and we, we hope to continue that. We've never gotten so many demo requests in, in an hour in the past, but we're excited to, to use those customers as a way to get the word out and, and have more people come, come to us. There's no reason why you have, need to have a dinosaur in your office today.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Nice. You should, yeah, skip, skip the dinosaur, get a horse. We have a, we have a full-size horse here, so.

• 2:47:08John Coogan?

  Statues are in.

• 2:47:09Jordi Hays?

  Dual entry is really sounding like this, a stallion of the ERP market, so.

• 2:47:14Speaker 06

  Dual entrance stallion, I like that.

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:47:17Jordi Hays?

  Short the dinos.

• 2:47:17John Coogan?

  Very inspirational office view right there. Wonderful having you on the show today. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 2:47:24Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. Thank you, Don. Thank you very much.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Good to meet you.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place.

• 2:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Our last guest of the show is Austin from Double Zero. He's in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TBP and UltraDome. Austin, how are you doing? How's it going?

• 2:47:49Speaker 07

  Good. I can have me on.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Kick us off with an introduction to you and the company and the news today. Would love to get up to speed on Double Zero.

• 2:47:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, certainly. So Double Zero is a blockchain protocol building an alternative internet for high-performance distributed systems and blockchain. And so at its core, this is a physical fiber infrastructure network run by multiple independent contributors to allow systems like blockchains to go faster than the public internet will allow them to go.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  What's the status quo in the industry? I feel like if I sign up for A W U S, I'm going to get charged Ingress and Egress bills and they're kind of abstracting the, like, underlying infrastructure, the physical infrastructure. At what level are you operating? How does all of this fit together?

• 2:48:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this is what's called an OSI layer one, two, and three network. So this is pretty much the lowest level down in the networking stack. And so this is the physical cables, the protocols that transport over them. But fundamentally, this is exactly what you're talking about. The egress and ingress problems in cloud data centers. That's pretty much the only thing that you get billed for in the data center. When you really think about it, especially the cloud data centers. And so this is a way that they generate lock-in. It is easier to stay in the Amazon ecosystem because data moving within Amazon does not get charged, whereas data leaving Amazon does. And this is why you have such a vendor lock-in in the cloud market today.

• 2:49:18Speaker 07

  And so if you think about the ultimate mission of decentralizing the entire AWS stack or the GCP stack and basically rebuilding these on decentralized rails, not just for the point of decentralization, but so you have a greater choice from a consumer standpoint. The network and connectivity layer really is, in my view, the first piece of that that we need to tackle. And it's in some ways the most broken piece of it today. The Internet is an incredible resource. It connects us all. It serves data in far-flung regions of the world. But it was never built for high-performance systems. And so Wall Street does not use the public Internet. Facebook does not really use the public Internet. Even all these big Internet companies that we think of, they run private networks.

• 2:50:01Speaker 07

  And they run private networks because the Internet is too slow to show you Instagram reels. And so why are we building what is supposed to be the alternative replacement to traditional finance on those rails?

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  How do you, who are the suppliers that are bringing Internet connectivity to the network? Do you need to do deals with companies like Akamai? I don't really know who the major players are in the space that you would be pitching to bring resources to the system.

• 2:50:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, so today we have 11 independent, basically, fiber contributors to the network. And this ranges from the folks you'd expect, you know, large trading firms that own and operate their own private networks for high-frequency trading purposes, like DRW Cumberland and, you know, Jump, to digital asset-native firms like Galaxy that are, this is a new thing for them, running private fiber, but it supports a lot of the other business lines that they already do, like market making and trading. And then you have data centers themselves, bare metal providers like TerraSwitch, Latitude, servers.com, Cherry Servers, getting involved on this as well as a way to basically make their regions more attractive for this new burgeoning blockchain and AI infrastructure.

• 2:51:14Speaker 07

  And then you sort of have the last category, which are blockchain-native groups themselves, like GTO.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  How does the high-frequency trading, like, example work? I remember reading, what was it, Flash Boys, where they built the fiber lines between Chicago and the New York Stock Exchange so they can trade commodities faster or something. Do those just go dark outside of market hours and then you can resell the slot capacity? Is that the idea? Or like, why would a high-frequency trading firm, if they built this pipe and they got it and they're making money off of it? Like, in what world do they end up with extra capacity that they want to sell back to, basically, a grid that you're building?

• 2:51:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's two things that are going on there. One is simply the technology changes very quickly. And so if you are in the business of being a high-frequency trading firm, you pay a pretty extreme premium to be on the absolute fastest path. In blockchain, the second fastest path or the fourth fastest path is actually totally fine. These are still orders of magnitude improvement over the public internet. And so sometimes they have what you'd call sort of secondary inventory that they can contribute to something like Double Zero. The other component of this too is there's not that many financial centers in the world when you think about it. It's a pretty tractable problem for a large trading firm with a large budget to go out and have a team that connects all these major financial centers. You look at

• 2:52:35Speaker 07

  just Solana, it's running over 300 data centers around the world.

• 2:52:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:52:39Speaker 07

  And when you include other blockchains, that number goes up dramatically. It's too big of a problem for any one organization to solve and address. And so what do we turn to? We turn to a consortium model powered and aligned through tokens. And that is what the token is the best unit at. It can bring disparate efforts together, again, a common goal to benefit all. And it really is an innovation on the traditional corporate structure, which of course in itself changed the world in its own right.

• 2:53:06Speaker 08

  Sure.

• 2:53:06Speaker 07

  Tokens just happen to be the best way to create this type of alignment.

• 2:53:10Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Your guys' token launched this morning, sometime in the early hours. It's now trading at somewhere around a $6 billion, fully diluted valuation. What goes into, like, what's like the, what's the process to get to get to this point from a, more from like a financial standpoint? Obviously, you need traction with the network and usage and a bunch of different partners. But we talked to a lot of, you know, more traditional public company CEOs. We'll often talk to them on their IPO day and we'll talk about the different processes around the road shows. But on the digital asset side, launching a network like this, what are kind of the key

• 2:53:53Jordi Hays?

  steps leading up to this moment? And congratulations, by the way.

• 2:53:57Speaker 07

  Thank you. Yes. One of the things that is different about a blockchain protocol than, you know, any sort of traditional structure is we don't own and operate any of the fiber. And now you can say, sure, Uber does not own and operate any of the cars. But at the end of the day, the role of the core contributors to the double zero protocol is to build the software layer with other core contributors that then allow this contribution of fiber units to it. And so a ton of the work in the early days on this project, apart from the software side of how do we actually build these things in decentralized fashions that allow for permissionless contribution of fiber? But how do we go out and convince these people who have access to fiber that they should take a quite valuable asset that has fairly

• 2:54:38Speaker 07

  high OpEx and fairly high CapEx and contribute that to the double zero network? And a lot of that comes back to, you know, our contributors, for the most part, are fundamental believers in the power of this technology. We don't have today like an AT&T or a Verizon or a Lumen contributing capacity to the network, because those are largely either publicly traded companies or companies that are owned by PE firms. And they're expecting a very traditional dependable type of return from that. Crypto is not that. This is very much the Wild West. The hope, of course, is that over time, we, you know, basically prove that it's worth contributing even a small slice

• 2:55:19Speaker 07

  of a global fiber network owned by one of these subsea cable firms or, you know, these traditional telcos into the mix. And we've had a number of outreaches just today from more traditional players, asking how they can get involved. The real thing here is all of these companies, it's the same thing that the cable companies were going through in the United States, maybe 10 or 15 years ago. They're priced and they're valued and they sell effectively dumb pipes. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way. They're quite sophisticated, advanced technologies, but they don't have the same ability to take a cut of what flows over them the way you see in other types of spaces, especially in software. And so the promise of going from selling something for a fixed dollar amount to a token model

• 2:56:03Speaker 07

  where validators operating on it and traders operating on it pay a percentage of their earnings into the network is a potentially disruptive business model opportunity for these traditional players. The same way that the cloud providers, yes, there was a technology revolution there, but it was as much a business revolution as anything else.

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  How has the new admin been helpful to you guys, even just in terms of being generally pro crypto? I don't know how long you've been building the foundation in the network, but I imagine, you know, this wouldn't have been the kind of thing you wanted to launch two, three years ago for a number of reasons.

• 2:56:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I got involved in crypto in late 2017, early 2018. Worked for a company called Republic, worked for a company called Bison Trails, which then got acquired by Coinbase and spent the previous four years working for the Solana Foundation. So I've been through the changing regulatory landscape. You know, we received a no-action letter from the SEC for key components of the flow of tokens in the double zero network.

• 2:57:09John Coogan?

  Shout out, Cooley.

• 2:57:10Speaker 07

  This is really important.

• 2:57:12John Coogan?

  Shout out Cooley. That was your law firm, right?

• 2:57:14Speaker 07

  Shout out Cooley.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  Let's go. We love lawyers here.

• 2:57:17Speaker 07

  Yes, Rodrigo, I owe him a drink.

• 2:57:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:21Speaker 07

  But I will say that the, you know, the whole thing that came together here was, you know, going to the SEC and asking for relief. So this is a process where you can basically go to them and say, we would like to do this. What do you think of this? Do you see any problems with this under current securities law? And so we applied for relief on two specific areas. The first area was around the reward distributions to contributors. So basically the network programmatically paying out tokens proportional to the utility that a contributor brings to the network. This is not like proof of stake. This is much more similar to proof of work where if you generate 10% of the hash power for Bitcoin, you get 10% of the rewards.

• 2:58:03Speaker 07

  But this is really important to us because many of our potential contributors, especially as we sort of move lower down and closer to the direct fiber owners, they are not sophisticated crypto lawyers. They may not even be sophisticated securities lawyers. And that sort of reassurance that we can get from the SEC of, hey, this programmatic payment based on this type of model, they don't see any issue with that from a security standpoint.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a ton of sense.

• 2:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely massive day.

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 2:58:31Jordi Hays?

  I hope you, it's unlike, you know, public company CEOs, you know, the market closes. And then you get a little breather. Not, you're not so fortunate, but massive, massive milestone. And as you start knocking down some of these massive partnerships, come back on and tell us about it.

• 2:58:53John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:58:55Speaker 07

  Appreciate it.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  He said that the internet is not a series of tubes. Are you familiar with the famous line that was said in Congress, I believe, the internet is a series of tubes? There's a music video. This is a

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Music video?

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Huge sign of respect. They turned it into a meme. It's from 2006. It's one of the, one of the great sign of, you know, respect in my culture to show you a YouTube video that you might not have seen. I want to show you this video from Internet Explorer 4.0, the internet being a series of tubes. Let's play this.

• 2:59:25Speaker 08

  The internet is not, the internet is not a big truck. The internet is not something that you just dump something out. The internet is not

• 2:59:34John Coogan?

  This was huge in 2006.

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  This is a real clip from, real soundbite, we can cut it. This is a real clip from a testimony that happened in Washington DC with a lawmaker who's trying to explain the internet to the, like, to Congress, basically.

• 2:59:55Jordi Hays?

  Not trucks.

• 2:59:56John Coogan?

  It's not a truck. It's not something you just dump something on. It's not fixed. It's a, it's a flow of tubes. And he was lambasted and made fun of for this, but it's kind of true. It's like, it is, the flow rate matters more than the fixed quantity. It's not, it's not, it's not a data center. It's a, it's a series of tubes.

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  It's a series of tubes.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, how'd you sleep last night?

• 3:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Brutally. It's just been such a, it's honestly been a brutal week of sleep.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  I got an 85.

• 3:00:22Jordi Hays?

  I got a 65.

• 3:00:23John Coogan?

  Oh, give me the sound. Give me the sound. Let's go. Yes.

• 3:00:27Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Yeah, they have this new feature that tracks your sleep debt.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Oh, I saw this. The sleep debt is really, really nagging me these days. Like.

• 3:00:36Jordi Hays?

  I've accumulated two and a half.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm at zero. I'm at, it's perfect sleep balance. Not in debt, no surplus, no debt. I'm doing good.

• 3:00:44Jordi Hays?

  It's great because I have this handicap of having a much longer drive in to work. And so it kind of, I really got to push myself, you know.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Equalizes for the twins.

• 3:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Earlier, yeah, it equalizes for the twins.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:58Jordi Hays?

  It was great to see, we saw Will Robbins in the chat earlier. He was.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  Thank you to everyone in the chat today.

• 3:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Pumping up dual entry. We had dual entry and then double zero back to back.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  That is a funny.

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  A little bit confusing, but apparently Will did the seed of dual entry. So he's feeling pretty good with this announcement.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  In other news, Inversion Space announced ARC, the world's first space-based delivery vehicle. This video looks remarkable. ARC enables the on-demand delivery of cargo and effects to anywhere on Earth in under an hour. And offers unparalleled hypersonic testing. Sounds very sci-fi. They have a rendered video here. We'll have to dig in and understand the actual timeline for this. It seems like a very ambitious project, but congrats to everyone over there at Inversion Space.

• 3:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. And we got to get on with London.

• 3:01:48John Coogan?

  We do.

• 3:01:49Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow, unfortunately, we will not have a stream. We encourage you to.

• 3:01:56John Coogan?

  Touch grass.

• 3:01:57Jordi Hays?

  Watch our recap of the week. Maybe we'll release the recap early. Go back. No show tomorrow. Watch the first episode we ever dropped. There's a lot of lore in there. Lot of lore. Enjoy that. Lot of fun. We will be off tomorrow. We will be back Monday. We'll be back Monday. With full force. I cannot wait. And we hope you all have a fantastic weekend. But don't start until tomorrow. Maybe around 5, maybe around 10. Maybe burn the midnight oil. But have a great weekend. We love you. We'll see you Monday. See you later. Bye.