China's Acquisition Spree, TikTok's Survival Deal, Intel Slips | Tuhin Srivastava, Bryce Strauss, Max Spero, Russ d'Sa

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:08) - What China Actually Imports from the West (11:58) - Sony and TCL Form Alliance (17:08) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (21:19) - TikTok Deal (31:41) - Tech Giants Hit by Spying (34:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (43:02) - Google and Epic Games Settle (46:21) - Crypto Prepares for Quantum Threats (49:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:34) - Tuhin Srivastava is the CEO and co-founder of Baseten, an AI inference company that has experienced significant growth, raising $150 million at a $2.15 billion valuation. He discusses the rapid adoption of AI models by enterprises, emphasizing the importance of infrastructure to support scalable and efficient AI applications. Srivastava also highlights the challenges enterprises face in deploying custom models and the role of companies like Baseten in facilitating this transition. (01:17:17) - Bryce Strauss, co-founder of Nominal, discusses the company's partnership with Pratt Miller Motorsports, emphasizing the integration of Nominal's engineering software into the team's race operations. He highlights the challenges of endurance racing, such as managing fuel consumption and data analysis, and explains how Nominal's platform aids in optimizing performance through real-time telemetry and decision-making. Strauss also notes the broader applications of their technology across industries like aerospace and defense, underscoring its versatility in handling complex engineering problems. (01:30:48) - Max Spero, co-founder and CEO of Pangram Labs, discusses the company's mission to detect AI-generated content and its rapid growth since launching a Twitter bot in late 2025. He highlights partnerships with platforms like Quora to maintain content authenticity and addresses challenges posed by AI-generated misinformation, emphasizing the importance of accurate detection tools to preserve the integrity of online information. (01:50:59) - Russ d'Sa, CEO of LiveKit, discusses the company's recent achievement of becoming a unicorn with a $100 million Series C funding round, valuing the company at $1 billion. He attributes this success to the rapid growth of voice AI and LiveKit's pivotal collaboration with OpenAI on ChatGPT's voice mode, which transformed their focus from video conferencing infrastructure to AI. D'sa emphasizes the importance of user experience in voice AI, noting that personal assistants should exhibit human-like empathy, while B2B applications prioritize reliability and efficiency. (02:07:39) - WSJ Mansion Section (02:18:55) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.com 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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, January 23rd.

• 0:04Jordi Hays?

  It's casual Friday, apparently.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  It's casual Friday because I got the Semi Analysis jacket on. Zoom in on this. Thank you to everyone over at Semi Analysis.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Normally, I'm the casual guy. I thought I'd let John.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Thank you to Doug. Thank you to everyone over at Semi Analysis. This is fantastic. It's extremely comfortable. And I look like I'm ready to go to our data center.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  It's built for Abilene.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  I feel like this is built for Abilene. You throw this on, you're ready to go. See what the hyperscalers are up to. Maybe wire up some GPU racks, do whatever you need to do.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  I love it. So, thank you to everyone over at Semi Analysis. We have another gift that came in the mail from a friend of mine, Alex Moore, over at the Arc phone case. Arc Pulse. Look at this thing. It's got, it's a phone case. It's so heavy. Feel how heavy this is.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  It's a fantastic presentation.

• 0:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  It has a certificate of authenticity in metal. The Arc Pulse exclusive edition Titanium Opal Damascus.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  The new iPhone has really been testing my case-free lifestyle that I've been running for so many years now.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Super bullish for cases. My phone's only a couple of weeks old, maybe months old. And it's just like completely destroyed on all the corners. It's really bad. So, born from a fascination with precision engineering and material mastery, the Arc Pulse Titanium Opal Damascus unites advanced metallurgy with sculptural intent. Every case is forged from over 100 individual layers of titanium, purged with argon gas bonded at temperatures exceeding 3,000 Celsius. So, thank you to everyone over at Arc with this fantastic case that has been delivered with his own case, a series of cases. It's sort of a Russian nesting doll situation.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Do you have news or can I tell everyone about ramp.com? Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't have said it better myself.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  What do you want to chat about?

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  What did you write about today, John?

• 2:07John Coogan?

  I wanted to dig into the question that we had with Joe Weisenthal yesterday. What does China actually import? Obviously, this was off the back of Davos. Vice Premier Haile Fang highlighted China's determination to become the world's market. They said, hey, we're the world's factory, but we also can buy stuff. Send us your stuff, we'll buy it. But what are they gonna buy? So he said boosting domestic demand was now on top of their economic agenda. This is in their 15th five-year plan, something like that. And we were going back and forth, like, what are they actually importing? We were saying semiconductors, but, you know, obviously, there's chip deals and GPU bans. Now, interestingly, China, like, the number one trade deficit for China is semiconductors.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  And it has been since 2005. So they want to buy semiconductors. Obviously, US trade policy oscillates. But semiconductors are the single biggest deficit for China. In 2020, even before the AI boom, China imported 350 billion worth of semiconductors, which was more than the value of the crude oil it imported that year. And it's been the largest importer of chips since 2005 and accounts for huge chunks of revenue for Qualcomm. It's over 50% of Qualcomm's revenue, I think, and over 25% for Intel. So everything that you get from China, if it's an electronics product, it's some gadget, it has a chip in there, that's probably going to be made in the West, you know, fabbed in Taiwan or made in an Intel fab, sent over to China, assembled.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  But then sent back out.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  And then sent back out, exactly. So they aren't imported there. Energy is a big driver of the trade deficit with China. China imports 74% of its oil supply and 42% of its gas supply. Soybeans, which you mentioned, and iron ore are also big categories. The iron ore obviously goes into a lot of, again, the factory, the world's factory.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Why can't China make enough soybeans in China?

• 4:00John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  It must be climate related. They love making stuff.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. We should dig into that, but.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Luxury was what you said, and you were right. Luxury is a clear net import category for China. Estimates are around 100 billion annually. Now, it's not the biggest driver of their trade deficit or trade surplus. But it is, and it's also not critically important in the way chips, or oil, or soybeans, or iron, or are. But it is, but it is an important story. And almost all of Chinese luxury good imports are from European conglomerates. You've got to think LVMH and Kering. It's not strategically important, really. And the foreign luxury market in China, so European conglomerates sending their goods

• 4:53John Coogan?

  to China, it actually completely fell off a cliff in 2024. Imports went down about 20% based on more, more international shopping that was happening, travel, and a domestic boom. So domestic Chinese luxury brands are on the rise. Lao Pu Gold is now drawing this from the same customer base as Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Cartier, Bulgari, and Tiffany. Gucci is closing stores, I think around 18 stores are closing. While the local champion Song Mont is seeing significant growth in their handbag business. So China does want to be the world's market, but they're also buying domestic a lot. The other dynamic that changed recently in the East versus West brand dynamic has been the acquisition of successful brands by Chinese companies with more competitive

• 5:38John Coogan?

  supply chains. So Morris Garages started in the 1920s and became synonymous with affordable British sports cars under the badge MG. Are you familiar with MG? Not super familiar. We've got to pull up some videos of old MGs to show you. My family actually had one when I was a kid. Whoa. A really old one. Are you familiar with MG? I think my grandparents also had one. Yeah, no. It was like a cool, it was a really, really cool, like, British, not luxury, not high-end, but a true driver's car. So we'll pull up one of these videos while I tell you about the brand. It's changed hands a ton. British Aerospace owned it at one point, so did BMW, but the MG business just collapsed because Britain had a lot of, you know, sports car manufacturers.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  They had Jaguar, and Land Rover, and Aston Martin, and there's a whole bunch of other companies. But the MGs, the old MGs, they still look great. Here's a video of one of them. Jordy, give me your review. Would you pick one of these up? I like the soundtrack, too. It's a good, this is a good song for, for an old retro video about an MG. These were, these were iconic back in the day. Yeah.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  I like it. It's got a nice silhouette.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, certainly, certainly a throwback, sort of a Porsche Speedster style. I like it. Um, but eventually, the company failed, 2005, and the brand was sold off to Nanjing Automobile Group, which was rolled into SAIC Motor, which is China's largest state-owned automobile manufacturer. And so, the acquisition, it actually worked. And, uh, sales of new MG motor models have picked back up. Since 2019, MG has been China's most exported car, with more than, uh, eighty-eight percent of sales happening internationally. So, they bought the brand.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Any idea, any idea where?

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Uh, Europe, Canada, basically everywhere except the United States. They sell them in, in England. So, the MG brand is still well, better known in, uh, in Britain. And, uh, with the new, uh, models, they're selling pretty well. We can pull up a video of the newer MGs, uh, because they have a sports sedan. They actually have, I think, um, like, sort of minivan as well. But here's, here's a review of the sports sedan. See the quad exhaust?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  All of the world has never seen-

• 7:54John Coogan?

  And look at this, uh, look at this, they have this crazy, like, tail fin that comes out. They have a lot of, like, fun gimmicks on here. But there's the MG brand. Still alive and well, thanks to China.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  No question, it's one of the best-looking MG cars on the market. At the front, you can see the LED headlights with the striking DRLs, nineteen-inch alloys, sleek, fast-back profile with aerodynamic lines around down this 4.9-meter-long car, and frameless doors. At the back, we have wide hips with flowing LEDs with not two, but four exhaust tips. And surprise, they actually work, because this Chinese car is not electric. Finally, I know. And after all that sportiness outside, in here, you find-

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it does, the, the rear end's nice.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Three hundred and seventy-five liters of space-

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Hatchback.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  With a lift-back design, so it's super easy to load and unload stuff. So this car is not just sporty, it's also daily-friendly.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  They also have a sports car that we can pull up, that has some very interesting features. Uh, it has some scissor doors, it's electric. Uh, there's, there's a reveal video that we can play here. Look at this. This is the MG, ah, it's like Sportster, Speedster, something like that. Cyberster. Cyberster, that's what it's called. The Cyberster. Look at those doors. That's kinda, it's, it kinda rips. It looks...

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, I mean, we've been, we've been wanting you to, for your next car.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  You need the doors to go up.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  To kind of like establish dominance in the, in the studio parking lot. The Chinese.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, let's play the review of the Cyberster from Forrest Auto Reviews. I really like this creator. He does, uh, one-minute vertical video reviews of cars from start to finish. So it could be essentially compressing like what normally a 20-minute.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  And this is an electric drop-top sports car.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  And he just goes through everything really quickly.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  This thing is gorgeous. You have these awesome looking headlights. I get these gorgeous body lines, but I think my favorite part has to be the way the door opens. I just come over here, push this button.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  And it just pops right up.

• 9:58Speaker 03

  So cool. But don't worry because if it's gonna hit something.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  It's hard to get those doors. BMW i8, that's the only option in America, really.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  They really are cooking here.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  They are. Paddle shifters in an electric car. It just changes your drive mode. But you could imagine with an update, you can do the, uh, like synthetic DCT.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Digital DCT, which has been very popular in the, uh, IONIQ 5 and?

• 10:22Speaker 03

  Tons of storage back there.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  So he really gives you like a full tour of the car in just 60 seconds.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  In the back, you get literal arrows as your taillights. This can do 323 miles on just one charge. It does 544 horsepower and because it's all-wheel drive.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  You cannot buy these in the US.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  No.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  And then he rips away. Boom. Loses some traction there.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  You get Brembo brakes, and if this were sold in America, it'd be $41,500.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  That's not bad, right? Like, that's a kind of a steal. Anyway, quickly, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  So this this trend has been going on with American or storied brands, European automobile manufacturers selling to Chinese companies. Volvo changed hands from Ford to China's Zhijiang Zhili Holdings Group. In 2010, the deal valued Volvo at 1.8 billion, and it also basically worked out. Sales have grown from half a million vehicles in 2015 to over 700,000 vehicles in 2023. And when I told you this, you were like, what Volvo? Crazy. And I couldn't believe it either. Zhili also bought Lotus, the maker of the Lotus Elise, the Avisia. There's a bunch of other sort of like more affordable sports cars, ultra-light, sort of tossable cars. And so Lotus is also another British sports car

• 11:48John Coogan?

  manufacturer to wind up in China. And so the the basic trend is like China excels at developing efficient supply chains, streamlined manufacturing operations, and it doesn't stop with cars. They're doing it with TVs now. So on Tuesday, Sony announced that they would be spinning off its home entertainment business, which includes the TV brand Bravia, and to their Chinese rival TCL Electronics Holdings. Sony's selling a 51% stake to TCL, while the brand will remain Sony. The display technology will be TCL. And so Sony's been falling behind Samsung, TCL, LG, Xiaomi in terms of TV shipments for a while. But the brand still holds a ton of value. Like Sony TVs were the best a decade ago, and still today, people like the the software a little bit more. And the Sony brand, it

• 12:33John Coogan?

  still has the aura of the the Walkman, the PlayStation. Like, it's just beloved electronics, and you see the Sony logo, and it's just way more familiar than TCL. Do you think Japanese excellence? Yes, you do. And and so Sony has been, you know, falling behind on the manufacturing front. TCL has been basically delivering a much stronger value prop on a price to quality basis, and the panel technology is is is loved and very competitive. But there's just more faith in Sony name. So the Chinese manufacturer is effectively pulling forward heritage and brand legacy by buying the name. And this feels like a trend that will continue for a while. China's fantastic at quickly grinding down manufacturing learning curves, developing high-quality products at affordable prices.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  But creating an iconic brand, it just takes decades. And so it's better to buy than build.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  So smart.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  This is the one thing you buy instead of build. And so Western companies, after getting beat up on margins and seeing their market share slowly shrink, I think the Sony TV market share was like dropping to less than 1%, while I believe Xiaomi's at like 6%. I didn't even know Xiaomi makes TVs. I thought they just make phones and cars and apparently they make everything.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  It is such an interesting dynamic because you have like, you know, Western brands and manufacturers that have just been saying like, yes, China's out competing us on manufacturing by like 2X. We're getting destroyed. We need, we basically need tariffs and things like that to protect, to protect market share, et cetera.

• 14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Jordi Hays?

  But the one thing that they'll never have is brands, right?

• 14:05John Coogan?

  More.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  It just takes so long.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, MG's.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  You know, building up the Volvo brand is not just like an advertising budget.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  It's time and it's their safety record and all these things that go into that.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  It's also like, who buys it?

• 14:17Jordi Hays?

  If you're out, if you out-compete just on manufacturing long enough and then you're, and then you get these opportunities to actually buy the, the, the top brands, eventually you can actually own the full stack.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So we got to look at one more MG, their hypercar. It's a concept car, probably will never ship, but I want your review on whether or not you would step into this and take it for a spin. This is the MG hypercar or supercar. This is from Supercar Blondie. And Supercar Blondie has an uncanny ability to get access to every concept car ever made. I'm constantly seeing Supercar Blondie content about cars that feel like they barely exist or.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  So it's a single-seater.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Single-seater. Like this is like, this is like a competitor to the Valkyrie and the, or something. I don't know.

• 15:05Jordi Hays?

  Valkyrie's.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Valkyrie's two-seater.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Two-seats.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's like a crazy, like, I mean, this is probably just for show during a big conference, something to turn heads and draw eyes, but pretty, pretty remarkable to see this from MG, the company that made, you know, these open-top roadsters in the 1920s.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it just looks like a. Looks pretty close to a speed tail.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  It does look like a McLaren speed tail.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  Which is also the center.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Center seat.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Also McLaren speed tail, inductive charging. Have you seen this?

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  So there's a pad that when you drive over it, it will charge the battery.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. So alternative to like a regular trickle charger.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you don't, so it's still a trickle charger.

• 15:49Jordi Hays?

  That's nice.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  Eight hours, but you don't need to plug it in.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  That's really nice.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  That's also happening with the, the new Porsche SUV EV, maybe the Cayenne EV.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari should pick that up.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 16:00Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari loves to put, put their trickle charge.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Tesla should pick it up. Tesla's the obvious one.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but Ferrari is notorious for being like, oh, that thing you need to use every time you drive your car. We're going to put it buried in the trunk. You're going to need to crawl in.

• 16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the, uh, the, like the Tesla charging, they remember the, the robotic arm, the snake that was going to, do you remember this? Tesla was at one point teasing, this might've been like a decade ago, but they were teasing basically a robotic snake-like arm that could go and plug in the car like autonomously. So you would just pull in and then at some point it would just go and plug in. And they never shipped it. You're looking at me like I'm crazy.

• 16:40Speaker 04

  I've never heard of that.

• 16:41John Coogan?

  You've never heard of this?

• 16:41Speaker 04

  I think they should also do the, um, you know, there's the Chinese EV where the battery explodes at the side. That thing is crazy.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Should we pull that? Yeah, yeah. You gotta pull that up.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  If you're next, you pull up next to your, your ops, your enemies, you just hit them in the shins with your battery.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh, Jordy, I want you to try and pull some of that up. But first I'm going to tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search filled from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Do we have any luck?

• 17:10John Coogan?

  John Arnold says, I don't know if Chinese manufacturers will ever make money, but I came away not wanting to invest in any manufacturing business in the rest of the world. And Ian Roundtree says, I'm going to keep investing in American manufacturing. So people are still, still pushing it. There's also big news. Andorl is bringing a 1 million square foot union-built campus along with 5,500 jobs to the city of Long Beach. The, the, the office of Mayor Rex Richardson, the Long Beach mayor, posted this. Over the next three years, Andorl will be building this. This is the largest private investment in Long Beach history. And it's a major vote of confidence in Long Beach's leadership in aerospace and advanced manufacturing. It's accelerated by 28 and.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  Grow Long Beach in action. Great work. Lex, love to see it, says Daniel. It's fantastic. And what a banger. Thousand likes on this. Everyone's happy about the new Anduril campus in Long Beach.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  I have this pulled up on Futurism. China unveils EV that can violently eject its battery. In case of a fire.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Okay, send that to the team. I'll tell everyone about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with amazing customer service.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay, if you scroll down, there's a video and we can see this in action and see what kind of situation.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  This is so wild. I remember when this video went viral. It's like, what is the point? Oh, it's because if it crashes and it's gonna burn, it'll shoot it out. But, oh, that just seems like so, so dangerous. But at the same time, people, people, you know, watch these videos and they, and they think like, oh, this is like widespread Chinese best practice, when really like, this is probably like their gundo equivalent. You know, just like a couple dudes.

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting that they're like, we don't just need to get it 10 feet away. We need to get it 30 feet away.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Cause you could just like, like gracefully drop it out or something or like, or like slide it out sort of slowly with a little pusher. But they have to like shoot it out like a cannon. It's amazing. Anyway. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. Next level vibe coding, state of the art reasoning and deep multimodal understanding. And speaking of Google, I think we gotta watch the video about AI industry news. Every two weeks, one of these models is destroying someone else's model. And we, we, we found a fantastically funny video on Instagram reels that we will play for you today, folks. So let's play the comedy.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  Google just destroyed Pinterest and ChatGPT. ChatGPT destroyed Perplexity and Google AI. LinkedIn AI just ruined WhatsApp AI. Meta AI. Oh, IRC T C AI just destroyed Uberola AI. Wow.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 20:08Speaker 05

  Brilliant.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  It's so good. What is that last one? IRC T C AI?

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  He's just making stuff up.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  He's just making up acronyms at this point. But it really is so true that like, there's just a time honored clickbait title of like, destroyed in all caps. I used to do it on my YouTube videos, always went viral. It's, it's, it's been proven. I was, I was taking credit for, for inventing that format on YouTube. Brandon Gurrell put me in the truth zone and, and said that I did not in fact, create that. That was created long before the BuzzFeed, the BuzzFeed era and is, is potentially time honored.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry, I will, I will drop, I will drop the video link in, in the YouTube chat.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  And, and while you're doing that, I will pull up the linear lineup and tell you who we have on the show today, folks, because we have a great lightning round coming up. We have Turin from Base 10, Bryce from Nominal, Max Sparrow, the AI slop janitor from Pangram, and then Russ closing it out with LiveKit. Some fantastic funding rounds coming up. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces are using Linear with agents, and you should be too. So.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  That's right. What's going on with TikTok?

• 21:24John Coogan?

  TikTok is, it's sort of the reverse, honestly. It's very interesting. You have this dynamic of like, the American companies or the Western companies, MG and Sony selling to Chinese because they have great manufacturing. And then TikTok, you know, we want, America wants control over the algorithm, over the data, security. And so you have a Chinese company that's now going to be operating in the US. And the Wall Street Journal has a piece here on it. First, I will tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and increasing its scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So the agreement was negotiated to comply with a 2024 law requiring the company to do a deal to address U.S. national security concerns. Of course, it was a total like,

• 22:08John Coogan?

  will they, won't they for all of 2024 with TikTok? And then also in 2025, we were constantly tracking like, when will this happen? It took years and years and years. Like, the actual TikTok should divest discourse is now like three or four years old. Lots of people have been working on this for a long time, but Rome wasn't built in a day and TikTok was not divested in a day. But TikTok officially established a joint venture that would allow it to keep operating in the United States, the company said Thursday, resolving a years-long fight to address Washington's national security concerns. Under the terms of the deal negotiated by the Trump administration, the popular video-sharing app will be operated by a new U.S. entity controlled by investors seen as friendly to the U.S. Its data management

• 22:51John Coogan?

  and algorithm training on American users will be overseen by Oracle, the cloud computing giant that has safeguarded its data for the U.S. for years and has close ties to the Trump administration. The deal was negotiated to comply with a law passed in 2024. President Trump delayed the implementation of the law a year ago after starting his second term to keep TikTok operating in the United States. He signed a series of executive orders to extend the deadline for completing a deal until it was met Thursday. Trump said in a social media post, "I'm so happy to have helped in saving TikTok." He thanked Chinese leader Xi Jinping for working with us and ultimately approving the deal with a capital D. He could have gone the other way, but didn't, and is appreciated for his decision.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Trump and TikTok's investors and allies pushed the deal through despite lingering concerns among lawmakers and security hawks that China could still influence the new entity through TikTok's parent ByteDance.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  It makes sense that this took so long. It sounds really simple, just divest. But in reality, you have to effectively rebuild an entire app, right?

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be, it's gonna be like a new app, figuring out the logistics of that.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's also just a ton of hair on the deal, right? There's a huge revenue share that's going back to ByteDance in perpetuity. That is obviously reflected in the valuation. Um, and so, and then the other, the other factor is like, if you have a US TikTok now, and then you have normal TikTok. If I'm on the US TikTok, am I sharing content to international TikTok? If I'm on the international TikTok, is it sharing my content back into the US app?

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  How does that all work out?

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be handled. You know, I would say like, most of the social media app, pretty much every social media app that you use, if you just cut off all international content creators, the experience on the app would get worse.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  So there needs to be like some content still flowing back and forth. But figuring out how exactly that works is, um, uh, still in process.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, TikTok CEO Shou Chu said in an internal note to employees, "The majority American-owned joint venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users." Uh, there was a, the, the, the whole TikTok debate really erupted when TikTok CEO Shou Chu was in front of Congress and was not really acting like he was the boss, basically. That was the main criticism. It felt like he didn't have full control over the entity because of course it's a subsidiary of ByteDance. And, um, and some of the US lawmakers were pressing him on how much control he actually has.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Did they send the right person to the congressional hearing? Uh, but it seems like he's held on and he's done well. He's also Singaporean, by the way, uh, so, you know, easier to, you know, be a part of the new US, uh, TikTok organization. Um, and, and allay any concerns of Chinese control, which is, uh, certainly at the heart of the, uh, of the administration's goals here. So, who's in the deal? You got Oracle, you got private equity firm Silver Lake, you got Abu Dhabi-based MGX. They will each own 15% of the new entity, while TikTok investors will own about 30%. Other notable investors include JD Vance's former firm Revolution and tech executive Michael Dell's family investment office.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Dell's getting in the deal. Vance spent a brief stint at the firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case during his time as a venture investor, which preceded his 2022 Senate campaign. I didn't realize that JD had been at Revolution. I know he had a separate venture firm, but I didn't know that he was hanging out with Steve Case, the former co-founder of AOL. Vance has said previously that the deal values the new entity at about $14 billion. A lot of people thought that that was really, really low, given TikTok's immense growth. But there is another side of this, which is that TikTok, I don't believe was ever monetizing

• 27:05John Coogan?

  or as profitable as its competitors, YouTube and Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg and the Google team were not exactly slow to move and launch competitive products. And so, you see this continuously, where Snapchat comes out, Stories is on a tear, and you're looking at the Snapchat growth curve, and you're like, this is going to kill Facebook. It's going to be the next Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg needs to acquire it. He puts in an offer, gets declined, and it looks like it's over. But then, the Instagram team moved really quickly. They launched Stories, and that effectively, you can see in the chart, Stories launches

• 27:48John Coogan?

  on Instagram, and people stop moving on to Snapchat. And so, a lot of people went back, who were on Snapchat, they went back to Instagram, and Instagram continued to grow, and Snapchat didn't flatline, but it definitely put a dent in their growth. And I think the same thing is true for TikTok. Like TikTok, a lot of people who just want that format, vertical video, endless scrolling slop, they can get that now. We got American-made troughs all over the place, everywhere the eyes can see it. So, the investors are paying the US government a multi-billion-dollar fee for arranging the deal, a concept Trump previously called a "tremendous fee plus."

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Interesting. TikTok said it had 200 million users in the US, up from its 2024 estimate of about 170 million users. So decent growth, but I don't know. I mean, 200 million in the US is a lot. Like, that's pretty much everyone.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is, will they ever get the rest of the US?

• 28:45John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  In the way that YouTube, you could assume, has like, effectively.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  You think they have like 300 mil?

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would assume that, that...

• 28:52John Coogan?

  I don't know. There's a lot of Philistines out there. There's a lot of Luddites who are just like, "Nah, I want DVDs. I want VHS tapes." Anyway, Trump touted his popularity on TikTok earlier Thursday, posting on Truth Social that his posts on the platform, TikTok, get more engagement than posts on TikTok competitor Instagram, which is owned by Meta Platforms.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  TikTok. Trump said that TikTok helped him win the second term.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, that's always been, for what it's worth, that's always been the case, right? Like, TikTok has always had allegations that they were botting.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:24Jordi Hays?

  Like, as a platform, effectively.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  People would go on there, and they'd be like, getting a tremendous amount of followers, tremendous amount of just engagement broadly.

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Far more than, than they would have on Instagram with the same content.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, some people would say, "Oh, that's because the TikTok algorithm is so good."

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, and there certainly are a bunch of very real people on TikTok. I don't, I don't mean to say that it's all bought it, but, uh, the experience of using TikTok, a lot of creators will just naturally have six times as many TikTok followers as they do Instagram followers.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It does seem like the algorithm is set up to, uh, like, serve you more content in a 10-minute session, because you're more quickly scrolling. And then there's also accounting issues, like, uh, on some platforms, if you just scroll past something for even one second, that counts as a view. On other platforms, it might take three seconds. On other views, other, you know, platforms, maybe 10 seconds, a minute. You might need to watch the full thing. So, there's always like, accounting abnormalities there. Anyway, if you want to stream on TikTok, because it's American, oh, now you want to bring, you know, some Oracle-focused content to TikTok on livestream?

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  Some SaaS-focused content?

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Get on Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this might hit you like a sack of bricks.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, breaking news, J.D. Vance is younger than Future.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  That is a crazy stat. Twenty-two thousand likes.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Future is straight up an elder now.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  He's an unk.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  No, he's beyond.

• 30:58John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he's an elder, I suppose. Yeah, you're right.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  He's a...

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Not quite an OG, but... Oh no, it goes, it goes unk, then OG, then elder.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Uh, "Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence," says Fortune, reposted by Unusual Whales.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, see if you can read this. See if you can read this. See if you can read this.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Try and read this. Wow, he can't. He can't. He can't do it. Slobbed.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I just, I need like some Subway Surfers or something.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna need some Subway Surfers to read this next sentence.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Anyway. "Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR built to evolve with modern, small, and medium-sized businesses." Get on Gusto. Um, we have, we have some drama that's continuing to unfold in the, in the payroll space. The Justice Department opens a criminal probe into Silicon Valley spy allegations. Subpoenas seek information on allegations that Deal valued around seventeen billion dollars recruited a spy inside a rival company. This was a huge story last year, and then it's been pretty quiet, and both companies have just kind of been chugging along.

• 32:09Jordi Hays?

  Spending a lot on legal.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation. Uh, grand jury subpoenas were sent out in recent weeks by Craig Masakian? Uh, the US Attorney for the Northern District of California. The documents show they seek information related to a spying operation that Deal allegedly ran inside a rival company, Rippling. An Ireland-based Rippling employee, in case you've forgotten. Keith O'Brien alleged in an affidavit filed in April that Deal CEO Alex recruited him and gave him instructions for what information to take from Rippling. O'Brien alleged that other executives were involved in the spying plot, including his father, who is Deal's executive chairman and chief strategy officer.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  A spokeswoman for Deal said the company isn't aware of a criminal investigation, but is willing to cooperate with authorities. That's an interesting statement. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this and you find out from a Wall Street Journal reporter. That's wild. So the company has previously said, we deny any legal wrongdoing and look forward to asserting our counterclaims. So deal says, we didn't do anything wrong. Of course, the affidavit from Keith O'Brien is extremely dramatic. There's that whole like, you know, oh, send that watch to London. We're gonna be like James Bond. Like, it's a really dramatic read. And you can go back and watch some old TVP episodes if you want to hear our full take on that.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. They're not, they're, yeah, I wonder, I wonder what information is actually available kind of publicly on this. Cause like, obviously in a situation like this, you have both sides that are kind of like feeding the media their side of the story.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  But, I mean, the facts are the facts here. Like, the Justice Department did open this, because the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the Justice Department opened the investigation. So, anyway.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, yeah, I think a lot of people weren't expecting this to actually have any type of like criminal component.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think a lot of people were just expecting like, a lot of drama, a lot of, you know,

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  And they would eventually just like settle.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Exactly, settle. And like, the worst case was like, okay, maybe it's like, you know, like a Series D sized payment for rippling, but they're both gonna just keep grinding. But it seems like it's going to the courts. So, we will see. Maybe there will be, maybe there will be, you know, courtroom sketches of these folks. Anyway, Nick, the chief OpenAI hater, has some breaking news from CNBC. OpenAI Chair Brad Taylor says AI is, quote, "probably a bubble," expects a corruption in the coming years. And Nick is, his camera roll is truly just filled to the brim with images of Sam Altman in various, like, you know,

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  The guy has probably the largest collection of Sam Altman.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Rare Altman, for sure. He has every photo that's ever been taken of Sam. And Nick just is, "Oh, my oh."

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  I don't know. This could be true, like, you know, who knows? I wonder what more of the context was that...

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, a Brad Taylor quote taken out of context turned into a headline. And then, and then it's like...

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  Nowhere, of course, would Brett Taylor be like, oh yeah, I think I think LLM usage is going to fall off a cliff.

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like, yeah, yeah, there's a variety of different companies. And kind of subcategories that could be overheated, but.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could take, you could, you could easily dig into that. And he's like, there's a bubble in like seed stage valuations. Like, I can't get an angel check in at less than 50 pre, like, you know, like, the bubble can take a lot of different shapes and stuff. Who knows what he was actually commenting on. Anyway, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Another clip from Demis from the Big Technology Podcast. He's taking shots at OpenAI, according to Yuchin Jin.

• 36:06Speaker 06

  Think actions, think actions speak louder than words, going back to the original conversation we're having with, you know, Sam and others claiming AGI is around the corner. Why would you bother with ads then? So that is, I think, a reasonable question to ask. But I, I, I think, look, from our point of view, we have no plans at the moment to, to do ads. If you're talking about the Gemini app, right, specifically. I think we are going, obviously, we're going to watch very carefully what, you know, the outcome of what ChatGPT is saying they're going to do. I think it has to be handled very carefully, but I think actions speak louder than.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute dog.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Post AGI, the clankers need to advertise to each other. You gotta do ads for the clankers.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I mean, the thing here is like, OpenAI has to not only like, figure out how to actually implement ads within the product, but they have to build out all the advertising, like, infrastructure, the platform infrastructure, in order for people to run campaigns successfully and at scale.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  So Google already has all of that. It is far eas-, like, it is, what, do you think it's like 100 times easier for Google to turn on ads in Gemini?

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Jordi Hays?

  Right? They already have all the customer relationship, literally, any company that advertises online. It's already working with Google and so it's really just like you can just flip the switch and so I could easily, you know, don't have any inside knowledge, but I could easily see Google just like having it all basically ready to go and literally just being like, okay, we can launch this whenever we want.

• 37:35John Coogan?

  There is an interesting steel man here. Let me try and do it. So.

• 37:39Jordi Hays?

  You need the helmet?

• 37:40John Coogan?

  I might need the helmet, but I think I'm good for now. So, so Sam and others. Well, first, let me tell you about advertising. Vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups, AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales, just like on Meta. So, the steel man on Sam Altman claiming that AGI is in the corner, around the corner, but we still got to do ads. Well, around the corner, even if that means six months, like if you have an incredible capital expenditure to get over that hump to create AGI, it's only six months away, but you got to do that last data center and you got to raise that last 50 billion and all of the investors.

• 38:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's easy to say like, we don't want to do ads when you have hundreds of billions of dollars in existing ad revenue coming in, funding everything that you're doing. So, anyways, I think this is, you know.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  I mean, we can also debate whether or not ads will exist post AGI. I would argue that they would, but what do you think Tyler?

• 38:37Speaker 04

  There was that headline about how OpenAI, maybe they're thinking about like taking a percentage of the, of the share of like the discoveries. I don't know how they would actually do that, or if it's like they're being serious at all, but that's like much more AGI peeled, right, than ads.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, that, yeah, that's a good point. So they're doing both. They're doing both. Anyway, New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just, just do it.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 39:04Jordi Hays?

  Apparently Vimeo, almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off, including the entire video team. I would assume that most of their team.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  What else do they do other than video?

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  So unfortunate. I have some fond memories of being a teenager when Vimeo was like really.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Vimeo was so differentiated.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:24John Coogan?

  It was where. You, there was like a level of quality that it wasn't just like some random person.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  I would go there to watch short films. In my case, it was like surf.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  It was like, if somebody was putting a ton of effort into making like a surf movie or, you know, some snowboarding movie, it would be on Vimeo.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they wanted higher quality footage. You could get higher bit rates, 4K, HD. Like, they, they were really on the frontier of that. Yeah, I remember watching a lot of ski videos there. There were some great ones. And also, just like, it was a place where people would put their, their short films. They had the Vimeo, like, you know, awards with the little wreath laurels that you could rest on. But eventually YouTube just went everywhere, all places. The ads went away for the people that care about that because they had premium subscriptions. And ultimately, the quality on YouTube just got better and better and better. And now you can get 4K, really high bitrate on, on YouTube, and it's indistinguishable from Vimeo.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  So, fewer and fewer, fewer and fewer ways to make a case for, you know, consumer adoption, essentially. Like, I, I, I certainly would not recommend anyone who's making video content distribute on Vimeo. I, I put everything on, on YouTube because YouTube has a massive audience and it's an aggregator. Yeah, discoverability is just so.

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  High-Yield Harry has the meme for the moment. He says, "But now we shall both surely drown," said the frog. "LOL," said the scorpion.

• 40:50John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't, I don't think this is exactly right. Like, if, if you buy, if you're a private equity firm and you buy an asset like this and you, and you lay off the team, like, you're likely, there are still people that are going to be trying to extract the value from that asset. It just might be a team on a different, in a different section of the firm, or an outsourcing agency, or something else. I would be surprised if this means that Vimeo is shutting down. I would imagine that they're trying to continue whatever business relationships they have and whatever subscriber base they have.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  Banjo says Vimeo was cool, but if you know about Vimeo, it probably means you're old.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Hmm, that's true.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  That's certainly true.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  You know about Vimeo?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know what Vimeo is.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  What's the last thing you watched on Vimeo?

• 41:36Speaker 04

  I have no idea.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  But, you know, but I remember, yeah, it was like, like artsy films would be on there or something.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was good.

• 41:44John Coogan?

  Anyway, Applovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. What is all this? So Matthew Zeitlin says, "My basic model of modern artificial intelligence labs is that they are like emotionally intense graduate school programs, but with unlimited money."

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  This is Matt Levine.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Matt Levine is writing about this. And Mary says, "My friend is dating a guy who works at one of the frontier research labs in SF and his sole job is to think and come up with a big idea every six months."

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  Capital B, capital I.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  So his workday consists primarily of long walks spent pondering. That's a good job.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Very, very well monitis coded.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  That's amazing. I mean, that seems like, honestly, in the age of research, in the Ilya Sutskever world, like, this is probably a good use of time as opposed to... There are plenty of people that will lock in and, you know, improve, make minor improvements to the consumer application or the consumer side of the business.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in a world where you have, you know, infinite minds, when you're a manager of infinite minds, what Satya was quoting, Notion co-founder. Yeah, you're probably just walking, pondering, thinking about what the next set of tasks to assign to your infinite minds.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  Well, Epic Games and Google apparently have a secret $800 million Unreal Engine and Services deal. And the quote in their scoop, quote, "Sorry, I'm blowing this confidentiality." What a crazy quote to give to a Verge reporter, but we're going to dig in. Addie Robertson and Sean Hollister have the story. "A judge is questioning whether Epic Games and Google are settling their long-running antitrust fight, partly because of a previously unannounced partnership involving the Unreal Engine, Fortnite, and Android. In a hearing in San Francisco today, the court revealed that Epic and Google have struck a new deal that apparently includes joint product development, joint marketing commitment, and joint partnerships.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  California Judge James Donato expressed concerns that the agreement, which he indicated would involve Epic, quote, 'helping' Google market Android and Google quote, uh, Google's newly quote app using Epic's core technology could have led Epic to soften it, its demands for changes to the overall Android ecosystem. Donato allowed Epic and Google to keep most of the details of the plan under wraps, but during the hearing, he quizzed witnesses, including Epic's CTA CEO, Tim Sweeney, and economics, and economics expert Doug Bernheim on how it might impact settlement talks, revealing some hints in the process. Quote, "You're going to be helping Google market Android and they're going

• 44:27John Coogan?

  to be helping you market Fortnite. That deal doesn't exist today, right?" Donato asked Bernheim, who answered in the affirmative. He also described it as, quote, "A new business between Epic and Google." Sweeney testimony cracked the mystery a little further. He referred to the agreement as relating to the metaverse, a team, a term Sweeney has used to refer to Epic's, Epic's game Fortnite. Epic's technology is used by many companies in the space Google is operating in to train their products. So the ability for Google to use Unreal, the Unreal, the Unreal Engine more fulsome. Sorry, I'm blowing this confidentiality, Sweeney said. Oh, that's a great line. Um, yeah, I mean, we, we, we've seen a number. What was it? What is the, what is the deep mind model that

• 45:10John Coogan?

  does, that plays the games for you that I'm in the market for? Cause I don't have any time to play video games. So I need an AI agent to do it for me. Uh, they have a number. So they have genie three, which generates basically a video, a, a, a 3D world that you can walk around in.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it's SEMA two.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  SEMA two will play the game for you and both of those, uh, should in theory benefit from, uh, using Unreal as the backbone of the training.

• 45:34Jordi Hays?

  Elon's probably pretty excited about that as well, right?

• 45:36John Coogan?

  Why?

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  Cause he likes to play on accounts that are.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  He ranks, but.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, yeah. Yeah. So instead of needing to hire someone, you could, you could bot your account. People already do that with, uh, like aim bots and stuff. Uh, usually you get banned, but, uh, makes a lot of sense in terms of training Google's generative AI models. Use Unreal, create a bunch of virtual worlds, walk around in those, interact in those, use them as reinforcement learning environments for agents and then bake that. Out into a bunch of different models that can be used for a bunch of different things. I'm I'm I'm super excited for all this. But it's it's just funny the way it's coming out. Anyway, if you need a reinforcement learning environment, you got to go to Labelbox. Reinforcement learning environments, voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  So Coinbase established an independent advisory board on quantum computing and blockchain. Quantum computing, if if built at scale, have the potential to reshape entire industries. We were talking to Kathy Wood about this a little bit yesterday. From finance to healthcare to material science and national security. For blockchain, the stakes are especially high. The cryptographic foundation that secures digital assets today could be challenged by the advances of the coming years. At Coinbase, security is our highest priority and preparing for future threats, even those many years away, is crucial for our industry. Most people, I think, handicapped the quantum thing at like 2030, 2032, 2040. I think Kathy Wood's estimate was 2040 for serious quantum adoption, even if you get on a Moore's Law type adoption curve. But.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nick Carter's been super vocal on X about about quantum just being like the biggest headwind to like further Bitcoin price appreciation.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's also this question, maybe I'm just like very, I'm like super out of the loop. But like, if you can crack like whatever the Bitcoin or any like blockchain with quantum, like surely you can also just get into like, you know, banks or like tons of like actual like things that are like probably way more important than than crypto. Like, it's like, if we have a world where you have like these incredibly powerful quantum computers, like, is crypto actually the most important thing that you need to be worrying about? Or is it like the nuclear codes that are?

• 47:46John Coogan?

  So.

• 47:47Speaker 04

  Surely those are stored.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're probably right with the nuclear codes. But in terms of just like fiat stored in a bank, there are a series of backups that are offline. There's even deeper backups at certain points. And so like the financial system, although they probably don't want to talk about it, does have the ability to like effectively roll back. So if there was like some massive quantum hack and like all the. Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan accounts or Goldman Sachs accounts were like drained. They would just be like, let's revert, but you can't do that on a blockchain necessarily. So, but there is still the dynamic of like, what happens if you crack Bitcoin? Like, how much are you stealing? How many new Bitcoins?

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, really, if you like steal any Bitcoin, Bitcoin just goes to zero.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  What's actually the point?

• 48:30John Coogan?

  But that's obviously still a threat, even if you just have some malicious actor who's just like, I'm going to take out a short position on Bitcoin.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Tank it and profit from that, that that could potentially be disruptive, certainly disruptive to Coinbase's business. So, good to see them taking it seriously. Anyway, MongoDB, choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best-in-class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next. Let's go to Scott Besson. He was complaining about the food in Davos and he did an interview on Real America's Voice, I guess, with Jack.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  So, so again, if you're looking at Davos as though it's a bunch of kick streamers.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Yes. That is the correct.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  He's effectively, like, Besson has effectively been just clip farming.

• 49:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  This whole time.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Okay, let's watch the Scott Besson clip.

• 49:21Speaker 07

  Certainly, they don't like carnivores here in Davos with the, with the food. You're, you're not a huge fan of the food here, I heard, by the way. You know, I, I, no. And, no, I, you know, I, I, I don't, I don't know if you remember, a couple of years ago, one of the recommendations from the, the Davos elite was we could all be eating bugs and insects. Yeah, the insect food. Like, yeah, I tell you, after, after a couple of days of the food here, I, I may switch to, to bugs and insects. You'll take the insect food up. Or, unless that's what it is. Or, or I'm telling you.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm gonna bring some popcorn.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  Cricket snacks fell off.

• 49:52John Coogan?

  They did.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  You remember? They were really, people were really pushing this. They were saying, oh, the protein content is so high. And I think humanity rejected it.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Well, you know, you know the story of Magic Spoon?

• 50:09Jordi Hays?

  Were they gonna put cricket?

• 50:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  Originally?

• 50:12John Coogan?

  They did a previous company called Exo.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  It was an American insect food company. They made some protein bars using cricket flour from pulverized house crickets.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  House crickets?

• 50:24John Coogan?

  House crickets.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  That sounds like you're taking the pets.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  They did a Kickstarter in 2016. They raised $55,000, which was more than their $20,000 target. They raised $5.6 million in Series A funding. I wonder from who? There's an article in the Journal. There's an article in Business Insider.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm on it.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Nas invested. No way.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Legendary rapper Nas invested in a company that makes protein bars out of crickets.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so on the Exo Protein site now.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Oh, is it still live?

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  All their bars are sold out. No, a couple, you can still get banana bread cricket breakfast bars.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Company was acquired in 2018.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 51:01John Coogan?

  By Aspire Food Group.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  You can get salted caramel.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  Cricket bars.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  And you can just get one pound of cricket powder.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  (laughing).

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  You can get a quarter pound.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  They should just get into selling live crickets. Just, just, just deliver them. Get your enemies' addresses and just deliver them. Uh, no, but, uh, so I, I, I think they...

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  1-800-CRICKETS.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  I think they would, I mean, the, the team certainly found a niche, a weird, like, you know, breakthrough. You're gonna get a lot of earned media with a, with a bizarre ingredient like that. But the ultimate traction, I think people just have an aversion to bugs and they, they just conjures, you know, images of bugs crawling around.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Blood memories.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Like it. Yeah. And so they sold the company, but then they started Magic Spoon, the not cricket-based...

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  Which just immediately ripped.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  It ripped. It was fantastic business. And I'm sure you've seen a ton of, uh, you know, uh, podcast ads about Magic Spoon and everyone's familiar with that company.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  So, you know, they, they, if you're in crickets, if you're in bugs, pivot to cereal, I guess. Uh, and that's what Beston's saying. He's saying he wants Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts, basically, Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon might even make Pop-Tarts. I don't know.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Anthropic published a new constitution for Claude. The constitution is a detailed description of our vision for Claude's behavior and values. It is primarily written for Claude and used directly in our training process. Was it written by Claude? Did Claude write its own constitution?

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That's a good question. You'd think, yes.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Rahul over at Ramp said, basically, TLDR is, I love you, you love me, we're a happy family with a great big hug and a kiss from me to you. Won't you say you love me too?

• 52:37John Coogan?

  You really know the Barney song. It's amazing.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  I didn't just sing it as a kid. I studied it, John.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  You studied it, yeah.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  More importantly.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Buzz Balls.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  Incredibly important. Thank you.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Is selling a $35,000 diamond engagement ring shaped like its drinks. The ring will be auctioned on eBay starting February 3rd. So I don't, how is it, how is it actually going to be, is 35K like the?

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Opening, opening bid? Or, or maybe it's, it's $35,000 worth of diamonds. It costs them $35,000 to make it, and they're going to put it on eBay, starting price 100 bucks, and then it'll get bid up, I guess? I don't know.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Proceeds will, from the sale, will benefit a heart-related charitable cause. It's kind of odd for an alcohol brand to be like, we're, we're...

• 53:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. That's cool. I mean, if you're, if, if anyone out in the audience is wanting to propose and like, doesn't really know how to, is struggling to figure out like the right kind of like moment or way to propose, this is like

• 53:38John Coogan?

  Toss a buzz ball.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Easy, out of the box.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  That's a woman in your life.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Toss a buzz ball at the woman in your dream.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  If she catches it, she has to marry you.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  She has to say yes.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Is this rage bait? Is this good marketing? Do you think this is good for Buzz Ball strategically? What do you think?

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if it's, I mean, I, I, I find plenty of moments to talk about Buzz Ball already, so.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Okay, unnecessary. I mean, it is, it is gimmicky, but the whole brand is sort of gimmicky to begin with, and so it doesn't feel out of context. It doesn't feel like they're trying to be a serious company, and then they did something wacky on the side, and I'm confused. This like feels within the, within the Buzz Balls lineage, within the Buzz Balls, uh, brand world, very much so. Uh, anyway.

• 54:21Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  If you're heading to Cisco AI Summit, be sure to bring some Buzz Balls, because on February 3rd, Cisco is bringing together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS, and more to discuss the future of the AI economy.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  We will be there.

• 54:36John Coogan?

  The whole thing will be livestreamed. We will be there for the livestream.

• 54:38Jordi Hays?

  Did you know?

• 54:39John Coogan?

  What?

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Do you know who came up with the idea? For Buzz Balls.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Absolutely not. I have no idea.

• 54:44Jordi Hays?

  A public high school teacher.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  What?

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  Merrily Kick, a former public high school teacher, has become one of America's richest self-made women after selling her ready-to-drink cocktail business Buzz Balls for at least 500 million.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  500?

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  What started as a side hustle has now transformed into one of the biggest brands of the industry. Kick founded Buzz Balls in 2009, inspired by a simple idea while grading papers by her pool. "I thought, I shouldn't have this glass container out here. I should have a plastic pool-safe type of cocktail." From this spark of inspiration, Buzz Balls was born. Fun, high-proof cocktails served in colorful, plastic, spherical containers. Buzz Balls quickly gained popularity and now sold at supermarkets, liquor stores, and convenience stores. She says, "I've been living the American dream. We've built a legacy. We've become a contender in a space where women never went," Kick says.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  The brand has grown intentionally, distributing 29 countries with an estimated annual revenue of $500 million. This is incredible story.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Monster company.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  In April of 2024, the drinks firm Sazarak acquired Buzz Balls in an all-cash deal.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  No way.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  Made it 500 million. Though Kick suggests the figure is much higher.

• 55:58John Coogan?

  No way!

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  Kick is an absolute dog. It is also cemented to her place among America's richest self-made women, with Forbes estimating her net worth at 400 million after taxes. So yeah, of course.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  She's gonna 10x that. Just get it in the market.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure she's cooking on her next idea.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Run it up.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Kick's journey is remarkable because she never raised money from investors. She bootstrapped her business.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  We gotta get her on the show.

• 56:22Jordi Hays?

  She used a small inheritance, maxed out credit cards.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  There is the founder's podcast episode about her.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  And took out a loan from a local community bank to get started. "I scraped and scrambled," she says. "I took every bit of every penny I could find and poured it into the business."

• 56:35John Coogan?

  That's incredible. Amazing story.

• 56:37Jordi Hays?

  Her unique company started making a profit in the second year with 1 million in sales and 100k in profit. Not bad. By 2014, the brand was expanding quickly and the drinks were sold at major retailers. By 2019, annual sales were over 100 million.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  Get her on the David Center.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow, she, I mean, she's elite. Akita Buzzball's success was owning its supply chain.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  She vertically integrated on day one?

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  It's just like.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Most like D to C founders in, in, in California like can't figure out how to get off a co packer.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  She moved production of the patented plastic spheres and the spirits used in buzz balls in-house to ensure the brand's quality and reliability.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Despite many investor offers over the years, Kick held on to her company until she found the right partner.

• 57:17John Coogan?

  Elite.

• 57:18Jordi Hays?

  I wanted somebody that was going to come in and have big guns.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Big guns.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  She's, she explained, uh, Sazrock, which owns over 400 brands, brought the resources and the expertise to scale Buzzballs.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  Kick and her family are still part of the business. I didn't sell because I didn't like what I was doing or wanted to leave. She explains, I sold for the exponential growth and because it's selfish to hold it, it back. It really has legs. From a teacher grading paper by the pool to a multimillionaire, centimillionaire. Merrily Kick's story shows the power of a good idea and the determination to make it happen.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. That's.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  That is an incredible story.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  You gotta get her on the show.

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And before we move on to our, uh, to our lightning round, let's debate Kylie Robinson's latest post. She says, do you think if the AI company's IPO this year will get insert frontier lab arenas like the crypto.com arena, what do you think? Should there be a Gemini arena, an Anthropic arena, an OpenAI arena? Should they do this? Is this good for the brand? They're already buying, uh, Super Bowl ads, so it doesn't seem out of the question. What do you think the probability is?

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like, uh, these type of, uh,

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  Advertising on like a, an arena like that, you typically see this with like somewhat commodity, like products that are, that are in large markets, but are, you know, in the case of like crypto.com, they're just compete like the, the products crypto.com is very interchangeable with Coinbase, right? It's a place you can go, give them USD and you can buy Bitcoin or whatever digital assets you want. And so they're really just competing on like brand entirely. And like currently, the way that you're seeing the market evolve, like I don't, I don't know.

• 59:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're competing on technology. Like how does the model actually answer? What are the benchmarks? They're competing on products. Like how does the app work? How, what are the mechanics? What can you do? Can you generate images in there or not? Can you generate video? How good is the video? Uh, does it do deep research quickly? Like there's a million different things. How's the voice mode? Like they're, they're definitely playing like a product race right now. There is a marketing.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  At the same time.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Was there ever, was there any of like the OG search companies that they ever get out? And like, did Yahoo ever have a?

• 59:48John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's interesting, but I do know that, uh, it's interesting that she mentions the crypto.com arena here in Los Angeles, the former Staples Center, because crypto.com is not a public company. So there's nothing that says that you can't buy an arena before you go public. Uh, who knows? Maybe we will have a Vanta arena by the end of the day. Automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I'd love to head to the Vanta arena, no matter where it lands. Um, anyway, we have our land of lightning round, starting now with Base10. We have Turin, the co-founder and CEO of Base10 in the retreat waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel. How are you doing?

• 1:00:32Tuhin Srivastava?

  Hey, how are you guys doing?

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 1:00:37Tuhin Srivastava?

  Thanks for having me again.

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  You've been busy.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  You've been busy. Give us the news.

• 1:00:41Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, we've had a crazy year. Um, we're 10x of last year.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  10x alert. Hit the gong for the 10x. Sorry to interrupt.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  All right, back to you.

• 1:00:57John Coogan?

  Back to business.

• 1:00:58Tuhin Srivastava?

  Last time I was on here, I was telling you about our Series D. We've raised our Series D now. We've raised three hundred million dollars, is a five billion dollar valuation, led by IVP and Capo G with participation from Nvidia and a few others. Look, it's just been, just to remind you guys about what we do.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:01:18Tuhin Srivastava?

  AI infrastructure platform. We focus on production-grade inference, serving the fastest-growing companies in the world. So a bridge, open evidence, cursor, notion, clear gamma, right? You know, you look at that crop of companies and how they're growing and, you know, we're playing a supporting role in making sure that they can run their models

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Tuhin Srivastava?

  as fast and reliable as possible. And just on the back of that, you know, we've realized how big this could potentially be.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  Take it, yeah, take us through how quickly enterprises are ramping up running their own models. Like, if we go back to 2022, Google had Palm internally, they hadn't really launched Gemini. OpenAI had GPT-3, and then they launched ChatGPT. But Microsoft had, you know, they were vending GPT-4 through Bing and stuff like. But at big companies were not really running their own large language models. Is that roughly correct? But now it feels like we're in the hundreds of companies. But out of the Fortune 500, like, how many, how many companies are actually running their own models at this point in time?

• 1:02:24Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, I look, I think it's still relatively small, but growing rapidly. I think, you know, if you go and look at, when we go and speak to enterprise customers, it's still incredibly early. But I think what they are doing is that they're looking at, you know, these other companies that, you know, they, you know, you and I would probably agree that the future Fortune 500 kind of eating their lunch. And if they don't, like, figure out how to move at that pace, I think they'll just be left behind. And so like, what we, we focus really, really heavily on those really fast-growing companies because we think not only are they going to be the future Fortune 500, but Forty five hundred go look at them as like, how do we bring these models up to speed as quickly as possible?

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, I mean, that makes perfect sense in the case of a company like Cursor, obviously, they have a ton of training data, they have a need for a custom model. Are we years away from someone like a Coca-Cola or, you know, developing their own? Or how does that, how does that play out? Yeah.

• 1:03:24Tuhin Srivastava?

  I, I, I think, look, there's two things that are happening, right? Which is, like, if you go look at OpenAI and throw up a adoption at these, at these companies, it is there.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:32Tuhin Srivastava?

  Definitely, it is definitely there. Once you've proven out these use cases internally, then you start to think about better, faster, more specialized, more secure, running on-prem. All these sets of problems. And so, you know, that is coming, like, is it like six months away? Is it twelve months away? Is it eighteen months away?

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Tuhin Srivastava?

  Who knows? I think the other trend that is pushing the enterprises online is RL. Which is like, how do you take these open source based models and RL them and get them to be as good, if not better than these frontier models for very specific tasks? And, you know, it's a big focus for us as well. We recently made an acquisition around that. But we do think that'll be a big driver of enterprise adoption.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Okay. Walk me through the pushback from a large enterprise that says, yeah, it's great, I can, I can train a custom model on my business. But I looked at the smaller models for a variety of benchmarks. And it feels like the big models just sort of are better at the small models tasks as well. Like, I should just use the latest and greatest big model for everything because the frontier is better at the specialized tasks as well. It just one-shots things.

• 1:04:48Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, totally. Well, I, I think, I, I think, honestly, a lot of the times they'll be valid then.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:54Tuhin Srivastava?

  You're like, yeah, like, I, I don't disagree with you. I think what, what you will see, though, is that as the frontier is getting better, open source is already, you know, if you go look at the open source models that are out there today, like the GLands, the Quans and, and the DeepSeek, it's not like they are eighteen months behind.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Tuhin Srivastava?

  You know, someone argue that they're, you know, within a quarter and for certain tasks are better. The complexity actually comes around, honestly, from enterprises, not so much like, can I get a better outcome?

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:22Tuhin Srivastava?

  It's, hey. You know, these large lab companies have massive inference teams.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:29Tuhin Srivastava?

  Do I have the skill set to be able to run the service at scale?

• 1:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Tuhin Srivastava?

  Within my premise with all my enterprise requirements?

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:05:36Tuhin Srivastava?

  That's ideally where we can help in and be that partner to them.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Tuhin Srivastava?

  To bring them online.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  Okay, so walk me through what it looks like when a Fortune 500 company says, "Okay, we're getting off of just a generic model. We want to do something that we have control over the inference. We're working with Base10. We're doing, you know, we're doing some custom RL. There's going to be some proprietary data in there. Who's involved? Are they hiring you or a consultant to set up the RL environment? Who's doing the training?"

• 1:06:05Tuhin Srivastava?

  No, no, no.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Walk through all that.

• 1:06:07Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, I think just engineers and infrastructure engineers. I think that is like one of the realities right now. And I don't think engineers who don't know how to grapple with AI just, you know, they don't. I don't know if they exist in the future, to be honest. But that being said, like, full of these engineers, it's like, hey, how can we make it as easy as possible for you to take this custom model, deploy it, scale it up, either, you know, in our cloud or within your own cloud? And so that is, you know, the job of the software. We have a really amazing forward deploy team that is very happy, very happy to help if necessary, but our goal is also just, you know, to enable them to do these things. And that is happening. I think it's early, though, especially in the enterprise.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  From, from your view, do you think we need more Neo Labs? Like, based on the conversations that you have with customers?

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Okay. I'm talking.

• 1:06:56Tuhin Srivastava?

  Look, more, more, more models are great. I think more people developing models are amazing. And look, I, I'm making a bet with my career with this company on, on the long tail of models and that they're existing models outside of, you know, two amazing companies. And so I think more people developing models just gives consumers and developers more choices down the line. And like, look, do we need more of the same? Probably not, but like, you know, all, all these companies have their own takes on, on, on the problem.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Help me understand your current thinking around model routers, routing inference across big, heavy-duty models that might be very expensive, like using all parts of the parade of frontier.

• 1:07:42Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  What are you seeing on the inside? Are companies trying to handle parcelling out the workloads themselves? Or do they want that to be something that's off the shelf that you sort of provide? What are some of the trade-offs that people are considering these days?

• 1:07:59Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, look, I think it's a spectrum. I think the most advanced companies are 100% doing that. They are breaking up their tasks, almost like model by model.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:12Tuhin Srivastava?

  And then figuring out how to route. I think less sophisticated folks or people earlier in their journey.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:18Tuhin Srivastava?

  Probably better way to put it, are relying on other people to do that.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:21Tuhin Srivastava?

  And the model companies are doing this themselves. I think the place where I struggle a bit is like, you know, some of these routing things are just, you know, routing for failover.

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:32Tuhin Srivastava?

  Which is, hey, model just stopped working.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:08:34Tuhin Srivastava?

  We believe that reliability should be table stakes.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Tuhin Srivastava?

  For serving models and, you know, ideally you don't have to build across what happens when X model provider falls over, Y model provider falls over, and have that. And that is a different routing problem.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Tuhin Srivastava?

  Routing based on capability is happening. It is happening outside the model, it's happening inside the model. And as the long-tail model comes online for specific model tasks, I think there's more and more going to be the case that that is being handled by inference company or inference platform like Bystan as well.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's certainly happened in the database market. Like, you have a big Postgres installation. You don't have a MySQL installation there as like a backup. But you might have a Redis Cassing layer in front of it, right?

• 1:09:16Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  So what is, help me understand that at the hardware layer. I know you have some insight into Nvidia's strategy here. I'm very interested in how you or other partners, other folks in inference might be thinking about the future of Nvidia's like big, powerful racks versus their more legacy chips that might be depreciating, but you can still run a great model on it versus some of the more exciting stuff that's happening with Grok in the future.

• 1:09:47Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look, I don't have a talent in Nvidia strategy. They're very good. I can hypothesize. Okay. Uh, you know, look, they're amazing partners to us. I think we are chip agnostic and we think, look, every every, every um task and every will have different requirements from a latency perspective, from a cost perspective. Yeah. Even what type of model runs on it. Sure. And so, yeah, so like we use H one hundreds, we use A one hundred, but we also use E two hundreds and G B two hundreds. Yep. And as, as you know, we get these, you know, new, the new types of chips or across providers, we'll be, we'll be working on them as well. So like, if you think about the Nvidia GROG stuff, you know, what are they solving for? It's like, you know, it's kind of breaking out pre-fill and decode. Yeah.

• 1:10:29Tuhin Srivastava?

  Using GPUs for pre-fill. You know, there's a compute bound problem. You can saturate, saturate the GPU. You can do batching and have really good throughput, but then you have the LPUs or like the GROG chips or the decode, which are memory bound. You're not doing a lot of new math per token. Why this is hard is like, that's a pretty complex orchestration problem between uphandling workloads that are doing stuff on GPUs and on LPUs. And I think Nvidia's, you know, obviously built amazing software around this to break out refill and decode Dynamo is the name of the software. Yep. And that we work pretty heavily with, but like, I think that would just be a new type of chip that the chip providers

• 1:11:08Tuhin Srivastava?

  um provide. And, you know, I think um one thing I don't think you can understate is how much, how much, how powerful um Nvidia supply chain is, CUDA is, CUDA is, and their, their ability to um, you know, be dynamic with architectures changing. And I think Yeah. um, you know, we, we have very, very much bought into that ecosystem and what that enables, um especially for inference and customers.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us your take or any insight on how companies at the application layer are kind of wrestling with uh the late, like laziness specifically? Like, everyone at this point has experienced, you know, a product like uh as, asking, you know, basically, uh, you know, wanting a product to be able to do something that you know it can do and then, and then, uh, you know, running into this like laziness element. What uh?

• 1:12:00Tuhin Srivastava?

  What do you mean by laziness? I don't quite get that.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I would say like, you know, thinking about, uh, let's, let's pick the, you know, biggest, uh, not to pick on anyone, but like the biggest consumer AI app, ChatGPT, right? Like, everyone is experienced asking ChatGPT to do something that you know it can do. And like, sometimes it will just kind of like circle around or like not really get to the thing that you want it to do. Um, even if you're paying for it on like the max plan or something like that. And so, and so I would like, I would assume that every company at the application layer that gets to the point where they're caring about margins is like starting to get to the point where they're like, okay, like, you don't always, because sometimes the model can be lazy and you're like, great, like, Yeah, you got me a quick answer.

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  You got me what I needed and I can just move on. Yeah. Yeah, other times it's like wildly frustrating because it's like, you know, asking if like, it's like asking an employee to do something at five o'clock and they're like, oh, like, uh, you know.

• 1:12:58Tuhin Srivastava?

  I, I mean, isn't that like, to me, that's like what defines a great application layer company, right? Like the,

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:13:04Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, the, the ones that aren't good are just wrapping around, you know, GPT and you, or, or whatever model and, you know, you as a user are left to figure like deal with that laziness. I think the best application layer companies, you know,

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  It's like serving the right amount of intelligence for the task.

• 1:13:20Tuhin Srivastava?

  And, and, and setting up the harness and how to use it for the problem that your user is asking you to solve for them, or you were trying to solve, like, you know, I, if open, if, if a company like Open Evidence was just, you know, doing something the lazy way, that would not only be really, really expensive, but they wouldn't do a really good job of solving that problem for their users. And it wouldn't be a great business in the long term. But like, you know, what makes these companies so good at how they use the models, how do you use multiple models and how they architect that to, you know, the thing the user is asking them and then, then layering in, how do we do this efficiently so we can make a business out of it? And like, you know, to me, there is like going to be a great divide um, in solving that laziness problem. I think it's a good way to put it, actually.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  You said two things that I'm sort of having trouble reconciling. You said that you're chip agnostic, but then you also praised the dominance of the CUDA ecosystem. Is it getting easier to implement LLMs in a way that run on multiple chipsets? We've obviously seen really strong performance from DeepMind on the TPU stack and Anthropic's talking about TPU now. But for a long time, the narrative was like, oh, it's going to be really cumbersome to re-platform off of the CUDA ecosystem. How are you thinking about just multi-chip architectures these days?

• 1:14:37Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think it is getting easier, but it is not easy.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Welcome to entrepreneurship.

• 1:14:46Tuhin Srivastava?

  Yeah, and like, look, just sitting on top of like, you know, that's why Nvidia is such a great partner for us. It's like, sitting on them doing this stuff, you know, we were, I mean, did you guys play free for a ring there when you were growing up with Madden?

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  I was more of Counter-Strike, Call of Duty.

• 1:15:00Tuhin Srivastava?

  Sure.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  StarCraft.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Tuhin Srivastava?

  It's pretty amazing that when we are doing stuff for GPU, they were downloading from this, a website looks exactly the same as the Nvidia driver page.

• 1:15:13Tuhin Srivastava?

  That is also amazingness of it, of like, how that is and how powerful it is. And I think that is, you know, yes, it's getting easier and like, hey, diversification is great everywhere downstream, but also like Nvidia is just amazing at what they do and.

• 1:15:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And being able to run a model on AMD does not necessarily mean that it will inference at a lower total cost per token or vice versa. It might be a little higher on certain models, blah, blah. And so, yeah, there's all these different trade-offs, but that's why companies come to Base10, correct?

• 1:15:45Tuhin Srivastava?

  Totally. And that's why the open source ecosystem is so important, right? That's why, you know, like. You know, you you've mentioned databases earlier, like I think similar to databases. At the in the fullness of time, open source has the fastest runtimes. And so I think that will like with Nvidia, you will see that, which is like, you know, you know, it's gonna be really good at running stuff on Nvidia chips is gonna be Nvidia who's gonna be really good at stuff running stuff on AMD chips. It's gonna be India. And so working with these providers of chips, I think to get the best runtimes from them. It is very important. And I think like this cross compilation stuff while important. You know, I I I'm a little skeptical. I'd say it's just like, you know, like it's fanciful for me to think that we would be better at running

• 1:16:30Tuhin Srivastava?

  software on Nvidia chips than Nvidia or or better. Yeah, I I at the lowest level. Obviously, there's all the orchestration of stuff that we are building that we think is very important, but we also very, very invested in those ecosystems.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Well, I believe in you. I think you can do it. But you know, I I take your point, of course. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the stream and have a great rest of your day.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll be back on.

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  Any day now.

• 1:16:55Tuhin Srivastava?

  Hopefully not. Yeah. Thanks for having me and appreciate you guys.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Up next, we have.

• 1:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Bryce.

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Bryce from nominal. I believe Bryce is the brother of the previous guest from nominal Cameron McCord.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  Technology Brothers.

• 1:17:21John Coogan?

  Not we no, not brother. Sorry, co-founder.

• 1:17:25Speaker 09

  Co-founder.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay. Well, you know.

• 1:17:26Speaker 09

  Nailed it.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  You you build a business with someone for a while. People just assume you're brothers, but anyway.

• 1:17:32Speaker 09

  Second spouse is what I like to say, but.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:17:36Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Where are you? Where are you calling in from?

• 1:17:40Speaker 09

  Guys, hello from Daytona, Florida.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:17:45Speaker 09

  You are in.

• 1:17:48Speaker 09

  You're you're in the garage. You're in the pits. At the Rolex 24. So we are here. So I'm yeah. nominal, you know, the company Cameron, Cameron, Jason and I co-founded. We announced our partnership this week with Pratt Miller Motorsports.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Congratulations.

• 1:18:05Speaker 09

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  Great timing.

• 1:18:09Speaker 09

  Oh, come on. Come on. Come on. That's fantastic. Yeah. If you, if you don't know who Pratt Miller Motorsports is, you know, they are the heart and soul of the Corvette racing team in the IMSA race series. So, you know, this is, this is full on heavy metal sports car racing.

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  This is American dynamism right here.

• 1:18:30Speaker 09

  This is. Amen. I'm about, I'm about 30 feet from a McLaren. Oh, you know, this entire garage is full of pretty, probably every, every famous sports car you know, but I don't know if you know, but the most dominant of them all for the last 30 years has been this yellow Corvette right here. Very nice. And that yellow Corvette.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:18:50Speaker 09

  Look at that. Wow. And has a nominal sticker. There we go.

• 1:18:53Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Incredible. Uh, how's, uh,

• 1:18:57Speaker 09

  Good stuff.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  Have you caught any of qualifying yet? Or have you just been too locked in?

• 1:19:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, this is the epitome of forward deployed because we just sent a founder to make sure this went perfect. Um, but it's been, it's been really fun. Yeah, I've been here for a couple of days. Um, we are, so think like last night, we were running our late night practice sessions. Uh, so Daytona itself is a like brutal race to start the season. It's a 24 hour race. Um, I'm not sure if you like me have now seen a best picture nominee, but, uh, in the F1 movie, Brad Pitt's F1 movie, the first seven or eight minutes is actually Sonny Hayes, Brad Pitt racing here at the Rolex 24.

• 1:19:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 09

  Um, and it's him racing the night shift. So. Yeah. Um, amen. Um, but yeah, him racing the night shift. So, you know, last night's practice session, every team gets one night to go out and actually like see the race conditions at night. Um, you know, different temperature profiles, totally different. Um, you know, race profile, you have like, I found out like at turn five right here, you have headlights from the parking lot that you have to deal with. Like. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's been a wildly interesting journey, but, um, you know, on the, you know, on the nominal partnership side, it's also been just really fun to see like, you know, we've, we've had a lot of wonderful meetings and things about strategy and race strategy and this and that. But like, you know, we are watching it come alive here. Um, so a lot of the practice and qualifying and everything else has come back to, uh, you

• 1:20:25Speaker 09

  know, how do we help them use a lot of data to win?

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  And the, the pressure's on, right? They're going for the fifth, fifth win this weekend? Is that right?

• 1:20:34Speaker 09

  Impressive.

• 1:20:36Jordi Hays?

  We've been following a little bit, mostly the Shopify team.

• 1:20:40John Coogan?

  The Shopify team we've been following a lot.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Toby.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  And there's a lot of tech people out there. It's great.

• 1:20:47Speaker 09

  There is. Yeah. The tech community here is like small but strong. It is like the epitome of motorheads.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 09

  Um, you know, it's people that late in life, you know, found thermodynamics in their life and they're like, this is the coolest thing ever. This is way cooler than Kubernetes.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  It's the best. It's the best. Yeah. And for us, we're, uh, the timing is great. We were at the track, uh, with, with a friend of the show, uh, Paul on, on Sunday. And we were just doing like really quick laps. We'd go out for like five, you know, five, 10 laps and then take a quick break and kind of like settle down. And we'd be spinning out on like, on like the fifth, on like the fifth lap. And like realizing like, actually like when you're going like these endurance races, it's, it's.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Also just like from an engineering perspective, you know, you take the car out for a couple laps and you let it cool down and check the tire pressure like 24 hours is endurance, not just for the humans, but for the actual vehicle. So can you talk a little bit about, uh, what goes into bringing that level of performance to the vehicle? What your role is, who the key players are in your world? Who are you interfacing with?

• 1:21:54Speaker 09

  Yeah. Oh my God. Um, okay. So yeah, 24 hours is brutal. You are right. Um, you know, the, the rest of the season, there, there is a 12 hour race in the season. We've got some sebring, but you know, the rest of the season is one, two, three, four, five, six hours and you know, you rip the car as hard as possible. So the 24 hour race, the strategy you're bringing in is much more around, you know, of all the things you have to care about more than anything, the cars get beat to hell, but uh, it's fuel. Um, you know, it's like this, this bad boy will burn a full tank of fuel about once an hour. Um, and so a lot of the pitch strategy, a lot of like the totality of the race comes down to really like managing all 24 hours well. Um, and so our, our role in this, you know, we, we come alongside this absolutely elite engineering team.

• 1:22:37Speaker 09

  Um, and help them, you know, make those, make those calls. Sometimes it's the high, you know, highest level. Um, you know, do we need to switch drivers earlier? Do we need to do something else? I have a. Let me think of another. Oh, okay. I got a fun one. Last night, one of the things we were looking at is I can't give away all the secrets, but I know everyone says they do this, but Pratt Miller like actually does this and does it better than anyone else. But last night they were talking about, you know, managing fuel from a like consumption standpoint. So think like, you know, we're watching how throttling is happening, a bunch of other things. Think when this comes into play is the car is, you know, you're behind someone else and your goal ends up being, how can I get them to stay on the throttle as much as possible?

• 1:23:19Speaker 09

  Because if they burn more fuel than I burn and we both go into the pits together, the long pole in the tent of a pit stop is refilling the tank. So they refill for five seconds, we refill for one second and we run right past them. And that type of stuff like, that is not a like trivial thing to do. Like that is complex math happening. That's tons of different telemetry, you know, like nominal. And to be clear, like Pratt Miller has been building elite software here for 25 years. I was in like the third, the second grade when they started building race software. You know, like, um, this is much more around like, teams like this are amazing because they just are obsessed with winning.

• 1:24:01Speaker 09

  Um, and so this whole partnership has really blossomed out of like that openness. You know, like we have plenty of wonderful, elite, amazing customers that have interesting things that they've built. And like, you know, there's a journey with getting them to like really adopt the way that we think engineers should work in nominal. Where Pratt Miller is like, okay, cool. I have all of this like sunk costs and let's rip.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  It's an engineering sport. Like I imagine a lot of those engineers could go in a second and walk down to El Segundo and be hired on the spot, right? So.

• 1:24:31Speaker 09

  Amen. The amount of, uh, the amount of people that have left the Pratt Miller team to go to like the end rolls of the world. There is a lot.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, Pratt Miller is like, please stop, Palmer, please stop poaching.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  But zoom out for me and, and try and make a little bit clearer. The involvement of nominal in this, how the product's being used, where the endpoints are. Are you working on manufacturing new parts for the car, managing supply chain, uh, testing? Like what else goes in and then maybe contextualize it with the work that you do with other defense contractors and other businesses?

• 1:25:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, totally. So think like Pratt Miller selected us and brought us in to think like, how can we transform engineers and all of their partners so they don't just build these two cars, but they also build three more Corvettes in the field for other teams? You know, how can they come in and like rethink fundamentally testing telemetry, decision making across race operations? So these are producing terabytes and terabytes of data this weekend. You know, we have to do a whole lot with that during the weekend to make really good calls. And way more importantly, we need to like catalog and catalog and index and manage like all of this volume of data. And then like, you know, what we do for the team is like, it's not just about these 10 races a season. Like you win when you have the same system integrated into your driver sim.

• 1:25:52Speaker 09

  Pratt Miller's also been way far ahead in the way that they think about driver sims and the sports car racing league. So all of the data from the driver sim is making it back into nominal. You know, we're helping them do like, actually like rethink the like procedural operations of that and automating a lot of pieces of that. And this is like almost verbatim, you know, how companies in aerospace and defense, how companies in energy, you know, how our customers go get this work done across the board. It's just they have like win or lose on the line. So they just, they rip it out of our hands.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  What about the other simulations that go on during a race series? I'm thinking back to the F1 movie. Most people are familiar with the scene where the F1 car is in the wind tunnel. Everyone can visualize the wind, the smoke flowing over a vehicle. Is that the type of data that someone could pull into nominal and then analyze? Or are you acting more as just like a data layer? And then there's another visualization software that would pull for that specific task? I imagine that there's a lot of point solutions still in place, but how do you fit into that?

• 1:26:54Speaker 09

  Totally. Okay, I'll tell you about the old world and we'll go to the new world. So they have a team here that manages like all of the Corvettes on the field. So not the Pratt Miller race team, it's like the Corvette racing team. You know, I last night was sitting with them and watching them click through somewhere between six to eight different pieces of software to like root cause a problem. A little bit of analysis here, a little bit of data management here. Go find the thing over here. Like nominal has been built on the principle of like clarity really, really fast. Comes with an in the end stack. It is how you manage the data, it is how you monitor the data, and it's how you analyze the data. So, you know, these engineers have been to nominal and they're doing everything from figuring out, you know,

• 1:27:34Speaker 09

  Yes, wind tunnels and other things are important. That's, you know, it's ultimately like small, small, small parts of the team thinking about something like aerodynamics. You know, like way more of the team is thinking about, um, you know, how are these settings affecting, you know, this particular force? So it's pressures, temperatures, voltages, vibration, uh, video data, log data, um, you know, all the different word people use in interviews, multimodal, you know, like all the different types of angles, um, that you need as an engineer to make a judgment call. Um, but at the end of the day, it's like, you know, we want to help them make really good judgment calls and then have a really good record of why. And if they can do that really fast, like we've kind of succeeded in the partnership.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  You mentioned like terabytes of data coming off the car. What's the telemetry like? Like, how is that actually, is it like over there? They connected to wifi? Like, how, how do you get the data off the car while it's on the track?

• 1:28:24Speaker 09

  Oh, man. Um, that is a fun, complex thing.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:28Speaker 09

  Um, okay. So, you know, every race fleet actually just has a lot of regulation here. Um, so like NASCAR, you can't pull any data off the track.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:28:37Speaker 09

  F1 has like a mesh network for the car to ripping streams all day long.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Speaker 09

  Huge, really high data rates, like, like, and all the things. Um, sports car racing is actually like a really interesting middle ground here where um, they do have telemetry coming off the car that, you know, race engineers are sitting in double decker, you know, fold out pit stations.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  ETVs and stuff.

• 1:28:58Speaker 09

  Exactly. With everything around them. It's like

• 1:29:00John Coogan?

  They're monitoring the situation. Their situation monitors. We love it.

• 1:29:04Speaker 09

  It's, it's the epitome.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:05Speaker 09

  Um, and yeah, so they'll, they'll have data come off the car, but then the really interesting part is like, it can't be that high rate of data. They are only allowed to bring very specific sources.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 09

  Um, and then every time it comes in for a pit stop,

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:16Speaker 09

  Um, they'll do things like they put an umbilical into the car and that is like actually how they have a secure communications line with the driver.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:29:23Speaker 09

  The rest of the race, everyone can listen to everyone else.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:29:26Speaker 09

  But if you want to, if you want to give your driver a little edge.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Plug in, wire headphones.

• 1:29:31Speaker 09

  Amen. And then if you want to get the high, the high volume data off, there's a technician that goes in and like, you know, pulls out a data stick and puts in a new data stick. And all that starts to go getting processed in nominal and in other tools. So that's the, that's the fun.

• 1:29:47John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, good luck to everyone. Thank you so much for taking some time out of a busy day to come chat with us.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So many, so many more questions. This was awesome.

• 1:29:56Speaker 09

  Well, that's great. My only ask is please, I need you to, if you don't have a team in M-Side, I need you to pledge allegiance to the yellow Corvette.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  I'm down.

• 1:30:05Speaker 09

  That's all I think. Make your plans for the weekend. Rolex 24.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  We'll watch it. I love an American manufacturer.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  He loves, he's, he's got his eye on the, the ZR1 X already. So.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  It's a good car. Anyway.

• 1:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Great hanging brace. Good luck out there this weekend.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. And up next.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Goes to you in the chat. Our forward deployed CEOs. That's the new meta.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  I like it. Our lambda lightning round continues with Max Sparrow. The, what do we call him? The slop janitor? Pangram labs? Yeah. Slips janitor. Pangram labs. Max, how are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. How are you doing?

• 1:30:48Speaker 10

  I'm great. I'm great. Yeah. Just cleaning up slop on X.

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  It seems like it. Uh, when, when, when did this project start? I feel like I've been start, I've seen most of the viral stuff, uh, in the last few weeks, but have you been building this company for a while? Give us a little bit of the pre-history.

• 1:31:03Speaker 10

  Yeah. So the company's been around for about two years. We've been building models to detect AI generated content.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:09Speaker 10

  And just building, doing a lot of the research.

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:12Speaker 10

  And trying to be the most accurate in the market.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:31:15Speaker 10

  But it wasn't until like end of 2025, December 29th, actually was the first day where I launched the Twitter bot and it's really just blown up since then. People are using it.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:25Speaker 10

  On articles, on basically all of these long form posts that people are just posting slop.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yep. So are you already monetizing it? Because I imagine you have a ton of attention, ton of people that wind up on the tool. I interact with it mostly through, I see the screenshots that people post, or I see your post. But are there businesses who have an incentive to partner with you? Are you talking to big platforms, small companies? Like, have you, have you started, like, what does the business look like today?

• 1:31:53Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. So individuals can either sign up for a free account on Pangram, they can get a Chrome extension and check things in the browser, or you can pay $20 a month to get access to a lot more checks. But we also work with internet platforms. So one of our biggest customers is Quora. So they send most of their content through Pangram, just to understand, like, is it AI-generated or not? Because that's against their policy and they want to keep the platform high quality. And so, yeah, we've had a number of API users, a bunch of different internet platforms, large and small.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  Are you worried about people basically, like, either like officially RLing on you? Or like, basically DIY reinforced learning by just generate me an essay, go into Pangram, it's at 100%. Make some changes and remove the M dashes. Okay, went down to 70%. Rewrite a couple of sentences and just keep iterating until I get it down to 0%.

• 1:32:49Speaker 10

  People are trying. I think that's part of the fun is like, that this is such an adversarial space. And so, like, part of keeping up with it is just making sure, yeah, we're robust to these GRPO attacks and this, like, RL on the model.

• 1:33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Does it make you mad when people are sharing an article on X and it's obviously written by AI? But they're just like, this is the best, this is the most well-written essay I've ever, I've ever read on this topic.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Changed my life.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  This changed my life.

• 1:33:20Speaker 10

  Infuriating. And the person probably spent like 15 seconds just typing in chat GPT, make it really deep, make it really good.

• 1:33:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Speaker 10

  The worst one that I read was

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, tell us.

• 1:33:31Speaker 10

  Was this like, um, the one that went viral about the like supposed Uber Eats or DoorDash whistleblower.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:33:38Speaker 10

  Like they wrote on Reddit, their entire post was AI generated. They're talking about how like, you know, the company's so evil. Um, and it, I think it went viral just because people wanted to believe that it's true, even though it was like obvious slop.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Mm hmm. Wait, were you able to clock that as AI just personally or with Pangram? Because when I read it, it didn't jump out to me as AI generated, but there were other flags that just seemed like factually inaccurate or, uh, just inconsistencies and like logical inconsistencies.

• 1:34:09Jordi Hays?

  To me, it immediately read like fanfiction. It was like, I'm on a, I'm in a public library.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Burner laptop. It's like, who does that?

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  Uh, like you could just post on Reddit anonymously. Like Reddit is not going to come and like arrest you. I don't know. Anyway, uh, yeah, but yeah. How, how did you clock it personally with the tool? Both? What were you thinking?

• 1:34:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. I was reading it. I'm like, this reads like a stor- this reads like a story and not like real life, somebody writing this. And then I checked it with Pangram, said a hundred percent AI. And I went to the comments and there are already other people were saying that, you know, this is obviously AI.

• 1:34:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. And, and then, uh, yeah, talk about the, the, the impact. Like, are you, i- is this an AI safety project? Do you think that there's, uh, there's like a societal, uh, you know, disaster that comes from AI slop? Is it something we'll adjust to? Is there a white pill? Good outcome here? How do you like process the, the, the like philosophical part of your work?

• 1:35:05Speaker 10

  Yeah. So I mean, I think a lot of the big labs are already doing a great job on the internal AI safety side, which is making sure Claude doesn't go out and like autonomously decide to kill everybody. But I think there's this like application layer, the like external AI safety of like, can people use AI for harm? And I think this is a great harm that people just like, aren't really like thinking or even trying to tackle. I think like this threatens, um, the internet as we know it today. I, I don't, if you're aware of like dead internet theory of just the idea that it, the internet is just going to become bots talking to bots. And it's like a ghost town where people can't participate anymore because their voices are drowned out by bots. And I think we're very much at risk of this if we don't have any technology to solve it.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  What do you think about the inverse? I I posted that you could probably drive someone insane by just quote tweeting everything that they say with the hundred percent AI Pangram screenshot? Because so I I I write a daily newsletter and I write about 500 words and I always I never use AI to write it or even proofread it. There's typos in there.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  It's so it's so brutal.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  People will still accuse me of using AI. And so we're like, maybe we need to livestream me typing it or something. And I don't know, it just doesn't matter. But it is sort of infuriating when you take half an hour, you write out some thoughts and then someone's like, oh, this is AI or share the prompt. Even if they're joking, it's like, kind of gets under your skin. What do you what do you think about that?

• 1:36:30Speaker 10

  Yeah, no, it's it's annoying. And I mean, I think that's another reason why, like, we're building this technology is

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:35Speaker 10

  There are other AI detectors out there that have 1% or 5% false positive rate.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:40Speaker 10

  And so they'll like incorrectly flag a lot of things, even like the Declaration of Independence. And so we so so Pangram has a 1 in 10,000 false positive rate.

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:36:49Speaker 10

  So the goal is we are almost never flagging something incorrectly. If we say it's human, like we're we know it's human.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  Are you working with any of the big dating apps yet? I can imagine that this is something they'd want and kind of like actual like on on the user side as you're uploading. Because they want to not have AI generated content because that would create a bad experience for users broadly.

• 1:37:14Speaker 10

  I cannot say I've I've heard some like about some issues from people who work in dating apps.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:21Speaker 10

  And I think the issue is growing.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  I heard an interesting story from a former dating app engineer who said that they're they they had bot problems 10 years ago. People would just go and write a Python script to just swipe on everyone and just send like basic messages. And he said that when they detected bot activity, if they banned them, the the the botter would just create another account. So what they did was they put them in like bot hell, basically, where they would only talk to other bots. Which is a funny solution because then their system says, hey, I'm still on the app. It's still working. I'm still seeing all the API requests. Everything's working. But they're just only interacting with their bots. But you can imagine getting false positive in that and just it being Worst experience, you're like, I didn't meet anyone. Everyone in this app's a bot.

• 1:38:05John Coogan?

  So there's a whole bunch of funny, funny new things. I do want to ask about image, image generation, image detection. That somewhat relates to.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. So yeah, what I was trying to get at is like where I, I assume over time, like most AI, most written content will have been run through some type of model before it's published, almost like a spell check even. Uh, so I'm trying to think about like, where, where do you really not want AI content, right? Like, I don't care if somebody uses. And, uh, uh, Gen AI to make like a headshot, right? Because like if they just want a headshot that looks somewhat like them.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, they might go into Photoshop anyway and add some color correction, increase the contrast.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just.

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Pimple or something.

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  Not that big of a deal, but where, where I do think is like the, probably the most pressing issue right now is just like any, anything news related. So if like, if you're, if you're sharing things that are like news or, or any content that people are using to understand the world. Like I could imagine, like, are we moving to a world where you'll have to add like a pangram watermark to the, to the post like, like, like, is that the kind of behavior that we want? Because like, if you, if, if an AI generated image goes up, two million people see it. And then six hours later, it gets community noted and says like, okay, this is, this was, uh, generated by AI. It's too late. Like two million people like, you know, may have thought it was real.

• 1:39:28Speaker 10

  That's a huge problem. And actually like, this is happening today. So, uh, if you know, like all the, like the Russian troll farms where they're like posting comments and like, uh, news articles. They've basically, Russia has expanded this to basically just use L L Ms that they have fine tuned themselves. And they've, we've seen news websites come out of Russia that just have 50,000 articles that are completely AI generated. Most of them are like normal news and then some of them are really pushing the like pro Russia, anti Ukraine stance.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 10

  And they're just posing as like random, like Oregon local news and.

• 1:40:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, and these are crazy and they're popping up faster than we can take them.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 10

  Like, we can identify.

• 1:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, didn't the White House, the White House share an AI-generated image?

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  AI-modified image, yes.

• 1:40:18Jordi Hays?

  AI-modified, but.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  Got community noted on X, got quote tweeted, but, uh, yeah, I mean, it's an increasing, increasing issue. Uh, what, uh, what is the state of potential bots on other platforms? Uh, it, it, uh, it's great that you got the bot working on X, but, uh, it seems like we really need it on Facebook. I, I, you know, if there's a couch the size of a room that is in the shape of a gorilla, there should be Pangram in the comments saying this is AI-generated. So the, uh, the elderly generation perhaps is protected from slop.

• 1:40:52Speaker 10

  So next up for us is Reddit and LinkedIn.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:56Speaker 10

  So I think Reddit, there's a bunch of viral posts that are AI-generated. I think people know that they can karma farm an account and then sell it to a bot farm or something. And on LinkedIn, I think it's just funny because like people are like genuinely posting slop. Like, they're not bots. They're just like.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:15Speaker 10

  Posting AI slop every day.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, are, what, what is the state of, of wiring up a bot on a, a modern social network these days? I feel like a lot of the APIs have closed down a fair amount. Uh, is it something where you need to have a relationship with the business to actually run a, you know, a useful bot that I would say, I, I, as a user, I want this. It's not malicious activity, but you're still getting API access. You could slop yourself if you wanted to. You have the access. So what's involved in actually spinning up a bot and keeping it online and keeping it posting regularly without hitting rate limits?

• 1:41:52Speaker 10

  So for Twitter is actually pretty easy. Um, I mean, besides having to pay $200 a month.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:41:58Speaker 10

  And then if we pass some limit, um, well, now they have usage-based API.

• 1:42:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:02Speaker 10

  But otherwise, before this, the next tier up was $5,000 a month, which is absurd. But, um, I spoke with some of the X people.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  For a startup that has funding, if you're growing, like it, it's, it's not, it's not completely prohibitive.

• 1:42:17Speaker 10

  But you can't do that as a hobbyist.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:42:20Speaker 10

  But yeah, it was not too bad with X. And then the other platforms seem to be a lot more locked down. So LinkedIn, I've been waiting for API approval for two weeks now.

• 1:42:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:42:29Speaker 10

  Um, and Reddit, kind of same thing.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:31Speaker 10

  But I mean Reddit seems to be pretty bot friendly. So I think we'll get there eventually.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:36Speaker 10

  I've never seen a reply bot on LinkedIn, but.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  Have you been surprised by conversations with any of the platforms? Because in some ways they just want more content that's engaging. And so there's kind of like this dilemma where they might say like, yeah, we're looking to crack down on, on, you know, fake imagery, but in reality they're like, okay, this is driving engagement. This is not like, you know, it's a, it's, it's like even with X, people have always said like, do, do they really want to crack down on bots? Or like, do they just say they want to crack down on bots? Because in some ways like it's just driving notifications for people that might not otherwise be having a lot of activity.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  One man's slop is another man's filet mignon.

• 1:43:16Speaker 10

  The, the LinkedIn trust and safety folks seem so resigned. It seems like they're having such a bad time because in every single text box, there's a little, little like write with AI button.

• 1:43:26John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:43:27Speaker 10

  So like in, I want to compose a post, I write 20 words and then have it expand it out into like a long essay.

• 1:43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:33Speaker 10

  Or same with like in-mails, they'll AI generate in-mails that are customized for the person's profile. And so like, they can't actually do anything around like AI slop or using AI as a signal because it's so integrated into the platform at this point. And I think to the detriment of the platform, like the quality of content there is so low now.

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  How many words, how many words of text do you actually need to detect if something's AI?

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen some people tag, uh, Pangram with like, someone will post like one sentence. And it's just like, I don't know, I don't know if it's a hallucination or something, but it's, it's a funny, funny meme.

• 1:44:08Speaker 10

  So, so our, our official line is 75 words, but I made it smaller for Twitter.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:14Speaker 10

  Because obviously there's so many, uh, short posts and typically what is going to happen is just going to say it's human.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:22Speaker 10

  Unless it's like really obviously AI or like as an AI language model, comma.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, yeah.

• 1:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the main, it almost doesn't really matter because like I really want to know if something's AI if it's really long.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I only want to read this for the most part if I know that somebody put in a lot of effort to like, you know, actually say something.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  And there is the flip side, which is like, I, if, if, if someone does a really cool, deep research report in one of the LLMs and then they just shared a link to it. And they're just like, hey, I was interested in this particular research report. I generated it. You can just click here and read exactly what I, what the prompt was, result was. Uh, I might be down because I like reading deep research reports sometimes if, if I prompt them and I might be interested in what you prompted. Uh, the funniest, uh, the funniest short Pangram, uh, uh, request is always someone will say, you know, is this article AI? And then Pangram will come back and say, yeah, it's a hundred percent AI. And then someone will say, is that, is, is the request to call Pangram AI? And Pangram will say like, no, it's not, it's human.

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  But, uh, anyway, so, so, so what's next? Uh, what's next with the business? What's the state of the company? How large is the company? Where, where, where do you see this all going?

• 1:45:35Speaker 10

  Um, so far we're, I mean, we're pretty small. We're still siege stage nine people. Um, but, uh, since July, we've grown 25x in terms of users and number of queries.

• 1:45:51Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Nothing like 20.

• 1:45:53Speaker 10

  We've seen a lot of, we've seen a lot of interest basically in this, um, consumer level interest, just like, I want to know what's slop or not. I, I'm not like a teacher. I'm not a writer. I just want to know that what I'm reading is authentic.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:07Speaker 10

  And so what's next for us?

• 1:46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Speaker 10

  My opinion, look forward to a Chrome extension that's like AdBlock, but for slop.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 1:46:15Speaker 10

  Just going to automatically slop, block everything that's slop on your, on, on the internet.

• 1:46:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you own sloppernot.com?

• 1:46:23Speaker 10

  I do not.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  You should. It's not for sale. Somebody else, somebody else beat you to it, but, uh.

• 1:46:28Speaker 10

  Somebody has it.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Well, congratulations on all the progress, the virality. Uh, I love seeing it and thanks for all the hard work. Uh, it's good stuff.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Really, really doing, uh, good for the world.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:46:39Jordi Hays?

  In the slop era.

• 1:46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 10

  Thanks so much.

• 1:46:41John Coogan?

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

• 1:46:43Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Next up.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Next up.

• 1:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Actually.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  We, our next guest will be in the restream waiting room.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Still waiting on Russ from Life Kit.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  In the meantime, we have some massive news. Johnny Carson's former LA estate just listed for $40 million.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:47:15John Coogan?

  Little teaser, the mansion section, we will be getting to it later in the show. But the Los Angeles estate that late night TV legend Johnny Carson once called home has hit the market for a dash under 40 mil. All proceeds from the sale have been earmarked for three charities, Cedar Sinai's Medical Center, the David Geffen Foundation, and SHARE, which supports disabled, abused, and neglected children. Compass is sharing the listing. He's a longtime host of The Tonight Show, and he died in 2005 at age 79, an absolutely legendary talk show host. Big inspiration for me. If you haven't listened to the Johnny Carson episode of Founders, you absolutely should. It's fantastic. Also, we previously

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  reviewed his other house, the Malibu compound, that recently hit the market for $110 million.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Still sitting on the market.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  So originally built in 1950 for Mervyn Leroy, the late film producer and director, best known for his work on The Wizard of Oz. Have you seen The Wizard of Oz?

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  But I think I was forced to watch that in school at some point.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy. It's toto. It's good. The estate rests, this particular estate rests on 1.5 acres in the prime east gate enclave, a gated driveway bolstered by a security booth empties at an expansive motor court with two garages with room for four vehicles, with sprawling stucco and stone accented structure at its center offering six bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It's 9,000 square feet across a single level. It's introduced via a marble clad foyer with access to an elegant wet bar equipped living room that wraps around to a cozy wood paneled den. I like that.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  I like the sound of that. You love a wood paneled den.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  I love wood paneling generally, ideally mahogany, the official wood of business.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  We need a mahogany sponsor, truly.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Huge missed opportunity.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  From there.

• 1:49:11Jordi Hays?

  You've been Mahogany's strongest soldiers.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  We love Mahogany. From there, a spacious living room sports a fireplace and pocketing doors spilling out to a pillared loggia. Loggia. I'm not familiar with that word. While a formal dining room connects to a kitchen with an eat-in island and a breakfast nook. A soaring rotunda flows to a posh primary estate, which has a fireside sitting area and dual walk-in closets and baths. It has a tennis court.

• 1:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  A basement with a wine cellar, detached two-story guest house that once housed Carson's office. The amenities continue outdoors. The manicured grounds host a sun deck, encased pool, and spa flanked by an open-air cabana with a fireplace, as well as a lighted tennis court and a viewing pavilion, holding a kitchenette and powder room, so you can view the tennis that's played. Per the Wall Street Journal, Carson had to convince Joanna to relocate from the East Coast to the West Coast. She was truly a New Yorker at her core, so it was hard to move her out to California, the nephew said.

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  How about one and a half acres in Bel Air? Will that do it?

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Not a bad, not a bad option. Well, there are some other, there are some other stories in the, in the mansion section, which we should go through. First, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers, and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring, and security built in.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  I loved hanging with Jake yesterday.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  He is potentially a Joe Rogan CEO. Fantastic conversationalist, fantastic. The way he breaks things down, tells stories, I really enjoy that conversation.

• 1:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he'll be back.

• 1:50:47John Coogan?

  He's on a generational run, and congratulations to him again on the good news. So the Call of Duty creator, Dave Anthony, has a custom Bel Air mansion. It just sold for $22 million. And we will tell you more about this property after our next guest joins, because we have Russ from LiveKit in the TVP in UltraDum. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Russ?

• 1:51:10Speaker 11

  Yo, Jordan. How you doing?

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:51:13Speaker 11

  It's great to be back.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much. First, kick us off. Give us the news. What happened?

• 1:51:19Speaker 11

  Dude, the news. LiveKit is a unicorn.

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  A $100 million series C, a $1 billion valuation led by Index Ventures, Salesforce, Altimeter's in, Redpoint's in, and you're now a billion dollar company. How's it feel?

• 1:51:42Speaker 11

  Feels amazing.

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  Is the job finished? Is the job finished? Yeah, overnight, true overnight success. True overnight success.

• 1:51:48Speaker 11

  No, definitely not. It's a day zero, but yeah, it took 20 years. It's pretty incredible.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  What were the key growth unlocks, the key KPIs? What was the first slide in the deck that got the deal done? Is there a break in the graph or has it just been continual growth and you're ready to take the next step?

• 1:52:06Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think it's really been kind of, I think like voice AI has really just started to grow and explode and you know, I kind of, I sometimes refer to us as the accidental AI company because we never meant to be an AI company. We were video conferencing, live streaming infrastructure and then we started to work with OpenAI on ChatGPT voice mode and everything changed at that moment.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  What do you see as a key like user experience, UI features to a great voice mode experience? I deliberately daily drive all of the major LLM platforms now and I'm starting to notice little subtleties about, does this one have the ability to go back 15 seconds, forward 15 seconds, make it like a podcast player, more familiar UI? What do you think is the most important for a potential customer to, if they're implementing a voice experience, how much do they make it feel like a podcast versus, you know, an avatar that they're interfacing with? What's your feeling on that?

• 1:53:11Speaker 11

  I think it depends on the use case. So I think if you were to separate it into two broad buckets, I think that there's like the personal assistants, right, that you kind of talk to as a friend or a companion. For those kinds of use cases, I think feeling very human-like. So latency, I think, is an important factor across both like B2B use cases and B2C use cases. But I think especially true in the B2C use cases, you're, you kind of expect that an assistant you talk to is going to feel like talking to a human being and have like a level of empathy that is not always necessary in a B2B use case. So for a B2B use case, I'll give you an example, like if you're trying to do patient intake at a hospital using an AI.

• 1:53:53Speaker 11

  All of on the phone, like really the goal, the job to be done there is to get on my doctor's calendar, right? It's, uh, do you need it to sound like a human or to respond with the absolute lowest latency possible? No, you need it to be reliable. So you need to make sure that it's going to actually, you know, qualify the, the user calling in, make sure they have insurance, um, figure out what's, uh, their, uh, you know, affliction and then get them onto the, the doctor's calendar, you know, 99.999% of the time or a hundred percent of the time. And so the reliability of the voice agent is most important for the B to B use cases. And then maybe like the, the empathy and realism is, is the more, uh, critical for, for kind of these B to C use cases.

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  What are your predictions or keys to success with the new Siri? There's been a bunch of news about, uh, Apple did a deal with Google. They got the best model. They got a great model, uh, powering it, but there's a lot of work that they need to do on the actual voice experience side. Uh, what, what would your be, what would your best practices be for Siri V2?

• 1:55:02Speaker 11

  Siri V2, I think like, uh, the two most important things, I think the realism aspect is, is gonna be there. I mean, if they're using a model from Google like Gemini Live, uh, their, their kind of voice to voice models quite good, um, feels quite realistic. Maybe, uh, one area where it could use a bit more, it could, it could use a bit more empathy, uh, in some places, I think. And they just, uh, acquired a company, um, called Hume in the space, which has a pretty strong, like, kind

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  of, yeah, that's right.

• 1:55:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah, the licensing deal. So they, that, that model has a lot of like emotion and it's can, does like sentiment analysis in real time. And so I think, I think that'll be an important unlock for, for Apple as they're using the, the Google model for, for this, uh, new Siri. Um, I think the other thing is just like having access to, you know, the right knowledge and reliability. Like the thing that just kills you with the original version of Siri is it's not reliable. It like can't do half the things. And, um, sometimes it, it does like a web search when you actually just want an answer and it's, uh, so I think like the, the reliability of it and, and making sure it has access to the right tools and can invoke those tools at the right time. I think that's going to be another critical thing, but you know, Apple's.

• 1:56:16Speaker 11

  Pretty incredible when they focus and try to nail an experience. So I think they'll get it done.

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  One interesting thing about Siri is there is a woman who voiced Siri. There's like a singular voice and I think everyone, no matter how much they use Siri, that they hear the voice, they're familiar with that identity. How do you think about companies that offer either one singular voice and they just build a brand around it and that is really an embodiment of this particular AI system? They give it a name and a personality and it has one voice versus giving the consumer the option to have multiple voices or even steer the voice over time with like real time sentiment analysis?

• 1:56:59Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think it depends again on the use case. So I'm glad you brought this up. So for Apple, for like Siri 2.0, right? We're talking about, we're talking about a digital assistant or a voice assistant that is running at like the scale of the entire world, right? Like Apple devices are everywhere. And so when you think about delivering a great experience at scale like that or at that level of scale, you have to think about kind of how do you meet the user where they are? So to speak on voices in particular, it can't just be one voice. I mean, like it has to speak different languages well, right? That's one thing. It culturally like, you know, you have to think about accents and like some of the

• 1:57:41Speaker 11

  paralinguistic cues, you know, if I say um or the way that I speak also varies or the way someone speaks varies across cultures as well, varies across languages, there's different customs. And so if you're trying to build a voice assistant that can meet the needs or feel like the right experience at the scale of the entire world, you have to go really deep on kind of all of these different aspects, conversational dynamics, what are the right voices, do they have the right accents? Do they speak the right languages reliably? All of that stuff matters. And so that's, you know, that's, that's something that at Apple's scale and scope, they have to solve that for something that's a bit more contained, like at a hospital

• 1:58:26Speaker 11

  in a particular part of the US, you may, you may not have the same kind of constraints or requirements.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  What, what's your opportunity in robotics?

• 1:58:37Speaker 11

  It's the next big wave. I think that like robotics has kind of this 80% overlap with with voice AI in that you can think of like a humanoid robot, which are a lot of the robots that are getting built now by companies. You're not going to interact with that that robot with a keyboard. You're gonna you're gonna talk to it and it's gonna have this additional capability where it's gonna have eyes and be able to see you and move in, you know, in response to what you do and your actions. And so you're gonna talk to that thing and that's the overlap. But then there's a lot of other new stuff that you have to do in the robotics use case because it

• 1:59:16Speaker 11

  has vision and because it has limited connectivity. So that robot may be out there in the field. It may not always be able to to connect to the network. You may need to be able to do things kind of locally or on a local network if connectivity is compromised. So there's like a lot of opportunity to build in the robotics space. It's still a bit earlier than than I would say voice AI is now in terms of like how it's scaling up and being adopted. But it's it's a wave behind voice AI that I think is going to be even bigger than voice AI.

• 1:59:48John Coogan?

  Are you tracking benchmarks around latency? I'm interested to know what you think about the progress to reduce latency in voice interfaces and particularly what the bottlenecks are. Do we need to just distill models down further? Do we need custom silicon? Are there going to be dedicated chips, ASICs for inferencing voice models? Because I'm not sure if you've seen those Instagram reels where people are doing like the human impression of chat GPT voice mode and they sort of like pause and it's and it's funny.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna talk about the guy who's like, I'm lying in front of the train tracks.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, no.

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  You've probably seen these. You're seeing your product in action. Honestly, it's a great ad for voice mode.

• 2:00:31John Coogan?

  But it feels it feels very much like we're we're almost in like the dial up internet era of these voice interfaces where there's this like little delay and that's clearly going away. But I'm interested to know like technically what what needs to happen to remove the delay from voice interfaces.

• 2:00:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, so the way to think about it is that there's kind of a bunch of different components to this end-to-end experience of like I speak, Yeah. model thinks, Yeah. model speaks back, right? And along that kind of path, you have the network latency. I'm speaking only the primary components. There's a bunch of little things too in the middle as well, but there's network latency. So getting the voice from me to the machine, wherever it's located. Then there is like the process of understanding when am I done speaking? That's called turn detection. Like when have I done, am I done sharing my thoughts? And then the model can now speak back to me or think and then speak back to me. So there's the step of figuring out when is the user done speaking? That introduces some latency.

• 2:01:34Speaker 11

  Then there's the actual inference part of it. And it depends on whether you're using a full voice-to-voice model. So a model that takes in voice directly and spits out voice. Or whether you're doing a cascade approach where it's the first model converts it into text. The next model is the LLM. And then the next model is taking the tokens coming out of the LLM and turning it back into speech. If it's the kind of the cascaded approach, then you have like three different spots where additional latency can come in, right? Like there's three models here, they all have to run. And then they have to pass information between each of those models. So there's another latency or place where latency creeps in. And then when the model finally spits out voice,

• 2:02:16Speaker 11

  whether that's from a TTS model or from the voice-to-voice LLM itself, then you have latency of the network where the AI's voice travels over the network and then is played out on my phone. And so it turns out you can actually like shrink the latency in each of these different components. Where are you going to get the biggest bang for the buck? I would say there's two places where you get the biggest bang for the buck. The first one, three places. The first one is that kind of three models or one model. So is it voice going straight into the model and then being processed and then spit out? Or are you actually doing this kind of like handoff between three different models? That's the first spot where you're going to get a big reduction in latency.

• 2:02:58Speaker 11

  The second place where you'll get a big reduction in latency is on the turn detection piece. So figuring out like, when is the user done speaking? And, you know, having the delay be as short as possible between, okay, the user's done speaking, let me pipe the data straight into the model, or maybe I'm already streaming it into the model, and then it's deciding when the user's done speaking and has its response ready to go. And then the third place is on queuing. So like, you have many, many people that are trying to hit these models at once. They're all using voice mode or et cetera at the same time. How do you figure out how to load balance that workload, that demand that users have, that speech data that the users are sending to the model? How do you figure out how to make sure that there's a model already waiting and consuming

• 2:03:43Speaker 11

  that speech versus making a queue up and wait, and then this person goes and gets a response, and this person goes? So doing the load balancing across those GPU workloads is another. And then, and then, as you mentioned, I think like, you can get a speed up on the model side from hosting on better hardware, or, you know, chips that are dedicated to to a particular type of, particular type of architecture.

• 2:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. It's exciting. Are you focused, like, you're raising a lot of money right now. Is this focused on OpEx, CapEx? Are you going to build your own data centers? Have you, have you confronted like the build versus buy debate internally?

• 2:04:22Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think for data centers, I mean, we have really healthy margins now. So there's no, there's no pressure to go and, you know, build our own metal yet. But we'll, we'll get there over time. You know, that's something that we've always talked about eventually, kind of, kind of fully vertically integrating the stack. But, you know, I think that the capital for us is going to be used in two primary ways. I think the first one is that we started our life as like network infrastructure. But it turned, and that's used to be the product that we sold even for voice AI companies. But it turns out that like, When we were selling voice network infrastructure, someone would say, well, how do I like test this model? You know, I built it with your software and now I'm running it on your network. Like, but how do I test it? We're like, well, go over here.

• 2:05:08Speaker 11

  Use this vendor and figure it out, like glue this stuff together. And then they were like, well, how do I deploy it? And we're like, well, you know, use this vendor. And then they're like, well, how do I observe it? And like, you know, all the data generated, like, did I use Datadog? What do I do here? And like, well, you can kind of piece it together this way. And we kept hearing this over and over and over. And then we said, okay, well, we're just going to start building out all the pieces. Because right now, building a web application is very familiar, very easy. And you usually have one single platform that allows you to build out the entire thing. Right? Like, NextJS has kind of become this default. NextJS and Vercel have become like the default platform for building out a web application. But a voice AI application, a robotics application, these things are actually very different from a web application. It's a completely different architecture.

• 2:05:54Speaker 11

  At the top of the iceberg, it looks like, oh, well, instead of typing and clicking a mouse, now I'm talking and the AI can see me. But just that kind of change at the input layer underneath changes everything about the underlying architecture of how that application is built and all the infrastructure you need to get that thing built. And so what we're doing is we're really building every single piece of that across the entire development lifecycle, so that you can start with LiveKit from zero, just a dream, scale to the moon in production, in reality, with LiveKit. And you don't really need to like go anywhere else. You can do everything within the platform. And so the first part is just building out this product, right?

• 2:06:38Speaker 11

  The surface area of it is much wider than where we started. So that's the first thing for the capital. And then the second thing is, is, you know, really investing in DevRel and some go to market around. Education, like helping developers understand how can they leverage this platform to accelerate what they're trying to build. You know, it's like lots of sample apps and workshops and things like that, events to make sure that people know that there's this tool that's kind of magical and can accelerate, you know, their roadmap and their kind of progress towards the vision of what they're trying to do.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Well, congratulations again. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, guys. The whole team.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:07:24Speaker 11

  You too, you too. Appreciate it.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  Go bye. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma Make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma, so outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams build. Create code-backed prototypes and apps fast. Back to the Rob report. Call of Duty creator Dave Anthony's custom Bel Air mansion just sold for $22 million. It was down in price. They first listed it 18 months ago for $27 million, and subsequently it underwent a number of price drops. He was the pioneering video game writer, director, and producer. He offloaded the residence in the posh Bel Air neighborhood of Los Angeles

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  he acquired 15 years ago in 2010. He paid $3.5 million for it, did some renovations. Now he has sold it for $22 million. The sprawling brick and limestone home sold to an unidentified buyer, repped by Ron F. Ron Smith and David Berg of Compass for $22 million, which is a lot less than the creator of the blockbuster Call of Duty: Black Ops franchise originally wanted. However, it's still a whopping $18.5 million more than he and his wife paid for an existing 1940s house on the hillside property before raising it and embarking upon a custom rebuild in 2018. So they bought it in... When did they buy it? They bought it 15 years ago, and then 18 years go by, then they do the custom

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  rebuild. Wow. Completed in 2022.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  You're a fan. It's set on a gated and hedged hillside parcel spanning almost three quarters of an acre. The Orindothan designed abode now offers seven bedrooms, eight full baths, and two powder rooms in roughly 9,000 square feet of H-shaped living space across three levels. English country-inspired interiors by Marie Carlsen and M.L. Designs. Sport, plastered brick walls and floors clad in wood imported from Germany's Black Forest, plus smart home and security systems. Standing out on the main level is a fireside living room with a vaulted oak beam ceiling.

• 2:09:28Jordi Hays?

  John, if you've seen Star Wars, you'll love this room.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  That's, that feels great. I have seen Star Wars, Jordy. I've seen all of them multiple times. I am a fan. The kitchen is outfitted with a fossilized stone eat-in island decor and Sub-Zero appliances and a windowed breakfast nook with built-in banquet seating, while the primary suite has a projector and a retractable 100-foot screen. Wow, that is a big TV or projector. A seating area that opens to a balcony and a marble bath anchored by a nickel-soaking tub. Lower level features a soundproof movie theater. So they have a 100-inch projector in the master, and then you go downstairs and there's a soundproof movie theater. This guy liked media, makes sense.

• 2:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Film enjoyer.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  Maybe he was playing Call of Duty on these, on the movie theater screen. It has cashmere recliners and an entertainment lounge with a bar and a climatized wine cellar. And upstairs, a mirror gym in a dark-hued study. We love the dark-hued studies here. This is the second one we've found so far. It's also soundproof, has a wet bar and bookshelves concealing a server area that doubles as a panic room. Interesting. Outdoors, the grounds host a tiled zero-edge pool with a Baja shelf and spa, grilling station, fire pit, conversation area, and fountain with lights and jets choreographed to music. Interesting. There's also a cobblestone motor court flanking a two-car garage. Born in Liverpool, England, Anthony relocated in 2004 to Los Angeles, where he worked on

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  Call of Duty, one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time, with more than half a billion copies sold to date. His breakout came in 2010 with Black Ops, which he directed and wrote. He also wrote and directed the sequel. He went on to launch the gaming studio Deviation Games, which recently closed up shop. As of now, he's reportedly pursuing a new challenge professionally. Well, we'll have to have him on the show and get him, get the update of what he's doing next. Uh, have you played Black Ops? Or were you strictly Modern Warfare? You played Black Ops? I enjoyed Black Ops as well. Were you, Tyler, were you a Black Ops kid?

• 2:11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, Black Ops 2.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Black Ops 2 is the one?

• 2:11:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess Black Ops 3 maybe.

• 2:11:38John Coogan?

  Sort of underrated. I, I've always been a fan of the single player, uh, the experiences, I think more than the average. The multiplayer is still like fun.

• 2:11:45Speaker 04

  You mean like zombies or campaign?

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  No, no, campaign, campaign. I feel like, uh, there, there was actually one Call of Duty recently.

• 2:11:51Jordi Hays?

  You would be just a campaign guy.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  I like campaign. It's very cinematic. It's like a James Bond movie. You, you know that meme of, uh, you know, what Greenland's gonna look like? And it's the, it's from, I think it's from Black Ops 2, where they're on the snowmobiles and they're shooting people. They're going through the forest. That's an iconic scene. I like the big set pieces. I like the stories. Yeah, it's not the, it might not be the heaviest, most layered storytelling.

• 2:12:12Jordi Hays?

  That's probably the most memorable campaign moment in any.

• 2:12:14Speaker 04

  No, it's definitely No Russian.

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, No Russian.

• 2:12:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Did you ever play that, Jordy?

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:12:20Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Fake gamer over here.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Which, which version was it?

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  Fake gamer. It's in Modern Warfare, right?

• 2:12:25Speaker 04

  Uh, I actually don't know.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  I don't know either.

• 2:12:27Speaker 04

  I think it's Modern Warfare.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  But yeah, No Russian is, they go, it was a very controversial scene.

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  That one was super dark.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Because you, you play, you, you go behind the scenes and you're, you're embedded as a, as a Russian. Uh, you're doing like a false flag attack, basically. And your job is to like shoot a bunch of people in an airport, which is very aggressive, very controversial. Uh, super dark, but, uh, certainly memorable. Uh, as is Shopify. Shopify, the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents.

• 2:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Montana.

• 2:13:01John Coogan?

  Okay, we're going to Montana.

• 2:13:04Jordi Hays?

  The booming mountain town with Montana's most expensive real estate. Once a remote ski outpost, Big Sky has transformed into a destination of wealthy home buyers. Uh, in southwestern Montana, near Yellowstone National Park is Big Sky, a mountain community that emerged around 1973 with the opening of Remote Ski Area, Big Sky Resort. Over time, Big Sky has transformed from a scattering of residences and businesses into a true town. Lately, the 10-year Big Sky 2025 Plan added biz, uh, added.

• 2:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Added new world-class ski infrastructure and modern luxury residential resorts reshaping the property landscape. This is helping push Big Sky to the top of the state's price charts with a median listing of 3.05 million in December. Despite this growth, the community keeps an authentic Montana feel. Dressing up still means putting on cowboy boots, jeans, and maybe, just maybe, a cowboy hat. Town Center is a newer commercial and housing hub with a mix of dining, shopping, hotels, and recreation. Nearby, the established Meadow Village has a small business area. Let's give it up for small business areas.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  And a residential feel. Together, these two districts have merged into Big Sky's growing downtown Lone Mountain Ranch. This historic guest ranch with a western vibe dates back to 1915, so before, I guess, the town actually formed. It's known for Antler Adorned Horn and Cantle Restaurant and a saloon.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  We've got to give some tips to folks who are heading out to Big Sky. There are memberships that you must obtain. Big Sky has three exclusive ski-in, ski-out, private residential clubs. You've got the Yellowstone Club, founded in the 1990s, offers classic timber aesthetics, private ski terrain, and a Tom Weskup-designed golf course. In addition to a variety of housing options, Montage Big Sky Resort opened in 2021 and is within Big Sky's Spanish Peaks community, which you mentioned. It has 139-room hotel and private residences. Ownership provides an opportunity to join Spanish Peaks Mountain Club. And then there

• 2:15:12John Coogan?

  is the one and only Moonlight Basin Resort on the grounds of the Moonlight Basin Club.

• 2:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this just opened. I have two friends there right now. It looks incredible. And they have homes. Montage is set up where I think it's only fractional for their residences, whereas Moonlight Basin, the one and only, you can actually buy entire homes. The business model of just buying a bunch of land for cheap and then building a bunch of homes and selling them.

• 2:15:42John Coogan?

  It really is sort of like a Montana forever environment, you know. Silicon Valley talks a big game about like building new cities.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  California forever.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  You head out to Montana and they're like, yeah, we built three of these like just recently. We built like whole cities. Ski season is obviously the big headliner. Big Sky's calendar is actually a tale of two high-energy peaks. Winter at the ski resort spanning 5,850 acres and one of the largest in the US is the undisputed king. But in the summer, the Big Sky PBR claims the throne as the premier event. It brings together the world's elite bull riders to an outdoor arena in town center, pairing the raw grit of professional bull riding with pyrotechnics and mountain top sunsets. We've got some advice for the buyer. The majority of the full-time residents typically live in the vicinity of Meadow Village or Town Center where there are more condominiums, a real estate broker says.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Within a quarter mile outside downtown, there are single-family homes, part-time and second home residents, and on the other hand, often buy in the mountains where there is ski access. Bullis suggests keeping an open mind. Some prospective buyers initially want a single-family residence, she says, but even those who thought they needed a four or five-bedroom house may be swayed by a well-designed condo aesthetic or the convenience of being able to easily lock up and rent out the unit.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Alex Waters, who we were with on Sunday with Paul, he is running the racing program out at Willow Springs. He's setting up a new members club in Bozeman that allows you to buy garages, which means that you can, you will have a primary, or not necessarily a primary, but you will have a residence on Montana, which means you can get away with not, there was a loophole with, you could set up an LLC in Montana.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Register cars there.

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Buy a car and then avoid the 10% sales tax or whatever it is.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  The old Whistling Diesel.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  But. That's been getting cracked down on. It never really was obvious that it was legal at all. I think it, I think it wasn't, I think it wasn't.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  It also aesthetically was a little offensive to some people when they said, there was sort of a carve out if it was like, oh, you had to do it because of certain regulations, like a certain car couldn't get approved. But there were, there were a lot of people that were like, hey, you bought a $800,000 car. Why can't you just afford to pay the taxes, the sales tax or whatever? Why are you, why are you nickel and diming? Like, can you really afford that Lambo if you can't just put a California license plate on it? It always had like a little bit of like an aesthetic, like, ah, you're, you're, you're skipping.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, some, some people were doing that specifically because their cars wouldn't pass smog in California.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. If they're old or retro, like you sort of get a pass. Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Did you see Aman is headed to sea?

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Got a video here.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play it.

• 2:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this video.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Aman at sea. They're calling it a philosophy.

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  Is it a, it's a boat? It's a cruise ship? Let's play this. Looks nice. Got a nice big bedroom. This is on a boat? Is this AI slop? Is this AI or CGI or is this real? Now we need to know. Let's go to the comments. I honestly thought that boat was in the video. That did fool me.

• 2:19:18John Coogan?

  The horse. That is a big boat. Wow.

• 2:19:20Jordi Hays?

  That's a big boat.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  They actually built this thing.

• 2:19:27John Coogan?

  Will this get you to go on cruise?

• 2:19:28Jordi Hays?

  They're gentrifying cruises, John.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  Incredibly, absolutely incredible. You truly nailed it. Wow. The comments? Adoring. People love it.

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  Aman Gati is the embodiment of space and seclusion comprising just 47 spacious suites. The yacht is imbued with the same quiet elegance as Aman's sanctuaries on land with unparalleled surface from the onboard team attuned to destruction.

• 2:19:54Jordi Hays?

  So it's a big yacht, John, but it's a lot of people.

• 2:19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  You're looking at hanging out with like, it's over 100 people with the staff, I would assume. You've got 47 suites, a couple of people per suite and then staff, that's a lot of people to be on, on a boat. I'm sure it'll be an amazing experience. Are you, are you signing up?

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  I would.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Cause I'm not.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  I've been anti cruise for a very long time. I, I think that there might be an over-rotation against cruise culture. It's been, uh, it's been degraded in many ways where many cruise ships, uh, the, the, the aesthetics are very like, okay, you're just basically drinking and gambling the whole time and it's sort of like boring and bland. Uh, and it's certainly not the correct cultural way to visit a coun- a, a, a country. Like if you're just like, yeah, I've been to, you know, France. No, I didn't go on land. I was just on this boat drinking and gambling the whole time. Um, it's a little bit, it's a little bit, it feels uncultured sometimes, but I think that, uh, certain cruise ships might offer specific things that people might enjoy.

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  It depends on, depends on, uh, what, what you're, what, what you're going for and what the community will be like on the boat, what the goals are. Who knows? Maybe it's all slot machines on the Aman.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  I stayed in Montenegro for a couple of weeks once and it was so funny because you'd just be in like the most quaint little village.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:17Jordi Hays?

  Like by the sea. There's tiny little boats out. It's totally idyllic and then just like this massive cruise ship would just like roll into the, to the port of this tiny town and it would kind of, it would kind of kill the vibe.

• 2:21:31John Coogan?

  I like the smaller boats. I like a catamaran, something you can scuba dive on.

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  I guess like my, I guess like my big question with the Aman cruise is.

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  Like if you're staying at Iman,

• 2:21:41John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:42Jordi Hays?

  It's probably, think like 50K for the week for a room.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Especially during peak season.

• 2:21:49John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  And, and so assume, and like renting like a pretty nice yacht with a full staff that's private.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:59Jordi Hays?

  Is like probably that's like.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  It's around the same.

• 2:22:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or potentially like slightly more, but I, I'm not sold that this is gonna be that creative a trade.

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  I, I, well, the, so the thing is.

• 2:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Especially if you're going with friends.

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  You're just.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  It's like, do you wanna go on the Iman, do you wanna go on the Iman boat?

• 2:22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:16Jordi Hays?

  And you've got, you're sharing it with a hundred other people.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Or do you and like friends wanna get your own boat?

• 2:22:22John Coogan?

  You might like hanging out with other random people that are there at the, on the Iman boat. Like, there might be serendipity that comes from the community, that might be.

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  I've met some cool, I've met some cool people.

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  What if you get like a hundred of your boys? And yeah, just, yeah. Just load the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. Maybe like 200, pack them four in each suite. Yeah. You know, you take the mattress off the bed and then half the dudes sleep on the box spring and then half the dudes sleep on the mattress on the floor.

• 2:22:46Jordi Hays?

  That would be, that would be such a funny bit around on the Iman.

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Is basically pick the most like, figure out like what is like the least desirable dates like next year.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:22:55Jordi Hays?

  For cruising in general and then all of your friends book it at the same time.

• 2:22:59John Coogan?

  It's like a fraternity offsite. Yeah, that would be good. Brotherhood trip. But yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with booking one luxury suite.

• 2:23:04Jordi Hays?

  But even then at that point, you could get, how, it would be cooler to rent like.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Put an all your crew in there.

• 2:23:09Jordi Hays?

  It would be cooler to rent 10 yachts with your friends all at the same time.

• 2:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:13Jordi Hays?

  And then just like park them and hang out.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  I like the idea of just smuggling as many of your boys into one room as possible. Just be like, sir, uh, you, you selected just two guests, why are there 14 dudes in your room?

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Why do you have 30 sets of luggage?

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Why did you ask for a seventh cot to add to your, to your, to your room, sir? What's going on? Like, don't worry about it.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  The other, the other thing with, with Iman is the most like first world problem ever, but like some of the menus are just like so. You know, makes sense, but like so focused on like sushi.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:48Jordi Hays?

  So raw fish heavy.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  That at some point you're like, I need to venture out.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:23:54Jordi Hays?

  By like day five.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think that is the actual value prop with the Aman is that you're you're potentially reducing the standard deviation or like the the uh the variable experience because if you're chartering something privately and you're and you're getting a private boat like you might have an amazing captain or you might have a mediocre captain. You kind of got to figure out the reviews and process that and then.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:17John Coogan?

  Oh, the chef, how are they doing? And then all the crew, are they all good? Whereas Aman, you kind of know that there's like a standard that's being held within that group and that everyone will be trained to the same standard, that there will be an organization that's maintaining some sort of base level of experience. And so.

• 2:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:34John Coogan?

  Uh, I don't know. Anyway, 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. We had some breaking news yesterday. Caroline Allison has been released from federal custody. She, of course, was involved in the FTX drama that erupted a few years ago. She's out and Martin Shkreli quote tweeted us into the oblivion.

• 2:24:59Jordi Hays?

  Ratio.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  He ratioed us by changing our changing. He didn't even use Nano Banana Pro. He just scribbled all over our trading card and said, snatched.

• 2:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, it worked. Yeah, I did. I was thinking like that felt very fast.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  It does feel fast. It does feel fast, but I'm excited to see what she does next. Will she build something? You know, we've seen some other folks get out and go on to redemption and we will see. Hopefully at some point she tells her story. It'll be interesting to see her side of it. Maybe she has convincing arguments.

• 2:25:33Speaker 04

  I heard she wrote a book.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:25:35Speaker 04

  I think there were some leaks. I don't know how true it is, but apparently she was writing.

• 2:25:39John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Jay Yarrow is sharing, Joe was highlighting Intel sold off after earnings yesterday. And Jay is particularly disappointed because he says, S H I T, I'm a US citizen and our sovereign wealth fund owns this one.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, bad day, bad day.

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  We all lost something today.

• 2:26:01John Coogan?

  Bad day to be a, to be a US citizen.

• 2:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do we, should we talk about, uh?

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  The, the, the news on Intel really quickly. Intel posts loss after spending increase. Swung to a loss for the fourth quarter on Thursday and forecast further losses in the, in the first quarter as the company spends heavily to ramp up production of its latest chips. Company reported a net loss of $333 million for the last three months of the year. And analysts were expecting them only to lose 294 million. So they lost more than expected. Revenue was 13.7 billion and a year ago it was 14.3. So revenue is declining, losses are expanding. It's a bunch of bad news. Shares fell 6.7% in after hours trading. The CEO, Lip Bhutan, said, our priorities are clear.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Sharpen execution, reinvigorate engineering excellence and fully capitalize on the vast opportunity AI presents across all of our businesses. The CFO said industry-wide supply shortages were a factor weighing on results and said the problem would worsen in the first quarter of, or 2026 before starting to ease in the spring. Well, I'm rooting for Lip Bhutan. I'm rooting for the folks over at Intel. I'm rooting for the American taxpayer who owns a little bit of Intel. So good luck to all of them. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta.

• 2:27:37Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John. We should talk about this out of home campaign.

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  OpenAI has purchased a ton of billboards. They have hit San Francisco.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  We got a whole bunch of folks at Clay, Valphos, Dakagon, Unified GTM, and Christina, of course, from Vanta is sitting there on the billboard. I like the aesthetic, the black and white, the big, there's a lot of white space in the design. It's not too cropped in. I think they, I think they executed these billboards very well. And it's, it's fun. OpenAI is such a, it's easy to collapse it into. It's just a, you know, app on your phone. It's a singular business, but they do have a lot of partners all over the startup ecosystem and they are paying tribute to them with this out of home campaign.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  I like to think about the 10 people left in San Francisco that have never heard of AI or OpenAI or ChatGPT, and they're just very confused, walking around, looking at these nice pictures. It really is for the builders.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  It is, it is another example of San Francisco billboards being very insular insider jokes like, you know, there aren't that many people in many cities that would be able to identify all of these founders by name or know these companies even, especially at the size they put there. They didn't even put taglines. They just put this person's name, building this company. You have to know it's an if you know, you know campaign, but I think there's a lot of people in San Francisco that do in fact know. So congratulations to everyone that is sporting their, their fits on a billboard in San Francisco now on OpenAI's dime.

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's head over to Fei-Fei Li.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:17Jordi Hays?

  According to Natasha at Bloomberg, she's in the fundraising market with talks, early talks, advanced talks, we're not sure, but their talks to raise 500 million at 5 billion. I do, I do think, when you think about the leverage that founders like Fei-Fei Li have to be going out and raising this much money this early and just still being like, sorry, the most I can give up is 10%. It's like they all want to do these 10% or less.

• 2:29:45John Coogan?

  She deserves the goat sound effect. She deserves the goat on the screen. She's a true goat.

• 2:29:49Jordi Hays?

  Goat on the screen. We got a goat on the screen.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  Former TVPN guest, very happy to have chatted with her. Her company, World Labs, has been posting some very interesting demos. Obviously, there was that box that you could see a virtual 3D world inside. That was very cool. And the way she talks about it is funny because it makes me feel like she's a gamer. And now I just want to, you know, get on Rust with her and experience whatever game she plays because she's sort of becoming an important player in like the future of video games, potentially, the future of gaming, the future of the metaverse. And I wonder if she has any favorites or has dabbled on COD late at night on voice chat,

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  screaming at people.

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with, so Green Oaks, Altimeter?

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Have initiated a trade dispute with the government of South Korea. They're suing South Korea of unlawfully attacking e-commerce giant.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  Coupon.

• 2:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Coupon.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  I think Neil went into detail on their investment in Coupon on Invest Like the Best.

• 2:31:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:31:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a great episode.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  It feels rare to have the venture firms be doing this suit, the lawsuit, or to initiate the trade dispute. It's interesting like where this lawsuit is sitting because typically, you know, if you back some company and then they get into dispute with the local government, the company is the one that's sending their lawyers. But in this case, it is Green Oaks and Altimeter. But people are coming out in force, supporting Neil Meta. Gary Tan said, Neil Meta is who you want by your side when it gets real. Not a lot of investors would go up against a sovereign to defend a founder. South Korea's government is about to find out that Americans don't take well to being bullied. And Brad Gersner gets in the replies with the American flag and the salute. Let me tell you about Cognition.

• 2:31:48John Coogan?

  They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. For sure.

• 2:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Substack.

• 2:31:58John Coogan?

  What's going on with Substack?

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  They're going into television.

• 2:32:01John Coogan?

  They're going into television.

• 2:32:02Jordi Hays?

  They're taking on big TV.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Big TV.

• 2:32:05Jordi Hays?

  They say, according to Max, they're launching Substack TV app on Apple TV and Google TV. Users will be able to watch video posts and Substack live streams.

• 2:32:15Jordi Hays?

  I think this is a so much of Substack's opportunity right now is just that X is rolled into XAI.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  And is like not operating, you know,

• 2:32:25John Coogan?

  as pure play.

• 2:32:26Jordi Hays?

  As like a pure play standalone company.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:28Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  Substack has been has been definitely ramping up the video functionality. We've done some live streams there. There's a lot of opportunity and it's a very interesting community. I think that's the strongest thing about Substack is just that it's a very high signal place. Like if you were, I'm, I'm, you know, the Substack experience is not scrolling random posts, random creators, but I feel very confident about if Substack were to serve me a random piece of content that was doing well across the Substack network, I would enjoy it because the creators that choose to be on Substack, there, there are just so few like

• 2:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could see, you could see a new kind of like, we were talking about Vimeo earlier, the, the dynamic that you saw between Vimeo and YouTube, where Vimeo was like a super intentional place.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15Jordi Hays?

  You can see something emerging again where like Vimeo is like maybe, or sorry, Substack TV is like a somewhat more intentional version of, of YouTube.

• 2:33:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Just because it is like based on like your actual audience, less around just like raw discoverability now.

• 2:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Logging onto the Substack TV app and like seeing exactly content just from the people that, you know.

• 2:33:37John Coogan?

  And also with Substack, if you're trying to create like a signal on a piece of content,

• 2:33:46John Coogan?

  the fact that people pay is really, really high signal. Like it's hard to clickbait someone all the way to putting their credit card down and being like, I support this creator and I'm willing to pay, you know, five or $10 a month for who knows how long. And so that just feels like a really, really strong signal to pull across the network if you're surfacing things. It's like, yes, this person isn't just good at clickbait. They're not just good at driving traffic. They're not just good at thumbnails and titles and hooks. Like they are good at, at creating such a response from their community that the community puts down their credit cards. And in the case of like Emily Sundberg at Feed Me, maybe they pay more than they have to.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Because people really do enjoy the relationship they're having with the creator. And so Substack has been very, very unique in that. Anyway, um, there are always more posts.

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Did you see these people, uh, clearly have not read, uh, Rocco's Basilisk?

• 2:34:44John Coogan?

  Yes, what they say.

• 2:34:45Jordi Hays?

  They're tearing up the Waymos in SF.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  That's not good news.

• 2:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we can pull up this video here.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  They're really jumping on this. This is a new one because Waymos have been.

• 2:34:52Jordi Hays?

  It's getting stomped out.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  This is a new.

• 2:34:55Jordi Hays?

  Two words I haven't said, put together before.

• 2:34:58John Coogan?

  They're really breaking the windshield. Wow. What is this? Did the Waymo drive through a particular protest? Did these people just, um, do these people just descend upon a random Waymo? And also like, this is a crime. This is property destruction.

• 2:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What would your mother say?

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I'm just thinking about like, the Waymos are, aren't cheap. Like, you're gonna be hit with like a $500,000 bill, even if you just have to pay for repairing the Waymo. Um, very, very odd. But of course, people are calling to give the Waymos weapons and people. That is the rallying cry of tech. I don't think Google will be doing that anytime soon. I think there were other ways to solve this. But it is terrifying if.

• 2:35:36Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, the bird and lime, the bird, the bird CEO, if he was looking at this, would be having a little bit of PTSD. You remember bird, bird graveyard, that account?

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, yes, yes. Uh, the autonomous, uh, technology really, uh, needs to get put through the wringer. Although a lot of, I mean, the New York City bikes seem to have been, you know, made it through the whole, uh, destruction phase and seem to be continuing to exist at least. Um, anyway, um, what else? Uh, Sam Sheffer had a post here that I wanted to read through. He said, "I'm waiting for bangers to post." The at bangers account on X apparently has not been posting very often. He's waiting for the Tesla Roadster. He wants another Starship launch from SpaceX. He wants Apple's folding iPhone and he wants Daft Punk to be resurrected. I thought it was a good list.

• 2:36:29John Coogan?

  I think the another Starship launch from SpaceX, that's like.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  For sure gonna happen. Apple's folding phone, maybe next year? I don't know. We'll have to talk to Mark German about it, but it seems like it's coming. Certainly working on it. The Tesla Roadster, that might be a ways away. That feels like that project has been fully mothballed in favor of other things like Optimus and data centers in space and whatnot, but I would still love a Tesla Roadster. There's still something. It is remarkable how few electric sports cars there have been. Obviously, there's the hypercars like the Ramazan Navara and the, what is it? The Ferrari. There's a few other like hypercars in the electric world that are like a million plus.

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari has like, is really weird.

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  The Pirelli Batista. The Batista is, oh, I think over a million dollars in fully electric and has not been met with positive reviews from the car community. But if you put that, that level of performance in something that costs $200,000, it is a different equation. And I mean, you take the Cybertrucks aesthetics and you take those type of design risks and if it's low volume, you could at least create something that's, you know, curious to see on, on the street. And a Halo car would be, would be fun. I'm excited for that. Anyway.

• 2:37:49Jordi Hays?

  Funny, funny story out of, from Semaphore. Liz Hoffman writes, "An entrepreneur's 13 hours in Davos jail. The food was phenomenal." Says Sebastian Heinemann, "Stint as a suspected terrorist started in the most Davos way possible, hunting for something to eat. The 31-year-old entrepreneur and first-time World Economic Forum attendee was scouting for a salmon roll at a party hosted by Digital Life Design Tuesday night at the Grand Hotel. He set the prototype of the machine he hopes to sell, a verification device to fraud-proof money transfers on a pillar. When he came back, it was gone. Hotel security was waiting to tell him the police had some questions." "I'm the idiot," says Heinemann, founder of startup Vertico, readily admits.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  "It's a black cube with hot glue blobs and wires coming out the side. He left it unattended in a small-town police state." What followed was thirteen hours in the custody of the fatigue clad but unfailingly polite Swiss police. We spent all week thanking in broken German. Semaphore reviewed his release ticket from the police, which said that Heinemann was noticed within WEF 2026 Securities Zone with a tech device that seemed suspicious and its use for illegal purposes could not be excluded. And anyways, the view from a Davos jail. So at the Belvedere Hotel Security, there's this detective mid forty Swiss who searches me extremely thorough. They handcuffed

• 2:39:14Jordi Hays?

  me and put me in the back of a BMW. Nice, nice, Swiss police, riding in style. I meet another officer who has the best English. The jail is right next to the train station. They bring out a fingerprint scanner and the guy tells me, I want to see if you're an international spy. I asked for my Lunesta pills because I have insomnia and he said, I can't give it to you because I don't know if it's cyanide. Whoa. This insane story. We walk into the office and there are two cells. Everything is all painted white, very antiseptic and Swiss. There's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. I love this founders like they're just like hustling, trying to, trying to get some customer interest and just goes to Davos jail and is like, well, I may as well make the most of it. Try to, try to, try to get a story out

• 2:39:59Jordi Hays?

  of this. Anyways, there's a metal bed drilled into the concrete and a toilet sink combination. They said it was spring water, so the water was good to drink. The food was phenomenal. Better, better review than Bessin. Scott Bessin. They brought it from the hospital, apparently. Chicken lasagna, amazing. The only complaint I have was the smell. The next morning, they bring this guy named Chris, a technical expert. He says, come out here, explain your tech. I do my pitch. I say, look, I'm not a very good hardware engineer, but I'm a great user of AI. I was one of the top users of Cursor last year. I did forty three thousand agent runs and generated twenty five billion tokens. We opened my machine. Chris and I go line by line through the code. I don't know the language the code was written in because it was written with AI. So Chris actually

• 2:40:43Jordi Hays?

  explained the code to me. They come back and they say, you're free to go. You can take all your stuff with you, but you're banned from Davos between now and six PM on Friday. I'm gonna apply for another hotel badge next year. So anyways, insane story. Don't, don't bring your hardware device that you don't fully understand with a bunch of hot glue in a, in a plastic box. Very. Very, very sketchy, but got a good story out of it.

• 2:41:10John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. Uh, the other interesting takeaway from Davos, Alex Heath summed it up uh, in the sources dot news newsletter. He says, after my conversations with AI leaders this week in Davos, I came away with the impression that the industry has collectively decided to gang up on OpenAI. And so you saw Demis and Dario hanging out, talking about how much they're open to collaboration, open to pausing, if that makes sense, open to working together. Um, and, uh, and, you know, Elon on stage, but not a lot of OpenAI love from all the other lab leaders. Sort of an interesting dynamic, the open, the anti-OpenAI alliance. I was also following the Kalshi market on will Elon win his case against OpenAI?

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  The volume's gone up. Uh, it's now a 58% chance that Elon wins his case against OpenAI. So like, we're getting close to 50/50. The market's pretty stable. Nothing's really moved it significantly one way or another. Uh, but I'm sure it'll be moving a ton, uh, later, once we have more news that comes out, more, uh, back and forth, more people sharing facts and figures.

• 2:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there was some, uh, reporting from the New York Times on, uh, Cash Patel's demands for a work trip to the UK. A lot of people were getting very angry about this. But I want your reaction, John. So every May, there's a Five Eyes conference with the head of every intelligence agency. This year, it was in the UK. Cash Patel is going. In the lead up to that, his detail that starts making crazy requests, you can tell me if these are crazy. He's got special requirements on everything and the Brits are getting pissed. Before the conference, his staff says he's unhappy because he doesn't like meetings in office settings. What he wants is social events. He wants premier soccer, Premier League soccer games.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  Now, that's deeply un-American.

• 2:43:00Jordi Hays?

  He wants to go jet skiing. He'd like a helicopter tour.

• 2:43:03John Coogan?

  That's fun.

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask, is this fair? He wants to go and develop, you know,

• 2:43:08John Coogan?

  I think, I think you need to go much further. You don't want to ask to go to some soccer match, do some European nonsense. You want to ask for an American football match. Bring the NFL over there. Yeah, the Super Bowl is happening. I want the All-Star game played here while I'm in town. Yeah. Bring the Patriots.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  I also think you're excited about helicopters. You're excited about jet skiing. Why not combine the two? Combine the two.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, bring them out at the same time.

• 2:43:34John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:43:34Jordi Hays?

  Head down to the lake.

• 2:43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  Down to the lake.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  That'd be good.

• 2:43:37Jordi Hays?

  Or the river, right? And just be zooming around together.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Jumping off, you know, trading places, kind of thing.

• 2:43:42John Coogan?

  What about wingsuiting? Let's get some wingsuiting going.

• 2:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  Some bungee jumping. I want to do, you know, that Red Bull jump from space? That's what I want to do on my trip. We're going up the edge of space. Felix Baumgartner? Yeah. I'm jumping out of a weather balloon into the central London.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good bit. You're going to tour another country and meet with people and say, like, actually, I want to go to space.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Very high up.

• 2:44:08Jordi Hays?

  I want to go to space.

• 2:44:09John Coogan?

  I want to go to space. In other news, Eric Jorgensen has announced pre-orders for The Book of Elon Musk. It's 61 days until the launch. David Senra, he's got an early copy and he says it's awesome. He highly recommends pre-ordering. If you're not familiar with Eric's previous books, he wrote The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which did fantastically well, sold a ton. Jack Butcher is involved in The Book of Elon. It should be very fun. And Naval wrote the foreword, which is very cool.

• 2:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Equipment Share, we're in public today.

• 2:44:42John Coogan?

  IPO.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  YC Winter 15. They say from Missouri to 373 locations nationwide, 7,700 team members and 8 billion of fleet under management. They built the operating system. Construction has been missing. Our friend Mitchell from Lead Edge is a big investor.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:45:03Jordi Hays?

  In Equipment Share. We're working on getting the CEO on any day now, but congratulations to the entire team and cap table at EquipmentShares.

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  That'll be fun. Well, it's time to plant the bomb and wind down the show. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today. It was a lot of fun.

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have an incredible weekend ahead. Only three more sleeps till we're back here. We'll be counting them down.

• 2:45:32John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the TPN newsletter, tpn.com. Visit some of our sponsors. Look in the description.

• 2:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Go browse around on their websites.

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  There's a lot of good stuff.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Lot of good stuff. And thank you to our whole team.

• 2:45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you to the team. Tyler.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of legends. Bunch of legends.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  The whole crew. And thank you to everyone in the chat. We will see you on Monday.

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, folks.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.