Mapping Neo Labs, Unlocking LLM Growth, Evan Spiegel Live in the Ultradome | Blake Dodge, Freddie deBoer, Sohail Prasad, Travis Brashears

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (04:28) - Neo Lab Market Map (25:53) - 5 Fixes to Explode LLM Adoption (42:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (56:39) - Oil Tycoon Teams with Rockefellers (59:32) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:31:33) - Blake Dodge, a journalist at Pirate Wires, transitioned from investigative reporting at Business Insider to focus on optimistic tech narratives. She discusses California's proposed wealth tax, highlighting billionaire departures due to concerns over the tax's retroactive nature and its impact on business. Dodge also emphasizes the importance of tech leaders engaging in visible public works to foster goodwill amid growing inequality. (01:46:50) - Fredrik deBoer, a writer and former academic, now authors a Substack newsletter and writes books, enjoying the independence of self-publishing. He discusses his skepticism toward exaggerated claims about AI's imminent impact on the economy, highlighting the inconsistency between dire predictions and the reluctance of AI proponents to commit to specific, measurable outcomes. To challenge these assertions, deBoer proposed a wager with blogger Scott Alexander, betting that in three years, economic indicators would remain within normal ranges, thereby questioning the narrative of an impending AI-driven economic upheaval. (02:05:00) - Sohail Prasad, Founder and CEO of Destiny (D/XYZ), previously founded Forge, a private securities marketplace that went public in 2022. He discusses the creation of Destiny Tech100, a closed-end fund listed on the NYSE under ticker DXYZ, designed to provide public investors access to private technology companies. Prasad explains the fund's structure, investment strategy, and recent investments, including a $100 million secondary purchase in Anthropic. (02:17:25) - Travis Brashears, co-founder and CEO of Mesh Optical Technologies, has a background in laser technology from high school through his tenure at SpaceX, where he contributed to the development of space laser communication systems. In the conversation, he discusses Mesh Optical's first product—a pluggable transceiver designed to enhance GPU cluster connectivity within data centers by eliminating power-hungry components, thereby improving efficiency. He also highlights the company's commitment to U. S.-based manufacturing, aiming to scale production to millions of units by 2027 to meet the growing demand for optical interconnects in AI data centers. (02:28:18) - Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., discusses the implementation of safeguards in generative video features to prevent misuse, the expansion of Snapchat's developer ecosystem with over 400,000 developers creating lenses, and the potential of tools like Easy Lens to democratize lens creation through prompts. He also highlights the contrast between user-generated content and AI-generated content, emphasizing the importance of authentic, original content in driving engagement. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com https://ramp.com/ AppLovin - https://axon.ai https://axon.ai/ Cisco - https://www.cisco.com https://www.cisco.com/ Cognition - https://cognition.ai https://cognition.ai/ Console - https://console.com https://console.com/ CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com https://crowdstrike.com/ ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io https://elevenlabs.io/ Figma - https://figma.com https://figma.com/ Fin - https://fin.ai https://fin.ai/ Gemini - https://gemini.google.com https://gemini.google.com/ Graphite - https://graphite.com https://graphite.com/ Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Kalshi - https://kalshi.com https://kalshi.com/ Labelbox - https://labelbox.com https://labelbox.com/ Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app https://linear.app/ MongoDB - https://mongodb.com https://mongodb.com/ NYSE - https://nyse.com https://nyse.com/ Okta - https://www.okta.com https://www.okta.com/ Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com https://plaid.com/ Public - https://public.com https://public.com/ Railway - https://railway.com https://railway.com/ Restream - https://restream.io https://restream.io/ Sentry - https://sentry.io https://sentry.io/ Shopify - https://shopify.com/tbpn Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com https://turbopuffer.com/ Vanta - https://vanta.com https://vanta.com/ Vibe - https://vibe.co Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP N.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Jordy's juggling. It's Wednesday, February 18, 2026. We are live from the TVP N.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  We are so back.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, baby. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more all in one place. We have a great show for you today, folks. Specifically, Tyler Cosgrove has been on a little bit of a tear with the market maps. He dropped the final, the final market.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Final market.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  We don't need any more market maps because Tyler made a market map that has every company on it. Let's pull up his latest market map. It looks like the United States.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  There was some VC associate out there that was making a market map and was just devastated.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  Oh my, all the companies I was going to put on the market map are now on this market map, uh, which is in the timeline, by the way. And, uh, it's very blue and you did select Google. Can you walk us through how you built this particular market map of every company on it? It's every company that has a Wikipedia article, correct?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Uh, correct. Yeah. So the one we're showing, that's the wrong one. That's for later. Um, so basically I, um, over, uh, winter break, actually I was interested, um, in this thing where like, okay, on Wikipedia, there's like all sorts of like, Wikipedia is, I think is like a very underrated data source. Um, and there's like all sorts of cool things I think you can do, right?

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  You mean Grokapi, right?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Well, so Grokapi is a little different because it's like generated on the fly, right? Um, but basically, you know, whatever, what I ended up doing is, um, I took every Wikipedia article, there's like seven, seven and a half million English ones. Um, and I ran them through an embedding model. It was Qwen 3 embedding 4B, I think.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  You speak Chinese?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Whoa, he's got it down.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  Uh, but basically I, I got an embedding for every single article, right? So it's like basically every article has a vector. It's like 2,500.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  You did this a while ago, right? The whole Wikipedia embedding or did you re-embed?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  This was like. A month ago.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I remember.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  So then, basically, I took all the articles. I found all the ones that are about companies, enterprises, right, which is basically, you can find some direct direction in the embed space that's like, corresponds to how much like company-ness something has, right?

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Company-ness, really? Oh, you don't filter by like Wikipedia's categorization of whether or not it's a company?

• 2:26Speaker 02

  So I use that, but that's not inclusive of every single company.

• 2:29John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  So it's like a little bit blurry, because some things are like, well, is it a company? Is it not?

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I noticed some like railroads on here that looked like maybe they're companies, but they're like state-owned and where does that fit in?

• 2:40Speaker 02

  It's kind of a blurry thing, so you can't just use just what Wikipedia says.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Companies.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  But you can basically find things that are companies, and then you have a, you have an embedding for every single one, right? So it's this big vector, super high-dimensional space. If you map it down to 2D, you can have this like cool 2D map, which is basically what I did.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  So you can see there's these big clusters, right? So it's like, in the top left, there's, it's all these theater companies, or there's space companies.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  I noticed the aviation companies were pretty far away from the train companies. Is that deliberate?

• 3:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, because you knew there was kind of like a little bit of rivalry.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, rivalry. They need to be, you gotta keep those apart, or they'll just start fighting.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Like, when you map something down from like, you know, there's like 2,000 dimensions down to 2D, it's like very hard to keep like a ton of things.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  And it just randomly looked like the United States.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that has nothing to do with, like, that was totally random.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Because I looked at it, and I was like, oh, okay, there's a lot of companies in Florida, a lot of companies in the Northeast, like, I guess there's companies in the West Coast.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I was like, oh, it kind of looks like.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  And then I was like, what is this, what is this enclave in Canada? Why does that, is that Alaska or something? But in fact, it has nothing to do with the United States. It just happens to look like the United States.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this, so it's like actually interactive, so you can like look up a company and you can find where it is and stuff.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Tylercausegrove.com/Wikipedia-map.html. Wow, really? A wordsmith with the, with the URLs there, Tyler. Couldn't use a TLD list.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  Domain. There are some fun ones in here. Anyway, that's a fun project. All the links take you to Wikipedia. Go check it out. And we market maps are basically done, but a lot of the Neo Labs are not on this market map. Quickly, let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And let's click over to Tyler's market map of the Neo Labs, because we've been tracking the Neo Lab boom. We've had a lot of these founders on the show. We came out of the world where we were like, okay, there's DeepMind, there's Google, there's OpenAI. Now we got Anthropic, there's Thinking Machines, and there's a couple different companies.

• 4:37John Coogan?

  But the Neo Labs have exploded. They have a term that's been coined. Sarah Guo was actually, I think, the first person that came on the show and sort of broke it down for us around the Christmas episode. But since then, the Neo Lab taxonomy has evolved, and so we needed to build a market map. So Tyler, take us through what's going on in the world of Neo Labs these days.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Neo Lab is kind of this interesting term, like it's very broad. People say like Neo Lab, it's not very clear what they mean. Because there's like broadly, I think it generally is like-

• 5:10John Coogan?

  And this will make it clearer?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Yes. I think after this, it'll be pretty obvious, like what, you know, what you should be looking at, how to think about these different companies.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't want to be more confused at the end of this.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  That would be a disaster if that happened.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  This is gonna be easy. Okay, got it, got it, got it. Go.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's just start. Okay, so you have Neo Lab, right?

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  So Neo, this prefix, okay, it has to be relative to something?

• 5:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  So Neo is relative to like your Trad Lab. This is your big lab.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Traditional.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  This is your, yeah, this is your OpenAI. And let's give it up for the big labs.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't get enough credit today. Open Data Centers, Spike and CapEx.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  So this is gonna be your OpenAI, your DeepMind, your Anthropic. This is kind of your big lab. Yeah, XAI.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  XAI kind of fits in there too, even though it's a newer Trad Lab, it fits in with the big lab. They got a lot of money.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Dario, I think on Torquash, he was like, yeah, three, maybe four labs, right? So the four is probably-

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Probably XAI.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  XAI.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I think you can also kind of throw in Mistral in there.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, Mistral's a little bit older, yeah.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, Mistral, there's much of these labs that were basically founded in the like two or three years before ChatGPT and then in the like six months after.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  So I think XAI is in there, Mistral's in there.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  And these specifically, these, I feel like those trad labs, it's like they did a transformer-based pre-training run. They have their own base pre-trained. Maybe it's not at the frontier, but at least they're playing that game. They're not doing fine tuning. They're not doing something else. So that's sort of like you're in the trad lab world when you're thinking about like a big pre-train run loosely.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, especially if you're talking about these big pre-trains, it's really just these four. No one else is really at that scale.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  But then, okay, so Mistral kind of brings us down into what I call the sovereign labs.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  So, I mean, you know, if you kind of look at this, it's basically just labs that are not in America. But I think also that there actually is some meaning to this. So like Mistral, you've seen Mistral become kind of the leader in European AI, right? So I think it was in, was it Sweden, maybe, or being a new data center?

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, Sweden.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  So they're kind of becoming like.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Stuff going on in France, too.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Macron is always talking about Mistral.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  It's a big leader. Cohere is also kind of, I think that's like a very, you know.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Canadian.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Canadian company, yeah.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, but also has done their own pre-trains.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  No ties to the curling team, though.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Complete, no ties. So I don't want them.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's important to put some distance between that scandal.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then you can go down, you can kind of see all your Chinese open source labs, you see your Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi. Unitree is also in there, right? Unitree, I think, so as we'll see later, there's also, I have section for like robotics labs.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  But this is very clearly like, you know, this is the Chinese.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us back in time now. What was going on before the trad labs broke out?

• 7:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so here I have this section, Legacy Labs.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  So these are ones that are kind of more entrenched in these big enterprises.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  So you have stuff like Microsoft Research.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  AT&T, Bell Labs, right?

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Oh, Bell Labs, yeah, I forgot about Bell Labs. After, you know what, you know how, you know why they call it Bell Labs?

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Why do they call it Bell Labs?

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Alexander Graham Bell. Yeah, it was founded by him.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Bell Labs.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  Okay, but also you have stuff like you have FAIR, Facebook AI Research. This was like, I mean, there's so many like OG research papers that came out of FAIR.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  This is what Jan LeCoon used to be head of before it transitioned to the, to MSL. Okay, so then I think let's move up here around your TRAD Lab, you'll still have POST Lab, right?

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  P O A S T.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  Yes, these are posters.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are labs where you get a lot of posters, right? So obviously this is OpenAI, you got Rune.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Anthropic, a lot of, you know, Shulto, etc.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  A lot of posters over there.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  A lot of great posters. Prime Intellect, I think.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  They're great posters.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Will Brown.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  A bunch of Anons at Prime Intellect doing great stuff over there.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And then you kind of get into the core.

• 8:57John Coogan?

  The proper Neo Lab.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, the proper Neo Lab.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  So this is also a bit hard to identify because like what is actually the core of a Neo Lab? What are these different kind of offshoots?

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  I think Prime Intellect is kind of the prototypical, like quintessential Neo Lab.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  When you think of it, where you basically have, it's like fairly recent.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  It's still very much research focused.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Like sure, they have enterprise, like, you know.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Think about different stuff, but at the core of it, you're still like trying to find these like new

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  novel approaches. It's research, you're hiring researchers. It's not just like engineers, sales guys, etc.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  So let's.

• 9:33Jordi Hays?

  Isn't, wouldn't Sakana be more of like a sovereign lab?

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, so a lot of these can fit in all different places. Sakana would be, yeah, Japanese maybe.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Okay, and you put MSL in here because it's a new project.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one was also a bit hard. It doesn't feel like a TRAD Lab because, I mean, maybe it has the scale, but it's just.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  It's newer.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  It, yeah.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  They haven't shipped yet.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, Neo, new lab, right?

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  I mean, it's so recent.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Definitionally. Thinking Machines is my classic go to Neo Lab.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  I feel like it's post. Post open AI Exodus and sort of open AI is nothing without its people. You know, you get the spin outs and you think thinking machines and SSI are two of like the first case studies that sort of set the tempo for, okay, it's possible to do some research outside of the big trad labs.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:22John Coogan?

  And so that's where you get the NeoLab boom from. And then a lot of the other companies are feel like are saying, okay, we're going to do something similar to thinking machines or SSI. We're going to commercialize early or late, but we're following in that, in that, and we're benchmarking to that. Oh, they raised two billion. We're raising 200 million. It's easier. There's a 10% chance that we, you know, are at their scale. So you can underwrite it that way.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. So thing machines also brings us to what I call the trad SaaS lab.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  SaaS lab, you've trad SaaS lab. So I think the way I think about this is the trad SaaS labs.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Are trying to basically use the data that's inside these big enterprises, pull them out with AI.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  So this is thing machines, right?

• 11:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  The rumored idea, right, is they're doing RL for enterprise.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  A bunch of these are doing fairly similar things where it's kind of chatting with your data, using the data that's very valuable to a company, but it's going to be inside the company. You can't really pull it out anyway. Besides having the AI be like internal. So you have a pod compute, you have pool side doing all kind of similar things in this, in this like enterprise LM field.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  And then that brings us to NeoSaaS.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  Not full base pre-trains for those companies, mostly fine tuning or RL on top of a particular company's.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Use case.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then I have NeoSaaS lab. This is different than trad SaaS.

• 11:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  These are different in that they're not really pulling, they're not going enterprise specific, maybe. I think that's one way to look at it. Also much more of like startup focus.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  But they're making a product that is sold effectively as SaaS.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  So cursor cognition, windsurf.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  I have Ramp Labs.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Ramp Labs. These are seat based sort of consumption based, but it's a product that's vended into a, and the product is. What you get and then sort of customizes as you integrate it, but it's not, it doesn't, the conversation doesn't start with a, with a, with a, with a business development relationship.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. And of course, I mean, these lines are, are pretty blurry.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  But then, okay, let's go down to the post lab.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Right. So post lab. This is after the lab.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  So that means like, basically they train the models and then these labs are working on top of those models. That's how I think of it. Right? So you have meter, you have EPOC, these are going to do evals.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Uh, you have PANGRAM, they're seeing, uh, is the, is the model producing slap?

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Or is it producing text that you're using in some way?

• 12:46John Coogan?

  These are purely eval. They, they don't have necessarily AI products themselves. They don't necessarily sell to big businesses just yet.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  They could still be training models, right? Like PANGRAM is training models that sit on top of the labs.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  That's true. So it counts as a lab.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Okay. What else we got?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  Maybe that brings us down to the safety lab.

• 13:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So these are pretty interesting. Anthropic kind of fits in this, right?

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 13:07Speaker 02

  Because they have a big safety team. They're doing a lot of mechanistic interpretability. You have Goodfire. I think they just raised at like 1.25 billion and they're just doing mechanistic interpretability.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  Um, very interesting. Aleuther AI is a similar kind of lab.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  I know Aleuther, yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. There also, a lot of these are also kind of in the open source space.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think Stable diffusion came out of Aleuther AI.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is another label that I, I think I could have put on, but it's so hard to get everything to like work together.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Open source, yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  But a lot of these are also like, uh, the core of the company is, is doing open source stuff.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Right? So Prime Intellect.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, fair. Was a good example. Almost all.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  And OpenAI back in the day. But a lot of these have bled together where OpenAI has an OSS model, but also a lot of consumer and enterprise. Yeah, makes sense.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Okay. So then, uh, in contrast to the, to the SaaS labs.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  We have the consumer lab.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Okay, consumer labs.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  These are focused, uh, on consumers, right? So you have, uh, Eureka Labs, this is Andre Karpathy's, uh, project. Yeah. I don't think there's anything been released from it yet.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Education though.

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Uh, but yeah, education. It's for people. Um, you have humans.

• 14:08John Coogan?

  Oh, it's four, four people, not four individuals working there.

• 14:10Speaker 02

  It's four people. Yeah.

• 14:12John Coogan?

  It might be four people. It might be one person. Who knows? He's pretty good.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. You have, uh, humans and.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Right? This is the, uh, I think, I forget the exact phrase. It's like humanity focused.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  They're going to turn human into sand?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Human sand.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Human sand.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, uh, we got to hang out with the founders at the Super Bowl. But there, but, but yeah, focus on, uh, Creating models that work better alongside people.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have a lot of like companions, these kind of ideas, right? You have a character AI also.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Do they really own C dot AI? What a great domain. If that's true, I don't know.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  We'll have to bet you. Anyway.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  So then that brings us down to the

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Visual labs.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Visual labs, right? So there's a lot of either multimodal

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  models, or they're actually like producing video or images, right?

• 15:00John Coogan?

  We've talked to a lot of these founders.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  I feel like almost all of them have been

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, World Labs raising today.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  Or fundraiser announcement today.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Mid Journey, etc. Leads are pretty obvious. You have your Neo Auditory Lab.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Mid Journey is the is the sailboat logo?

• 15:13Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  It's a good logo.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  You have Media Reality Labs on there, too.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. They're visual. Not not fully AI yet, but they're getting there.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Yep, you have, okay, you have Neo Auditory Lab.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Right, so this is going to be anything that has to do with vocals

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  or voice or music, right?

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yes. Eleven Labs.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Eleven Labs, of course.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  Sponsor of TVPN, thank you.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  Suno, right, making music.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Gemini also released a new model.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Yes, today.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Miria.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  Miria three. I didn't even know there was one or two. It's a trilogy already? They just got secret models that they're hiding from us.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is very interesting field. And then you have your Legacy Auditory as opposed to your Neo Auditory, right? So these are your old ones. This is, well, John, do you want to talk about nuance?

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Dragging Naturally Speaking. This is the original box software. You buy it, install it on a Windows computer. You can talk into a microphone and it will it will write down what you say. Dictate it, yeah. Using some AI, not a large language model at the time, not a transformer based architecture, but became a very large company. I think it's part of Microsoft now or something. I think it's been acquired a few times. But, yeah, very, very interesting company. A lot of really solid Free loops, yeah, that's a, you know, you're in the lab making beats, I guess.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Okay, so now moving up, I think this is really the very interesting section. So this is Neo Trad Lab.

• 16:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  So I think, what is a Neo Trad Lab?

• 16:37John Coogan?

  It's just the simple, it's just a simple definition, clearly.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  Does it even need explaining? I think, I think everyone gets it.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Watch your head, by the way. Yeah, I was coming really close.

• 16:46John Coogan?

  You might want to be on the other side.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  To the team. Okay, so Neo Trad Lab.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  It's a Neo Lab.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  But it's Trad.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so what does that mean? So basically, the way I think about a lot of these labs is that they're extremely research focused.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  They're also largely, they're focused on like kind of a single idea.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  So if you think of like OpenAI, very research focused, obviously, but they're doing a lot of different things.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  Right, so they have.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Consumer enterprise.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have consumer, but it's even like on the product or on the research side, right? They're doing their video, images.

• 17:18John Coogan?

  Sora, images.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but even, even within like language models, I'm sure they have a, you know, continual learning.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Team or all these like weird moonshot things. Where I think a lot of these Neo Trad Labs are basically focused on one single moonshot idea.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Okay, so example, flapping airplanes, right? They just came on to talk about data efficiency.

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  This is kind of the one kind of moonshot idea, right? Obviously, it's like a very general, broad.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  There's a bunch of different ways you could tackle it, but they're like, that's the problem that we're going after.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  But it's one specific thing they're working on.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  And I mean, they, they talked about, oh, you know, if we figure it out, there'll be some, some value, but we're not exactly sure how it's going to come out.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Like right now.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  And we're not sure how we're going to productize it necessarily.

• 17:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:00John Coogan?

  But we have a, but we have really.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, but so the idea is like, if, if the, if, if these labs can figure out like the core research idea.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Then the value will, will appear, right? So this is, you also heard this out of Ilya with SSI, right? Not sure how they're going to get revenue, but it'll come if they figure out.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  A breakthrough.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Continual learning. If we build it, they will come. Yes, yeah.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Work before.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  So a lot of interesting things here, so we can look at like, okay, general intuition.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:26Speaker 02

  They're basically doing a lot of multimodal training where they can basically take video game data and try to figure out how to map that on to LLMs or world models or these types of things.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:37Speaker 02

  You have inception, I believe they're doing.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Dream tech.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Wait, okay, I'm thinking of logical intelligence. They're doing like diffusion models.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Right? So diffusion, but but for L M's.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  But for text. Yeah, we've seen a demo from Google on that.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. Inception is doing, I think they're doing the energy based models, which is kind of this weird thing.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Okay, wait, I have both of those companies flipped again, but it's so Yann Le Cun is into this.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  It's so simple. I mean, I don't know why you're flipping stuff around. Like, this is, this is literally just NeoLab 101. You're doing a basic breakdown.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  The point is that they're doing these like kind of weird architectures where like energy based model, it's like kind of different than a normal L M where you don't have this normal backprop, stuff like this. But the the point is that like, these are all like very kind of weird like architectures that they're working on. So maybe the big labs have like small teams that are working on this stuff. But basically, these people go out of the big lab. A lot of them are coming out of the big labs.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  And they're starting these new projects.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Like coming out of a trad lab or a or a NeoLab or a Neo.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Or Legacy Lab.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  A NeoSAS lab.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, so now, let's move up a little bit. We have Neo.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  What is NeoLab Lab?

• 19:47Speaker 02

  NeoLab Lab. Okay, so this is, yeah, I like this one. So these are a lot of companies that are focusing on. They're also like very research focused, but the the point of the research is to build essentially like a researcher. So it's they're recursive, right?

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  So.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  You have recursive and recursive.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, you have actually two that are recursive and recursive. Actually, you have Richard Sotter.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  You have Prick Labs where they're not, they're a little bit more focused on the hardware.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  But the whole point is that they have this kind of closed loop.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Where you can basically build a lab.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Within the lab, right? That's the whole point. NeoLab Lab. You're building a lab.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Got it, okay.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Unconventional AI, similar thing. I think they're.

• 20:29John Coogan?

  The product will be a lab. They're in the lab manufacturing business.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Correct. Yes. Okay, moving up, we have Math Lab.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  So there's, these are pretty interesting. Axiom and Harmonic.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  And then you have MatLab.

• 20:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  But these are pretty cool. There's been a lot of good breakthroughs recently. I think there's a bunch of ESDOCH problems that are are being solved, or maybe there's being proven in some ways, but there's a lot of like interesting research coming out of these.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Harmonica is Vlad Tenev, the founder of Robinhood.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Correct?

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Yes. Wet Labs?

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, Wet Labs.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  So these are your bio labs.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Oh, you got LabCorp. Yeah, I'm familiar with LabCorp.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, LabCorp. But there's a lot of, like, biology-focused labs. It's actually like, I didn't know a lot about a lot of these. But there's all sorts of, like, interesting research. So isomorphic labs, this was spun out of, I believe Gemini, or at least Google.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. They're working on, like, longevity and just drug development almost.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  So some of these are very focused on specific forms of drug development.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Some of them are just like broader, where they're very focused on longevity stuff.

• 21:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cool.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, let's go to... Yeah, what's going on up top? Oh, yeah. Up top, we have Labrador.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Oh, that's really important. If you want to understand labs.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So you got, yeah, these you got, you're going lab. Foundation.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  The white lab.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Your black lab. Your chocolate lab.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  Your chocolate lab. Yeah, chocolate labs are important.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  If you want to understand labs broadly.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, then moving back down, we have the NeoKinetic Lab.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  So these are going to be your labs that are more focused on robotics.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  So you have a bunch, you have Project Prometheus.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  This is Bezos's lab. It's still kind of in stealth, which is why there's not even a logo for it.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  You have Figure, you have Skilled AI.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Skilled AI is the Luke Metro project?

• 22:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yes. Physical Intelligence, someday, right? These are all your kind of NeoKinetic labs, right? These are, started fairly recently in the past, like, maybe four or five years.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  Broadly.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  And then the Neo-Neo Lab.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Neo-Neo Lab, right? Okay, so OneX is building Neo-Robot, so they're Neo.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Neo-Neo Lab, that makes sense, yeah.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  And then Legacy Kinetic is the previous.

• 22:44Speaker 02

  Legacy Kinetic is kind of the old gen.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  But cooking.

• 22:48John Coogan?

  They're cooking. Yeah, Waymo's cooking.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Cruise and Boston Dynamics have been a little bit behind. Zooks also, another self-driving car company.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  There's a bunch in here that I could have included.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Stealth, I think, that never really hit inflection. Okay.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then you have your...

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Mostly vehicle-focused.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  You have your Dark Lab.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  So this is...

• 23:06John Coogan?

  Working with the government.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  I have, yeah, I have Shield AI, I also have DARPA.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  DARPA is a lab, yeah. They invented the internet, right? GPS?

• 23:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  DARPANet?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  That's good. And then Simulation Lab, I think that might be the last one.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Simulation Lab, yes. So Simulay, we just had them on.

• 23:20Jordi Hays?

  And then SpaceX, you could put up there, because aren't they working on this Pentagon contract?

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, where's Rocket Lab? Rocket Lab needs to be on there. That's a lab.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  There's a lot of labs that, I mean, yeah, lab is very, very broad term.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Very broad term. Well, at least it's crystal clear now for everyone.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think this should be pretty obvious to anyone who's thinking about Neo Labs, like how to be thinking about them now.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  If you've been paying attention, this is all second nature to you.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you add up how much all the companies have raised? It's gotta be in the north of 200 billion.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, so I didn't do that, but for all I was trying to figure out how to include the valuations on the map.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was too complex.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  You didn't feel like you could do the math?

• 24:02John Coogan?

  No, we don't know how.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Well, it's also, a lot of them are rumored. It's actually like, kind of hard to find out, because a lot of these are still really in stealth. Like, a lot of these NeoTred labs, they basically, because the whole point is that they're doing this like research stuff, they're not gonna like productize early.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, how much do you put in the DeepMind bucket? That's a huge amount of investment. And it's not exactly disclosed. Do you count the TPU? Do you count Google Cloud, like, different allocations? You can go really deep in the stack to understand the impact of like, the broad AI buildout. But yeah, I mean, if you just total this up, you can really just do XAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and get like 90% of the way there. And it's probably like 200 billion.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  It's also hard because it's like evolving so fast, right? So David Silver's lab, who he was, used to be at DeepMind.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Well, I like ineffable.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Ineffable intelligence.

• 24:49John Coogan?

  That's a good word. You know what ineffable means?

• 24:52Speaker 02

  Rumored today.

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's indescribable.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. But these things are coming out like every day, right?

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  And you put the typos in just to prove that it was made by humans. So like Sovereign Lab, and then ineffable intelligence also has a typo.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  And so I just want to make sure, I wanted to make sure people do.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  This is not AI generated.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you put the typos in so that it was proof that you made it.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I don't want.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, whatever you built this in doesn't have spell check, I guess. Anyway, fantastic report. Thanks for breaking it down.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 25:29John Coogan?

  I learned a lot and I hope you did too. And let me tell you about a lab Gemini three Pro. It's Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. And I'm also going to 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.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  One show, two maps.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  One show, two.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Strong start.

• 25:55John Coogan?

  Should we break down five wildly obvious fixes that will explode consumer LLM adoption? They don't want you to know this over at the big labs, but I have some ideas. Basically, everyone's been really focused on agentic coding and the SaaS apocalypse and what's happening in the business to business world and the enterprise world. I've just been sort of like thinking back on, you know, basic improvements to the chat apps that I use all the time, because there's some really obvious stuff that I think, I think is in the works and I think it's coming, but I wanted to just sort of like get it all down in one place to think about what the next iteration and the next breakout moment when people are like, oh, I'm using them even more. I'm having a better experience. What would that look like?

• 26:38John Coogan?

  So the first thing is that I realized that I've asked ChatGPT just when was OpenAI founded? Three different times. It's the exact same query. Like it doesn't need to light the GPUs on fire for that question. The answer never, literally never changes. You can cache the result and that's what Google does with those knowledge, knowledge queries, knowledge panels, and there's a whole bunch of different, there's a whole bunch of different ways to. Deliver results that are sort of pre-cached. And so if you just look down, when when an LLM launches, basically every question has never been asked before. But now there's a lot of people that are just showing up with the exact same question.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Give me the history of the Roman Empire. Give me the history of this company. And you might not be the first person to ever ask that question. Exactly. But also, if you do a little bit of fuzzy,

• 27:33John Coogan?

  if you do a little bit of like fuzzy search over it, you've there are probably like hundreds of thousands of people that have asked the exact same thing. So cache those results, give them to the user instantly. And I think this like instantaneous feeling of LLMs, like they felt slow for a really long time. They actually got slower. Like it was always sort of slow. You watch the token stream in. But then, once the reasoning models and the thinking models and the deep research and the O3 Pro came out, it was like really slow. It was like, close your phone and come back in 20 minutes. That doesn't have to be the end state, and I don't think it will be. And I have no better example than the number two on my list, which is Cerebrus inference. So ChatGPT currently has a model called 5.2 Instant.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  And it is not instant at all. I I fired up prompt to 5.2 Instant and I said, no reasoning. Tell me the history of LLMs. It took 38 seconds to deliver the full response for like all the tokens to stream in. And it does a good job. It shows you images and stuff, and it is a cool. It is a cool illustration. But then I went over to Codex Desktop and I fired up GPT 5.3 Codex Spark Low, which is a crazy name, which we'll get to. And it responded in under two seconds. Because it's from what we know, Spark is incredibly on Cerebrus. And it's very, very fast. And so everyone's obsessed with like the fast models in the agentic coding world, because you're waiting a half an hour for something to get back to you.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  You're waiting five minutes for something to get back to you, and you're actually losing your train of thought. But I think that applies in consumer as well. And I think the interaction of sending a message and then just immediately getting a response. Before you actually think, oh, well, like, it's waiting. I'll close the app. I'll check my messages. Oh, I got an Instagram notification. Let me go over there. Like, like, instant responses will keep people in the apps longer and user minutes will actually increase once that rolls out. So, pretty simple implementation for, I think, most companies. My, my, my, my big question is, like, I know Google has a huge advantage with TPU, but I don't know if they have, like, an answer to Cerebras specifically. And Nvidia just brought Grok, which can do, I think, some of the same things. So I'm, I'm curious to know how every lab solves the, like, fast responses question,

• 29:46John Coogan?

  because that feels like an important piece of the puzzle. It's not the only piece of the puzzle, but it's an important feature. And I think we're going to see it rolling out to consumer LLMs very, very soon. And I do think it'll be an interesting moment for people to both ask a question and just boom, it's as fast as going to Wikipedia and just seeing, like, okay, everything's rendered. It's thoughtful. It's what you want. And on the flip side, I think that it could make people a lot more chatty with them, like, actually asking follow-up questions, because you don't feel that cost of, like, oh, if I ask you to follow up and tell me more or re, or go a different direction, like, I have to wait. I have to wait. So I might just close the app.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Speaking of GPT 5.3 Codex Spark low, no more model names. Like, truly no more model names in consumer AI LLM chat apps, like, ever. Like, just bury them so deep in the UI that you never see them. And people will complain. People will be like, I wanted it to be easier to pick. I like picking between Pro and Thinking and Fast and Instant. I know what I want for everything. People will complain. But it will all inspire the model routing team to grind harder. And the model routing team has a hard job to do, but they will eventually figure it out. And eventually, you should be able to just talk to the model. You can already do this. In ChatGPT, you can say, hey, think really hard about this question and give me a really thorough answer. And it'll go, it'll switch from Instant to Thinking.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  I don't know that you can trigger Pro from that. I haven't actually experienced that. I did try and trigger a deep research report. I said, hey, please deep research the Roman Empire for me. And it does not fire off a deep research report. Deep research is buried under like a plus button, then you have to select it and say, okay, I actually want you to do this thing. And then it takes you down the deep research like workflow, which I understand is like for inference reasons. They don't just want you firing off deep research reports all the time. But I think in the future, like the the model router should be very intelligent about, okay, this is, this is a question that people have asked thousands of times, let's just go get it from a database, which is crazy to think in the age of AI, you wouldn't even be hitting a GPU. But I think that's going to be real.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  And then I think on the other side, like you should, it should detect like, okay, this person wants something that's far beyond anything that we've ever worked on before. We gotta go search the internet, we gotta write some code, we gotta do a whole ton of stuff.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna need 10 minutes.

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Fire up deep research, right? Fourth, ads. We've talked about this, but we gotta get them in the LLMs, we gotta get them everywhere. Because I was thinking about the, the, the, the death of Google Reader. I don't think you were ever a Google Reader guy, were you? But it was amazing. You could take all these RSS feeds from all these different blogs during the blogosphere. You could put marginal revolution, Tyler Cowen's blog, all these different stuff, all these different things in there and just kind of scroll through them really quickly. And Google wound up killing it and everyone was like really upset. And the reason was, I think, because they never really got on the Google ad flywheel where there was real like revenue generation and.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, was that just that it didn't hit a, a scale that enabled it to make sense?

• 32:49John Coogan?

  The failure of every Google project that has failed is always a question of like, was it because they weren't making money from it? Or was it because they hadn't monetized it yet?

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Or it just never got big enough.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Never got big enough to monetize.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  A million.

• 33:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Weekly active.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  It's not probably worth keeping around.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But my, my, my takeaway from Google's surface area of products that are successful and loved, Google search.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Google, YouTube, Google Maps, Chrome, Android, like, these are all direct funnels for the ads flywheel. And so you can see that they're driving the bottom line. There's a whole bunch of folks on the team that are getting excited when they're hitting their numbers, when they're making more money for the business. And so they just get more and more resources, more and more engineering effort, everything gets better. And I think that not only are ads the best way to deliver high-quality products to the broadest possible audience, but they just make products better top to bottom. And yes, there's the stated versus revealed preference thing. And yes, you might want to pay to not have ads like you do on YouTube. Many people do. But I do think that that ads flywheel is going to be really, really important as the inference gets really.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  And right on time, perplexity ends ads experiment.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  I saw that.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  This was the news from this morning in the information from Catherine. He says, perplexity is no longer offering ads, an executive told the Financial Times. The AI search startup is pulling back from this line of business as rival OpenAI starts showing its users ads in ChatGPT earlier this month. The company said it worried ads would undermine users' trust in their platform, with an executive saying the challenge with ads is that a user would just start doubting everything. I don't buy this at all.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  That's very weird.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Arvin has a history of kind of just like trying to provoke OpenAI at every turn. So coming out, perplexity, in my view, like, this is just like somewhat bearish, right? They're trying to serve as many people as possible all over the world. The best way to do that is going to have an ad-supported tier, kind of bailing on this, on this moment. I don't, I don't know. Maybe it's not worth reading too much into it, but a little bit early to throw in the towel on the economic engine that has driven the internet for its entire history.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we talked to a lot of founders who have brands and they love advertising. And I think that's another side of this, which is that when, like, a lot of Entrepreneurs and also people who work at businesses want to grow their businesses and they have fond, you know, memories or affiliations with Facebook and Google because that's how they grew their companies. And when you talk to somebody like Sean Frank at The Ridge, he's like, I'm going to be first in line to advertise on ChatGPT. I can't wait for that. It's converting so well already. I want more of that business. And we didn't really hear that with the perplexity ad product. We didn't hear people lining up to buy ads in that product. So maybe it was not going as well.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is they, so according to the information, perplexity started testing advertising in 2014, less than a year into its test. Taz Patel, the executive leading the ads effort, left the company and perplexity had only let in less than half a percent of the brands that wanted to advertise on the chatbot. So there was like a bunch of demand. They barely let anybody use it and then they bailed on it. And so.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Interesting. Well, the last one is somewhat related to Open Claw, but I think way down the funnel, beyond the 20-minute deep research project, you probably want to be able to fire off something that looks like Claude Code or Open Claw or Codex to write lots and lots of code and solve a really, really hard problem. And so many reasoning models can already write some Python and execute it, but it's clear that everyone wants to go further, hence the Mac mini boom. And I'm not actually sure how important access to the local file system is to most consumers. Like when I, when I think about what's, like, most of the data in an average internet user's life is mirrored in the cloud.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  I think they care about their camera roll, they care about their email, their messages, and almost everything's in the cloud. I've noticed this when, when I move from one computer to the next or I move from a phone, I'm like, wait, I didn't actually, there was a time when it was like, oh, you're moving computers, like, like get an external hard drive, like, make sure you drag all your folder, all your files over. Most of the stuff's mirrored to iCloud, that can be accessed via an API. It requires a business development deal, probably, but it does seem feasible. And a lot of the LLMs have hooks into Gmail already. I think all the, all three major LLM apps have, have Gmail integrations already, and more integrations are coming, clearly.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  And so I'm not sure that you need to replicate Open Claw and have it running on a dedicated piece of hardware, even like cloud-hosted. But I do think people will want to be able to fire off something that writes tons of lines of code to solve a particular problem, even if it's something as mundane as like getting you a restaurant reservation at a place that doesn't have a, you know, an API. Like, if there's a restaurant that just has a web form and you basically want to deploy, like, agent mode, that might look like writing a web scraper and writing something that actually does like a headless Chromium browser and like clicks it, and that might be generated from something that looks a lot more like Open Claw or Claude Code than something that is

• 38:34John Coogan?

  just a couple lines of Python in a reasoning model. Anyway, there are also a bunch of nice-to-haves. These aren't really on the list, but, you know, these, these apps, they still occasionally fail to return results when you're in areas with patchy cellphone service. There's like little UI things. Some of them botch text-to-speech requests when you will, you'll fire off a deep research report and they'll be like, "Read this to me," and then it'll read for like a minute and then it just stops. Some of the apps don't let you listen to the deep research reports, or they let you listen to the normal reports. So there's all these like little fine details in the UI that I think are causing more churn and people can just chop away at.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  It's unclear if what, what is required to make an amazing product is just A/B testing all of these things and just optimizing, or is it taste? I have no idea. But if you wind up doing, this is my recommendation for anyone who's working on this stuff, if you're just going to run an A/B test to figure out what is the correct user interface... And you've and you run the you run the A B test, you you find out that the button should be blue instead of green. Don't tell your boss you ran the A B test. Tell them it was taste. So that it's all about taste.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  Good call.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  And that you have taste.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  It's all about taste.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  Because then you'll have a job forever.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  But but if you're say I I'm just the guy who runs A B test really well.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Raise.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Probably, probably. Taste is king. It's true. The A I the A I models can't taste. They can't taste. They can't taste A five wagyu. They can't taste a Cabernet Sauvignon. Only you can do that. So make that dinner reservation and enjoy a nice glass of red wine. Because the models can't. They just can't. There's just no way. There's no way.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Alpha.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  Alpha.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Alpha.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the A I market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build A I. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligent cloud building the A I supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one G P U to hundreds of thousands.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  Robin Hood says historically investing in private markets was limited to institutions and the elite, but not anymore. With Robin Hood Ventures, you can now get exposure to private companies like the ones listed below. They have a new fund that has Databricks, Merkle, Revolut, Airwallex, Boom, Supersonic, Ramp, Aura, and Stripe, which is signed and pending close. Very curious which of these companies, if any, were actually on board and excited about being part of this lineup?

• 41:10John Coogan?

  I think Ramp was. I saw fax Herbert from Ramp posting about it. And he is.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  But that but that doesn't mean the company.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Investor relations.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  He said, we are excited to partner with Sarah, Shiv, Chan, and the broader Robin Hood Ventures team on their inaugural fund. On a personal note, I'm revealed, I'm relieved to finally have an answer for family and friends who have been asking, how do I get exposure to Ramp Equity? And so, you know, if if this is coming out from your head of investor relations, it's not exactly a Mac Rim style response. So I think I think most of the companies that are in the press release at at least and and saying, hey, you can use our logos are cool. We'll see where it goes. There there are folks that are that are that that might get funneled in there and they don't want to be and there might be a whole bunch of different. Different debates and back and forths. What is Anker?

• 42:04Jordi Hays?

  Sheil shared kind of some of the the cost basis from the prospectus. They bought Databricks at $150 per share, now trading at 204, Ramp at 90, now trading at 98. Airwallex $21, it's now trading at 18.8. And then Merckor at 714 now trading. So already seen a little uptick. Anker came in and was sharing some of his insights. Insights for end of the show. He says, a single closed end fund that gives you exposure to some of the top private startups. My thoughts, people want access to private markets, of course. So much wealth creation in America happens in startups and people desperately want access.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  You can see this with the insane silly fees people are paying for Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI SPVs. He says, too, the structure of this fund is broken. As a closed end fund, the price here can diverge very significantly from the net asset value of the underlying assets with FOMO from access. This easily traded at a very high multiple to NAV, leading to a lot of retail investors getting their face ripped off. It ends up being less of a venture fund versus a speculative product to ride private market sentiment.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  It's a great disclosure.

• 43:16Jordi Hays?

  Disclosure, long Robin Hood, but will not be participating in this. Yeah, so we actually have the founder of Destiny on the show.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Sohail Prasad, he's coming on at 1pm and they're sharing their Q4 results. They have exposure to Anthropic, Chaos Industries, Hermes, positioning Destiny as a New York Stock Exchange listed vehicle, democratizing retail access to high growth.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Destiny has suffered from this same problem. They were super early. They got this fund out in almost two years ago, exactly, or close. And immediately it spiked, right? There's a lot of demand to get exposure to these assets. And it's sort of come back down to earth since then, but excited to get the update from him and understand.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  And let's pull up the rest of the Linear lineup to show you who's coming on the show today because we got Blake Dodge from PirateWires, Freddie DeBoer from Substack, Sohail, as we mentioned, from Destiny, Travis from Meshoptical, and then Evan Spiegel, the co-founder and CEO of Snap. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents. Moving on, Elon Musk announced that XAI is moving away from traditional academic benchmarks like humanities last exam to focus Grok on maximal utility for real-world engineering and software development. Said, "Actually, I don't think HLE is a great measure of usefulness. We're moving away from these benchmarks."

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  Andy Scott says, "So it's bad?"

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Who said that?

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  I think it's totally fair to just focus on real-world utility, but of course, people are still going to ask, "Well, I still want to know how it does."

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, Tyler, give us the update on 4.2 that came out today. So Grok 4 has already been out. This is a minor revision.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  And 4.1.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  4.1. So now we're at 4.2. And is it focused on benchmarks, or have they carved out a particular niche yet?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think historically, especially when Grok 4 came out, people were like very, very quick to say, "Oh, this is so benchmarks," or whatever. I think they've definitely retreated from that, like, at least path with 4.2. It doesn't look like outrageously benchmarks or anything. They did this kind of interesting thing where, so it's still not like fully out. It's still like in beta, if you go on the Grok interface. They did this kind of interesting thing where there's like four agents. Every time you actually do a prompt, there's like four agents, and the agents specifically have like distinct roles. It's almost kind of like you have four instances of the same model, but they have different system prompts. So you can try to get like, okay, this one is like focused on doing like qualitative things.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Instead of mixture of experts, mixture of agents.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, mixture of experts is like, that's like in the architecture of the model. Where this is like, you train the model, then you kind of add this as almost like a harness type of thing.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  So it's kind of an interesting path. We'll see. Like, yeah, again, this is still not like the actual 4.2

• 46:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Full, full release.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  I believe.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  Um, but we'll see.

• 46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what the bull case is here for, for XAI. They, they, there's a world where they carve out some sort of niche, you know, Anthropic's focused on coding very specifically and, and, and, you know, had some major, major gains there. Uh, what else is there?

• 46:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I think with macro hard, um, they're going very hard on computer use.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Okay, computer use. Yeah, see, that, that, that would be an interesting thing where they could like jump to the front of that. And if that's the important, the important technology for a couple of months, that could be really good vibes.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Also, it is interesting to think about, uh, with the cerebrus news and with the value of like high speed inference on, uh, one, the whole model on one chip, uh, is that something that, uh, that Tesla's chip team can, can iterate towards on a faster time horizon than other chip companies? I don't really know, but, uh, they, I mean, they, they do custom silicon and they've done it for a long time and they got an entire self-driving model that runs on a car. So, you know, they have some experience there. Um, and they obviously design and fab, or they don't fab it themselves, but they design it themselves. And so, uh, will be, will be interesting to see how they, how they carve that out. Let me tell you

• 47:50John Coogan?

  about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the AI, leading AI trust management platform. Let me tell you about AppLovin', profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Tariq says, I'm proud to share that Humane has invested $3 billion into XAI's series E round just prior to its historic acquisition by SpaceX. Through this transaction, Humane became a significant, a significant minority shareholder in XAI. The investment builds on our previously announced 500.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  Mega watt. AI infrastructure partnership with XAI in Saudi Arabia, reinforcing Humane's role as a strategic development partner. So, yeah, interesting. Uh, maybe, you know, would have wanted to get this out before, um, before the SpaceX acquisition, but better late.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait, they said they got in before the acquisition.

• 48:44Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 48:44John Coogan?

  You mean the news?

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  But like, you know, this round got announced a while ago.

• 48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  So maybe they would, they're, they're coming out with this news today.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they're saying, hey, we got in before the acquisition, so we got, we got SpaceX shares.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  They're saying better, better late than never.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  On, yeah, you mean on like a comms front, but like from a financial perspective, like that, that was the right time to invest, right?

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:10John Coogan?

  I think that's, I think that's what's going on. I wonder, I wonder why the announcement was delayed. Maybe it's, it's like regulatory approval.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:17John Coogan?

  Because it's an international investment.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Um, let's play this clip from Jeff Bezos. Uh, his space company, Blue Origin, will move heaven and earth to get to the moon before rival SpaceX. The CEO, Dave Limp, said.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Recently Jeff Bezos, who never tweets, this was his first tweet of 2026, uh, posted a photo of this like black tortoise. Which goes along with Blue Origin's motif of slow and ferocious, methodical.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Are turtles ferocious?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  But a lot of people have viewed it as a warning shot to Elon Musk, which really was focused on SpaceX going to Mars. And now he's saying we're going to focus on the moon. What do you make of that tweet? And what is the competition right now? Do you think you're going to be the first?

• 50:04Speaker 04

  Well, it gives me an opportunity to put on a T-shirt for you. So there you go. That's that.

• 50:10Speaker 04

  Nothing else. Let me do that.

• 50:13Speaker 03

  I get to keep this?

• 50:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's all yours. And that's the first one off the presses too, by the way. I think everybody's going to want one of those.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  He's T-shirted Mark Bloomberg.

• 50:20Speaker 04

  To lose for blue to succeed. What the US needs is it needs two SpaceXs. It needs two launch companies that are

• 50:29Speaker 04

  competing vigorously against each other to try to give us the most capabilities as a country, commercially, civilly, from a defense perspective. Because our adversaries aren't standing still. And so we need, we need to be moving very quickly.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  Healthy competition. But I think a lot of people run into that as the tortoise being Blue Origin and the hare being Elon Musk and SpaceX. Because it also comes after Secretary Duffy had said that SpaceX is behind. So they were opening up for everyone in terms of Artemis. And Jared Isaacman, who's now the administrator, also said essentially, yeah, whoever can get there first is going to get the contracts. So do you think you're going to get there first?

• 51:07Speaker 04

  I think if asked, we will make it, we will give it a run for our money. I like our architecture. I like our odds of getting there very quickly. I don't, I don't have a crystal ball into what SpaceX is doing. I think, again, Gwen and Elon are competent, and they've showed every day by launching rockets. Elon. But I love the fact that the US would compete us against each other. They are for sustainability on lunar. We're talking about who could get there in 2028. If asked, we will step up and we will move heaven and earth to get to the moon first.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Move heaven and earth.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Powerful line.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  The moon race is gonna be fun. I think it's shaping up, shaping up well. I mean, yeah, a little bit of a come tortoise in the hare story, a little bit of come from behind. I'm not buying the tortoise as ferocious.

• 51:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't love, I don't really love the, I don't really love the analogy. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't think it's the best com strategy. Like, I like the vague posting out of Jeff. It gets, it gets the people going, but at the same time, just imagining SpaceX as a hare, just like running, running a bunch of laps around the tortoise, just kind of.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  They need to take this way further. Elon needs to wear tortoiseshell glasses. Be like, I turned your tortoise into my glasses. And Bezos needs to start carrying a rabbit's foot for good luck. That would be the hare. Like, I got your foot. You know, I want, I want much more, I want more battles here. This is great. Well, let me tell you about Okta first. Sorry. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  According to Kalshi, according to Kalshi, Blue Origin, will Blue Origin land on the moon before SpaceX? So if Blue Origin lands an uncrewed... Uh, moon lander on the moon before SpaceX before January thirty, uh, one twenty thirty, the market will result, yes. So currently it's at a seventy percent.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Seventy percent. So they think the moon race.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  Up from twenty nine percent in March.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Of course, like the race isn't over, like the finish line is not get, uh, get one lander to the moon. It's like develop an economy on the moon and get lots of people there. So, uh, you know, it would just one read on this market, but it is interesting. Uh, and, uh, certainly, I mean, you can see the market was not pricing this a year ago, and, uh, I don't think anyone was. I think everyone thought that Blue Origin was kind of just a side project that was sort of just like doing space tourism. And now it seems like they might be going to the moon, which is pretty cool. Um, we have some breaking news.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Claude Oath is officially not allowed in Open Claw. So Anthropic is responding to the Open Claw, Open AI news. And Andrew Warner shares that, uh, this would be a great time for Sam Altman to step in and let us use Open AI subscriptions with Open Claw. So in the Claude Code docs, Oath and Oath authentication, which is used with the free, pro and max plans, is intended exclusively for Claude Code and Claude.ai. Using Oath tokens obtained through Claude free, pro or max accounts in any other product, tool or service, including the agent SDK, is not permitted and constitutes a violation of the consumer terms of service. So if you're on the consumer plan, um, uh, if you're on

• 54:30John Coogan?

  the consumer plan with, uh, Anthropic Claude, like you just signed up for a normal plan on your app, and then you get excited, you want to sign up for, you want to set up Open Claw on your Mac mini, you do that. And then when you're in the login flow, you say, hey, I'd like to use my Claude tokens over here. It's going to say, no, you got to set up an enterprise plan. You got to set up a proper API, correct?

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  It's been the way it's been for a while.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  This is not news, though. This was like a couple of weeks ago. I think like a week after Open Claw got like super big, they, they stopped. You can still, I mean, I'm pretty sure you can still use API, like an API key.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  An API key?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  And will that use your, your consumer plan?

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Right now, so how it used to be was you could have a Claude subscription.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Um, and then with that, you get a certain amount of, of like basically Claude Code tokens.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  Uh, but they're super, they're like massively subsidized.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Versus the API. It's like ten X.

• 55:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Uh, for the Claude Code tokens.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  So then they were basically using those in.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Open Claw.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Or in other agents.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was for open code.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, not actually open claw.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm getting.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I know.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's a similar thing.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Twenty five different names.

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, uh, it, it, uh, the, the chat is saying that this is, this is news that like the, the particular open claw integration maybe broke today. Uh, Peter from Open Claw has responded and says that, uh, OpenAI has already publicly said that, uh, OpenAI subscriptions will work and continue to work in Open Claw. And so, uh, it's a little bit odd because like, yeah, I mean, you can just use the API. That's not that, uh, they're like, if you're technical, that's not a problem. But for the sort of pseudo-technical folks who are setting up, uh, Open Claw instances on their Mac minis, they might be a lot more encouraged to set up the system if they're

• 56:16John Coogan?

  able to just log in with OAuth, um, with their Claude accounts because they're like, yeah, I already have the app and I use the app and, uh, I have some extra tokens. Why don't I use them over here?

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Thomas says the news is that they're applying it to the SDK.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Yes, so there we go. Um, anyway.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, moving on.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  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.

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  Out of the Journal.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 56:44Jordi Hays?

  The fossil fuel tycoon teaming up with the Rockefellers to fight energy poverty. I'm sure the, uh, the online conspiracy community will, will love this one. Uh, but we love tycoon. We were trying to bring the word tycoon back. So we're happy to see the Journal using this. EQT chief executive Toby Rice is starting a nonprofit to tackle the lack of access to modern energy infrastructure in poor countries.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Toby Rice made his fortune unlocking a gusher of natural gas in Appalachia. He has a bold new ambition, bringing energy to millions of people in impoverished nations. Rice, the chief executive at EQT, one of the largest natural gas producers in the US. Is a co-founder of Energy Corp, a nonprofit, Energy Corp, a nonprofit that helps developing nations such as Ghana, Zambia, and Burundi build out their energy infrastructure and prosper. Unlike other philanthropic incentives that emphasize renewables to energize impoverished societies, Energy Corp sees a role for a broader spectrum of solutions from fossil fuels to solar panels and nuclear plants. Notably, this approach has been endorsed by the Rockefeller

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  Foundation, one of the oldest and richest foundations in the US.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  They really opened up the floodgates with this. The Rockefellers, you know, wasn't John D Rockefeller the richest person in human history? You see how much he's putting in this project? 200 Gs, 200K. Go solve it. Go solve energy globally. 200K. There you go.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Best I can do is 200 bucks. I got you, guy. I'm super excited about this.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  I think Macron deserves a victory lap at this point.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Macron's size is looking significant.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's size. It's size compared to this. No, no, obviously, they have a lot of other donors. The Rockefellers is just a fancy name. Because Toby and his wife have personally contributed $3 million, and the initiative is raising $10 million this year from energy companies, family offices, and private individuals. And from his perch at Pittsburgh-based EQT, a company with a market cap of $36 billion, Toby Rice has preached the benefits of selling more American natural gas across the globe to reduce emissions and strengthen security of the US and its allies. Now he's wading into a debate. Should impoverished societies be encouraged to rely on polluting fossil fuels to improve their fortunes, or leapfrog to intermittent renewables? There was this question about, should Brazil

• 59:13John Coogan?

  be allowed to clear-cut the Amazon rainforest to pull forward industrialization? It's the world's lungs. Everyone suffers if that happens, but they would certainly benefit in the short term. So, there's a hot debate here, and he is engaging in it. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  David Holes has hit the timeline. He says 5 million humanoid robots working 24/7 can build Manhattan in six months. Now just imagine what the world looks like when we have 10 billion of them by 2045. Now imagine the year 2100.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Dyson Sphere. Dyson Sphere, Dyson Sphere by 2100 is the, is the correct like debate. Like, is it before, is it after, but it's like around there.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  I keep, I keep going back to my land thesis.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like when, when armies of, of robots can build anything, any time, what, what is actually scarce? In this case, I think with 10 billion of them, I don't even think land will be scarce anymore. It's like, hey, we're making, we're gonna build an island.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  We're gonna bu- build another moon. We're building the moon.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  New moon alert.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  There's, there's no.

• 1:00:22Jordi Hays?

  New moon alert.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Just build another earth and just throw it on the other side of the, of the solar system.

• 1:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, you know, right now, we're talking about what businesses are unslopable.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:33Jordi Hays?

  The next meta will obviously be unclankable.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Unclankable businesses. What's unclankable?

• 1:00:38Jordi Hays?

  What's actually unclankable when, when you can send, you know, an army, uh.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Well, figure out what's unslopable, figure out what's unclankable, and then go invest in it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Richard says SF guy eating a delicious blueberry. In 18 months, everything will be blueberry.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  This is a perfect contrast to the, to the other post. Just two sides of the SF discourse. No, no, no. David Holes, David Holes is like, he's, cause I, David's seen humanoid robots. Like, he's, he's, he's lived in SF and, and been around this stuff. Like, he's, he's, he's a true believer. And he's, and he's sort of saying like, I've seen what they can do, and I understand the exponential here. And now imagine 10 billion of them in 100 years. Like, it's gonna be crazy. And then you have, uh, Richard on the other side. Everything will be blueberries.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I thought you were talking about the delicious tacos post. He said, I'm the CEO of a hot dog company. I've worked on hot dogs for 10 years, and I wasn't prepared for what I've just seen. Your life is about to change. So what can you do? Buy as many hot dogs as you can. Buy stock in hot dog companies.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  It's a good idea. I am long hot dog. I like hot dogs.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Hot dog market map.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Good with the kids. Everyone loves a hot dog.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Hot dog.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Brings joy. It's all American. There's nothing better than a hot dog at a ballgame. Except for fin.ai. That's better than a hot dog. It's the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Anduril fundraising show's defense tech is still red hot.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Pretty crazy.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  A.D. Ruth, one of the scoop athletes.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  Scoop.

• 1:02:27Jordi Hays?

  She says, in case you missed it on Friday, we broke the news at Anduril's and talks it double its valuation to around 60 billion.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Woo.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  New funding round. So if you were buying triple layered SPVs in Anduril at

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  You're gonna make it.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  45, you might make it, assuming you didn't pay three levels of 10% one time.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  And assuming that the guy you bought them from

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  Actually owns.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  And is now in custody of the feds. That's a bad.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  The round is notable for more than just its price, while Anduril technically has both A and I in its name. It's not the AI centric type of startup that typically gets all the investor attention in this current cycle.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Very unslappable, right? You're not going to vibe code a drone.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  You're not going to vibe code.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think that, I think, I think when you think about who's going to unlock the potential of AI for the government. You think of Palantir.

• 1:03:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Jordi Hays?

  Anduril.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  No, no, I, I, yeah, no, I just mean in terms of like AI disruption. Like, it's like, it's not something that you can, you can vibe code a Fury drone. Like, that takes a lot of hardware, a lot of testing. You gotta blow a bunch of stuff up. You need a test range. You need government contracts.

• 1:03:36Jordi Hays?

  I just don't, yeah.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Relationships that are built over decades.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  I think all these, all these, you know, defense oriented businesses, even if they are building software, are quite a bit more insulated just because

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Oh, totally.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  of the trust factor. And if, if Anduril sells a product for one price and you have a small team coming together saying, you know, we're 10 people, we can build you the same thing

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  for half the cost, there's not quite as much pricing pressure because. The government wants reliability. They want to set something up and use it for a really long time. They don't want to really take risks, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Defense tech's on a tear. Shield AI, a drone business that can also tap the AI interest, thanks to its autonomous software, is in talks to raise a $12 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, and several other younger startups will likely raise money in the next few months. Paul Kwan, managing director at General Catalyst, said that part of the reason the firm is so optimistic about defense tech is because there are very few trillion-dollar markets that are critical for global resilience, that are dominated by legacy vendors, and which are experiencing both tech and geopolitical transformation. Yeah, the number of companies that fall in that bucket is pretty small. General Catalyst has invested in Anduril as well as other defense-related businesses such as Sironic and Helsing, a European rival

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  to Anduril. As the world unfortunately braces for more wars, increased government spending has led to high-priced contracts for defense tech. Kwan said that the US Department is realizing that defense tech is critical for deterrence. Kwan said he has also seen a shift among entrepreneurs, believing that many of the most talented founders are choosing to build for the defense industrial base. And you can check out the rest of the story on The Information.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of attention's been focused on OpenRouter. If you go on OpenRouter and look at the rankings, you can see that Chinese open-source models are completely dominating charts. Minimax is...

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  I saw DHH talking about Kimi K2 is now a daily driver for squashing bugs at 37signals. Very interesting data point. Since a lot of this can be... I think the OpenRouter stuff can be a little hard to contextualize because there's some amount of volume that doesn't get captured in OpenRouter, obviously.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  It's the majority. Of the volume is not captured.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:05:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. According to Zephyr, who's very on it, it's 1 to 2% globally.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  Do you, do you, you, you think that's about right?

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, definitely. I mean, i- if you just compare like the, like, it's, if you look at the actual like token count, it's like in the billions for like over, you know, a week or something.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  Where, uh, you know.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'll see Sundar.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Over the summer, he was like, we're doing, you know, quadrillion tokens every month or something. So it's like the, the scale is completely different.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Quad.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  And also, it's like, um, no one is going to be using the big labs, uh, models on this because they would just hit the actual API. It's easier, right? So it's like, if I'm going to be calling Anthropic, I'm probably just going to use the Anthropic API. I'm not going to go through OpenRouter.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  So you should expect it to be the, the open source models because, uh, like, one of the good things about OpenRouter is that it, um, has like all the different inference providers together. So like, uh, you know, there's, there's a ton of companies that host the different open, open models.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  Um, so like aggregates them all together.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, and also, I mean, this doesn't, this doesn't count for token generation in consumer LLMs. Like, and that's a huge thing. Like, Google AI overviews is, I think, the most used LLM product in the world, something like that. And that's technically generating tokens. When you just hit Google search and it answers with an LLM query, that's token generation. And then there's stuff that's happening in Gemini app, Claude app directly, not even coding. Like, no one's using OpenRouter within their consumer app, um, unless it's like some third-party thing. But most of them are gone. Um, anyway, uh, let me tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's continue with the timeline. Jacob Rintamaki has a post here.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  He says, unfortunately, it is not seen as cool to say, but the beatings will continue until more people internalize this. He's talking about Rune, saying, I don't think this is really true, but it's hard to fight open source copium because people act like you shot a dog or something because Anton. Two years ago, back in December 21 of 2023, said AGI is more likely to come out of someone's basement, some mega-merge Hermes 4000 than a giant data center. And I think everyone agrees with this now, but it was very unpopular to say at the time. I remember John Ludig had a post about open source AI not being like on the critical path to AGI

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  because of the scaling laws and a whole bunch of other economic factors. Like, he sort of predicted that Meta would stop being so focused on open source because it just doesn't make sense to spend a trillion dollars or $100 billion on infrastructure that then you capture so little of the value of. And I think that's why Anthropic has not been very pushing like hard on open source. And even the other superintelligence initiatives, not many of them have been open source. The open source question has been a very different business model. But it is very important in terms of a model commoditization and terminal economic equilibriums in the AI lab battle.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Orin Hoffman is sharing that Ozempic is bad for business. A few months ago, someone told me they had heard a rumor that a bank or hedge fund had banned its traders from taking Ozempic, Wegovy, and other GLP-1 weight loss drugs. The theory, as I understood it, was something like traders need to make quick decisions based on gut instinct and GLP-1s mess with your gut instincts. You're not hungry for snacks. You're not hungry for profits. You lose your edge. Orin says GLP is getting banned by hedge funds, maybe by sales teams too, killing your grindset.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  It is funny that, doesn't it, isn't GLP glucagon-like peptide, isn't that a peptide that's secreted by the gut? And so it's like, your gut instinct is actually tied to your gut. Like, maybe it's just nominative determinism, but it is funny that those things wound up being...

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Your gut instincts, for some people, saying, put on masks. Scale. It's time to scale.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Time to bulk. Bulking season's here. Get off the GLP-1s and start levering up. Go and risk on.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Dr. Cameron Maximus says, guess what increases drive testosterone? A microdose of terzepatide to cut down on physical appetite, macrodose of testosterone to amplify psychological appetite. So the solution is, we're going to ban GLP-1s. Only if you're taking them solo, you've got to be taking a full stack.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Did you see Bone GPT say, "Turns out you really do got to be hungry for it."

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  It's fantastic, fantastic. As is Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits in HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  And TBPM.

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  And TBPM. Claude Sonnet 4.6 has improved on benchmarks across the board. We touched on this yesterday, but particular, particularly outstanding in office tasks and agentic financial analysis. You could see this being baked into Claude for Excel and a lot of knowledge work. Lucas Byer over at MSL says, formerly OpenAI, says, "I usually look at which benches the small model surpasses to its previous big brother. If it's only a few, I think that gives a hint as to what they focus on. Here it is only agentic financial analysis and office tasks. It's just heuristic, of course, but interesting nonetheless." And I wonder

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  if that's, I wonder if, Tyler, how important is speed between Sonnet and Opus? Is Sonnet consistently faster or just cheaper?

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's usually faster. It's just a smaller model.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Faster and cheaper.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  And then there's Haiku, right, which is the smallest one.

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  Because I'm wondering if in the coding domain, there's a little bit more tolerance for, "Okay, I've delegated this task, it's going to go cook, and then I'll come back and review the code, review the pull request," whereas in finance...

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  This was the whole thing about Codex, right? Because Codex was much slower for a while before Cerebras. So people would be like, "Oh, Codex is so bad compared to Claude Code." Even though, you know, a lot of people internally at OpenAI were saying, "Oh, no, actually Codex is way better." It's just because they're used to having the internal model that's run on the better hardware, right?

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  So I think speed is actually, it plays a like very large role. So even if you have a, you know, smaller model, it's much faster.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Even if it's a little bit worse, I think there's still a lot of like, if you're iterating a lot, that can actually be much, much more efficient.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm just thinking like in terms of like an Excel copilot for someone who's spending their time in Excel, not in GitHub.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Will speed be a killer feature for them if they're currently like, yeah, I've tried it, but it's really slow. It actually slows me down because it takes 20 minutes to respond. It gets it 80% of the way there, but I can do 90% in 15 minutes. So I'm not using that model yet. I'm not excited about that. Maybe this is something that speeds things up. But of course, there's ways to just inference the model faster, even even the big guys.

• 1:12:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think when a lot of the agentic browsers first came out, one of the like benchmarks I would I would use is like editing a

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Scratch sheet?

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, sheets. And it was so slow that it was like, it was working, but it's just so unbearably slow. There's like literally no point of using it.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  So I think, yeah, speed is like massive.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Speed kills.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  What about a hair bench?

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Hair bench? What's hair bench?

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says Jordy needs to bring Tyler with him when he gets his haircut.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Haircut, haircut alert, haircut alert.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Gabe, I did send Tyler, Tyler asked.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  I sent him my barber's information. So I think they're working on it.

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  Haircut alert. We gotta get a card up. Jordy doesn't want to do it, but I think we should put up a card for Jordy's new haircut. We don't like secret haircuts.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  If you are heading to New York Stock Exchange, you need a fresh haircut and we are partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world? Get a haircut and then go raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  Great call, John. Dwayne says, what is going on at Anthropic? They're going after people with multiple paid max accounts. You're paying full price multiple times and they're treating you like a criminal. Not sure what Dario is trying to speed run here. And on Reddit, on Claude Code, it says Claude just banned having multiple max accounts since around a few hours ago. Signing into another account has stopped working.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  I think some people do need to have their multiple max accounts banned. They're just, they're not building anything useful. They're wasting tokens and they're just creating endless, endless setups and tool chains and MD files. And unless you're actually shipping something that's going to drive business value and be used by more than one person, you only get one account. I'm with Claude on this. Stop wasting tokens on your silly thing. I was reflecting on like, like the, I was texting you this last night, like, like Am I dumb and out of ideas or is all the software I want just illegal? Because I was like, all the things that I want are things that could exist, but they can't exist for business reasons.

• 1:14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, like I want, I want an Apple TV app.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, give the example.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want, I want an Apple TV app that has Netflix installed. It's like, why doesn't Netflix agree with Apple TV? Because Netflix doesn't want to get aggregated. They're an aggregator, they want you to open that app on the Apple TV. So the Apple TV app doesn't have Netflix content, even though you have the Netflix app installed on Apple TV, the device. And I was saying like, I subscribe to all these different news sources. I want like an Apple News that aggregates them all, Google Reader that aggregates them all. I pay, but I'm still logged out of a million things. Like I'm in some social app and then it opens in a Safari web browser. I'm not logged in, there's a paywall, it's annoying to log back in. I want something that just like aggregates all my news sources and jumps the paywall.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Well, that's not the coding issue, that's like, that's a business issue. Like, they want you to log in for a reason and they have a decision to that. So, I don't know. I think we're still early in the broad, like, distribution of people building custom software and experimenting with things. But at the same time, like, we've had great writing models for a long time. And anyone we know, everyone could write their own books. Everyone could write a better ending to the end of Game of Thrones and send it to you as a text file right now with the current models. And I haven't read anything that I've been like, oh yeah, this is really good. I gotta read this, this AI-generated book. So, I don't know, there's like some weird bottleneck there that is like, it's not, it's not a bear case for AI.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Look what Gabe is offering. Yeah. Sounds very illegal.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is popcorn TV or it's called U-Toren. I know, I know, I know. Xbox Media Center.

• 1:16:39Jordi Hays?

  Trying to play by the rules.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Xbox Media Center, but that's the thing, is that, is that yes, that streaming site, like yes, you can vibe code that, but like, that can't actually get to scale. It can't actually have an impact in the economy because it's breaking the rules. And there's a lot of, there's a lot of AI stuff that, that feels magical. And you see this with C-Dance from ByteDance.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Where it's in the journal today Tik Tok's Chinese parent develops movie app. I love that headline and in on Twitter, it's all it's all. See dance just destroyed VO three and Sora two, but in the word in the journal, it's Tik Tok's Chinese parent develops movie app. And there's something interesting here. So Singapore is where it's based. Singapore, the company behind Tik Tok has developed an artificial intelligence model that can turn a single text prompt into a high quality video with a storyline, scene changes and distinctive characters. The the new AI video creation model from Beijing based Byte Dance is generating buzz in China and backlash in Hollywood over copyright issues. It shows how Byte Dance, known for creating Tik Tok, is emerging as a rival to OpenAI and Alphabet's Google

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  in the race to build tools for making AI movies and other video entertainment. China's visual models have been very, very competitive, said Steve Long, a video game developer in Helsinki, who participated in beta testing programs. Byte Dance recently ceded control of the US version of Tik Tok to an investor group. Global users of another Byte Dance.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Ben Thompson was going off on on the.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Cheeky pint.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  On cheeky.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Get a couple cheeky pints in that guy. He's going to let loose.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  He let loose, he's saying, we got the worst.

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  He said, he said, we got the worst possible outcome with with Tik Tok where they still control the algorithm.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  And we violated property rights.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Rough. Shots fired.

• 1:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Of course, still still in motion.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  And but for now, not doesn't seem like it's been fully solved.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  But this was the interesting paragraph that I wanted to highlight in this journal article. Global users of another Byte Dance app, CapCut, a popular video creation and and editing app will soon have access to see dance to it's latest AI model for creating videos. The company said the model is already available to users on CapCut's Chinese version. And so I mean, you've seen on Instagram reels, like there are a ton of CapCut editors out there. I get served. You know, how to edit in CapCut, and I don't even really use the app, but it's clearly incredibly powerful. There's a whole bunch of cool features in CapCut that would basically be After Effects plugins and would probably take a long time to configure, but just come out of the box and it's just a couple clicks. So you don't have to know any code or install anything. It's just there.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  And now you're going to be able to generate sea dance videos. We'll see how long you can still generate Larry David and Marvel characters. That stuff will probably get pulled back on eventually, at least in the CapCut American version. But you're going to see a lot more, a lot more slop in the trough. What do you think?

• 1:19:30Jordi Hays?

  Handel says, just had to drop in and say thanks for the gift suggestion. I got my girl MongoDB for Valentine's Day.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  That's great to hear. That's so great to hear. I'm so glad. It really is the perfect Valentine's Day gift, MongoDB.

• 1:19:45Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball is.

• 1:19:47John Coogan?

  Before we do this, let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball says, if the Department of War and Anthropic can't agree on terms of business and they shouldn't do business together, I have no problem with that, but a mere contract cancellation is not what is being threatened by the government. Instead, it is something broader designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. This is normally applied to foreign adversary technology like Huawei. In practice, this would require all Department of War contractors to ensure there's no use of Anthropic models involved in the production of anything they offer to DOW. Every startup and every Fortune 500 company alike, this designation seems quite escalatory, carrying numerous unintended consequences and doing potential significant damage to US interest in the long run. I hope

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  the two organizations can work out a mutually agreeable deal. If they can, I hope they agree to peaceably part ways. But this really needn't be a holy war. Anthropic is in Google in 2018. They've always cared about national security use of AI. They were the most enthusiastic AI lab to offer their products to the national security apparatus. If Anthropic, run by Democrats, whose political messaging Is Anthropic run by Democrats, whose political messaging sometimes drives me crazy? Sure, but that doesn't mean it's wise to try to destroy their business. This admin believes AI is the defining technology competition of our time. I don't see how tearing down one of the most advanced and innovative AI startups in America helps America win that competition. It seems like it would straightforwardly do the opposite. The supply chain risk designation is not a necessary move.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheaper options are on the table. If no deal is possible, cancel a contract and leverage America's robustly competitive AI market to give business to one or more of Anthropic's several fierce competitors. And there was also reporting this morning that Anthropic had approached 1789 Capital.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Chris Buesker.

• 1:21:37Jordi Hays?

  And Don Jr.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  And they turned him down.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  Turned him down.

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Turned him down. They turned down, from 1789, they said, not interested.

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  I think I know a little bit about why there might be so much pushback against Anthropic. And, I mean, you saw that the Sonnet 4.5, people are really excited about this model, but it completely fell flat on its face when asked with a basic question, why did clavicular get frame-mogged? And Sonnet 4.5 responded, I'm not familiar with clavicular as a specified person or entity, or what frame-mogged means in this context. Could you provide some more context? So, it's just like, when you see something like that happen, it calls into question everything about a company. It's just like, how could you let this happen with so little worldly knowledge

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  as to not understand the significance of clavicular's frame-mogging? Anyway. Overheard in SF, a VC was giving advice. OpenAI and Anthropic are like Godzilla. You need to find an alleyway to hide in. What a funny, what a funny thing to say. Ben, this is Ben Hylak. He says, don't take advice from junior VCs. There's something good there. I mean, the models, you know, if you're in the path of models improving, you will get stomped like Godzilla. But there's still plenty of opportunities all over the ecosystem, especially if you're not doing something that's in software. I'd be like, you know, like, there's plenty of startups that's just like, don't touch

• 1:23:16John Coogan?

  software.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Just don't do anything with code.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  Just don't do anything with technology.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Don't, don't do anything with a website.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Don't do anything with a website.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  If you need a website to do business.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  I'm short. I'm passing.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  You're cooked. It's over.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  It's over. It was fun.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  No, but clearly, I mean, there's plenty of like, brands and products and technology and all sorts of things to build and.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, we are working on, we are working on an alleyway project.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  With, with Riley Walls.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Yeah.

• 1:23:46Jordi Hays?

  We're not gonna share anything else on this.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Are we doing that? I'm very excited.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we are, we are cooking there. So more to come.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Well, there are people who are doing well in spite of Godzilla stomping around America. And one of them is Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Imagine human, reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. I like that Godzilla sound effect. That's good for when the labs are on a tear. That's what's going on.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video from Buco Capital.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  What is this video? $2 trillion in capex for this. This is, this is, what if Donald Trump was from other countries?

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  He was born in other countries.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  This is, the fidelity here is, is really, really high. Dmitry Trumpov.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  This stuff is probably going mega viral on TikTok right now. It's going to mega viral.

• 1:24:42Jordi Hays?

  So Buco, Buco says $2 trillion in capex for this, by the way, kind of like saying like, it's silly, but I look at this and, and think.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  It's worth every penny.

• 1:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Completely worth, completely worth it, even if, even if the $2 trillion just created this one video.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, really good. We're entering the, entering the post, post-slop era.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Back to Taste Gate. Young Macro chiming in on Taste Gate. Is Taste valuable? I don't know. I can't tell. But maybe it is. Some people say it is. I'm not really going to weigh in. But Young Macro is weighing in. He says, "Many will not want to hear this, but Taste is just G, intelligence, with sufficiently varied training data." Steve Jobs had Taste because he was like plus-three standard deviation IQ and trained on calligraphy class and being homeless, smoking weed in India or whatever. Meanwhile, his IQ matched now, microdoses amphetamines to narrow the training set and ends up drone-maxing at Citadel Securities with a great transcript. "Sorry, Chud, the flunker will get the cake this time."

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  There is something interesting there. Uh, um, just the idea of like varied wildlife experiences being valuable to, to, to generate, you know, it's not exactly out-of-distribution training data, but just, "Oh, life well-lived will translate into innovation and taste," or just like new ideas as opposed to being tracked and funneled into Citadel Securities.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I, I haven't, I haven't really waded into the Taste debate at all. Just because it, it, it's not, uh, everyone's trying to define it in their own way. It's something that in some ways you people like to say, "Oh, you can't buy it."

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  You can't buy it in the fullness of a company because I think like Taste comes from the founder or the founders and it just kind of like, you know, percolates through, uh, the organization indefinitely. Like, there's companies that have a billion dollars to spend on marketing that just functionally can never be good at marketing because the founder likes to be heavily involved in marketing and they don't have great marketing taste or instinct or whatever this thing is. Um, but it just feels like everyone's, I don't know. I'm for Taste. I'm against Taste. I, I have like, you know, it, uh...

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Fun fact, if you hold your nose, you can't taste as well. So if you're trying to be tasteful, don't hold your nose.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, COVID wiped out a lot of people's.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they lost their smell.

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had some good friends, some good friends.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  They got COVID in their household recently, fully wiped out. So that household had zero taste.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Zero taste.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  They traded all their cars. They traded all their cars for Lamborghini.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  In the span of a week. I was like, what's going on?

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  That's extremely tasteful. I don't know what you're saying.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of taste, let me tell you about Figma, the most tasteful sponsor. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. Introducing Claude Code to Figma, explore more options, push ideas further. Moving on. What is self-evidently true?

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  AGM says, all this progress in Gen AI, not a single serious piece of culture, other than slop shorts. I would take that back. I would say granny, my granny got hit with a bazooka is a serious piece of culture.

• 1:28:08John Coogan?

  But that's not AI.

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  I think what he's saying is that there's all this progress in generative AI and no one has like one shotted like make something amazing and it just does it. Like, there's always this like Herculean effort and inspiration. Like, we always go back to Harry Potter, Balenciaga. Even that Trump video is like, it's only funny because of this context and like, it's not purely just like, oh, okay, the Gen AI did it. And it's certainly not a serious piece of culture. It is a slop short. That's fair.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  All this 10x vibe coding and not a single new compelling consumer app. Techies do this all the time, confusing.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, Tyler's question back.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  He didn't try Claude with ads.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, that's true. That's true. Claude with ads was definitely a compelling consumer app while it lasted, R I P. Techies do this all the time, confusing being Gutenberg with being Luther, the maker of the technology of the culture for the culture itself. Hephaestus forges Achilles armor in the Iliad, but he's not the hero and barely appears otherwise compared to other gods. Techno capitalism might make Hephaestus the rich guy on Olympus, but Homer is going to write him out of the script anyhow. Brutal.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  History mogged.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy Gaffon says, "Humans don't belong behind desks. It's not our end state to be factory workers who replaced hammers with keyboards. Everything that can be automated should be automated. Hammers were meant to hit your face. Hammers were meant for bone smashing."

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  John Arnold said, "Everyone deep in tech or finance is in full freakout mode over the pace of AI progress over the past two months. Own index funds and you barely notice, but specific sectors are exploding, digital and power infrastructure, while anything related to human behind a desk is plummeting."

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  Interesting. Don't strike your face with a hammer. Strike your crowd with CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is available.

• 1:30:13Jordi Hays?

  Before that, we've got to talk about Japan's largest toilet maker.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Toilet maker.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  According to a UK-based activist investor, is an undervalued and overlooked AI play. Halliser Capital sent a letter to the board of Toto last week to make sure, make more of its advanced ceramics segment, saying it holds a crucial position in the semiconductor supply chain. Segment generates 40% of Toto's operating profit. Sounds like an insane headline, but we should dig in.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  No, it actually maybe sort of makes sense if you need ceramics in the semiconductor supply chain. I wonder, the funniest outcome here is, you know how like, we can't get PS6s anymore, PlayStations are out of stock, like, will you be able to buy a toilet in the future? Like now, like, you will need to sacrifice your new toilet in favor of advancing the techno-capital machine.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  Ryan, Ryan.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  Artificial intelligence.

• 1:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Dehaney is responding to Buco, saying, "What stage of the cycle is this?" And says, "Launch the nukes, write it all down to zero. Who cares anymore?" Because there's a Business Insider article called, "After three years of forcing myself to love venture capital, I quit and became a silent disco DJ in Bali."

• 1:31:26John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  So, that's where we're at. That's where we're at. But...

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Well, we are at the point in the show where we will bring in our first guest, Blake Dodge from PirateWires. You can go and subscribe at PirateWires.com. Blake, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:31:41Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm great. How are you guys?

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  We're fantastic. What has been keeping you? Well, first, introduce yourself since it's the first time on the show. I'd love a little bit of your background and then some of what you've been focusing on at Pirate Wires recently.

• 1:31:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally. So I basically started my career as a journalist at Business Insider.

• 1:32:03John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  I covered healthcare and then technology. I was doing like big scary investigations with a lot of documents and, you know, secret sources and stuff. And I got a little bit,

• 1:32:22Speaker 05

  not burned out, maybe a little bit burned. I wanted to tell more optimistic stories about what was going on in tech. And so that's why I joined Pirate Wires about a year ago, where I've done a lot of that work, kind of like the white pill case for why you should believe in someone. But then we also do, we do a lot of work that I think centers original thought. And maybe the, kind of in the spirit of the contrarian, we'll look at an issue, what everyone else is saying, and then kind of tell people, actually, but actually, this is what you should think.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Truth.

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so lately, we've been doing a lot of that with the proposed wealth tax.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:33:11Speaker 05

  In California, we've kind of flooded the zone there and been duking it out, actually, with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. So I kind of feel like I'm back at BI all of a sudden.

• 1:33:22John Coogan?

  Exactly. Well, yeah, what has been the response? I mean, you've interviewed a ton of billionaires in California. It feels like the base case is just like everyone leaves, like, maybe they're not all loud about it, but, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's not out there, but like, he did buy a place in Miami, and it seems like he might be a Miami resident soon.

• 1:33:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's kind of two waves. There's people that were like, I'm gonna get out in 2025, so I never have to pay the tax. And there's a second wave, which I think is the Mark Zuckerbergs that are like, I, like, if this goes through, it'll get fought. I might not have to pay it, but then I'm still kind of like, you know, potentially hedging and getting out. And so I think there's, again, this is, we're kind of in the midst of the second wave of people that are like, I might have to pay it once, but I'm certainly not gonna pay it. Every year for the rest of my life.

• 1:34:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, a couple of weeks ago, Mike Slana published a piece where he interviewed more than 20 billionaires in the state of California, which is just like, wow, might make him the most well-sourced tech journalist ever. But they literally all said that they were leaving or planned to leave.

• 1:34:33Speaker 05

  So that's really striking. That's like a meaningful percentage of the total billionaires in California. And what's really interesting is they're not.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  They may be leaving because they don't want to pay the tax, but actually the tax is retroactive, so many of them, many of the folks who are leaving probably will still have to pay it if it goes through, but they're leaving anyway because of the kind of overarching political landscape of California, like they're, they're just kind of over it. And they find the kind of lefty politics to be too risky, not only to build wealth, but to build companies.

• 1:35:19Speaker 05

  There's language in the proposed ballot measure that has really thrown people through a loop where. So the government has this challenge of tallying people's net worth, you know, which is not easy. When it comes to founders of private companies, they're using kind of a shortcut where founders will be presumed to be owners of anything they control. You guys have probably seen the scary math with this on your timelines, but basically since founders often have, their shares often come with outsized voting rights.

• 1:35:59Speaker 05

  What this means is you could be presumed to be an owner of 10 times the value of your actual economic position. And that's all subject to a rebuttal process and stuff. It's not. Supposedly meant to be the final word. Um, but I think founders hear that and it's like, okay, like this is, this is a significant risk um to, to, to the business and to my longevity in the state.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the probability that this actually passes? It feels like something that would be broadly popular amongst a direct, in a direct democracy scenario. I saw some protests that did not seem very widely attended and so it doesn't, it seems like it's hard to marshal 50 million people or 10 million people that are against this because it's not a tax that affects everyone.

• 1:36:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, the pro billionaire protest for some reason was not well attended um in San Francisco. I have no idea why.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not by billionaires.

• 1:37:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like Gary Tan with like one sign.

• 1:37:14Jordi Hays?

  Did Gary go?

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  I don't think he went.

• 1:37:17Speaker 05

  I actually don't think he went. Um, yeah, so the politics on the other side are a bit better um because the headline of this whole thing is let's tax billionaires 5% of their net worth one time for this like um, you know, emergency of paying for healthcare for poor people. And so for Medicaid.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:42Speaker 05

  And so I think that does have a certain political appeal if it does make it on the ballot. We're sort of hearing like mixed reviews on its chances. Mike did some reporting that went out just today actually that suggests their signature gathering maybe a little bit behind. And then you have a ton of opposition in state, like Gavin Newsom hates this thing. He's been meeting with Dave Reagan, the head of the union who sponsored the ballot measure to try and get him to stop. There's also like teachers' unions and kind of some surprising adversaries.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, there's other unions that are like, hey, you're gonna, you're, you're trying to, you're, you're trying to get this tax for purely your own benefit. Like we, you gotta cut us in. So it's like the unions, even if they might have been in favor of it, if they were gonna get a piece of it, there's, there's quite a number of groups that are just saying like. I don't want this to happen if I'm not getting right is that is that

• 1:38:44Speaker 05

  like actually that is kind of how it works yeah um because the unions and different special interests use the ballot proposition process to raise money like or to to to get more funding streams and um Mike learned specifically that the teachers union is feeling kind of left out in this particular scenario um

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  how how have the um how how is Reagan reacted to everyone leaving how are they are they processing this because because you know play this out

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  yeah you have a number in mind you're like I'm getting 5% of 60 people's wealth and that's probably like a couple billion dollars and then there's only and then 20 leave and you're like okay now I'm getting like 3 billion and then another 20 like now I'm getting 1 billion

• 1:39:35Jordi Hays?

  yeah there's also an insane power law

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  yeah right oh yeah sure

• 1:39:38Jordi Hays?

  so

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  the biggest ones leave of course

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  the people that stay might be the

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  the guy who's at 1.2 is like ah I guess I'm good for my 20 mil you can take it

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  yeah I mean so far the the folks behind the ballot measure have not acknowledged that people are actually in fact leaving um they continue to call wealth flight largely a myth um which is crazy we'll be talking these people on Twitter like we literally spoke to to 20 of them they literally are leaving the state it's not a myth but they point to research um mainly looking at the movement of millionaires and just generally wealthy people after taxes are increased and it's true that in those cases there's not a lot of mobility but I think they have

• 1:40:32Speaker 05

  made the mistake of assuming billionaires are the same

• 1:40:35Jordi Hays?

  yeah is is part of the strategy that uh this is the best possible branding for attacks like this and and this type of like campaign focused on billionaires one time is how you get something like this passed then once it's passed you'll have the ability to kind of like reduce uh reduce the set of requirements to qualify for it and you can eventually get down and be um eating off of the plate of all Californians middle class etc

• 1:41:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm actually, I'm staring at a quote that I have here in my last story. There's a couple of academics whose work like heavily influenced this wealth tax and pretty much all wealth taxes globally. One of those men is advocating for a 2% globally coordinated billionaire tax where all of the countries kind of get together and agree they're gonna do this.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like a one world government?

• 1:41:35Speaker 05

  I literally in this quote have a screenshot of Michael Gibson's summary of the Teal Antichrist lectures. So yeah, he says, "It's clearly far from enough, but also what history shows is that what's most difficult is to move from zero to something positive. And once you have something positive, even if it's 2%, then it opens up a realm of possibilities." And so they say it's one time, they say it's an emergency, but clearly...

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  What's the takeaway from the Netherlands? They passed this 36% unrealized capital gains tax. It excludes, I think, real estate and startup equity, but what's the thought process there? It seems super bearish for the country as a whole. But any learnings?

• 1:42:32Speaker 05

  I haven't looked at that one specifically. I know that internationally, these wealth taxes do have a pretty dismal outlook. The cycle is kind of...

• 1:42:45Jordi Hays?

  It's very American to be like, "Ah, we can make it work." It failed everywhere else, but it'll work here.

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's funny too, the...

• 1:42:57Speaker 05

  They're still saying wealth fight is a myth, but part of why these other wealth taxes tend to go poorly is because the wealth leaves.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:04Speaker 05

  So.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  Can you give us a white pill, something that I don't think from a comms perspective, don't tax me is going to be effective for the billionaire class, but what should they be focused on in a world where a lot of people are seeing billions of dollars in wealth creation from what they see as slop, what they see as scams, what they see as, you know, variety of, you know, water usage, energy price, blah, blah, blah. What are the white pills that you think tech has delivered or is in the process of delivering over the past few years and into the future?

• 1:43:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's the question of the hour because inequality isn't, you know, continues to get worse and kind of fuels the politics behind these things.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:55Speaker 05

  Um, I'm kind of a gundo stan, like I, I believe in this patriotic vision for tech.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:05Speaker 05

  And this idea of keeping regular people in mind and building businesses that last and create value and don't just kind of addict people to things that they shouldn't be doing or shouldn't be spending their money on.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:23Speaker 05

  Um, and I think, you know, who knows what billionaires could do, like, there's a lot of ideas out there. Mike Solan actually just wrote a Christmas wishlist for billionaires with like 20 of these really beautiful white pill ideas.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 05

  Um, one of the easiest things is, you know, building like beautiful public works, libraries, statues, like things that people can see with their own eyes and feel gratitude about, whereas right now I feel like-

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, it's not that compelling to be like, don't hate me, I built this short format.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  Instead of like the public library, it has the Rockefeller name on it or something. Like, there's a lot of examples as you walk through New York City where you see a beautiful building and you're like, "Oh yeah, and that's free to the public now." I'm a big fan of like the Hearst Castle, like William Randolph Hearst, like just built this castle for his entire life, spent all his money, died before it was even done, and then it just becomes like public good.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Or even in California, the like really ramping up something like an adopt-a-highway program, like driving around LA, the roads are just so, so, so bad.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the tangible, you know, the tangible thing that you can see is very, very, it's very impactful as opposed to like the anonymous donation that just kind of works its way through the economy. Might be more impactful, but certainly less grounded in reality.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Anyway, where can people find you? Sign up for PirateWires, follow you on Axe, where else are you active?

• 1:45:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I'm on Axe, I'm at DodgeBlakePirateWires.com. We're covering all this stuff every week.

• 1:46:05Speaker 05

  We've really flooded the zone and, yeah, and I feel like too, we're pro-tech in the sense of not being anti, but we also tend to ground things in a set of values, which I think is a little, well, I love it personally.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  I'm glad, that's fantastic.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us, and we will talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And with that, we will kick off the Lambda Lightning round, because we have Freddie DeBarre from Substack. He's an independent writer, and we're bringing Freddie into the TVPAM Ultra Dome from the Restream Radio Room. Freddie, how you doing?

• 1:46:58Speaker 06

  Pretty good, although, you know, from Substack still never sounds as cool.

• 1:47:01John Coogan?

  Sorry.

• 1:47:03Speaker 06

  The Wall Street Journal or whatever, whatever anybody says about like independent media, it's just never going to catch up, but that's okay.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  From social media.

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Do you think Substack should do a bundle? Do you think Substack should do a bundle? This is a big debate.

• 1:47:16Speaker 06

  It's the thing is, is like, it's like the same question about like, um, why can't I just pay a dollar for the New York Times article I want? Because the reason why is like the finances just don't work. I would like if I would love to be able to do that from a standpoint of like getting people to read my stuff, but my financial life would collapse. Like, like it's, it's getting that, that regular income in that sort of makes this possible.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think my view on it is, I think the, uh, like a, a bundle that is just a, is systematized via a platform is going to struggle. But a bundle that where you get four or five writers that just basically say, we're going to build a media company together, that can work.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Because there's just so many other small things you need to do around compensation and what's fair and who's doing what and all these different things that I think are, uh, when you have a bunch of personalities coming together, it's hard to just have it be entirely in code.

• 1:48:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on.

• 1:48:16Speaker 06

  The problem is that like eventually if you bundle enough people, you just have a newspaper and I probably wouldn't get into the newspaper business in the 21st century.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  I love newspapers though. I got, I got.

• 1:48:25Speaker 06

  Oh, I love them, but I, I'm not investing in one of those.

• 1:48:28John Coogan?

  No, no, I, I think it's a, it's a, the time, the days are numbered. I might be the last person subscribing. Uh, anyway, uh, give us a little bit of your background since the first time on the show. Uh, how'd you get to Substack? And then, uh, I want to talk about your wager and the future of AI, the impact on the economy, all of that.

• 1:48:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I, I mean, I'm a writer. I, you know, was an academic. I was in academia for years. I used to work for the City University of New York. But now, frankly, I find not having a boss or a schedule or ever having to get up on any particular day to be very attractive. And now I just write books and I write my Substack and, you know, it's enabled me to buy a house and, you know, so it's, you know, it's a pretty good living.

• 1:49:16John Coogan?

  Living the dream. So tell me about your wager. How did this happen? What is, how did you come to define the, the, the actual bet? And what's at stake?

• 1:49:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I, I'm frustrated by the AI conversation. I think that it is, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of a mutton Bailey argument. A mutton Bailey. Yeah, so my Bailey's, yeah, for those at home, it's just like, you are, you make a very sort of extravagant argument. And when challenged, you retreat to a simpler and easier to defend argument. So you might say, the Christian God is real and built the universe and he rules over everything. And then when you're challenged, you say, oh, well, God's just a feeling and God's in the, in the wind and whatever, right? That's like a mutton Bailey. I just think that that's all over AI where the CEO of

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  Google is saying that this is bigger than fire and electricity. And people are saying it's going to end death, etc. But then when challenged, it's like, hey, you know, these LLMs, like, you know, they, they might make, like, you know, going through legal documents, you know, of much more efficient processors, this constant sort of back and forth. As far as the wager goes, the people in the AI world kind of come from this sort of rationalist, yeah, Silicon Valley sort of culture. And they say you should be very sort of objective and specific in your predictions, and you should put money on them. And so Scott Alexander is a guy I've known for a long time, the blogger of State Star Codex and now Vastrol

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  Codex 10. He is a AI enthusiast. He was a signatory on the AI 2027 document.

• 1:50:57Speaker 06

  So I just, I challenged Scott and said, I believe that three years from now, we'll be in a more or less normal economy. And that was chosen because, you know, AI 2027, you know, this is like going to 2029. So I felt like it was giving him enough sort of wiggle room. And I just defined a bunch of economic indicators and said that if any one of these indicators are violated, he'll win the bet and I'll lose.

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:51:22Speaker 06

  And the reason to do that is just, I'm, I'm looking for someone to put their money where their mouth is about like, is this actually going to cause a white collar apocalypse and all these economic sort of things? And I mean, he said no and would prefer to do a 10 year version. So we're kind of looking at that right now.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Okay, so I have some of these. Unemployment must stay under 18%. That, what do you have now, four or 5%? That feels like-

• 1:51:48Speaker 06

  But see, but this is, this is the point.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:51Speaker 06

  This, this is the Martin Bailey, right? Dario Amode, the CEO of Anthropic, last week in a interview with the New York Times said that within the next couple of years, 50% of all jobs are going to be destroyed, right?

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  He said 50% of all jobs? I thought it was early stage white collar labor.

• 1:52:09Speaker 06

  No, no, no, no, no. Look, look it up. He's, he said 50% of all the jobs in the economy are going to be eliminated, right? And this is the thing that bothers me. This is why I made the bet.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Cause I ran, I, yeah, I actually ran the numbers on the new argument, the Bailey, which is entry level white collar work. I mean, the US economy is only 60% white collar, early stage is a couple percent of that. And so you're at a percentage of a percentage and quickly, if you lose 50% of that, the unemployment rate goes from 5% to 8%, 9%. Like that statement, that new statement can be true, but it cannot be, it can simultaneously be not that disastrous.

• 1:52:45Speaker 06

  Right. So the, the CEO, not the CEO, but the, um,

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:48Speaker 06

  The, the head of AI science at Microsoft just made a very similar sort of pronouncement.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:54Speaker 06

  Um, and, and this is what I find just endlessly frustrating about this conversation is it cannot simultaneously be true, that we are imminently facing a replacement of an immense number of jobs in the economy thanks to AI. But also 18% is like a extravagant figure for me to set for this bet, right? If you, if you really believe these things. And so I, I'm just never sure how seriously these AI people take it, in part because-

• 1:53:27Speaker 06

  The CEO of Anthropic and the head of AI at Microsoft and almost everyone else who gets quoted in this domain has a direct financial incentive to exaggerate the impact of AI.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, I mean, Scott Alexander did take the bet, though, so he's putting his money where the, where his mouth is and, and certainly on the other side of this, correct?

• 1:53:50Speaker 06

  Well, we, we are looking at the, at the conditions. He wants to do 10 years instead of three.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:53:56Speaker 06

  And so this is, it's actually turned into a kind of an interesting econometric debate, right? So people are saying, where did you get 18% unemployment for, for, then you're something like 40 conditions I listed or something like that.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, there's a ton here.

• 1:54:08Speaker 06

  And I said that, um, we had 15% unemployment, you know, five and a half years ago.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:15Speaker 06

  Right? Because of COVID.

• 1:54:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:16Speaker 06

  And what I'm trying to do is to set up the bet in such a way that a non-AI source is not going to screw me, right? You know?

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:54:25Speaker 06

  And the, and the great depression, which obviously was not AI-driven, we had 28% unemployment at some point, right? So, um, and it's actually led to a kind of interesting debate about like, how do you define a normal economy without letting the natural swings that are common to a capitalist economy?

• 1:54:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was listening to, I was listening to a conversation about AI apocalypses and the person that was being interviewed was like, well, my P doom from AI is extremely low, but I think the chance of nuclear war is like 5%. And so it's like they had a high P doom, but not because of AI, which is like a very hard thing to wrestle with. And that's where you're getting at.

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is, uh, is, is, I, I've talked on the show a bunch about a bunch of these different groups using basically fear as, as, as a kind of motivator to get the, to kind of bend the world, right? So if you want people to adopt AI, you should tell them that it's going to, you know, create such, such insane changes in the economy that any company that doesn't adopt as much AI as possible today is gonna, is gonna be destroyed. Or if you are trying to get, uh, you know, as many young people to adopt a product, you tell them, well, like, all jobs are gonna be wiped out. Or if you're pitching a bunch of, uh, if you're pitching investors on Wall Street,

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  you can say, well, you know, all these jobs are gonna go away. So like, it's effectively.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the, the incentive to use kind of like fear is very obvious in all of this. And I think it's now coming back to bite a lot of these people because the broad, broader populace is saying, I don't want AI. I'm good. I don't need it.

• 1:56:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Even though they're using the products and they love them. Like, almost everyone can tell you an incredible story about AI in their personal life. Like, even if it's as simple as like, I made this like, cool illustration for, you know, my grandma for her birthday, and she loved it, right? Or, I used it to learn about this thing. And so, I think it's interesting, is like, using this like intense fear-based marketing to justify, to kind of catalyze adoption, you know, fun, you know, success with fundraising, et cetera. But then again, it's kind of coming back to bite in the sense that everyone's saying, well, no data, I don't want a data center in my backyard. I don't, I don't want my company to even be investing in this, et cetera.

• 1:56:55Speaker 06

  I mean, speaking of fear, I mean, you just mentioned nuclear war, right? And it's, I, I just think that you can believe, as I do, that AI is going to be a very meaningful technology. But the fact that people are more scared of a robot apocalypse than nuclear war. Look, right now, this, Russia has multiple Bore class nuclear submarines off the coast of, the east coast of America that have the capability of raining nuclear fire down, thermonuclear fire down, all up and down the seaboard, right? The eastern seaboard. I mean, like, you know, a single modern thermonuclear bomb detonated above Central Park

• 1:57:35Speaker 06

  would destroy eighty-plus percent of the buildings in Manhattan and hit parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, et cetera, right? And that, and again, this is the Martin Bailey thing, right? Which is like, you might say, well, that's a very extreme scenario. But every day, I am opening up my web browser and reading about, oh, AI is going to exterminate the human race. Or, you know, AI is going to put us into this utopia where no one is ever going to die again, right? And it's like, Part of what I'm trying to do is just claw out like a normal space in this, right? To just say, there is a very obvious future where these tools are meaningful, eliminate

• 1:58:16Speaker 06

  some jobs, are have a lot of cultural importance, but where we're not suddenly faced with a fundamentally different version of human life.

• 1:58:26John Coogan?

  So if it's not nuclear war, and it's not fire, and it's not electricity, it's also not the fax machine, are we talking about mobile, cloud, the internet, like, how big is this thing? What does your world model look like for how AI progresses and diffuses through society?

• 1:58:47Speaker 06

  Sure, I we have to understand those are different kinds of importance and different kinds of influence. So you've mentioned the internet and the mobile phone, okay? Obviously, the internet and specifically the smartphone, the iPhone, have had massive cultural and social impacts on the United States. It would have shocked people in the mid 1990s to learn that we have about the same productivity growth and about the same GDP growth in this country now that we did back then, right? Like, many, many people were invested in this idea that this sort of this missing GDP growth, you know, we're at half of what we were in the mid 1960s. A lot of people thought, okay, the internet's

• 1:59:28Speaker 06

  the thing that's going to restore us. The internet is very meaningful and it's very influential, right? And yet economically, it hasn't had the effects that are expected. And that's just like, that's how history works, you know, that's that's just like there's there is a you always have to bake into percentage to the degree to which like there's regression to the mean, right? Like, we always seem to find ourselves way back to this sort of mundane reality. And I look at things like when everybody got so depressed and disappointed after ChatGPT 5 was released, because they thought it was going to be AGI. And you had all of these lonely guys who were like, oh, this is just going to change life forever, and now everything's going to change. It's like, no, it's things are

• 2:00:10Speaker 06

  going to change, but slowly and in a distributed fashion, and you have to keep planning for normal life.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Counterpoint, maybe this time's different.

• 2:00:21Speaker 06

  Maybe this time is different, but absolutely. So show me. I mean, here's the beauty of all this. The beauty of all of this is like, if this, if the real stuff happens, you're not going to have to convince me, right? Like, if we really have AGI the way people think we are, no one's going to disagree because the effects are going to be so profound, there's going to be nothing to disagree about.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Okay. How did you interpret this latest piece in the Financial Times from Eric Brian Falsen? I can't pronounce his last name, but it says, "While initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures reveal that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter. This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input, is the hallmark of productivity growth. His own updated analysis suggests

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  a U.S. productivity increase of 2.7% for 2025. This is nearly doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade. It feels like we're seeing glimmers of something changing. Is that not a sign?"

• 2:01:39Speaker 06

  I mean, we'll see, right? We have to actually like, look at the, at the numbers as they come down the pike. We also have to be aware that like, there's a lot of built-in incentive for people to ascribe these changes to AI. So for example, cutting a lot of jobs is very unpopular, and firms tend to be sensitive to that unpopularity, right? And saying, well, hey, AI came, we didn't make the decision, we just, we had to sort of, like, that's a very sort of easy thing to do.

• 2:02:08John Coogan?

  No CEO would ever do that. That doesn't make any sense.

• 2:02:10Speaker 06

  To, like, what, to say that AI was the reason to do it? Yeah.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  Of course. They'll use anything as their cover.

• 2:02:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, and so I just, in general, I caution people to say, look, it's like I've said this before. You know, when I was in high school, a very distinguished scientist came to my science class. And he was on like the board on like the National Science, some sort of board of the National Science Foundation. He was like a geneticist and he came and he said like that he envied and also felt bad for us because the the Human Genome Project was going to so radically change human life that we were going to see things that he couldn't imagine, but also the job of doctor wouldn't exist in 10 years. And this, I was in high school in like 1998, this probably happened, so you know.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Studying medicine.

• 2:03:00Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:03:01Jordi Hays?

  And you quit.

• 2:03:02Speaker 06

  Right, right, you know, like if you can actually, but this is, this is an exercise that people can do at home, which is to go back, like just to Google and look at the predictions about what people thought the Human Genome Project would do.

• 2:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:14Speaker 06

  Obviously, genetic research in general is very important. But there was a real belief among very intelligent and highly credentialed people that we were on the verge of something absolutely humanity changing. And life's more complicated than that. And again, like, I just, I want AI boosters to do more showing and less predicting. Right? Show me, right? Like, show me the change instead of predicting the change.

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is really fun.

• 2:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we have this, we have this, we have these debates, we have these, you know, kind of debates and conversations all the time. Specifically, the, there's a popular influencer on Instagram that every time a tech company does a bunch of layoffs and says, we did this because of AI, he takes that and like makes this crazy story up around how, you know, AI is just immediately causing all this job loss. And I'm just looking at it as like, I know the company, they had a lot of bloat. They're getting some, they're getting some

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  Efficiency.

• 2:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Efficiency increase because of AI. But certainly, it wasn't like the 2,000 people or whatever

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  were sitting there being like, oh, yeah, I just on boarded this new agent and now it does everything that I did, including going to all the meetings and. You know, sitting around all day. So

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's incentive on both sides, both the AI boosters and the AI bears sort of have an incentive to be like, it's going too fast. It's going, it's, it's going wrong. If you, if you love AI, you want to say it's going really fast. If you don't like AI, you want to say it's going too fast. They're both sort of aligned. So you get this like super cycle. Very fascinating. Well, have a great rest of your day and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have Sohail Prasad from Destiny.

• 2:05:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:05:11Speaker 07

  Hey, how's it going?

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 2:05:12Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to finally have you on the show. We met once, I think it was too long ago to remember what we were even talking about, but it's great to, great to see you again and a lot going on in your world. So why don't you kick off quick kind of background on yourself? And then let's talk about Destiny.

• 2:05:30Speaker 07

  Sure. Uh, great to see you. Thanks for having me. Um, founded Forge, a stock market for private companies back in 2014. Took that public in 2022 and then Schwab bought us last year. And in 2020, started a company called Destiny to bring public access to private tech. So along the way, I realized that there's such a big inequity. Um, most people in the world that use, you know, all the companies that are advertisers for you guys that are tech companies in our everyday lives, you have no way of owning that. And wanted to create a way for anyone to own a piece of that future from the convenience of their brokerage account.

• 2:06:11Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. I've been, yeah, following Destiny since you, since you launched it. How long did it actually take to get it up and running? There's a number of groups now that have seen what you've done, or maybe had a similar idea and are trying to bring products to market. Uh, but you've been, you've got a nice little head start. I guess, I guess the journey really did start with Forge. Uh, was a, uh, probably couldn't have pulled Destiny off without having, having done that first and had all of that understanding of the market. But, um, but yeah, what, what are, what were kind of like, what was the logic around the decision for, for kind of the current structure and all the decisions that made, that went into, uh, building the initial, uh, product and then kind of where is it going from here?

• 2:06:56Speaker 07

  Sure. Thinking about what the dream product is, it kind of looks like QQQ for private tech. That's a dream. Anyone can buy it on any given day. Anyone can sell it. It has exposure to a broad base of private tech companies. Now structurally, there are definitely challenges. You know, an open-end ETF, you don't have enough liquidity in the underlying private companies that would support the creation of shares on a given basis or redemption on a daily basis. So we looked across the market at what kind of structures are possible and ultimately decided that a listed closed-end fund gets that intraday liquidity. It's listed on the NYSE. It's accessible, but you're still able

• 2:07:39Speaker 07

  to go invest in these companies. So it took us quite a while. We spent 19 months waiting for registration with the SEC. The first time, we listed in March of 2024. And then we spent another 15 months waiting for the SEC to approve our shelf.

• 2:07:58John Coogan?

  Overnight success. I love it. Walk me through the mechanics of the closed-end fund. That means that you you own shares in private companies. When I buy shares in Destiny and then I go to sell them, I'm not selling them to you. I'm selling them to Jordy. Is that right? Or someone else in the market?

• 2:08:19Speaker 07

  Exactly. So we trade intraday on the NYSE. Market just closed, but anytime you want, you can go into your Schwab account. You can buy DXYZ. You can sell it. And it's all effectively secondary market trading. You're not creating or redeeming shares. Now, last year, we got approval from the SEC or got effectiveness to raise up to $1 billion opportunistically. And that allows us to issue new shares, use the capital we raised from that, and then invest in new companies.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  Okay. So if there's a if there's a delta in NAV to market cap, it's because there's expectations about what you'll buy with that with those shares, maybe?

• 2:08:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, early on, there was a huge delta as people found out that this was even possible back in 2024. And I think that was just people realizing, oh, wow, I can actually do this. I don't have to go anywhere. I don't have to make a new account. I can buy this. And people got really excited. And now, you know, that premium has come down just as we've gotten more mature. I kind of, we had a decision to make when we brought it to the market, which is we wanted to have a portfolio of the top 100 private tech companies. Should we wait until we build a whole portfolio? Should we just list it with no companies in the portfolio? And we decided, hey, we'll build it effectively in public. So we've listed with 20 some odd companies. Today, we have 35 and we're kind of growing that over time.

• 2:09:43Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, what were the conversations like originally with companies? Obviously, you're not always buying direct access or not getting direct exposure, but you're buying into SPVs or things like that. But what were the conversations like in the beginning? How are they going now with, with Robin Hood's new product? It sounds like at least some of it is, is actually being

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  like authorized by the company or they're like effectively signing off on it or cool with it. I'm sure in other cases, companies are less excited about it, but like, give us, give us the, an overview there.

• 2:10:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, but with the secondary market, it's always even for the last, you know, 15 years, been case by case basis. Some companies have really active secondary markets and they facilitate it. Others try to keep more of a tight control. From day one with Destiny, what we did is make sure we have flexibility to invest across the board. So we've invested in companies that are doing primary rounds. We recently invested in a company called Skilled AI. SoftBank led that round and we were a part of that round. We partnered with Beast Industries and are working directly with them. And then at the same time, we can also opportunistically buy through secondary markets. So sometimes there are employees or early investors that need liquidity and they come directly to us and we can buy from them.

• 2:11:07Jordi Hays?

  What part of the, part of why Destiny is exciting and other products are exciting is that, is that every, anyone can get exposure to the asset class. The, the, the challenge is that oftentimes by the time you know a company's amazing, and it should be in the Destiny 100, it's already been marked up to 50, 60, you know, billion or whatever the number is.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  330.

• 2:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes eight, you know, in the case of SpaceX, you know, hundreds of billions. What are your plans around, obviously picking companies at the super early stage is hard. It's also very risky. Like, part of the appeal of Destiny is that you're, you're getting exposure to companies that we already know are like solid, they're well capitalized, they're hopefully leaders in their market. But how are you thinking about like qualification for, for Destiny? And would you ever go earlier stage? Is that too risky? All that stuff?

• 2:12:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's one of the reasons we decided to call it the Destiny Tech 100 and target building out a portfolio of 100. You want to have enough range in there so you can have some of the early unicorns. You call it one, two, three billion dollar companies that have, in many cases, product market fit. They have growth, but they have, you know, more room to grow, as well as at the same time, some of the larger companies that are tens, now hundreds of billions of dollars and beyond. And so we will have over time a mix of those companies so that we can kind of get some of those earlier stage, albeit still late-stage bets, and others that are, you know, the blue chip mature companies.

• 2:12:51John Coogan?

  Oh, how do you think about the actual investing strategy? Is, are there any like, I mean, you mentioned like post-unicorn, are there heuristics or firm rules that are in a bylaw, in bylaws? Or are you just sort of like the fund manager and you're tasked by the shareholders to make the best investments that are according to your own intuition, skill, obviously your incredible background, all of that. But how do you think about the actual capital allocation question?

• 2:13:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, so right now, the portfolio is in progress. So you look, sometimes we might be overweight one company for a while. SpaceX was greater than 40% of our portfolio. That's come down. And so we're kind of in this building phase. As we reach a more steady state, we want to be reflective of the late-stage venture-backed ecosystem. So we actually publish rules and eligibility criteria on our website. We're like, you know, companies had to raise recent rounds of financing, the other kind of growth metrics and TAM that we look at. But generally speaking, we don't want it to be, you know, whatever we like on a given Monday. We want

• 2:14:05Speaker 07

  to say, hey, we want overall late-stage venture-backed exposure. And where we get to use our discretion is, hey, what's the right time to buy this? What's the right structure? What's the right pricing? Things like that, where if you just had an index, you would be a forced buyer at any price, at any structure. And so it gives us the ability to go and find unique opportunities in the primary secondary markets and actually invest behind that.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  What's the process when a company in the portfolio IPOs? You have a number, a number of portfolio companies that will be IPO-ing or should IPO this year. There's a lockup period, and then I imagine you guys plan to exit those positions and then recycle the capital. But how are you thinking about that?

• 2:14:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we want to be long-term capital partners for the company. And so generally, once a company goes public, we're not selling our shares immediately. We'll wait for a few years. Instacart was one of the companies in the portfolio that went public, and we waited for a few years before we slowly started divesting that position. And so that's how we're trying to balance, you know, the two things, which is our public shareholders are looking to us for exposure into private markets, but we also want to be great partners for companies and smooth their transition as they go public.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Well, congrats on all the progress.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  What was the, so, so what was the, talk about the most recent acquisition or investments? You guys are in Anthropic for $100 million breakdowns for the new companies.

• 2:15:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we just announced a couple of weeks ago that we closed a $100 million investment, a secondary purchase in Anthropic. I mentioned skilled AI.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  He's like, I can't let you get out of here without a gong. I knew it.

• 2:15:59Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Very cool. Well, yeah, we're excited to continue to follow Destiny and the overall, overall market. You guys have definitely led, led the charge. Second time leading the charge, it felt like with Ford. You guys were very ahead of the curve and ahead here as well. So, great to have you on.

• 2:16:19Speaker 07

  Thanks. More to come.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Amazing. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on Meta. And before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. It's Jensen's birthday from Nvidia. And guess what? He was born on the same exact day, same year as Michael Jordan. I thought-

• 2:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Really is the Michael Jordan of GPUs.

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Dylan Avriscotto on our team is such an underrated poster, got 8,000 likes just with two screenshots. One, Jensen's birthday, the other, Michael Jordan.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  Playmaker.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  February 17, 1963. Happy birthday to Jensen, and thank you for all you do. I'm going to tell you about Shopify before we bring in our next guest. Shopify is a 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. And without further ado, let's bring in our next guest, Travis from Nash Optical. Travis, how are you doing?

• 2:17:31Speaker 08

  Hey, nice to meet you guys.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you too. Thanks for hopping on.

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  Big, big, big day.

• 2:17:36John Coogan?

  Huge day. We saw the news-

• 2:17:37Speaker 08

  What else happened on February 17? We, we launched on February 17 as well.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. Add it to the list. How much did you raise? Break it down for us.

• 2:17:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, 50 million total across our seed and Series A.

• 2:17:53Speaker 08

  Nice.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:17:56Jordi Hays?

  First time on the show, before we get into Mesh, introduce yourself, what got you into this? All that good stuff.

• 2:18:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, I'm Travis Brashears, one of the co-founders and CEO here at Mesh Optical. And I worked, I've been working on lasers since I was in high school and with Professor at UCSB,

• 2:18:17Speaker 08

  Philip Lubin, and then I went to Berkeley.

• 2:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting. So in high school, you were, you were basically studying UCSB. You're studying the blade, the laser beam.

• 2:18:28Speaker 08

  Yep, I was studying the laser. That's right. Been one with the laser since I was, you know, 15. And then I went to SpaceX and started working on the Space Laser Com System there and got to the really fortunate opportunity to design and I worked with a really awesome team there on the Free Space Laser Com Terminal.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  Cool. So talk about-

• 2:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Living the space laser dream. Incredible stuff.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  So talk about, talk about the actual product, you know, how much of this is still R&D, ready for commercialization? Then I want to talk about the implications, like how this product actually rolls out into the, into the world.

• 2:19:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So our first product is a pluggable transceiver that is used in all of the GPU clusters. So you just mentioned Jensen, like the Nvidia GPU clusters for every one GPU, there's like four to five of these optical interconnects that help connect all the GPUs together through the networking, through making sure that they can be like a coherent cluster. And so the first product we're making is what we call like a linear pluggable optic and it deletes a really expensive and costly, like power hungry thing that is called a re-timer or DSP. And so it allows the people who deploy compute to save a lot of power. And so that first product is just simply allowing those GPUs to connect

• 2:19:50Speaker 08

  over optical and deleting some power, power hungry chip inside.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  And this is within a data center or in between different data centers?

• 2:19:59Speaker 08

  This is within the data center. Yeah, so our first, yeah, our first product is, is yeah, within the data center, they connect them with fiber optic cable on either end. Um, and uh, yeah, and so the

• 2:20:10Jordi Hays?

  And these are, these are already, already in market. You're selling these.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:15Speaker 08

  Well, ours are, we're standing up the production line, so we, we care a lot about co-locating the engineering talent with the manufacturing. Um, one of the key things we learned at SpaceX is to, to be like right where the stuff is built. So behind me is the manufacturing line and um, we'll start testing in the next month here, uh, some samples and then start scaling production uh, right after that and um, trying to get to, you know, millions of units in 2027 is like really where the, the high volume starts to come into play.

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Uh, i- i- is this the kind of thing where it's really just a, it's execution risk? Like, can we build this at scale? And if we can build them, there's insane uh, demand and it's, and it's less demand risk?

• 2:21:01Speaker 08

  Yeah, the demand we sort of think of as infinite because, you know, the more intelligence we have, uh, the more intelligence we have, it, it just like is more compute. And so whenever you see people deploying more and more compute, they need more and more transceivers. And so um, as intelligence scales with compute, so does transceiver demand.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Uh, fifty million dollars in the bank. Uh, where are you based in the company? How big's the team? What does the next twelve to eighteen months look like for you?

• 2:21:30Speaker 08

  Yeah, we, we're based in Los Angeles. We're in Gardena, California. Uh,

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. The home of lasers.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you. Uh, Los Angeles needed a win.

• 2:21:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah, a little outside El Segundo, but uh, yeah, we're gonna bring Gardena onto the map as the, the laser hub of, of the world. Um,

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:21:50Speaker 08

  And uh, yeah, so we, we're about fifteen people now and, and growing quickly and need to move to a bigger building now.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Are there like two buyers for this? Like, are you gonna do deals with like every data center builder, every NeoCloud? Just the hyperscalers? Are you gonna be a supply chain partner like just to Nvidia or just to AMD? Like, what does your business look like in like that scale?

• 2:22:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, we want to sell, I mean, my, our long-term goal here is to be able to connect all, all things with optical photons and whether that's an interconnect in a data center or an interconnect in space, whether that's free space or in a fiber. But to start out to answer your question specifically, like, anyone who, who deploys compute on the ground, we will try to sell to. That could be a NeoCloud, as you mentioned, it could be a hyperscaler. We have a strategy that we want to follow to kind of follow our volume, match our volume to our potential like future customers and make sure we don't start all the way at like really high volume because obviously we need to scale our line.

• 2:22:57Speaker 08

  We care a lot about getting our manufacturing done here in the United States. One thing about all these transceivers that are made today, they're all made overseas. They're made mostly in China and Thailand. And so, no one has like really stood up these high-precision, what they're called flip chip die bonding or pick and place machines. Like, when we bought the most high-volume flip chip die bonder, they asked for your Chinese social credit number on it. Because no one buys them here.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Wow. What, do you think that we'll get any mesh products in space in the next five years?

• 2:23:39Speaker 08

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:23:40John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:23:42John Coogan?

  2027, you think what I'm thinking? Valentine's Day gifts.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Here we go, for that special person in your life.

• 2:23:48Speaker 08

  Lasers for Valentine's?

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  Crazier things have happened.

• 2:23:52Jordi Hays?

  We're big, we're big fans of.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Girlfriend.

• 2:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they like, they like, they keep saying they want some metal, you know? So get them some, get them some hardware.

• 2:24:02Speaker 08

  I was a, I was a laser cat for Halloween once.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  No way, oh, that's cool, yeah. Talk about, like, what is the shape of like actually working in the factory? Is this stuff risky or does it all happen in a clean room? How much of this is like a TSMC-type fab? Like, what is it like today?

• 2:24:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, the clean room is here. We actually took some panels off to get the machines in. But yeah, it's a pretty, like, we take the approach of like question the requirements and delete the part or process if we need to. And, you know, we start in like a semi-dirty environment to make sure, like, we don't want to go overboard, right? You don't want to just go all in on a clean room when you don't have to. So actually, back at SpaceX, we started making the space lasers in a tent. And so, like, there's actually a tent behind me, or in front of me, sorry. And so, like, you don't want to go too all in on like, it has to be in a clean room.

• 2:25:03Speaker 08

  You do tests, end-of-line testing and qualification to make sure that like, if it starts to impact your yield, then you would implement procedures and processes to keep it cleaner. This is like a pretty good clean room, but not the best. And so, we'll see how our yield looks with this one. And we'll implement stronger strategies if we need to. But, yeah, all of our semiconductor packaging is happening here. And, you know, we get some dies from other foundries that are all outside of Asia. And then we bring them here and package them.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Last question from me. What was the biggest lesson you learned from working at SpaceX?

• 2:25:43Speaker 08

  I mean, just what I said, it's like, question the requirements and delete the part and process. It's like, it's so simple, but it's so useful. And like, when we're designing something, like, you want to try to know why each part is there. So in our design, we've deleted quite a few parts. And most people don't delete that part, but it ends up work. Anytime you delete a part, you delete a potential failure mode. And you want to be like a really reliable system. You need to delete as many parts or processes as possible. It also helps you like assemble things faster. So that was one of the big lessons I learned.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that feels like, I don't know, easy to say, really hard to do in practice. Like, it feels like you have to experience it. Like, I've heard that a million times and like, I'm sure that there's things that I could delete, like even my daily workflow that I haven't figured out how to do. That's, I love that.

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, SpaceX is a company where like, you learn, learning things the hard way, in the most extreme way. Where mostly you ship a soft, you ship a piece of software, it doesn't work. It's like, okay, let's patch it. You ship a rocket, it has some like dependency that you didn't think was maybe that important. And it blows up and you gotta live with that.

• 2:26:55Speaker 08

  Or the whole laser mesh doesn't work, so.

• 2:26:59John Coogan?

  Let's hope that doesn't happen.

• 2:27:00Speaker 08

  That was, you know, like putting a kid in charge of that is really a crazy thing that SpaceX does is they hand the baton to a really young person and put the whole company on, like bet the company on those people. And I think that forges things like within people to be able to deliver and then the delete department process like helps them understand the whole system really well.

• 2:27:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, we are not far from Gardenia.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, come by.

• 2:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, come by for your next appearance. I've got a feeling you'll be back on the show this year.

• 2:27:34Speaker 08

  Great, yeah, I would love to be there. You guys are welcome to come anytime as well.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  I love it. Thank you so much.

• 2:27:39Jordi Hays?

  I love lasers, I would love to.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day, we'll talk soon. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connected in bank accounts, to move money, fight fraud and improve lending, now with AI. And you saw it at the opener. Jordy, get those Juggle balls ready because it's time to tell you about Turbo Puffer. Social release vector in full tech search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 2:28:05Jordi Hays?

  The team sent me these, these little puffers. They're incredible.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Jordy's juggling abilities, very fast.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna be hard to keep here at the studio.

• 2:28:12John Coogan?

  Well, without further ado, we have Evan Spiegel from Snap in the TVP in UltraDome. Good to see you again, Evan. Welcome to the show, welcome back to the show.

• 2:28:23Speaker 08

  Great to have you, thank you so much.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Coming by and stopping by the TVP in UltraDome, always good to have you here.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  You out suited me.

• 2:28:30John Coogan?

  That is a beautiful suit.

• 2:28:31Speaker 09

  It's always a great excuse to wear a suit. My wife was like, where are you going today?

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  I like, I like the buttons that don't show through. I don't know what that's called, but that's a touch of like some, it's very tasteful.

• 2:28:41Speaker 09

  Thank you, I appreciate that.

• 2:28:42John Coogan?

  Are you, are you in, are you following the taste discourse? People are saying that taste is important. Do you have a stance on this?

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  In the context of building

• 2:28:51John Coogan?

  It's more of like a post AI thing, like AI is going to be able to do everything, but not taste. And it's just like, it's sort of always been obvious, but it's also fun to write about. It's fun to talk about. There's a whole bunch of interesting examples, but.

• 2:29:01Speaker 09

  It's funny you say that because our designers are literally becoming engineers right now. So it's kind of like, you know, I mean, if you think about like 10 years ago, right, the even like the power dynamic in a company, the hard part was building things. Right now, the hard part is like having a great idea. So I think taste is important.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  I guess the I guess the question I was joking about earlier was like, there's, there's two ways to build a new consumer product. One is you A B test the color of the button and you just look at the data. And that's more of the engineering mindset. And then there's the tasteful approach, which is maybe like, I just know green is the right color for my brand. Did you engage in both throughout your journey? Did you, is there a place for both? Like, how do you see those two? The gut instinct interfacing with like the engineering reality, like somebody pulls up the chart and they tell you that it's got to be blue, but you know, yellow is right.

• 2:29:51Speaker 09

  I think for us, like, there's a huge difference between like generation and iteration, right? If you're trying to come up with a new idea, it is really important that you can exercise your sort of creative opinion or judgment. I mean, you know, the reason why we chose yellow is there were no other apps in the top 100 that were yellow. So that was like an easy one to stand out. We didn't have to.

• 2:30:10Jordi Hays?

  We monopolized yellow.

• 2:30:11John Coogan?

  Verticalized yellow, yeah.

• 2:30:12Speaker 09

  Us and McDonald's.

• 2:30:15Speaker 09

  But I think, you know, what becomes very important very quickly is that you're able to iterate, you know? So once you put something out there, A B testing, experimenting, that that really helps, especially as you have a big organization, you don't want to bottleneck, you know, people's experiments. So anyone can experiment and learn.

• 2:30:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. One way to think about it is like, I feel like executives thrive if they have great taste because they have a lot of people coming to them with, you know, work or projects. And it's their job to decide like, what are we actually going to focus and prioritize? And now anybody can create like. 20 different concepts for a website and so they're having to choose from that to then go up the chain and decide, okay, which one of these should we actually implement? But there's like, taste is becoming more important because now it's so much faster to just create anything. So at every level of the stack of the organization, you have just like more things to choose from and taste is just choosing. Taste in your personal life is like choosing like, do I get this jacket or that jacket or do I put, use this

• 2:31:15Jordi Hays?

  flooring in my house?

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  How many logos should be on my shirt?

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  That's great. Give us the news. Massive milestone. What happened?

• 2:31:26Speaker 09

  Well, I literally came here for the gong. You know what I mean?

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:31:30Speaker 09

  It's a great strategy.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  We got a bigger gong if you were here last.

• 2:31:33Speaker 09

  In a horse apparently.

• 2:31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did get a bigger gong.

• 2:31:36Speaker 09

  Is this, is this a new hor- is this like for year of the horse?

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  No, we were early. We were early.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  We got a whore!

• 2:31:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we were early. We, it was really funny. It was so funny. So, so we were walking by the store.

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:47Jordi Hays?

  And John and I were walking and I look inside, the store's closed, but all you can see, it's like dark in there and there's this massive, it's at the, yeah, massive horse. And I was like, we need one of those immediately. And John's like, what do you mean? We're not going to be able to get like a horse. And then we look on this website for like a few thousand dollars, you can get this horse. I was like the easiest.

• 2:32:07John Coogan?

  The hardest part of buying a horse was convincing the production team that we actually weren't joking. Cause Jordy sends in the chat, hey, we need a, we need a horse statue. And he's like, oh, this is funny. And then we're like, no, we're serious. Like, okay, he's joking. And we're like, no, actually go figure it out. This is your job. Anyway, we're not here to talk about.

• 2:32:22Speaker 09

  Congratulations on the horse.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:32:24Jordi Hays?

  We got a horse, you got a big milestone.

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  I think the horse was here last time, but it was wrapped in Christmas lights and we had a massive Christmas tree. And there were so many other things going on in the studio. You gave us that very nice Christmas ornament, which we love. You, you signed it. But it was distracting from the horse. But now the horse is front and center. But more importantly, your, your direct revenue is front and center. Give us the news.

• 2:32:44Speaker 09

  Yeah. So we've reached a billion dollar annual run rate on our, oh, wow. Thank you.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  Is the job finished?

• 2:32:59Speaker 09

  And 25 million subscribers.

• 2:33:00John Coogan?

  That's huge.

• 2:33:01Speaker 09

  So I think that's like ESPN size for subscribers, which is like next stop Hulu, you know?

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:05Speaker 09

  Uh, but really exciting for us as we've worked to diversify, you know, our revenue and create this, this whole new business line.

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  What was the reaction?

• 2:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like narrative, narrative violation too around social media, right? There hasn't been a lot of, people will pay for entertainment products, but there hasn't been a bunch of like scaled, actually like a social media product with, uh, you know, that kind of SaaS.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the reaction like when you initially launched subscriptions?

• 2:33:32Speaker 09

  Well, I think what's so cool is people are really passionate about Snapchat and so they want all these new features and they're asking us all the time, like, hey, can you, you know, chat backgrounds or like, can we have a bit emoji pet or whatever it is?

• 2:33:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:43Speaker 09

  And in the past, we'd be like, oh man, like this is really a feature for power users, right? Like we can't build this like for a billion people.

• 2:33:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:50Speaker 09

  So this gave us the justification and the resources, like, okay, fine. Like, you know, pay us two, two bucks a month.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:56Speaker 09

  Have your bit emoji pets and your chat backgrounds and all this fun stuff. And so people just keep the requests coming.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:01Speaker 09

  We keep building all sorts of fun stuff and actually it's great for the team because otherwise we never would have prioritized all these really fun features.

• 2:34:07John Coogan?

  How do people actually submit requests?

• 2:34:09Speaker 09

  Uh, literally email.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Email.

• 2:34:11Speaker 09

  Email customer support, you know, and we do like, you know, research and things.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  Cause a lot of the tech companies, it feels like they're very faceless.

• 2:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Directly.

• 2:34:18Speaker 09

  Well, it's [email protected]. So it's like a little too easy to send. Goes like straight to my phone too. We love that. Yeah.

• 2:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Dangerous, dangerous to say that on the show.

• 2:34:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, what has been the key to scaling revenue there? Has it been just driving increases in ARPU or just onboarding more and more people into the premium product, uh, doing more top of funnel, like bringing in these prosumer users, uh, as net new users, re-engaging people? Like what's been working?

• 2:34:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, a big focus has just been continually dropping new features, letting people know about those features, creating new entry points into the subscription service through those features. One of the big things that we rolled out last year was memory storage. So we've got people who are storing a lot of memories on Snapchat. So we give like five gigs free, but if people want more than five gigs of storage, then they can either pay just for the memory storage or they can join Snapchat Plus.

• 2:35:16John Coogan?

  It's so funny because I remember when Snapchat started, everyone was like, oh, this is genius. They don't have to have any cloud storage costs. And now it's like, oh, well, we're in the business, but we have a monetization scheme on top of it.

• 2:35:29Speaker 09

  Well, 10 years later, it turns out there's a lot of cloud storage costs. We were paying them.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I've seen the Google bill.

• 2:35:37Speaker 09

  Suffering from success.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  Have you seen demand for AI features and what does demand for AI features in a consumer context look like?

• 2:35:45Speaker 09

  Absolutely. I think one of the really exciting things, people don't realize how widely the Snapchat camera is for generative AI, you know, images and videos. I think in Q4, 700 million people use generative AI lenses. So those are like our camera editing tools. And we have a feature called Lens Plus, which basically takes some of the most cutting edge Gen AI features, you know, video generation, those sorts of things, and puts it behind a paywall. So if you want the most advanced Gen AI, you know, image and video editing features, that's part of Lens Plus.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  How have you thought about using camera as the end-to-end editing suite versus sort of bifurcating them, looking at what TikTok and CapCut are separate, edits and Instagram are separate? When do you want to go separate? When do you want to consolidate everything?

• 2:36:28Speaker 09

  Generally, for Snapchat, one of our strengths is how much content is actually created in our camera because it's much more authentic. And what we find today, especially because everything is so overly edited and stylized because everything is created with generative AI, what our community tells us all the time is that we want authentic, original content. So for us, we really focus on stuff that's actually captured and made in our camera rather than uploaded. And even as we think about like the types of content we distribute on Spotlight or, you know, Boost and Spotlight, for example, we're thinking a lot about what's actually made in the Snapchat camera. And this stuff is hilarious, but not edited in the same way that it might be on other platforms.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Have you thought about how

• 2:37:10John Coogan?

  Like agents will take hold in a social media app. I've been trying to think about this, like, you know, the Manus acquisition. Like, what does it look like if I have an agent that can go and, you know, work its way through my social network profile? It's like, I could kind of tell it to like, like every comment that comes in that's positive and it could do some sentiment. I don't know if I actually want that. Like, how does that play out once you get to models that can actually run in the background? It's not just, I ask for a question, I get an answer. Or I say, replace the background with a beautiful forest and it does it. Have you thought about any of that yet?

• 2:37:50Speaker 09

  You know, we, early on, brought My AI into Snapchat, right? And that was like a great proving ground to experiment with things like, you know, personality, memory, all those sorts of things. We're being able to bring My AI into group chats or conversations. Like, so I do think it's been useful in that regard. Certainly, the My AI use case is very utilitarian. Like, we see a lot of like just questions, homework, help, like that kind of stuff. You know, on the Agentic side, I'm much more excited about what's happening inside the business. Like, I think the potential for business transformation is off the charts. I think like, you know, if you look at small and medium sized companies for the last 10, 20 years, they've almost been like left for dead. Everyone's been so excited about mega cap companies. Like, I think the next 10 or 20 years, the efficiencies that small and medium sized businesses

• 2:38:34Speaker 09

  can drive to grow using agents is going to be off the charts. So I think that's like, that to me is where I'm most excited.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  So is anyone writing code anymore? Are you vibe coding stuff now? We see every level of the spectrum. It's either the CEOs committing code or no one's writing code. It's always at the extreme, but what's your experience?

• 2:38:53Speaker 09

  It's not vibe coding anymore, it's Agentic engineering.

• 2:38:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:38:57Speaker 09

  I think, look, I think what's really interesting about what we're seeing in Snap is that like, to some degree, you know, and because the company's been around for a while, you know, it's operating at two speeds. Like, there are team members who have fully embraced Agentic engineering, right? And who are essentially not writing code, right? And then there are other teams that are still operating in a more traditional way. So, you know, because this change is happening so quickly, one of the things we're very focused on is driving these tools through the company, you know, really making sure that folks embrace this new way of working, helping train folks to do that. Because, you know, certainly for quite a number of folks, they are not, not writing code in the way they used to.

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  What's the, like, the next development that you're most excited about? Is it just? Understanding the code at a deeper level, sort of like a higher IQ model, or thinking in systems and scalability, like it's not, you know, some tiny app. There's so many users on here. One tiny change can have massive ramifications across a database. The stakes are a lot higher. So what are you looking for in the advancing in the tools, of AI tools to actually improve your business?

• 2:40:05Speaker 09

  Yeah, for us, it's really just right now about building agents across the enterprise, right? Like, so whether it's like, you know, somebody reports a bug, the agent goes out, figures out who else has reported a bug like it, actually tries to go figure it out, right, proposes a fix, right, those sorts of things. Or, you know, you look at our sales team, right, and all the work they're doing, everything from really trying to understand a client's objectives, generating insights for them, putting that together into a presentation, mapping it to our, you know, advertising solutions. Like, you know, I think there's just a huge opportunity.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, even thinking an advertiser that spends $20,000 a year with you guys should in the relative near term get the same type of presentation and like, almost like high-touch experience that somebody spending $10 million should get, right? And that doesn't feel like, a lot of that is like people making slide decks, like really being on it, like being timely with like kind of feedback or, you know, things like that. That feels like very within reach with agents.

• 2:41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through the current pitch to advertisers. When you meet with a new big company, I'm sure everyone's used, you know, your advertising product at this point, but let's assume there's some new hot company that is growing, they have a physical product or something, and they want to grow their customer base, grow their reach. What are, how are you positioning your offering on the advertising side?

• 2:41:29Speaker 09

  Nearly billion user platform, including more than 110 million monthly active users right here in the United States in this really, really important 13 to 34 demographic. And the reason why that demographic is so important is because they are forming lifelong relationships with brands and with products. Right? And not to mention, they're making, you know, their first car purchase, their first home mortgage. I mean, even their first like tube of toothpaste, right? So I think those are the sorts of really important long-term brand relationships that are so critical.

• 2:41:57John Coogan?

  I'm sure I'm still using the same toothpaste brand I bought when I was in 19 or something. I have not churned from that company. The LTV is probably through the roof. Does, but so do you have to stress the importance of thinking in not a ROAS, not a one-year LTV payback, but thinking about capturing a customer that could stick around for a decade or more because they're a younger audience? Is that something that's resonating?

• 2:42:23Speaker 09

  I think that fundamentally ROAS is critically important. It's something that we really optimize towards and a lot of people use, you know, lower funnel objectives on Snapchat. That's been a huge driver of growth for us, especially with the small, medium customer segment because folks are very sensitive to their return on investment.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:37Speaker 09

  But when I, you know, talk to advertisers about why they love using us, it's always the new customer metric. Like, that is why they're coming to Snapchat. They say that if I look at the percentage of new customers I'm getting.

• 2:42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:47Speaker 09

  When I spend on Snapchat, like, that really moves the needle for my business and it moves the needle for me over the long term.

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  And it feels less like a tax, which happens on some other platforms where it's like, these people were already coming to my, they were looking for me and I had to pay for that? It's frustrating. Do you already have something?

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, what are you excited about in AI hardware broadly and everything that you guys are working on? It feels like this will be a massive year for hardware across the board. You've got, you know, Apple, you know, people have been reporting, I think, this week on multiple new hardware devices. There was that, like, somewhat believable looking, like, OpenAI.

• 2:43:27John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI ad. But anyways, a lot of action going on, a lot of energy and excitement. You guys are in a good position because you've been working on it for about a part of a decade now.

• 2:43:39Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it's a transformational year for Snap in this regard. We just spun out specs into its own standalone subsidiary. So it's really going from like, you know, R and D science project to like, real company after almost 12 years. So that, you know, is really important for us. I think, you know, it intersects with some of the things that we were just talking about in terms of the evolution of AI because You know, one of the biggest things I think folks have been concerned about when it comes to building a new computing platform is how to compete with the lock-in that the app stores have, right? How can you possibly compete with all these other app stores? And I think literally at the beginning of this year, people realized like, software isn't a mode anymore, right? That like, having an app store isn't a mode anymore because it's so easy to build software.

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22Speaker 09

  You can even build software on the fly, right? And that, to me, is really exciting and coming at an amazing moment.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What can you do to lean in? I saw somebody had hacked a pair of smart glasses to work with OpenClaw. And I imagine, like, is there anything that you would do on that front to really lean into the whole kind of like hacker movement around AI? Because there's like, you guys are building a bunch of experiences internally. We've used a lot of them, they're very cool. But at the same time, opening it up and saying like, hey, this is a platform that anybody can build on. And we've seen this even with the kind of the Mac Mini movement. Mac Minis are starting to sell out in different points around the country. People are obviously willing to spend real money to experiment around all these products.

• 2:45:07Speaker 09

  I think the, the big thing that you're sort of circling is the way that people are using their computers is really changing, right? And they're really just supervising agents doing work for them. And that is a perfect fit for specs. Because the whole idea is to stop spending all this time hunched over your laptop or staring at this.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  We were at breakfast this morning with this guy. I didn't take a picture because it would have been rude, a violation of his privacy, but his posture was literally like, it was, it was the most insane posture. He needed, he needed specs.

• 2:45:37John Coogan?

  He's getting hacked. One way or another, it's peak performance. He's getting hacked, I'm calling it now. Like, I know we're gonna see this guy.

• 2:45:44Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, like, we, we, it feels that, that...

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  He's waiting for his laptop.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  What you're imagining, which is like, we can all just spend all of our day walking around, being productive, monitoring agents in a, in a kind of a heads-up display. It feels within, it feels within reach.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  It does.

• 2:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, finally.

• 2:46:01John Coogan?

  It does.

• 2:46:02Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's incredibly exciting. So it's cool that all of this stuff is coming together, you know, in this moment. And I think, you know, it is super important for us to be investing in hardware because we talked about, software's not a mode anymore, right? So it becomes even more important to do very hard things in the real world at a time when software's being disrupted in this way.

• 2:46:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the same time, I feel, you guys are in a unique position because it doesn't feel, uh, well, like, looking at the video game industry, I think that... AI will present like a pretty huge challenge for a lot of these, you know, smaller studios that were just in the business of like spending a few years making a game, releasing it. If it becomes way easier to to build a game, that's bad for them, but it might be great for like a Fortnite or a Roblox or one of these platforms that have these big existing social networks. And so I feel like your your core business of actually still being a social network where people are connecting with other real humans is in a good is in

• 2:47:01Jordi Hays?

  a good position. And so, yeah, the hardware is just like a bonus.

• 2:47:05Speaker 09

  And one of the things we've been thinking a lot about, you know, is both with the front graph and in terms of our distribution, how do we leverage all these amazing tools to just start building more apps, right? Like, one of the things that we always love to do is come up with new ideas. In the past, we've been like, oh, we got a great idea, but we got to build it. Oh, man. Right now, you know, I was just looking today, we have a really, I mean, I shouldn't even be saying that.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  Something coming soon, anyway.

• 2:47:27Speaker 09

  We've got a wild new idea that we're working on.

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I was I was gonna ask, like, have you been pitched by the vibe coding? Like, do people want to be able to, like, send an app around, basically, that they just prompt on the fly?

• 2:47:39Speaker 09

  I think so. And I think I think what's going to be really interesting about all these companies, like, before, so many of their resources were dedicated to engineering. Now, I think people are going to be much more focused on marketing, on distribution, right? And that's a big shift in the way that these.

• 2:47:52Jordi Hays?

  Being able to being able to send send somebody an app that you just made for them that historically you would have just like sent a funny picture to your friend.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  This was my experience sending you soras of me walking on the beach in the Volta themed suit. Like, it was like, I was able to make an in joke with me and my three friends in a group chat that would not do well on social media broadly. You have to have all this context, but because the cost of generating new content had dropped so low, I could do something that didn't require a costume department and cameras getting set up or all the all those different things. Talk a little bit more about Gen AI. There's a lot of crazy video models are releasing. It seems like a lot of companies are moving fast and breaking a lot of things, particularly in like the Hollywoods or Hollywood's not happy about this stuff. Like, what is what is a responsible rollout of generative video features look

• 2:48:46John Coogan?

  like?

• 2:48:48Speaker 09

  What a great question. So I think for us, we have a lot of safeguards in place, you know, both around basic things like you shouldn't be able to make somebody nude, you know, or put in a compromising position, or that sort of thing. You know, you shouldn't reproduce copyrighted content, those sorts of things. So we, you know, as we look at, you know, even open prompt experiences where people can ask for, you know, to create different sorts of photos and videos, we try to layer in safeguards to prevent that sort of thing from happening. And we do a lot of adversarial testing to make sure, you know, that that is unlikely to happen.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  And then in terms of lenses, sponsored lenses, different experiences that partners are bringing to the platform, I'm interested to know, what's the shape of the ecosystem? Like, are there, are there random developers out there who are making things and then earning some sort of rev share from that? Is there actually a flywheel there? Or is it particularly like, you're working with a brand and they're going to do a sponsored lens and like, your team is developing that for them? What does that side of the business look like?

• 2:49:51Speaker 09

  Yeah, it absolutely spans the spectrum. So there's 100,000, more than, well, gosh, maybe 400,000 developers now who built lenses for Snapchat and increasingly for specs as well. You know, those developers can apply to include their lenses in Lens Plus and earn a revenue share out from that, you know, if people are engaging with their lens and that kind of thing. And then we've got a whole, you know, internal studio as well. So we can work with advertisers if they want to build a unique experience, or we have tons of partner studios who we can connect them with. But, you know, increasingly, there's a tool called Easy Lens. It's pretty fun. If you pull it up and just play with it, you can build a lens from a prompt. So-

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  That's what I was going to ask. I imagine that that has to be acceleratory for you, right?

• 2:50:30Speaker 09

  It's huge for us. And again, we're thinking a lot about how to connect, you know, the, we have, you know, Lens Studio, which is more of the pro tool, and then we have Easy Lens, which allows anyone to create with a prompt. But I think, you know, even Lens Studio itself is going to become much more, you know, oriented around agentic engineering rather than-

• 2:50:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you just prompt it and it's wiring up whatever your domain-specific language is. Very interesting. Yeah. Are you starting to see an actual kink in the graph of lenses that are being deployed yet? Or do you think that this is something that comes once people realize that it's actually easier to go in?

• 2:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. There's some dynamic on the internet that I feel like is somewhat real, where the more funny you think something is, the less likely it is to be actually viral.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  The haze paradox.

• 2:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I jokingly called this the haze paradox, which is also a haze paradox.

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  It doesn't work.

• 2:51:29Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it's this idea that something that is actually the funniest thing that you see on the internet for an entire year, might have a TAM of like, close to one or your group chat. But that's great if you're talking about giving people tools that allow them to generate like, hyper-personalized things that are only funny to them, or like a handful of their closest friends. It's like, actually gives you the ability to create a lot more joy on your platform.

• 2:51:57Speaker 09

  And that's exactly what we see with Gen AI, that people are using it for these more communication-oriented use cases. But on the content consumption side, it's the authentic, original, unedited, non-AI content that does super well. So, definitely a major contrast there. And I think, as it pertains to easy lenses, when we started rolling that out, we saw a huge step change in the lenses that were being created. So that's become a big focus for us. But I also think you can imagine, in a not-so-distant future, I mean, now the way that the models work, it's very hard to scale real-time image transformations, which are one of the reasons why I think people love lenses, because it almost feels like you're looking in a mirror, right, and transforming what you look like. I think in the not-so-distant future, a lot of lenses will just be prompts, right? And those prompts

• 2:52:40Speaker 09

  are going to be shareable. And we have a whole feature right now around the Imagine lens and some of our other generative lenses, where we have trending prompts, and you can share prompts with your friends, and iterate on them. And I think, again, kind of tying back to the importance of the friend graph, I think you see that intersection of people creating these inside jokes, but then also being able to really easily share them with their friends, how people create their own content, inspired by those prompts.

• 2:53:02Jordi Hays?

  It's pretty cool.

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that seems really, really important. I mean, whenever one of these new image models goes viral, the stuff, there's always some like ground truth meme, human element that's underlying it. I think of the Studio Ghibli moment. It's like, I've seen cartoons, I could just go look at a cartoon, but I haven't seen a cartoon of me. And so there's a little bit of that in there. So the lenses make perfect, perfect sense in that, in that case.

• 2:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's get, uh, let's get the California update.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  What's on your mind broadly in the state?

• 2:53:33John Coogan?

  Going better than ever, right?

• 2:53:34Speaker 09

  It seems to just get better and better. I don't know how we, uh, I mean, if we didn't have this weather, we'd really be in a tough spot. You know what I mean? It's incredible what, what we get away with.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  It really, it really is.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  That's gotta be a big piece of it. The weather is fantastic. Although yesterday was a little rainy.

• 2:53:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Basically, California has like karma for forever flexing the weather on the rest of the state.

• 2:53:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:53:58Jordi Hays?

  Like how many times I've, I've messaged a friend and they'll say like, oh, it's like, it's mine, it's like five degrees out right now. And I'm like, oh, it's like 71. It's gonna be that way all week.

• 2:54:13Jordi Hays?

  And so in exchange, in exchange, we get like the gnarliest political environment.

• 2:54:17John Coogan?

  It's a little chilly today. It's 56. That's sweatshirt weather.

• 2:54:19Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 2:54:20Speaker 09

  Freezing. It's freezing.

• 2:54:21Jordi Hays?

  Freezing. It's absolutely freezing.

• 2:54:23Speaker 09

  Stay indoors. This is crazy.

• 2:54:27John Coogan?

  But yeah, broadly, how do you think California's going?

• 2:54:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, I, you know, I'm concerned. Uh, what I, what, what gives me some optimism is that it looks like more and more people are increasingly concerned.

• 2:54:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:37Speaker 09

  Right? What I was most worried about, uh, you know, even six to nine months ago was the number of people that like thought things were going really well in California because they were contrasting with what they were seeing at the federal level, right? And feeling like, oh, California is better. It seems like, you know, there's less chaos here or whatever, you know, because we've got a single party state essentially. And so I think now more and more people are, you know, are hearing that we're number one in terms of homelessness, number one in terms of poverty, right? You know, number one in terms of unemployment and they're like, whoa, like that doesn't line up with the California that I love, that I want to be a part of. Like, how can we change that and fix that? So I think the awareness is really important because, you know, in a democracy without awareness, you're not going to get change. And so I think, you know, hopefully that will continue to build.

• 2:55:19Speaker 09

  I think, you know, if Newsom decides to run for president, that's going to, I think, raise even more awareness of California and the challenges that we're facing here, which again, I think will be helpful. So right now, to me, it's really an awareness game of helping make sure Californians understand, like, this is not going in a direction that I think we want. And if we want change, then we're going to have to ask for that, right, and advocate for that. But I think that's happening more and more, you know, which gives me some hope.

• 2:55:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I want to ask about live streaming. How do you think about it? It feels like it's having a little bit of a moment with the clavicular stuff. I don't know if you've been tracking any of this.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  I love this. So locked in.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  He famously got frame mogged. It's a huge deal.

• 2:56:05Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, so he's running, you know, I have a billion users on the internet, but so there's basically a number of creators on Kick that have generated probably 100 billion views, like some absurd number. The one John referenced is from the looks maxing community, which is effectively guys that try to be as good looking as they possibly can. So it's basically this whole drum, like, it's kind of like WWE brought to very internet native. There's all these different characters. One of them is running effectively a 24/7.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Whenever he's sleeping, he's streaming. So it feels like IRL, IRL live streaming is hitting,

• 2:56:53Jordi Hays?

  just having a really big moment right now. How have you thought about it historically? Does it play any type of role in Snap's future? Or is it not something that the users actually want?

• 2:57:07Speaker 09

  We decided to step our way there essentially with creator subscriptions. So we just started testing creator subscriptions with a small group of creators. What we find on Snapchat is that people have very, very loyal relationships with creators. So, once they subscribe, like, they want to come back every day and see what's new on their story and message with them and, you know, really get to know them better and build this deeper, deeper relationship. So, we thought creator subscriptions was a good extension of like what we're already seeing happen on Snapchat. We're going to test that out and see how that goes, but that will give us some of the infrastructure to start thinking about, you know, stepping from there.

• 2:57:41Jordi Hays?

  And that would be an individual creator just going live, talking with their existing follower base.

• 2:57:48Speaker 09

  Yeah, potentially to start with their existing subscriber base or even with their, you know, yeah, not necessarily even their followers more broadly, but their existing subscriber base. And then, you know, layering in some of the replying and gifting and those sorts of things before opening it up more broadly.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  How have you been?

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I felt like my personal stance is that Twitch as a platform since landing at Amazon has just like not gotten the, not just gotten the attention that I think it potentially deserves. I created an opportunity for the kicks of the world to step in.

• 2:58:24John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, I haven't seen Andy Jassy live streaming on Twitch once.

• 2:58:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:28John Coogan?

  And so.

• 2:58:29Speaker 09

  By the way, I would love to see that.

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  I would love to see that. Earnings on Twitch, obviously, just do it.

• 2:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that would be cool. Yeah, so you guys should, you should fire up your, and do just an earnings call on the platform.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  I want the CFO there explaining the whole financial model, what happened, keep it wonky, it's fine. That's what Twitch is. Every social media platform is like a flourishing of niches. And you find your niche and there's going to be someone there who's like, "Yeah, this is amazing." Switching gears a little bit, you mentioned subscribers are getting close to Hulu numbers. How have you been processing the? Somewhat polished, produced, vertical short-form trend that's sort of happening. I see them in the App Store. I haven't been a user really, but you're familiar with what I'm talking about. Real Short is one of them. They seem to be popular. There's obviously some organic creation that's happening on a fully UGC platform. But how have you thought about that?

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  It feels like sort of Revenge of Quibi in some ways. But where do you think that goes? How important is that? Is there a role for you to play in that ecosystem?

• 2:59:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I know that we've got a lot of advertising partners who are marketing the short-form videos on Snapchat. And I mean, those ads are so... Sometimes I find myself watching one for like a minute and I'm like, oh my God. I gotta know what happens next. Who killed her? So that seems to be working.

• 2:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, good.

• 2:59:54Speaker 09

  But I think when we experimented with shows many, many years ago, I think for us, we just found that the volume of creativity, the billions of snaps being created in the Snapchat camera, meant that really Snapchat is at its heart about UGC fundamentally.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:00:13Speaker 09

  And I think in the places where we've really allowed UGC to flourish and creators to flourish, and actually where we didn't do as many shows or didn't do as many publisher stories, we really built a very vibrant, organic creator ecosystem. So I think in the ensuing few years, we've pulled back from doing that sort of more premium content because what we just see our community love is connecting with the folks that feel like they're next door.

• 3:00:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, YouTube did the same thing. YouTube Red, they had a whole bunch of produced things and you'd see the... It'd be like, my favorite creator got paid a bunch of money to do something produced and it's getting less views because I actually just want him to turn on the camera and just talk. I don't need all that other stuff because that's not what I'm there for. And I think that recognizing the desire of the user, the context, like all of that really matters. The medium is the message, right?

• 3:01:00Jordi Hays?

  What is your... How do you allocate your time in 2026? Where are you spending time that... How has that kind of changed over the years?

• 3:01:15Speaker 09

  I mean, at a high level, it's probably 80/20 Snapchat and Specs. I think that's going to have to start shifting this year. You know, not, maybe not totally 50/50, but certainly close, close to it. Just as we, as we ramp up and, you know, bring that product out into the world. You know, my happy place is making new stuff with our team. That's what I love to do, our design reviews, you know, whether that's, you know, with Specs or with the Snapchat team. That's, that's really what I, what I love to do. But, you know, a lot of what I've had to do over the past couple of years is really work closely with the team to rebuild the ad platform and to create a totally new, you know, this small, medium customer segment for, of our advertising business. I mean, our, our business three or four years ago was almost all large customers and like highly concentrated in the United States. And when your business is concentrated on a small number of very big customers, it just

• 3:01:59Speaker 09

  creates a lot of unhelpful volatility. And so, what we've done since then is, you know, build out a platform that can deliver lower funnel goals, you know, especially the small, medium customers and then really diversify.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  You don't get to work on the fun stuff if you don't have the economic engine.

• 3:02:15Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Last question from me. Virtual reality, you've obviously looked at this, haven't gone super deep in it. Over the weekend, I watched The Matrix in VR. I also watched in, on Apple Vision Pro. You watched the whole Matrix in VR? No way. The whole Matrix, I did. No way. Yes.

• 3:02:35Jordi Hays?

  They said no one had ever done that before.

• 3:02:37John Coogan?

  I also, I also watched. You made history. It's incredible. You should hit the gong for that. I mean, that's unreal.

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for yourself. A self hit.

• 3:02:53John Coogan?

  That's incredible. But, I'll do you one better.

• 3:02:56Jordi Hays?

  We did an eye lapse of it at like five minutes in, he like takes.

• 3:03:00John Coogan?

  I know, I didn't, I didn't. I watched the whole thing. I did, I did, I did, I did. But, but I went further. On Saturday night, I watched Terminator 2 in VR.

• 3:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, back to back.

• 3:03:09John Coogan?

  I watched back to back films. I watched two movies. And you don't have like a ring around here? It's not, it's temporary. It goes away after about an hour. And yes, my wife did say something about it, but. What was she doing? Was she there? It was, it was a rare situation where she was out of. The house with the kids and so I just had free time. I never.

• 3:03:27Speaker 09

  You're just plugged in.

• 3:03:28John Coogan?

  But but but truly, truly around family like you can't use it because it's so antisocial. Even with the eye, it just doesn't work. So like I actually finished watching Terminator two just on my phone. Because it was less antisocial than putting this VR headset back on when once the family came up. Anyway, I did successfully watch a full movie in VR, let it be known, I did. But I can't tell, and I think I already know the answer now that you're laughing at me, but. Am I like one year early? Am I 10 years early to watching movies in VR? Or am I just weird and it's never gonna happen?

• 3:04:00Speaker 09

  You're gonna watch movies in glasses for sure.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:02Speaker 09

  Right? And I I think like what, you know, it's so funny, a couple of my. Buddies, you know, are big into finance stuff like that. So like if we travel together, you know, they'll bring their monitor. To like, oh, yeah, yeah, come on, you can't get stuff done without your.

• 3:04:15Jordi Hays?

  We just got the new Dell one.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, we didn't?

• 3:04:18Jordi Hays?

  It's like six feet long.

• 3:04:19John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 3:04:20Speaker 09

  You gotta have your, you gotta have your setup.

• 3:04:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:04:22Speaker 09

  And so, yeah, so they travel with like a big monitor or, you know, even two monitors. So I think like a lot of the early stuff you're gonna see with glasses are people who just want the full.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:32Speaker 09

  Setup, but like do not want to ship, you know.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:04:35Speaker 09

  A monitor to wherever they're going. So I think like, if you, you know, if you're, if you're traveling or you're, you know, on a plane or something, you want to really get work done. It's so hard to do that on a laptop. So I think you're, I think you're right on time, actually.

• 3:04:46John Coogan?

  Right on time, okay.

• 3:04:47Speaker 09

  Or a pioneer.

• 3:04:48John Coogan?

  Next time you come on, we'll ask, have you watched a full movie in any VR product? And we'll see, we'll see if I'm, if I'm early or just weird.

• 3:04:56Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about timelines for watching movies in glasses?

• 3:05:00Speaker 09

  That's a this year thing.

• 3:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then what about, what about glasses? Is it that you still have some element of the real world? It's not as anti, you know, you're not getting the like, you know.

• 3:05:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's not this huge, heavy, closed headset with a screen, you know, right in front of your eyeballs. So I mean, so it seems like you love it.

• 3:05:18John Coogan?

  I was, so, so the trick is that I was laying perfectly flat.

• 3:05:22Jordi Hays?

  In a fully bright room.

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, this is the other thing. This is the other thing. It needs tracking. So you have to leave the lights on. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding. Seriously. So you can't turn off the lights. And so if I get home. And my wife wants to go to bed and turn off the lights. I'm like, okay, it doesn't work.

• 3:05:38Speaker 09

  No way.

• 3:05:39John Coogan?

  Because it loses the tracking.

• 3:05:41Speaker 09

  No way.

• 3:05:41John Coogan?

  But if you rest it right on your head, just perfectly, and then also, the VR headset, it wants to be world locked. So initially, the screen is down here, and you have to look like this, and then you have to re-center it up here, and then it appears above you in beautiful 4K, and it's amazing. And you sit there and you watch The Matrix from start to finish, and it's actually a great experience. But it is weird and niche, and I don't know if it'll ever happen.

• 3:06:06Speaker 09

  But I think the idea of, you know, being able to watch something on a giant display in a lightweight pair of glasses is compelling.

• 3:06:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, if it's lightweight, but like, truly, you actually can't have a VR headset on your face for more than 10 minutes.

• 3:06:18Speaker 09

  I love that it's super bright.

• 3:06:20John Coogan?

  It has to be bright. Like, the ISO on these cameras is so low that even if I just have my lamp on, it's like all fuzzy and noisy, you know?

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  You should make a warehouse, and get a bunch of like yoga mats, and have the Vision Pros, and it's a VR movie theater. You go and you just lay in the break.

• 3:06:37Speaker 09

  Super bright.

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  It really is like the most dystopian, antisocial thing you can possibly do. But The Matrix was a great movie, so it was worth it. I sacrificed.

• 3:06:46Speaker 09

  Worth it.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  For the Borg.

• 3:06:48Speaker 09

  And you broke the record.

• 3:06:49John Coogan?

  I did, I did. Call Guinness right now.

• 3:06:52Speaker 09

  When you all aren't live, you just move the table, put some mats down, and then you've got Yeah, yeah, it's perfect.

• 3:06:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 3:07:00Speaker 09

  Great to catch up. Thanks for having me. Good to see you.

• 3:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team on that.

• 3:07:03Speaker 09

  Thank you.

• 3:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Really.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  Thank you. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our newsletter at tbfn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific.

• 3:07:15Speaker 09

  Are you sure? You gotta get out of here?

• 3:07:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you want to keep going?

• 3:07:18Speaker 09

  I kinda want to keep going.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  I don't know. What else is in the news? If we got news, we can do it.

• 3:07:23Speaker 09

  We can get to it tomorrow.

• 3:07:24John Coogan?

  Okay, we can get to it tomorrow.

• 3:07:25Speaker 09

  Thanks for hanging out with us, folks.

• 3:07:26John Coogan?

  Thanks for hanging out with us.

• 3:07:27Speaker 09

  We love you. We will see you.

• 3:07:29John Coogan?

  Tomorrow.

• 3:07:30Speaker 09

  Goodbye. Cheers.