New Apple Products, Anthropic's Strategy, Why AI Costs Don’t Hurt Apple | Dean Ball, Scott Kupor & Jared Isaacman, Adam Bry, Matteo Franceschetti, Dillon Rolnick

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:57) - New Apple Products (08:53) - How is Apple Unaffected by AI Costs? (34:13) - Sam Altman Defends Pentagon Deal (38:14) - Anthropic's Strategy (45:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:01:05) - Dean Ball, a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and former Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, discusses the complexities of AI regulation, emphasizing the need for balanced, technocratic oversight to prevent extreme outcomes like total decentralization or nationalization. He critiques the government's punitive approach toward companies like Anthropic for contract disputes, advocating instead for modest regulations that allow private AI firms to operate independently while ensuring public oversight. Ball also highlights the importance of maintaining trust in American AI companies internationally by avoiding actions that could erode their perceived independence from the U. S. military. (01:30:17) - Scott Kupor & Jared Isaacman. Scott Kupor is the Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he oversees the firm’s operations and has led investments across enterprise software, fintech, and marketplaces. He is also the author of Secrets of Sand Hill Road, a guide to how venture capital works and how startups raise funding. Jared Isaacman is an entrepreneur, pilot, and commercial astronaut. He founded the payments company Shift4 and later commanded the Inspiration4 mission, the first all-civilian orbital spaceflight. He is also the founder of the Polaris Program, a series of private human spaceflight missions conducted with SpaceX. (01:47:31) - Adam Bry, co-founder and CEO of Skydio, discusses the company's position as the largest U. S. drone manufacturer, emphasizing their focus on AI and autonomy since its inception in 2014. He highlights the transformative role of autonomous drones in law enforcement, particularly through the "drone as first responder" program, which has led to significant reductions in crime rates in cities like San Francisco. Bry also addresses the importance of transparency in drone usage, advocating for public awareness and accountability to ensure responsible deployment of this technology. (02:06:47) - Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, a company specializing in sleep fitness technology, discusses the company's recent $50 million funding round led by Tether Investments, their profitability, and plans for international expansion into China and Brazil. He highlights the development of new hardware products, the pursuit of FDA approval for sleep apnea detection and mitigation technologies, and the company's commitment to enhancing sleep quality through innovative solutions. Additionally, Franceschetti shares insights into global sleep patterns, noting that Australians, particularly those on the coast, exhibit the highest sleep quality among their users. (02:16:57) - Dillon Rolnick, CEO of Nous Research, discusses his company's commitment to advancing open-source AI by developing tools like the Hermes agent, which integrates coding capabilities with platforms like OpenClaw to enhance user interaction with AI. He highlights the growing interest in AI agents that perform tasks autonomously, allowing users to delegate work and receive completed outputs, and emphasizes the importance of making these tools accessible and cost-effective to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and user awareness. To foster innovation and community engagement, Nous Research is organizing an online hackathon to explore diverse applications of their AI tools. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, March 4th, 2026.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  New haircut.

• 0:06John Coogan?

  New haircut alert. We are live from the TVP, the ultimate technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill, pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a little bit of a shorter show. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. We have Dean Ball coming on to give the other side of the Ball versus Thompson argument about Anthropic. Then we have Scott Kupor and Jared Isaacman coming on to talk about space. We're going to the moon and they're going to take us there. And then we have Adam Bry from Skydio, who I actually worked with through Andreessen Horowitz, maybe

• 0:47John Coogan?

  10 years ago. And then Mateo, CEO of Eight Sleep has some exciting news. And Dylan's coming on to break down the latest AI agent, Hermes agent. Well, anyway, there was some big news this week. Of course, everyone knew that Apple was launching new products, but there were some surprises and there's some cool stuff. Starting with the MacBook Neo, my, the more downstream take is like, how is Apple affected by the AI boom? But let's start with the actual products because this thing, in the video, it looks so small. It looks like an eight inch laptop. I guess this is, so this is the MacBook Neo, sort of designed to compete with the Chromebook. It comes in at $599.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, not even just the Chromebook, just all PCs.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, you're not going to get this for, like, if you're in a professional workplace, go to a desktop with multiple monitors, plug in, you're doing like advanced work, like, this is for students, this is for the low end, and it is.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Or just a personal computer. I think it's designed for people that have an iPhone, but don't have a Mac.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Because of costs.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  And now they can have an integrated suite.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  It's, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's a crazy product. I, I love the, I love the launch video too. It's very weird when they start because it's just this like blank block and then they're adding features to it with CGI. It does a really good job. It's sort of anticlimactic because every feature they add is just like what you'd expect. Yeah, I was kind of like, oh, is this gonna be a touchscreen? And then it's like, oh no, it's just a normal screen. And it's like, oh, like, guess what? It has a keyboard. Boom, mic drop. Oh, it has two USB C ports. It is kind of cool that they put the, the headphone jack a little bit further down. That was cool. And then they're like, check it out. You're never gonna guess this. A camera? We put it on the computer.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  They're like, hey, we heard you liked having an iPad that you could attach a keyboard to, so we basically took an iPad and put a keyboard.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  But it's very cool how, how they like sort of expand the product, like show you, okay, there's the speaker. It's pretty big. It goes on the side. There's two of them. Shows you. But this does not look like a 13 inch computer to me. This looks like an 8 inch computer to me. This looks like a small iPad. And 13 inches is a very normal size.

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the model's just like Shaq or something.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I, I think they actually used some of the big hands to make it like maybe look smaller or something, but 13 inch display, 16 hour battery life. The price is the really crazy thing. So $5.99 for students, it's $100 cheaper. So $4.99. That is one of the cheapest Apple products they've ever made. I'm pretty sure the headphones cost more. The Apple Pro, the Apple AirPods Max costs like 500 bucks. Remarkably cheap. A18 Pro chip, 256 gigs or 512 of storage, four colors. They got it in Ramp Yellow. They call it citrus, but I think everyone's gonna be.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  And it now costs the same amount as the entry level iPhone?

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  17E?

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it has Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 6 connectivity, 8 gigs of RAM, 1080p front facing camera. Like, people are sort of like, ah, it's underpowered. But look at the price. This is, this is crazy. The last time Apple had a product that was anywhere near this cheap was. Wow, where was it? Let's see, I wrote about this. In 2014, so 12 years ago, a long time ago, they sold the MacBook Air for $8.99. And now they have this down at $4.99 or $5.99, which is remarkable. Really, really cheap. Cheap for 2026, cheap for an Apple product, even cheap when compared to other laptops.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  So this is sort of like their escape hatch, their pressure release valve. So they can actually increase the price on the other products more because if you're price sensitive, well, they have a product for you. And there was something similar that happened with the new suite of iPhones where the iPhone Pro Max was getting so big and the camera notch was so in your face and the phone was bigger and heavier and the battery life was great. It was very powerful and a lot of people want that. But there were also a lot of people who were complaining, "I just want a thinner phone." Well, then you have the iPhone Air and there's going to be crazy trade offs. You only get, I think, one camera, the battery life's not nearly as good. It lags. It lags. But for some people, if they're going to be complaining about all the features of

• 5:08John Coogan?

  the Pro Max, it's like, well, we got the Air for you, stop complaining. And I think that's a lot of the strategy there. So the other products they launched, MacBook Air with an M5 chip, MacBook Pro with the M5 Pro and M5 Max chip. Did you wind up going, how much memory did you wind up going with? Forty-eight. Forty-eight. Is that enough? I feel a little, I feel a little soft. Is that enough to pull up tweets and react to them on a live stream? Time will tell. Apparently you actually have been maxing out something like 32 gigs of RAM, which took me by surprise. I have not had, I've not been memory constrained, but I do, I do actually love the idea of

• 5:48John Coogan?

  getting the top end memory, which is the thing that constrains you on running LLMs locally. Is that correct, Tyler?

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you can always like...

• 5:59Jordi Hays?

  If you have a really good model, you can like get around the memory thing, but it gets like super slow because you're like loading it in and out.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Okay, you're loading it in and out for like every token that you're generating.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need a lot of memory to run.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but so, so if I go with the 128 gig, the top of the line chip, I should be able to inference like a pretty smart model locally, pretty reliably.

• 6:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's also like the, you can always just quantize the models down.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  And so like, you can actually run like really frontier like resource models on like pretty normal hardware now.

• 6:29John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm just purely thinking for, you know, doomsday prepping, the idea of, you know, you have your library in case you're bored during the apocalypse, you have your DVD collection, you can watch all the movies from start. That's, that's the big one for you because you're going to be able to watch all of American cinema from the beginning.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  I, I still don't think I'd actually watch.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  You wouldn't do that. What would you be doing? Assuming that the internet's down, this apocalyptic scenario, you can't scroll.

• 6:51Jordi Hays?

  Plenty of other things to do.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  What would you do?

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Take a walk on the beach.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  Uh, what if you can't go outside because there's nuclear fallout everywhere? You're stuck in your bunker. What are you doing? Whittling? Did you get into whittling?

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  I actually used to love whittling as a kid.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Called it, called it. He's not going to be watching movies. He's going to be whittling. I will be whittling while I watch movies, while I inference a local model that I can just ask questions to and, and get all sorts of history. And there might be a few, a few, a few hallucinations because it's not querying the internet because of course in this hypothetical scenario, the internet is gone. But I would still have access to, you know, all the pre-trained information and basically the world's best encyclopedia, which would be fun. What else did they launch? In a world, uh, in a world where computers keep going up in price, it's kind of wild to see Apple drop a $5.99 laptop, says Theo.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  A phone priced Mac.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Agree more. Fry says, oh man, they're going to sell five billion of these things. Yeah, this is, uh, this feels, this feels like more of a no-brainer for kids than an iPad for some reason. I don't know if I'm just like old school and I'm like, if it has a keyboard, it's gonna work.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  iPad, iPads with kids just have really bad aesthetics.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  It does.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Kid with an iPad, just zoning out, right?

• 8:03John Coogan?

  You get them a keyboard, they're locked in.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  But you get them there.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  I think there's something here.

• 8:07Jordi Hays?

  You're like, are they, are they day trading?

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, they're doing something for sure. It might be underpowered, but it'll get the job done. And they, I, I, I think there's something about, you know, typing on a keyboard that does lend itself to more creation and less consumption. Like, the iPad is a media consumption device. That's where, where most people use it for. Throw on Netflix, play a game, do something. There, there aren't that many people that are power users, but as soon as you get the keyboard, you're ready to type, you're ready to, you're ready to work. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. User favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And let me also tell you about Okta. 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.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  So hilarious chart from Andreessen Horowitz. Apple on CapEx? Nah, we're good. They looked at the standard, standardized quarterly capital expenditure for Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Apple. And all of the four companies that are working on AI, Amazon, obviously through AWS and Anthropic, Microsoft through OpenAI, Alphabet through Gemini and Meta through MSL. They are all absolutely off to the races, going to the moon on CapEx. And Apple is down 19% since 2015 on this standardized metric that A16Z put together. Very, very funny. And it's just interesting that Apple has been so unaffected by AI costs.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  Not just on the CapEx side, which is where every hyperscaler sort of had to say, yep, you know what? Our business is fundamentally different now. We are not the high-margin cash flow generating business. We're going to draw down on that cash. We might be taking on some debt. Like, this is a big, big, different financial model. It's a very different financial model from years past. And Buckle up, you're coming with us shareholders and the stocks have done well because a lot of shareholders have believed in the goal, believed in the value of AI, believed in the value of building compute infrastructure broadly. And they've been rewarded for it in most cases, but Apple's just sort of sat that out and said, hey, we're not, we're not going to train a foundation model, we're not going to build a whole bunch of compute infrastructure.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  We're going to serve Gemini.

• 10:25John Coogan?

  We're going to serve Gemini and we'll pay them what a billion dollars a year, something like that.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  It's like.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this, this year will be really interesting. It'll be fascinating to see what the new Siri actually looks like, what it can really do. We'll start to see that, I think in Q2.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  And then separately, we're expecting new devices from OpenAI, right?

• 10:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Teasing the Puck, Dime, whatever you want to call it.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it'll be interesting to see if they can kind of break the, the AI hardware curse.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  That I feel like is.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Well, I, I wanted to think about that because I, I wonder if the story's over for some of those like cursed, bad launches product. Like we saw Friend apparently has found a little niche, very controversial, but Humane has sold to HP. It seems like they're not working on that product anymore, the PIN, the AI PIN. But the Rabbit R1, I think his name's Jesse, uh, you know, that product, there's, there's something there where with enough iterations, I feel like that might sell well. I was playing with the board the other day. That hardware, it's like a huge screen, touchscreen that you can play games on, like there's still these niche applications that I think you could potentially,

• 11:40John Coogan?

  if you have a hardware team, you have the ability to sell something, it's, it wasn't polished, the AI wasn't good enough. Well, the AI got better, you still have the supply chain. Maybe there's a way to cut through, but it probably needs to be a little bit more niche.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Everyone's going to have one. Tyler, what do you think about hardware in the age of AI?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I think the Mac Mini is like a good example of like AI hardware right now.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that's a great example. Yeah. I wonder, I, I, I wonder what.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Like how exposed the Gemini APIs will be in iOS? Because if you if you fully expose like Gemini Kit like, you know, in iOS, just like you can call like a weather API or Maps API like Uber exists because there was like a there was like a GPS API that you could just call within an iOS application with a couple lines of code. And you didn't have to like figure out where the user was because the iPhone just told you that as long as you click like, yeah, share my location with Uber. If you now get an app that has not just Apple's local L L Ms that are sort of,

• 12:45John Coogan?

  you know, mediocre, but it can go and call Gemini and do a whole bunch of crazy stuff, you you start running into like, will someone build an open cloth app or something like how much of Apple's AI strategy will wind up being vended into the third party ecosystem, which has served them so well for so long, they've sort of turned their back on it. They locked down Apple Vision Pro a little bit more. There was a there was way less uptake there. And and there's a ton of risk because if I develop like a free iOS app that then incurs like a ton of Gemini tokens and ton of charges. How do those get passed through? Is Apple just biting the bullet on it?

• 13:29John Coogan?

  But there's something interesting there where where turning app developers loose to to build software that takes advantage, not just of local L L M capabilities, but Gemini under the hood and and sort of wrap it up in a neat bow that is, you know, available to the consumer could be could be very cool. Anyway, the big question that I had, and I will get into the essay was. So Apple's unaffected by capex costs, but they've also with this release been unaffected by memory costs and the RAMageddon. So I will I will take you through how I dug into the question of memory pricing at Apple. But first I will tell you about Label Box. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And I will also tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of I T H R and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. That's a good sound effect. I like that one. I have one too.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Surprise.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe you haven't used that yet.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  I know, no, no, because I was so burned by the last time I got access to the soundboard, I went too crazy. So there was one, one show where me and Jordy both had full soundboard access, all of the same sound cues.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  One single show.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  And it was truly.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  A disaster.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  What's the, what, what, what's the metaphor from Greek mythology? It was the, it was Pandora's box for me. Like, once I opened it, I could not resist and I became addicted and I was pushing the thing way too much.

• 15:01Jordi Hays?

  It is very addicting.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  And it just didn't work. So we were like, no, let's have Jordy play the soundboard. I'll, I'll do other stuff.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  The, the issue for me as a, as a soundboard artist is.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  When I'm not doing the show.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:13Jordi Hays?

  When I'm hanging out, when I'm hanging out on the weekend.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm just thinking.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm just, I'm, if somebody says something.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Like we're at dinner.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm thinking about the sound effect.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  I was, I was hanging out with you and you said something crazy and I wanted to just be like. And so I opened up my phone, I went to YouTube and I pulled up that sound and played it. But then I had to turn on my volume and it took me way too long and the joke had passed. But we have a solution. Tyler Cosgrove over there has been working on a soundboard app that can go on your phone and you can have, we should do a widget too, so that it's just there on the home screen, boop, your favorite, your favorite soundboard cues. So, uh, expect that soon. Anyway, let me tell you about Apple and profitable advertising made easy with axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay, hit us.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  So the, the, the question, the question, like, like, I get, I get the strategy of Apple saying, look, we're good with Google handling the AI inference stuff. They have GCP, they have the TPU, they got Demis, who's got a book written about him by Sebastian Malaby. He, like, like DeepMind is great, we're working with them. Um, so CapEx unaffected, I understand that. How are they not affected by memory prices? Ramageddon has come for us all. Um, and, and, and, uh, Ben Thompson of Stratechery and John Gruber of Daring Fireball actually had a bet about this, and I hope I didn't misspell John Gruber's name. They had about, they had a bet about this. They said whoever wins this bet gets a steak

• 16:45John Coogan?

  dinner. A steak dinner was at stake and Ben Thompson lost.

• 16:49Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  John Gruber won because John Gruber said, "Apple always overcharges for RAM."

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Getting a, if you went to build a computer, or a phone, or laptop, or you know iPad equivalent, and you just went to retail, getting an extra 128 gigs of memory, or a slight memory upgrade, might cost you 30 bucks. In the Apple ecosystem, that's like $200. So, Apple has built in this pricing buffer for a very, very long time, and that buffer really saved them this year. But there's a lot more to it. So, many companies are dealing with RAMageddon this year. And some stats that are interesting, DRAM prices rose 172% throughout 2025. DDR5 spot prices have quadrupled since September of 2025.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Trendforce expects PC DRAM to roughly double in price just in Q1 of 2026, with LPDDR pricing seeing the steepest increases in history. So, every wafer that's allocated to an HBM stack, a high bandwidth memory stack for an Nvidia GPU, is literally a wafer denied to the LPDDR5X module of a mid-range smartphone or consumer laptop SSD. So, they are truly commodities. There's only so many of them, and they can only go to one place or the other. Apparently, OpenAI's Stargate initiative alone could consume up to 40% of global DRAM output as it stands today. And this is a problem because there's only three major companies in the memory category. It's Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  Together, they control 95% of the global DRAM production.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Remember, Micron has been trying to build a new facility in New York.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  And six people basically blocked it.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Oh, I, we talked about that, but I'm missing it.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  The rumor is that it's like foreign funding.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Actually trying to hold Micron up.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, Micron has been very, they've been a huge beneficiary of AI margins and higher prices. And so much so that they've actually reallocated all of their capacity to AI, and they pulled out of their consumer brand, which is called Crucial. So, if you ever tried to build a gaming PC, you probably found Crucial Ballistics, which was like this very aggressively X-Games branded, like PC gamer DDR memory, which was, you know, very important.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Like the Monster Energy of RAM.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. Couldn't have said it better myself. No, it really is. Like, the branding on Crucial Ballistics is like insane. Anyway.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Gamers will be rising up soon with Monster Energies in hand to to take the the the RAM by by force if they need to. I already see memes about this all the time. I see these like the worst AI slop video you've ever seen, just absolute junk. And then the caption will be like, so this is why I can't afford RAM, you know, or this is why RAM is $800 a stick or whatever. And then on the flip side, people will say, you know, occasionally there'll be a good AI slop video. People will be like, okay, it's worth paying $800 for RAM because this is so good, right?

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Goes both ways.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  It goes both ways, but clearly people are feeling the the the pinch. But Apple fans will be sitting out the fight, thanks to a few key moves from Apple that helped them avoid disaster this year. So, one, Apple has long term supply agreements that allow them to secure memory 12 to 24 months in advance. They also benefit from vertical integration and custom silicon. So instead of buying that consumer grade commodity DRAM modules that you see go into either gaming PCs or Nvidia GPUs, for example, they negotiate multi year contracts directly with Samsung and SK Hynix for custom LPDDR packages that meet Apple's exact specifications. And so I

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this is like, RAM's always been cyclical.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  And so it makes a lot of sense for Apple to say basically like lock up pricing, Samsung's locking up the demand. They I don't even think Samsung would have predicted this level of demand even three, four years ago. Otherwise, they may not have priced priced it in the way that they did.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that that maybe you get to is

• 21:01John Coogan?

  And Samsung's still making their default margin. They're just like, the opportunity cost is so high because we could we could reallocate.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is, is they they probably have so much margin in the upsell that they could have some margin compression.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Still be

• 21:16John Coogan?

  So, Apple at various times has had over $100 billion in cash. They currently have over 66 billion in cash. Like, they can take the hit there. They can also just take a hit to their margins.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Every AI lab looking at that cash being like, Tim, I could really put that to you right now.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're the only hyperscaler that hasn't really shelled out to the tune of 10, 20, 30 billion into one of the frontier frontier labs. Maybe that changes. I don't know. Somebody was throwing out like, Apple should buy Anthropic, or or or Amazon should buy Anthropic. But I think the price is too high at this point. It's just too it's just getting away. But so I'm not I'm not 100% sure about the how the manufacturing supply chain for memory works, but I believe that because Apple's specific requirements, it's harder for Samsung to just instantly reallocate a product that's been already manufactured in a way where crucial ballistics, if it's going into gaming PC, it's easier to reallocate

• 22:17John Coogan?

  those wafers. So even if they didn't have those contracts, I think I think the the supply chain's a little bit stickier with Apple because they're vertically integrated. And then, yeah, of course, they have the money to overpay. We talked about how the MacBook Neo is this pressure release valve. So even if the memory does increase, they have this, they have the cash buffer. They also have the they're charging 200 bucks for something that costs 30. If it goes to 60, they can just take a hit on margins buffer. Then they have the contract buffer. Then they also have this Neo where if the MacBook Pro goes up in price, the MacBook Pro buyer is probably less price sensitive. They're like, yeah, you know, this year it was $4,000 instead of 3,000. I'm buying it for business purposes.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  It's not that big of a squeeze. And then the price sensitive buyer says, yeah, you know what? I'm not going to go for the $2,000 laptop. I'm going to go for the $600 laptop this year. And they're still in the Apple ecosystem. But my takeaway is like, this is an incredible testament to the operational prowess of Apple to pull this off at this scale. The Sony PlayStation 6 is allegedly going to be delayed until 2028 or 2029 because of rising memory costs. They're going to wait it out. Because there are three players, it's not just TSMC in this case. It does feel like there'll be more pricing competition and and there's more of a race to build capacity. Whereas the TSMC, if they don't build the next fab, they can just continually raise prices and and increase margins once the

• 23:45John Coogan?

  next contracts go up for renewal. Whereas if if Samsung has a bunch of capacity and Micron doesn't, like Samsung wins. And so there's more of this game theoretic, like they got to, they have to build. And so I think a lot of people, and Tyler was talking about this with me earlier. Like we, we all expect this memory shortage to be a few years, not more, not like five or 10 years. So if you push out the Sony PS6 to

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  You're not bullish Tyler?

• 24:14John Coogan?

  2028, he's bullish.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  No, I'm very bullish, but I, I think, yeah, cause because there's more players like I, I think the, the shortage will be

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Just say you're not AGI pal.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  I mean, there is a question about like, if you truly go exponential forever and it just like, okay, yeah, there's like, you know, trillions and trillions of dollars of, of data centers being built. It's like, can even Samsung, Micron, SK, Hynek's keep up forever? No, so it might, we might be living in like a permanently higher price just because like it's a more valuable product. Like we get more

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this time might be different.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  Might be different. Um, also the Nintendo Switch 2 might go up in price next year. It's really bad for, for gamers. Gamers, gaming graphics cards are going up in price and Nvidia is pulling out of gaming graphics cards or skipping a year. So it's mayhem for gamers, uh, but long-term, the competition between the memory manufacturers should stabilize prices. And, uh, but you know, yeah, just watching all the big companies that are not Apple get caught flat-footed is just crazy to watch. Because it's not like, it's not like the folks at Nintendo or the folks at Sony are like, oh yeah, first time manufacturing something. Like if you told me that like the team behind the rabbit R1 was like suffering from higher memory costs, I'd be like, yeah. Like it's a new company, new product. They haven't done this. Like Sony has been making Playstations for decades and they still got caught flat-footed on this.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  And a lot of that is a testament to the brand power that Apple has, the network effects, the, the, the, the scale they built that they are in this position and still not getting squeezed, even when other hyperscalers are getting squeezed on all sorts of stuff.

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  Tim Cook, still underrated.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  He cooked. He has cooked and, uh, and yeah, the operational side of Apple is always, it's just habitually underrated. E- even in the face of like slight misses on features and products and, uh, and, and marketing and oh, this, this ad didn't land. Well, the business is still thriving and dealing with just crisis after crisis. Like the tariff should have been a major crisis. They got through it. This memory, Ramageddon should have been a crisis. They got through it. It's all been very, very good news for Apple. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs and get that cha-ching ready because I'm going to tell you about Phantom Cash.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Apple is exercising the Coase conjecture. They're waiting for open source models to get better, applying pressure to frontier lab pricing, e.g. rejecting Anthropic overtures. Anthropic wanted more money from Apple. They went with Google and Gemini. This is from Soren Larsson, who is an economist who I really respect. It may rather be that impatient buyers have adverse selection, revealing actually poor business positioning. So he is identifying Apple's leverage in the system.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  They're, you know, this consumer aggregator and they've been doing very well. Kyle Harrison says that, quote, "We ran the math. OpenAI is buying three to four times more memory than it could possibly need in the short term. The most charitable explanation is aggressive forward positioning. The less charitable one is that they're cornering the supply to kill on-device AI before it starts." Well, if the on-device AI happens on Apple products, that doesn't seem like that real of a scenario, but it is an interesting thesis. I think that across the frontier labs, everyone is just very AGI-pelled.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  They're seeing the increase in capabilities, but also the sort of like stacked exponentials. Ben Thompson was explaining this today, that when you went from LLMs to reasoning, the number of tokens, the number of compute required just to get a single answer, went like, you know, 10x all of a sudden. And then we saw the same thing with coding agents, where these long-running tasks are sort of like squaring the amount of compute. And so you just keep stacking these things on and you just get more and more compute demand, but you get more economic output. So it winds up being all worth it.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  When will Apple release the iPhone?

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  The only other thing on the OpenAI memory side is...

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  They plan to sell a lot of consumer devices.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  They do. Oh, so they might be buying it for that, right?

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, so we don't really know, but, but yeah, I think that, obviously, OpenAI has kind of rolled back some of like that 1.2 trillion dollar number.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  But seeing, seeing the growth in demand just in this first couple of months of the year starts to look like, hey, maybe, maybe, maybe he wasn't so crazy after all.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Like, the, the, the, the models are justifying the compute. And I think that, we talked about this yesterday a little bit with the orchestrators, just this idea that, you know, where will the next 10x come from? Well, it's probably from just running 10 instances of Claude Code or Codex and, and just firing off 10 times as much inference. And, and people are ready to do that. They're, you, you see it all the time on Twitter, people talking about how much inference they're, they're doing. When will Apple release the iPhone 18? Call she has before October at 35%, before 2027 at, at 34%.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  What is the chance that they don't release it this year? That would be probably zero, and I think it is, it is zero. So, stay tuned. I'm sure Mark Germain will have good coverage on, on the next iPhone 18.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Nick, let's get the Germinator back on.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I, I, I wanted to invite John Gruber to talk about these, but Mark Germain, of course, is welcome at any time. But we, but we have yet to talk to John Gruber, and he has been covering Apple fantastically throughout his entire career. So he would be an interesting gentleman to talk to.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  TSMC.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Gusto first. Gusto is the unified platform for payroll benefits, NHR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. And let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  TSMC submitted a new semiconductor fab construction plan for the Southern Taiwan Science Park last week. The site is located on Tainan's An Ding District, adjacent to the F18 fab, and covers 15.46 hectares.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  They're doing more 2-nanometer production.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  The leading edge with eight hectares allocated for the production area and one hectare for administrative facilities. The project is expected for completion and production start in 2028, says semi analysis. So we'll see what what happens in the actual capex guide from TSMC. Ben Thompson has been very disappointed with where TSMC has been guiding on capex, but maybe this is a shift. I wonder how much faster it will be to build another TSMC fab over there. If they ramp production of this new facility before Arizona, if they eclipse and there's

• 31:40John Coogan?

  a flipping and this gets to scale before Arizona, it will reveal some very serious problems with America's building and permitting system, I would imagine, or maybe maybe talent pool. I would I would certainly hope that

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Both.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  That Taiwan, I mean, this is their crown jewel. They should they should get this up and running fairly quickly without many delays since they've done it before and they are heavily invested in TSMC, of course.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, Wendy's US president posts new video amid burger battle with McDonald's and Burger King.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's let's watch. Let's rate it.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Does he does he put

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I like the way that he's holding it, you know.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  Okay, seems normal. Yeah.

• 32:22Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful. Kind of. I like the burger.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  This is good.

• 32:27Jordi Hays?

  I like talking, talking with food in his mouth. Okay, yeah, going, going, going back for a second. You gotta top it off with the fries and frosty. He's saying burger, he's not saying product.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Product.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Excellent. Yeah, no hesitation, no hesitation.

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Wait, what did he dip in the frosty? Was that bait? What did he what did he do at the end there? He dips a french fry in the frosty? Whoa, okay.

• 32:53Jordi Hays?

  Okay, doesn't call it a product, no hesitation, talking with the food in his mouth.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's bold, that's bold.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Bold. I'm giving this an eight out of 10.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  If you scrolled out, I like Colonel Sanders after seeing this, just knowing

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also, also the way he he kind of puts the fry in

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  And quickly, you know, kind of pulls pulls the hand back.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  I it's got style points.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Dude, here's a good job if you're looking for a gig that will bring home the bacon. Apply for the job of CEO at McDonald's. Apparently, the guy makes 18 million a year.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Wait, do they have an open job application?

• 33:31John Coogan?

  No, but after this, it's entirely possible.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  That if you, if you put on a masterful performance chomping down, uh, you can ma- you can make a run. I don't know. It is funny that there's just like one after another of CEOs. Uh, this is probably good for all of them. I don't know. Uh, this is, this is fun. People are, I want no jump cuts. Somebody should have seen swa- somebody should be seen swallowing the food. Oh.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  People are, people are analyzing.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  That's somewhat, somewhat fair.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Analyzing the details. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Berber Jin came in and shared Altman defended OpenAI's Defense Department contract in all hands yesterday, calling the backlash, quote, "really painful. This was an example of a complex but the right decision, with extremely difficult brand consequences and very negative PR for us in the short term," he told staff. Uh, yeah, I, I still, I still stand by that, uh, given, given the events that have transpired in the world

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  since last week, like, being there to, like, meet, meet the government.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Feels like, uh, being on, uh, on the right path.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  It was just, yeah, it was just odd that, uh, the, that like, Google strategy was to not say anything. Do nothing, win, basically, I would think. Or, or do nothing, don't go up or down. Like, uh, Gemini just...

• 35:10Jordi Hays?

  But goo- but, but I don't think Gemini is involved in this contract. It's, it's Grok.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  It's Grok?

• 35:16Jordi Hays?

  Grok was the other one that, that, uh, came in with the same terms.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  So Gemini doesn't have any relation with the Department of War? I think they do. I, I, I think, I, I thought that there was a, there was an announcement.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  I might be, they, they might. I just don't think they were involved in this contract negotiation.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Cause I've seen, I, I've seen Palantir, like, show that they have like three or four models that they sort of like mix together to get responses. I don't know. OpenAI announced its Defense Department deal on Friday, hours after the Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth designated rival Anthropic a supply chain risk. There's still a question as to whether or not that's going to go through. So, Callchy has it at a 42.8% chance, and it hasn't really moved. It's unclear if that's just like staying in tweet land and is like bluster, or will there be something there? Or will, I mean, I have to imagine that at this point, both the Department of War and Anthropic are talking to each other. Do you have more information?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, Gemini does have deals with the DOD.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  They do?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, there's the 200 million one that was in July. That was, Anthropic was also in that one.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  And then they did, there was the recent, like, genai.mil. Do you remember Hegseth was tweeting about this?

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  But they're like involved in that, too.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I am, what I'm so shocked by is, how does AWS have an advantage in 2026 on FedRAMP and like federal classified networks? Like, I get that it's like hard, you have to do a lot of cybersecurity, you have to really harden the servers, but you would think that Microsoft and Google would have figured out how to fully support the deepest depths of the US government and get full approval before, like, maybe Amazon would have gone first, but I would have thought that Microsoft and Google would be like a year or two behind. And so you would see, you would see Gemini and OpenAI like checking those boxes really

• 37:06John Coogan?

  fast. But, but I don't know, I guess, I guess AWS does have like a material advantage there still. Altman said that while he didn't regret signing a deal with the Defense Department, he wished he hadn't announced the decision so quickly, telling staff that it looked opportunistic and not united with the field. And I think that's, I think that's a good point. I agree with him on that. His remarks echoed a memo he shared with the staff and on X Monday, in which he said the deal looked opportunistic and sloppy. A groundswell of AI researchers at the company And across Silicon Valley spent the past few days criticizing Altman and the company for what they saw as capitulation to the Pentagon by essentially agreeing to a deal that allowed AI to be used in all lawful cases. And we will see where the laws go.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  I've been digging a little bit more into like the rules around surveillance. There's actually like a ton of them and it's a very nuanced thing. And so it feels like it's hard to bake it down into a single line, but a single line is what hits on social media for better or for worse.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:06John Coogan?

  And so you can see a single line and be like, that's amazing. It's exactly what I think it means and that could either mean good or bad.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Very, very tricky.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  Scott Besant went on CNBC this morning and said, no private company will ever dictate the terms of our national security. Anthropic's attempts to push use clauses into their contracts with the United States government are unacceptable and their products will no longer be utilized by the US Treasury or any other government agency. So doubling down there. There was also a story in Semaphore this morning from Reed. He writes Anthropic's investors don't have its back in its fight with the Pentagon.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  This is very interesting.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic may be standing its ground against the Pentagon, but the AI powerhouse is doing so with a noticeably quiet quarter, its own high-profile backers. Despite the company's defiance, Silicon Valley's biggest players have remained silent. In a recent meeting between Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and Pete Hegseth, the issue of Anthropic came up, according to two people who were briefed on the encounter. Amazon has invested billions in the startup, a crucial part of Amazon's custom chip strategy as the largest consumer of the company's Tranium AI chips. And Hegseth has been threatening to designate Anthropic a supply train risk, which would make it impossible for many of the military suppliers to do business with the company. Jassy demurred, declining to take Anthropic's side, the people said.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  He wasn't alone. Despite Anthropic CEO Dariyamides' very vocal opposition to the Pentagon's demands and rival OpenAI's Sam Altman's running commentary on the matter, a number of Anthropic investors have remained silent. One investor told Semaphore that speaking up might further inflame things with the admin and that they were still holding out hope the issue could be resolved. And others said that Anthropic requested they say nothing. Anthropic and Amazon declined to comment. The Pentagon didn't immediately respond to a request for comment as well.

• 39:59John Coogan?

  The most important thing here is that we get Pete Hegseth on Twitch. Amazon, Andy Jassy is sitting down with Pete Hegseth. Hegseth likes Twitter. He likes X. Get him live streaming those press conferences. Put him on Twitch. That's the goal here.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Go direct.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk more with Dean Ball about the back and forth. Noah Smith summed it up. Honestly, in the Ben Thompson versus Dean Ball debate, we have Dean Ball on the show at noon. I think Ben is right. Noah agrees with Ben. There was just no way, or in any nation-state, there was no way America or any nation-state was ever going to let private companies remain in total control of the most powerful weapon ever invented. This is a big question about like, where are we? Like, are we there yet? Like, is this the most powerful weapon ever invented that feels like... This feels very much like a training run for something that's coming in the future, and it's important conversation,

• 40:58John Coogan?

  but we're not necessarily there yet. So we'll see. Dean Ball replied. He said, "Also, Dean versus Ben is wild and an honor for me as a guy who's been reading Ben since the days of Android will not commodify iOS and views Ben as a core inspiration for my own project today, even though I disagree with Ben here." You will hear much more from me on this soon on a certain podcast. I hope he's referring to TBPN. But the thing is, Ben is anti-regulation and does not own the consequences of state seizure of AI. Neither do you. There was another post by Dean Ball I want to get him to unpack a little bit more. He said, "It is so clear..." That the important fissure in AI politics is not now, right now, is not liberal versus

• 41:39John Coogan?

  conservative, Democrat versus Republican, EAC versus EA, or safety versus anti-safety, but instead takes advanced AI seriously as a concept versus does not take advanced AI seriously. And why this is so interesting to me is because it feels like both Dean and Ben are in the takes advanced AI seriously as a concept camp. So we'll see if he agrees with my understanding of both of their positions, because it seems like they both are in the same camp of takes advanced AI seriously, but then they disagree about the level of pressure that the government should place on a private corporation.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  And so, very, very interested into, in digging into that. Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma make, Claude Code, Codex, or Sketch, the Figma Canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape. Build in the right direction with Figma. Let's move on to Will Minidis. He has also been chiming in on Darius' public statements.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  He says, "There's a strange, there's a set of strange little fictions that tech has chosen to believe as some sort of basis set for the perceived morality of their work. Chief amongst these is the idea that the legal system doesn't exist, and when it does, it is, it's a precise mechanistic process. Tech is a positive sum in a community, which means you pretend that the standard weapons that exist to the modern corporation, coercive litigation, IP blocking and trolling, standard white shoe law firm stuff."

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Really taking shots at white shoe lawyers there.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  "Is negative sum or something bad we don't do here. This leads to a weirdly formalist view of the legal process that we must avoid it at all costs, but if we must engage in it, then it's a fair and repeatable process that must necessarily yield, if not the truth, then at least the same outcome repeatedly and provably. It's this instinct that gives you Anthropic's odd contract formalism. This is how you end up thinking your best move is to show your cards at the forefront and thinking you've won the hand." There's incredible potential for outperformance available to you for betraying any of these silly norms that tech uses to feel good about itself. The modern corporation must avail itself of all possible edge and holy wars require holy weapons, so get busy.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  The idea that sticks with me here is that if we engage in it, then it's fair in a repeatable process. I talked to someone who is doing something with the legal system and he said that like on this particular issue, it was a true like left-right issue. Like a liberal judge would always cite on one side of the case and a conservative judge would always cite on the other side of the case. So no matter how well he argued, it came down to did his case get a liberal judge or a conservative judge? And I was like, oh, well, like that seems simple, like get a judge that's aligned with your company and your position. And he was like, yeah, bad news.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  The way they decide which judge I get is they literally spin a physical wheel. And I was like, and so there's nothing you can do with it? He's like, yeah, no, like it is secure. It's like a real process and like that's by design. Like some things are better left in the democratic process to inject a little randomness so that you can't put your finger on the wheel and pick the right judge and get exactly what you want. Like that's not possible. But it is, it is potentially like the least bad system, but still very stochastic and still very random. And so you wind up in this weird situation where things are not necessarily repeatable. Repeatable is the interesting thing, that you can, you can go into an engagement in

• 45:30John Coogan?

  a legal context and wind up with a different scenario, just somewhat randomly, and that is almost by design. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Dario was at the Morgan Stanley Tech Media and Technology Conference today and was dropping bombs on defense. He said, "We believe in defending America." Anthropic has been working with the national security community for two years. "We are the most lean forward on AI's acceleration." He says, "We do not see hitting a wall this year. We'll have a radical acceleration that surprises everyone. Exponentials catch people off guard. We are at the precipice of something incredible. We need to manage it the right way." I'm very interested to hear like the, this idea that he thinks we're at the end of the exponential. I feel like most technological processes, Karpathy was saying this, maybe? He was saying like, like

• 46:31John Coogan?

  AI is a continuation of, of, you know, previous technological revolutions, right?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was why he said, "We're not going to see like massive growth in GDP." I think that was his reasoning. It's just kind of the same process.

• 46:43John Coogan?

  Same process.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  You saw like internet, or you saw computers and you saw internet and AI, it's the same curve.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's very interesting. I mean, there are people that, like, he's saying there, like, "We don't see hitting a wall this year." But it begs the question, like, do you think that there's going to be a plateau? Because at a certain point, like, you, you, you, you plot out the AI revenues and you get to something that's larger than GDP and the GDP has to move in order to grow. Like, like, what happens at the end state? What does the end state look like? I feel like, uh, we gotta talk about this. Me and Tyler were talking about the, the, just the general, like, AI safety discourse on both sides always ends with people just saying, like, "We gotta talk about this."

• 47:23Speaker 02

  No one has any answer to, you know, "We gotta figure this out, guys. We all gotta, we gotta talk to each other."

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. No one's like, no one's like, "I have a clear plan. I think it'll work. You might disagree with me, but this is my plan and this is what we're gonna do. And here are the steps. And like, I think this gets us the good, the good outcome." Everyone's, everyone's just like, "I don't know." It's very, very weird. It just from a comms perspective, it's very weird.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I feel like that's how decisions get made in companies. Like, if, if a decision is really obvious, you can handle it over text. If it's not, it's like, let's, let's discuss live.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I mean, you talk to a lot of companies about...

• 48:02John Coogan?

  About their plans and, and I mean, the good companies can think in decades and, and think like, okay, we're going to do this and then we're going to make a, I mean, the original Tesla plan, we're going to make a sports car and then we're going to make a sedan and then we're going to make a cheaper car and like, that's the plan. And, and there was no like, oh, we gotta talk about this. It was like, it was like, yeah, we're going to make a bunch of cars and then we're going to make more factories to make more cars and like, this is the plan. Uh, we're like, we're just not, we're just not really seeing that from, from, from lab leaders at the moment. Um, but still plenty of optimism. Uh, there, the, the, the, the square packing, circle packing discourse has hit the timeline. I absolutely love this. First, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store,

• 48:45John Coogan?

  on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Um, so John Bidwell in 1997 found a more optimal way to fit 17 squares into a larger square. The smallest square that contain all 17 looks like an absolutely deranged solution. Everyone would expect that it's just a nice even grid. You take, you add one, but if you pack them in this way, you get 17 squares of absolute chaos, uh, on the next, on the next slide. Um, and, and someone made a waffle maker. Someone made a waffle maker that optimally packs 17 squares into, um, into the squares of the

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  You will get mocked at breakfast.

• 49:32John Coogan?

  You will get mocked by anyone except a mathematician, I suppose.

• 49:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  So Kevin says, for years, society was limited to only 16 syrup squares per waffle, but with recent combinatorial optimization breakthroughs, our research department has achieved previously unheard of densities of waffle syrup. It's great, great news. Uh, very, very funny that, uh, this came through. And then someone, uh, in the previous post was posing the, the universe is not real, dude. This is ridiculous. I'm gonna fight God because it looks, uh, very crazy to pack, uh, an arbitrary number of squares within a, within another square. But, uh, that's

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  Someone should do this for cubicles in an office.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Can you imagine if you're in the one cubicle that's slightly off kilter and everyone's like, "Look dude, like you have the same amount of space as everybody else." And you're like, "Yeah, but I'm at a 37 degree angle to the wall and it's driving me insane." Uh, that would be very, very odd.

• 50:37Jordi Hays?

  Did you see researchers at the University of Southern Denmark, developed a limbless soft robot that crawls using air-filled chambers and Kirigami-inspired flaps? You're gonna love this.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  I hate it.

• 50:50Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna love it.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  I am the Indiana Jones of tech podcasting. I hate snakes. I hate, I absolutely hate snakes. Very, very weird. It's over, boys, says Autism Capital. Very weird, but uh, you know, exciting that people are working on robotics and I'm sure there's some, some odd application.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure there's no like ultra nefarious use cases for something like this.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  We're going subterranean. Andrew's already working on it. What do you got, Tyler?

• 51:18Speaker 02

  These look like, uh, these would be good for like.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  For what?

• 51:21Speaker 02

  Medical. You make them really small.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  That's also like. Yeah, would you volunteer to, as a trial subject? I think you should go first. If you think, if you think they're so good, I think you should go first.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Someone launched ciggies.app, the most comprehensive archive of Chinese cigarettes to exist on the Western internet. Discover new packs in their history, track favorites and, and packs you already tried, share your collection. The Chinese cigarette industry is absolutely fascinating. It, I think it makes like hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for the government. The, the, the main cigarette company is nationalized. And so they make, they make an absolute ton of money. They fund their military with it. Uh, it's a fascinating.

• 52:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, really lovely website.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  We, we really gotta go into the history of nationalization because uh, the nationalization and privatization uh, is interesting all over the point, all over the place. I looked into nuclear weapons and how those were nationalized. Uh, fascinating sort of like hybrid, public, private partnerships with a lot of consultants in the private sector. And then obviously the, the defense primes making the, the missiles, the ICBMs, but not the warheads. Um, but uh, in the tobacco industry. There are some fascinating examples of countries that start cigarette manufacturing businesses, develop large, sort of deeper supply chain operations and then privatize

• 52:51John Coogan?

  those and then that when they sell that asset to a Western tobacco firm, there's sort of like a cash windfall for the government that can be very beneficial. They can go build roads with the money or I don't know, cut people's taxes. But, but there's the other side of, okay, a company is getting large and then gets nationalized. But plenty, are there any other industries that stuck out to you, Tyler?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  I mean, there's, I'm still like, kind of looking at, there's so many like weird like ways to view nationalization though. Cause like, so at least in the US, like historically, it's been mostly basically during wartime or if like a really important company is facing like huge crisis, right? So like 2008, like I think GM at one point-

• 53:32John Coogan?

  Government Motors.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Treasury owned like 60% of GM.

• 53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  So there's all like interesting-

• 53:38John Coogan?

  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  But even like, if you think about tobacco in the US, like almost like having super strong taxes is like almost like kind of a form of nationalization, right? Where you're basically taking like a ton of the profits away.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that was always the pushback of, of, you know, if there's runaway profits by the AI companies, just, you know, instead of nationalizing them in that, in that scenario, you can just tax them and then redistribute the profits.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's like this real spectrum, right? Cause like if you think of like Intel.

• 54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:08Speaker 02

  So the government now owns like, it's like 10% of Intel, right? So like, but what does that actually mean for like running Intel? Like, do they have a say? Like right now, they're not supposed to.

• 54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Maybe that changes. It's like this, this interesting spectrum.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally. Anthropic is on track to generate annual revenue of almost 20 billion, a projection based on current performance, more than doubling its run rate. This is from Bloomberg. And Zero Hedge says unprecedented damage control, leak after leak, just how bad is it? And Matt Slotnick says, the leak is bad, sir, really bad. Now everyone knows we're the fastest growing software company of all time. We must put a stop to this. I think what Zero Hedge was getting at was that the reason you leak, you know, strong economic performance is, is to, you know, allay concerns around-

• 54:57John Coogan?

  You know, pressure from the government, supply chain risk. Because really, the revenue would not be growing if like companies were pulling out because they're so worried about the supply chain risk that they gotta, they gotta move on so fast. But still, funny.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, adoption is outstripping any kind of pullback from, from, you know, the Department of Treasury and very other, various other kind of organizations in the government.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ara Karasian over at Ramp has some extra data. He said, "Most people in tech know Anthropic commands the majority of API spend by U.S. businesses. As of January, Anthropic took 50% of spend on enterprise AI subscriptions, too. OpenAI still leads on business count, but the biggest spenders go to Anthropic, all from Ramp data." And Ben Thompson had some extra context here about the data, but I was, I was actually DMing with Ara last night. And it is fascinating what's happening. The market is so, so big that everything is growing and you see these charts and you're like, it's over for this company. It's over for Cursor, and then Cursor puts up $2 billion.

• 56:04John Coogan?

  And there's just more and more growth that's happening because of the diffusion problem and the, and the, and the fact that companies onboard. And just more and more companies are onboarding to AI tools every day. Ben Thompson said, "There are some caveats to the Ramp data. It only includes OpenAI and Anthropic, not Azure Copilot or Google Cloud Gemini. Ramp is also probably tilted more towards startups and smaller companies and larger enterprises. That noted, it certainly matches the vibes. Anthropic established that code, that coding foothold and has been on absolute tear over the last six months in particular in terms of not just its model capabilities, but also clogged code. And the overall sense that it is in the lead and enterprise CTOs are a smaller and more easily reachable set of customers than consumers at large.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Meanwhile, an AI subscription business model has always been more compelling for the enterprise than for the consumer space for the same reason that productivity apps always end up as enterprise products, not consumer ones. There's no consumer CRM, for example. Enterprise actually, enterprises actually value productivity and are willing to pay for it. Consumers don't and won't, which is why the business model makes sense for the consumer space, at least at scale, is advertising." So he's, once again, ad, ad-pilled.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  What else is in the in the news?

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Eddie, Endowment Eddie, you put this into context. Even in Q4 of 2021, public SaaS quarterly net new ARR peaked at 2.6 billion. Anthropic has added nearly 11 billion in early 2026.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is from

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  That of course is like a run rate, not actual ARR necessarily, but still absolutely shocking.

• 57:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Tyler said, for those who have traffic track at home, Anthropic just added a Palantir in revenue in the month of February alone.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:54Jordi Hays?

  Pretty unprecedented.

• 57:56John Coogan?

  Howard Linzon said Anthropic pulled off the rare quadruple Lindy. Great product. People pay for it. People love it and promote it even though they pay. And the people like Dario's handling of government. Next up, the people tear Dario down. There is this interesting like tall poppy syndrome in Silicon Valley a little bit where like whoever's at the top gets like, you know, triple glazed and then it needs to be torn down a little bit. So we'll, we'll, we'll see where all this goes. But

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  Putting, putting AI growth in the context of the shoe market.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Darren Rovell, former guest of the show, shares that New Balance is up almost 20% year over year at 19%. Adidas 13, Lululemon 9.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  Lululemon's doing well.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  And then every other brand here in the negative. Puma at minus 8%. Under Armour minus 9.4. Nike minus 10%. And Jordan Brand down 16%. Really insane to see such a huge decline. I feel like the sneaker era, the era, the Jordan era is, is over for now.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Is this more of like changing in taste that New Balance and Adidas are growing and Nike is not? Because if they were all, if all of these like major household name brands were trading down, I would say like, oh, this is like the Timo effect. This is the white label effect. This is the, the Allbirds, the DSC, like just more competition from newer brands, challenger brands. But it seems like there's more of just like a reallocation from Nike to New Balance and Adidas. Like Adidas might just be on a, on a brand tear doing some good advertising. But New Balance has been killing it with their positioning. Interesting to see total revenue as well. Nike is huge, 46 billion. Adidas is down at 26. Lululemon's at 10.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Lululemon has done, has done really, really well. New Balance, they're bigger than New Balance. Anyway, my portfolio every day at the opening bell looks like D-Day, says Huma. This is an absolute disaster. It really is so crazy. I was trying to explain yesterday to a friend like how the market, I was like, you're probably getting destroyed, right? And he was like, yeah, it's terrible. And I was like, well.

• 1:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Is this your retail investor friend?

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Yes, it might shock you to learn that the market overall is like

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Only down half a point?

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  It's, it's an absolute tale. Korean stocks are crashing. The COSPI index, the Korea Stock Exchange, is down 10%. Korean stocks are crashing, says Joe Weisenthal. The South Korean Stock Market fell over 8% and triggered a circuit breaker. Jim Cramer said, beware of South Koreans, spill over to our markets, WDC, STX, SNDK. Are you all still vulnerable? So there's lots of companies that are at risk. We will dig into the South Korean Stock Market collapse soon, but we have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. First, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, let's bring in Dean Ball from the Restream Waiting Room. Dean, how are you doing?

• 1:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Good. How are you all? We're fantastic. I've been enjoying your coverage. We had Ben Thompson on the show Monday. It's very funny that this debate is phrased as the Ball versus Thompson debate because it feels like you agree on way more than you disagree on. But I would love for you to sort of set the table for us and just kind of give us your run of like, what actually happened? Because there are a lot of things that have been said but not enacted. There's been bunches back and forth. So what's the, what's the, what are the rules of the road? What are the, what are the, the table of facts that you think like are the most reliable here?

• 1:01:52Dean Ball?

  First of all, there are very few people I respect more than Ben Thompson and who have inspired me more than Ben Thompson. So yeah, I think we agree on the vast majority of tech policy issues and other tech stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think basically what's going on here is that, you know, there's a dispute about a contract, right? And that's fine. Grownups can have disputes about contracts and they cannot come to terms of business and then they don't sign the contract or they cancel the contract and that's fine. The problem here is the punishment. The problem here is that the government is saying, if you don't do business with us, we'll destroy your company or we'll threaten to. And that just can't be the way that America works. And I don't really like, you know, there are people who say, including, I think, you know, this was an argument that Ben made,

• 1:02:34Dean Ball?

  that, well, what should Anthropic have expected, you know, what should they have expected? The way they talk about AI being so powerful, how could they not expect the government to bully them and quasi-nationalize them in these ways? And my view is like, well, no, what we should do is have like modest technocratic regulation so that we can avoid these sort of extreme outcomes of either like, yeah, total decentralization, total anarchy, or like bull, Bolshevism, right? Like, we can avoid that. It's called capitalism. It's called like the system that we have now. And I've spent the last two years being confused as to why we don't try to do that.

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  So in terms of...

• 1:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. So I guess so far Anthropic has not been labeled a supply chain risk.

• 1:03:20Dean Ball?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  Officially. Is your belief that the Department of War is just really busy right now for obvious reasons and they haven't gotten around to it yet? Or do you think that it's coming and that's why, you know, like where do we actually go from here?

• 1:03:37Dean Ball?

  I truly don't know. I operate under the assumption, so the War Secretary Pete Highteth said last Friday that they're gonna do it. And they're gonna do an extremely expansive version of it. So I operate under the assumption that he's not lying about that. Basically take him at his word. It'll happen eventually, but I don't know.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Do you think he, I mean, I know that there was some debate over the shape of supply chain risk, whether that means you have a partnership with Amazon, Amazon works with the government, you can't work with Amazon at all, or Amazon can't use your software specifically, your model specifically on government contracts? Do you have any idea of where the clarity might be found there?

• 1:04:20Dean Ball?

  Well, so in terms of what the supply chain risk designation actually allows, my reading of the law is that it would be only in the fulfillment of the government contract and not more broadly. But there's a lot of things. First of all, you could just write it more broadly and try to fight it in court and see what happens, right? And who knows, right? You could also jawbone, right? You could have the president call Amazon and say, hey, we don't think you should be working with these guys, right? Very hard to sue about that because that's not a policy action. And there's also a very, very large range of other things that the federal government could do if it wanted to, if it wanted to really harass, which, you know, the irony of this is that we all

• 1:05:03Dean Ball?

  know this because of what happened to Elon's companies during the Biden administration. I objected to that then and I object to this now.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, unpack a little bit of that history. Take us through it.

• 1:05:15Dean Ball?

  Yeah, so, you know, basically Elon being kind of a political enemy of the Democrats, the Biden administration brought on a very large number of investigations, regulatory actions, FCC, DOJ, a lot of different other things. I think there's a chart somewhere and it's like 12 to 20 things, you know, it's a huge number of different things that they brought. And each one of those is going to entail millions of dollars in compliance costs and legal costs for these companies. So it's non-trivial amounts of harassment that's going on. And I, again, I think we shouldn't do that kind of thing.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Sure. Is this broadly under the umbrella of like lawfare?

• 1:05:57Dean Ball?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Okay. Walk me through this idea of the fissure in AI politics right now is not liberal or conservative, Republican versus Democrat, EAC versus EA, safety versus anti-safety, but instead takes AI, takes advanced AI seriously as a concept versus does not take advanced AI seriously as a concept. It feels like you and Ben Thompson both are taking AI seriously as a concept. Does that map with your reading on his arguments, your arguments? It feels like there's just a different downstream understanding of how this plays out in a world where advanced AI is a serious concept to grapple with, different than making pencils.

• 1:06:44Dean Ball?

  Yeah, right. Like, I mean, I think the other way to put this would be like, do you think that Dario, Amade, and Anthropic are directionally, and the other frontier labs is worth noting, are directionally right about where this is going, or do you think that, you know, think they're not? And also, not just do you think they are, but do you really take that seriously? Do you own the consequences of believing that these guys could really be correct? And I think a consistent theme of my writing over the last year especially has been kind of being confused that there's people who just do not take, they might say that like, oh, AI is progressing very quickly, but they don't actually like, their downstream

• 1:07:27Dean Ball?

  assumptions and like conclusions about what we should do don't seem to sort of reflect that. It's very hard. It's a very hard thing to do. But yeah, that would be like my broad take.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  So this is, this is where I start to get confused, because if I take advanced AI seriously, I do, then it feels like nuclear weapon level technology in a few years, maybe it's five, maybe it's two. But that leads me more into the Ben Thompson camp where I say, well, of course, there's going to be a dramatic showdown between the US government and the private company that has invented something akin to nuclear weapons. And so, walk me through how you are thinking of, you know, if we're developing new, new, you know, powerful technology, what, how should the government actually interact with that?

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Aside from like, the lawfare in the short term, like, what's the long-term solution?

• 1:08:24Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I mean, the long-term solution, I think, is probably going to be a hybrid system where there just is regulation of these frontier labs, and there is government oversight of them. But it's just like, it's like, You know, JP Morgan is a private entity that lobbies against government policy all the time, right? They're a totally independent actor of the government, and yet they're also deeply intertwined with the government. I'm not saying that we should regulate AI companies like banks, I hope not, but I'm saying that like, you know, technocratic regulation exists in, you know, capitalist republics, and it's not communism, and we didn't like nationalize the banks, right? So it would be, my proposal would be to sort of take step-by-step approaches to solving

• 1:09:08Dean Ball?

  actual problems, not just doing regulation for its own sake, but really trying to shape this so that it isn't some sort of violent, or not literally violent, but some sort of conflict, and instead is, you know, a gradual development of like, yeah, this is how the government and the public ultimately achieve oversight of these labs, because I would agree that if we are going to this place of like near-term superintelligence or something, that isn't going to just exist in an unregulated fashion. That's kind of been my point for, you know, for a year and a half now.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, so what's the gap between regulation and nationalization? Because at a certain point, if we're in the nuke analogy, it feels like the government takes that, and then they get to decide where they, they point those nukes. And, and as I was reflecting on the, the creation of the atomic bomb, I was sort of left like optimistic about the American project and optimistic about the way that played out. I don't know if you have a different side, but I feel like the government did get control of nuclear weapons, there hasn't been a nuclear war, and the whole concept of like, the person that you're voting for will have their, they'll have the nuclear football, they'll have their finger on the button. Do you trust them?

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  That is an animating force in our electoral process, whether you like the current administration or the previous administration, whether you trust them or not. But like, Americans vote on that question every four years, and I think that that's a good system. I, I, I like that.

• 1:10:39Dean Ball?

  A hundred percent. I think that the nuclear bomb analogy starts to break down.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:45Dean Ball?

  But one thing I'd say about about nuclear weapons is that it's true that nuclear weapons, you know, we got that and that went, I think, basically pretty okay as far as these things go. But, you know, what we didn't really get is nuclear energy to the nearly to the extent that we could have.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Completely agree with you on this. Yes, continue.

• 1:11:01Dean Ball?

  Right. And so that created the single regulatory sort of point of failure.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Dean Ball?

  Single points of failure are often problematic in complex system engineering. So, um, you know, what do you, what do you do? Well, you know, maybe, maybe we shouldn't have done it. You know, maybe we should, maybe the government effect on the sort of the equivalent of the consumer side, the economic benefits, we didn't really get those as much as we could have. So that would be one thing. But the other thing is that even nuclear energy, you know, it's not directly useful to you. It is not, nuclear energy is not like, you are not personally going to express your liberty, exercise your liberty through nuclear energy or nuclear bombs, but you will with artificial superintelligence and you certainly will with today's coding agents, right? And so the question is like, should the government be able to own that?

• 1:11:51Dean Ball?

  And my view is that without really substantial guardrails, um, that is just almost certain to devolve into a profound act of tyranny. And so I think that having the companies separate and apart from the government, but still overseen by the public through regulation, that is kind of like my view as to what is ideal. But the problem is that saying that view, um, A, it's really hard to get that right. Regulation is tough to get right. You want to get it exactly right. And it's possible that all my ideas are terrible and they're, you know, they're all going to go to shit, right? That's totally possible. But what you want to do is you want to, um, yeah, you, you want to, you want to at least try, try to get that right. The problem is that that has been,

• 1:12:31Dean Ball?

  that view has been characterized very often as sort of supporting regulatory capture. Um, so it's like, you know, what did Anthropic expect the way they talked about these models? Well, maybe they expected for like California's SB 53 to pass and for there to be like modest, technocratic, light touch regulation that only affects the frontier labs. And like, I don't think that's lobbying for regulatory capture. I think that's actually just the prudent thing to do. Um, even if I don't agree with every regulatory impulse that Anthropic has, I think that in broad strokes, that's the play.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you, oh, sorry, Jordi.

• 1:13:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask, like, how much do you think information asymmetry played into the dynamic of the negotiation and the results? I mean, you have the Department of War, who presumably everyone on that side has some idea that we're about to enter a conflict. And Friday comes around, the Department of War knows they're hours away from a strike. Dario, according to Emil, like, isn't kind of engaging with him. And out of that, maybe the admin says, hey, this is not a partner that we can rely on, and we don't want other groups in the government to be relying on it as well. And it just kind of blows up.

• 1:13:42Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I mean, so I think some of this is about personality. Some of this seems like it's about personality clashes. Some of it's about politics, undoubtedly. I think some of it is also about principle, though, right? Like, and I think the DOD is not crazy at all. Like, my, my problem here has never been with the DOD's policy principles here. They're saying Anthropic can't put usage restrictions that look like public policy, because we set public policy. Dario Amede doesn't decide when autonomous lethal weapons are ready for prime time. We do. And I think they're 100% right about that. But the solution to that problem is you don't try to destroy the business of Anthropic. You tell Dario, no thanks to the business. And you move on and you find somebody else who will, who will do business.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Which is what Dario said in the CBS interview. He said, there's other providers, we can agree not to work with each other.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:34Dean Ball?

  Yes. Right, that's fine. That's fine. I mean, frankly, the tokens are probably higher margin for Anthropic, you know, sold to private entities, not to the government. Because Anthropic is subsidizing them for the government, so it's a bad business, as we're seeing.

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  What's a, what's a, what's a good outcome here?

• 1:14:49Dean Ball?

  I think we cancel the contract. And, and look, the other thing is, like, the DOD says, well, we have all these other contractors, there's Palantirs of the world, and Palantir might rely on Anthropic. And so we can't have, our, our contractors can't be relying upon Anthropic, because if that's true, then we're still relying upon Anthropic. So it's fine for them to say, no one who has usage restrictions like this can do business with any of our contractors. I think that's fine for, in the fulfillment of DOD contracts. Like, I think that is perfectly fine.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Isn't that basically supply chain risk by any other name?

• 1:15:26Dean Ball?

  Well, no, because supply chain supply chain risk would be specific would be done at the company level as opposed to like at the

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  At the contract level, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. Also, can you can you explain a little bit more about the the logic of supply chain risk? Because I was shocked when like DJI is not on there. DeepSeek doesn't seem to be on there. Kuen doesn't seem to be on there. Like, this feels like very bad if I'm just trying to think of like my short list for things that I might want to supply chain risk. Like, yeah, it's good Huawei is on there, but I got 12 other. Unitree. Yeah, yeah, Unitree I don't think is on there. Yeah, like, like, when should the government apply this? Does it matter if it's international? Is there is the national versus international designation important?

• 1:16:17Dean Ball?

  Well, one thing I'll say is we don't know everyone on the supply chain risk list because sometimes those designations can occur in classified contexts. But, um, but it is the case, I think, that that the supply chain risk designation, if you go and look at the statutory history, it's really intended for foreign adversary companies. This, this is about, this is about, it's really about China, frankly. It's really about China. And so it is kind of, you know, wild to be in a, whatever you think of the chip export policy of this administration of, you know, wanting to sell more Nvidia GPUs to Chinese companies. It is kind of wild to have that policy and then also to say that we're going to treat American companies that we don't like, like Chinese companies, like, like enemies of the state.

• 1:17:01Dean Ball?

  I don't think we should be doing that.

• 1:17:03John Coogan?

  Can you talk to me about what your 2025 was like? What your goals were? What of those goals have been achieved? Like, give me sort of a scorecard on like AI policy in DC.

• 1:17:18Dean Ball?

  Well, you know, what I wanted to do is, I mean, first of all, you know, obviously getting the action plan done, that was a, you know, 18, 20 hour a day kind of thing for four months of my life. So that was, that was an intense sprint and getting it done is obviously a career highlight for me. I didn't get it done unilaterally, of course. A lot of people worked on it. But, um, you know, that was a big part of it, sort of course correcting from what I thought were some of the excesses of the Biden policy, a lot of which was, by the way, this national security inflected control over the labs. So it does disappoint me to see us sort of progressing back into Biden era mentality, which is what this is. So there's, that is a little bit concerning to me. But yeah, like that. And then more

• 1:18:02Dean Ball?

  broadly, um, you know, I don't, I just, I want to AGI pill people, you know? I want people to like feel the, feel the like, the importance of what is going on. And, um, and hopefully, uh, you know, try to think more strategically about this issue. Because the thing is, is that it can't just be one or two people doing this. It has to be a community of people.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  So, so walk me through what AGI pilling means in March of 2026.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  More Mac minis than people on Capitol Hill.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I mean, like, I mean, like, there's terms like software only singularity, that robotics will be delayed, that there might be, Dario talks about like the end of the exponential. He doesn't seem necessarily super intelligence pilled. He seems like we will get someone who's 150 IQ and you will be able to run it in a data center like the, what does he say? A million geniuses in a data center. It's not, it's not one god, a country of geniuses in a data center. It's not one god that's like so like time traveling and teleportation. Like, it's not entirely all this crazy sci fi. It's a little more narrow. So in terms of timelines, expectations, like what are you telling to elected officials these days?

• 1:19:21Dean Ball?

  Well, I think the very challenging part is that there's the trajectory of the technology and then there's the effect of the technology in the near term, right? So the technology that we have right now is already legitimately science fiction in my mind, but we don't live in a science, we don't, the world is not obviously more science fiction-esque than it was three years ago. We don't have flying cars, we don't live on the moon, right? We're not doing it and we don't have Dyson spheres assembled around the sun or whatever. And the reason for that is that it takes a very long time to transform institutions and to transform the way that organizations are structured. And so, again, like that's the important thing is that to me, it's about, the actual

• 1:20:03Dean Ball?

  winner of the AI competition is going to be the country, the civilization that is like most imaginative at like, we went from artisanal types of, you know, manufacturing to factories to eventually assembly lines, right? We, we're going to do that but for the next generation of things and inventing that. What is, what is all that? What does it look like? And, you know, that's the, that's the, that's going to be the, where the real economic benefits come and the real things that change the world come from. But those take time and they're really conceptually difficult.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  How do you think about competition with China with the backdrop of nationalization? I heard this, I heard this quote that was like, if you nationalized SpaceX a decade ago, like you'd just get NASA, like you don't get SpaceX if it's owned by the government? It needs to be

• 1:20:51Dean Ball?

  Completely.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  Independent. And so with that backdrop, like what does a healthy American AI lab ecosystem look like that can actually go and win on a geopolitical scale?

• 1:21:02Dean Ball?

  Well, I think first of all, yes, it's, it's gotta be, it's gotta be private companies because they can move faster and be more innovative. Also, very importantly,

• 1:21:13Dean Ball?

  It's about trust, right? Like selling, if we're gonna, if we're gonna sell these services internationally, we need other governments and foreign companies to trust our companies, to trust that they're not just ultimately linked to the US military. Right? Because that's the problem is that doing, doing business with China, you sort of know, well, at the end of the day, every company in China is ultimately a military asset. And that diminishes trust in Chinese companies. We're, that's something really profound that we're eroding with this action right here. And that worries me quite a bit.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been thinking about that in the context of like sovereign AI throughout Europe. And I was just like, yeah, look, France didn't need its own Google. They could just use Google like it was fine. But when you actually take AI seriously, then you start to wonder about, okay, well, does their strategy, as behind as they might be, does it actually make sense?

• 1:22:08Dean Ball?

  Yeah. One of, one of the things I hope we invent is, I, open source models, I think are useful and good. But I actually think what's, what's more important right now is like open source infrastructure such that more people can sort of like really put their, put their own

• 1:22:29Dean Ball?

  imprint on models. And more people can feel that sovereign experience without having to like build, you know, multi-gigawatt data centers and whatnot. I hope we can do that. That's a really interesting thought.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  National compute reserve or something like that?

• 1:22:45Dean Ball?

  Or like, yeah.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Institutions could access?

• 1:22:49Dean Ball?

  It could be like that, but also even more than just the compute itself, also like all the infrastructure that connects the compute and all the like, I, I think there's something really interesting there. And I'm excited to see more people do things like that.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about the concept of like an FDA for new models? You're releasing a new model, like it has to pass a battery of tests or benchmarks that are maintained by a, like a federal institution in the same way that when you, when you release a new cancer drug, you have to test it on mice for something like that?

• 1:23:20Dean Ball?

  Yeah, I think the problem with that is that it's that there's too much to test for because the models can do too much. So we don't know what to test for. So we have very clear endpoints when we're testing a drug in a person, right? We have very clear things that we want to test for. It's much harder to do that in the context of a generalist AI model. So that's one of the things that worries me about licensing. In addition to licensing can slow things down and it can regulatory capture is very real. It's a very real thing. I have always thought of AI as being a little bit more like like financial services where the regulation is not actually targeted at the products per se. The regulation is more generally targeted at the entities themselves.

• 1:24:05Dean Ball?

  So we regulate banks. We don't, we do regulate loans, but we do that by way of regulating banks. We don't like have a, there's not a government agency that like approves every single loan that a bank makes. We, what we do is we look at the entity of the bank and we say this is, this is a sound institution. This is a soundly governed institution. That's the kind of thing that I think will be, that's, I don't know. Again, I don't think we should regulate AI like banks per se, but I think that is a useful structural intuition for thinking about AI regulatory policy.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Dean Ball?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Uh, Jordy, please.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  How much, uh, how much attention, uh, is DC paying to the news out of Square? The, the pushback from, uh, or block, the pushback from Silicon Valley was, hey, you're blaming this on AI, but it doesn't feel like, maybe that's a small part of the reason to do this riff, but certainly not the entire story. But then a bunch of groups are going to use this as, you know, example number one as to changes in, in the labor force due to AI.

• 1:25:09Dean Ball?

  Well, it's a bad combination because it's all these companies, all these tech companies that over hired in the sort of immediate post-COVID. And then now they're also the most exposed to AI, right? They're the ones that are adopting AI the most aggressively. They do the things that AI is best at. There's lots of software engineering. And so like it's both things happening at once, I would say. And that creates an exaggerated sort of funhouse like effect of the actual impact of AI on the labor market. I'm very skeptical that like we're going to see things like that at like wide, you know, firm level anytime soon. You know, in the broader economy. I think we could see it more in the software engineering discipline because there are a lot of big software engineering enterprises that hire too many people, right?

• 1:25:54Dean Ball?

  So like, you know, I think that's a very live possibility. But DC is DC. People are going to interpret the news for whatever's convenient for them, you know? And if you, when you play the long game, you have to try to just build credibility over the long term with people. But yeah, I mean, everyone's going to say this is evidence for whatever I'm on about.

• 1:26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hypothetically, how do you think something would play out? If, if like there was a battle on the moon and NASA says, hey, we want to buy a bunch of rockets from Blue Origin or SpaceX. And we want to go to the moon to fight this war on the moon. And the private company CEOs say like, no, we're not interested in, in that. We want to just launch more satellites. Like it feels like another analogy for like the nationalization conversation. And maybe, maybe it's just a weird time because I feel like in previous eras, a lot of the, you know, you go back to like the dollar a year men,

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  a lot of, a lot of American industrialists sort of like stepped up to the charge and were like fans of the government. And now there's like much more, it feels like we're more divided than ever. But, but what is the correct way to marshal a cornered resource as a government?

• 1:27:17Dean Ball?

  Well, I would think in practice that the companies, the SpaceXs and Blue Origins of the world would actually eagerly help the government there. But let's take your hypothetical and say that they didn't. There's an authority called the Defense Production Act, Title I, which is a, there's something called Priorities Authority, and the government can quite literally just put itself at the front of the line for any launch of any rocket. And that's what I would suggest they do in that situation, rather than commandeer the rockets themselves. That's kind of what I would suggest.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  That makes sense. So Defense Production Act, but it requires extraordinary circumstances.

• 1:27:51Dean Ball?

  The president can do it basically whenever he wants. The president can make a unilateral finding. The other thing I'll say that's funny about all this is that like, you know, one of the things I was enthusiastic about putting in the action plan, a little notice provision of the action plan is basically saying, in the event of a national emergency, DOD needs to have, DOD needs to know with the hyperscalers how it's going to commandeer the data centers for like, if it needs like tons of compute in some sort of national emergency. That's in the action plan. So like, I'm not here saying like, total, you know, whatever, like no government involvement. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying that like Anthropic has a right to exist. If they don't do business with the government, we shouldn't kill them. That's all I'm saying.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the Wall Street Journal called it like a fight about vibes. And I think most people are not at the point where they say, yes, AI is actually nukes. And yes, like the, one company should, should like, you know, like they should be destroyed if they don't give it all up. Like that's a very middle of the road position that I think a lot of people agree on.

• 1:28:53Dean Ball?

  Yeah, 100%.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Jordi, anything else?

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Not for now.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good to see you.

• 1:29:00Dean Ball?

  Hey, guys. Thanks so much. Good to see you.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about vibe.co. For DDC brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertised on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Dean said that the reason we don't have Dyson spheres is because institutions aren't quick to adapt. So you have no more excuses not to build a Dyson sphere.

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Make it happen.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  This is a high agency organization.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  We have very little institutional overhead.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  No, no, in the limit, I believe it. I mean, it's like, it's a, it's a long chain of events that, that require all of these different diffusions to happen. But

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask Jared his Dyson Sphere timeline.

• 1:29:50John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I mean, obviously, the big question is moon versus Mars, but I like, I like getting up to speed on the plan for the Dyson Sphere. That should be firmly within the, the 100 year plan for NASA. I believe it. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. And let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we have Scott Kabor returning to the show, and Jared Isafin for the first time. Welcome to the show. What's going on, guys? How are you two doing?

• 1:30:27Scott Kupor?

  What's happening? We're doing great. How are you?

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Please, take us through the news today, because I'm very excited to hear from you. I'm very excited to be joined by you today.

• 1:30:38Scott Kupor?

  Well, I'm just here for moral support from my good friend Jared. So Jared, you want to, you want to give them the, give them the news?

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  Sure. And by the way, I appreciate you giving me a 100 year timeframe on the Dyson Sphere, because

• 1:30:51John Coogan?

  We'll get to that.

• 1:30:52Speaker 05

  It's, I mean, we're over a half century here, just getting back to the moon, so we gotta take things in steps. But

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  Step by step.

• 1:30:58Speaker 05

  But really, that's, that's where the partnership with, with OPM comes in. And Scott has been a champion for us here with NASA Force. We, we gotta rebuild some of our core competencies here at NASA. You know, we, we made some big announcements last week that said, look, we, if we want to get back to the moon, we want to achieve President Trump's vision within the timeframes that have been, that have been established, we're going to have to do things differently. We're not going to launch moon rockets every three years. We're going to try and launch them in less than a year. And people are like, that's impossible. I was like, have we, you know, I literally went and got the data from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo era saying, you know, we used to do this every three and a half months. We literally, from the time Apollo 7 splashed down to Apollo 8 launched to fly around the

• 1:31:42Speaker 05

  moon is measured in weeks. It's like eight, nine weeks here. So what do you mean we can't do it? Well, they said, look, we don't have some of the same expertise we used to have during the space shuttle era of turning our mobile launchers around. You know, if you're launching every three years, you build up all this experience and expertise and then they, then they go out after the mission is launched and they go into industry. So we gotta, we gotta do some things differently right now. And one of which is we gotta start bringing in folks back from industry that have the expertise to grow our young talent. Because we have no shortage of people that want to grow up and work at NASA. I mean, you know, like from the time they're kids, they want to get there. So plenty of, you know, young talent coming in the system. But, but what Scott and OPM are giving us the ability to do is bring in term-based appointments from industry. Some brilliant

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  minds from, you know, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, all our great tech companies who say, I want to serve my country. I want to stick around for a couple of years on a term-based appointment, elevate some of the talent. That's how we're going to get back into turning rockets around in months instead of years. That's how we're going to get back to the moon. So there's amazing.

• 1:32:43Scott Kupor?

  This is part of, I was gonna say, look, this is part of a broader thing that I think you and I have talked about a little bit, which is, there's kind of two pieces we're trying to solve on the, you know, the government tech side. One is obviously, can we get early career young people in, as Jared said, you know, kind of NASA. Unlike most of the federal government, actually has done a really good job there. The other piece is, how do we leverage the private sector to help make sure that we have much better connectivity with the private sector and public government? And so, the second part of Tech Force, right, was always the private companies, having people come in. Obviously, we want to basically double down on that now for NASA Force, and make sure that we've got kind of all those relevant industry partners who are saying, hey, look, we want to have, like, some of our best people come in, second themselves for a year or two, help make NASA, you know, as effective as possible and bring up the next generation of folks. And then if people

• 1:33:26Scott Kupor?

  want to go back to the private sector, like, that's great, they can go do that.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, so talk about the the the type of roles that you need at NASA. When I think NASA, I think frontier science, rocket science, but also the actual astronauts. And then when I think of industry, I think of like the manufacturing expertise, the person that's going to build the rockets repeatedly because there's this beautiful partnership between the private industry and NASA these days. But how does that actually, when the rubber meets the road, who do you need to come join NASA that might not, or you know, they're perfectly suited to advance NASA's mission right now?

• 1:34:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I'll tell you, there's two categories there that you mentioned that we don't need to worry about. So astronauts, we always get, you know, tens of thousands of applications there. So that's good. And I would even say on science, because when it comes to the planetary science and heliophysics that we do at NASA, no one, we're the only game in town.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:34:26Speaker 05

  You know, in 2028, we're going to launch a nuclear powered octocopter to Titan to search for signs of life. You're going to want to come to NASA to do that job. But there are areas where we have, you know, some overlap with industry when it comes to building our our heavy lift rocket, SLS, where, you know, industry is also doing very similar things, which, to be honest, is a problem. NASA should only be focused on the near impossible, what no one else can do. But SLS is a component of a broader strategy that President Trump laid out with Artemis. We're starting with SLS. Eventually, we'll evolve to other vehicles so that there's an Artemis 100 and beyond someday. But while we have some of that overlap when it comes to our launch pad, turning launch

• 1:35:10Speaker 05

  operations, mechanical engineers there, we need propulsion engineers that are can be helpful on our vehicles, those that have cryo fluid, you know, specialization so we can stop some of these hydrogen leaks, some of these helium flow issues we've had before. Those are areas that industry is extremely well versed because we have the healthiest commercial launch industry that we've had in the history of America's space program. And to get people that want to serve their country, give us a couple of years over at NASA, elevate our talent, like I said, it's going to make a huge difference in terms of turning our vehicles, launching with greater frequency and achieving the president's national space policy.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Can you walk me through the current top few reasons why the moon is important? Just as a high level, I want to go back, I'm already on board, but for those people who say, "I want to hang out on Earth," why are we going to the moon? Why is the moon important? Why is it valuable?

• 1:36:03Speaker 05

  Okay, so I'm really glad you asked this question, and there's quite a few answers that go along with it. First, the whole like, shouldn't there be other things that we should be doing? Yeah, and we do. A very small percentage of our resources are actually invested into a, you know, a national imperative goal like returning the moon. This isn't the 1960s anymore, you know, where it's four and a half percent of the discretionary budget. It's a quarter of a percentage, and you know who's making up the difference? Private industry. You know, folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are putting billions of their own resources in play to build capabilities for the good of the American people and really all of humankind. So it's not, you know, the taxpayers footing the bill to do this like it was in the 1960s. Now, what are some other reasons that we should do it?

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  How about we made a promise to the American people and have for 35 years? Every president for 35 years has said, "We're going to return to the moon." It was only President Trump under his first term, when he created the Artemis program. Now, in his second term, my first day on the job, where he signs a national space policy that says not only go back to the moon, but also build out a moon base, are we taking steps in that direction? And after $100 billion, I think we owe it to the American people to do it. I'll give you national security reasons to do it. 1969, July 20th, America lands Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin on the moon, brings him safely back to Earth. It sends a message to the world. What else is America capable of doing? Well, if you take 35 years and $100 billion and you fail to do it, well, it sends the exact opposite message.

• 1:37:29Speaker 05

  That's a real national security implication, because then it says, "Something's broken, and now I'm going to encroach on America's leadership across all the most important technological domains." Here's another good reason. We don't know what we're going to find. I mean, that's the best part of the greatest adventure in human history, is going out and learning. Scientific, economic reasons, we will go to the South Pole of the moon where there's ice, we will use that as a proving ground for power, navigation, communication, in-situ resource manufacturing, the capabilities we're going to need when we someday send American astronauts to Mars, and then we got to be able to bring them back. And the way you're going to do that is probably making propellant on Mars. I'd rather do that two and a half days from Earth than nine months away from Earth.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  I love it. Jory? Those bars. Fired me up. Um, uh, how do, how do people actually, uh, apply to NASA? And how broadly are you casting the net? Uh, I, I, I think you identified the, the astronaut program being like the most elite of the most elite. We've all seen that one guy who was like a Navy SEAL and then a doctor and then he became a.

• 1:38:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, Johnny Kim.

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. Uh, but, but. What's he do, what's he doing now, by the way? Any idea? I don't know. Is he still an astronaut?

• 1:38:40Speaker 05

  So he, yeah, oh yeah, he's definitely not. I mean, look, Johnny Kim is a rock star, right? I mean, you know, Navy SEAL.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:47Speaker 05

  You know, Navy SEAL sniper, then goes and gets his MD. I think he got it from Harvard, right? So then he becomes a doctor, then he becomes a NASA astronaut. While he's waiting for his mission, he goes to Navy pilot training, becomes a, a Navy, a naval aviator.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:39:01Speaker 05

  Uh, there's nothing this guy can't do. He just came back from the space station. He was up there for nine months. He actually went up on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:39:08Speaker 05

  Uh, so now he's entitled, uh, to some time off.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:11Speaker 05

  Although I'm, I'm gonna do everything I can to convince him to come to HQ and, uh, and help us out a little bit. Cause that kind of leadership and competence, like we need, we need as much of that as we can get at the top of the organization.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 1:39:22Speaker 05

  But I guess your, your question on like, where do people go?

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  Like if I'm not, if I'm not a Navy SEAL sniper and I'm not, you know, I'm just a guy who's hardworking. I'm an American and I want a job at NASA. What are the different roles that are open? What are the skillsets that you're looking for? And how do you actually apply?

• 1:39:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, we're, I, I tell you, we're looking for a lot of engineers and a lot of technicians. Uh, there's a lot of ways to learn about opportunities. You can go anywhere from NASA's website to, uh, USA jobs. Um, we, we certainly have positions open and we're, we're hitting this in a couple of fronts. We, uh, another area where Scott has been super helpful. One of the biggest surprises when I was on the job is 75% of our workforce is contractors. Now they, they get paid exactly, almost exactly the same thing as civil servants. They don't necessarily get all the same benefits, uh, but they're working for companies that have a 40% uh, gross profit premium on top of it, which actually, you know, is about a billion a year, a little more than that, that we could be using for science and discovery. But even more than that, they have different tools for collaboration, for HR systems, just. You know, you take seventy-five percent of your workforce as contractors and then you combine

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  that with five prime contractors and hundreds of subcontractors building your rockets. Probably no wonder why some things take a little longer than they should, cost a little bit more than they should. So we're converting a lot of contractors back to civil servants. We have this great pipeline of young talent that comes in through our internship programs. We have over a thousand. Every, I think it's on like a trimester type basis, we bring in fresh talent. But then really, how do you bring up that talent and make them lethal within the domains that we focus on here at NASA, you know, those critical engineering capabilities and science, operations and technicians? That's where NASA's tech force comes in.

• 1:41:03Scott Kupor?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, just on the, yeah, from a tactical perspective, if anybody's interested today, just go to, you know, US Tech Force and we will obviously make sure we have it. And then as we roll out formally the NASA force side of it, we'll have a separate landing page for people and make sure that we can get folks, whether they're coming in on the engineering side or whether, you know, they're coming from private sector. But easiest way to go right now is just go to US Tech Force and we will absolutely make sure that we get you in the queue here.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Jared, can you reflect on going to space? How did that happen? What does it mean? Would you recommend it for other folks?

• 1:41:38Speaker 05

  I think like a lot of things in my career, I got very lucky. So I certainly, I mean, I definitely can tell you when I was in kindergarten and I said I wanted to grow up and be an astronaut, the chances of that I thought would be, you know, near zero in life. But got very lucky, you know, kind of, you know, reached out at the right time. I mean, this goes back actually to 2008. I went to Bikenor Kazakhstan to see a Soyuz launch with a lot of the early pioneers of the commercial space industry. And I just kept knocking on the door until it was the right time. And then got lucky to lead, you know, SpaceX's first mission to orbit Inspiration Four, followed up with a developmental program in September of 2024. We went farther into space. We tested a new spacesuit. We used,

• 1:42:20Speaker 05

  we communicated over a beam of light. It was very cool. But I'll tell you that despite the views that I've, that I've seen, the opportunities that I've had in space, I've got the, I got the best job in the world right now.

• 1:42:33John Coogan?

  Do you see part of your mission or part of your legacy being not only the economic opportunity on the moon, the national interest mission on the moon, but actually just allowing more humans to experience space? Is that important?

• 1:42:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, and they go hand in hand with economic opportunity, right? So I do point out all the time that I actually think one of the most important KPIs is more people living and working in space. Now, for that to happen, I mean, because I'm not a believer there's a huge like tourism pipeline in this because it still costs a lot and it'll never be the safety level of an airliner. So you're still, you know, taking a controlled explosion, you know, 1.8 million pounds of thrust sends somebody to 17,500 miles an hour. That's, you know, and when they get there, odds are really good. They're not even gonna feel good. So we gotta, we gotta crack the code on the orbital economy that some days necessitates more people living and working in space. But if you're asking what I hope the greatest

• 1:43:33Speaker 05

  contribution in NASA, because it's not landing on the moon, that's, that's just, that's just luck, honestly, to be here at a time where President Trump gives us the mandate, the resources from the one big beautiful bill, congressional appropriations, like you have all the tools to execute on that. Really, in my mind, it's, it's concentrating our resources here at NASA on the needle movers. You know, sometimes you get, you know, mile wide, inch deep on a, on all the things you're trying to do, but really focus on the things that no one else is capable of doing, but, but NASA, and then empowering the workforce, like the best and brightest across the nation, get rid of as much needless bureaucracy and things that impede progress. And if you can do that, then, then things like returning to the moon and building a moon base will be pale in comparison to what we're capable

• 1:44:17Speaker 05

  of achieving in the years ahead.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Last question, bit of a funny one. The chat asked, what's the best watch to bring to space?

• 1:44:28Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't even know if I come even allowed in this world to endorse a brand. You're in real trouble here.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  Probably not.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  I guess anyone that keeps the time accurately. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to be here, Jared, and always good to have you on the show, Scott.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for your service.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference and scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. It is, in the government role, there's so many, there's so many things you can't do. But according to the chat, he has a fantastic watch collection. I was wondering if there was a memento that he brought with him because you know the story of the moon swatch? You know this whole?

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  The moon watch. Was it going to be a Rolex? Was it going to be an Omega? It wound up being Omega. Very, very, very interesting bit of watch history we can dive into at some other time.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news from this morning.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 1:45:37Jordi Hays?

  Tucker Carlson's

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  shipment of nicotine was hijacked. Very dramatic.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  An attack on one nicotine pouch brand is an attack on us all.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Tyler asked me this morning. Tyler was like, hey.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, you think I'm guilty? I'm not guilty, Tucker.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  You were, no, you were a little bit late for the gym today and we thought maybe.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Hijacking.

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  A little hijack.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Fast and Furious.

• 1:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Josh. Billenson says stealing a truckload of Tucker Carlson branded nicotine pouches is like the plot to a Zuma reboot of The Fast and the Furious.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. In, in the, have you seen the original Fast and Furious, Jordy?

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

  It is so embarrassing.

• 1:46:17Jordi Hays?

  I've seen, I've certainly seen trailers and or scenes.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  Have you seen any Fast and Furious movies? Any of them? There's so many good ones. Anyway, in

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  And there's, there's like forty of them, right?

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they, uh, there's like twelve. Uh, they, and they all have like puns as names. So there's, uh, the original movie is called The Fast and the Furious. Then later they just came out with one that's just called Fast and Furious, which is very confusing. Then they had Fast Five, they had Too Fast, Too Furious, which is hilarious. Uh, I was really hoping that for the 10th movie, they were gonna do Fast 10, Your Seatbelts. That would have been a good pun, but they didn't. And then they did the Fate of the Furious, F A.

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  Alright dad.

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  Ah, I got you. Anyway, in The Fast and Furious, they, they're stealing, I think, DVD players. And so they, they hijack a truck.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Right, because they love movies so much?

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  They love movies. It's, it's insider dealing, because it's like the movie industry is like, we gotta promote the DVD players, make them, you know, oh, you want these DVD players, right? Well, what else you got, Jordan?

• 1:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Trey says the I W C that Jared wore to space, he, Jared auctioned off for charity.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Well, I should have asked a more, more pointed question about that. Anyway.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Patriot.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Vanta. Automated Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. We have Adam Bry from Skydio. He's the co-founder and CEO in the Reaching Waiting Room. Welcome to the show, Adam.

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Great to see you. How are you doing?

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Great to be here, guys.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Uh, give us the backstory of Skydio. Get us up to speed on Skydio. I'm obviously familiar with the, with the company, but for those who aren't, there's, there's so many, so many places we can go in drones and defense and, and DJI. There's a million places I want to go, but, but introduce the company and, and take us through the shape of the company right now.

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  So we are the largest US drone manufacturer. Uh, we sell drones to military, we sell drones to public safety and law enforcement. Uh, we sell drones to critical infrastructure inspectors. Uh, we serve a number of our allies around the world.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:19Speaker 06

  And the big bet that we made when we started the company was on AI and autonomy. So we started in 2014. We've been at it for 12 years. Um, so we made, made very big bets on AI and autonomy when they were, uh, Not nearly as obvious as they are today. And we're at a very exciting moment in drones where they're really having their moment. And the way people use drones is transitioning from manually flown to dock based and remote and autonomous. And we're just seeing incredible stuff happen now with our customers.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  I remember Chris Dixon, I believe this is the story, showed me a video of a Skydio drone flying around a house and doing sort of a roof inspection. Is that a real business now or insurance agency? Walk me through some of the less, everyone knows about Ukraine, what's going on there. But like, how are drones actually getting used in the American economy today in an industrial context?

• 1:49:08Speaker 06

  So that is a real use case. We have customers that are doing insurance claims adjustment with drones. So rather than taking out a ladder and climbing up on a roof, you just take a drone out and push a couple of buttons, it automatically digitizes and specs the whole thing. The biggest and fastest growing use of our products today is in law enforcement and public safety, where there's just been this huge paradigm shift. So law enforcement has been using drones for like the last 10, 15 years. But historically, it was typically a pretty small team. They were manually flown. You know, they would get called out every once in a while if there was an event. But the paradigm shift now is the drone lives in a docking station on the roof of the police department. It can be flown remotely. And when a 911 call comes in, you click one button on a map and the drone will launch

• 1:49:51Speaker 06

  itself, it'll fly there, it'll give you real time awareness. And it just changes outcomes because you can see a crime in progress, you can find a missing person. Yeah, we've got a good one here. So this is, this is close to home. This is San Francisco Police Department. This is called Drone as First Responder. So basically, this was a report of a stolen vehicle. They launched the drone. They're following this guy from the air. He doesn't know they're there. So they knew that people would do this. They'd steal license plates after they'd stolen the vehicle. They never actually caught anybody in the act, but with the drone, it's easy. So now he's got his stolen plate.

• 1:50:24John Coogan?

  And he's putting it on the car.

• 1:50:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So he nicely holds it up so we can read it from the drone.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  No way. This is not an actor. This is a real criminal.

• 1:50:33Speaker 06

  No, this is real. This happened last year in San Francisco. So now he's tinting the windows. So this is bad news, right? This is a stolen vehicle, cold plate in the vehicle, tinting the windows. He's going off to do a bunch of bad stuff, but they know exactly where he is thanks to the drone. They send out a plainclothes unit, they roll a spike strip.

• 1:50:51Speaker 06

  So he's got flat tires and that's basically into the story. And this is happening all the time. This is happening like every hour, almost every minute somewhere across the country. The cops are responding to calls with autonomous drones.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  So take me deeper into that example. That feels like a replacement for dispatching a whole helicopter. That feels like there's probably enough bandwidth at a police department to have someone sort of manually piloting that, even if there's some autonomous systems that are just keeping you from crashing into the walls. But what level of autonomy are we talking about right now for like the most functional use cases?

• 1:51:26Speaker 06

  So the way that our customers talk about it is force multiplier. And it really is a force multiplier because you can have one person sitting in an op center. They call them real time information centers and they can be flying up to four drones at once. Because there's a lot of automation built into the software. So you can just click a button on the map and the drone will fly there. Or you could click on a car or a person of interest and the drone will start following it. So it's a highly, highly leveraged activity and it's also just faster to get somewhere. So rather than taking half an hour for an officer to roll out on the ground and find the address, whatever. It's like 30 seconds for the drone to get there. It can very quickly determine what's happening. And yes, you're right. You do have sort of a remote officer who's flying and controlling this thing,

• 1:52:08Speaker 06

  but they're just much more highly leveraged. And so the impact is kind of two sided. One of the ends is what you saw there in that video where it's like high stakes scenario, prime in progress. We're going to use the drone to change an outcome. The other end of the spectrum is like the most mundane stuff where somebody reports that like, you know, there's a car parked where it shouldn't be or something and would waste an hour of somebody's time to go check on it. But you just send the drone and you can very quickly see what's going on. And so the law enforcement, I think default expectation in Really, probably like the next two or three years is if you call 911, a drone should show up in 60 seconds or less. And this, this is happening that, you know, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Oklahoma

• 1:52:48Speaker 06

  City, Miami, uh, you know, big, the big cities across the country are all using Skydio.

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, and Yeah. So when, when a city does a, when a city, uh, signs up as a customer, deploys, uh, deploys your product into the field, is there a lag time before you see, like, I'm assuming crime statistics must start to change as criminals

• 1:53:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  realize, hey, I don't have like, you know, 15 minutes to kind of get my act together after committing a crime. I have like, you know, 120 seconds and then I'm going to be being tracked and it just makes it a lot more complicated. So maybe you end up, uh, you know, getting a real job or something like that instead of committing crime.

• 1:53:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  What, what, what, what kind of shows up in the data?

• 1:53:35Speaker 06

  Economy booms as criminals Exactly. Jobs. Crime goes down, employment goes up. Yeah. Uh, so like San Francisco has been public this. I think that, I think that, uh, crime is down like 30%. Auto thefts are down close to 50%. Wow. Yeah. Since they've rolled this out. So I think, um, and there was, there was actually like an unintentional testimonial from a guy who, you know, who had lived in this world. I remember this. You, you might've seen this. I remember this. We should actually find that clip. Yeah. Uh, but he, he was basically saying like, crime is over in San Francisco because you're screwed. You know, like you steal a car, they're going to show, the drone's going to show up in 30 seconds. There's nothing you can do. Yeah. And it is, you know, it's, it's satisfying for me. And I think it's also, you know, for us as a company and for our customers. Yeah. There's just an asymmetric advantage. Like when there's a drone following you from

• 1:54:18Speaker 06

  above, like there's not a lot you can do. And, you know, I was asking one of our customers, they were showing a video of a retail theft where somebody had, had lifted 50,000 bucks from a store, $50,000 worth of goods. Wow. And they, the drone got there. It ID'd the person just as they were getting into the getaway car. They followed the getaway car to the person's residence, then just arrested him. I was like, oh, man, this is incredible. Can you use this video in court? And the chief said, there's no way this is going to court, right? Like, we've just, we've got this person cold. We've got video evidence, the whole thing from the drone. And so it's also just way more efficient. Yeah, way more efficient for the system that you don't have to go through like a long trial.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Because the defense attorney shows up and doesn't say, oh, there's a bunch of wiggle room. They just say, okay, they got it dead to rights. Like, you should just plead guilty, plead it out, and just do the time. You did the crime. Talk to me about what's on an exponential and what's on a linear trajectory. What I mean by that is AI progress, clearly on an exponential. When, if you're trying to read that license plate, I believe that you're going to get better at reading that license plate twice as better. Like, the quality of your AI systems is going to just double constantly. Probably same thing with your production capacity. You're probably, you know, exponentially growing the amount of drones that you can make. But battery technology, range, flight time, security, like, what is still not on an exponential?

• 1:55:38Speaker 06

  It's a really interesting question. So the way that I kind of think about it is,

• 1:55:45Speaker 06

  we have a similar kind of dynamic to the self-driving car companies. We're building this really hardcore, real-world technology that has to deal with the full complexity of what the real world can present. Different weather conditions, different operating paradigms, different visual lighting conditions. And a lot of these, you know, AI is on an exponential curve, but I also kind of think the real world is exponentially complex. And so there's this very, very hard, real-world grind that you have to go through to make this stuff work reliably and scalably. I mean, you can kind of think of our drones like self-driving cars that fly. And that is the hardest piece. And, you know, we've been at it now for 12 years, and there's really, unfortunately, no shortcuts. I mean, it's taken us a long time, millions

• 1:56:29Speaker 06

  of flights, tens of thousands of drones we've built to learn a lot of these hard, real-world lessons, and then incorporate them into our hardware and software to make the system reliable. So we're benefiting now. You know, we made big bets on computer vision. That turned out to be right. We're on a great exponential there, but the... The visual complexity of the real world is also exponentially high.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk us through the the importance of like dock based drones. When did you start building docks? Because I imagine you started with drones and then eventually realized that you need to actually sell the infrastructure that there is not, there aren't just going to be sky ports with charging infrastructure that just pop up everywhere. So walk us through what we're what we're seeing in that video and sort of the the rollout here.

• 1:57:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, so that's a dock in action. So vertical integration, there's different ways you can approach it. I think I'm a big believer in vertical integration, like building the dock and the drone and writing all the software that runs on it and writing all the cloud interfaces to to manage it. Like, all these pieces need to work together to deliver kind of this solution. Like, at the end of the day, we're kind of a boring enterprise solution to our customers. There's just a bunch of cutting edge robotics under the hood to make it possible. And it's it's been a journey to get to where we are. We we were talking about docks when we started the company in 2014. One of the things I believe is you got to have, for these really big technology plays, you kind of need, you need an incremental business path along with the incremental technology. Like, I think the biggest successes, Tesla did this, SpaceX did this. You've got the grand vision, but you've got to find ways to make incremental technical progress and unlock incremental business value along the

• 1:57:57Speaker 06

  way. So building the drone without the dock is is an obvious example of that. I think in 2019 is when we really like went all in and said, like, we think these enterprise markets are ready. We think the dock is the way to serve them. So it's been a six, seven year path from then to now have our products really being produced at scale, reliably working at scale. And, you know, there's a lot of little problems, little and big problems you got to solve along the way to make it work.

• 1:58:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about a little bit about privacy, surveillance, regulation. Can you spy on me? Can the government spy on me? I love the idea of finding my car if it gets stolen, but I'm a little bit hesitant about having a drone follow me around everywhere for no reason, just in case I go two miles an hour over the speed limit. Like, how do you grapple with those trade offs, the regulation, how you think the government uses this technology?

• 1:58:49Speaker 06

  So I think these are civilizational questions and I think ultimately they are like policy and regulatory questions. This is a hot topic today, like what's the role of companies and how their government customers use it. So, you know, we have a voice in this conversation. We have a strong posture towards transparency. I think transparency is basically the key, especially in law enforcement, because if the police are transparent and if people see... You guys hear me?

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  No, no, we're good. If you take them out, you can probably just switch to the computer audio.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can hear the hum of your workshop.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Your massive facility behind you. Workshop makes it sound like it's like Santa's workshop.

• 1:59:30Jordi Hays?

  It is Santa's.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  It's a manufacturing facility, Jordy.

• 1:59:34Jordi Hays?

  They have elves.

• 1:59:35Speaker 06

  The biggest drone factory in the world.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you now.

• 1:59:38Speaker 06

  Okay, great.

• 1:59:39John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 1:59:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think transparency is the key, because, you know, if people see what law enforcement is doing with drones, they can form their own assessment and there's natural accountability built in there. And really, one of the things that I think our customer is doing an amazing job of is being maximally transparent on this stuff. When an agency launches their drone as their first water program, they're not trying to like hide it in a back room. They're like hosting a press event, they're explaining what they're doing, they're showing videos like the one that I showed you. And we actually have, we do a bunch of transparency features in the product, so we have a transparency portal that basically makes it easy for an agency to publish all the flying they're doing and citizens use this. You can log on and you can see like, oh, were they following me around to see if I was going through model towers? No, they were like busting somebody who stole

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  my car. And this is kind of aside, but one of the things that I've come to appreciate working with law enforcement is there's very high direct accountability there, because these police chiefs and sheriffs, I mean, they are either directly elected themselves or they're downstream from an elected official. And if something goes wrong, they're on the nightly news explaining it and they don't want to be there. And so... They take this stuff really seriously. So it's not to say that there aren't legitimate concerns and that everything's going to be perfect, hunky-dory, but I think the the feedback mechanisms are in place to get us to a healthy place and the safety benefits are just incredible. Like when people see like the one that I show, they tend to get it.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've been pretty, I've been pretty satisfied with the way local jurisdictions have been able to decide as a small community, whether or not they want license plate readers or whether or not they want, you know, doorbell cameras to be accessible. And it hasn't been something that's been forced upon every community or banned from every community. It's been on a city by city basis and that feels like the correct formulation structure based on what we know we're entitled to as Americans.

• 2:01:33Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. Yeah, like, sorry, just on that note, like, when you're selling to public safety and law enforcement, it's basically a community sale. Like, all this stuff goes before city council before it gets approved.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Speaker 06

  And, and they're the ultimate people that are carrying the purse ring. So that's, agency knows that, we know that, and that's part of that. They're, they're our ultimate customer.

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about DJI. DJI got added to the FCC's covered list and the end of last year, how, you know, long time over.

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  They just had a cool feature where I guess like anyone can access any of them. So like, if I have one, like.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had the guy, we had the guy that hacked, that basically vibed coded his way into being able to control and look at the video feed of 7,000 DJI.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  He found the back door.

• 2:02:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he found the back.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  And then he hacked into a vacuum and drove it to the back door of the house that he was in.

• 2:02:21Speaker 06

  You know, some might say that Chinese drones come pre-hacked, but no hacking required.

• 2:02:27John Coogan?

  But, yeah.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  But how is, how is the FCC's action impacted your business? I'm assuming that's something that you felt would have been an obvious decision for the government for many years prior, but give us the history.

• 2:02:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, I think that part of what's happened here is like when we started the company in 2014, drones seemed like toys. You know, they were like kids toys, people flew them. And they've been through this evolution from like toys to like useful tools for expert operators to to now, I would argue, like critical infrastructure. And then the conflict in Ukraine, foreign Ukraine, I think just demonstrated to everybody how important these small light drones are from a national security perspective. So I think there's been kind of just increasing awareness over the last 10 years that this is critical technology with with very high national security stakes. And, you know, from our perspective as a company, like, our goal is just to win on the strengths of the product and the tech. And I think that the shift to dock and autonomy really plays to our strengths, both as a

• 2:03:26Speaker 06

  company and as a country. And you can see this in the market, like historically, DGI had like 70, 80% market share in in law enforcement. And in the dock world, they're still our number one predator. So like flock safety is effectively a DGI reseller, like all of their drone as first responders work is done with DGI drones today.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:03:47Speaker 06

  But the scoreboard has flipped. You know, we are, we are winning the majority of these deals, even before the FCC action, on the strengths of the product and the tech, because it's just sort of a different recipe. It's similar, but it's a different recipe to deliver the solution. Price, people are a little bit price sensitive because the value's so high. You know, price is probably DJI's greatest strength. So, look, from our standpoint, like, our goal is just to have the best products and and tech in the world. We certainly benefit from policy and regulatory tailwinds. And, you know, I'm, I'm not neutral on this. We have a business stake in it. But I think there's a lot of reasons why we want a domestic drone industry, and why that's important for our national security. I mean, this stuff, it's critical for military, it's critical for infrastructure, it's critical for public

• 2:04:30Speaker 06

  safety. And so it's exciting to see, like, huge momentum now towards domestic industry and and domestic manufacturing. But ultimately, the only stable long term solution is to have the best products and tech designed and built right here in the US. And that's what we're doing. And that's what the factory behind me is doing.

• 2:04:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:47Speaker 06

  I think this new chapter of drones as infrastructure is is a huge opportunity for us as a as a country.

• 2:04:52Jordi Hays?

  And how are you thinking about scaling manufacturing capacity over the next decade?

• 2:04:59Speaker 06

  I mean, we're all in on it. It's a fun problem. I mean, it's just, it's a, it's all engineering of some flavor. It's a different set of engineering problems. So we're adding more and more automation to our factory. We're investing in the systems and processes. I think that the like, the combination of AI and robotics is changes the way manufacturing works. Like, it's possible to automate more stuff. It's possible to have what happens on our factory floor be more software defined. I think that's, you know, that's going to be more to our advantage versus just pure low cost labor. Like, that's not our strength in the US. We have phenomenal workers planting drones, but it's, you know, it's a different, it's a different labor equation than it is in Asia. So, you know, we're investing very heavily in like, the software aspects

• 2:05:41Speaker 06

  of manufacturing, in the automation around it. And it's, it's part of our core identity as, as a company, and we're continuing to scale. So, you know, we're in an 80,000 square foot facility now. A year from now, we'll probably be in a 250,000 square foot facility.

• 2:06:01John Coogan?

  It's a huge facility. Huge facility. Congratulations. And thank you for taking the time to come chat with us. Good luck with the continued scale up. And, I mean, I, I, I think I met you over a decade ago. So, a true overnight success.

• 2:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Come back on when you have news, Adam.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:06:23Jordi Hays?

  Really, really cool to get the update.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:06:27John Coogan?

  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. And you know what? I got another ad read. fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Did I mess it up? No, it didn't trigger. fin.ai is the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And without further ado, we have Mateo from Eight Sleep back on the stream his fifth, sixth time. We can't stop talking to this guy. How you doing, Mateo?

• 2:06:58Matteo Franceschetti?

  Looking rested.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 2:07:01Matteo Franceschetti?

  All good. Great to see you guys.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  I have absolutely loved my Aidsleep. I continue to sleep on it. Negative 10 on my side, plus 10 on my wife's side. My five-year-old has a feature request. He says, "Where's my zone? I sleep in the middle." And we're like, "You don't sleep in the middle. You sleep in your bed." But I'm sure you get that all the time. But how are you?

• 2:07:24Matteo Franceschetti?

  All good. How are you doing, guys?

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:07:27Matteo Franceschetti?

  Back here with some good news.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  Always great to have you. Give us the news. What happened?

• 2:07:33Matteo Franceschetti?

  We just announced a new round. We raised 50 million dollars, 1.5 billion.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:07:46Jordi Hays?

  And who'd you raise it from?

• 2:07:49Matteo Franceschetti?

  From Tether Investments. The tether company, they are doubling down on AI and health. And I have been friends with that. Paulo, the CEO, for a long time, he's a really big fan of us. And very quickly, he said, "Okay, how can I accelerate you guys even more?" And we were able to close the deal very quickly.

• 2:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Give us an update on the business overall. Everything you're focused on this year, all that good stuff.

• 2:08:22Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah. Well, the best part is in between, now in 2025, we raised twice, right? Including this round. But the best part is we were profitable. So that's the part I love the most. We didn't need money. But you know, when you have the right investors, that they can really push you further. It makes sense from a strategic standpoint. So we were profitable. We launched three products last year. Now we sell in 34 countries. We're launching China in a matter of a few months. So we'll be in China as well. And then we will launch Brazil as well this year. More hardware products coming. As I say, strong unit economics, a lot of people loving us. We just need to keep shipping.

• 2:09:06Jordi Hays?

  What actually goes into an international launch for Aidsleep?

• 2:09:14Matteo Franceschetti?

  For 2026?

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, like, you know, it's a it's a heavy product. It's not the easiest thing to ship in the world. You know, some some brands would have entered Brazil or China a long time ago, but you guys are going kind of country by country, clearly focused, much more strategically, maybe.

• 2:09:34Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, we almost wanted to prove the strategy even at the board level. So we started with Canada and then from Canada we went to Australia and then Europe, then UK, then we launched Middle East, which was super successful. Then we launched Mexico, which was super successful. And then Saudi Arabia, Singapore. Now, the the next big bet is China, which will happen in around April. And then Brazil, Brazil is quite complicated. The interesting thing is we sell everything direct to consumer. So we don't use distributors or we don't go into any retail store. So we control everything. That makes things faster, but at the same time, it's it's there are still a lot of requirements also in terms of approval as a consumer electronics device.

• 2:10:19Matteo Franceschetti?

  So usually that is the thing that requires the longest. And then the supply chain and the shipping, but that is honestly fairly tricky.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  What what what key kind of health trends are you tracking? I'm sure you were you were.

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  Are peptides changing sleep at all?

• 2:10:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't it? I think there is one peptide that specifically targets sleep.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  I'm just curious.

• 2:10:41Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we are running some some clinical studies, but yeah, they're a couple that seem promising for that. And and and then there are also some drugs about sleep apnea that seem really effective. They were not approved yet, but there are certain pills that it seems they can really help with the mitigation of sleep apnea. And then we we filed for FDA approval, both for detection and mitigation of sleep apnea. We invented a new technology that mitigates sleep apnea without you wearing anything. I think it could be a massive home run for the business. Obviously, we we need to get to the finish line and prove it and get the FDA approval. But if that happens, it would be a game changer for millions of people.

• 2:11:26Matteo Franceschetti?

  You know, forty percent of people with sleep apnea, they don't even know they have it. And this is a life threatening disease for certain people. And I think we have a really nice solution that is extremely convenient, seamless. They will have millions or billions of people.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Billions.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  Ninety-three last night.

• 2:11:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, how did you?

• 2:11:48John Coogan?

  Ninety-five percent quality, one hundred percent consistency, seven hours and eighteen minutes. Not too bad, not too bad.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-one.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  But doesn't it, but doesn't it adjust? Isn't it possible that I got a better night's sleep than John last night? But, but he on average gets worse sleep. And so he put up an okay, a good night for him. John's best night's sleep is a nightmare for me.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but take me through. What does it take to get me to a hundred? I know that there are other pieces of the puzzle. I have the, I have the, I have the mattress cover, of course. But should I be taking supplements? What else do you have for me that could get me to a hundred more regularly?

• 2:12:35Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, so you, I, I, I would think in three dimensions. On one side there is consistency, so going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time.

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm very consistent about drinking like a full bottle of wine before bed. Is that good?

• 2:12:49Matteo Franceschetti?

  That's not gonna help with your, with your score and your HRV.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  I just, I just blackout and then I wake up and I'm like, I fell asleep. It was effective, made me sleepy.

• 2:12:59Matteo Franceschetti?

  Actually, I give, I give, yeah. I give a presentation to a bunch of entrepreneurs and some of them start to challenge me and say, yeah, I know that you keep saying this thing of the alcohol, but every time I, I have a couple of drinks, I pass out and wake up. But then I believe alcohol is not bad for me. And I say, look, man, we can look at your data.

• 2:13:20John Coogan?

  You can look at your data, yeah, I got the data.

• 2:13:24Matteo Franceschetti?

  But statistically, it's not good.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Yes, but, but on, on the supplement side, what's interesting, melatonin? Give me kind of sort of your thesis about the other things that impact sleep.

• 2:13:35Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, honestly, the one that works is well known is melatonin.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:39Matteo Franceschetti?

  The problem with melatonin is you cannot keep taking melatonin for too long.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:13:45Matteo Franceschetti?

  Uh, so usually we have run a bunch of studies. And what we have seen is you should keep it below point five milligrams.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:53Matteo Franceschetti?

  Uh, that otherwise it creates dependency.

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:56Matteo Franceschetti?

  Then when you're traveling or you wanna adjust for leg, you can go up to two milligrams, something like that, but you should stop after three, four days.

• 2:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:04Matteo Franceschetti?

  Not much.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Matteo Franceschetti?

  I understand a lot of people take three to five milligrams every single night forever.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then they build a tolerance and they don't get anything out of it. Like, you know, you can't just drink caffeine every single day and expect to have the same results.

• 2:14:15Matteo Franceschetti?

  Exactly. Then some people report some benefit with magnesium, my shravaganda and some of that. But usually the benefits are fairly minimal.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:14:25Matteo Franceschetti?

  Um, right now, the only one that is very well proven to work is a melatonin.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how many hours of sleep data do you have?

• 2:14:37Matteo Franceschetti?

  Me?

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. At eight sleep, how much data are you studying these days?

• 2:14:42Matteo Franceschetti?

  Oh, we cross billions of nights.

• 2:14:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, billions of nights.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  He just wanted an excuse.

• 2:14:54Matteo Franceschetti?

  The interesting part is, what excites me is because we sell in thirty four countries now.

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Matteo Franceschetti?

  It's so interesting, right, to really think that we are powering this people all across the globe, right, different genders, different, everything.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  What, can you tell us what country sleeps best?

• 2:15:10Matteo Franceschetti?

  Australia.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  Australia sleeps best.

• 2:15:13Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, there is a specific place in Australia, um, on the coast where they sleep like babies. They're like unbeatable.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:15:24Matteo Franceschetti?

  Um, Americans don't sleep very well in the Grand Skimo.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  What, what's the, what's the thesis there? They're just by, they're hanging out at the beach, they're super relaxed.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. They're lazy.

• 2:15:34Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. It's probably just a local culture where they're still active, but they're probably way more consistent and they have more time for for for sleep. And then the other interesting thing is sometimes you see weird spikes in in good or in a good or bad direction for for sleep. Now, I I would publish a long time ago, I know how sleep deep during the election, election day, or there are all these studies about when, you know, you change the time, uh, forward, backward.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Delay savings time, or probably the Super Bowl, there's a whole bunch of different dates.

• 2:16:11Matteo Franceschetti?

  Super Bowl, all that kind of thing. So it's, yeah, it's pretty funny.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  And video earnings, probably people losing sleep.

• 2:16:18Matteo Franceschetti?

  Yeah, even after COVID, a lot of things changed. People started sleeping way longer after COVID, particularly during COVID, they were sleeping like an hour longer on average per night, which was pretty impressive. And still today, you see the difference across even the different days of the week.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  Wow, that's impressive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the round.

• 2:16:39Jordi Hays?

  On the new round.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon, Mateo.

• 2:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great to see you as always.

• 2:16:44Matteo Franceschetti?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:16:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Dylan Rolnick from News Research coming on the show.

• 2:17:07Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Dylan, how you doing?

• 2:17:08Speaker 08

  Yo, great to meet you guys. Big fan of your show. Happy to be here.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Uh, thank you so much for taking the time. Uh, since it is the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and what you're working on.

• 2:17:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm Dylan Rolnick. Like you said, I'm the COO and, uh, broadly, I would say News Research is working on being a super internet native AI lab.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:29Speaker 08

  Essentially just focused on bringing open source to the forefront and all we can for open source AI.

• 2:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, talk about, uh, agents, harnesses, uh, uh, conductors, orchestration. How are, how do you envision this year playing out for how people, your customers, your users will interface with AI?

• 2:17:54Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, so I mean, I think this year has already been pretty heavy on agents. We did our, I mean Claw, right? Open Claw hours.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:02Speaker 08

  Um, we just put out Hermes agent. So

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:05Speaker 08

  I think people are just starting to get used to a kind of different way to interact with AI that maybe they're not as used to. That's like blowing people's minds. So if you're like super close to it, some of the stuff might not be that shocking, but I think you saw with how things became very popular, very fast, people getting a first glimpse of like putting an AI out there, kind of like letting it's do its thing and coming back to something that's finished or done, like a work product is pretty incredible for people.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Baby Keem quit the rap game. Focus on Open Claw.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Baby Keem is focused. He's getting Mac, he's stacking Mac minis.

• 2:18:31Speaker 08

  I did, yeah.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:18:33Speaker 08

  Yeah. We gotta convert him. That'd be a big win for us.

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:36Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:18:39Speaker 08

  So anyways, yeah, I mean, like we're, we, we think it's super powerful. We put out our Hermes agent, like I said, sort of an alternative kind of, you know, eh, we view it as sort of taking the best of what you would see in a coding agent and what you would see in something like Open Claw. And then we added a bunch of capability that's important to our own work to advance the stuff that we're doing. Cause like if anyone's going to use a agent to advance their work, like it sure as hell is going to be us first. So.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, when, when you say advan-, you say advance work, but it feels like there's still some consumer angle. Like what are the textbook use cases that you're seeing?

• 2:19:12Speaker 08

  We're just starting to get some feedback on what people are doing, but I think, you know, from the professional standpoint, it's like, uh, people want a way to just have a task be put out there and they come back like they're messaging with it on Telegram. They're saying like, I'd like for you to do some research for me. And then by the time I get back to my desk, I'm able to look over that kind of thing.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:31Speaker 08

  But from our vantage, we put in like, you know, we have traditionally made our name basically doing post-training.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:38Speaker 08

  So all the tools that we've been using, we've been trying to feed into that tool so that this thing could actually help us advance that goal as well.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  So are you building on top of open source pre-trains then?

• 2:19:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. So what we did to initially gain some popularity was like it was Lama was putting out base models.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:56Speaker 08

  We fine tuned those into something that we thought would be like something the market would want. Which is why I'm excited about the agent stuff because like we were kind of sitting there being like, okay, here's what we think is like a gap between what models are doing presently and what we could add to the fine tune world. Um, but once you actually have an agent out there that's like touching people and doing like economic work and helping, you get more feedback as to what it is that you actually need to post trains. So for us, it's kind of like, now we have this thing out there. Can we shape an open source model into something that makes the best out of this harness? And is cheaper or like better across some vectors.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Uh, how are you thinking about go to market? Uh, the open source piece is interesting, but what are the other levers to get people to adopt the product?

• 2:20:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think, um, just bludgeoning people with how you can use this thing is important. I, I think there's a huge gap between what people know about AI and what AI can actually do. Like even some of the people that I consider some of the most like savvy, uh, non-technical users of AI are continually blown away by like what Hermes agent can do. And Hermes agent again is just like a harness on other people's agent. It's not even like the compounding effect yet.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:03Speaker 08

  So I think like making that super easy for people to dive into and get.

• 2:21:07John Coogan?

  So, so yeah, what are you actually, uh, like pitching them? Cause like, you know, chat GPT comes out, everyone's like, this can do your homework. Uh, like this will replace like Wikipedia. Uh, this will replace Google search, right? Like go here and instead of just typing, you know, tell me the history of the Roman Empire in Google. You just do that in chat GPT and you get something that's looks different and is better in a bunch of different ways. Like what's your pitch for like the first prompt that they should fire off?

• 2:21:35Speaker 08

  That's a good one. Um, I think the, well, so the first part of the pitch is like, I think open source is crucial for a lot of people and they might not realize it yet, but I think one of the things I hear from folks that use any agent is like, I'm willing to spend a couple bucks, but maybe not like, you know, a hundred bucks a day.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:51Speaker 08

  And Claude, while extraordinarily capable is expensive because it's just like Omni capable. Um, so I think the ability to like hone in on the agentic capability at a cheaper price point is definitely part of the pitch. And I would say just like get in there, figure out what you spend the most amount of your time doing that you don't want to do. And ask Hermes agent to solve that for you.

• 2:22:12John Coogan?

  I think we need some more specificity if we want to pitch these people. It's it's tough.

• 2:22:17Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  People need a killer use case. They need their hands held. Uh, and uh, there's certainly, there's certainly opportunity out there, but uh, uh, hopefully, you know, this will evolve. I'm always, I'm always taken by that example of mid journey. Where if you gave, uh, David Hole's mid journey, he said, if you give people like a blank box and just say, prompt whatever they want to prompt, uh, they will just type dog and they'll just get like a picture of a dog. And they're like, I could have gotten a dog on Google Images. Like this doesn't do anything special. But when they went into mid journey, they saw everyone else prompting. They say space dog on Mars with a, you know, rocket ship, blah, blah, blah. And then they would, they would remix and, and enjoy. How are you thinking about bringing the different community together, the different Hermes agent?

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  I, I was on Instagram and I saw someone who used Open Claw. This is just like a family friend. Uh, but used Open Claw to build a new, uh, photo album, piece of software to collect photos from all of their different family resources. So they have some in Google Drive. They have the, the grandparents use, uh, you know, some Microsoft product. And they wanted something that would synthesize all of this together into one, you know, central place, tag them all, do all of this. And I was like, that's an interesting use case. I like that she built that. And that's something that I could maybe say, hey, maybe I want that. And maybe that becomes a product one day. But, uh, how are you thinking about bringing the community together?

• 2:23:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a good point. So here's what I'll say is when we put this out, we were kind of thinking of it as like a gift to the community. Like we're very open source focused. Like I said, like, let's just see what people can make use of this thing. And we're probably in that discovery phase of like, what is it that people are doing? So we had a bunch of immediately cool stuff that I thought came out. And then we're putting together a hackathon right now to try to get more of that. Like you want to see, like you said, you want to be inspired by what other people are doing. So we're putting together a hackathon that's going to start tomorrow online. Let everyone do, I think we're in play mode, like do the coolest stuff that you can.

• 2:24:13John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:24:13Speaker 08

  And let's figure out what exactly hits.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it is like the best time to go to a hackathon, to host a hackathon. Like we are truly at this like incredible moment where the tools have gotten so much better.

• 2:24:23Jordi Hays?

  I would use the agent to figure out homes in my area that look like castles.

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm very inspired by our.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Somewhat of a castle.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  This is a cool building.

• 2:24:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm in a castle. But yeah, I mean, you might not want to give that away because that could be a hit for the hackathon.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  You're gonna have to bid against, you know, Casey Hanmer, he, Terraform, he operates his business out of a castle in Burbank. It's amazing.

• 2:24:48Speaker 08

  It makes you feel very secure and strong.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  It has like true turrets. It was built, it's not really like a defensible castle. I think it was built more for, maybe just a crazy person or something, maybe for the film industry or something. But it looks fantastic. And your office looks fantastic as well. Congratulations on all the success.

• 2:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, shoot us, shoot us a note on, on who ends up winning the hackathon.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  We'll cover it.

• 2:25:09John Coogan?

  That'd be awesome. I'm sure, I'm sure you'll be posting about it as well.

• 2:25:11Speaker 08

  Appreciate that.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, Dylan, have a great rest of your day.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Dylan.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:25:15Speaker 08

  Great to meet you guys. Have a great one.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. Did you know, according to Tyler Cowen, this is how people talk? According to Sardius, brutally sweater-mogged by boomer-foi doom-slop-maxing on change-gooning-your-sweater-is-not-ready-for. That sentence, it's like, it's completely escaped velocity to the point where I don't, I don't even understand it, and I follow most of this lingo pretty closely. But I appreciate that Tyler Cowen has just reflected on the fact that the vernacular is fully changing on the internet, and it is, in many ways, indistinguishable, or indecipherable. It

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  is, it's a mess. It is, it is, it is its own form of slop. The, the, the looks-maxing lingo. The A&W CEO has joined the burger wars. This just continues and continues. I mean, I guess it's free, free press if you're in the fast food industry. I didn't know that A&W was even a store. I didn't know that they sold burgers. I thought they just had root beer, A&W. Have you ever been to an A&W, Jordy?

• 2:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Never heard of it.

• 2:26:29John Coogan?

  Never heard of it.

• 2:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Never ever heard of it.

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  You mentioned it, but here is the picture with beautiful lighting. Baby Keem says, three more to go, two sparks on the way. Is that the Nvidia spark?

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  DJX spark?

• 2:26:44John Coogan?

  DJX spark? That's an expensive computer, right? He's, he's really wiring everything up. 10,000 likes. He's having a great time. I, I appreciate that, that Baby Keem is having, having a good time in the open source AI agent world.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Sudo says, developers are cooked. I vibe coded a worse version of an existing product in four weeks with serious security flaws.

• 2:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a wild time. Be careful out there. The other interesting thing that's going on is like, there's, there's new data on, on serious, serious traffic declines across tech publications. This is from Danny Crichton. Says, no discussion of tech media can get past this basic traffic fact. In the AI world, Google and social no longer refer traffic, which means that the vast majority of readers just never find you in the first place. This is of course, a reaction to Trey Stevens' proposal that, but maybe that he should buy Wired. And it's unclear if he's just having fun, but there's been, there's been, there's been a call

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  from the tech community to like, bring back the Wired we read in the magazines as a kid. You know, it used to be so techno optimistic. Now it's this hypercritical, maybe semi-political outlet. But what Danny is pointing to is that these publications have, have seen just in the last two years since 2024, traffic declines of between 30% and 97% for digital trends. The interesting one there, I think it was of course Wired. In November of 2024, Wired was putting up 7 million, 7.7 million views in traffic. Now it's down at 2.9. And there's another one on here.

• 2:28:33John Coogan?

  I had no idea that, that Mashable was still so big. Mashable has actually done pretty well. 16 million two years ago. Now it's down at 11 million, not too bad. But ZDNet, that was a website where I would go and, and The Verge is on here too. 5 million views down at 7.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder how much of this is. Due to AI overviews and, and you know, Google search results now are more ads, more, more paid links than organic links.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  There's a lot of that. There's a lot of, uh,

• 2:29:09Jordi Hays?

  But I think, I think a bigger issue is-

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  Something happens and it gets screenshotted and shared on X. That's pretty new too.

• 2:29:13Jordi Hays?

  The screenshot, there's a hundred, for each one of these publications, there's a hundred or a thousand people that will take whatever news-

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  And reconstitute it.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  And just make it more socially native. So I would imagine that the stories these companies are telling are getting a similar amount of impressions overall. That's just not happening.

• 2:29:32John Coogan?

  Potentially more because a lot of the stories that they write about, at least the ones that do scoops, are, are more interesting than ever. The Verge has had some great reporting. Uh, Alex Heath, who formerly worked at The Verge and is now writing at sources.news, his Substack, um, says more viscerally, these traffic declines represent directionally aligned revenue declines. And so, um, if, if you see a publication that's down 85% in traffic, they might be down 85% in revenue. And that is going to completely change the way they think about the business, both from a staffing perspective, but also from a content and editorial perspective.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Because if you are seeing traffics, traffic decline in one niche or one category, you might need to go viral by doing a listicle or doing something that doesn't feel like your roots. Well, you know, the roots have been dug up in some ways, on some publications.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're not seeing a decline in VC podcast viewership.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true.

• 2:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there are a number of VC podcasts that are racking up a million views for-

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  A million views.

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Interviews with Series A or Series B founders.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very, very impressive numbers. There are some allegations.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  A lot of people think that, you know, technology is niche, some Series A founder that you haven't heard on, they can attract a million people to sit down and watch them on Zoom, talk about their business, uh, for an hour. Uh, but apparently they can, and the, and many venture capital firms have showed us that it's possible. Uh, you do have to pay the people to watch, uh, and the viewers- Views might be a little low quality, but if you pay the viewers.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  And people won't comment.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  If you pay, yeah, they won't comment. That's an extra bill you gotta pay and it's very unclear why they aren't buying comments because if you're buying the views, just buy the comments too.

• 2:31:17Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. The reason, the reason is that, the reason is that they are running paid traffic on Meta at their own YouTube videos. That is actually how they're getting the views. The Meta ads as of a couple of days ago were public. You could see them. They're just like running. If you're on Instagram, you'll get an ad for a podcast and then people.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  That was, that was on Meta. I thought, because apparently.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  And Google, and Google.

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  Because you can actually just run ads for your content on YouTube and then you get people who are in YouTube to click on that content. Now, are they less likely to comment? Absolutely. Like the, the example on the right is Dwar Cash. He got a million views and it had 4,700 comments. I went back and checked some of my videos just to kind of know like, what is the correct ratio? Then if I got a video with like a couple hundred thousand views, like there were probably a thousand comments on there for, for a variety of reasons. Also just people saying like, if, when the real fans show up, they say like first, second, like, oh yeah, still watching in 2026? You know,

• 2:32:19John Coogan?

  people will just do this. And very, very odd just to go buy views because it doesn't create a lot of value and it sort of sets you up for this type of dunk, although Matt Turk is being nice and not calling out the particular podcast that did this. Max Ferens, who runs, he's the general manager of the Dwar Cash Patel podcast, says, "Deep down, I know these, these are pictures of screens, but it really looks like you printed these out, marked them up with a pen and highlighter and took the photos." Max is so, is so funny and he, he had a bunch of things. He says, he was quoting this and said, "You have no idea how long it takes me to write 4,783 comments."

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Like he's, you know, responsible because of course he's not faking the numbers at that scale. That's not what's happening.

• 2:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Kyle Corbett says, is highlighting some news. The New York legislature is rapidly pushing through a 2025 bill that would prohibit LLMs from providing substantive legal analysis or advice in New York.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  It seems that L M's could still provide substantive help to lawyers under this bill as written.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Consumers, however, would be stuck with the chatbot refusing to answer their legal questions. So again, this just seems bad. The entire point of L L M's and A I is to give intelligence to anyone, right? Like the fact that an individual can get the equivalent of five hours of legal work in a single prompt.

• 2:33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:56Jordi Hays?

  By like uploading a contract is very good for consumers. I don't even know how bad it'll be for lawyers, especially given that at least right now, even if I could generate entire legal docs, I still want a lawyer to, you know, play a part in it. But again, Kyle Corbett says, I sold my company last year. G P T five pro was at least as valuable in that negotiation as our attorneys who billed us four hundred and fifty thousand dollars. This is a terrible law.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Uh, the prime agent is timing is chiming in. I saw him on a podcast recently and I just really like the way this guy talks. I've been getting a bunch of his Instagram reels too. He's he's a great streamer. Responding to former guests of the show, Gergay or Roche, says, things that were not on my bingo bingo card. One anthropic marked as a U S supply chain risk by the government, same as Huawei. Again, that hasn't actually happened, but it's predicted. Uh, two, Claude going viral across non tech people as a result. Number one on the app store. Three mass chat G P T cancellations thanks to Open A I becoming the government A I supplier. And prime agent says, then they will release five point four.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  Everyone will say A G I and forget all about last, the last week and this week. That it that's why it's so fun to cover A I because everything changes every two weeks. It's a it's not the it's not the something big is happening like I was reflecting. I was, uh, someone was asking me about, uh, that something big is happening essay. And I was like, well, actually they predicted that in March, it would be like April of twenty twenty in regard to COVID and the fact that we are just having this normal conversation and walking down the street normally and things are pretty much the same, uh, sort of shorten the gates that, uh, but it's still worth paying attention to. And, uh, I don't know. I'm excited for the next, uh, the next model shift. There's some crazy.

• 2:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Which I think is tomorrow. Our theory was, uh, they said G P T five point four sooner than you think.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. It's GPT five point XXX stream. Citrinny chimed in and says the next AI model will have extreme reasoning. Probably trying to jump to the top of the meter chart, I would imagine. That's sort of the benchmark that a lot of people are tracking. So you got to do a lot of reasoning tokens, a lot of, a lot of high, high, uh, long context reasoning. But, uh, whatever they call it, uh, it'll be fun to test drive and see what happens.

• 2:36:22Jordi Hays?

  There is a new company selling a device called Spectre. The first smart device to stop unwanted audio recordings.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  Crazy, yeah.

• 2:36:31Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, this post went super viral. People are pretty excited about it. Someone else was highlighting that there's hundreds of products on Alibaba and spy shops that sell these sort of portable audio jamers.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  There's also a company that sells to doctors that's for transcription. Remember we talked about it and the company's printing like a hundred million dollars and they just like have a very niche sort of like boring use case.

• 2:36:55Jordi Hays?

  That's for recording. This is for jamming.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  Oh, this is for jamming.

• 2:36:58Jordi Hays?

  This is for TJ, people like TJ Parker.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Don't want to be recorded.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  Cause there's, there's both of these. Anthony Pompliano said, we have to live in a simulation of both these companies launch on the same day. And it's one company launching, uh, you know, a, uh, a note taker for real world meetings. It records everything around you. And then on the same day, they launched Spectre, a different company launched Spectre one. The smarts, the first smart device to stop unwanted audio recording. So the battle for the, for the sound waves is well, well underway. But yes, uh, so, so this other post that you said is sort of, uh, putting Spectre one in the truth zone on the first smart device to, to stop unwanted audio recordings. Talking about the idea that there are mic jammers, uh, elsewhere.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  And these are other, these are available if you, if you want them, but. They certainly haven't been marketed and a lot of people were unaware of them until this product launch. So, you know, is distribution important here? Is distribution always important? Yes, probably. And so, good luck to them. Good luck to the ongoing cold war between the recording and the jamming. It's going to be, it's going to be like just a crazy, crazy battle.

• 2:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Accenture.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

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

• 2:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Accenture is buying Down Detector.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  I saw this.

• 2:38:27Jordi Hays?

  For 1.2 billion. Why? There must be something to this business.

• 2:38:31John Coogan?

  They said as part of a deal, a 1.2 billion dollar deal. So is it possible that Down Detector is owned by another company and Down Detector just sort of came along for the ride? Because I can't imagine that Down Detector is worth 1.2 billion. I mean, in respect to everyone who runs that site, it's certainly valuable, but that seems like a lot for what they do. But I don't know. I mean, I could imagine this having business value. If you've implemented a system and you want to make sure that the system that you implemented as Accenture stays up, having the infrastructure to track uptime is valuable. A lot of companies are struggling with uptime. Doug O'Laughlin was talking about GitHub's uptime. There's

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  been a lot of people posting about Claude having patchy response times because of the surge in demand. This is clearly something businesses care about because every, every dollar, every minute of uptime is dollars, is profit.

• 2:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe in the, in the age of vibe coding, every product is going to be going down so much.

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  Oh, I feel like, yes.

• 2:39:33Jordi Hays?

  Accenture, Accenture's helping companies, you know, unlock AI. And they're like, wow, this stuff's, this is going to be pretty bad.

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Down Detector, bull market for Down Detector.

• 2:39:45Jordi Hays?

  Julian Weiser interviewed a founder named Ben Sarah. He's building a company called Pulsia. They've gotten to one and a half million of ARR in two weeks with zero human teammates. Very, very cool progress. But Zarim says, why is the company named AI Slop backwards?

• 2:40:07John Coogan?

  Is that intentional? Is that a nod? Or did they just get lucky or unlucky?

• 2:40:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's maybe a happy accident.

• 2:40:13John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 2:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Really, really good. Donald Trump is at a roundtable, I believe, on energy, on the data center build out. And Donald Trump, according to Mike Isaac, wistfully at the tech roundtable, speaking about OpenAI's Brad Lightcap. Brad, so young. Look at how young.

• 2:40:41John Coogan?

  That's so funny. Brad Lightcap does look very youthful. He has aged very, very gracefully.

• 2:40:47Jordi Hays?

  A very youthful businessman.

• 2:40:48John Coogan?

  Also, an absolute dog who's been on a generational run and done fantastic things throughout his career. So, congrats to him. But this is so, so funny. What a weird, that's a total, like, record scratch, freeze frame. Yep, that's me. Here's how I wound up at a White House roundtable with the President of the United States saying, so young. Look at how young. Thanks, Mike, for finding and editing that up.

• 2:41:17Jordi Hays?

  And a good place to close out the show. Brian Johnson walked at a fashion show at Paris Fashion Week. A Capital says, from immortal unk to runway unk.

• 2:41:29John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for Brian Johnson, walking the runway. That's a bucket list item. I don't know if it's on my bucket list, but I'm certainly glad that he had the opportunity. Congrats to Brian Johnson.

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is, it kind of looks like a futuristic funeral.

• 2:41:44John Coogan?

  It does.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Like a sci-fi. Like, it doesn't have, it doesn't feel...

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  The clothes look fairly comfortable, though. I like the functionality.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  But he is looking absolutely danged.

• 2:41:51John Coogan?

  He's looking jacked. That is true. He is looking very strong. This is some mass surveillance going on. They're surveilling his mass.

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  That really is massive.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  This is mass surveillance and whether you like it or not, they're going to be taking a video of you and you're looking massive and putting it on the internet and going viral. Well, thank you for watching the show today. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp Pacific time. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpi.com. Give us a follow on LinkedIn. I have been doing a magic trick recently where I will post on LinkedIn while I'm live.

• 2:42:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a certain hand signal.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  You have to figure out how it's happening. How can John possibly be live on the internet on this stream and simultaneously posting content, great content, some of the best content on LinkedIn at the same time? It's a mystery. No one understands how I can do it.

• 2:42:45Jordi Hays?

  And right now over at LinkedIn, it's...

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  No, no, no, that's not true. I got 100,000 impressions. It's working. It's starting to work. But we figured it out that on LinkedIn, we are going to be focused more on behind-the-scenes storytelling about how we think about media, how we think about the business of TVPN. That has been what's resonating. And so, we're going to be focused a little bit more on that as opposed to some of the tech analysis that we do on X and here on the show, some of the interview clips. The interview clips just aren't really flying there like they do on YouTube and X and Instagram. So, we're starting to find our audience there. Give us a follow on LinkedIn. We'd love to hang out with you there. Anyway.

• 2:43:25Jordi Hays?

  And we hope you have a wonderful evening. We'll be back tomorrow.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  We'll be back tomorrow.

• 2:43:31Jordi Hays?

  Big show.

• 2:43:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.