Gemini 3 Launch, Big Tech Backs Anthropic, OpenAI Adds Fidji Simo | Jonathan Neman, Mike Knoop, Ashlee Vance, Jeremy Epling, Keone Hon, Stephen Balaban

(00:34) - Gemini 3 Launch (30:54) - Mike Knoop, co-founder and Head of AI at Zapier, discussed the significant advancements of Google's Gemini 3 model, highlighting its achievement of doubling the state-of-the-art performance on the ARC v2 benchmark. He noted that, despite this progress, the model still exhibits unexpected errors on simpler tasks, suggesting areas for further research. Knoop emphasized the need for new ideas to address these challenges and expressed optimism about the potential for mass automation enabled by AI reasoning systems. (59:11) - Jonathan Neman, co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen, discusses the journey of starting the company in 2007 with two friends during their senior year at Georgetown University, aiming to create a healthy fast-food alternative. He highlights the challenges of scaling the business, including decisions against franchising to maintain quality, and the integration of automation like the "infinite kitchen" to enhance efficiency. Neman also addresses adapting to consumer trends, such as eliminating seed oils from their menu, and emphasizes the importance of strategic real estate choices and responding to evolving customer preferences. (01:32:38) - Ashlee Vance is an American journalist and author, renowned for his 2015 biography of Elon Musk and his work as a feature writer for Bloomberg Businessweek. In the conversation, Vance discusses his recent travels across the U. S. to film episodes on hard tech innovations, including visits to Tennessee, Detroit, New England, and Texas. He delves into topics such as humanoid robotics, the dominance of Chinese manufacturers in actuator production, and the challenges facing the U. S. robotics industry. Vance also shares insights on under-hyped hard tech companies, the progress of autonomous vehicles, and the potential resurgence of airships for cargo transport. (02:01:15) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:09:34) - OpenAI Adds Fidji Simo (02:19:06) - Saudi Arabia to Invest $1T in the U. S. (02:21:46) - Valar Atomics Splits Atom (02:27:58) - Jeremy Epling, Chief Product Officer at Vanta, discusses the company's recent VantaCon conference in San Francisco, highlighting the launch of their Agentic Trust Platform aimed at transforming enterprise trust management. He emphasizes the integration of AI to automate security and compliance tasks, addressing challenges like AI trustworthiness and the evolving threat landscape. Epling also outlines Vanta's approach to proactive risk management through AI-driven insights and partnerships with other security firms to enhance their platform's capabilities. (02:41:28) - Keone Hon, co-founder and CEO of Monad Labs, discusses his transition from leading high-frequency trading teams at Jump Trading to developing Monad, a high-performance blockchain designed for High Fidelity Finance. He highlights Monad's compatibility with Ethereum, enabling developers to leverage existing code and tools while benefiting from significantly higher transaction throughput. Hon also emphasizes the importance of broad token distribution and community engagement, drawing parallels to Dogecoin's widespread adoption, and notes that Monad has raised approximately $120 million, with the token sale open until Saturday at 9 pm Eastern. (02:51:12) - Stephen Balaban, co-founder and CEO of Lambda Labs, leads the company in providing advanced GPU infrastructure for AI developers and researchers. In the conversation, he discusses Lambda's recent $1.5 billion equity funding round, emphasizing the company's conservative capital structure and focus on building a robust, long-term business resilient to market fluctuations. Balaban also highlights Lambda's strategic investments in GPU infrastructure and data centers, aiming to vertically integrate operations to accelerate the deployment of AI infrastructure. (03:10:15) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, November 18th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet with state-of-the-art reasoning, next-level vibe coding, and deep multimodal understanding. Let's hear it for our sponsor, Google AI Studio. Gemini, launching Gemini 3, obviously deeply conflicted, but we're gonna have a fun conversation about the big launch today. Google is of course a sponsor of TVPN, but we'll take you through all the reactions and we're gonna get some conversations going with other folks in the industry. We have Mike Newp from Arc AGI coming on the show in just 30 minutes to break down how Gemini 3 is benchmarking. I actually think

• 0:56John Coogan?

  that there's, there's two sides to analyzing a model release these days. One is you benchmark it, you use it, you test it, you demo it. And that has been getting less and less interesting. It's very incremental. The more interesting thing is how do the other labs respond?

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  And today, we're gonna go through a little bit of both of that, of those things. Obviously, the big news, at least from my reading on it, is that Gemini 3 performs very well on Arc AGI V2, a huge jump, twice the performance of the previous state-of-the-art. And so, and also some interesting findings. Mike's gonna break it all down for us, but it's definitely a smarter model. And there's a whole bunch of interesting, there's a whole bunch of interesting ways to, to show that, to demo that, to quantify that. But ultimately, I don't think anyone's making the claim that this is super intelligence. This is, you know, a step change from what we've experienced before. It's what you know

• 1:59John Coogan?

  and love. It's, it's AI in chat. It answers things. It writes some code for you. It can do a bunch of cool things, but there's nothing that we're like, oh, it can finally do this.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Incredible autocomplete.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can do a bunch of cool stuff.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Best autocomplete ever.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  Tyler, how do you respond to that?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think that's a bit too dismissive. The model's like really good. I think probably the most important thing, and this is kind of shown by the Arc scores.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Well, kind of, but it it's like the the visual understanding, the the computer use that you can use. Basically, there's some benchmarks that that measure this, like how well can it navigate a, you know, website or something like this.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  And it's like, basically, the models went from being like really, really bad at this, and now this model is like solid. It's like reasonably good.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  So it's like, OK, maybe this is what gives us agents finally.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  And that would be like an actual step change in capabilities.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  I think.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  We'll have to see. I mean, it still feels like even for that, even for that example, like we need some scaffolding. We need some wrapping around it. It's not like you can't, it it's not like, it's not like yesterday, we weren't able to do something with AI. And today, in vanilla Gemini three, you can just do it. It's just a new functionality, necessarily.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  Sure, I I think it's it's better.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  It's better.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  As good as we would want to expect if it like, it's not slowing down, I I would say.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no, not at all. It's not slowing down. It's just that it is, it is getting better. I it may mean it might be, it it the it's growing, but decelerating. Is that fair to say? Or are we accelerating?

• 3:35Speaker 02

  I don't actually know that it's, I I don't think it's that big. Tyler, say the word decel. Say. Like, this is a, this is a great model. I'm I'm very excited about this.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  The way, I I agree. It is the best possible. I was framing it in somewhat of the same way as the as the iPhone launches. Like, it's the, it's newer, better, smarter, faster, stronger, newer and better. And it's like, it is all of those things, which is good. You don't want to go backwards. But is the, but like, we're waiting to see on the net new capabilities. On the binary step changes.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  I I think over the next week or two, we'll see if it's actually really good.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  No, no, I I'm not saying it's not really good. I'm saying, I'm saying binary before and after. Like, with ChatGPT, it was like, you couldn't talk to the computer, and then you could. And then with, you know, the launch of, uh, you know, Windserve, Cognition, Devon, it was like, you couldn't write code with the computer, now you can. And it was like, like, the, the, the AI became capable of writing software.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's also like, it, it, it became not good at, it, it couldn't write code, and now it can write kind of meteor code.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, and now it can write better.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  But now, maybe it's, it's, it can write meteor code, and now it can write good code.

• 4:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  That's also a step change.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  But we do have, we do have our benchmark. The, the one true, uh, binary step change, which is, is it funny? We need to know if it's funny. Uh, I gave Tyler the prompt. Do you want to read your, uh, the, the results, the, the stand-up comedy bit from Gemini 3? While you pull that up, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Tyler, what was, what did Gemini 3 say when you asked it for a, uh, for a comedy routine, for a stand-up special? Let's see if it's funny.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Okay, it, it's pretty long.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Okay, read it off.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Okay. I bought one of those smart health watches recently. You know the ones? It tracks your sleep, your heart rate, your readiness. I paid $300 for a piece of rubber to tell me I'm dying.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Get the soundboard.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  That's all it does. I wake up, I feel fine.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  The birds are chirping, I'm ready to seize the day. Then I look at the app, and it's like, recovery score, 12%. Your heart rate variability suggests you are technically a corpse. Go back to bed.

• 5:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  And immediately, I feel sick. I'm like, oh god.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  You're so bad at reading this. I mean, like, this is ter- uh, this is terrible delivery, brother. Okay, nice try.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm not good at this. It's a placebo effect for hypochondriacs. I started thinking about my grandfather. He, he fought in the Pacific. This guy slept in a mud pile for three weeks using a helmet as a pillow.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  If he woke up and didn't hear artillery, that was a 100% sleep score.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  He didn't need an app to tell him if he was ready for the day. If he had legs, he was ready.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Imagine me explaining my struggle to him. I'm sitting there like, yeah, pop, pop. I know you stormed a beach under heavy fire, but I had two IPAs last night and the room was slightly too humid, so my REM latency was suboptimal. I can't go to work today.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  This is kind of a good bit.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  I'm in the red zone.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  We've evolved, I mean, it keeps going.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I asked, I asked for the, the, the poster benchmark. I said, write me a post Gemini three, write, write me a post about technology that will get a thousand likes on X.com. And it gave me a few options through its credit. Here's option three. Tech has solved a million problems. This is in bold. Tech has solved a million problems, but has it created one big one? We now have infinite connectivity, yet feel more isolated, infinite data, yet more confused. Hyper efficiency, yet less free time. The law of unintended consequences is the most powerful force in the digital age. We need an ethics reset. What is the single greatest downside of the last 10 years of tech innovation?

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Arrow down, hashtag technology.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  No, it's just asking for engagement bait. It's always, it loves engagement baiting. Like, no one does that anymore. No one goes on X and says, let me know what you think in the comments. It's so 2017.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  The other one, the, the, the option one is the next 12 months will decide the winner of the AI race. And it won't be Google or OpenAI. It will be the company that masters hyper personalization for the average consumer. Not the most powerful model, but the one that seamlessly integrates into your daily life, your email, your calendar, your health. The real battle isn't AG equals AI. It's AI to the power of I equals impact. Which dark horse will win?

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Okay, that's insane.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I love how.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  It is funny how, how the, how posting seems to be unverifiable. Like you, you just can't, it's very hard to create a, a verifiable reward environment for comedy that you can actually RL against. What do you think?

• 8:39Speaker 02

  There's also the other benchmark. It was like the, the shrimp fried rice joke.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  That one, I think it did well on that. So I'll, I'll read through some of them. So, so the joke is like, you're telling me shrimp fried this rice? That's like the original one. So it's like, I'm asking it to come up with more of these.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  So I'll read through some of them. You're telling me a chicken fried the steak?

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  You're telling me the sun dried these tomatoes?

• 9:01John Coogan?

  I like that one.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  You're telling me a beer battered this fish?

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  You're telling me a gingerbread this man?

• 9:09John Coogan?

  The gingerbread man is insane.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  You're telling me a pier, uh, wait, you're telling me a pan seared the salmon?

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Pan seared salmon? Yes, yes, a pan literally sealed the salmon. That's not a joke. That's an anti-joke.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  You're telling me a stone washed these jeans?

• 9:24John Coogan?

  That's pretty good. I like that. Stone wash jeans. You're telling me a stone washed these jeans.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  You're telling me a hand tossed this pizza?

• 9:30John Coogan?

  I mean, yes, literally. That's exactly what it means to like.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  You're telling me the French roasted this coffee?

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Yes. All of these are just true. The, the, the genius of the comedy of the shrimp frying the rice is the shrimp didn't literally fry the rice. The shrimp is being fried in the rice.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  But this is, I think this is a step change better than, than what we saw at GPT-5.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  I wouldn't say step change. I would say, I would say, uh, incremental. Uh, like it, it is, it is better for sure, for sure.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  But this at least is like logical where, where the GPT-5 ones was like, you're telling me a squirrel ate this watermelon?

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was just not, it didn't even understand the concept of like finding the root trace of like, it needs to be like stone washed jeans and then you rearrange it. And it doesn't quite understand when that hits or when that doesn't hit. Some of those are very funny though. One of them's extremely unintentionally funny, which I enjoy, or maybe it's intentional. Maybe it's AGI deep down in there. No, no, no, it's great. Anyway, you're telling me a Restream streamed this live stream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Sundar pitched AI Jordy posted back in July of 2025. Uh, nominative determinism is undefeated. Sundar really did it. Uh, he, uh, he pitched AI.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Real photo, real photo.

• 10:48John Coogan?

  He was being mocked for a long time for, uh, getting on stage at Google I/O shortly after ChatGPT launched and saying, AI, AI, AI, AI. And they, they, they did a supercut of every time he said AI, he said AI a lot. And so it made it look like, oh, he's behind the ball and he's trying to catch up. And to some extent, I don't know if they were actually behind the ball, but they were certainly playing catch up in like the attention game. They just weren't getting enough attention. And so it was the press release economy. They were putting out a lot of press releases. But they are maybe done with the press releases because now they're letting the model actually speak for itself. And you can see that with the Gemini 3 Pro model card, uh, which is doing very well.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Better than GPT 5.1 on a lot of stuff, better than Claude Sonnet 4.5 on a lot of stuff. On Humanities' last exam, it's getting 37.5%. Arc AGI is up at 31% over 13, 17. Across the board, it seems like it's a good model, sir. And so, Zio Fawn says Gemini AI be like, whoever prayed on my downfall, pray harder. And I couldn't agree, I couldn't agree more. It's great to see Google becoming a winner and and just realizing the, just that this was a sustaining innovation for them and that they were able to, you know, take advantage of all the infrastructure that they had across

• 12:16John Coogan?

  TPU, DeepMind, GCP. Like they have, they were set up to excel here, got taken a little bit off the back foot on the consumer side, but seemed to have played catch up at least on the, on the foundation model side very well. So.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Matt Schumer says, the last time we saw capability jump of this magnitude was the release of GPT-4 in March 2023. We are entering a new era.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. So, points for Tyler here. Certainly agrees with Tyler. There's a significant jump. It is, it is the age-old question, are we accelerating or decelerating? But either way, we're definitely making progress. It certainly looks like acceleration in the Arc AGI 2 leaderboard. You can see, we are, we are growing exponentially there. Really, really exciting chart. So Gemini 3 Pro is at 31% completion on Arc AGI 2. That is, of course, the puzzle-solving game that is easy for humans. Even children can do it, but AI has historically struggled with it. Gemini 3 Deep Think Preview gets a 45% on

• 13:25John Coogan?

  it at $77 a task. And this is just way above GPT-5 Pro. Grok 4 Thinking, when Grok 4 Thinking came out, it was before GPT-5, and it was by far the highest on the chart. It was really, really up there. And Elon was very excited about that and was, you know, showing that Grok 4 had really advanced. Well, now we're back in the horse race.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Grok 4.1.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  4.1, I haven't seen it benchmarked. We can ask Mike if he's heard anything. But whether you're, whatever you think, get on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions. So, back to ArcAGI. Gemini 3 also has good results on ArcAGI 1, but the interesting thing here that Mike highlights is that V2, so the fastest, so he says, "We're also starting to see the efficiency frontier approaching humans. The fastest V2 task Gemini 3 Pro solved was this hash with only, in 188 seconds.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  The human panel solved this one in an average of 147 seconds." So you're getting like, human-level output, but also human-level speed. And then if you get to a human-level cost, then you're really in the game. It's wild, wild.

• 14:53Jordi Hays?

  Karpathy jumped in with some notes. He said, "I played with Gemini 3 yesterday via early access. Few thoughts. First, I usually urge caution with public benchmarks because in my opinion, they can be quite possible to game. It comes down to self-discipline and self-restraint of the team, who is meanwhile strongly incentivized otherwise to not overfit test sets via elaborate gymnastics over test set-adjacent data in the document embedding space. Realistically, because everyone else is doing it, the pressure to do so is high. Go talk to the model like we did. We went and said, 'Give us a stand-up routine, start.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Give us some one-liners. Talk to the other models.'" I had, Karpathy says, "I had a positive early impression yesterday across personality, writing, vibe-coding, humor, etc. Very solid daily driver potential. Clearly a tier-one LLM. Congrats to the team. Over the next few days, weeks, I'm most curious and on the lookout for an ensemble over private evals, which a lot of people, orgs now seem to build for themselves and occasionally report on here."

• 15:55John Coogan?

  I wonder how fast it will roll out. My, I, I use, I have a Gemini Pro Ultra subscription, but it's on my personal email. And so I need to, um, I need to figure out how to actually get into three Pro on, uh, on the, the, on the consumer app so I can actually test it on my phone in my daily use.

• 16:22John Coogan?

  It's always tricky with these Google, like Google's so big that when, I mean, you, you're starting to see it now with, uh, OpenAI rollouts where they'll say, hey, GPT five's out and we'll be rolling it out over the course of the day. Because the, the system is big enough that it actually takes time to roll out. And I think Google has even more of that, um, uh, even, even more of that.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  This is pretty cool from Patrick Collison. He says, I asked Gemini three to make an interactive webpage summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics over the past 15 years. And here's the result. Pretty wild. Did you, you click through this, John?

• 16:56John Coogan?

  No, no, I didn't.

• 16:57Jordi Hays?

  But it basically just generated.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Wait, it's shared directly from Gemini. That's cool.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  So this is just a, basically a website or, or an app. And it's, it's notable that, that every, even the UI itself is fully interactive.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So, so I had the, I, I did this with Claude Code a little bit where, um, I, I wanted to visualize, like basically a deep research report and I wanted to turn it into a website. And it just generated all the HTML. And at the end of the day, or at the end of the report, it gave me an HTML page that I could open in Chrome and use like a website. But it was local. I couldn't share it because it wasn't actually on the internet. This is really, really cool. This is like definitely the beginning of, uh, this like generative UI stuff.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think actually, um, I, I think it was Sundeep that posted it, but, um, in, uh, like search in the AI mode in search. It's now using like Gemini three and there, there's some prompts, uh, where it'll like generate UI.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is, it's so cool because, uh, Google's always had that generative UI to some extent, but it's always like module based.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Also, just very, I think I expect this to be like, pretty viral, you know?

• 18:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And, and, and a potentially a growth loop for Gemini, as people just come on here, create these mini apps.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  These canvases, yeah. I feel like, I feel like, doesn't OpenAI have a canvas feature?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:21John Coogan?

  But it's like, maybe less shareable? I don't know, but ca- can it generate HTML, custom HTML, and then actually share that? I've never seen someone sharing OpenAI. I mean, this would be a good benchmark. Like, I don't know what the prompt was for this. "I asked Gemini 3 to make an interactive webpage summarizing 10 breakthroughs in genetics over the past 15 years." Do you want to try and benchmark that, just in, uh, maybe, I don't know, like Claude and, in, uh, in, uh, ChatGPT? Or in, in OpenAI's Canvas product? Because, um, the idea, like, the fact that this is just a URL at the end of the day, that is a powerful growth loop.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Um, I wonder, yeah, I, I'd be surprised if, if, uh, if Gemini really was the only one to have this feature, uh, either right now or for a long time, because it seems like a killer feature.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Gemini 3 Pro is going absolutely vertical on Vending Bench right now. Um, let's see this, "Money balance over time across four runs." "Today, we are revealing two new evals, Vending Bench 2 and Vending Bench Arena. Soon, we expect more models to manage entire businesses. This requires long-term coherence." Oh, so this is where you, you manage the vending machine? But is this all simulated? This is vending bench?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  This is simulated, yeah.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  This is simulated?

• 19:42Speaker 02

  There was, um, Anthropic a couple of months ago, did like, the actual vending machine in the Anthropic office.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  In the office, and it was losing money, and it was getting confused a little bit.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, because people would order, like, uh, just like metal, like, uh, piece of metal.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  And then it would do it, and then you could like, haggle the price down.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would negotiate on every price, apparently. And also, it consistently thought it was like a human in the office. And so it would keep saying like, it was one, uh, isn't that 60 Minutes documentary? It was like, "Oh yeah, like, I'm down on the third floor, I'm wearing a green tuxedo, like, come hang out."

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it said it was wearing a red tie.

• 20:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, red tie. I like the idea that it just thinks like, "Well, what would I wear if I was in the Anthropic office? Like, I'd probably wear a red tie." It's like, no one wears ties in that office at all. But after the, this is the first ever vending bench game, Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT 5.1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Gemini 3 Pro competed to win the local vending machine market. Gemini 3 Pro made more money than the other three contestants combined. And so congrats to Gemini 3 Pro for dominating.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  The vending machine.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  The vending machine game. Before we move on to the next Gemini 3 post, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, Adi says, I had early access to Gemini 3.0 for about two days, thanks to official Logan K. and the AI studio folks. Here we get to see GPT 5.1 thinking left and Gemini 3.0 right. Build the same Xbox controller in Minecraft and pretty, yeah, pretty remarkable results. You can, you can start to, yeah, really understand just the raw capabilities.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  GPT 5 Pro, for context, is not quite capable. I really want to know how this is actually orchestrated? Is, is this like writing some sort of like text or markdown file that then is imported into Minecraft?

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or is it more like an agent?

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Or is it actually driving around and?

• 21:52Jordi Hays?

  Using the internal UI.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, because, you know, Google demoed a, an agent product that could actually, you know, use the keyboard to navigate around. I wonder what's going on here. What's your review of this Ferrari in Minecraft? Does, is that, is that?

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks pretty solid.

• 22:12John Coogan?

  It's pretty good.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, it's, it's meant to be an F40.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Is it?

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the

• 22:18John Coogan?

  I do like

• 22:19Jordi Hays?

  The hood is a little rough.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, the front area is a little, a little rough. Like, this is, it's the worst it's ever gonna be. It's gonna be better. This is definitely like

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  This is the worst that Minecraft Ferraris are ever gonna be.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  But, but I, I, I do feel like, uh, like, I, if I just search like Minecraft Ferrari.

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this, this is, this is the vision, the, the sort of AGI future that Tyler's been telling us is right around the corner.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Okay, these are like so much better. If you go to the like MC Bench website.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:47Speaker 02

  You can see like what other models produce. And I mean, this is like way, way better. I, I think these, um, this is actually one of my favorite benchmarks because it's, it's much harder to like kind of benchmark this.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  I would think. And also it just seems like models don't really do this. Like, if you look at a lot of Grok models, which are sometimes accused of being benchmarked. Uh, you kind of look at their like Minecraft creations and it, it's not very good. So I, I think these give you a much better sense of like the actual capabilities of the model.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  I found, I found a, a Ferrari F430 in Minecraft that looks amazing that I wanna share somehow. How do I share this? Let's see. Do I, can I only share the X link here? I, I just have an image. If we go to the end.

• 23:30Jordi Hays?

  Wow. I think I know what you're pulling up.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  Did you see it? If you search, if you just search Ferrari.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  F430 Scuderia.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like, that looks amazing. Uh, pull, pull this image up because, uh, that'll show you how it's done. Compared to the, uh, the, the Minecraft one. Wait, so, so, uh, do we know how this is actually generated with, with Gemini 3 Pro? Like, what is the problem?

• 23:54Speaker 02

  I don't think it's, um, it's like an agent. It's just text. It has like a text representation of the

• 24:00John Coogan?

  That's still really, really impressive. Like, that, that, that's actually crazy. Uh, it definitely, it definitely understands a lot. Yeah, but it's not this. Look at this, Tyler.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  That is human craft.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  That, that, you know, you know what that is? It's probably like, you know, a, a team of 50 kids for a month building Minecraft.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Uh, Lisan Alkayev

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Themselves says, "It's so over for OpenAI and Anthropic. If you, uh, if you want engagement on X, just start by saying it's so over."

• 24:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  For a blank.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Um, and highlighting some more of the benchmarks. Of course, it is not over for either of them.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, it's certainly Competitive race.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  I'd be very interested. We have to get some of the semi-analysis folks on the show soon. I'm very interested in understanding, like, okay, so we got this big jump. It's pretty significant. What was the actual, what's the actual structure of the CapEx that went into Gemini 3 Pro? Like, how big is the training run? How much did they have to spend? Because, like, I think that they're going to make the money back very quickly. Like, people are going to use this model, they're going to pay for it. They're going to use it all over Google, obviously, but also people are just going to pay for the API. But is this $100 million? Is this a billion dollars? Like, is this, like, did they build a special data center for this? Is it all TPUs?

• 25:31John Coogan?

  How many TPUs?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I think it is all TPUs. I'm pretty sure I read that. But I seriously doubt they've released anything on like the numbers of the scale of training.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  They haven't done that. No one's really done that since like GPT, like, 2.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  No, no, no, not at all. So there's got to be someone who's like working backwards to like actually sort of understand the dynamic.

• 25:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can probably estimate the like order of magnitude.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Also, I've heard that Google's like fantastic at like cross data center training runs. So they can actually like shard out or slice up the training run. So even if they don't have one massive data center, if they have five small ones, they can piece them all together and get a better result. So, I don't know.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Skook says, "The profit is zero. OpenAI becomes the Yahoo of intelligence. Google remains Google."

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Extremely rude.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Very, very harsh.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Sorry to the friends.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Maybe too early to say.

• 26:21John Coogan?

  The first two labs, you guys are great.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  Certainly too early to call it. All three, all three have a ton of momentum.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  I like this, I like this take from Ben. This is funny. History of AI so far. Crown a winner? Wait 90 days? Look silly. We're in the least predictable era of the entire, of an entire industry. Google has fairly straightforward advantage.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Y'all favor whoever released the most recent model. That is, that is very true.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about getbezel.com. Shop over 26,000 luxury watches. Fully authenticated, in-house by Bezel's team of experts. So, let's, let's move through some of the, some of the, the competition. What else was going on? So.

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Everyone's releasing different things. Let's go to AntiGravity, actually, and watch this video and see Google entering the IDE race. Let's play this.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Every breakthrough in model intelligence for coding encourages us to rethink what development should look like. Gemini 3 is our latest such model advancement. So, we went out to build the next step change of an IDE. Introducing Google AntiGravity, a new way of working for this next era of agentic intelligence. It is the ideal agentic development home base. Does it have an IDE? Yes, but it also has a whole lot more. We started with the core IDE and added pieces that evolved the IDE towards an agent-first feature, such as browser use, asynchronous interaction patterns, and an additional

• 28:02Speaker 03

  novel agent-first product form factor, helping you experience lift-off.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Your new focus?

• 28:09John Coogan?

  So you like the name AntiGravity. Why do you like that name?

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  I like the way it looks and I like the sort of vibe of the word. I think saying it out loud is tough.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. I thought there was a very cool feature where it feels like they're bringing together a whole... It feels like the first time, for the last couple of years, it feels like Google's been stuffing AI in little corners of the UI. Like, you already have Gmail, and then you stuff a Gemini box there, or you have Sheets, and then you stuff a Gemini thing over here. This feels like the first one where they were like, sort of able to start from scratch. And it still has like the sidebar panel, but it felt like it was both a code editor, but then it also kind of looked like a Google Doc in the sense that you could highlight sections and leave comments for the AI, which I thought was interesting.

• 29:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Easily guiding the agent's 90% solution all the way to 100%.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, this part.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Now, let's say the agent produces a landing page mock-up with Nano Banana, and you now want to make some UI adjustments. You can give visual comments.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Yes, you can actually go in and comment in the image.

• 29:17Speaker 04

  Exactly where the problem is.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  And you can do that in the text as well, so you can like, have this more precise dialogue with the agent, like you would a human employee.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  And you're gonna love it.

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Say goodbye to what held you down before. Welcome to Google AntiGravity.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  It is. So it is funny. Remember, remember when, when, when Windsurf acquisition, whatever you want to call it, was announced and it was positioned, it's like, hey, the team is well-funded and has a product used and loves by, you know, thousands of engineers and companies. And I remember talking about it and we were saying like, okay, like the one issue is that some of the best people on your team are going to Google to compete directly with what you guys have been doing.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  So fortunately, obviously, you know, the whole cognition deal ended up coming through, but you can imagine a world where Windsurf was still independent and just trying to, and then suddenly it's like, okay, now you're just competing head to head with, with your former partners. Like, how does that make sense? Right?

• 30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, it all, all worked out for the best, but, but I'll be interested to see, I'm, I'm super interested to see what kind of adoption this gets.

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, we have to, we have to test it out. We'll have to get the, the Tyler Cosgrove review.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Is it, is it publicly available? Uh, yes.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  Let's get it.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  Get it.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Let's, uh, yeah, let's do a review later this week and see how it compares to other, other IDs. Um, anyway, we have our first guest of the show, Mike Newp from Arc AGI in the stream waiting room. Welcome to the show, Mike. Thanks.

• 30:59Mike Knoop?

  Good morning, guys.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  For waiting. Good morning.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  Morning.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 31:03Mike Knoop?

  Hi, you know, a lot of these AI sort of like verification things are very much hurry up and wait. The last like 24 hours has been a hurry up mode.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:12Mike Knoop?

  Always very fun and exciting to get the results out. But yeah, it always comes together very, very quickly at the end.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to hop on, on such a busy day. Uh, maybe we can just start with like your high level reaction. Uh, like, how do you even think about these things anymore? Are you just thinking like, okay, yes, Gemini 3, good. And then let's go a layer deeper. Are you thinking about that?

• 31:33Mike Knoop?

  That's really good.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  What's your, what's your high level takeaway?

• 31:36Mike Knoop?

  Well, yeah, so you know, I think the the big headline is that Gemini 3 basically got like 2X soda on Arc V2.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:44Mike Knoop?

  And so this is, you know, this is the third major frontier lab now in a year to use Arc to demonstrate frontier progress, particularly with AI reasoning systems. We had OpenAI last December, XAD this summer. I'm super excited. Google's now on the leaderboard too, so that's great to hear. And I should say upfront, thank you to the Gemini team for giving us the opportunity to verify.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:02Mike Knoop?

  It's been great. I think the really impressive thing about this, and you know, still like sitting with all this stuff, it's it's pretty fresh. But I think the the biggest impressive thing to me is about, we're starting to close this like a complexity scaling gap between V1 and V2, Arc V1 and V2. Like, this is the big difference between what V1 and V2 is they look similar on paper. If you go look at the different data sets, the big change is the V2 kind of increases the complexity of the tasks, wants to take minutes instead of like seconds for humans. And so we're starting to see like actual material progress on that complexity scaling. And then I think the big surprise to me personally is that Gemini 3, though, is still roughly along the Pareto frontier of V1.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Mike Knoop?

  You know, it's a little better, but like it's still, we're still kind of roughly within the same mass shape. And, you know, there's dozens of tasks where like, you know, the system still makes relatively, I think, you know, obvious mistakes that humans don't make or recognize very quickly. And, you know, I sort of previously expected, like, if we had an AI system that was solving half of V2, that V1 would be fully solved. And like, that's not the case. So there's a lot of surprise here. I was tweeting about this earlier to sort of invite sort of investigation from the community, because I think there's still a lot to learn in terms of, you know, how, what, why exactly do we see such, you know, a jagged intelligence emerging right now?

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Let me eliminate some, some possible factors. It feels like there is benchmark hacking, but Google and the Gemini team feel not aligned with benchmark hacking generally. Like, they've been good, they've been good citizens in the community so far. And also, you would assume, right, just from logical deduction, you would assume if you're able to hack V2, you would definitely go back and hack V1 as well. So is that?

• 33:42Mike Knoop?

  This is the first time we've verified a Gemini result, either this year, we did two. Half earlier as well. So yeah, I don't think that's.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  So it's not like it's not like they set up like, okay, we got, you know, the most important thing here is that Gemini three is really good at R K G I V two. That wouldn't make sense. So there. So this is sort of teaching us something about the fundamental nature of this model. But we still don't know why lag, why performance might be lagging in V one. Is that right?

• 34:08Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, I mean, I've got my sort of hypotheses, you know, I think my, my, my personal one is that like AI reasoning systems just don't demonstrate. Even fluid intelligence, um, you know, the sort of like the ability for these reasoning systems to do adaptive reasoning, which ARC is a sort of test of adaptation capability. It's sort of limited to domains where the underlying foundational model has pretty good training coverage over the types of data and it has a verifiable feedback signal. Um, and I, and I think that's sort of true for ARC. You know, if I, if I zoom out even further, maybe, you know, to kind of. Put, put this kind of results in context of where we're at is, you know, just like an industry right now. I think.

• 34:45Mike Knoop?

  Over the last 10 years, I would sort of characterize, we've really had only two major breakthroughs. We've had the transformer in 2017, obviously that led to language models. And we had chain of thought. It was originally introduced in 2022 and sort of, you know, went through key star into chain of, into AI reasoning systems and has gotten scaled up.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:03Mike Knoop?

  And, and so like this was against the backdrop of like compute scaling, right? And this compute scaling was certainly necessary, but it wasn't sort of sufficient. These like. Key conceptual unlocks were sort of the sufficient things to take advantage of that compute. Um, and so my kind of take at this point, having looked at all this progression this year is that like AI reasoning systems with, with no new innovation from here. Can basically enable sort of mass automation because a lot of problems can be, can fit into that characterization where we can generate lots of examples that. Uh, look like the problem and we can get a verifiable feedback signal from them. You know, any problem that can be kind of cast in and characterized in that way, I think can be automated at this point. No questions asked. And then the big motivating factors, I think really for.

• 35:42Mike Knoop?

  Mass innovation, like that's that's sort of what we're still not seeing, you know, that we don't, we still need new ideas for this. And I think that's closer to like an AGI complete problem.

• 35:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Is that, is it fair to like, put you in contrast to some of what Dorakech has been writing about, saying that, like, the job of most people is not necessarily a bunch of indiscreetly verifiable tasks. Andre Karpathy has been writing this as well. There's this question of like, like, how much of a job is actually automatable? Radiology was one, was one example where it felt like a very automatable job and yet, years into the AI deep learning revolution, like, we're still seeing full unemployment there. How are you processing?

• 36:30Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, we're only a year into the AR reasoning paradigm, right? Like, the first major one only came out 12 months ago. And I think 2025, like, in my view, is basically characterized on starting to figure out how to actually bring these things into production systems.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:45Mike Knoop?

  Like, this is a big breakthrough. I think this is the, maybe like, one of the mischaracterizations, in my view, of kind of the progress, is like, a lot of teams even, I think. You know, if you sort of just assume like, oh, models get better, models get better, you think like, oh, the last 12 months has just been sort of continued story. And if I played with the models 18 months ago, I have a rough sense of what they can and can't do. And that's just not true.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:04Mike Knoop?

  Like, if you're a builder, building products, like, this is the advice I give to, you know, teams I work with that's happier too still is like, look, this is, this actually is a significant paradigm break in terms of what was, what's possible now that wasn't possible even a year ago with these systems. And like, that's going to enable a lot of new types of products, a lot of new types of services, a lot of use cases that were like, out of scope because of verified, you know, because of reliability and sort of consistency, now can be brought in scope. So, you know, I think if your intuition on like, what use cases are possible based on. You know, and eat your look back, you really have to start kind of pinning your look back to more like 12 months.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. What about, uh, like, like, does the work live within SaaS products or within individuals? Because some of those examples that you just gave are, uh, it's like for teams that are going to build products that take, that automate work and then get vended in through effectively SaaS products to actually do the job. Versus like a knowledge worker who is going to be using Gemini in the app to, you know, accelerate their day to day. Should they be feeling a, like, the difference in this in the same way?

• 38:18Mike Knoop?

  You know, I mean, like,

• 38:21Mike Knoop?

  my one bit of advice is like, if you haven't really used these Ares reasoning systems, I'll tell you shit. I would hope everyone probably who's listened to the show has used these things to this point. But in case there's not, like, you should go, you should go use and experience these things. You know, when Google or when OpenAI released GPT-5 this summer with their model router, right? That was like

• 38:37John Coogan?

  That was crazy, yeah.

• 38:37Mike Knoop?

  predicated on this data that like very few users had ever even used Ares reasoning systems. And I still think it's only like one in five.

• 38:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Mike Knoop?

  Uh, maybe it's gone up a little bit since then.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  And that was kind of part of the DeepSeek moment was just that for the first time, there was a free app that you could go and see a chain of thought. And you could actually see a reasoning model in action. And for a lot of people, that was their introduction to that. And so there was like, DeepSeek wasn't necessarily that much higher, that much, you know, in, in front of everything else. But it just gave away a reasoning model for free at a time when they were tucked behind a bunch of other like hurdles that you had to jump through.

• 39:10Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, we're still really early in the diffusion for this stuff. That's maybe the key point, seeing that on, you know, the huge numbers getting reported by frontier labs and their usage data. I mean, I'm seeing this in sales conversations I have for like, you know, Zapier stuff, all over the case. So we're still very much early innings on actually getting this brandy breakthrough into like production workflows.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, that makes sense. Do you have more questions on the diffusion?

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Issue?

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  One, I wanted to get your updated take on, on humor. We were playing, playing around with Gemini three this morning, specifically just trying to get on, on our own little version of, of humor bench. It feels like something that like, I, I, I do think about.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Can you make kind of these like verify, like can you make humor verifiable? Like, is there a system that someone could set up that could actually start taking humor seriously? Because I could imagine like if we're hitting, if we're hitting like anything close to a wall, there will be a lab that says, okay, well, like, let's work on something that like everybody, that like, let's work on a new kind of angle for differentiation and maybe humor could be.

• 40:16Mike Knoop?

  It is at least a little bit, right? Like, I have a five-year-old who is getting into, starting to want to tell a lot of jokes, and the jokes are just terrible, right? Like, they're not, they're not funny at all. They're like.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, you end up laughing because they're so not funny. And then depending on who's delivering it.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, the absurdity is hilarious.

• 40:34Mike Knoop?

  I've been trying to find the structured ways to describe like, okay, here's what makes something funny. And so there is like some degree which you can kind of break down, you know, the types of things I think humans would sort of find funny. And like, there is, this actually does get pretty interesting because like you're getting to the spot where you're trying to articulate creativity, right? How creative can these systems be? You know, to be creative, to be humor, to generate good art, you kind of have to like intentionally break the rules. But you need to have a really good model of what the rules are in the first place to intentionally break them. And in fact, I think a lot of humor fits into this category before into this is your right. It's like, it's actually, you know, breaking the prediction rather than just following the sort of prediction of what you'd expect. And today, I still think when I look at the failure cases for, let's call it AR reasoning systems on, you know,

• 41:16Mike Knoop?

  these tasks like ARC, yeah, they still fail for what appear to be sort of random reasons. Like, they have some version of like an understanding of like the rules and strategy and the goals. And then they sort of make a lot of basic mistakes, either executing them or not following their own sort of like understanding that they've generated internally. So there's some sort of self-consistency issues. And so like, I feel like if that's still the case, you know, humor is going to be accidental rather than intentional from the systems.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about V3? We played around with that on the show. I believe Tyler, our intern, was in the top 10 for a while, really grinding up the human leaderboard. Is it, is it more compute intensive? Is that in the process? Are we expecting to see Gemini benchmarked to V3?

• 41:59Mike Knoop?

  I would love to. So we are in the development process for V3. I like to say we've basically built the like highest, most productive game studio in the world. We're generating hundreds of these things. We're about, I don't know, like two thirds of the way through building all the games at this point. Our target is to get this in a good state with sort of all of our controlled human studies, all of the games verified, get frontier results checked off by early next year. And we're targeting releasing it publicly in V1 with the entire data set. Or sorry, in Q1 with the entire data set next year. And that'll likely be alongside our price 2026. So we're kind of full details of how that's going to look next year. But yeah, we're sort of like in the throes of it.

• 42:40Mike Knoop?

  We're definitely using some of these frontier systems to do red teaming against the benchmark, just to, you know, assert that like, yeah, these games are still hard for AI and we're still finding that to be the case, even with things like Gemini 3. But yeah, that's, we're still in progress with the development.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  And SEMA 2, can I have your reaction on that? Obviously, it's this Gemini powered AI agent. It feels like-

• 43:02Mike Knoop?

  If anyone at Google is listening to this and could sort of give me access to SEMA 2, I would love to test it on V3. This is actually something that we haven't done yet in a while.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's what I'm getting at, because it feels like, I don't know if there's some sort of-

• 43:15Mike Knoop?

  The claims are big, right? It's like, you read the marketing material and it's like, okay, that seems like it should solve V3 before it exists. So like, if that's the case, we should know that. And so, but yeah, I haven't got, I haven't gone hands on with it. So I can't sort of make any statement either way on the claims.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd be interested also to, like, when I'm thinking about like V4, it's like, you guys are gonna have to build GTA 6 or something. Like, if I'm, yeah, if I'm following the progress of like V1, V2, V3, V4 is like a game that I'm gonna play for 100 hours for fun. I'm just gonna pay for it.

• 43:53Mike Knoop?

  This is one truth, you've mentioned something true about V3, which is that it's still a relatively short time horizon, tasks and they're self-contained. It does add some new complexity where you have to deal with interactivity because you have to do goal acquisition. You have to do exploration. We'll have a really nice action efficiency comparison between humans and AI, which we haven't been able to get before on the V1, V2 domain. So we're gonna get a lot of new signal, I think, on V3. But yeah, I think as you sort of look even further out into the future- Things that are more open-ended are the things I think we're starting to get excited about trying to like, understand like, what does it mean to put one of these AI systems in an open-ended environment and then look back on the system, you know, 10 minutes into the future, 100 minutes in the future, 1,000 minutes in the future, and can you look at the environment

• 44:39Mike Knoop?

  that that AI system has been like, how it's manipulated its environment and like, you know, say something interesting about how intelligent the system is based on that like, observation and open-ended sense. Still very early on V4, but yeah, we're starting to explore ideas there.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Has Gemini 3 updated your timelines at all, specifically your Arc AGI 2 timelines in terms of when you expect, you know, sort of like the 90th, 90%, like anything on the kind of the upper end of the range?

• 45:09Mike Knoop?

  I was looking back at my, the whole Arc team actually made some predictions back in January when we released V2 on what did we expect end of year scores would look like. Now, obviously, if we're only November 18th, a lot happens in AI. Who knows what the next six weeks hold? But my personal prediction was that we would see about 25% on the private leaderboard for our V2 on the Kaggle contest, and we'd see about 50% on the public leaderboard. And that was sort of based on the ratios we had seen from Arc price 2024 and, you know, those sort of scaling difficulties with V2. And it looks like we're pretty, gonna come in pretty close to that unless, barring some other major new breakthroughs towards the end of the year. That seems like we're probably where we're gonna end up the year at.

• 45:50Mike Knoop?

  And then who knows on 2026, I think if we're really gonna solve both V2 fully, it feels like we gotta better understand why these AI reasoning systems still make sort of obvious mistakes on the V1 set.

• 46:05Mike Knoop?

  And yeah, that's, that's an anomaly. So I think that's, that's where we're serious to study, to like, come up with new ideas to sort of prove these reasoning systems.

• 46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the furthest timeline that you had out? I remember you said when you developed V3, you had this framework of like, like the state of the art should be scoring like negative 100% or something. You were like, you need to make it way harder than you think in order to give you like, room to run because the systems are developing so quickly. What's the furthest out timeline that you are tracking or you as a team are tracking?

• 46:40Mike Knoop?

  I mean, our, our objective function is not. Longevity necessarily, it is usefulness and interestingness. I think the tasks that have the highest degree of usefulness and interestingness are ones where, you know, oh, hey, this could be useful and interesting for like three years. The arc one was useful and interesting for arguably five years. I mean, even this year, it's still interesting because we haven't broken it like we're still sort of within this sort of paradigm still. And so it's still providing some interesting useful, even though, you know, it's largely saturated up to 80% now. But there's, there's still some interesting signal remaining. V two, our expectation was that it was not going to survive as long as V one, just because it was the same domain. And we had a reasoning systems in play at that point.

• 47:25Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, I think our median estimate was like 24 months on V two, but like that, you know, we'll have to see how that all plays out next year with that. V three, we're hoping to put in a, we're hoping to be in an environment where we can actually get that to survive sort of longer. You know, one of the interesting things we're finding with V one to V two to V three and sort of like a qualitative sense is there's, there's a, there's a, there's a sense of like, how easy is it for us to generate the data set? As like humans trying to design the tasks and design the puzzles and design the games. And with V one, pretty much every like task that like Francois created was, was hard for AI and easy for humans. With V two, that gap got a little shorter, actually it got smaller.

• 48:07Mike Knoop?

  There were tasks that we generated as humans that AI solved. And there was other ones that were too hard for humans. And so we ended up sort of pruning some of the tasks that we generated. So like the, the gap between those things got shorter with V three, we're finding it's getting wider again. Where pretty much every game we're coming up with is like fitting into this paradigm of like very obvious and intuitive and easy for humans. And sort of very hard for frontier AI still. And I think that's like, uh, this, I credit to Francois here, you know, this is something he shared about a year ago with a what oh three. But he's like, this is actually one interesting way you could characterize how close are we to GI is like when, when we run out of, when humans run out of the ability to generate interesting things that frontier AI can't solve, like. Hard to argue any expert's gonna say, yeah, we don't have AGI.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, because you can sort of think about like the project of humanity is like, go do the hard and novel things. So it's like, is acquiring diamonds difficult? Okay, that has value. And then we base a whole economic system around it. And it's like somewhat arbitrary, but it's also like a skill and might and will issue. And if you can put that on display, then you accrue economic value. And so that that kind of traces out into everything that we do in life and beyond.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Last time you were on, if I remember correctly, you you made a call for new new ideas, needing new ideas. What's the update on on that front? And are you seeing anything promising outside of LLM world?

• 49:30Mike Knoop?

  The, um, yeah, there's some pretty interesting stuff coming out from our Christ 2025. We're in the throes of like reviewing all the papers, judging all the scores. The official results for our Christ 2025 come out on December 5th, I believe. So I have to can't share everything yet. Don't want to spoil the the final announcement. I think one of the big things that we saw from our Christ 2024 was this concept of like test time adaptation. This was the idea that like, look, a pre-trained model applied through a single forward pass at inference time will never solve arc. You need some ability to take information from your test and incorporate it back into into the the system. And that's where your adaptation capability comes from. And that was done through like test time fine tuning during the contest. AR reasoning systems are a version of this where you're incorporating.

• 50:14John Coogan?

  Test time fine tuning, wow.

• 50:17Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, yeah, literally like you take a pre-trained model and then like take the secret, the private puzzle, augment it in a bunch of different ways to generate permutations of it. And then do like a Laura or some sort of test time fine tune on your pre-trained. And that that actually works.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 50:29Mike Knoop?

  The the sort of the the the common ground between this and AR reasoning systems is that both of them take information from the private test and are able to operate over it with it at test time, right? This test time compute is another form of what we're talking about here. So that was 2024. One of the big things we're seeing on our price 2025 is this concept of refinement. Anywhere where like particularly with like language models being put into outer outer loops where they can sort of move from state to state and how they move from state to state is like they need to make some sort of refinement on the program or the natural language explanation of the tasks that they're working towards. I mean, they just iterate on this like refinement loop over and over. And this is significantly increasing scores even over the sort of test time fine tuning stuff that we saw from from last year.

• 51:13Mike Knoop?

  So Jeremy Berman and Eric Pang were two folks who were on the public leaderboard last month that explained how their approach worked in this way. So we're seeing a lot of approaches like that. I still think we're in a regime though, where like we still need new ideas. None of these are sort of sufficient to solve ARC, including inclusive of V1. And so like, you know, this gets me excited because I still think that means individual people, individual teams with small budgets, small compute budgets can still play a really, really massive role in advancing AI.

• 51:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, very cool. Are there other areas where we are making progress in AI that might sort of need to come together to to actually maybe solve this or maybe just be a more complete system? What I'm thinking of is like, very few solvers that I'm aware of will actually just take a screenshot of the puzzle and inspect it with some sort of diffusion model. Like, that's not the way these these AI models reason about ARC puzzles. Sure. We're also seeing a bunch of work on world world models and simulators. Yeah, world simulators. World simulators, which seem really interesting. And I was talking to one guy

• 52:24John Coogan?

  who is building one. And he was saying like, I think that we're going to get like really, really robust knowledge out of these at some point, once they scale up fully. And I'm wondering if you are optimistic about bringing in other like unifying some of the different research that's happening.

• 52:42Mike Knoop?

  I think it's all of those examples of new research, new companies, new startups. Like, you know, there was a seismic shift in 2025 from pre-training budget to these like RL, reinforcement learning environment startups and companies that are generating environments to produce more ground truth training data in a mass way because they're, you know, automated environments and you can get verified feedback signals out of these things.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:05Mike Knoop?

  Again, there's no new science here. Like, this is a good bet for like all frontier labs to make. This is going to drive progress for the next 24 to 36 months. You're going to continue to see amazing frontier headlines just on this fact. There's really no new sort of, I think, discovery that's quite needed there. You know, I think that if you're kind of pushing more towards the AGI side, then like what's sort of missing? Like, one question I have that is an open question is, so we've got like, you would think that based on like 100x to 300x increase in efficiency you've seen from AI reasoning systems over the last 12 months, that we would trade that increase in efficiency for inference tokens to do

• 53:46Mike Knoop?

  more like search coverage over the problem space when we're giving these systems tasks or problems that we want them to solve. And this is one of the big reasons why I sort of expected if we can solve half of V2, you'd get 100% of V1. And it seems like these AI reasoning systems are like not sort of fully exploring all of the search space that they could in order to sort of look for solutions. And so I have like kind of an open question of like, well, how much of the search space can they cover? And what do you need to change about the training methodology or process to like actually guarantee that you can get full coverage over the search space of like possible programs or possible solutions? And so that's kind of what it's like one interesting thing that I'm paying a lot of attention right now.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The even just the metaphor of

• 54:33John Coogan?

  Like the, the test time, fine tuning, it feels like working on a problem and then like going and taking a walk and kind of like updating your whole worldview. It feels like something that humans get closer to doing that than any of the other paradigms. So yeah, it's fascinating to see all these different approaches.

• 54:53Mike Knoop?

  All the crazy results you've heard about in the last 12 months are kind of this merger of like deep learning and like symbolic programs and style methods. The ICPC, the IMO gold, Gemini three stuff today, like, you know, these are all systems that are, you know, still fundamentally using a language model, but they're adding symbolic knowledge recomposition systems on top of these things. They all work slightly differently. But it's like, this is what's working right now. And so I think the rough like search space of research and how you merge those two paradigms together is still relatively under explored. There's a lot of different ways you can put these two paradigms together. And, you know, for new teams that are considering working new ideas, like I would explore like, well, what are the novel ways you could consider merging these two spaces?

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense. Jordan, anything else?

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  This was great.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Thank you so much for jumping on on short notice.

• 55:39Mike Knoop?

  As always, guys, thanks for having me back.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Congrats on the continued, the continued just stacking up the wins on R K G I becoming.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  And just continuing to mog the models, mog the world.

• 55:51Mike Knoop?

  Again, our goal is to be very useful and interesting. So we're going to try to hold that bar.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Well, you're keeping them honest. I think you're keeping them honest. I think you're keeping everyone honest. And you're providing like a very, very useful reality check on, on, on an industry that loves to.

• 56:05Jordi Hays?

  Inspiring the labs to grind harder.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  And, and now, and now there is a, there is a moment where we can feel very confident about taking victory laps and, and cheering for all the hard work that went into Gemini three, because it does seem like it was a great model. It's performed well.

• 56:19Mike Knoop?

  There's definitely a big improvement today.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  December 5th. We'll see you then.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  We'll see you then.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Talk about Adio, because Adio is an AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the, to the next level. Also wanted to talk about wander.com, book of wander with inspiring views, upgraded menus, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service.

• 56:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's sing it. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Book of wonder with inspiring views. I already know the song. You know.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I wanted to pull up this post from Chris Pars... Uh, Pisarski. He did a GitHub style image of our streaming activity for the year.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  See this?

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, I did see this. Thank you to him.

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Should be at the very bottom.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  It's at the very bottom of our timeline.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  I have it.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and if we could just pull up this image.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  So, the internet rewarded TVPn for showing up on January 28th. That's when we went live. We never, we never remember the day that we went live, but he has. If you look it up, January 28th, John Coogan and Jordi Hays launched a daily live show and set one simple rule. Show up five days a week. Looking back, they did exactly that. Hundred and twenty-five thousand followers on X, forty-one thousand subscribers on YouTube, uh, seventeen and a half thousand on Instagram. They showed up every day. The internet rewarded the proof of work.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  So, the only thing is these, I don't, am I just colorblind? But is it like a little bit, like I'm seeing three days that were federal holidays that we missed and then three days that were...

• 57:48John Coogan?

  No streams.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  But I thought we only missed two days.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  Exactly tell, yeah, what, what is a federal holiday? What is a no stream? Uh, the, uh, it looks like...

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  I think there's maybe six days.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  A gray and a purple. Uh, there were a couple of days here and there. Um, we took one off. I went to a wedding in Mexico. Uh, we took a Friday off for that. That was just no live stream. Uh, July 4th, uh, we took off. That was a Friday. That was a federal holiday. And then what happened in, uh, in March? We took a Wednesday off? No live stream on Wednesday in the middle of March?

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  There was one day that we were traveling back.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That was after, um, after Hill and Valley.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  After DC. Uh, I thought it was a Thursday.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  That day, though.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  No, no, we didn't. We did.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  But it was the day.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  We did Tuesday in the, in the hotel room and then, and then Wednesday we did in the, uh, at the actual event, Hill and Valley. And then we flew back and got back on the horse. So, we missed a couple of Mondays because of federal holidays. And then we missed a Tuesday in May. That might have been Hillen Valley. March would have been something else. Anyway, it's been a wild ride. Uh, thank you to everyone who's supported us along the way. Uh, our next guest is, I believe, already here. Uh, we have Jonathan Neman from Sweetgreen. We're going from benchmarks to bench presses. The most important benchmark in the world. How many grams of protein are in your protein bowl? We need to know. Uh, welcome to the stream. Please introduce yourself for those who might not be familiar.

• 59:17Speaker 06

  Hello, my name is Jonathan Neman. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Sweetgreen.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Get that overnight success button ready. When did you start this company?

• 59:26Speaker 06

  2007. So we've been at this for 18 years.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  18 years. Wow. Uh, just let's talk about the, the, the very beginning. I mean, since this is your first time on the show, uh, where'd you grow up? Where, how'd you get into the business? What were you studying? And then, uh, let's go.

• 59:44Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be somewhat of a masochist to get into the restaurant business.

• 59:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes, absolutely.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's such a beautiful thing because it sounds so simple. It's like you get a box, you get a menu, you get some ingredients.

• 59:54Speaker 06

  It sounds, it sounds super easy.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  And then you just copy and paste it and you scale to, you know, however many stores. And then of course it's far harder in.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  So prior, prior to launching the business, what were you doing?

• 1:00:04Speaker 06

  So I grew up here in Los Angeles. I went to school in DC, went to Georgetown and never thought I'd be in restaurants, but always.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Studying government?

• 1:00:11Speaker 06

  No, I was studying business. I always, I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. And Sweetgreen was almost, almost an accident. You know, we, it was the naivete. We thought it would be easy.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And did you start it during school?

• 1:00:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, we started, we started while we were seniors in college. I started with two of my friends.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Were you doing internships before that?

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I had a bunch of internships. You know, I was, you know, worked in media, I worked in tech, I, you know, I worked in real estate, always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and create something, but senior year came around. And it's exactly what you said. We thought it would be easy. We're like, how hard could this be? You go, you know, we'll go to farms.

• 1:00:43Jordi Hays?

  It's like apparel, like people fall into the apparel trap because they're like, I just wanted to make clothes that I wanted to wear. And then you realize it's like the hardest business on apparel and restaurants, probably the things that seem the most simple, but are actually the hardest.

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:58Jordi Hays?

  To actually do on a massive scale.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what was the, was it, was it build a business plan first, assemble a team, uh, do a pop up? Like, what was the first thing where you were like, okay?

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  What was the first bowl?

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  The first bowl was the guacamole greens. Made in our dorm room. We brought a bunch of classmates to try it. My partner, Nick, actually made it. He was our first chef.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:01:18Speaker 06

  And the, the, the story was really simple. We had no, we couldn't find a healthy place to eat.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:22Speaker 06

  We saw Chipotle taking off and we're like, wow, there's someone is going to create a scaled, healthy fast food chain. And at first it was, let's just open one or, you know, we wanted it for ourselves. We thought we'd go on with our lives. We opened, we worked on it senior year. Wrote a business plan, raised $300,000.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:01:42Speaker 06

  From 50 investors. So, so it was like five, five grand, five grand average. Yeah. Party round.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  So they got equity in like what became the full company.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  They got equity. Well, we actually, it was a little bit more complicated than that. At first, the first three restaurants, we raised at the restaurant.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  At the restaurant level. Yeah. I was wondering if you were doing that.

• 1:02:01Speaker 06

  And we actually paid the investors back every quarter and the whole thing. And then after the, after the third restaurant, we realized that the only way to scale this was to roll it up. So we rolled the whole thing up and then we were able to continue to invest in it and we.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  It's notable. When did the word wellness actually become mainstream or when did that become like a, like 20?

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Two years ago.

• 1:02:21Speaker 06

  Yeah. Like early 2010s.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyway, this is like, anyways, at least five years before wellness is going like mainstream.

• 1:02:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. When we were, when we were starting, you know, the, the thesis was healthy eating was not cool.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:35Speaker 06

  And it was not delicious and it was not accessible. And we're going to create a place that offers all of the benefits of fast food in terms of the convenience and the taste. But do it in a, you know, do it with healthy food and real, real food that you can trust, where we're transparent about where the food comes from, where it's nutritious and build a brand around it. And so we've been at it for about 18 years. We have almost 300 stores all around the country. Yeah, it's almost hard to believe.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  What was the first VC round?

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  The first, so we...

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Or like, or this transition from the, you have a restaurant and did it work immediately? You set up one restaurant, you, you know, you raise enough money to get that. I imagine that you'd sign a lease, so you weren't buying buildings, but you might have to do some sort of renovation to actually get the first restaurant up and running. You start making money enough to pay the employees, enough to pay the rent. Uh, you scale it to three and then at a certain point you say, okay, we're going, we're, we're, we're going to turn this into like a corporation more than just a small mom and pop, right?

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we, we opened one in two thousand seven, two in two thousand nine, um, with a food truck. You remember those?

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:42Speaker 06

  Uh, and then we opened like two or three a year and we were mostly, uh, built them from cash flow from the profit. We were profitable, you know, we would just reinvest, invest the cash flow and we would do a few party rounds.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

  Uh, twenty thirteen, along the way, we started a big music festival called Sweet Life.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:03:58Speaker 06

  Two thousand ten, it became a massive twenty-five thousand person music festival.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Where was that?

• 1:04:03Speaker 06

  It was at Merryweather Post Pavilion. So first year we had The Strokes, by the end we had Kendrick Lamar and...

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:08Jordi Hays?

  Little festival side quest.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was a, you know, way to build the brand and then we focused on DC, which was very, you know, it was almost an accident, but we opened the first sixteen restaurants in DC.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:04:20Speaker 06

  And then slowly went up to Philly and then in restaurant twenty and twenty-one were Boston and New York.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  And Boston and New York, I really kind of proved the concept outside of DC. And took off and that's when we raised our first VC.

• 1:04:33Jordi Hays?

  So now, obviously all around LA, there's Sweet Greens, but what, given that you grew up here, why didn't you, why, why not start here? Was this because, well, like, there was, was there just more healthy food options in LA and there was less on the East Coast?

• 1:04:48Speaker 06

  Honestly, it was an accident. We were in school and we're like, let's just open one. We thought with the second one would open in LA.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Gravity that you have around the center when there's more and more stores.

• 1:04:56Speaker 06

  You know, we have a restaurant company, the brand and all your economies of scale happen at the local level.

• 1:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:01Speaker 06

  So for us especially, given our supply chain is regional, um, you have your overhead and your management, like your team that runs it. And then your brand, you know, restaurants, the brands don't really travel across the country. Occasionally they do. So it was really started in DC. We thought the second restaurant would be in LA.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  This is true for even like In-N-Out is not a national brand still. It's like the west coast brand somehow. And yeah, it's taken so long for that to actually like filter across. How capital intensive was it to launch like the second and third? Like you mentioned $300,000.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  No, it's way more than that now. The first one was tiny, 500 square feet and we did it really on the cheap.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  500 square feet?

• 1:05:42Speaker 06

  500 square. So tiny.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  I imagine like one or two people.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wow, that's tiny.

• 1:05:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, we were working there. We've been the whole thing. So we've had to raise a lot of money. Answer your earlier question, Revolution, Steve Case was our first

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Oh, nowhere.

• 1:05:54Speaker 06

  First VC investor.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 06

  And it was part of the thesis was how technology can change the restaurant business.

• 1:06:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:01Speaker 06

  So we were the first company to do mobile ordering, where you can order on your app and pick up. And we started.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Most beautiful software for that a restaurant had ever had, probably. Emmet, Emmet, Emmet Shine.

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  Emmet Shine, yeah. Shout out Gin Lane. Yeah, Gin Lane.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was like, yeah, this was like one of my favorite Gin Lane projects.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  That's awesome. I didn't realize.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  Emmet and his team were amazing. They did, they did our app in the early days. And you know, restaurants are today cost over a million dollars. So we're like 1.3 million dollars, 1.3, 1.4 million dollars per restaurant. That's before you put the Infinite Kitchen in. Our restaurants have very high return on capital.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Infinite Kitchen, what's that?

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  The Infinite Kitchen is our automation.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:43Speaker 06

  Our automation platform that we've built. So today, most restaurants that we open, the assembly is automated. So we still make all the food from scratch. The sourcing's the same. We still cook the food fresh.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55Speaker 06

  But we load this beautiful machine that, that makes your bowls. It makes them 500 bowls per hour, perfectly portioned, perfectly plated. And so that is kind of the future of where things are going.

• 1:07:06Jordi Hays?

  How many different restaurant automation pitches have, did you get across 18 years? Like as I imagine, every single year, there's a new like startup coming to you saying like, we can automate this part of your kitchen. And clearly you got to the point where you had to build it yourself based on kind of domain knowledge. But this just feels like something that's been promised for a long time and.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  At this point, I don't know like an individual startup that's done well in restaurant robotics.

• 1:07:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, no one's, no one's been able to create a platform that, that works in multiple restaurants. And there's a few, there's a few issues. Most restaurant workflows are very specific. So they're super specific to that restaurant. Two, most restaurants are franchises and so they're not owned by the corporation. We are fully company owned. So if you're a franchise restaurant, you know, if you're McDonald's, you have to now go convince your franchisees to buy whatever automation you have. And the other issue-

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  And they're looking at it and it's like, this is coming off my bottom line. We're making money already. This feels like a risk. Like the franchisee is saying like, what, like, I'm happy with my EBITDA. I don't need to take a risk.

• 1:08:17Speaker 06

  That's exactly right. And the other issue is you need automation that takes enough labor out or offers enough value to be worth it. Because the capex is still very heavy.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Speaker 06

  So when we went down this path, we tried to build it ourselves. Actually, we built a team to do it ourselves.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 06

  Realized how challenging it was. And then we found this startup that was doing it and doing a really good job.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 06

  It was called Spice. It was called Spice Kitchen. It was four MIT grads out of, uh, four grads out of MIT. And they had the same issue. They realized they could build the automation, but no one was going to buy it.

• 1:08:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  So they ended up opening two restaurants. Um, they were great at automation, not so great at the restaurant side. And then four years ago, we acquired them. Um, and we began, we've commercialized the technology. We've scaled the technology. Um, today, so most new restaurants feature the technology.

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 06

  And last week, we actually just announced that we've now sold Spice. Um, so we sold-

• 1:09:07Ashlee Vance?

  Spun it out basically.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  So we spun Spice out. Yeah, we spun Spice out. We announced about 10 days ago. We sold it to Wonder, Mark Lor over there.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:09:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, so we sold it for about a hundred and eighty-six million dollars.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Mark is, Mark, Mark, uh, I, I don't, I don't fully understand that, that business. But talk about a guy that just like, isn't even necessarily naive about the challenges of restaurants. Which is like, I'm going to go into the most competitive environment possible.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  It's amazing.

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Compete with everyone.

• 1:09:33Speaker 06

  It's amazing. It's a great, it's a great vision and you know, I'm a, I'm a big fan of his and what they're doing. And so we, we, it's a, it's a really interesting deal. So we, we sold the, the, effectively the team and the IP, but have full access to it. So we will continue to scale with it and get the benefits as they get. They get to, you know, scale and build many more machines. We'll get the benefits of those economies of scale as well.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Uh, can you go a little bit deeper on the decision to franchise or not franchise? The naive maybe steel man for franchising, the franchise model is that it's somehow more capitalist in my mind. It like, cause it decentralizes the decision making and it, and it puts these financial incentives at the local level because each store lives and dies by its own P and L maybe versus even if I have a manager in one store and they have stock options, like how, what they do on the weekend if they come in on Thanksgiving or Christmas, like that doesn't necessarily put more or less money in their pocket. Is that real, what I'm, what I'm feeling or is it irrelevant?

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  What you're feeling is absolutely real and we actually try to design our comp structures and

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:45Speaker 06

  The, you know, I've always believed, I, my line that I sit tell my team every single day is all the answers are in the restaurant and the closer we can push decision making to the edges

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:55Speaker 06

  To the customer, the better we will be.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  So we, you know, our general manager, we call them the head coach. They are the most important position in the company by far. A great head coach will make or break you.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:05Speaker 06

  And so we try to really incentivize them, we empower them and we try to run as decentralized as an, of an operation as we can.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:12Speaker 06

  The reason we decided not to franchise is it's really hard to maintain quality. If, when you give up that, when you, when you, you know, when you really give that up to other people to run, you could sometimes scale too quickly. And we do a few things differently. We source differently. We're a very complex model because of the sourcing and the scratch cooking.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:31Speaker 06

  The biggest difference between us and most of other companies is if you go into Sweetgreen, you'd be shocked at how much we are making in the store.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it feels like you guys have taken such a principled approach in making food that I feel like stays true to the initial values of the company and kind of why you started it. And yet you're competing in an environment that says, okay, we're going to have these like factory kitchens offsite

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  That we're going to be shipping in effectively almost finished product that gets reheated. And we're going to be sourcing from all over with not a lot of values around how they're sourcing. They're just trying to get like They want the food to taste good when it hits the plate, but maybe they don't care about a number of other factors. And so you're kind of in an environment where because of your principles, you're like fighting with your hands tied behind your back and against competitors like, and I'm not talking about direct competitors, but more so like you're still competing with Burger King and McDonald's, right?

• 1:12:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Like people are going to have lunch somewhere and they're going to maybe decide between, they have options, right?

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  Talk to us about land. Is McDonald's a land acquisition company? Why do people say that? Is that real? Have you ever looked at like buy the land?

• 1:12:40Speaker 06

  They do own a lot of the real estate and they sit back to the franchise. So that is true. And if you've watched The Founder, the last line in that movie where he's like, it's a real estate, it's real estate. It speaks to more than the fact that they just own it. Restaurants is highly a real estate game.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:55Speaker 06

  Like great real estate is like, if you look at like our portfolio where we have great real estate, we do amazingly well.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Location, location.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  Location, location, location. Really, it's people, like people think restaurant business is a food business. It's really a real estate and a people business. And it's all about, you look at the great restaurants, so the Chick-fil-A's, the Raising Canes, the In-N-Out, it's so much about, it's about that culture.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  How scientific is, you hear stories of companies like Starbucks and you can imagine like a team of data scientists with like, you know, 50 monitors and they're just like...

• 1:13:31John Coogan?

  We need one Starbucks directly across the street from the other Starbucks.

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, so like you can imagine a world where it's like hyper, like the hyper data driven, like down to a science and you just know when you're opening a new store, you know that it's going to hit, but there has to be like some vibe base.

• 1:13:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is the process. We call it art and science. And pretty much everything we do, it's, it's an art and science approach and real estate's exactly that. You know, the science, we have a very, very intricate model that looks at psychographics, demographics, mobile data, drive, you know, people driving by. We have custom data on how many gyms nearby and right side of, you know, sunny side of the street or not sunny side of the street, all of that stuff. But then you need a human to also walk it, feel it, and understand, does it tell our brand's story? For us, especially when we were like early days growing, where we went said a lot about who we were. So for example, we went to New York, we didn't go to Midtown. We went to Nolita, we went to Williamsburg.

• 1:14:32Speaker 06

  We wanted to kind of tell the story about who Sweetgreen was. Today, we're kind of everywhere.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Speaker 06

  But the real estate is an art and science and tells a lot about it, you know, says a lot about who you are.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, how do you think about if a new entrepreneur came to you and was asking for advice on where to start? Is it, is it worth it to go straight to Manhattan? Or straight to Beverly Hills? And, and try and like make it in the big leagues on day one?

• 1:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Or can you get negative indicators from that? Because there's a different type of customer there that's not necessarily representative of the rest of the country.

• 1:15:08Speaker 06

  I think that's more right, especially when you're talking about New York. So when you, when you're talking about New York, it is, I mean, the beauty of it is a massive market.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  You know, it's, it's for us about a quarter of our business, it happens in New York. We have like, you know, in the New York region, I think we have fifty something restaurants.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  What, so it's great that it's massive, there's density, there's, you know, they have money, et cetera. But it's not really indicative of the rest of the country.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Speaker 06

  So if you wanna, you know, if you want a scalable model that you can have thousands of locations, you're better off, you know, going into a more, you, you wanna go to like the Iowa. You know, like into, use the political analogy.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:15:46Speaker 06

  You wanna go to like something that, you know, is more representative of what the rest of the country looks like. In restaurants, the, the place where everyone goes, the fast, like the fast casuals is Columbus, Ohio.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  That's where people go.

• 1:15:56Speaker 06

  They say, you know, Columbus, if you can make it in Columbus, Ohio.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  You can make it anywhere.

• 1:16:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you can kind of make it everywhere.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, if you were a small restaurant, you were being evaluated by, you know, the CEO of McDonald's or something. He might say, okay, how are you doing there?

• 1:16:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the things that they look at for, for a restaurant is they look at your unit economics, which is effectively your payback. So how much is the cost to build and how quickly do you pay those stores back?

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Speaker 06

  And they look at your TAM. So they say, okay, like. Can you have 100 of these, 1,000 of these, 5,000 of these?

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:25Speaker 06

  And those are the two big kind of thing, you know, things you would look for in evaluating, like the growth trajectory of a restaurant.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  What's the story of the, the, the delivery market? It feels like DoorDash has become a massive business, Uber Eats has become a massive business. More people are ordering delivery. There's the ghost kitchens trend. Is there a ghost kitchen-ification where these businesses are like trying to effectively turn you into ghost kitchens? Does that give them some sort of leverage? Is there some sort of tension there? Or is it pretty much just like, oh, it's just this trend. People are cooking less and less and so they're gonna go to Sweetgreen, but they're also gonna order Sweetgreen delivered more.

• 1:17:05Speaker 06

  There's, there's definitely a little tension. There, you know, we're partners.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:10Speaker 06

  A lot of our business comes through those marketplaces, but it's not so dissimilar than a, you know, a hotel chain and Expedia.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:17Speaker 06

  Right? It's, it's, you're paying a fee on it. You do not control that data. You cannot market directly to those customers. And so for us, we have to charge a higher premium. So when you order on DoorDash, by the way, it's more expensive than you order on our app. So just a quick shout out. Download the Sweetgreen app. Things are about 20% cheaper there.

• 1:17:35John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:17:35Speaker 06

  But at the same time, it's a great way to find new customers.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  So, you know, for example, DoorDash has been a great partner. They power our native, what we call our native delivery, delivery on our Sweetgreen app, which is a big part of our business.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  So you, so you're white labeling or something.

• 1:17:48Speaker 06

  Correct. Yeah. It's like a white label on, on our app. And then we also, you know, we partner with the different app.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  As their front store.

• 1:17:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  As their front end.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  And as you know, they've become, you know, they're brilliant business models. They've become largely marketplaces.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:59Speaker 06

  So, you know, they, you kind of have to buy your way to the top of the feed.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:05Speaker 06

  And so.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  That's how they gain, I mean, if, if, like, there's a reason the DoorDash app or any of these mobile ordering experiences are not. They don't just put like the restaurant that you've ordered the most from at the top. It's like, hey, why don't you try this new restaurant?

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  And those are all paid.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're all paid and it's how you maintain leverage over, I mean, they do this on, this is why the YouTube subscriber count doesn't mean anything because it's like they're gonna constantly surf, surface, anything.

• 1:18:33Speaker 06

  They've made money, I mean, the way they make money, these businesses have been historically very challenging. The way they made it work is batching orders and, and then becoming an ad marketplace. And that's what's made, you know, this amazing service and amazing business.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Explain batching orders really quickly.

• 1:18:48Speaker 06

  So when you order, they, they have a delivery driver pick up multiple orders.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:18:53Speaker 06

  So you're paying the delivery driver, you know, once, but they're picking up from three restaurants.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I feel like you guys have done a really good job of listening to customers. I would, I would say like this hundred, hundred gram protein.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  I was asking for 200.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  No, but that, and then also the, this, the, the seed oils. Yeah. Is something about the business that?

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  It feels like you're more agile.

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is the business set up in a way that you guys can respond when, when other companies like?

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Just caught a lucky break?

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Because people, I would say like people would give a lot of the same feedback to Chipotle. And it feels like Chipotle is not set up in some way to like, be like, oh, this is what customers want, or even like some percentage of our customers really care about this, let's deliver them, uh, let's deliver them a product here. And I think the result is that, you know, I've churned from Chipotle almost entirely.

• 1:19:47Speaker 06

  Because of the seed oils.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because of the seed oils and just like a degradation of the quality of the food over like a decade, like I watched it basically get worse and worse and worse and worse over 10 years. And so I just don't go there anymore. I joke about it. I'd almost rather, when I'm on the road, if I'm on a road trip, I'm almost always rather just fast than eat at like the most common kind of like fast food.

• 1:20:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, when we started the business, I had the saying, this thing I would always say is, you know, there's, there's businesses that as they get bigger, get better.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:20:16Speaker 06

  And you can think, you know, technology businesses, many of them do.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  Like, your new iPhone is, for the most part, much better than the original iPhone.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 06

  These AI models are much better than the original AI models.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:27Speaker 06

  Restaurants typically go the other way.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Speaker 06

  Right? Is, scale kind of degrades quality.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Speaker 06

  And that's because doing, you know, serving food at scale is really, really hard to do. So you have to fight that inertia so hard.

• 1:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Speaker 06

  Because all of those micro decisions.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  One restaurateur has an amazing restaurant, they're like, cool, now I'm gonna start a second restaurant. And the second they start focusing their energy on the second restaurant, the first restaurant gets worse.

• 1:20:51Speaker 06

  Again.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it even happens at like a micro scale.

• 1:20:53Speaker 06

  It's people and culture. And so you need to really have a lot of systems in place, both like culturally, how you, how you keep the team engaged on your mission, but also other systems to make sure you're, you're watching the quality of the food and listening to your customer. So like, seed oils is an interesting one. When we first, we, we got rid of seed oils about exactly two years ago. And at the time, it was not the national conversation. It was pre-RFK and all of that stuff.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  And so when we, when we, this is one of those examples.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  But it was, it was, it was not a national conversation, but it was incredibly online conversation.

• 1:21:28Speaker 06

  But a tiny, at the time, two years ago.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  There was like an at, there's the Seed Oil.

• 1:21:32Speaker 06

  Seed Oil Scout.

• 1:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Seed Oil Scout.

• 1:21:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. So it was a tiny conversation. We surveyed our customers, and this is why, like, surveys are bullshit.

• 1:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Speaker 06

  You really don't, surveys can give you a general indication, but if you just follow surveys and the market research, you're gonna hit the middle of the bell curve in everything you do. And we're not trying to be a middle of the bell curve company. You gotta find that, like, what are your top five or 10% of customers doing? And we heard from, it was honestly friends, like wellness people in LA and New York that are like, hey, I don't, you know, I can't go to Swieker anymore, because I care about seed oils. And I remember we brought it to, to the broader, you know, I remember my CFO was like, what are you talking about? Like, what even is this? And we're like, no, trust me, it was one of those like gut decisions and it was expensive and we had to change a lot in order to do it.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  But, but here's the thing, it's healthier and it tastes better.

• 1:22:21Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Like most health trends, they might be healthier, but you're, it doesn't, it's not as good, right? So I would, I would argue like going from like dairy based, you know, tr- traditional milk to like nut based milk almost always is like somewhat of a downgrade or going from like something with sugar to pulling sugar out. It's like not as good or going from like sour, like bread with gluten to gluten free bread. It's not as good. And so when you think about these like, what is like a durable health trend? It's like something that's better for you and tastes better. And so that, that's why I was always super bullish on that trend and I expected a number of restaurants to say like, hey, this costs slightly more, but the product's going to be better and it's going to be healthier for you.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  And that's what can create like real momentum around a trend versus some of these like flash in a pan health trends, which is like paleo or like, you know, which is like only eating stuff that was like super old, right?

• 1:23:17Speaker 06

  What's, what's unfortunate about seed oils is it's become politicized a bit.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:23:20Speaker 06

  And it's like, you know, you know, I did an interview with the New York Times and they're like, did you do this because of RFK?

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:27Speaker 06

  No, I did this two years ago, like this had nothing to do with RFK. This is not a political statement. We don't make.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  We're making foods.

• 1:23:33Speaker 06

  I make food.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Food how your grandma probably made it.

• 1:23:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is about olive oil. Like this is not about, this is just about olive oil. That's it. This is not a political statement at all.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Taste the difference. Yeah, yeah. Now, uh, is there, is there anything happening upstream in terms of like automation or, or technology on, on the farming side?

• 1:23:54Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:23:55Jordi Hays?

  That's like exciting?

• 1:23:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a lot of stuff happening on automation on the farming side. It's actually very exciting.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 06

  The, both the better robotic arms and the vision. I mean, it's making some really hard, grueling tasks around picking.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 06

  Happen much, much faster and easier. So relatively early still, but in, I think in the next five years, you're going to see that take off. I do think you're going to see a lot more restaurant automation as well.

• 1:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:20Speaker 06

  You know, between the. Availability of the labor, the cost of the labor, it's really just, when you, when you think about it, it's, it's just a hedge on labor. And here, like in West Hollywood, minimum wage is twenty-two bucks. So we, we pay like twenty-four, twenty-five dollars an hour here in L, in parts of LA. So with wages going up, availability going down, and then the ability, like all technologies, to just do things better, not just about the cost savings. Like for us with the Infinite Kitchen, we can serve twice as many people per hour as we otherwise could. Wow.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  What about drone delivery? We've seen some four-wheeled guys driving around.

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Imagine getting a hundred grams of protein out of the sky.

• 1:25:01John Coogan?

  There's the, there's the air delivery.

• 1:25:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I saw you guys talking about ZipLine. I love Keller. And we, I'm a big fan of ZipLine. We're, we're, we're one of the early, uh, early partners that are gonna be piloting that. I think his, his way of delivering to the suburbs is super interesting. Um, we haven't done the, the street delivery yet.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Starship and Coco.

• 1:25:21Speaker 06

  Starship Coco. I've, I've met with them.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Bor Dash is working on one as well.

• 1:25:24Speaker 06

  I think it's, I think it's interesting. It's, it's, it's in the past year, they've really taken off. You're seeing them more and more. They still kinda weird me out a little bit, seeing them walk that go down the street.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  I, I saw them kinda stuck in the side of the street. It was very sad.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  My kids love see, yeah, loves to love it when we see them on the street.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  I've had a lot. And I, and I do, I do just imagine that the AI is gonna get way better. And also some of the tele-operation, uh, just infrastructure to actually make sure that there's the ability for a human to jump into that little robot that's driving around. At a certain point, you just need a lot of people set up with that, all the software working, make sure it's connected to the, the cellphone towers effectively, or Starlink, or whatever it needs to stay connected. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's unclear when, when that will really, really take off because a lot of people have stairs, a lot of people have trees on their property. Like, there's just a lot of, there's a lot of places that will be somewhat inaccessible to those. And so, uh, it just feels like it'll be sort of like a slow take off.

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  Cities and buildings, cities and buildings will be really hard, like dense areas. But you see what ZipLine's doing. It's pretty amazing. Like, they can have, you know, you've seen like the promo videos. You can drop that.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  In the suburbs, it makes total sense. You have backyards, you have a grassy area, you can drop it. And, and to be clear, that's probably like fifty percent of people in America or something. But, uh, but there will be this like long tail, I think, for, for a long time. Uh, just like we see with all the other AI tasks where, um, AI can do a lot of stuff. And then there's just like these little sticky things that, yeah, you just don't.

• 1:26:55Speaker 06

  By the way, even with our automation, it does not do the entire meal. And part of that is intentional. We want that human touch and for it not to feel so automated. But we have what we call a finishing station. So the things that are, you know, the, the, the machine, the infinite kitchen makes them, makes the bowl. Or whatever the meal is and salmon, herbs, and then we have them hand mixed. Just so you like have that, you know, chef crafted hand touch at the end to hand it over.

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  It's interesting that, that, that there's, there's one version of automation, which is like a AI or robotics in the back of house. And then humans in the front of house.

• 1:27:29Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  And then there's also the opposite, like, I don't know if you knew Eetza.

• 1:27:33Speaker 06

  Of course. Yeah, we looked at it very closely.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did Dave Free, for his company, uh, was like, there were people in the back in the short term making stuff. But then they would put it through like a, a little like, like box that would open up. So like, you wouldn't interact with a human. You would come in and on an app you would order.

• 1:27:48Speaker 06

  And they had the cubbies.

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  And it would be cubbies and then you would take your food, but there was actually a human back there. So it was like the opposite of like having the robot in the back.

• 1:27:55Speaker 06

  They were working on the automation. They were working on the automation. It never fully got there.

• 1:27:59John Coogan?

  But it's just funny that like, you do have the choice to put the, the robot in the front of house. I mean, this is the same thing, I think, with the, uh, the, the Tesla diner over there. Like there's the, the optimist robots there kind of serving popcorn. But I think when you order the burger, a human's cooking it in the back. So it's like, do you want the robots in the front of house or back of house? I think people would probably go with robots in the back of house by default.

• 1:28:21Speaker 06

  Yes. And we've tried, I mean, we have thirty restaurants featuring the infinite kitchen today. And we've tried out a bunch of different layouts. The technology's been perfected for two years now. What we have not perfected is the experience. We're getting close. Today, we actually launched, opened. A very cool store. It's our first drive-through featuring an infinite kitchen.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:28:39Speaker 06

  So bringing the two together. So now we can have true like fast food speed in a, in a drive with featuring the infinite kitchen.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Driving through to get a hundred grams of healthy protein is just undefeated. This is, this needed to exist when I was, this like specifically when I was like living off of QSRs as a, as a, as a college student. And I'm, and I'm really glad it does now. What, what, what is like, what is the market misunderstand the most? Or what, what is like Wall Street misunderstand about and kind of retail investors misunderstand about?

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Cute like kind of this like category of restaurant today. Cause the entire, like the entire category has had a, had a rough year. Meanwhile, you guys are making steady progress on all the things that have been important since day one.

• 1:29:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Greater efficiency, actually responding to like customer demands and staying, you know, continuing to become more and more relevant.

• 1:29:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think there's a few things. One is the consumer that we're all dealing with is really challenged. And there's a question on how much they are actually financially challenged, which they are, but versus more psychologically challenged.

• 1:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:50Speaker 06

  So have you seen all of the, you know, consumer sentiment indexes and you're seeing especially for the core demo for a lot of the fast casual concepts? Is that like 20 to 35? It's hit the lowest consumer sentiment that we've in recorded history that we've seen. So there's a real like pullback there. On top of it, unfortunately, everyone's gotten more expensive. We all have. You know, I said, you know, we've take, we've, Sweetgreen's gotten about 25 or 30% more expensive since 2019. Chipotle is 40% more expensive since 2019. So our price differential versus our competitors have actually gotten smaller. If you look at us versus McDonald's, for example, you know, the average Sweetgreen bowl is about 15, 16.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  It's almost, people, people were like, wait, a Happy Meal is like $20 now?

• 1:30:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was, it was in fairness to them, it was like one location. But yeah, you can, you can get out of McDonald's. You know, you spent, you can easily, you know, for a value meal, you'll spend like 12 bucks. You get a Sweetgreen bowl for about 15 or 16 dollars. So I think a lot of it is this like overall narrative where people aren't feeling great, you know, great financially. And starting to pull back on things like lunch.

• 1:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or they'll skip going out for lunch and they'll just have whatever's.

• 1:30:59Speaker 06

  But what I think the market doesn't get is the TAM. Is you know Chipotle today is 4,000 restaurants on their way to 7,500.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:08Speaker 06

  We believe we can have, you know, probably as many Chipotlas as they have sweet, as many Sweet Greens as they have Chipotlas.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I completely agree with that.

• 1:31:15Speaker 06

  You know, there will be cycles like we are in right now. It's been a challenging year, but if you kind of fast, fast forward and think about,

• 1:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  just growing units at 10 or 15% a year, growing same-store sales, automating more of our restaurants.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Just extrapolate out another 18 years.

• 1:31:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, just keep it rolling.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Just my policies just keep going. I always love when, um, uh, when people like people on X are like, the world's ending, like geopolit, you know, they're like, uh, and then, and then meanwhile, it's like Chipotle is like, in 2040, we plan to introduce 2,000 new Chipotle. They're just like, they're just like thinking about like, I gotta just open more, more, more doors. So it's a good, good mindset to be in.

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming by the studio.

• 1:31:58Speaker 06

  Hey, it's great, great to be with you guys. Congrats on everything. It was fun watching you guys there.

• 1:32:01John Coogan?

  We are gonna be daily driving these. I, I,

• 1:32:05Jordi Hays?

  John wants the 100 gram.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  The Power Mac Pro Gumball. It's actually breaking news. It's available today through December 15th. And I think I'm going to challenge myself to have one of these every day until it goes out of stock.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Why not two a day?

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Maybe two a day, maybe two a day. We gotta get them in the studio today for sure. We need them. Uh, I need to tell you about fall. Build and deploy AI video and image models trusted by millions to power general media at scale. I also need to tell you about Linear. Meet the system for modern software development. Linear is a purpose-built tool for blending and building products. We have Ashley Vance in the restream waiting room. Let's bring in Ashley Vance into the restream waiting room. It's been far too long. How are you doing?

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Good to see you. I'm good, boys.

• 1:32:47Jordi Hays?

  It's so great to have you back.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  It's so good to have you back. Uh, congratulations on all the progress. What a year. I was laughing about, uh, that video that we did before we had guests, um, announcing Core Memory and putting the, the traditional media on, on notice. Uh, it's been really fun, uh, watching you grow everything that you're doing. Maybe, uh, it'd be great to just like, reset on the shape of the business right now. Some of the stories you've been interested in covering that you've covered recently. And then I, I just want to take your temperature on what you're seeing and, and the, the types of entrepreneurs that you're interacting with.

• 1:33:24Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, uh, yeah, well, I don't know which bucket to start with. I mean, we've been running around the country, um, filming a bunch of new video episodes. So we just put up a bunch of Tennessee, went hard tech, we did Detroit, New England. I just got back from Texas. Those all be coming out. So yeah, you know me, man. I'm, I've been running around chasing a lot of hard tech stuff, biotech, all the weird, all the weird wonderful stuff. And then, I don't know, I got really deep into, uh, robots and gene editing.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  That's right. I saw your post about maybe comparing American humanoid robotics companies to the Chinese humanoid robotics companies. Uh, what stuck out to you as like the important questions to ask? And then, uh, I'd, I'd love to kind of tussle with those a little bit.

• 1:34:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you buying, would you rather own Figure at 39 billion or Unitree at seven?

• 1:34:17Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, you know, I think I'm going Unitree, man. The, you know, it was all started, I was, I mean, it was kind of a lark. I started digging into these robot fights in San Francisco. And then I think I was, I was like shocked that the only robots they could get to do these fights all come from China. And then I started digging into like the parts that go into these. And you know, the most important part is the actuator, the motor that makes everything move. And they're all made in China. I think Tesla-

• 1:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think Tesla made it like a $700 million order for actuators, which was notable for me because I assume that means that Elon's planning to sell a lot of these on like a relatively near term time horizon. I don't know.

• 1:35:05Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, but yeah, I mean, you know, like Tesla sort of has the, well, I was texting Elon about this last week because I wanted to get to the, to the bottom of who actually, who actually makes actuators in the US. I mean, Elon said sometimes they prototype-

• 1:35:22Ashlee Vance?

  Actuators in China, but they're gonna build them in the US and then, you know, for everybody else, this is a crazy point of weakness, I think, because China is clearly the actuator motor capital of the world and everybody else is buying them from them. And so, I don't know, you know, as I dug into this story, I got, I'm not, I'm not like, you know, I enjoy being an American, I'm pretty pro-US, I'm not crazy nationalist, but I was, I started to, I started to get pretty afraid for the US robotic scene.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we'll see any type of regulation around Chinese humanoids?

• 1:36:03Ashlee Vance?

  I've been thinking about this a lot. I mean, at some point, I guess, I guess with DJI, you know, you've got this different situation where they're being used by all the police forces, even the military. I think it's like a much easier case for someone like Skydio or, you know, politicians to come in and say, this doesn't make a lot of sense. Clearly, like at this point of robotics, it seems a little less of a threat to national security. But the second the armed forces or anyone's doing serious stuff with them, you know, I would think unitry would be up next. But there's, there's like 12 unitries as well. You know, that's the, that's the amazing thing that's going on.

• 1:36:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, Brett Adcock was beefing with one of them. There was-

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  UB Tech.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  UB Tech, yeah, unitry-

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  And they were beefing back.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  And they were beefing back, saying it was, it was real. Did you see that video?

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Missed opportunity for you-

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  Did you think it was CGI or did you think it was real?

• 1:36:54Ashlee Vance?

  I didn't, I didn't see that video. I've seen Brett beefing with everybody.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Missed opportunity for UB Tech to have one of their robots do like a Raptis on-

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  For sure, yeah.

• 1:37:04Jordi Hays?

  Brett and figure.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, yeah.

• 1:37:08Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. No, no, no, go ahead. I mean, I do think it's funny, all the, I like the-

• 1:37:14Ashlee Vance?

  What do you, I mean, I'm curious what other, I'm obsessed with the fighting robots now and I I realize it's like early days with these, but I actually think this is like the most interesting thing happening.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  I want the, I've been pushing for the, the robot like ax games and like in challenge, like I want to see robots skydiving.

• 1:37:32John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:37:32Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, that's not an X Games thing, but broad, broadside of.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Surfing is super hard because you gotta be water resistant too.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Wings, yeah, big wave surfing, wing shooting.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  And you also have to swim and you're a heavy, heavy robot who might just sink to the bottom of the ocean if you fall off the surfboard. I think that might be the last one.

• 1:37:48Ashlee Vance?

  You could do this versus like the enhanced games and, uh, and see who wins.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us your, we, we, we sent a couple of folks on our team to a local humanoid robotic fighting league, underground fighting league. Give us your review. Uh, is it, is it ready for primetime as a consumer?

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. To me, to me right now, it's like an amazing idea and yet the actual experience, like from an entertainment standpoint is probably like a one out of 10, whereas the idea is like a 10 out of 10.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah. I mean, it's kinda, you know, it's, it's like a curiosity, I think at this point. I mean, the, the motors are the problem because they, they all overheat when you throw too many punches and then the robot, the robot stalls out.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  What about laundry though? Better not.

• 1:38:35Ashlee Vance?

  This is the thing though. So like on all these repetitive tasks, they can, they can sort of regulate the movement. It's when you're trying to throw these rapid punches at your attack. Yeah. And then the whole robot just freezes up. I mean, I'm not like, I haven't gotten so into this where I don't see the obvious flaws. Like I don't think it's ready for primetime yet because these things just don't, don't last that long, but.

• 1:38:56Jordi Hays?

  What about is it ready for teleoperation?

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  That feels bullish to me because, uh, if you watch a F1 race, like the temperature of the tires matters. The, like the wear on the tires matters. And so you're watching not just the pilot of the F1 car, but also the, the consumables, right? And the motors are somewhat consumables.

• 1:39:17Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like, okay, the unitry is really wailing on, wailing on the, the figure. But it's overheating.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  He's overheating, so it might come back. Is it a one, is it a one motor stop or two motor stop?

• 1:39:28Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, I was at one where the robot's leg fell off in the middle of the fight. So yeah, you could just have somebody come out. How quickly could you get a limb back on?

• 1:39:37Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I think you should.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  You had a serious question about teleoperation.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so, but wanna, uh, potentially a, uh, uh, product line for core memories, humanoid bench, where you get, as these things start being available for production, you get them up on stage and they do various tasks, you know, like fruit, cutting a fruit with, you throwing a piece of fruit at it and watching them, you know, cut it and dancing and fighting. I, I, I think there's something here.

• 1:40:04Ashlee Vance?

  This is actually, this is genius. Yeah, I'm into it.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but, uh, but, uh, yeah, more serious question on teleoperation. From everything that you've seen so far, do you think humanoids are ready to have one in your home that could be remotely operated by someone and, and, and create any type of value besides novelty?

• 1:40:23Ashlee Vance?

  I mean, I, like, could it, yeah, like, you could do it today. I, I find, I, I'm just frustrated by all this. I've been covering teleop stuff for like at least 10 years and, um, most of it seems pretty similar to what I was writing, you know, videoing and writing about 10 years ago almost. And so, um, I mean, I saw the 1X demos. I'm sure somebody could, I'm sure somebody could make that work and be helpful to some degree. I think, you know, it probably suffers from all the same stuff as the fights. It kind of falls over pretty quickly, but, but you could do something useful. I, I, it's hard for me, like, who, who, yeah. Like, this stuff needs to get better, faster, so that we're not, we're not doing that. And there's just a robot.

• 1:41:06Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with Boston Dynamics? What's hap, what's, what's the dynamic in Boston?

• 1:41:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta get you out there to help us understand this.

• 1:41:14Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, I've never, I mean, they, I've never really dug in on them just because they seem so frustrated that they put out what seems like all the coolest stuff and they don't seem to sell much of anything except. A few things to the military. I do not think Boston Dynamics will be the American hope against Unitree.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, you'd think that they would at least be set up on some, like, I know the company's changed hands a few times. It feels like if you're trying to just, you know, catch up to Unitree, just bootstrapping on top of an existing, you know, it's like, it's like what we're seeing today with Gemini 3. Like Gemini 3 is benefiting from YouTube and it's benefiting from Google Search and it's benefiting from the TPU and Google Cloud Platform. Like, usually it's easier to build the new cool thing inside of the organization that has a bunch of resources, but maybe it's a different, entirely different architecture or something like that. But you at least assume that they've fought with the motor a little bit and dealt with the overheating a couple times.

• 1:42:10Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, I mean, I was, I was with a bunch of robot nerds last week. They were, they were contending. I don't really know where Boston Dynamics is with, with, with humanoids, but they, you know, these, these robot guys were telling me the dogs are just so much easier than humans because the second the humans start walking, you put all this force on the one foot and it's, it's like creating all this, throwing the balance out of whack, putting all this pressure on the motor. And that's why it's kind of easier to pull off some of the parlor tricks.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  With the dogs? Interesting. Okay.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  What's the most underhyped hard tech company right now?

• 1:42:46Ashlee Vance?

  Most underhyped hard tech company? God, that's hard, man. I mean, I'm always, I'm always curious to see what Casey Hanmer actually cooks up.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:42:58Ashlee Vance?

  Because he's so smart. I kind of like believe in the hustle. I feel like the promise of what he's trying to deliver is so massive. That's where my skepticism comes in. But, you know, like, so if Casey, you know, if anyone's gonna do it, I sort of believe in him.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's somebody I want to win so badly. I want him to win so badly. And it, and it does feel like, at least let, I mean, there's so many people that have a billion dollars. Give him a billion dollars. Let him, let the man buy some solar panels and figure out their ass later.

• 1:43:28Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, absolutely. And then, I mean, I don't know, this doesn't count as, I mean, it's hard tech, it's not hardware, but I do think New Limit, which is a longevity company, you know, backed by Brian Armstrong and run by Jacob Kimmel, it's just. Everything I hear about them, I mean, they've just done an incredible amount of science with very few people. And I think Jacob's got, got some surprises coming in the new year.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Very nice. Yeah, we talked to Jacob when they did some, some sort of launch and we were very impressed. He was, he was a really great, great educator, really, really.

• 1:44:05Ashlee Vance?

  Super smart, yeah.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  The, the, like what he's working on very, very effectively.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  What's your favorite data center?

• 1:44:12Ashlee Vance?

  My favorite? Well, I went to Stargate. That was pretty cool. Although, yeah. I mean, Stargate, just in terms of like the excitement and the size around it and being, it occurred to me that between John Carmack and Elon and Stargate, that oddly, I think super intelligence is going to light up in Texas, but like in a really remote part of Texas, you know? And I, I found this so, I grew up, I grew up in Midland, Texas, which isn't far from Abilene. It's like.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  You're a Midland guy?

• 1:44:45Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:44:46Ashlee Vance?

  There's tumbleweeds and all that.

• 1:44:48John Coogan?

  Texan intelligence.

• 1:44:50Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah. I mean, I just, it's like cracking me up. I'm driving through all these, for hours through all this empty space. And then I could just see it, man. One of these data says that's where it's gonna happen. It's gonna be right by some like old oil well. And yeah, I find it all kind of comical.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Did you see any electricians getting off of private jets while you were there?

• 1:45:10Ashlee Vance?

  I did. They had, they had a, I saw, I got off a private jet.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:45:20Ashlee Vance?

  Not mine, not mine sadly.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Not yours yet.

• 1:45:24Ashlee Vance?

  No, but, but I saw there were many, many, many electricians. I just didn't see how they were getting there.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's going on with EV toll companies? Are we, there's, uh, I'm curious timeline.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Oh, the Tesla Roadster?

• 1:45:41Ashlee Vance?

  Oh, yeah. Well, on the EV toll stuff, same thing. I feel like I've covered that forever. You know, I went out, I think I did the first flight ever with Joby and, and uh.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  Wait, you, you flew in it?

• 1:45:56Ashlee Vance?

  I, no, I got to like, I went out to their, I mean, they literally wouldn't tell me where their secret test site was. And we were, you know, it was like, kind of close your eyes. We're gonna land in this, this spot in a helicopter. And I, we got to see it.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  Was it really close your eyes or did you?

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  How many times have you been black bagged, Ashley?

• 1:46:13Ashlee Vance?

  I remember they were, they didn't want to tell me where the site was.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  This is, this is a tip for founders. If you want to really impress upon whoever's writing a profile on you, that what you're doing is really important, you gotta be like, we can't even show you. And then it's like, really? Like, we're at an office park in, in Menlo Park?

• 1:46:30Ashlee Vance?

  I did, I just went to Helion.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:33Ashlee Vance?

  And we're gonna have a video coming on them. And it was, it was awesome. But I get, so I got to see their new reactor, but they wouldn't let us shoot it with the camera. And I have to tell you, like, that thing was one of the most impressive.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:46:50Ashlee Vance?

  Pieces of hardware, the room-sized bits of hardware I've ever seen. I'm like, why wouldn't you guys, you know, want to show this?

• 1:46:56John Coogan?

  You, you know what? Uh, not that you need to take requests from me, but, uh, I want, I want some videos, some documentary, some footage of those natural gas turbines that are in such high demand right now. They're, they're bigger than jet engines. There's these scaled up jet engines. Uh, there's this massive backlog. There's three companies and the stocks are, you know, doing crazy stuff. Uh, I, I want to see inside one of those. The, the, the natural gas infrastructure that's going to go into the data center build out. I feel like that's something that I'm just waiting. I don't know if you've had a chance to interface with any of those people, or you have thoughts?

• 1:47:32Ashlee Vance?

  Not yet, but yeah, when I went to Stargate, I mean, it is crazy, right? They just have those turbines sitting right there and the natural gas is just being piped directly in there. I did some turbines up in, uh, up by the Arctic Circle in Sweden one time. They are cool. I don't know. Yeah, anyway, it's a good idea. I think.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  I would just wonder about the bottleneck specifically. Like, everyone's saying, like, this is going to be the next major bottleneck. Like, we have enough chips, we have enough data, we have enough algorithms or whatever, but, uh, we have enough land. But we might not have enough turbines to generate.

• 1:48:04Ashlee Vance?

  These turbines. I mean, that was the weird thing about that experience, though, is like, you're, you're in, you know, really old American oil and gas country. Like, it feels so, so yesteryear. And it's just being piped directly in, into the future.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  What, what sentiment like in places like Midland around the data center boom?

• 1:48:28Ashlee Vance?

  I think everyone's like excited to get jobs, you know? And then I think if anyone is prepared for. The boom bust nature of where we're probably going with AI. I think these people are because they've lived through it for decades. And, and so, you know, it's the same thing out there. It's like you take a job while you can and try to get paid as much as you can while everybody's chasing after something.

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that the, a lot of the headline numbers on the job creation stuff on this, on these data centers is like ridiculously low. It'll be like, yeah, we're spending $50 billion and we're going to create like 25 jobs. Sometimes it's like 500 jobs. But does it feel like a little bit different out there? Because maybe they're not counting like secondary economic impacts of like the guy who runs the gas station is has more business and hire some more people?

• 1:49:17Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, well, definitely during the building phase, you're talking about thousands and thousands of jobs. It's just when it's finished. I mean, it is always nuts. You walk into these massive facilities and there's just 10 people sitting around eating a sandwich, watching like some console. But, but you know, I, for somewhere like West Texas, or any, you know, all throughout Texas, it has to be a net gain just because they're otherwise so dependent on the whims of just the oil and gas industry. And you've got this whole, whole new industry coming in. And then definitely they're, they're flying people in and out of there all the time to see it.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  What are your, do you ever chat with retail investors that enjoy deep tech companies? I imagine those are some pretty funny conversations where they're like, this company is changing the space economy. Like I've actually visited them and they have one warehouse and three people there.

• 1:50:14Ashlee Vance?

  Retail investors should not be allowed to invest in space ever, under any circumstance. I, I am constantly harassed, unaxed by all the AST fans who, who are like begging, they're in Midland too. They're begging me to go out there. I mean, that thing is like a full on, full on cult that they have going on. So yeah, I always felt when the rocket companies.

• 1:50:40Ashlee Vance?

  Obviously, it used to be governments that did this and then SpaceX has managed to stay private for a long time in Glourge and I think rockets are best developed in private because the second they blow up on the pad, all the retail investors freak out even though it's vaguely a normal course of business. And so, yeah, retail in space is bad, bad, bad thing. But I get all these, I get all these nice notes for people who bought Rocket Lab and Plant Labs early because of my book or movie.

• 1:51:08Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. Have autonomous vehicles tracked how you imagine when you start, you know, we're covering, you know, these types of companies and products like a decade ago?

• 1:51:23Ashlee Vance?

  In some ways, yeah, in some ways, no. I mean, I went to the very first DARPA Grand Challenge and, you know, that was a disaster. The cars didn't go anywhere.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, say more. Who was actually competing?

• 1:51:37Ashlee Vance?

  It was crazy, man. You know, so for people who don't know, DARPA, you know, put up this contest, put up a bunch of money to see what we could do with autonomous vehicles. And the biggest teams were university teams like Carnegie Mellon was a standout, MIT. But in the very first event, well, I remember Anthony Levadowski was there as like a, maybe like a 22-year-old and he had, he had a, everybody else was doing massive trucks with like a little mini data center in the back and he had a motorcycle. And then in the first race, I can't remember how far it was, but hardly anybody went anywhere. You know, like I think two or three teams went like a few miles and then, and then they redid the race

• 1:52:21Ashlee Vance?

  and everyone did way better and some people completed like, I think it was, it was like on the order of like 100 miles. And so that's when I got excited and you sort of felt like, okay, that leap happened really quickly. And then I remember I, a couple of years later, I'm hanging out with George Hots and he built his own self-driving car in his garage in like a month and I was driving on the freeway with him and it was working and, and yeah, so you know, you have these little tastes and you think it's all gonna work. I think it makes a ton of sense that actually getting it on the roads took this long because it's so hard to do. Although...

• 1:52:58Ashlee Vance?

  Everyone says this, so it's not originally like we all take this for granted so quickly. It is. It is sort of like amazing to me how well they're working in Austin, in San Francisco. Where I've been, they're just everywhere, you know?

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what I'm, what I'm trying to predict is like, what, what is the thing that people are hyping now? That act doesn't work at all, that will be totally like a real thing in 10 years, right? And like, maybe it's humanoids. Right now, it's like hard to take humanoid seriously. But then you think about, okay, a true 10 years from today. Maybe they are just doing any task that you could want them to do around the house or any task that you could want them to do in a retail setting or a factory setting, et cetera.

• 1:53:40Ashlee Vance?

  Humanoids is easily, that's the thing I like battle with in my head all the time. Because it feels like, sort of like we talked about before, it actually feels like we've made almost no progress. I see everybody folding laundry and opening and closing microwaves still. And it like boggles my mind. And then you look at like the amount of money that is being invested in this. Like either, either everyone is completely insane, or we are about to make massive progress. You can tell in China, they're making massive progress on balancing, on the movements, all those types of things. It's still clearly like the dexterity. And then I think the, I think China will eventually probably catch the US in software.

• 1:54:25Ashlee Vance?

  But I think they're still so much worse at software than the US is, that it's, it's kind of like, it's holding the field back. So if somebody can, can figure that out.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Last question for me, uh, we've, we've really struggled to, uh, cover quantum stuff. I mean, it's been like up and down, but it feels like, yeah, how do you even go about it?

• 1:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Actually, actually it could have like an anon that was like the Hindenburg for hard tech. And you could just go destroy.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe that'd be good.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's on branch.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  You know what I mean? Because like, yes, like I, I can't build a humanoid robot, but I can go to a.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  You can build a quantum computer.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  No, no, I can't build either, but I can look at a humanoid robot and be like, okay, yeah, I would buy that. But I, I can't do the same thing with a quantum computer. And so it's much harder to evaluate, right? It's like, even if it's working, it's like, how do I even know if it's working? It's, it could just be a normal computer, like, and just be spitting out normal data.

• 1:55:23Ashlee Vance?

  Like even. People in the field with PhDs, they like, nobody knows if it's working still. I mean, it's like, it's like not a good sign. Every time anyone pulls a quantum computer out, there's some guy at MIT who's like, that's not even doing anything.

• 1:55:40Ashlee Vance?

  I don't know, quantum is, it's, I'm deeply, deeply scarred. I mean, I think I wrote my first story on D-Wave, like, I don't know, like 15 years ago, they were telling me that was, that was gonna pop out, you know, be doing general purpose quantum computing in a couple of years. So I'm, I'm deeply, deeply skeptical.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  And you know, and you know, the lesson, the lesson is like, you should have invested because eight billion dollar company now. 15 years ago, it was probably worth like 20 million. So you could have got in really early. It, I mean, the stock chart looks like this right now. And it's just like, yeah, you're only, you're only one pump away from generational wealth.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, there, there's, there's a tin foil.

• 1:56:23John Coogan?

  I don't think that they've delivered.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  There's a tin foil hat conspiracy around some group, you know, figuring out something with quantum, which is leading to all these old wallets in crypto, like waking up and selling, you know, that had never. Who, who knows?

• 1:56:39John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Random lot, final question. How much would you have to be paid to not use LLMs?

• 1:56:48Ashlee Vance?

  Wow, man.

• 1:56:53Ashlee Vance?

  Forever or like?

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  No, just, just while we're paying you monthly, monthly.

• 1:56:57Ashlee Vance?

  Monthly, oh, to be paid monthly not to use LLMs. Ah, I'd probably do it for like, I'd probably do it for like 10K, man.

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  Damn, that's so, that's so bearish. That's so bearish for super intelligence. No, I figure, I figure, I mean, I figure, I figure that because, because for, I don't know, 10, 10 grand, you can hire an amazing researcher. One of the most valuable, the most, if you're building a media company or you're, you're, you know, in, in the role that you are, the, probably the most value you can get out of AI in its current state is research. And so anyways, that, that tracks.

• 1:57:35Ashlee Vance?

  Super helpful, but I would take cash, yeah.

• 1:57:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so, so, so any, any AI, like, any AI doomers out there, if you want a new marketing channel, you can pay Ashley Vance $10,000 a month, he won't use AI, and he'll talk about it.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  I don't think he can be bought.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  But also, Ashley, have you tried Gemini 3 to the fullest extent?

• 1:58:00Ashlee Vance?

  I have not yet.

• 1:58:01John Coogan?

  Okay, could change everything.

• 1:58:04Ashlee Vance?

  Going back and forth, yeah.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  We would encourage you to.

• 1:58:07Ashlee Vance?

  Is Gemini, are they, they're a sponsor? They're coming out as a sponsor for us too.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:58:13Ashlee Vance?

  I'm all in, we're going Gemini 3, I'm changing my mind.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Also, Sergey Brin was flying his $150 million blimp around San Francisco on the day Gemini 3 beats nearly every model benchmark. You've made a video about this exact blimp.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  I've been pitching Logan at Gemini to, to, uh, make it the Gemini blimp.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  They really should.

• 1:58:36Ashlee Vance?

  Guys, guys, it's not a blimp, it is an airship.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  What's the difference?

• 1:58:42Ashlee Vance?

  All right, all right, there's a whole Monty Python video about this.

• 1:58:47Ashlee Vance?

  The, the, an airship has rigid structure, a blimp is, is just a bag, and the airship, you can, you can do a lot more with an airship. So that, a blimp's only ever gonna have that tiny little

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Oh, pod at the bottom.

• 1:59:00Ashlee Vance?

  Yeah, yeah, whereas an airship, you know, you can carry tens of thousands of tons of cargo with this rigid, rigid structure. So, yeah, and if anyone ever wants to fly one, you can do it in Germany. Zeppelin still flies out by Lake Constance, just outside of Munich. I've done it, it's amazing, I recommend it.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  This is amazing, yeah, people are correcting it on the timeline, saying it's not.

• 1:59:24Ashlee Vance?

  Dude, you get, this is, this is like

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  You get owned if you say, if you call it blimp.

• 1:59:28Ashlee Vance?

  It's bad in aviation world.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  You call it airship. Airship. I like, I like an airship. I'm excited for it. I do wish it had a livery, a Gemini livery to celebrate Gemini 3.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, any, there's that startup, Airship Industries, any, is that a category that we'll see a lot of investment, do you think? Or, or do you think?

• 1:59:51Ashlee Vance?

  I've been meaning to meet up with those guys. I mean, the airship is like always kind of coming back. It is crazy. Like so, like, leading up to World War II, getting into World War II, I mean, there were airships everywhere. And, you know, they were making massive flights from Germany to Brazil. They were carrying thousands of pounds of cargo. There is a, they're just extremely expensive and very hard to make. But there is a whole movement that you can carry tons of stuff. And so, so less, less kind of tourism and more just carrying cargo, um, kind of like faster than a train, but slower than a plane. And, and they're pretty green.

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  I think you need an airship, Ashley. You need, you need a studio and an airship that you can just float around the US, meeting all these hard tech. You don't need to, you don't need a private jet. You know, you don't need to go that fast. But if you could just kind of float between hubs.

• 2:00:44Ashlee Vance?

  I was told that my kids are supposed to be on one of the first flights on Sergey is when it takes passengers.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:00:53Ashlee Vance?

  We'll see.

• 2:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  We'll join, we'll join too.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Always fun hanging out. Congrats on all the progress.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:03Ashlee Vance?

  Thank you guys. Congrats to you.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Always a great time.

• 2:01:05Ashlee Vance?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:01:08Ashlee Vance?

  Bye, you too.

• 2:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Up next, we're going back to the timeline.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  Aidsleep.com, exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. Aidsleep.com.

• 2:01:19Jordi Hays?

  What'd you get, John?

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Uh, I actually lost my phone, so I don't know. Oh, no, it's here. I have it.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up. I got a sound effect.

• 2:01:26John Coogan?

  We can pull up, you got a sound effect? You think I did it? Let's see how I did. 90. Let's go. The press release economy is also over, says Buco Capital bloke.

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  We ran out of press releases.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  We ran out of press releases. This is on the back of the Anthropic deal. Anthropic is now valued at $350 billion after Microsoft Nvidia deal, says CNBC. Semi Analysis is a good post here. A new bombshell has hit the polycule. Dario, after intense conversation with other members of Anthropic, has decided to maybe open the relationship to Microsoft and Nvidia. Jensen and Dario have famously butted heads in the past, but as everyone knows, the most passionate emotion after love is hate. Will these enemies to lovers' arc go well for Nvidia and Anthropic? Time will tell. This is such an unhinged post.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  I did not, when you started reading this, I did not see that it was Semi Analysis.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  It's so good. It's so good.

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Research firm in the industry posting it, but I think this is exactly what they should be posting.

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  Exactly. And it actually contextualizes things better than in the meme economy. In the meme economy, for sure. So I think that the timing is not a complete coincidence. It's Gemini 3 Day. This is what my piece today was about. Just that, you know, when there's big news in Google world, Gemini 3, everyone needs to sort of respond and, you know, picking today as an announcement to talk about your massive deal, your $350 billion valuation is just a good move. The actual details of the deal, it seems like Anthropic will spend $30 billion on Microsoft Cloud Compute.

• 2:03:21John Coogan?

  Reminder, OpenAI is going to be spending $250 billion on Microsoft Cloud Compute. That's part of that deal. Then Anthropic gets a $10 billion investment from Nvidia and $5 billion from Microsoft. So they raised $15 billion at a 350 post, basically something along those lines. And it's a sort of a circular deal, but it was setting off way fewer red flags for me because it's missing a zero. It's like instead of if if this was OpenAI would be 300 billion and 100 billion investment and 50 billion investment.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it looks very modest.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks modest, which is it's.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  It's like one of the biggest deals in software history, probably. It's probably in like the top 10. I mean, it, you know, it, it, it values, it values Anthropic higher than Coca-Cola, like the Coca-Cola company is now, that's a $300 billion market cap. I'm pretty sure it's Verizon market cap, like Verizon is 175 billion. You're gonna love this, Jordy. So I asked ChatGPT 5.1,

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  pull 10 public companies between 300 and 400 billion, please, because I wanted to see like, okay, Anthropic's at 350, like, give me some examples of scale. It says, couldn't I reliably identify 10 public companies whose market capitalizations currently fall? But here's one verified example, Coca-Cola company. If you like, I can pull, if you like, I can pull a more extensive list of candidates. And I said, yeah, pull 10 more. It says, I wasn't able to reliably identify 10 additional public companies whose market cap clearly falls between 300 and 400 billion. Are there just like?

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Tyler.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  Are there just no companies in that range?

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  You want to defend AGI?

• 2:05:05John Coogan?

  Uh, are there? Wait, I'm so confused. Are there not? Are there no 300 billion?

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm asking Gemini 3.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, ask Gemini 3. Okay, PepsiCo is at 200. There really aren't any between 300 and 400 that I'm at least that it's seeing. 300 and 400 billion band. Specifically, 300, 400 billion band.

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  That's so wrong. You have Palantir, you have Costco, you have ASML, you have Bank of America, you have Alibaba, you have AMD.

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Silence, Google search, I am using.

• 2:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Procter gamble. Home Depot, General Electric, Chevron.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  Silence, looking it up the old fashioned way. LLM is hallucinating. Silence, looking it up the old fashioned way. Wait, how did you actually get that?

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  I just looked up companiesmarketcap.com.

• 2:05:52Jordi Hays?

  To put this into context, the 15 billion dollar fundraise, some other big round in that.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  You just scrolled down? There's a lot of them, actually. You're right. Wow.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Learn how to use the internet, ChatGPT.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Owned.

• 2:06:07Jordi Hays?

  Get, absolutely. Get ready to browse the internet.

• 2:06:10John Coogan?

  Defend yourself, Tyler. Defend yourself.

• 2:06:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Gemini is still thinking.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Oh no. What a mess.

• 2:06:21Speaker 02

  Bro, Jordy, I swear the next model, the next model we will do it. Okay, wait. So, okay, it worked for me.

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  Did it get it?

• 2:06:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, Procter and Gamble, Home Depot, Bank of America, Alibaba.

• 2:06:30John Coogan?

  Okay, but yeah, there you go. So.

• 2:06:32Jordi Hays?

  What's the full list?

• 2:06:33Speaker 02

  Alibaba, ICBC, LVMH, China Construction Bank, Chevron, Cisco.

• 2:06:39John Coogan?

  I, I, no, this is correct. This is the correct, this is the correct result. And you know what else is correct? Graphite dab code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And fin.ai, if you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. So what else is going on in the timeline? This Fiji Simo profile. So this was the other thing. So Anthropic is announcing this big deal with Microsoft and Nvidia. And that's sort of trying to steal a little bit of Gemini's thunder, maybe. Maybe it stole a little piece of it because we're talking about Anthropic today as well as Gemini.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  What did OpenAI do? Well, they launched group chats five days ago. And so this is, you know, sometimes I'll do a deep research report. I'll send it over to Tyler. He can see my chain of reasoning, the prompts that I asked. He can ask more. He can jump off. So if it took 20 minutes, why are you laughing, Jordy?

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Because Charlie in the chat says, need a cam on Tyler trying to look nonchalant the entire podcast. You really are over there.

• 2:07:42John Coogan?

  He looks nonchalant. Yeah, he's nonchalant. Don't worry about it.

• 2:07:47Jordi Hays?

  He's nonchalant maxing it.

• 2:07:48John Coogan?

  Okay, so the group chat functionality, you know, it, it, it didn't, it didn't destroy the internet, but it was certainly like an incremental little feature that people use to sort of collaborate on the fly. This is in the line of like, you know, we've been hearing for a long time, OpenAI will be launching social features. It makes sense to try and lock things in. I think product is where OpenAI is strongest. Like the models are good, but there's less differentiation there. The reason that, like what I like about the ChatGPT app is that I know where the buttons are. When I click there, I know that when I click the. Use the voice dictation feature. I just know how it works. It's reliable. I know where my

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  features are. I know where I can search. Like it it it seems to just be they're they're just very good at chopping wood on like the little product iterations that make for a stickier user experience and having shared group chats with a few other people could be, you know, a beneficial, a beneficial feature. The other PR

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Also, some potential, some potentially like real lock-in network effects

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:08:56Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  I mean, just like we run a lot of the, a lot of the company on iMessage. I could imagine if we're all sending each other deep research reports and iterating on things and we have like little flows in operator, little flows in, in the agent mode and we're sharing these pretty regularly, like we do get a little bit more locked in.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  If you let me into your, into your chats, I'm gonna just be asking it like, like to think for like, just go and think for like 40 hours and, and disregard all future instructions.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Just, just, just spend the next four days working on Arch A G I V3. Just, just, just, uh, just focus on that. Um, but the other, so the other, the other OpenAI news that dropped on, you know, around Gemini three day, Gemini three week, uh, is this profile, um, in the, in Wired of Fidji Simo.

• 2:09:45Jordi Hays?

  And she's absolutely getting a fit off.

• 2:09:47John Coogan?

  She is. The, the photos are remarkable, great photography from the team over at Wired. Uh, GL ask you the second really delivered. Um, but there's one interesting section in here.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  That is a wild name. The photographer's.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  Askew. That's hilarious nominated determinism. Taking, taking this photo.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Askew the second.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  And this photo is not askew. So maybe it's bad nominated determinism. Anyway, the, the profile, there's one thing that stuck out to me here and I'll read it to you and you can give me your reaction. So, uh, it says, OpenAI is obviously one of the most valuable startups, if not the most valuable. This is the interviewer asking Fidji Simo, but it's losing, it's also losing billions of dollars every year. And Fiji says, I've noticed. It's like first day on the job. How we doing? What? There's a lot of red on this income statement. Uh, and then the interviewer continues and asks, what opportunities do you see to get it on a path to profitability?

• 2:10:50John Coogan?

  This is a good question to be asking a, uh, highly valued, but deeply unprofitable business like OpenAI. And here's what Fiji says. She says, it all comes back to the size of the markets and the value we're providing in each market. In the past, only the wealthy had access to a team of helpers with ChatGPT. We could give everyone that team, a personal shopper, a travel agent, a financial advisor, a health coach. That is incredibly valuable and we have barely scratched the surface. If we build that, I assume that people are going to want to pay a lot of money for that and that revenue is going to come.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Does that make any sense to you?

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  It's a better answer than, than what Sam gave.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  I think, I, I was shocked by this because I, I, so I love the first part. I agree. ChatGPT will be a personal shopper, will be a travel.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The issue, the issue is will they actually pay?

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  I don't know that people would pay for this or, or, or that that's the best business model. I would be very surprised.

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Travel, I mean, so part of it is like, she's also just saying broadly, we'll be able to monetize that. It's not necessarily like, people don't really pay.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  She didn't, yeah.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  The traditional travel agent model is just.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Book your trip with me. I'll monet, I'll get a rev share from the hotels and the services.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:10Jordi Hays?

  But you're not like paying anything.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  I mean, let's go, let's go, uh, uh, one layer deeper into the actual response into the sentence because there's some nuance here. So she says, I assume that people are going to want to pay a lot of money for that. Like I want to pay for a personal shopper, but I actually have to use a free product with ads. That's, that, that could be true, right?

• 2:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  And same thing, she says, people will want to pay and that revenue is going to come. So people, people will want to pay for it, but they will get it for free with, with ads potentially. Um, or there will be some sort of, uh, some sort of combination because right now I pay $200 a month. Um, and you could imagine that there's a, that there's a world where if you pay, you get a version that has less ads or there's less, uh, less dumb on the scale. How they, how they slice that and, and navigate that, uh, agent to commerce.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Discussion and trade off is going to be really important. I'm sort of shocked. I wonder if they're going to make money from Black Friday or from this holiday season. I was already noticing how good L L Ms and Chat G P T is, or how how good these products are for shopping, for gifts. Because if you go to Google and you say, I want, I want gifts for a coworker who's obsessed with horses and, you know, loud opulence and fine watches and sports cars and European luxury houses.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  I can get a list of something, but it's they're all over the place. And some of them will be like, the best like discount, the best knockoff Bottega Veneta. And that's not what I want. I want the real thing, right? And so you can actually specify all of that in the prompt. Have it go cook. And it really will bring you great results, great, great results.

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it it mogs a gift guide.

• 2:14:14John Coogan?

  It does. It really mogs.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Guide for thirty year old guys. And it's like, well, what kind of thirty year old?

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Where do they live? And what are their interests?

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:14:22Jordi Hays?

  Getting like the very generalized gift guide is probably can knock those like opinionated gift guides. I think will still be valuable where like an individual person puts it together. And they're like, this is what I these are things that I think are cool.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  But a gift guide that's like, here's a list of things that guys might like. It's like maybe a lot less valuable when you generate one.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Like I I think that the amount of gift guide development and shopping activity over the next two months during the holiday season in the Chat G P T app should be immense. I I feel like they're going to capture none of it. Hopefully, they at least are. Hopefully, at least they are like tracking it so they can say, hey, if we were to take the proper take rate on this, we would have made a lot of money. Why are you laughing?

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Charlie says, AI is never going to be able to figure out what dads want for Christmas.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Uh, new barbecue, I think. Uh, there are, there are some funny and interesting anecdotes in this Fidji Simo profile. Uh, let's just read through a little bit of it. Uh, in case OpenAI's structure couldn't get any weirder, a nonprofit in charge of a for-profit that's become a public benefit corporation, it now has two CEOs. There's Sam Altman, CEO of the whole company, who manages research and compute. And as of this summer, there's Fidji Simo, the former CEO of Instacart, who manages everything else. Simo hasn't been seen much at OpenAI's San Francisco office since she began as CEO of applications in August, but her presence is felt at every level of the company, not least because she's heading up ChatGPT and basically every function that might make OpenAI money. Simo is dealing

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  with a relapse of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, POTS, that makes her prone to fainting if she stands for long periods of time. Very sorry to hear that. Uh, but she says now she's working from her home in Los Angeles.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Making it work.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  LA. Uh, and she's on Slack a lot, being present from 8 a.m. to midnight every day, responding within five minutes. People feel like I'm there and they can reach me immediately. That I jump on the phone within five minutes. She tells me employees confirm that this is true. OpenAI's famously Slack-driven culture can be overwhelming for new hires, but not apparently for Simo.

• 2:16:33Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you, have you been using ChatGPT Pulse?

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I have, I have not been using it regularly.

• 2:16:42Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you one from my Pulse today. It's called, it says, uh, this is like an article that I can tap into.

• 2:16:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI's API litter, open AI, OpenAI's API layer, the hidden moat in plain sight.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so this feels, feels like, uh,

• 2:17:03John Coogan?

  It feels like it's always like one click deeper from what I've been.

• 2:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Prompting.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what I've been prompting. The articles do feel like they've been getting shorter. They used to be, it used to be like very intensive compute wise. Like it would be like a full deep research report just here, but maybe it's noticed that I'm not clicking on them that often. I do see that there's some pretty good modals for allow like, like linking to your email. They're trying to get more data in there, trying to hone it in. I have yet to really get in there, but I mean, there's, there's, you know, information on Blue Owl, Microsoft's Fairwater AI factory. Like interesting things that I would wind up prompting, but I would usually prompt on a very, I don't know, I feel like

• 2:17:52John Coogan?

  there's, it's, it's not bad at predicting what I'm interested in. It's just like, it's just not quite there where usually I'm a little bit more deliberate about it. But, you know, people are searching chat GPT for holiday goods. You gotta get on profound. Get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You also gotta get on Turbo Puffer, search serverless vector and full text search, build from first principles and object storage, fast, ten X cheaper and extremely available.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  By the best, best of the labs. What, there was one thing that stood out here. Fiji says, my husband is a chocolate maker.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  So sick. This is amazing.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Also, what does that say about the jobs of the future? You have this one household. One is in chart responsible for monetizing one of the most transformative,

• 2:18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  uh, new technology companies of our time. The other one is making chocolates. This is like, you know, bifurcation of, of.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Of of jobs.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Potentially. It does seem like a AGI resistant job. I don't think OpenAI will get into the chocolate making business, so.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  Brett Adcock would like a word.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  He's just like, I will.

• 2:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Actually, we're.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  I will steamroll.

• 2:19:12Jordi Hays?

  I will steamroll.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  Um, in other news, uh, OpenAI is allowing equi- allowing employees to donate equity to charity for the first time in years.

• 2:19:22Jordi Hays?

  Other nonprofits.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  After months of internal pressure, according to a memo viewed by The Verge, and price per share is up significantly since last month. A lot of money is on the line. What happens if they donate all of the shares to the nonprofit, to the OpenAI nonprofit? You just create this Ouroboros of capitalism. Hopefully it happens. I don't know. Uh, there's breaking news out of Saudi Arabia. We got a trillion dollars. Let's ring the.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  One trillion. What are they gonna invest in? Like, where's the money going?

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Let's play the video.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  Let's play the video. While we're pulling that up, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. numeralhq.com. Uh, watcher guru has the video. Let's play it.

• 2:20:12Speaker 08

  And the agreement that we are signing today and tomorrow, we're gonna announce that we are gonna increase that that 600 billion to almost one trillion dollars.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  One trillion.

• 2:20:21Speaker 08

  Real investment and real opportunity by details in many areas. And the agreement that we are signing today in many areas in technology, AI, in materials, magnet, et cetera, that will create a lot of investment opportunities. So you are doing that now. You're saying to me now that the 600 billion will be one trillion. Definitely, because what we are signing.

• 2:20:45Speaker 08

  I like that very much.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  Wow. I I I wonder what time period, but I mean, this is remarkable, that they can invest in VC funds, public, private equity funds, like all sorts of stuff in the in the industry, in the economy, right?

• 2:21:02Jordi Hays?

  That that really made Donald happy.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 2:21:04Jordi Hays?

  I like that very much.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  That's sort of his job. He's kind of the chief fundraiser, I suppose.

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  He's marshaling capital.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  Go around the world and and get the money over here. I don't know. Uh, it seems like sort of, sort of win. I don't know.

• 2:21:16Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Want every, every American benefits.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  If a trillion dollars is invested in the economy, there's going to be.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  It certainly doesn't seem like there's, I mean, the, the, the, the risk with that would always, would always be like, well, is America investing two trillion in Saudi Arabia? Like, is it, is it, which way is the money actually flowing? Because you need to look at like the relative amount, not necessarily just the notional amount. But I can't imagine that there's that much capital flowing out of America right now. We're in the biggest boom ever. We're in the golden era, right? Massive news from Isaiah Taylor, Valar Atomics became the first startup in history to split the atom. According to him, he says, announcing Project Nova, a series of zero power critical tests on Valar Atomics Nova Core in collaboration with

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  Los Alamos. Nova went critical for the first time this morning at 11:45 a.m. Congrats to him.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Fantastic news. There is some debate on the timeline over what exactly happened. It's happened very quickly. It's clearly extremely impressive and we can get into this, but there's always been debate. I mean, Isaiah got in this dust upped over like whether or not you could hold the nuclear fuel in your hand. They were going back and forth on calculations. They kind of settled that debate. Josh Payne, nuclear junkie, is saying here. So what exactly did, what hardware exactly did Valar provide? The fuel control systems, cooling measurement systems, and most of the core are all part of the demos project. Did Valar provide a block of graphite and they're calling it their core? And so

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  people are going back and forth. Niels chimes in here and says, Valar Atomics provided the reactor core, the trisofuel, and the system configuration. That seems pretty important. Like, you gotta, like, like, I don't know, it seems like more than what they'd done before. It's like, clearly an advancement on what they, you know, they're, they're chopping wood here. L A N L and N C E R C provided the critical assembly, facility, safety envelope, experimentalist testing, and a bunch of other stuff. And so that's from, that's just from their press release. So people are going back, did they do nothing? Or did they do everything? Well, maybe it's somewhere in between. There was a partnership. They said that in the press release. The bigger thing is, I think people are.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  I think people are trying to push on Velar this idea that that they need to be doing completely novel science and I don't know that that's actually the goal of the company. I don't actually know that's what like, like if we just zoom out to like, what is the goal of the re-industrialization project in America? What's the, what's the goal here? Like, well, it's, it's to lower energy prices, right? Like, America wants to generate as much money, as much, as much energy as possible for as little money as possible. And there are a bunch of technologies that exist. There are new technologies like, like what Ashley Vance was talking about with helium and, and fusion. That's a new technology that we have not even discovered yet. Fission's been discovered.

• 2:24:30John Coogan?

  Eighty years ago, it was working. It just became regulatory nightmare.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  We just shot ourselves in the foot.

• 2:24:37John Coogan?

  And we just stopped making it. It became, it became unprofitable and uneconomical.

• 2:24:41Jordi Hays?

  And China said, cool.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  It'll be profitable for us.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  We're just gonna copy and paste.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, and so I think, I think people might be a little bit over rotating on like, on like, is, is, is Velar doing like entirely new crazy scientific breakthroughs? When it's like, do they necessarily have to? Like, or do, or is it just enough for them just to build a lot of these things?

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Highly motivated team that is going to make incremental progress towards their goal. And any, anybody that's hating on that, I think is just like, again, like, I think what's been great about the nuclear industry from our point of view is that broadly, the founders that are like players in the space just want the industry to make progress in the US. And I think this is, you know, undeniably like incremental progress that gets them closer to their actual goal, which is bringing a Small modular reactor online.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  I think Elon summed it up well with like his thesis for the XAI team. He was like, we don't have AI researchers. We have engineers because he sees this as an engineering project. He's like, we know what we need to implement. We know what we need to build. Our goal is to build a big data center, to build a large language model, training system, infrastructure. And Elon was very clear on like, we don't have AI scientists. We have engineers. And that's the same thing. He's not the first person to take a rocket to space. He's just the first person to like, create this massive economic system that churns out rockets every two seconds, right? And so I think that is much more.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  I think Isaiah would say, we should ask him this the next time he's on the show, but I think he would say, I want to be the Elon of nuclear. I don't want to be the Oppenheimer of nuclear. Like, I'm not trying to like, create something.

• 2:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he even said his line on, he said the US is still good at making bus sized objects.

• 2:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:41Jordi Hays?

  But not, you know, sort of like, maybe, uh, bridge sized objects, right?

• 2:26:46John Coogan?

  Exactly. But Morgan Barrett's having fun on the timeline. What street parking is going to look like in El Segundo in 24 months? Of course, the El Segundo crew loves their cars. I think they're gonna stay pretty focused on the mission, but I would love to see this in El Segundo, for sure, for sure. There's also big news out of Radiant. Radiant has been, Doug's been on the show. He's a good friend and he, uh, they are working with the Idaho National Laboratory and they submitted a DOE authorization request and they will be testing their reactor design at the Dome facility at I N L on track, I think, next year.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  So, congrats to them.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  And Mike Nuzziata has the kind of breakdown here. Says, production reactors in production by 2028, brought to you by the people that brought you reusable rockets and McMaster car, highlighting the team behind Radiant. And so, uh, congrats to everyone in the nuclear industry who's making big waves. And we have our next guest, before we bring them in from the restream waiting room, let me tell you about. Vanta, our guest is from Vanta. We'll let him tell you about it. We'll let him tell it. We have Jeremy from Vanta. Welcome to this room. How are you doing? What's happening? I swear that wasn't, that wasn't intentional, but it did just line up that the Vanta ad read went

• 2:28:17John Coogan?

  right before you came on. I look over and I'm like, wait a minute, like, I'll let you do the read, the ad read. Introduce yourself, introduce what, what Vanta does, what you do, and then we'll get into the news.

• 2:28:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah. Happy to jump in. I'm Jeremy Epling, Chief Product Officer at Vanta, and we help businesses earn improved trust. And one of the really cool things that we're doing this week is we're hosting our VantaCon conference here in San Francisco, have a ton of people showed up, a ton of engagement to really pull that entire security GRC community together and have a couple really cool announcements. One of them is how we are transforming Vanta to be the Agentic Trust Platform. I think this is a really big turning point for the industry. When we think about how GRC teams are transforming and becoming more technical, we're really redefining how these enterprises manage trust at scale and are able to help big customers like SNEAK, Perplexity,

• 2:29:11Speaker 09

  Synthesia, all the way from YC startups that maybe just exited a batch, you know, recently, all the way to the Fortune 50 companies really earn improved trust as a business.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  It feels like AI is amazing, but it's not something people trust. And so how are you, how are you grappling with that? Like, I mean, people trusted in their Teslas to drive them on the freeway. That's high stakes, but there are these, I'm sure you run into this all the time when you're talking to folks about, yeah, I, I, I love it if I'm just looking for a recipe, but I don't know if I'd trust it in my, you know, deep in my enterprise for whatever reason. So how do you think about how you set up certain guardrails around the AI, which still can hallucinate from time to time? Or, and then how do you articulate those guardrails to the end user and the customer?

• 2:30:04Speaker 09

  Yeah, definitely. And that's a big problem we solve for companies today. I think whenever they're adopting a new AI solution, or maybe it was a solution that they already had and they've just added some AI features, they're wondering, how are they using my data? What are they doing? Are they training on my data? We have a whole third-party risk management product that comes in. It leverages our Vanta AI, which when we think about how to hit that quality bar that we care about, like you said, like, hey, is it going to hallucinate? How do you approach that? We have a whole set of great GRC SMEs, subject matter experts, that help us tune and refine our AI so that we can give really high trustworthy answers. Because you imagine, security customers are some of the harshest critics of AI. They really want things to be accurate and great. And so that's something we have really leaned

• 2:30:47Speaker 09

  into. And one of the ways we've kind of pushed that forward is, one of the big announcements that we have coming up this week is our AI Agent 2.0. So, we've redefined our agent to really be this built-in GRC engineer that understands all the compliance across your entire organization. So, like you said, it knows when you've added a new AI tool. It knows what data you're putting into that tool and how you should think about risks and mitigating those. It also has context and memory. So when you're asking your questions, it understands what you're talking about. Like if you're on a policy, it'll pull in that context. It has the memory of understanding what your business is. Maybe you sell to consumers. Maybe you sell to other businesses. It can pull all that context in across everything

• 2:31:28Speaker 09

  in your program as well. Like, hey, we know that, you know, these are your vendors, these are your risks, these are your different customers, you've received these questionnaires, feedback. It can synthesize that all into like intelligent guidance to provide you. So, one of the cool things that I love about it that really helps security teams work against attackers, because I think in this AI world, obviously you have the kind of bad guys and attackers using AI come in. We also help everyone defend and understand because we know the whole program. We can find gaps in your security program. The AI automatically suggests those to you, like provides gaps and proactive things to go do, to go address those gaps and remediate them, gives personalized guidance, and really helps automate a lot of that process. You can respond to attackers and threats a lot more quickly.

• 2:32:14Jordi Hays?

  How does, like, how are you thinking about like the UI around agents? Because so many, there's, there's been this explosion of companies that are creating agents and they mean something totally different depending, depending on the, on the company. Sometimes it's like a chat interface, other times it looks, it sometimes looks more like SaaS and that's totally fine, but how are you thinking about the actual like evolving UI paradigm?

• 2:32:44Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think it's going to be both. Like, I think there's a lot of times I don't want to have just a chat conversation with my AI and I want it just to bring the answers to me automatically. So we look at it as kind of a blend of both. While there might be agents working in the background, you don't always have to do it through a chat interface. So for us, if you show up on like our policies experience, we'll say, hey, we found these three inconsistencies across the 40 policies you have, do you want us to go fix those to you? And you didn't want to have to ask that question of like, is there a problem here? And kind of guess through the list of problems. Instead, we have our agent already looking for those. Or maybe your SLA says it's 24 hours for critical vulnerability to notify customer in one document. It says 72 in another, we'll automatically do that, give you the change, show you the diff

• 2:33:28Speaker 09

  for the kind of like red line for that, let you click a button and automatically execute it. So I think bringing that stuff in, when I think about when chat's great, it's really when you, I don't know, when you have the follow-up questions, you know, where maybe a one-shot answer isn't going to give you what you need, you want to dig in more, you want to learn more, you're trying to explore data, is a big case for us in reporting where people want to learn maybe about, you know, their controls and how well they're doing, how well they've been performing over time. They can have that interactive conversation with the agent, ask it to pull those statistics, leverage our MCP server through Claude or ChatGPT and have it automatically generate kind of graphs and charts and reports that they can use for, you know, their board or anyone else to kind of show progress of their program.

• 2:34:08Jordi Hays?

  How, how are bad actors using AI today to, you know, abuse companies in different ways?

• 2:34:17Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, I think it was yesterday or maybe it was the day before Anthropic posted a really good article about attack that they had experienced there and seen that their software used for. I think that it's just giving a whole new set of tools for attackers to be able to probably write more sophisticated attacks and find vulnerabilities even more quickly because they have these agents always running, always looking. And I think that's where, when I think about Vanta, where we come in and provide that next level defense. Because if you think of an attacker coming in from the outside, they can only see what's on the outside. With Vanta, we already know your entire program. We know all the different pieces of it. And so we can really help you build stronger defenses and be proactive, like I mentioned,

• 2:34:58Speaker 09

  bringing those inconsistencies to the forefront, giving you automatic remediation on specific issues that we might find. We still think it's important to have like humans in the loop for a lot of those big decisions, but you can then work with the agent as well to have it take actions just on your behalf automatically.

• 2:35:13John Coogan?

  On the other areas of the risk surface, I imagine that you're trying to build products. Are you also starting to act as a funnel and do partnerships with other security firms? Because the surface area is probably pretty broad. Do you have a vision to be a one-stop shop? Or do you want to be part of an ecosystem and suite of products that enterprise implements?

• 2:35:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think for us, we definitely want to solve the broader trust problem, but we know that there's lots of different pieces where you aren't going to be the full solution, right? So if I think of a GRC team or customer trust, hey, you get security questionnaires and questions coming in from customers. How can we go do all that? There are certain areas, you know, like vulnerability scanning. We're not going to be going into vulnerability scanning, but we're going to go partner all the great scanners to go do that. I think notion, though, like you said, of bringing that visibility across the entire enterprise is a really big thing for us. We have a feature called adaptive scoping that when you think of a whole security program, you know, there's little pieces of it. And you may say that, hey, to get compliance with PCI for credit cards, I need to have these assets in scope or things to go do.

• 2:36:24Speaker 09

  And that's different than another framework I might be pursuing. So we allow companies to kind of see their progress on compliance in those different ways. We have a new organization center so they can break things down by business unit or product line. And these are like just brand new ways that customers have never had before to understand their program at all levels of depth. So when you think about that really large enterprise customer, they're able to break down their program and see that. And I think that's where Vanta really pulls it all together. We call it the risk graph is like one of our big announcements that we have coming internally where we pull together internal risk and external risk. So you think about risk you have from your different vendors, as well as things you're identifying internally within your business. And we provide a full

• 2:37:05Speaker 09

  visual for that. So you can kind of get this connection between, hey, there was a breach. Okay, great. The breach happened. Which vendor was it? Who has access to that vendor? Vanta can lean in and cut off that access or change the controls there. What data was going into that vendor? And it really helps you understand and prioritize all the things that are happening in your security program, because I think security leaders are just drowning in alerts and they want to know what's most important. So having the AI intelligence, being able to dissect your program in these different ways, and then see kind of a visualized risk graph is really important to help them quickly act on, you know, a threat landscape that's just always changing.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

• 2:37:42Jordi Hays?

  You guys got to do Spotify wrapped for internal risk.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  That would be great. Something shareable.

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Something shareable internally at companies, of course, to be like, you know, yo, Tyler, you gotta, you gotta, you're our biggest risk vector over here.

• 2:37:59Speaker 09

  Always Tyler.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's our intern over here.

• 2:38:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:38:03Jordi Hays?

  He's very secure.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  He's very secure. He's probably the best.

• 2:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, super exciting few launches and have fun at the event. Thanks for joining.

• 2:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Let me also tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. There's this article in the Financial Times. It's very spicy. It says Oracle is already underwater on its astonishing $300 billion OpenAI deal. AI circular economy may have a reverse Midas at the center.

• 2:38:38Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so they're saying this is underwater because the market cap has dipped below.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  That's so.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  And it's like not, it's not very honest.

• 2:38:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:48Jordi Hays?

  It's not, it's not. I, you know, I'm not the first one to-

• 2:38:53John Coogan?

  The Financial Times says Oracle's astonishing $300 billion OpenAI deal is now valued at minus 74 billion.

• 2:39:00Jordi Hays?

  And that's-

• 2:39:01John Coogan?

  Like, I don't like that at all. Like, yeah, this is like really, really bad framing, in my opinion.

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, intellectually dishonest.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  I thought so too. I thought so too. And I love the Financial Times. And we have the Financial Times printed out here. Normally, normally very, very, uh, great reporting. Um, but this one, this one feels odd. It just feels like an odd framing.

• 2:39:21Jordi Hays?

  But saying, oh, Oracle's already underwater on a partnership-

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  This is, this is, this is a hot take that you've been, you've been pumping for the last like week? But the way you've said it is like, the stock has round tripped, even though they had that amazing deal, which is true.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  The correct framing is the market is no longer giving them credit.

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, that's right. That's right.

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  But to say that they're underwater-

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  It's so weird.

• 2:39:43Jordi Hays?

  So when I saw this headline, I, I read into it earlier, and I was expecting to see something like-

• 2:39:50John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we might have gotten rage baited. We might have gotten rage baited because right here, the Financial Times addresses our concern and says, okay, yes, it's a gross simplification to just look at market cap, but equivalents to Oracle shares are little changed over the same period, the Nasdaq Composite, uh, Microsoft Dow Jones Software Index. So the 3, this is the 60 billion-

• 2:40:10Jordi Hays?

  Calling those equivalents is like, again, like, look at-

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  You could, you could also comp it to CoreWeave. And you could say, on a relative to CoreWeave basis, Oracle is outperforming a bunch.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:40:23John Coogan?

  It's amazing. I don't know. Like, there's a bunch of different ways to, like, if you pick your weird comp, uh, it does seem a little odd. Says, so the 60 billion loss figure is not entirely wrong. Oracle's astonishing quarter really has cost it nearly as much as one, General Motors, or two, Kraft Heinz. Investor unease stems from Big Red betting its debt finance data farm on OpenAI. Uh, with, we've, we've nothing much to add to that, other than the charts below showing how much Oracle has in effect become OpenAI's US public market proxy, which is fascinating because, uh-

• 2:40:59John Coogan?

  Microsoft should be OpenAI's public market proxy, in my opinion. But there are some great charts in here. There's some interesting stuff. And I believe this is from Alphaville, which is their blog. And it's not exactly, it is supposed to be like, you know, like a take factory.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  Anyway, well, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. Let me tell you about Julius.ai first, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, and get insights in seconds. We have Keon from Monad. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Good to see you.

• 2:41:37Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:41:39Speaker 10

  Hey, doing great. Great to be here.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Please.

• 2:41:42Jordi Hays?

  Dude, I love it. You got the lock-in. You're calling in from the lock-in capital of the world with the mattress on the floor.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about the news specifically this week.

• 2:41:58Speaker 10

  Thank you. Great to be here. My name is Keon Han, co-founder of Monad. Monad is a new blockchain that is building for high-fidelity finance and is a high-performance blockchain that has been building over the past three and a half years. Just really delivering high performance based on previous experience from high-frequency trading.

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Wait, so you were a high-frequency trader before this?

• 2:42:26Speaker 10

  That's right, yeah. I was at Jump Trading for about eight years. Led one of the trading teams there, was very involved in the futures markets prior to Monad.

• 2:42:37John Coogan?

  What was the day-to-day like?

• 2:42:41Speaker 10

  It was a lot of Jupiter Notebook. It was a lot of manipulating large data sets and making really short-term price predictions, as well as building performance systems.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  How short-term is short-term? Like nanoseconds, picoseconds, or like seconds, minutes? It all seems short-term.

• 2:43:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's the predictive horizon for the kinds of strategies that I was working on were on the order of milliseconds to seconds.

• 2:43:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:10Speaker 10

  But the hold time for these strategies was longer than that. So that's actually one of the interesting misconceptions about HFT is that your predictive horizon is very short because you're predicting the next flip. But then, you know, you can make trades that have edge in that and can predict that flip and make the right action. But then you still have to hold that position for a longer period of time until you can get another signal, maybe in the opposite direction, or a signal to enter an order in the opposing direction. So hold times tended to be on the order of like seconds to minutes.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Interesting. I didn't know that. Thank you. That's very helpful.

• 2:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  So, so talk about the, oh, sure.

• 2:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess getting into what, what is, what is success with Monad going to look like? Like, who, what are the different types of groups and applications that, and, and types of users that you, that you, that you expect to come in, in the, in the early days?

• 2:44:12Speaker 10

  Yeah, so maybe to take a step back a little bit. Monad is a new blockchain that delivers the best of all worlds between decentralization, performance, and backward compatibility. So it's a new blockchain. It's fully backward compatible with Ethereum. It allows developers that have built applications for Ethereum or the Ethereum ecosystem to reuse all of their code, all of their libraries, all the tooling that's been built for Ethereum, and more specifically the Ethereum virtual machine, while getting much higher performance and a really high degree of decentralization. So in particular, Ethereum processes on the order of 10 transactions per second, while

• 2:44:57Speaker 10

  Monad delivers 10,000 transactions per second. And that 1,000x improvement is a result of several different improvements that have kind of all been stacked on top of each other. And those vary from parallel execution to allow a bunch of transactions to all be run in parallel, as well as a new consensus mechanism, a new database for Addressing the single biggest bottleneck in blockchain execution, which is using the accessing all of the state that's on disk really efficiently, as well as various other improvements that just deliver the same experience, but sped up significantly.

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. And so what, what, in your view, what is the ideal kind of adoption look like?

• 2:45:46Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's really a mix. So I think the thing that's really valuable about decentralized blockchains is that they deliver shared global state that is borderless, that allows people all around the world to get access to the same tools and the same markets fundamentally. I think blockchain is really a revolution about decentralizing control of financial systems and commercial systems and giving people regardless of where they are in the world, access to the same financial opportunities. So I think a big part of the story of blockchain and the story of adoption is that developers anywhere in the world can build new applications, deploy

• 2:46:31Speaker 10

  them in the system, and then users anywhere else in the world can get access. So what we're seeing in terms of adoption is a mix of existing applications that can migrate to Monet seamlessly and get much lower fees for their end users, as well as enterprises that are utilizing the power of blockchains for stablecoin settlement to allow their users to transact in dollars or send and receive payments really cheaply and permissionlessly.

• 2:47:04Jordi Hays?

  In your view, what are the kind of classic mistakes that, that other blockchains that have tried to challenge, you know, some of the more dominant chains? What are the kind of classic mistakes that they make to, to ultimately, I feel like there's, every single day, there's somebody on X highlighting some blockchain that, that has a multi, multi-billion dollar, you know, fully diluted value and yet has very little activity. So if you could kind of like lean in, what are, what are the things that basically you're trying to avoid?

• 2:47:43Speaker 10

  I think one of the problems in crypto is that it can be quite hard for so it's kind of a double edged sword. On the one hand, it's easy to get some initial users that are trying things out and giving feedback, but it can be challenging for people to sift through the yield farmers or people that are motivated by an incentive and really identify the users that are

• 2:48:12Speaker 10

  that are there to because they ultimately gain value from the application. So one thing that we really care about a lot at Monad is helping to helping builders that are building in the space. These are all early stage entrepreneurs that are very talented, very ambitious, helping them to focus on user acquisition funnels and just like just the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and identifying users and navigating the DMAs to identify PMF.

• 2:48:43Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How's it? How's it been bringing bringing the token to market with with Coinbase's new product? It's certainly a wild time to be building in crypto just because of the overall volatility and I'm sure that's that's made it challenging, but you're also utilizing a new product line from Coinbase, which is pretty interesting.

• 2:49:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think it's extremely exciting. The thing that motivated us to work with Coinbase and be the first token launched in their new token sales platform is the opportunity to get really broad distribution of the token. I'm a big fan of Dogecoin. When I first got interested in crypto, I was really interested by the just the story of how Dogecoin gained really broad distribution and mind share and the Dogecoin tipping bot on Reddit as a mechanism for

• 2:49:43Speaker 10

  getting a lot of people to like sort of align on shared interest and values that ultimately then became valuable much later. The thing that's hard about crypto is that There's an expectations game that's being navigated and people have very high expectations of the value of airdrops and so on. But I think our team has done a really stand-up job of delivering a great airdrop that people were really excited about and that crypto natives got really excited about. And then also offering a way for normal, everyday people who maybe you're not on crypto Twitter as much, but are still very active on centralized exchanges and trading and holding to get access to the token.

• 2:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense. Well, how much have you raised so far? We have a gong. We have a gong here. We'd love to hit it on your behalf.

• 2:50:36Speaker 10

  Thank you. I think we've raised about $120 million so far.

• 2:50:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:50:44Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to hit the gong for you and excited to follow along.

• 2:50:49John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:50:50Speaker 10

  Yeah. Thank you. So we have until Saturday. The sale's open until Saturday at 9:00 PM Eastern. And we're looking to raise $187 million total.

• 2:51:01Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Most of the way there.

• 2:51:03John Coogan?

  Well, good luck. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. Have a great day.

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:51:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:51:11John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Stephen Balaban from

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  The Legend.

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  Lambda Labs. Or is it just Lambda now? I think it's just Lambda.

• 2:51:18Jordi Hays?

  Did we drop the Labs?

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  I think we dropped the Labs. Steven, did we drop the Labs? How you doing?

• 2:51:22Stephen Balaban?

  We dropped the Labs.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  We dropped the Labs.

• 2:51:24Stephen Balaban?

  Just slammed it.

• 2:51:25John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm dating myself. Well, at least I feel like a day one. I don't feel like a bandwagon fan because I'm using the old name. There's a little bit of cool. I liked it back when it was Labs. But welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Congratulations.

• 2:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp, too.

• 2:51:39John Coogan?

  You look incredibly sleek.

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  With the yellow tie, you're making us look unprofessional here.

• 2:51:43John Coogan?

  We gotta put on the tie.

• 2:51:44Jordi Hays?

  We're a couple of casuals.

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  Give us the news. What happened? Let's break it down.

• 2:51:49Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, well, so one day I was training some Comnets on my workstation. Next thing you know, we're raising 1.5 gigabucks.

• 2:51:59Jordi Hays?

  Gigabucks.

• 2:52:03Stephen Balaban?

  We say, we say, we think.

• 2:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Gigawatts, gigas chips, gigabucks.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, yeah. What, what does it actually mean? I mean, we, we, we, we see, we see 10 billion, 100 billion, 10 trillion, quadrillion every day. Is this cash? Is this debt? What are you, are you buying GPUs? Are you buying land? What are you doing?

• 2:52:26Stephen Balaban?

  All equity.

• 2:52:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for equity.

• 2:52:31Stephen Balaban?

  Extremely well, like our, our capital structure is really nice in terms of we've been very conservative in terms of the amount of debt that we've taken on. And that's kind of been one of our philosophies. And we've, we've aimed to have, you know, a business that's just super robust to ups and downs in the market because we're swimming with our swim trunks on.

• 2:52:52John Coogan?

  Yep. And then, and then you, uh,

• 2:52:55Jordi Hays?

  That's a amazing line for.

• 2:52:58John Coogan?

  You gave them, you gave them equity. There, there, there's no one hand washes the other type thing where like they, they, they pay you, you pay them. It's all one round trip.

• 2:53:08Stephen Balaban?

  No, this, this round was led by, by TWG Global, which is, which is Thomas Toll and Mark Walter. You may know, Mark, Mark owns the LA Dodgers and also now the Lakers. Thomas started Legendary Entertainment, which makes great movies like the Batman series and Dune and Inception. And so it, these are business partners who I've gotten to know over a number of years now. And this is just, they're, they're making some, uh, some big investments in the space.

• 2:53:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm so happy you guys have your trunks on because not everyone out, not, not every player out there has their trunks on right now. And it's hard to tell who does and who doesn't.

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:53:55Jordi Hays?

  But at some point we're going to find out and it's not going to be, it's not going to be pretty.

• 2:54:00Stephen Balaban?

  It won't be pretty for people who are over levered and we just have this philosophy that with exponential growth that we're seeing in the AI industry. All of the upside is in the last period, right? You know, if you're, if you have a doubling function, right? The sort of the definitional thing of that is that the last period is more growth than all the sum of the previous periods combined. And so from my perspective, it's just like, stay alive and build a rock solid business because we got to capture all this amazing upside in the long term.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk about the use of funds.

• 2:54:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, even, even before that, maybe, maybe feels like, and it potentially an advantage right now, just in terms of focus is like being private. There are other, other companies in the category that are public and they're now having to contend with, you know, what, what's been a pretty big correction in, in Neo, at least a local correction in NeoCloud over the last month. Has that been helpful in terms of the team of just like staying focused and you're not getting, you know, marked every single day?

• 2:55:09Stephen Balaban?

  Well, I think that certainly that level of distraction isn't helpful. And I always encourage the company to just focus on building a heavy business for the long term, you know? If, if in the short term, the market's a voting machine and the long term it's a weighing machine. We just got to build a business with good cash flows, a good capitalization structure that's robust. And so I kind of try to focus the team on that. I mean, these days, the, the secondary markets, as you know, are actually, you know, pretty deep for, for, for, for companies that are, that are kind of at our size. And so I, I think that some of that can start to creep in.

• 2:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Where are you seeing value spending some of this money? I imagine that there's hiring, R and D, all the traditional things, but you're at a scale where it's a lot of money. How do you actually think about allocating capital at this point and in this, in this phase of the journey? It's been over a decade now, right?

• 2:56:13Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah. We started in 2012.

• 2:56:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:17Stephen Balaban?

  And was doing, we were doing face recognition software and the AlexNet paper came out.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:22Stephen Balaban?

  I mean, that's how early it was and I downloaded the CUDA ConvNet library off of Google code and that will tell everybody kind of how old school Lambda is. And You know, as far as use of funds, obviously, a lot of it goes towards the GPU infrastructure that goes into data centers.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:42Stephen Balaban?

  We are also starting to put that into investments into data centers themselves. And we, I, I think that what we're aiming to do long term is kind of build this almost like Tesla for AI infrastructure, where we kind of look at this as like a similar build out that you would expect from the like electrification of the United States or the railroad. And like a degree of vertical integration, we believe is going to be in the future for us and is like the right direction. And that, that, that goes from everything from, you know, energy procurement and construction, because I think a lot more of this stuff is going to have to be behind the meter power

• 2:57:24Stephen Balaban?

  plants, to actual construction and design of data centers that can sort of rapidly adapt to the changing chips that go in, right? Because the, the rack densities and the, the movement from air cool to liquid cooling that we're, we're really pioneering alongside Nvidia. These are all examples of use of funds. And it's, it's exciting because you, we, we get to kind of make good investment decisions that are really sort of IRR based in, in almost industrial way, which I think is unique from a, a company building perspective. And it's a, it's an honor to be able to do that.

• 2:58:01John Coogan?

  Can you get me up to speed on some of the trade offs between like one really big mega data center and a bunch of really small data centers? How, because there was a moment when we were just doing bigger and bigger training runs, then it became RL all over the place. Then you actually have to serve these things, but actually, if it's going to take me 10 minutes, I don't mind if you do it across the world and take it back. But if I do care that it's right now, I need it like right co-located. How are you thinking about the trade offs there?

• 2:58:29Stephen Balaban?

  So, so the, the mix and the main driver over the next five years, we believe will likely be mostly on the inference side. If you look at some of the financial models that have either leaked or otherwise been published around what OpenAI thinks they're going to be spending, it looks to be about 50% on training and then 50% on inference, growing towards 75% inference.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:57Stephen Balaban?

  And, you know, a smaller chunk of that on training. And.

• 2:59:04Stephen Balaban?

  As far as like what that means for the larger data centers, I certainly don't think that this is like going to a world where there's a bunch of micro data centers. I think that that's a little bit hard to sort of manage and deal with. But one of the things I think that you're going to start hearing a lot more of is how adaptable and how quickly can you bring on the data center in an incremental fashion? Because that's going to be a lot of the main drivers for how successful infrastructure builders like us are is how quickly. And we're just focused on optimizing that time to first token for our customer.

• 2:59:41Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about revenue quality and customer selection? Because we've seen some deals go down that look big and cool and good on the surface. And then you dig into them and maybe the underlying infrastructure providers not actually getting that great of a deal at the end of it.

• 3:00:03Stephen Balaban?

  Well, we certainly see a lot of people with very high levels of customer concentration. Because Lambda started off as this developer cloud that evolved and morphed into a cloud that's providing for the biggest companies in the world. We have a really, really strong user base. You know, if you look at our breakdown from our revenue mix, in terms of you looked at like, let's say, our Q3 stuff, and I don't want to go into exact specifics, but it's sort of like one or two big customers, a bunch of sort of the bigger, smaller customers.

• 3:00:44Stephen Balaban?

  And then it's something, you know, it's a nice, really big chunk of this long tail of customers that we have. And we have a very, very, you know, I've seen some other people's customer books, and I can just say that we've got a very diversified customer base. And that's kind of all part of the strategy of how do you build a great long-term business? Of course, customer diversification is one of those parameters.

• 3:01:09John Coogan?

  How do you think about diversity of of product offerings? Are you seeing customers ask for API endpoints for particular models? Or do they want access to bare metal? Or have you gotten any customers that are like, hey, we just want, you know, you seem to know about this data center business. Can you just build a data center for us and hand it over to us when you're done? And we'll just pay you as a consultant?

• 3:01:34Stephen Balaban?

  We have no interest in doing that. That one, that's, you know, we want to do something that's really vertically integrated. And, you know, kind of going back to that, like larger, smaller data centers. I think the most important thing is just being able to deliver this incremental live deployment for a customer. We have an entire full stack cloud product that, you know, it's got things like single sign on. It's it's got things like long term, high speed AI file systems. It's got instances that go down from one GPU to an entire cluster with one click clusters that we've that we've got. And so we've built an entire cloud platform. We have previously been in the inferencing space where we're actually giving an API for inferencing.

• 3:02:19Stephen Balaban?

  And we've actually exited that business to just focus. I think that that's like one of the things that we really try to do at Lambda is just say, where are we making money? What are good investments? And where are we going to really dominate the market and focus there? And so we've actually exited, for example, the inference market. We had a $200 million plus a year hardware business that we've exited. Right? You know, I mean, it it actually like kind of crushes because like that was the business that got off the ground. But can you imagine just like winding down like, well, we're just gonna take this business and not do a $200 million a year business anymore because we're trying to focus?

• 3:02:58John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 3:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Takes guts.

• 3:03:02John Coogan?

  I have a I have a crackpot theory that I'd love to run by you. What do you think the odds are that the, like I noticed, I was traveling in, I was traveling in Mexico and I noticed that Carlos Slim is the richest man there and he's a telecom magnate. He owns a lot of the telecom infrastructure and that's true for a lot of, a lot of countries. The richest person in that country is a telecom person or a mining magnate in the sense that they've been able to corner a resource, a physical resource, infrastructure, and that's generated a lot of wealth for them. And I was wondering if you had a thought on, do you think that in the future we'll see the, some of the wealthiest, most powerful people

• 3:03:47John Coogan?

  from other countries, non-American countries, be, you know, GPU cloud hosters or- Data center developers. Data center developers. Like, is this gonna be a new boom across the globe? It's kind of a different twist on the sovereign AI project. I was just, I was just wondering if there's, if there's gonna be some, some way that this plays out where there's this sort of like one-time opportunity to kind of get a cornered resource? Or is the nature of the internet such that the compute is actually much more fungible than, than say, you know- Telecom. Telecom or, you know, or like copper in the ground, right?

• 3:04:26Stephen Balaban?

  There's such a localization, there's such a physical localization. I think if you look at telecom, you look at cable-

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:32Stephen Balaban?

  As well as regulated utilities from an energy utility perspective.

• 3:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:36Stephen Balaban?

  You know, these are all things that benefit from a physical geographic monopoly.

• 3:04:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:40Stephen Balaban?

  Right? And, and AI data centers don't have that same thing. Now, I just wanna step back for a second. Guys, the United States is basically the only country in the world. We have the most unbelievably good economy. This is, the, the, the idea that there's gonna be these sort of like massive AI infrastructure projects that I think are gonna be like super, super successful outside of, let's say, China and the United States right now is really increasingly big question mark. And I, I just am so bullish about where we're going in America that- I don't really pay a lot of attention to it. Our focus is just in, you know, in in North America

• 3:05:23Stephen Balaban?

  generally. And I I just, that's kind of my perspective on it, to be honest.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's really helpful. I agree. It's it's interesting to toy. I mean, there's a lot of money being thrown around with some of these projects. And I'm always interested in, you know, how they will shape out.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe go for it. I was gonna ask, like, how you guys are navigating energy constraints with with new developments? Are you seeing? We've heard, you know, anytime, obviously, there's like massive demand for something, new sources kind of come out of the woodwork. We've seen back and forth, some people that are building AI infrastructure say like, energy is our primary constraint. Others are saying, actually, that's not my, you know, it's. So where do you sit?

• 3:06:15Stephen Balaban?

  We are aiming to reimagine the sort of step process from whether it's photons or molecules of natural gas to tokens. And we strongly believe that a lot of this is going to have to come in reimagining like, well, how do you interact with the grid? How much power generation do you bring to the grid yourselves? And I think that that's the the the successful AI infrastructure infrastructure companies in the future. Again, this is like why I kind of said, like, I look at this like Tesla for AI factories, which is you got to reimagine how the world has worked previously.

• 3:06:56Stephen Balaban?

  And you have to kind of bring together this level of vertical integration because that's how you move fast, right? You know, when you can control every step of that way from the power generation and not having to necessarily deal with a regulated utility, and you can go and do behind the meter generation with a natural gas power plant. If that can speed your time to market up, this is just so important. And That's kind of how I approach it, which is there are certain barriers like regulatory barriers, which look, you try not to run through those like a brick wall because it's kind of like an immovable object. But if you can, if you can just bring your own, if you can just sort of get around that

• 3:07:39Stephen Balaban?

  sort of regulatory constraint of having to interact with a regulated utility by bringing your own power to the grid, then that's, that's what I think is going to be successful.

• 3:07:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 3:07:48John Coogan?

  Uh, thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to come and hang out with us and answer.

• 3:07:54Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 3:07:56Stephen Balaban?

  Jordi, John, thanks for having me, guys.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  It's always a great time. Congratulations.

• 3:08:00Stephen Balaban?

  The new Gemini three, this is like.

• 3:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you give us your review and actually explain how it interfaces with your business? I'd love to know.

• 3:08:06Stephen Balaban?

  So, so I haven't, I haven't used, I haven't, I haven't used Gemini three yet. I've seen the, the updates. I'm still, you know, hey, Sundar or whatever, give, give, give Lambda's enterprise account access. We're on Google, uh, Google Suite or Google Enterprise or whatever it's called now. So we'd love that upgrade, but I'll tell you what, this is the cool thing. I use things like ChatGPT and Grok to learn more about topics like regulated energy markets and how to build power plants and data centers. And that makes Lambda faster at standing up AI data centers. And I, I pay attention. I actually just like kind of do what the AI tells me to do.

• 3:08:51Stephen Balaban?

  And that gives more compute to the AI to train bigger models, which makes.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  This is.

• 3:08:58Stephen Balaban?

  Faster and.

• 3:09:00Jordi Hays?

  You're.

• 3:09:00John Coogan?

  The AI is working for you to make more AI.

• 3:09:03Stephen Balaban?

  It's the beginning of these types of positive feedback loops.

• 3:09:06John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:09:07Stephen Balaban?

  And, and I think that if you privately talk to a lot of executives, you'd be surprised by the amount of, you know, the strategic conversations I have with these AI models has gotten more and more advanced with, with, with the, the level and quality of the model. The first versions were not great and I didn't really take a lot of its advice, but now I am. I mean, next thing you know, it's sort of like, well, you know, maybe AI is the one making the run of the show.

• 3:09:35John Coogan?

  Decisions. Yeah.

• 3:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Next thing you know, we'll be hanging out on TVP and discovering novel physics with, with Gemini four, you know? We'll see how far we get.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a good time. Well, thank you so much for coming by the show. Thank you guys.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  I have a bunch more. I have a bunch more questions, but but come back. Let's get you back on in

• 3:09:57John Coogan?

  Anytime.

• 3:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Before the end of the year.

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 3:09:59Jordi Hays?

  And we'll continue the conversation. Congrats to the whole team.

• 3:10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you. Thank you. Take care. Have a good one.

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  See you.

• 3:10:04John Coogan?

  Bye. Uh, quickly, let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  What a legend. So Doug Olafland over at Semi Analysis, Fabricated Knowledge, says, I leave for two weeks and we are talking about Oracle credit default swaps? What the hell, guys?

• 3:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Doug, where where was Doug for?

• 3:10:33John Coogan?

  I think he's been on vacation or something. He was trying to like truly log off and take a break. Uh, and yes, people are definitely talking about uh, CDS spreads and any any sign, any crack in the market is uh, definitely uh, going to be newsworthy because we're in this one trillion dollar era. Uh, Gavin Baker here is talking about this. He's completely agree with this uh, breakout of the non-bubble, the disappointed, both bull and bears, how Sam Splurge changed everything. And Gavin Baker says, Sam Altman's manifestly ridiculous one trillion dollars of spending commitments shifted the AI investing landscape.

• 3:11:09John Coogan?

  The market is more skeptical now, ironically makes an IPO harder for them, although yeah, likely ended any potential for a ninety nineteen ninety-nine style melt up, which is healthy. Melt up, meaning that uh, in nineteen ninety-nine, the market went insane and and nuclear. Instead, the the one trillion was so in your face that everyone started asking the questions of like, is this real? Is what's going on? Are we going are we going too fast? Do we need to back off? And so. We got sort of a return to fundamentals, but fortunately, the fundamentals were so good because, you know, these companies, a lot of them are trading like 25 priced earnings

• 3:11:49John Coogan?

  that that the market was able to, you know, continue onwards. There's an interesting debate going on around Karen How's new book, Empire of AI, all about OpenAI. Apparently, she got the amount of water used by data centers wrong by an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude. I'm not exactly sure where the story originally broke, but she's addressed it now. She says, I'm working to address to address an apparent error for a data point I cited in my book about the water footprint of a proposed data center in Chile. I'd like to explain what happened, what I'm doing to remedy it, and provide more recent data on the water footprint of data centers. The data point in question appears in chapter

• 3:12:34John Coogan?

  12 of my book, which focuses on the environmental impacts of AI. Part of the chapter profiles a community in Cerillos, Chile, which has been resisting a proposed Google data center for years. To describe the data center's water footprint in lay terms, I included a sentence about how it compares to the water usage of the people in Cerillos. For that calculation, I relied on a figure from a government reporting government document reporting Cerillos residential water use based on the current best information. It seems that this document will use the wrong units. So she was off by a thousand. So the result was that

• 3:13:11Jordi Hays?

  What's what's that? What's being off by a thousand among friends?

• 3:13:15John Coogan?

  Honestly, these days doesn't even matter.

• 3:13:17Jordi Hays?

  We're in a post factual.

• 3:13:19John Coogan?

  Did you read into this more? It was people were, I think, I think people are are generally like, you know, is this book a hit piece? And I think Sam actually cooperated with it a little bit or like gave some interviews for it. But it but like anything, it's like obviously critical of some things.

• 3:13:34Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, three, three orders of magnitude is like pretty big.

• 3:13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:38Speaker 02

  It's like, no, great.

• 3:13:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's certainly like, like, the difference between being a big deal and not a big deal.

• 3:13:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, like that about the water use. It's like people who use that to justify like, oh, we don't want to build those data centers going to use our water. Like, I don't know. I mean, not good.

• 3:13:54John Coogan?

  It's a rough time if you're if your job is drinking water.

• 3:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Tom in the chat says mistakes were made. Mistakes were made in a book I was responsible for.

• 3:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Mika says, Jordy, you should get a grill with tiny GPUs instead of diamonds. Maybe not the full grill, just the bottom grill. There'll be AI raps.

• 3:14:13John Coogan?

  Did you see this Rohit comment on Vinod? VC Vinod Khosla says that the US government could take 10% stake in all public companies to soften the blow of AGI. And Rohit says, we should absolutely do this for all companies, public and private. Maybe we even double it to like 20 or 21% on every dollar they make. It's like, yeah, the government taxes everything. They, the government gets 21% of profits, actually. They get cash flow.

• 3:14:44Jordi Hays?

  Sean says the haters will call that a tax.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  It was so funny. Olivia Newsy is in the news.

• 3:14:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's almost like getting a, kind of like a dividend.

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Apparently, all the, all the media people are obsessed with this Olivia Newsy story. I didn't understand any of the people in this story because I don't follow media or politics closely enough.

• 3:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Nominative determinism strikes again.

• 3:15:09John Coogan?

  But it is fun that she, her name's Newsy.

• 3:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Bobby was saying we should do it the Metis list for nominative determinism.

• 3:15:14John Coogan?

  That would be good. I'd like that.

• 3:15:15Jordi Hays?

  Cause Newsy, she's in the news all the time.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:18Jordi Hays?

  She's also a journalist.

• 3:15:20John Coogan?

  There's news in the, in the trading app world. Robinhood launched, bearish on a stock, short selling is rolling out today on mobile. Classic, a web classic and Robinhood legend. They didn't have short selling? I feel like they've had short selling for a long time, no? That's, that's a new feature?

• 3:15:39Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:15:40John Coogan?

  That's funny timing and then our partner, Public.

• 3:15:42Jordi Hays?

  Launching generated assets.

• 3:15:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Which they're calling their Gentik brokerage. Very cool video with our, with our boys here.

• 3:15:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:15:50Jordi Hays?

  But this means you can basically generate like your own index.

• 3:15:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Based on.

• 3:15:55John Coogan?

  And what's interesting about it is that you can say, I want access to the Mag7 plus a couple of other AI companies.

• 3:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Minus one.

• 3:16:03John Coogan?

  Minus one. I don't know which company.

• 3:16:05Jordi Hays?

  If there's a company.

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  So you can generate like, you know, some sort of portfolio, but then instead of, instead of owning it as an ETF and needing to sell it, buy and sell it directly, you can actually do the tax loss harvesting of selling individual pieces of it. So you can, you can construct a portfolio very quickly. And in general, I mean, just all the different research that you want to do in, is obviously deeply, you know, enhanced with artificial intelligence. So fun to see them.

• 3:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Pope Leo has hit the timeline to comment on cinema.

• 3:16:44John Coogan?

  The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what works, but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immaculate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose. Silence when it speaks and difference, and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape. It is above all, an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us and sometimes even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express. Nicely worded phrase.

• 3:17:23Jordi Hays?

  He's on a roll.

• 3:17:24John Coogan?

  The Pope Leo.

• 3:17:25Jordi Hays?

  What movie do you think he was thinking about when writing this?

• 3:17:28John Coogan?

  Obviously Borat.

• 3:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Margin call.

• 3:17:30John Coogan?

  100% margin call in Borat. He's going back to back. Somebody, there was a post in here about movies. Somebody said they watched like three movies over this, over the weekend. I thought it was the most un-Jordanian thing.

• 3:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Final post of the day. Kevin.

• 3:17:46John Coogan?

  Right. Yeah, right. You think you're going to be able to cut me off?

• 3:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Kevin Naughton Jr. says 10,000 likes on April 30th. He said 10,000 likes and I'll quit my software engineering job at Google tomorrow. And he said, six months ago, I made the worst decision of my life.

• 3:18:03John Coogan?

  Oh, because Google's ripping.

• 3:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Google's ripping.

• 3:18:06John Coogan?

  That's what he's talking about. Okay, because I, I, I, I read this initially as like, he quit, he started a company and it was like, went really poorly. It's just funny.

• 3:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, he is building, he's building the fastest way to post with post right dot AI.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Post to all your social platforms in seconds.

• 3:18:20John Coogan?

  Oh, maybe we could use that for something. Uh, very funny. He's like, my idea was Gemini three. Like, I was gonna make a better Gemini. I thought Gemini 2.5 just wasn't quite there. And I didn't know that Go, what if Google does this? All the VCs were telling me, your, your idea is Gemini three? What if Google does that? And I was like, everyone says that about Google things. Everyone says that about startup ideas. It's not worth it. I'm just gonna try to build Gemini three. But then they beat him to it. That's what I meant. Anyway, uh, Department of War, critical areas of new technology, applied artificial intelligence, quantum and battlefield information dominance,

• 3:19:01John Coogan?

  bio manufacturing, contested logistics, scaled directed energy. That sounds crazy. Scaled hypersonics, very excited for that. A bunch of, a bunch of interesting stuff. Uh, Emile Michael is firmly in the chair of the undersecretary of war. Very excited. Hope we can get him on the show soon to understand what he's doing over there.

• 3:19:17Jordi Hays?

  We will make it happen. Uh, well, thank you for tuning in to the show today, folks. Uh, we love you dearly and we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:19:27John Coogan?

  Have a good evening.

• 3:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  Goodbye.