Tokenmaxxing, SF Street Name Auction, Corporate Retreat Gone Wrong | Riley Walz, Aditya Bandi, Zach Shore, Hongwei Liu, Zak Kukoff, Thomas Laffont

(00:45) - Meta Employees Tokenmaxxing (15:43) - Intel Joins the Terafab Project (29:59) - Corporate Retreat Gone Wrong (45:34) - Big Tech Teams up Against China (53:01) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:29) - Riley Walz, a 23-year-old software engineer and tech enthusiast, is known for his inventive projects that blend technology with community engagement. In the conversation, he discusses his latest venture in San Francisco's Sunset District, where he and his friends purchased a foreclosed alley for $26,000 and transformed it into a community art project. They paved the alley, invited the public to submit digital artwork through their website, and auctioned the naming rights, with the highest bid reaching $135,000, all while ensuring the alley remains accessible to vehicles. (01:17:18) - Aditya Bandi, co-founder of Noon, discusses his journey from India to the Bay Area in 2015, where his first startup was acquired by Yahoo. He highlights the challenges designers face with traditional tools that separate design from functionality, leading to inefficiencies. To address this, Noon integrates design directly with a product's codebase, enabling designers to work on both visual and functional aspects simultaneously, streamlining the development process. (01:29:45) - Zach Shore, President of Hermeus Corporation, discusses the company's recent $350 million funding round, the rapid development and testing of their high-speed aircraft, and the strategic expansion to Los Angeles to leverage local engineering talent. He highlights the advantages of unmanned jets in accelerating R&D cycles and reducing risks, and outlines the progression of their aircraft from initial prototypes to the upcoming Mach 3 platform. Shore also emphasizes Hermeus' focus on defense applications, aiming to provide advanced capabilities to the U. S. Department of Defense before considering commercial markets. (01:45:32) - Hongwei Liu, CEO and founder of Mappedin, discusses the company's mission to digitize indoor spaces by transforming traditional floor plans into dynamic, interactive maps, enabling users to navigate complex environments like malls, airports, and hospitals. He highlights the challenges of keeping indoor maps up-to-date due to constant changes, emphasizing the importance of providing building owners with tools to manage and publish their own maps. Liu also mentions Mappedin's significant market presence, including partnerships with major venues and events, and announces a recent funding round of $24.5 million to further advance their indoor mapping solutions. (01:53:14) - Zak Kukoff chairs the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates, where he advocates for the policy needs of founders and investors. In the conversation, he discusses the challenges and political dynamics surrounding data centers, including public perception issues, energy consumption concerns, and the impact on local communities. He also highlights the importance of proactive messaging and strategic political engagement to address these challenges and support technological progress. (02:12:33) - Thomas Laffont is the co-founder of Coatue, a global technology investment firm spanning public and private markets. He focuses on investing in high-growth technology companies and is known for his long-term approach to backing category-defining businesses across software, internet, and AI. Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, April 7th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Uh, let's pull up the lineup because we have a great show for you today, folks. We have Riley Walls, the jester of Silicon Valley. You had a different name for him when he came on. There was something else.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Internet rascal.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Internet rascal. That was it.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  He is a rascal.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  He's, uh, he's coming on to talk about the auction to name a street in San Francisco. Uh, we have a whole bunch of funding news. Aditya Bandy from Noon, Zach Shore from Hermias is coming on. Uh, Wangwei Liu from Mapadin is coming on. And then Zach Kukoff and Thomas Laffont are joining us live in person in the TVPN Ultra Dome. Uh, well, there is a whole bunch of news to run through. The first story is that Meta employees are apparently token maxing and competing on an internal leaderboard called Claudinomics for status as a token legend. This is from, uh, the information. Uh, over a recent 30 day period, total usage on the dashboard topped 60 trillion tokens and this sparked a huge debate over

• 1:10John Coogan?

  how much is Meta actually spending with Anthropic? Of course, the other big news is that Anthropic, uh, just passed 30 billion in, uh, run rate revenue, uh, with one of the, probably the steepest revenue growth chart in human history. Absolutely legendary.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, this, this, uh, you know, chasing status as a token legend reminds me of kind of, maybe it was a year ago at this point, you were saying like, will tokens ever become like eyeballs, the way eyeballs were during the

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  During the dot com era.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  Right? Just optimized for, for eyeballs. Obviously not every eyeball visit to a website is created equally.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  But people were optimizing for, uh, eyeballs. And now, uh, you know, I don't, uh, the reaction to this, I think, has been generally, at least online, like been, uh,

• 2:01Jordi Hays?

  I guess reassuring. A lot of people are saying Gary Basin says, you why Marty says good heart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And so who knows what's actually going on internally, but we do know Zuck is pushing the entire company to be as AI native as possible. And this guy loves spending money too, right?

• 2:25John Coogan?

  I have a crazy bull case here that I will run through. Let's get through some of the story. First, we got to pull up this, this comic from XKCD in the comments here. When a metric becomes a target, it ceases to be a good metric. It's right under the leading post. There we go. And says, and the other counterpart, he says, sounds bad. Let's offer a bonus to anyone who identifies a metric that has become a target. It is good. I don't think that's what's going on here.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  Max Leiter was texting a friend at Meta and sent the, the post we just discussed on token maxing and said, true. And the person said, yes, it's pretty sad. But I mean, imagine so, so Meta has been, there's been rumors of Meta layoffs for a while now.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Unclear how many, if any, if any have happened. But if you're sitting there, the company, Zuck is saying like, we need to get AI native. Boz is saying, we need to get AI native. And then suddenly there's a token leaderboard.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  You do not want to be at the bottom of the list. I will say that, right?

• 3:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, you don't want to be the, you don't want to be the guy who's having to explain like, no, well, I've actually getting the most out of each incremental token. And the other guy is just like, set up a, set up an agent that just counts one, one to a million, over and over and over.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you have to measure the actual output, the impact on the business. I mean, fortunately, Meta has been a huge beneficiary and a huge winner of AI. The ads are getting better targeting. They're seeing, they're delivering more ads and the. And the quarterly earnings have been strong. The headline number here that that sort of took everyone by surprise is that Meta's staff used, this is from the information, Meta's, the story claims that Meta staff used 60.2 trillion tokens over 30 days, which would pencil out to about a third of Anthropic's ARR was the number that was thrown out, but both of these claims are pretty questionable. And so Tyler did some back of the envelope math to show that the one-third revenue estimate is way, way too high.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  And I don't know, do you want to take us through some of the reasoning there and then we can talk about the knock on effects of all this?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so 60.2 trillion tokens is the number, like we can just assume that's true. So basically, I'm going to assume that the, all the employees are basically just using Opus 4.6.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 02

  So then there's basically three numbers you need to look for.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  In like the API cost, so there's like input.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  There's cached input and then there's output.

• 4:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  So for Opus 4.6, it's $5 per million tokens on input.

• 4:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  It's 50 cents per million tokens on.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Cashed.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Input cached, and then it's $25 on output.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you multiply that 60.2 trillion tokens at the highest possible rate, $25 per million tokens, then you do get like a billion dollars in them.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  That's a crazy number. But like you have to think about it like, you know, if you're using like Claude code or any of these coding agents, you know, the vast, vast majority of the, of the tokens used is input.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Because like, so imagine you're working on some, you know, coding file, right?

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  There's like a thousand lines of code in the file. Maybe the model's only changing like, like 10 at most, right? That's a very small percentage. So the output tokens are going to be, you know, a very small percentage of the total tokens going in, right?

• 5:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So Open, Open Router publishes like a lot of this data, so you can kind of use those ratios to figure out what is actually, like, what are the actual numbers of, of the, you know, input versus cache versus output?

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  So this is.

• 5:59John Coogan?

  Just to get sort of like market standard averages.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Baseline benchmark.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:05John Coogan?

  Now, Meta could be using these tools differently, but if we're to assume that they're. The the shape of their agent decoding efforts are similar to the average. This is what the numbers look like.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so maybe that there is like some, you know, bad incentive where people are just saying to the model like, count up to a billion and then do it again.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  So then it's like totally skewed, but if if they're doing it relatively normally.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  So on open router, it's about 98.9% of all tokens are input.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Input.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  And that's including dashed ones, right?

• 6:33John Coogan?

  Because you're stuffing the context window with all your code base or a huge amount of context.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's not changing every time, so you can cache it.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  So then that's like 1.1% is output.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  So basically, if you basically get all the numbers, that means like the kind of mean token, the mean million tokens is going to be $2 and like around 26 cents. So that'll get you to something like 136 million dollars a month for the 60 trillion tokens, right? So that's like way less than the 900.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So that that would be 1.6 billion a year, like run rate.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Still huge.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  That's what, but that is still in the max.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  That that's like, I'll talk.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Assuming they're in the top.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's assuming that open router, that the the kind of breakdown of how they're using the tokens is the same as open router, which I think it's not, but if we assume that, that's like $4,500 per engineer. If there are, I think, 30,000 engineers at Meta.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:31Speaker 02

  Every month, $4,500 on tokens.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  $4,500. That's actually in line with what I've heard a lot of other people spending in terms of their token budgets.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not like absurd, absurd.

• 7:40John Coogan?

  That's not absurd.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  If you're trying to incentivize people to use them.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, not at all.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  But so so you can actually see the breakdown on open router of how people are using tokens. So 17, the biggest plurality is OpenClaw, which is 17.6%.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  And then Claude code is 16.8.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  So I think. If you think about Claude code, you would imagine that like in Claude code, there's the kind of percentage of cache tokens is going to be higher than in in open claw.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  So I think Meta's usage is actually going to be more heavily based on the the cache tokens.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  So if you do it just based off like Claude code usage, you'd actually see a higher percentage of of the input tokens be of the total tokens. So it's only like 0.8% is the output. So then if you get all those numbers through again, it's only like 55 million a month, which would be 669 million a year.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  And each engineer would be like $1,800.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's actually pretty low.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Which is like, I think, very reasonable.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  John Chu over at Coastless says, "Plenty of my Meta friends told me folks have been building bots that just run in a loop, burning tokens as fast as they can due to this policy. It is an app. It's an absolutely stupid policy and is similar to how Meta uses lines of code to measure engineering output. Managers are supposed to use it as a proxy and dig in to understand work complexity, but plenty of managers are lazy and just don't." That was in response to Christine over at Linear saying, "Ranking engineers by token spend is like me ranking my marketing team by who spent the most money."

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  "We may not have hit our KPIs, but Joe spent $200,000 on a branded blimp that only flies over his own house, so he's getting promoted to VP."

• 9:20John Coogan?

  I'm I'm pro branded blimps, though. I like that idea. The so my take on this was that, yeah, it it sort of ties to what Jensen Wong was talking about at GTC. He was saying that an engineer that's making $500,000 might soon command something on the order of $250,000 a year in token budget. Under Carpathia, he had a similar line. He said, "It's all about tokens."

• 9:49John Coogan?

  He said on a podcast last month, "What is your token throughput and what token throughput do you command?" And so Meta actually has two different harnesses internally. They have a version of open claw called My Claw, and then they also, of course, acquired Manus. But it appears that they're running Claude, maybe Opus, under the hood to actually generate the tokens that come through those harnesses. The interesting thing is that at 250K AI budget per engineer, you're at like 20,000 a month. And so based on Tyler's math, this feels like, okay, there's going to be another maybe 4X to get to Jensen's prediction.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  The baseline that was going viral around, oh, Meta spent like maybe a billion dollars last month with Anthropic. That would work out to like $83,000 a month, which is absolutely insane. And I don't think anyone's really thinking that that's what's going on here. But this felt, a lot of people were saying like this is, you know, there's a lot of negative.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  The other thing is like ARR is the annualized run rate version, right? Which does come down, we don't know how they calculate it.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm assuming they're not choosing like a Saturday, like multiplying that, right?

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. But the bigger question is like a lot of people, you know, John Chu there is saying that, you know, oh, this is like a bad metric. And maybe it is, but I think it makes clearer the strategy with Meta Superintelligence Lab. Because if you're looking at, you know, it's clear that they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this just for internal code gen tooling, like running their business. They are going to spend an inordinate amount of money on frontier inference. And so training a model there, they will be able to amortize the training cost of the next model that they build. Not just over can they get a product out that goes viral and becomes its own standalone chat app

• 11:54John Coogan?

  that people pay for, or maybe it's ad supported. Like just on the internal usage, they could be running a, you know, multi-billion dollar token bill that they would have to pay another lab. And so if they develop that internally, it's pure vertical integration. And then you also have everything that's happening on the actual ad targeting and content delivery side. And when you add up all of those, all of a sudden, the big question has been like, does Meta, is Meta going to be able to launch an entirely new AI product, like Vibes or something like that? And this is a data point that to me says they don't need to. Because just from a pure vertical, vertical integration story, the investment in MSL can pencil out.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  What were you laughing?

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  I just want you to get to your schizo theory.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  What's a schizo theory?

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  That you that that the this, this, this whole like token maxing thing is like a is like a barrage while they distill the model.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is a, there is a world where if you're running, if you're, if you're generating trillions and trillions of a frontier model.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Like Meta is really like burning through a lot of tokens.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  And you have it generate everything.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  It's like, oh, we're just token maxing.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's another story about distilling we'll get to later in the show, but there is a question about if I, if I have a, if I write an essay and then I have a model rewrite it, those tokens, they are from that model provider, they, I buy them, they become mine. Can I train on them? That's probably out of terms of service. So you would think no, but you sort of wind up in this ship of Theseus world where if, if Meta pays Anthropic a hundred million dollars or a billion dollars to go rewrite every line of code, every email, every Slack chat, every internal message, like basically

• 13:47John Coogan?

  map the entire organization, rebuild it, they wind up with an incredible training corpus that they can use for their next model. But I would imagine that they can't, and I imagine that the, that the enterprise contracts go both ways. They can't, you know, the lab can't train on the corporate information. That's standard in all of the enterprise contracts. And I, and I would imagine that the opposite is true as well, although it is this fuzzy ship of Theseus world where if you're using coding agents to upgrade your infrastructure and then you want to run and train some model on your infrastructure, do you have to pull out the tokens that were revised by the AI lab that you don't have the right to train on? It's all very interesting.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Apparently startups that have gone out of business are able to sell their corporate histories for something like a million dollars to data brokerage firms and AI labs now. Have you heard about this?

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I heard about it.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, skeptical.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm skeptical. I mean, certainly there's a market for it, but

• 14:50John Coogan?

  Basically, all the code that a company built over a few years, maybe they

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Code, but also usage within different enterprise.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, all sorts of different stuff. Basically, like, you know, an RL environment or something that can help whatever business process they were doing. So if you're, and you could imagine a data broker buying the data set from a startup that has their go-to-market motion that can be RL'd on, and then also their code base that can be folded into training on how to write better code and all of their marketing messages. And basically, everything that they did on internal, external columns, everything is tracked. Maybe they've been using granola or something. They have like very detailed notes of everything about how they built the business, even though it wasn't successful. There's going to be a lot of lessons there that can be folded into the next training run of the next thing. Anyway.

• 15:38Jordi Hays?

  In other news.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:40Jordi Hays?

  Intel is joining TeraFab.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  Yes, let's read through this.

• 15:43Jordi Hays?

  Intel is proud to join the TeraFab project with SpaceX, XAI, and Tesla to help refactor silicon fab technology. Intel says our ability to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance chips at scale will help accelerate TeraFab's aim to produce one terawatt a year of compute to power future advances in AI and robotics. And throwing up a post of hanging with Mr. Musk himself. What Intel up on the day, up almost 3%, unsurprisingly, and just continues to be on a tear, up almost 15% in the past month and 167% over the last year.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's go through the Wall Street Journal's coverage of this. Elon Musk is partnering with Intel on his ambitious TeraFab project, which aims to build specifically designed chips for SpaceX and XAI as well as for Tesla. In an announcement Tuesday, Intel said it would work with the companies to design, fabricate, and package ultra-high-performance computing chips at scale. The company shared a photo of Chief Exac- executive Liputan shaking hands with Musk CEO of SpaceX and Tesla. The partnership is a win for Tesla, which has struggled in recent year.

• 17:00Jordi Hays?

  Intel.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  Which has struggled in recent years, leading the company to cut production capacity when demand was surging for data center chips and when competitors like Nvidia and AMD have thrived. That was always a just such a tough pill to swallow when you would talk to the ASIC companies like Cerebras. And you'd say, hey, like you're doing something new. You're not, you're not doing Nvidia chips. Is there any way you could get off of TSMC? And they're like, no, like we still need to be in Taiwan. Obviously, there's a huge geopolitical component here. We can get into all that. But last year, the Trump administration reached a deal to acquire an equity stake in Intel for around $9 billion to help secure the American chipmaker's business. The US government held 8.4% of Intel shares outstanding in as of March 20th.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  According to securities filings, the figure doesn't include warrants that could increase the government's equity stake in Intel. So that, as you mentioned, Intel shares gained 3% in Tuesday trading. Terrafab represents a step change in how silicon logic, memory and packaging will get built in the future. Liputan said on X. Tesla and SpaceX confirmed the partnership in posts on X. In March, Musk unveiled the plans for a single facility in Austin, Texas to make chips to be used by SpaceX and XAI, which merged in February as well as by the publicly traded Tesla. He pitched the project as an opportunity to quickly experiment on chip design by designing and manufacturing the chips in one facility. The fab will make chips for use in Tesla's robot taxis, which they're already

• 18:29John Coogan?

  fabbing, I believe at Samsung, although they do have Nvidia Dojo chips, I think that are TSMC. So they've been doing, using both of those fabs, but Optimus will also need chips and they are planning to use Intel for that as well. So these are two areas of priority for the electrical vehicle maker as it shifts its focus to artificial intelligence-enabled products. It will also make chips optimized for use in space where SpaceX is planning to deploy huge numbers of satellites capable of handling AI computing tasks.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So who else do you think they need to get involved here? Because just the two of these, the two of these got, you know, Intel and Tesla coming together, it's, it's, it's good to have more involvement, but still I think the entire project.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  No, we've seen, we've seen a few of those like AI leader gatherings in DC where you see Tim Cook and, and Sundar and Sam Altman and Dario and all the, the whole, all the leaders are together. And I was always hoping that at one of those dinners, they would say, okay, everyone's going to try and say the biggest number, but this time it's going to be how much you're committing to Intel and how much you'll, how much you'll buy from them if they come online with a competitive product. Because the demand side is, has, has always been a big problem for Intel, that they have the capability, they have the plans to build the two nanometer, three nanometer plant, like a frontier plant, leading edge fab. But

• 19:59John Coogan?

  every other company has been so tied to TSMC. But we, but I think everyone now acknowledges that TSMC is not, is not investing super heavily in CapEx. They're not going, you know, they're not scaling up as much as, as the industry would like them to. And so lots of folks have, have sort of signaled towards a chip bottleneck coming in the next few years and Intel has the opportunity to communicate that. This seems like the first step in that, in that chain. So companies, including Tesla, often design their own semiconductors, but need a supplier to actually make the so-called, make them in a so-called chip fab. Musk's companies have sourced chips from a wide range of suppliers, including Nvidia, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor. Oh, I got it. Musk said that TeraFab is needed because his

• 20:44John Coogan?

  company's demand for chips is slated to far outstrip the supply it gets from partners. I was listening to Chuck Robbins from Cisco talk about data centers in space and the heating issue came up and, and he was like, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't really have like a solid answer for that yet. But I do think that if you are bullish on data centers in space, you have to start with the fact that Starlink works in space currently, because it is doing compute.

• 21:21Jordi Hays?

  You couldn't possibly put, let's be honest, John. We couldn't possibly put a computer up there.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, there are computers with, like, they can't inference frontier models. They can't, you know, it's not gigawatts in space yet. But there are, I believe, across the entire Starlink cluster, megawatts of compute in space with solar panels. And they do heat up because you are running a chip that routes packets across the internet from one satellite to the next to get you your internet via Starlink. And so it's not that it's a solved problem. It's that we are actually, we are on a path to, you know, deploy some level of compute in space, Tyler.

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we've seen, like, Philip Johnson, like, there are chips in space right now. Like, there are GPUs, I think, he said there were like five or six H100s, right?

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 02

  So like, they do work. It's like, I think most people's problem with space data centers is that it's like economically, it doesn't make any sense.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Well, so, yes, that is the correct angle. But a lot of people are getting hung up on. But no, no, there is a whole conversation about, like, it is impossible. And you need to like move past that into the economic equation, which then gets you into timelines and actually thinking about what needs to happen to dissipate that heat. But clearly, yes, you can. I mean, you can put humans in space on the IFS and cool that. They're like, we have created ways to move heat around in space for decades. It's obviously a new challenge. But I think starting with the baseline of like, it's, there is compute happening in space right now. We're going to try and, I mean, Elon wants to like 1,000 exit,

• 23:02John Coogan?

  100,000 exit, million exit. I don't even know how, what the scale is, but orders of magnitude. And so there's new engineering challenges. But at the very least, it's worth acknowledging that there is computation happening in space at scale with the Starlink cluster. Anyway.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of space, it looks like Elon is going to use SPCX as a ticker for the SpaceX IPO, which he had to acquire from Matt Tuttle. Hence the ETF's ticker change shown below. Eric from Bloomberg says, "We predicted this could happen in a December note. Nice catch by Will, who famously gave the meta ticker to Zuck." I did not know that Will Hershey had the meta ticker previously, so.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Wait, wait.

• 23:47Jordi Hays?

  We know somebody that squats on-

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Who had the meta ticker?

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  A guy named Will Hershey.

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  At a company called Roundhill. But we know somebody who's been-

• 23:56John Coogan?

  That was Matt Ball.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  We had somebody here come in-

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Outside of show hours and say that they were squatting on a bunch of tickers. And the idea seems so... I think what might be the reality is that you actually, that it needs to be, it needs to be further along than just reserved. I don't know-

• 24:18John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 24:19Jordi Hays?

  Having it, you can go, if you're a startup today, you can go reserve your ticker today. But I'm not sure that that actually gives you enough leverage to when Elon comes knocking, ready for an IPO, you actually have priority over.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  I think you have to actually be doing something with it. So if I have it correct, I'm looking it up to make sure that I have the facts straight. But Matthew Ball started an ETF based on the Metaverse, which was, he wrote a whole book about the Metaverse and had a series of blog posts outlining the broad trend and the various companies that would benefit from that. And so-

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  The chat is not like- Ticker squatting.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  The team does not like, oh, okay, Roundhill squats on lots of tickers? That's interesting. I don't know, apparently Meta Materials was in that ticker for a little bit. There's been a few others, but I think-

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  Roundhill creates ETFs.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  ETFs. Well, I think if you have an active ETF, that's a lot different than just having a reservation. Although, I don't know, maybe you do get paid off.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  So this fund, it was only like $10 million. So it's very small. So you actually could like-

• 25:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, $10 million is still like, you know, not, you know, it's still a fair amount of amount.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  But you could potentially launch an ETF with 10 million of investor interest.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, like if you have a really good ticker.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, you can definitely make an argument that like, yeah, it's worth over $10 million and you can somehow marshal enough capital to, you know, do something with it.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  There was a, there was a YouTube influencer who launched an ETF and it, it sounded so good on paper because it was like, wow, like his audience came together and put like $10 million into this ETF, but it was like generating something like three basis points of fees or something. So regardless of how it was like, regardless of what the fund did, like the actual flow would be like less than what he was earning in YouTube ad revenue, like a few thousand dollars a month would be like the net gain from the, from the ETF effort. And I think it was something that got wound down pretty quickly. Anyway, I had, I had

• 26:28John Coogan?

  a broader take on Elon and Intel. So back in 2022, I was trying to imagine this divergent path, the, the road not traveled of Elon buying Intel because Intel-

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we talked about this before. There, there was a moment where people were tracking like Intels, corporate jet, Elons-

• 26:48John Coogan?

  And Global Foundations too, but yeah.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it seemed, but I think it ultimately ended up just being election related.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, they happened to be at Mar-a-Lago maybe at the same time. But it was, it was such a cool idea because Elon had, you know, I mean, he'd run PayPal and stuff. He, he had some experience in like software, but he hadn't run a social network. So there was a lot of, there was a lot of questions about like, what would happen to Twitter? Would he be able, would he need to change the business model? He wound up doing subscriptions. It wound up being a good exit because he went, rolled it into XAI, which rolled into SpaceX. So everyone did fine. But there was a lot of like, okay, $44 billion for Twitter, which after the Zerp era ended, all of those companies traded down 60% or something. So there was a lot of chatter around, is, is this a good deal?

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Is this a good use of his time? He's known for running incredibly intense engineering operations, making self-driving electric cars, rockets that land themselves, like, like semiconductor fab feels more like that than social network feels like, like rocket factory, right? It is a factory at, at the end of the day. And so I was trying to work backwards from like, could that actually have happened? I don't know. The numbers I had was- So at the end of 2022, Intel was a $110 billion market cap company. Like, that's a huge company still, even though it had been beaten up in the public markets. But Elon had just put together 44 billion to buy Twitter.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  And the CHIPS Act had put, in 2022, had just put together 280 billion, including 53 billion specifically for US semiconductor manufacturing.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  Also, just think about where Intel would trade if Elon.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Had been able to own it or roll it in. I mean, it would be, like, just putting together the 44 billion was a Herculean effort. And there was a ton of debt, and there were all these different parties.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just a much, much different business.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  110, and it's not like you can just go buy the company at its lowest possible value. You have to make an offer that all the shareholders will approve of and potentially be higher than the, than what the market cap is. Because if you're, if you're an Intel shareholder and you're looking at $110 billion market cap, you would imagine that it could go up, and it did. It's now over, what, 200 billion, Intel market cap? What are they at right now? 260. So, like, if you, if you, if you were a shareholder in 2022 and you were at 110, you probably, you know, are happy that you didn't get bought out at that time. But it was possible.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  It wasn't that much of a stretch to imagine something happening there four years ago. We didn't wind up on that path. But, you know, my hope is that this is the first step on the long road to generate enough demand for domestic chip manufacturing to really move the needle. Because I'm rooting for Intel, and I'm rooting for American semiconductor supply chain. Tyler went over to the TSMC plant in Arizona. It seems like it's going well.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's huge.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  It's huge.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  They didn't let me in.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  They didn't let you in. But we need more, very clearly, and Intel is working on that, fortunately.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got to talk about a corporate retreat that went badly wrong.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Technology company Plex took its 120 employees to Honduras for a week-long bonding experience. It was a disaster from the moment. They arrived. Senior executives at the tech company Plex were eager to treat their 120 fully remote staffers to a week-long corporate getaway in a tropical paradise. Pop quiz, Tyler, do you know what Plex is?

• 30:22John Coogan?

  I don't know about Plex.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Have we seen Plex before?

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know either. So, we all failed, but now it's your job to figure it out. I will continue.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  I know every technology.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  The plan for the Honduras trip was simple: company meetings in team buildings-

• 30:34John Coogan?

  Was this a streaming company?

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  -by powdery soft beaches during the day and island fund at night, at a cost of roughly half a million to the company. They billed the trip around a Survivor theme with themes and challenges, but it'd be fun, not too physically grueling. The CEO of Plex, a free-streaming platform, would play a role similar to that of Survivor host Jeff. Perhaps the executive should have taken it as a sign that just as the first bus of staffers pulled up to the resort, the chief executive was already in his hotel bathroom, experiencing the initial waves of violent stomach infection. What followed was a comedy of errors, including military drills that outpaced anything this group of office workers had in mind: a rogue porcupine, stranded airplanes, and one syringe to the butt of an employee.

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Corporate retreats are generally assumed to be torture, or at least a semi-stressful chore, what with their forced fun activities and hybrid work-play environments that leave workers confused about boundaries. Is that, is that like the industry standard? That seems wild.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  I don't know. I don't think I've ever been on a corporate retreat. I've been on some like founders fund events, but those aren't really retreats. Those are more just like conferences. But, I don't know, corporate retreat seems, I don't know, unexplored territory for me.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  It's no wonder the new season of Jury Duty, a comedy series that tricks an unsuspecting non-actor into believing his off-the-wall fictional circumstances are actually happening, is set at a corporate offsite. But in real life, PlexCon 2017 beats anything on TV. Here's the story of an all-staff company getaway told by six people who were there, a trip where most everything that could go wrong did go wrong. Nearly a decade later, they're still working together and still talking about it. It's crazy that they-

• 32:14John Coogan?

  So it had its impact. It was bonding experience.

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, it's crazy that this is now- Now coming out. So Sean Hoff, 42, founder of Moniker Partners, an independent corporate retreat agency that planned the trip. About three weeks before we arrived in Honduras, we got an email from the hotel's general manager that said, "I will be departing. I wish you the best with your retreat." I knew something was off. Three days later, another email. The head chef was no longer going to be at the hotel. Scott, 52, chief product officer and Plex co-founder. We get there. We've got to take the bus from the airport. Dirt roads. You start getting closer and there are guard towers around the property. People with machine guns and stuff. A lot of people were like, "Where are we going?" Keith, CEO of Plex, 54. We usually go a day early and we set up. If there's any little

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  thing we have to get it right, just so the employees have the best experience possible. Keith woke up the day that people were coming in Sunday morning and he is sick as a dog. Everyone there is fried. Basically, people are telling me, "Don't eat the vegetables. Don't eat the vegetables."

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Don't eat the vegetables? That's like the safest thing to...

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Because they clean it. They wash it in water. It's usually not filtered water, right? Because it would just be kind of crazy to...

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Here it is. I...

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  So I've got to have a salad, just one salad. So I got E. coli, which may be the worst thing you could get possibly ever. Just as people were arriving on the buses, I was like, I had lost eight or 10 pounds. They had a doctor come to me, which apparently is pretty standard. They nailed an IV bag to the bedpost. People are arriving for a party that night. The next day is Survivor themed kickoff. There's not one person on the planet more excited about Survivor than Keith and his wife. They have watched every single episode. My wife and I met Jeff, the host of Survivor. What I wanted is when everybody shows up, I do a Jeff, "Welcome to the island. Here's the theme for the week." But Scott got to do it. The opening Survivor thing was a contest where people on their different teams open up a platter. You have to eat what's on the platter. Sean, Sean, who's

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  the Plex head of business development.

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Who are you going to call?

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody is, somebody is cold texting me, pitching me their startup, and they've called me a bunch of times today.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Wait, is it actually them or is it their AI agent?

• 34:23Jordi Hays?

  I wish I could pick up. It's just like a little bit, a little bit too much to... But yeah, cold texting somebody, like getting their number, I don't think that's the new meta.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we heard from an executive in tech that they are getting dozens of emails every single day, trying to recruit them, and every email comes from a new Gmail account that's unregistered, brand-new, but it's all LLM-written, very different, doesn't really do all the research, but has a few keywords in there, and it's clear that someone is building a next-gen recruiting agency that's basically just a lot of spam. Feels like the end result will be a return to relationship-building and not broad top-of-line.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  I should read the cold text from this morning. And I have nothing against cold email and just being bold, but I did read this out loud to you, John, so I'll read it to everyone. So I get a text from an unknown number today at 7:00 a.m. "All right, Jordy, good news or bad news first? This is blank," and I'll leave the name out. And then I just get a PDF of a deck, and then a text. "All right, Jordy, the bad news is this was an unplanned introduction and, on the surface, probably lukewarm outreach. The good news is that there's zero doubt you're now in touch with the founder with the most grit of anyone you've interacted with the past 12 months and likely anyone you'll interact

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  with over the next 12 months. Fifty thousand seed-round passes over the past 10 months, here to make 50,001." So, you know, you should be coming in being like, "I've been passed on 50,000 times. I'm hoping this is the one that gets through."

• 36:20John Coogan?

  That seems like a rough estimate, though.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  "Months of feedback and iterations have made it better, so you're seeing more quality presentation than rejection 10,000. Looking forward to your message."

• 36:33John Coogan?

  The chat wants the builder to pitch. They want you to hear this out. Everyone's in favor of this.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, pitch who?

• 36:41John Coogan?

  Uh, they, they, the chat wants you to get on the phone with them.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Do it live.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  I mean, they wanted to do live. I don't know if you should do live, but you should take the call and uh, and get to the bottom of it.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I will take the call. I will take the call, but.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Let's go back to the corporate retreat.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Um, okay, so they hire, they hire a former Navy SEAL.

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  To basically haze the team on the beach.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  And you can pull up a picture, an image here.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  The quote is, "This is not a super fit group in general." "One of our biggest mistakes was hiring a former Navy SEAL to pump the team up." "As I'm in my room dying, I could hear them out there doing all the drills and yelling." "And so I'm in here thinking, 'This is terrible, but it sounds terrible out there, too.'" "Uh, we're doing Army crawling on the beach. It was 100 degrees." "I bailed out partway through. I went into the ocean just to cool off." "I went in probably on all fours because I was tired." "It's not a fit group, not a super fit group in general." "The ex-Navy SEAL is like, 'We can tone it down, no problem.'" "We get up there and it's hot and humid and people are passing out." "I don't think he'd ever seen quite such an unfit group." "We ended on, I guess, what's probably a golf course." "Uh, on command, everyone had to hit the grass. Everyone's silent."

• 37:50John Coogan?

  "We're pretending we're Navy SEALs, but I happened to land in the wrong spot." "I'm just like, 'Oh, God, what is happening?'" "I was sitting on a fire ant hill. I was wearing shorts." "I jumped and had my, I had hives and bumps from the bites." "This is ridiculous. Someone saw an alligator on the golf course. Sounds like a ridiculous."

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  There was a porcupine that fell through one of the ceilings.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  This is like a fire festival for, uh, corporate.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  The fire festival of corporate retreats.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  I, it's, it's fun, but this, this porcupine is horrifying. Wow, look at this guy. Rick Phillips discovered this in his room shower. The hotel got, uh, pretty much just got the porcupine and left. I guess for me, it was a good thing because being a non-talkative software engineer, I got some notoriety. "It's a beautiful resort there. Sand fleas. They had to fumigate every day." "What a weird quote." "Uh, we did a nice dinner down by the beach and everyone got bit by the sand fleas that weren't supposed to be there." "We all got matching tank tops."

• 38:43Jordi Hays?

  Real life, uh, real life episode of The Office.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  You can imagine Michael Scott.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Um, there is some breaking news. Um, Anthropic is set to preview powerful Mythos model to ward off cyber AI threats. Uh, the AI company is partnering with Amazon, Microsoft and others to offer the new model to find and patch software bugs. Uh, this is from the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic is taking steps to arm some of the world's biggest technology companies with tools to find and patch bugs in their hardware and software. The company is making a preview of its new AI model called Mythos, available to about 50 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, uh, owned Google and the Linux Foundation. Uh, cybersecurity researchers and software makers worry that artificial intelligence is becoming so good at exploiting vulnerabilities that it could

• 39:33John Coogan?

  cause widespread online disruption. Security experts have predicted that AI models will discover an avalanche of software bugs and the effort is set to help companies stay one step ahead of cyber criminals and other threats. This feels like a very good rollout strategy generally, both because we've seen a huge amount of, of cyber attacks and, and hacks and accidental releases. Like even if it's not, uh, you know, there's been, we had a, a, a member of the security team from CrowdStrike on the show last week, uh, talking about the, the rise in cyber attacks broadly. And so getting the, getting the, uh, uh, the,

• 40:13John Coogan?

  the, the most frontier models in the hands of big companies early, great from that perspective, and then also just great as a product demo, uh, which will get the entire organization excited about deploying the technology broadly. So very good as like a, as a B to B, uh, go to market motion. This makes a ton of sense. Uh, when measuring the dollar cost to find a bug, Mythos claims to be about 10 times as efficient as previous AI models. Uh, details of Mythos's capabilities were previously reported by Fortune. While Anthropic has no immediate plans to release Mythos, other models will likely match its bug finding capabilities within the next few years, Graham said. We basically need to start right now preparing for a world where there is zero lag between discovery and exploitation. So very carefully.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Rolling these out. The Claude Opus 4.6 found more high severity bugs in Firefox in two weeks than the rest of the world typically reports in two months. And so, good, good news there for cybersecurity. There is some.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Some news yesterday in the New York Times. Shots fired at Indianapolis Councilman's home after a boat that was backing a data center. No one was injured, but Councilman Ron Gibson called it deeply unsettling. This broke on X. Yesterday, and Alex writes in the New York Times, bullets hit the home of an Indianapolis city councilman early Monday morning, leaving shattered glass and holes through the front door and a handwritten note reading "No data centers was left under the doormat." The councilman, Ron Gibson, was among the city's leaders who voted 6-2 last week to approve a rezoning measure that would allow Metro Blocks, a Los Angeles company, to build a data center on the northeast side of Indianapolis. Local residents had protested the proposed data center for months citing concerns about

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  environmental impacts and changes to a historic neighborhood. Dozens of people filled the city council chambers, city county council chambers last week before the vote, holding signs and speaking in opposition to the data center, the station reported. Gunfire at his home crosses a line, Mr. Gibson wrote in an emailed statement. I understand that public service can bring strong opinions and disagreement, but violence is never the answer, especially when it puts families at risk. So, very, very dark situation. Mr. Gibson wrote that he and his eight-year-old son were awakened by the gunshots between 12:45 and 12:50 a.m. Monday, and he rushed to reassure his son that he was safe. He said 13 rounds were fired at his home with bullets striking just steps from the dining

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  room table where his son had played with Legos the day before. Incredibly, incredibly dark. Rune says, "Just so everyone is clear, this is evil. You are justified in thinking it's morally bad. Tons of apologetics happening for bad people. If you think behavior like this is just dessert for the tech industry due to some hobby horse you have, you've gone insane." And Noah Smith says we may still be underrating how big of a political issue AI is going to be. And there's a video here from CBS. We can, we can put the sound on.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Just days after voting in favor of building a new data center in Indianapolis, local council member Ron Gibson says he woke up to the sound of gunfire overnight. Gibson said 13 rounds were fired at his home while he and his eight-year-old son were asleep. Some of those bullets landing just steps from their dining room table where his son was playing with Legos the day before. When he stepped outside, he says he found this handwritten note reading "No data centers" under the doormat.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  There are real benefits tied to this development. Construction is expected to support roughly 300 jobs over a three-year period.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  While some councilors argued the data center will bring revenue and jobs, there was pushback from residents over environmental and quality of life concerns. The vote to move forward passed six to two. Indianapolis police are calling this an isolated and targeted incident, and police have yet to identify a suspect. And one group that protested that data center last week released a statement today saying in part, "Violence has no place in our community or in our advocacy." The FBI now assisting in the investigation. Tony?

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Chanel, thank you. Noah Herschel in the chat says people have gone insane. It is, it is extremely disheartening to see.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  I mean, I would hope that the, the case to be made for data centers is much more complex than 300 jobs over three years. Like the ratepayer protection pledge, the environmental concerns, all of that needs to be addressed and communicated, not because of this, this is, you know, horrible, but just in general from the, from the public that has pushback and reticence about the data center development.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, local tax revenues.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it should be, it should be a boon to every community and the, every community should feel like the, the net benefit is truly positive. And I feel like people, many, many community members do not feel like it's in their favor. And so there's a lot to do on that front.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  In some other more positive news, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google are uniting to cop to combat model copying in China. This is a bigger discussion around AI safety. We've talked about this.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  Give a look at that.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Some, some.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Who knew?

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Faith and.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Who knew they could get along?

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Yes. I mean, like, I mean, I'm sure people in the chat have seen the New Yorker article where there's just tons and tons of quotes from various AI leaders, all, you know, upset with Sam Altman. And the, the, the inter AI drama has been bubbling up since the dawn of OpenAI. Like, OpenAI was started as a reaction to Google, and then Anthropic leaves and teams up with Google, and then Elon doesn't like Anthropic, and then Ilya Sutskever and Mira leave, but they don't join Anthropic. And so there's been so many personalities and so many disputes. I feel like the, the takeaway is that this is all extremely high

• 46:32John Coogan?

  stakes. There's a technological, you know, transition happening, a huge amount of money on the table, a huge amount of influence on the table. And so everyone is sort of clamoring for their share, and it's creating a lot of, a lot of friction. But my, my overall takeaway from the, from the New York article was, a lot of that had been already reported out. A lot of that was, you know, we sort of knew that there were rivalries and, and, you know, a lot of hurt feelings between different members of the AI community. And nothing was particularly shocking to me. But if you have more comments, please leave them in the chat.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Let's go through this.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  This, what's actually going on with this, this model copying in China question. So rivals, OpenAI, Anthropic, PBC, and Alphabet Inc.'s Google have been, have begun working together to try and clamp down on Chinese competitors, extracting results from cutting edge US artificial intelligence models to gain an edge. In the global AI race, the firms are sharing information through the Frontier Model Forum, an industry nonprofit that the three tech companies founded with Microsoft in 2023 to detect so-called adversarial distillation attempts that violate their terms of service, according to people familiar with the matter. The rare collaboration underscores the severity of a concern raised by US AI companies

• 48:02John Coogan?

  that some users, especially in China, are creating imitation versions of their products that could undercut them on price and siphon away customers while posing a national security risk. And so I was trying to square this question of distillation and model commoditization with the news that Anthropic has reached 30 billion in run rate and has an agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity. Like, clearly, there is insatiable demand for frontier tokens, frontier models. They're incredibly expensive to train. We saw in the Wall Street Journal that these-

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  Expected training costs from-

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was training and inference, but it was hundreds of billions of dollars. And so the hope is that you're able to amortize that over at least a couple of years, you know, a long time, ideally. The shelf life of a model after you train it is pretty limited if you're being commoditized and copied. If you're being distilled, it's even faster. At the same time, just staying on the frontier clearly leads to an incredible ramp in revenue. So is commoditization a real problem? It feels like it's almost just more of a problem from an AI safety perspective because you can't have the geopolitical conversation, like what Bernie Sanders is proposing around different labs working together,

• 49:24John Coogan?

  potentially pausing or slowing down, or just even adding more constraints and reviews before models get released. It's harder to do that if you have a different country that's racing ahead and moving much faster and trying to close that gap. Now, if the model is delayed in America and their whole strategy is to distill the model, well, then they're still three months behind, even if we take three months off in America. So maybe that's not an issue. But it was an interesting development, so.

• 49:59John Coogan?

  The, I guess, models get bigger and more powerful. Hopefully, it becomes easier to track distillation efforts. I would imagine. So what is the canonical example of the distillation question? Was that originally DeepSeek, Tyler?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. It's very hard to prove, right?

• 50:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Because it's like, how do you, you know, you don't. If you just look at the weights, there's no way to really tell. It's just like, you just ask the model, you know, who are you? And then it says, I'm Claude.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  It's like, OK.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the smoking gun. But that doesn't always happen because you could remove all references to Claude.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like people were saying, when, you know, DeepSeek first like came on, everyone's like, oh, wow, this is so good.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  People at OpenAI were saying like, OK, they've distilled on this.

• 50:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  But like, was there any like proof? Not really, maybe just like vibes. If you talk to models a lot, you see that they kind of respond similarly.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  Compared to other models.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  And, and I mean, the smart strategy, if you are a distiller lab, would be to generate a bunch of tokens from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI, mix them together so that maybe every once in a while it says Claude, but only one third of the time because you have a whole bunch of other tokens from other, from other models, and it all blends together. So that actually underscores the need for the Frontier Model Forum and the three companies working together.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  I do wonder how you like actually combat this. Because it seems very hard unless you basically just say, the only people that can hit the API are like trusted enterprises. And you have signed these big contracts before, which I think is, there's a good case for me for that being like the way forward.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  I mean, it doesn't seem that crazy to do like varying levels of KYC for varying levels of token spend or enterprise contracts. So if you are, if all of a sudden it's like you're doing meta level inference, well, let's make sure that it's meta. That's actually the one on the other side of that contract and that they're not vending the frontier tokens into another, like reselling them basically in some way. So you need a chain of know your customer. But in theory, you should be able to have, you know, a $200 pro plan that only, that does not.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Ever deliver the level of of tokens to fully distill the model. And then as someone ramps up on the API and they're spending 5,000 a month, okay, you do a little bit more of a check. Then they're spending $100,000, then they're spending $10 million. And once they get up, like every lab must know, okay, to distill this, you probably need to spend $100 million, $10 million, whatever the number is, set the KYC threshold there. And but it's going to be cut in a third because it's going to happen across all of these labs. So whatever their whatever their threshold is for, okay, it's really time to go and and do the do the proper KYC. You sort of need to divide that by three because you have to assume that it's happening across all three.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  And then it's also probably happening across multiple smaller organizations that are, you know, essentially fronts and are harder to KYC. But I don't know.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Let's do a lightning round of.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Timeline?

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  Posts.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Okay, what do you got?

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  Reid Wiseman, he's an astronaut.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  He's on Artemis 2.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  December 7, 2016. He posted at 8:47 a.m. Dreamt I was in lunar orbit last night. Been in that post vivid dream that wasn't real funk all morning. And yesterday, he made it real.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Wow, I I I saw this post and I was like, oh, like, that's just like some random poster like, okay, cool. Like, yeah, like, cool, cool story. Like, yeah, anyone could have that dream. I didn't realize that it was actually the.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  Almost 10 years.

• 53:40John Coogan?

  The astronaut who is now on on around the moon and making his way back to to Earth. There was another cool video from the from the moon mission. Astronaut Victor Glover discussed what it means for him and the entire Artemis 2 crew to be observing Easter Sunday from space during their historic mission. We should pull this video up. It's on X. It's about a minute long. Let's see if we can play this.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  I think these observances are important and as we are so far from Earth and looking back at, you know, the beauty of creation, I think the, for me, one of the really important personal perspectives that I have up here is I can really see Earth as one thing and you know, when I read the Bible and I look at all of the amazing things that were done for us who were created, it's, you, you have this amazing place, this spaceship. You guys are talking to us because we're in a spaceship really far from Earth, but you're on a spaceship called Earth that was created to give us a place to live in the universe, in the cosmos. I think maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special, but we're the same distance from you and I'm trying to tell you, just trust me, you

• 54:56Speaker 05

  are special. In all of this emptiness, this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe. You have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together. I think as we go into Easter Sunday, thinking about, you know, all the cultures all around the world, whether you celebrate it or not, whether you believe in God or not, um, this is an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing and that we gotta get through this together.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 55:24Jordi Hays?

  Powerful stuff.

• 55:25John Coogan?

  Great mission.

• 55:26Jordi Hays?

  Creating cycle.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  Having a GF is insane because it's literally unlimited chat with no tokens spent.

• 55:31John Coogan?

  There you go. Uh, what did, uh, Suckz say? Is three weeks too young to give my baby a Redditch Ruteide? Not trying to raise a fat porky butterball. Yes, it's too young. Be careful up there. Uh, have you seen this image of the Instagram Growth Guru? This goes viral constantly and normally it's a, it's like a reels reaction video, but someone took that, this exact message and put it on X and it went mega viral with 130,000 likes. Instagram Growth Gurus are so funny. He can't use his laptop because he's holding a drink. He can't drink because he has a cigar in his mouth. He can't smoke his cigar because both hands are occupied. I think, I think this is surmountable though. I think you can actually hold the cigar with

• 56:16John Coogan?

  the martini or something, but it is a true like peak performative growth guru. Very, very funny, but I'm sure, I'm sure it had its intended purpose. Chase passive insubstance, that's my mentor you're talking about. He makes multiple eight figures in passive income and only charges $25,000 for a full day, full day boot camp mastermind to teach me his strategies. Delete this.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  I yield Harry dialing into a morning meeting. Morning. Stocks are down slightly after Trump announced a whole civilization will die tonight. Really dark over on Truth Social today and hoping.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's on the cover of the Journal today. Trump, Trump stirs fear in Iran over talk of attack. President says the US military could take out the entire country in one night. President Trump said Monday that the US military could take out the entirety of Iran in one night and Iranian officials have told mediators now to trying to reach a last ditch ceasefire deal that they, that they fear Trump will follow through on a massive attack Tuesday night. So we are, we are continue to hope, hope for a, a resolution to the geopolitical conflict. It's very, very frustrating. And yeah, it would be so much better to refocus on problems at home and opportunities at home. Anyway.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  What is Pirate Wire saying about Citrini? Analyst number three. Ryan writes, our newspapers used to put reporters in active war zones. They've stopped. So new media is picking it up. Last week, research firm Citrini put a man in the Strait of Hormuz to figure out what is going on in the oil world. Citrini's quadrilingual employee referred to only as analyst three, packed a bag with 15 grand in cash, some zins and cigars before shooting over to Oman. After managing to finagle his way onto a speedboat, analyst three reported from the water just 18 miles away from the Iranian coast while smoking a Cuban. In a world where the New York Times is calling NATO the North American Treaty Organization,

• 58:22Jordi Hays?

  we've got live financial reporting from Iran. Yeah, this, this was just absolutely.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  Insane story. An insane story if you can just do things.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, I'm talking to Satriani about coming on the show later this week. Obviously, he's been working incredibly, incredibly hard with his team to report and publish this and turn things into analysis. And there's a whole deep dive that you can read on Satriani. And just what a fantastic piece of reporting. Truly unexpected. I didn't think anyone would do this. We were joking about it and they just went and did it.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  We stopped doing ads, but NASA-

• 59:06John Coogan?

  NASA's doing ads now?

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  Carrying the torch.

• 59:09John Coogan?

  Okay, let's see it.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  They have a number-

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Is that a sponge daddy or something?

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Scrub daddy?

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  That's the viral infomercial product, right?

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 59:17John Coogan?

  And then a Liquid Death as well?

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Is there a Liquid Death?

• 59:20John Coogan?

  This is, this has to be fake, right? The Taco Bell thing? This is a joke? I can't tell. Is the Nutella's in here?

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  There seems to be real Nutella.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  AI generator or something? Yeah. Grok wanted me to tell you, it's real. I don't know. It does seem like people are having fun with this. But yeah, very funny.

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  All right. Andrew Huberman says 93 years and 231 days old and Isolston dead hangs for 2 minutes and 52 seconds-

• 59:56John Coogan?

  That is insane.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  To set new world record.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  We tried this this morning-

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we did this this morning.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  2 minutes and 52 seconds is truly an eternity. I don't know if that's in the cards for us. Maybe, maybe we can get there. What is CARP at? 5 minutes, something?

• 1:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, CARP is at around 5 minutes.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  Absolutely insane.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, these, these numbers don't sound big, but you start hanging and it is absolutely brutal. So congratulations to, to Anne.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  What a feat.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  What a feat. Well, we have Riley Walls in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. It's a TV Pin Ultra Dome.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Riley, how you guys doing?

• 1:00:32Speaker 06

  Hey guys.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Are you?

• 1:00:34Speaker 06

  We're good.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Are you where I think you are? Introduce yourselves, explain where you are.

• 1:00:39Speaker 07

  We are at the alley.

• 1:00:40Speaker 06

  We're live at the alley.

• 1:00:41John Coogan?

  Live at the alley.

• 1:00:42Speaker 06

  This is, uh, this is the street right here.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, life is good. This is my friend Patrick.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Hi Patrick.

• 1:00:47Speaker 06

  We worked on, uh, the alley together. Yeah, this has been a really fun project.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Speaker 06

  We, yeah, it's been a blast.

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Give us the full history of, of the alley, how you guys came to own it, and then we'll get into this project.

• 1:01:01Speaker 06

  Basically, uh, we learned that this, this alley was foreclosed on. It's kind of a long story where this, this woman accidentally bought it thinking that she was buying this house right here.

• 1:01:10Speaker 07

  No, no, no.

• 1:01:10Speaker 06

  Which is, no, it is this one.

• 1:01:12Speaker 07

  Oh, it is it.

• 1:01:12Speaker 06

  Which, which was, which is worth like a million dollars. And she bid 25K on it, thinking that she was getting the steal of a lifetime. She won and...

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  And is this the kind of thing she didn't, she didn't want to tell anyone? Like, because she was like, okay, this is like, probably thought it was too good to be true, but then like, maybe it was real, so she didn't want to tell anyone if she maybe talked about it.

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  She knocked on the doors, because this is an apartment building, and she knocked on the doors and told the tenant she was not raising their rent. Um, so she was, she, she really thought she owned this. And then she realized she didn't, and then, um, there, there was a whole news story about her mistake, and then we, we eventually reached out to her and, and negotiated for a little while, and we, we bought it for, uh, a little more than she actually bought it for. So she got bailed out, and we, we were able to do a nice thing and still do this crazy project.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, so, did you find this alley from the news article? Is that how this all started?

• 1:02:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, we had, the, the, Patrick and our friend Theo and I, the three of us, we had been talking for like, a while before that about buying a different alley in San Francisco. Uh, but we, we couldn't end up buying that one, but we, we saw this news, we were like, oh, this is perfect.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 07

  And we, we tried to, we tried to email her to, to, you know, get us, get us the offer, but Riley had to send, send a letter in, in the mail.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  And she got the letter physically?

• 1:02:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. Physical sale, that worked, yeah.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so, uh, it transfers to you, you, you own it, and then what, uh, what rights are you entitled to? Because clearly it's not the house next door, but you own something. Like, what exactly do you own?

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  We, we spent um a, a good amount of time with lawyers to figure out what actually is allowed.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  There's actually a car driving right at us right now.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  If you need to move, you can show us wherever.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  What neighborhood is this, by the way?

• 1:02:57Speaker 06

  This is in the Sunset, uh, which is like twenty fourth and uh. Kirkville. Yeah, three fourth and Kirkville.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  Certain middle Sunset. All right, live, live on air. There's a car coming.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  There's a car coming down the alley. Okay, so it's.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  So this is actually, this is actually a great question because we, we uh, yeah. Live demo here. We, so we, we legally can't block the alley, so we are obliged to move. Um, that is actually in tandem with the question you guys just asked. Yeah, we, we can't block it. Um, cars have uh, the right to drive down it because there's, there's easements here. Um, but we do have the right to paint anything on the surface of the street.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:33Speaker 06

  And we also can give um, the alley a name.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:36Speaker 06

  Um, so yeah, it's, it's.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Is there already a sign? Does the alley have a name? Has it historically had a name?

• 1:03:43Speaker 06

  No, so it um, it, Google Maps calls it Dirt Alley. We think that some editor randomly added that like a couple of years ago, but it's nowhere else.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:51Speaker 06

  It says that name. No official name.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Okay. And then, and then is there any square footage that anyone could build on? Is it, or is it just the actual road?

• 1:04:02Speaker 06

  It's, it's just the road. Yeah, we have, we have, it's literally, it's, it's literally like eight feet wide and yeah, nothing else, so.

• 1:04:08John Coogan?

  So do you have to?

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  And, and the, and the aura of, you know, if, if you become the owner of this, of having an alley named after you in the great city of San Francisco.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, take us through the process to actually auction this, set up the website, draw demand. How did all this play out?

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  Totally, yeah. So when, when, when we, when we first bought it, it was, it was actually Dirt Alley, right? Like there was, there was nothing on it. So, so first we had to pave it. Uh, and so we, we, we found some pavers, uh, you know, and they paved it, uh, eighty feet of it or so. Uh, you know, built the website in, in, in a weekend, I think, uh, with, with our friend Theo, uh, who's, who's helping us with the project. And um, yeah, and then, and then we, we, we thought about how to go live and I don't know if you want to say more. Yeah, yeah, I think this has been cool because like the, the art side of it, like people can go to PaintersStreet.com, it actually just ended five minutes ago. Uh, but for like the, during the weekend, people could submit little like forty-eight by forty-eight pixel drawings. And we have space to paint like twelve hundred of them on the street. And that's like totally free and then to to kind of cover the entire project and be a little

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  more like capitalistic, we we auction off the naming rights. So that ends in like 55 minutes or so. And yeah.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  So the full street is going to be painted with this this full alley, like this whole mural of everyone that picked something?

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  And this was free? It was it was basically anyone that wanted to could go in. Was was this inspired by Reddit, the place, that idea?

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's been the huge inspiration. That's something really cool to see. So yeah, we're kind of reviving that and making it I R O and S F.

• 1:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Talk, talk about the expectations because when when we first chatted about this, we were like, well, we'll be, we'll be, we'll be the early bidder to to at least make sure you guys get your money out. And then by the time you actually sent us the the auction, it was already well, well, well above. So how's the response been?

• 1:06:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's been because we were, we were kind of stressed because we're like, putting a lot of money on the line. And we're like, we either, this will either like flop and like, or it'll actually do really well. And it has done really well, which is, which is good. Right now, the the highest bidder is WordPress. WordPress Way. WordPress Way, 135 K, which is, which is insane.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  And how is the auction going to work at the end? Is it going to be like, I forget the terminology of it, but if somebody places a new winning bid within the last, let's say, minute, does it extend the auction? Are you expecting if like, are people circling now? Or I feel, I feel like I saw Josh Browder. I know that Josh is probably thinking, I'm going to wait until the final minute and come in with the top offer. But how, what's the dynamic going to work like?

• 1:06:46Speaker 06

  So in the last five minutes, if somebody bids, then it gets extended by another five minutes until until it ends. So it'll be a while.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  And then once the auction closes, what's the process like to actually rename it? Have you, have you traced through, like, what does it take to update Google Maps, Apple Maps, Waze, all the different mapping features? Do you think that would be pretty easy? Or is it, is it like, is there like a self-serve portal for like renaming streets? How do you prove this?

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  There is, um, this is a unique street because it's privately owned.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:07:17Speaker 06

  And as the owners, we, we, kind of the source of truth for a name like this is the sign itself. So putting up a sign and then we can, I think Google Maps, like you take a photo or something and you submit the edit and it should appear soon. I actually, when I was in high school, I, um, maybe I shouldn't share this on the internet, but I, I, uh, as like a senior Frank, I installed a street sign like on an unnamed alley in my hometown, named after my high school track coach. And, um, it got renamed on Google Maps and it's been like five years as this road has been on there.

• 1:07:47John Coogan?

  And it's still on there.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, five years later, the, yeah. Like people think it's real. It's really funny. The mayor has mentioned it in a, in a meeting before. Yeah.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  Did you, uh, did you have to do anything to sort of, uh, I mean, these projects, they always run the risk of like vandalization, basically. I'm looking at, someone clearly tried to paint Wrong Way on the street, although they couldn't quite get all the upvotes to land the way they wanted. So it's a little bit out of order, but, uh, did you have a process for, uh, reviewing submissions? Or was this all community led? Like, how did you think about the risk of someone putting up something that was like offensive?

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, we had, we had some attempts at this, but, but we, we had some automated stuff to remove it. And then we were, you know, the entire time it's been up since Thursday, we've been manually reviewing it. You know, as a team, we have a group chat and we're just, you know, reviewing it and, and someone's taking the turn. And wake up in the morning and there's some stuff we're moving, but it's not, it's not been so bad. It's been, the internet has been pretty friendly to us. It's relative to how, how bad it could be.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  It gets crazy. I remember, uh, didn't Justin Bieber put out a post on like, I'll go wherever the audience votes me for my next tour and they tried to send him to North Korea.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  It's a famous example of like the internet going wild. At the same time, Bodie McBoatface, very successfully named Boat, you know, everyone enjoyed that one. Give us an update on some of the other projects. How is the, uh, the Pokemon Go Payphone project going these days?

• 1:09:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, that ended a few weeks ago. Basically, I had gotten a list of all the payphones in California. There's still like a few thousand at work.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:17Speaker 06

  And then made like a Pokemon Go type game where you have to go to different payphones. You can claim them by calling a number and yeah, like three or 400 payphones were called from. And it was really, really cool to see people go out and find them all.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  And there was a leaderboard, but no specific prize?

• 1:09:36Speaker 06

  No, no prize. Yeah, just the memories.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Who won? How many calls did they make? How much did they travel?

• 1:09:45Speaker 06

  This girl named Maggie won. She won by one point.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:09:48Speaker 06

  And yeah, she was driving all over the state, it seemed like. There was a lot of phones. I think I nerdsniped quite a few people, which is cool to see.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  What other projects are on your plate right now? Are you still working on the J suite or is that project sort of done at this point? I know that there's a whole documentary you can talk about, but what else is in your world?

• 1:10:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, Gmail has been pretty crazy. There's like 15 or so people that have helped in some way for that project. And it's kind of died down now. Maybe there'll be some resurgence in the Epstein files, maybe we'll see. But yeah, that's been really, really crazy to see. Project that I'm probably going to drop this weekend is we scraped a bunch of data about the US, like how much money the US government spends and will hopefully make like a Spotify rap style. Like, oh, here's how much you paid in taxes this year. Like, oh, this much, this many dollars went towards like defense or social security or things like that. So that'll be cool to see.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Sure. I'm sure that'll make a lot of people really happy.

• 1:10:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. It's crazy to see. Like, I'm like, oh, actually, like, I kind of, you know, seeing these actual numbers, like where things actually get spent on, like, I feel like it just makes you think a different way.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, in general, like with something like that, Spotify rap works so well because people screenshot it, they share it. How do you think about the user-generated viral loop for these projects? Is that like a key piece of the idea phase? You think about, okay, how can I actually create some sort of flywheel for generating attention? Or is this just like, sometimes you get lucky and people share and it's sort of an afterthought?

• 1:11:33Speaker 06

  I think it's fun thinking about like, I mean, like the alley project, it's just like a fun idea. Like, we were actually talking at like a party like a year ago.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41Speaker 06

  And I was like, oh, there's some alleys that get foreclosed on in SF, like, it'd be funny.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  It'd be a big ball line.

• 1:11:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I said it as a joke, but then Patrick and Theo were like, let's actually do it. And then there was a girl that was like in law school at the party, we were talking to her about like the legality of it. And then it just, it took a while to actually make it happen, but like, it's just kind of fun for us. And then thinking about how to actually make it go viral is also like a, kind of a secondary thing, but it is, I think the framing is so important for these sorts of things and like, we also wanted something cool. Like, this is kind of just a cool, like, thing to do for SF, like, it's cool putting SF on the map and doing things like this. Especially when there's like, yeah, I think, I think we're really lucky that these sorts of things can get funded too. I think SF is a very special place for that.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  What kind of inbound, what kind of inbound pitches do you guys get at this point? Like, I'm sure people are DMing you, like, hey, I found this weird kind of anomaly. I think, I think, I think you could, you know, something like, like an alley. Uh, is there an inbound flywheel yet?

• 1:12:39Speaker 06

  There's all sorts of weird things, I don't know, like, someone's like, yeah, we have like a tank in SF, like, ideas for that, like, there's like, there's like a lot of weird things.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm expecting you guys to, to figure out some mechanism to, like, effectively take over a country at some point. Maybe that's the next step.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  I wouldn't put it past you. Uh, well, congratulations. Where can people go to actually bid?

• 1:13:00Jordi Hays?

  Paintastreet.com slash auction. Forty-six minutes, twenty-eight seconds left. We're gonna be keeping our eye on this.

• 1:13:08John Coogan?

  And it's still at WordPress.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  As it counts down. Uh, yeah, I'm very interested to see how people react when there's only, when there's only a few minutes left.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, this will be very fun. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come, give us the update and chat with us. Uh, congratulations on a huge success. I mean, I, this is, uh, well, well above, uh, I mean, a hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, that seems well, uh, above what you paid and you should be able to recoup all the costs. Do you have a plan for what to do with the money?

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, not gonna use it for ourselves, I'll be clear, we're gonna, um, we'll, it'll take some money to paint the actual mirror on the street, but there'll definitely be something left over, we'll just keep it for the next project of this sort, in San Francisco, some kind of IRL project here.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Uh, well, what a fun project, thanks for coming on and sharing with us.

• 1:13:57Speaker 06

  Congratulations to you guys as well, it's crazy that we're coworkers now.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're colleagues. Yeah, we're gonna be up in SF next Tuesday, let's hang in person.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to do a show from the alley at some point.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  That'll be amazing.

• 1:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Great, hang guys.

• 1:14:10John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:14:14John Coogan?

  Um, the, uh, have you seen this map of the surface of Venus? Did you know that Venus has land surface?

• 1:14:22Jordi Hays?

  I did not.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Uh, the land surface of Venus has some insane RPG world potential. Someone needs to vibe code a video game where you can go run around on this, or play some sort of 4X game. Uh, yeah, someone says, "Hasbro's really messing up not releasing Risk Venus." Um, uh, there's another, there's another cool AI project that launched from Netflix. Uh, there's a video here showing their new project Void. Uh, the AI removes objects from videos, uh, but it even corrects the physics after the objects or people are removed, and there's a demo in the comments here. Um, so, so you can see that, that they, that the

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  bottom is the, uh, the, the element that's being removed, and so if you have the, the, the kettlebell is deforming the pillow, once the AI removes that, which is often a very, very time-intensive VFX task, the physics of how the scene would have played out if that character had not been in the scene are then, uh, you know, recalculated. And so, the duck, not only is the duck not being smashed, the duck just appears like normal. And, uh, this is just a, a project that, um, will, if you've ever done any of this type of work, it's, uh, it's incredibly cumbersome, and so, um, I think this will be adopted very, very quickly. Uh, Nishan says, "He had a use case four years ago, a

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  big Hollywood VFX, uh, company came to us." The company I was working with and asked us to remove freckles and pimples from the face of actors and actresses 4K movie footage. At the time, we really struggled and failed to do it. If it was now, we would have easily tackled the problem. And there's so many examples of this. The physics weight, the physics correction part, removing stuff from video isn't new, but making the background actually behave correctly is a completely different problem. And so this is a huge, huge move for the VFX industry in Hollywood.

• 1:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Also, is this, has, does Netflix have a history of contributing to?

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think so. They've done, yeah, they've done, I mean, they've done a lot of, they've done a lot of standard setting around cinema camera gear. They were a big proponent of the black magic ecosystem, I believe. Great, like, price per value for shooting a film and delivering in 4K, which is something that they sort of mandate across their entire ecosystem, but can be cumbersome for creators if they have to go shoot on a very expensive cinema camera. They've done a lot of stuff there. And then, of course, they acquired that AI company from Ben Affleck, I believe. Wasn't that the story?

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  And I don't know, it's possible that there were some researchers from that team that bled over onto this project, although this seems like it was in flight for longer than before. I agree, Corridor Crew needs to do a video on that feature. That would be very cool to watch them road test it and see, you know, where the boundaries are because I'm sure it doesn't work in every possible scenario. The demo footage is always going to be the best, but very, very cool. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest, Aditya Bandy from Noon in the waiting room. Let's bring Aditya in. How are you doing?

• 1:17:23Speaker 08

  Hey, hey, John, hey, Charlie. I'm doing good. How are you folks?

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  We're doing great.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 1:17:28John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Since this is the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:17:33Speaker 08

  Absolutely, yeah. Thank you for having me. My name is Aditya Bandy. I am the co-founder of Noon. And yeah, I'm, you know, originally, you know, from India. I moved here to the Bay area in 2015 as part of my first startup, getting acquired by Yahoo. I'm a product designer turned product manager and a second time founder. You know, I have a co-founder. His name is Kushagra. He's also a product designer turned second time founder. Yeah.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  What was the first company?

• 1:18:03Speaker 08

  So we were actually, you know, back in 2013, there was this problem of like rendering PDFs and Word documents inside apps.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:12Speaker 08

  And basically, I was building this company called Bookpad out of Bangalore. And we can render 13 plus formats in any app. So someone like Dropbox could integrate with us and start rendering documents. So that's the company we built and Yahoo bought it for Yahoo Mail.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Speaker 08

  So we became part of the whole attachment layer for Yahoo Mail.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, so if you're in Yahoo Mail and you need to open a PDF, it just opens in the browser.

• 1:18:34Speaker 08

  Yes, Word document.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  Is, how much of that is a technical challenge? And then how much of that is just sort of dealing with like, you know, Adobe IP? Because I imagine that like Adobe has products and they maintain a standard, but you can use some of it, but there's pieces that you can't. Like, what were the decision-making criteria around building the product there?

• 1:18:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, it was very complex. Like, you know, if you, basically, all of these formats were not made for cloud or for browser. They were built in 1980s. Like, if you open up any PDF or a Word document, it's insane how complex they look inside. So we had to build a rendering engine. We had to build a conversion layer that understands these documents and tries to recreate them for the cloud. So, or, so that's basically a very technical challenge for us to do that, yeah. And we just were very, you know, young and happy and trying to solve something very, very complex. And that just made us very happy.

• 1:19:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. So walk me through the decision to start the next company. What was that like? What was the, okay, this is time to run it back?

• 1:19:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, yeah, my co-founder and I, we've been product designers all our lives. We love building products. And then we've been like observing the AI space. We've been like using design tools for the last 20 years of our lives, right? Like, from grad school. And then for the most part, like, you know, all the tools that exist in the market, like, they're all. Graphic design tools, like you can design the visuals of the product, but not, not the product directly. Uh, so, so designer is limited to designing the visuals and then they hand off the visuals to the engineer to build it. That's how it was always done.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:17Speaker 08

  And the moment AI coding tools came into the market, everyone started realizing, oh, I can build, I can do the functional aspect of it as well. And then they started realizing how amazing it is to do both together.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:20:28Speaker 08

  But all of that was happening in multiple tools, it's all broken.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:32Speaker 08

  And that's, that was the idea behind this, like, hey, why is it happening in multiple tools? Why can't it all happen in one tool? Where someone who wants to design and build products can just do it all in one tool?

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, I mean, when you, when you hear about vibe coding projects, you, you hear about like insane lines of code, so much, so much functionality, like instantiated, just to, uh, you know, a cou- a couple of sentences dropped in a prompt. Um, what changes about the product design workflow in a world where sort of the entire underlying structure of the product can change on a dime all of a sudden?

• 1:21:13Speaker 08

  Uh, so the, the, the, the tools that are very text-based, um, so the problem is like they're very limited in, in how you can say something, right?

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:22Speaker 08

  Uh, now describe me a painting.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 08

  Let's say you start describing the painting, you can never fully describe the painting, right?

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:28Speaker 08

  Uh, that's the problem with text-based, um, editors or text-based design tools.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  I mean, you hear a lot of people, uh, sharing that even just for like one-off, open-cawed tasks, like texting an image or screenshot from their phone along with a prompt, just to give a little bit more, hey, here's a screenshot of my calendar. Uh, I'm essentially exporting a bunch of information via PNG, uh, which is a richer format than people thought, I guess. Um, and so, uh, how, how closely do you want to link the visual design elements, the interaction elements, the logic of how things fit together? Um, because, you know, like, we've, we've already sort of transitioned out of the, uh, you know, uh, visual designer in a pixel-perfect, like layered Photoshop file

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  into something completely new and, and, and dynamic, but that, that, uh, that barrier is bleeding and, and, uh, or is, uh, is, is becoming fuzzier, basically.

• 1:22:26Speaker 08

  And then the way we look at it is if you if you're trying to understand like what what are we trying to do? We are first of all, what we're saying is like we work on top of your product code. So essentially, we don't do any MCP, we don't need to do any sort of like any middle layer like Claude or Codex. We don't need any of that. We directly sit on top of your product code. Yeah, code base. And then then what happens is like the designers or anyone who's working on the product can see that that code visually rendered on the canvas.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:54Speaker 08

  So now you can understand, okay, this is what my product looks like in different screens and different components.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:59Speaker 08

  And then from there, you have a lot of control to, you know, refine it, make it better, create new screens, create new features. Um. So and then you don't need multiple tools.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:10Speaker 08

  That's the second advantage. You're not switching between multiple tools. Things are not getting lost in translation.

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:15Speaker 08

  Um. You know, all the details are preserved.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Yes, so walk me through. Oh, sorry. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 08

  Yeah. And the last thing is like you work on both the functional and visual layer.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:24Speaker 08

  So you it's up to you. You you you build you build the visual first and add functionality.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:29Speaker 08

  You could you can control both of them, you know, very, very, you know, in a fine-tuned manner.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you're thinking about just something as simple as like making a CTA bigger and you're dragging the size of a button, that can be quicker in a visual format than in a prompt where maybe you wind up describing the number of pixels that you want it to be or say a little bit bigger. Okay, a little bit smaller. It can be tricky. But what is the flow of actions that are happening behind the scenes once I actually resize a button, for example?

• 1:24:02Speaker 08

  Yeah. So let's take the button as an example, right? So first of all, the button that you're seeing on the canvas.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:06Speaker 08

  It's not a rectangle or shape. It is real button code behind. So that's why it's getting rendered on canvas for you.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:12Speaker 08

  Then then when you're actually, you know, trying to edit the button visually or maybe using some, you know, AI there or maybe directly you're doing it, the code is getting edited in real time. So essentially, you can think of us as like a visual code editor. So you edit the code visually. So you're kind of building a code editor from scratch that can be edited visually.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh. How are you thinking about going after customers? Do you want to be in the enterprise or more self-serve? Like where where's the beachhead?

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And how how much how much of this round was based on uh traction to date versus long-term opportunity and and scale of the market?

• 1:24:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, I think for us, like, you know, we're a design tool, design tools. People want to try it first before even thinking of like before thinking of paying it or getting like into a team. So we're always going to be a free tier, use it for free. If you, if you like it, then pay for it. That's our model. So we're going to, we're going to be, we're going to be bottoms up that way. But in terms of the traction, like we're currently like, you know, a lot of some of the best known tech companies in the Bay Area. We have pilots with them and they're going live. So a lot of that has helped us like first build the product with their feedback. And then, and then do pilots with them to make sure like, you know, it's working for, for a team, for serious work.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about some of the angel investors in the round. How much did you raise?

• 1:25:41Speaker 08

  So we raised forty four million overall.

• 1:25:50Speaker 08

  It's an amazing, amazing journey for us.

• 1:25:54Speaker 08

  And, and some of the, some of the investors that we have is like first round capital chemistry. F four scribble elevation, these are the VCs. But the most exciting part for me and my co-founder is that we have some of the best design and product minds in the industry. Part of the fundraise, right? Solio, the second designer at Facebook, investor in Vanta, Popplicity, Versal. Then we have Katie Del, head of design at Stripe, Scott Belsky, founder of Behance. Then we have Mike Davidson, head of design at Microsoft AI. Andy Morissette, head of design at Popplicity. Ian Silver, head of design at OpenAI. These are just some of the names, like we have a lot.

• 1:26:36Speaker 08

  We didn't share the full list actually for fundraise, it's just some small, yeah.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. How are you, how are you tracking the way design is changing in the era of vibe coding? It feels like more and more small businesses, more companies are building custom software. A lot of it is sort of like. Internal facing, so design is more of an afterthought. But you have to imagine that if the software is valuable and provides growth, a growth vector for the business, at some point, you're going to wind up with design challenges and trade offs.

• 1:27:16John Coogan?

  Is, are you thinking that this will be like a tool that's eventually dropped on top of like a vibe coded system? Or do you think this was more of like an entry point into a company building new tools internally?

• 1:27:30Speaker 08

  So all three types, right? Let's say the first type, an existing company, big product, let's say, you know, like Spotify or someone else like Dropbox. They have an existing product, they can, they can use the tool to build their next feature. The vibe coding, if you, let's say you're a site, you're doing a site project, you vibe coded something on Lovable or some other, some other vibe coding tool. You can build, you can bring in your project here almost instantly and start designing and working on it better. And you have the third one, you're starting from scratch, you can of course like start from scratch very easy on tool and then, and then build your product. So can you kind of support all entry points? It's a very multi-purpose tool that way.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about business model? It, this feels like very logical for seat based and yet there's been so much pushback around the seat based model. You're sort of starting from scratch, so you can pick your, your monetization method. What are you thinking of for the next couple of years?

• 1:28:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think right now, at least like we've, we're working on the pricing model. We're talking to a lot of customers to understand like what works for them. We don't want to break their budgets, right? Like there are certain budgets assigned already for this. So TBD, you know, we'll, we'll soon publish our pricing on the website when we show the product as well. So very, very soon you'll see, you'll see the product go, you know, on the website and the, and the pricing going live.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on pulling it around together.

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon.

• 1:28:56Speaker 08

  One, I have one thing, like I also have, I got a gun.

• 1:28:59John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, you have a gun?

• 1:29:00Speaker 08

  I have a gun for you.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Hit that gun.

• 1:29:03Speaker 08

  Because we've.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't hear it.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  I think Zoom, I think the Zoom noise cancellation just completely killed the gun. We'll hit the gun. We'll hit our gun.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:29:23Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on. I'm sure you'll be back on.

• 1:29:25John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon. Congrats to the whole team.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Name a street. We are counting down the minutes. How long do we have? Twenty-nine minutes. Wordpress is still in the lead.

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  Still at number one at $135,000.

• 1:29:45John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Zach Shore from Hermias. He's returning to the show with some massive news. Zach, how are you? Where are you?

• 1:29:55Speaker 09

  What's up? Great. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  This is your second outdoor guest today. It's fully spring. Spring is here. Riley was in San Francisco. I assume you're in Georgia?

• 1:30:06Speaker 09

  No, close. I'm in Virginia. I'm at the Defense Action Forum, the JP Morgan.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:30:11Speaker 09

  Event. So, good place to be when you're announcing a $350 million unicorn round.

• 1:30:18Speaker 09

  There it is. That's what I was waiting for.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:30:21Speaker 09

  Thanks, fellas. And congrats to you as well.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 1:30:25Speaker 09

  Big moves for the TVPN, fellas.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  Big moves, big moves.

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  What's new? What's? It's been a minute since you've been on the show.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Give us, give us all the updates.

• 1:30:35Speaker 09

  Yeah, guys, a lot. I mean, obviously, we've got the raise, but the raise is a function of the milestone. So, you know, we flew our second aircraft in nine months, which is pretty unheard of. The first one we flew last year in like May of '25. And then we just flew our MkII aircraft. That's an F-16-sized unmanned aircraft. So, you know, fighter jet speed, fighter jet size, thousands of pounds of payload, thousands of pounds of thrust. We're slated to fly it again on Friday. There you go, exactly. That was out in white sands. And, you know, imminently push this thing to supersonic and really just start, really start building the heavy systems that the country needs. The second aircraft, which is a MkII aircraft, is in production right now in Atlanta. And then we just announced

• 1:31:16Speaker 09

  also that we're expanding our headquarters out to Los Angeles in the Gundo.

• 1:31:21John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:31:21Speaker 09

  And we're going to build our MkIII platform out there. So, yeah, we'll be neighbors. I'll come see you guys.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  All right. What with autonomous jets is, how does, how is the development and just like R&D process different? I imagine, I imagine there's a bunch of advantages because you're not worried about a human life. Obviously, there's still a bunch of risk and you don't want to, you know, crash. Crash, the thing that the team worked so hard to build, but the the iteration cycle feels insane based on on how you've described it. And so I'm curious how.

• 1:31:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, you you kind of nailed it, right? I mean, taking a person out allows you to take a lot more technical risk. Just like full stop. I can lawn dart something intentionally, right? Just to push the envelope on a vehicle to really.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  What is lawn dart?

• 1:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Is that?

• 1:32:11Speaker 09

  Yeah, just like. Right?

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Speaker 09

  If we need to, that's not our goal.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Speaker 09

  You could, right? If I really want to find the edges of performance and there's nobody on board, you you have that, you can take that kind of risk. Um, and then you can iterate faster. There's also, I can take all of the systems that exist on an aircraft that are there for human survival, the oxygen, the ejection seat, all the command and control, you know, capabilities, the the human, human machine interface screens, the the um stick, the throttle, all that. I can pull that all out and I can put in more payload, more fuel and just continue to drive uh more capability for the warfighter. I mean, we just saw um that incredible mission to to rescue those uh F-15 pilot and copilot in in uh in Iran. And ideally, you know, your vehicle like this, you don't have to do a rescue mission. We don't even have to

• 1:33:00Speaker 09

  put ourselves in those positions and ask American men and women to to take that kind of risk. So there's you know, operational utility to the unmanned platform and there's a significant accelerant to development because of the risk we can take.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, take us through the different uh aircraft that you've built so far. Uh, because the and then remind us of the goal of

• 1:33:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:33:20John Coogan?

  How how fast are we going? Is is like miles per hour the correct benchmark for each subsequent test? I imagine that you're trying to make each one faster than the last, basically?

• 1:33:29Speaker 09

  That's that's correct. I think, you know, we we speak in terms of Mach, right? So Mach one being supersonic.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:34Speaker 09

  Um, but so the first aircraft was not really an aircraft. Uh, we called it Turkey. It was sort of a actually, no, before that was Emu, excuse me.

• 1:33:42John Coogan?

  Emu.

• 1:33:42Speaker 09

  A flightless bird, right? So that had a jet engine and uh it had a bunch of the avionics and the sort of radio links to just show that we could build an integrated team, build some hardware, hook up the engine and get this thing sort of taxiing down the runway. We did that in in 24. In 25, we built Turkey, uh, which was a flying bird, but turkeys don't aren't meant to fly. And so that aircraft flew at um Edwards and we demonstrated we could rapidly build a jet powered aircraft. It was a 10,000 pound airplane, had fixed landing gear. It was a GE JD5 engine, uh, which is the same engine that you see on the jet trainers that uh American men and women train on. And that was in May of 25 and now we're on Mark II and we call that aircraft Eagle. And this is where it gets kind of fun, right? This is where you start to see what I would call product utility.

• 1:34:26Speaker 09

  So this aircraft is the size of an F-16, maybe a little bit bigger, fully unmanned. It's got a 30,000 pound thrust engine. To give you a sense of comparison, like the CCA program, those engines are roughly 3,000 pounds of thrust. So you're looking at 10x more power, about 10x more payload. And just a totally different problem space that we're working in. And the first aircraft of this series, we're building three of these Mark II Eagles. The first one we flew, that's what you showed the video of, this one will go supersonic. So the premise of this aircraft is demonstrate that the vehicle design, the shape, they call it the outer mold line, can get through something called transonic. So transonic is that window right before supersonic. And there's a lot of very unique things that happen with physics, for lack of a better term,

• 1:35:10Speaker 09

  right before you go through that supersonic window in terms of shock waves and stability for the platform. And so you really want to demonstrate that your plane can make it through that, you know, 0.99 Mach to 1.1, 1.2 Mach window. That's a huge risk window that we're going to unlock here shortly. The next vehicle, Mark 2.2, will have some additional pieces of proprietary technology on it. Our proprietary pre-cooler, which is a technology that sits in front of the engine, will be on that next aircraft, that aircraft's being manufactured right now in Atlanta. And that will allow that airplane to do Mach 2 plus. So now we start to really get into that really, really high speed regime. As an example, you know, the F-15 is the fastest fighter jet in the world right now.

• 1:35:50Speaker 09

  That aircraft in a dive with nothing on it will do maybe 2.5, maybe, maybe Mach 2.5. So we'll do, we're going to go for that number straight and level with this aircraft. And then the third aircraft in this series is going to be Mach 3. And that aircraft is going to be manufactured in the new El Segundo facility. And we'll be flying somewhere around the middle of 27.

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Talk about the actual technology.

• 1:36:17Speaker 09

  Speed is just insane.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:19Speaker 09

  Speed of R and D.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 09

  It's why. Interative design, guys, I mean, right? Like, continue to build hardware so that as I am build, as I am flying the current airplane, I am building my next airplane, right? And so on and so forth. I mean, this is SpaceX over and over again, right? This is SpaceX for aviation, or as we say SpaceX sideways. So, you know, that's how you can take this kind of, uh, this hardware risk and continue to go. And to your original question, our goal is Mach 5, right? That remains our goal. But the key technical unlock in here is actually Mach 3. Because in order to unlock our next propulsion approach, we need to demonstrate that you can get a turbine engine, this case, the F-10229, the F-16 engine. We need to demonstrate that I can fly that engine at Mach 3 for a period of time. And so that's what this series of aircraft are going to do.

• 1:37:04Speaker 09

  And then we've also got some pretty exciting, um, you know, capabilities that we're going to be able to offer to the warfighter, uh, with this platform at the same time.

• 1:37:12John Coogan?

  How focused are you on the, on the, on the defense industry specifically? Because there must be demand from commercial, there's demand from the AI world for this technology. Uh, how are you thinking about the trade offs there?

• 1:37:27Speaker 09

  Yeah, great question. So, commercial is one of those things where, yes, this technology eventually will naturally lend itself to a commercial application, but we're a ways away from that. I mean, if we think about just aviation historically, you start with the, the defense environment. Think about how jets and planes were even adopted. I mean, the Department of Defense is going to take more risk and going to, you know, help develop inherently just by operating these systems, these technologies to lower the complexity, lower the risk on them, so that they can be eventually adopted in a commercial environment. But the other problem is, when you work in the commercial aviation, the, the flight certification requirements for a new commercial engine or a new commercial airframe are steep.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:04Speaker 09

  For a good reason, right? We're putting people onboard.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:06Speaker 09

  So to have the economic viability to pursue that certification process requires you to have a stable business that's got robust economics. So for us, even if. You know, we do eventually want to go after commercial. You have to build a viable defense business first just to have the economic scalability, not to mention the expertise on the platforms. And so for us, you know, I certainly want to do commercial work eventually. And I think these propulsion systems will lend themselves, but we are a defense company, right? That is our bread and butter. That's where we're focused. We're not interested in some of the, you know, the energy plays on the propulsion. We are really just true north unmanned, high Mach, high altitude systems for the warfighter. And as those systems come online, we will be, you know, the arguably the best aircraft manufacturer in the world, and that will start lending that to other aircraft problems.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  Talk about the actual technology that enables you to go Mach 3, Mach 4, Mach 5, ramjet, scramjet. What is the, what's the lineage here? How much of this has been used in the past? What are you inventing from scratch? What are you pulling off the shelf and leveraging?

• 1:39:09Speaker 09

  Great question. I mean, a lot of what we're doing has been done before. We're trying to stay out of the world of science problems, which is where you get into the scramjets Mach 6, 7, and stay in the world of engineering problems. In science problems, things have to be invented that don't exist yet. Specific materials, production processes. Ramjets have been around since the 50s. NASA did a lot of work on this. You see these on missiles currently and all over the place. And so ramjets are very well understood and well tested. And so what we're doing is taking a different approach with the propulsion system and using something called a turbine-based combined cycle or TBCC. And this is an engine type that's a mix of multiple propulsion cycle, propulsion systems. NASA sort of led the way on this. And we demonstrated this propulsion cycle on the ground in about 2022.

• 1:39:54Speaker 09

  And I think DARPA is the only other group that's done this. And so us and DARPA are the only people who've demonstrated this propulsion cycle. And it's got basically three components to it. You got your inlet and the air comes in and the first thing that happens is we've got a proprietary precooler that cools the air down and slows, slows the flow. It then hits the turbine. So in this case, the F-100 229, the jet engine. So we're not building a new jet engine. Now, the challenge has been with ramjets, for a ramjet to light, the air has to be moving through at Mach 3. So how do you get the system? How do you get that air flowing in Mach 3? Typically, we've seen it in missiles with rockets and you boost it, right? You use solid rocket or liquid rocket, but that has a couple of problems to it. Number one,

• 1:40:36Speaker 09

  You have to really harden the system to handle all those Gs. And you're not going to have big wings because of drag. So you're really looking at systems that are not really optimized for flight. And they're just one way. So with an aircraft, you can have a more graceful acceleration. We are able to basically tune that jet engine, that F-100, to get Mach 3 airflow. It goes through the ramjet. And then I can light the ramjet. Now, once I light the ramjet, I cocoon off the turbine engine. I route the air around it directly into the ramjet. Now I can fly Mach 3 to Mach 5. When I decelerate, I do that whole system in reverse. I open the doors, the air comes through the turbine engine, the ramjet shuts off, and the traditional jet engine takes over and takes me from Mach 2 back down to the ground.

• 1:41:20Speaker 09

  And this is why it's called a turbine-based combined cycle, because I'm combining these two propulsion genres. And it allows us to use mature technology to unlock these flight conditions. And you won't get much above Mach 5. That is hypersonic is that line at Mach 5. And we don't need to get much above Mach 5. There's two reasons. One, survivability and the analysis we've seen, it's overkill. And you're going to find yourself in physics land that's going to cost you more and take you a lot more time to run up that curve. And also, you get in the Mach 6, 7 world, now you're in science problem world. That's scram jets, which are still more new. That's CMCs for very bespoke material sciences. I can have a hot vehicle that's titanium or Inconel or steel, and I can mass produce that to handle the heat and temperatures.

• 1:42:05Speaker 09

  And so what we're doing is taking a lot of old information and we're modernizing it. And for that matter, the SR-71 had an aircraft called the D-21. You can Google this. It was a drone that sat on top of the Blackbird, right on the back between the engines. And once the aircraft was above Mach 3, they turned that aircraft on. It was only a ramjet, no moving parts. The air flowed through that ramjet. They lit the ramjet and the aircraft flew off. And it went Mach 3 plus for about 3,500 nautical miles. And so in this way, we can start accessing those conditions again, just like we did in the 50s and 60s.

• 1:42:40Jordi Hays?

  Was the D-21 a single-use, designed to fly reconnaissance?

• 1:42:48Speaker 09

  It was designed to fly reconnaissance, yep.

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  But then it would just ultimately crash and burn?

• 1:42:54Speaker 09

  It was supposed to return. They didn't end up going the full distance with it. They had a couple of successful test flights. They also had some bad flights where they had some challenges. You can look up the history. But more importantly, this concept was executed and validated in the 60s, right? And so we can take modern practices and all these learnings and sort of bring, bring the past forward and say, you know, speed is in vogue again. The introduction of ICBMs and stealth technologies really took America's focus away from high-speed systems. And that's why nobody really worked on these things for about 60 years.

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  Question from the chat. There's a claim that China has a system that can go Mach 20. Do you know anything about that? Does that seem realistic or propaganda?

• 1:43:37Speaker 09

  It sounds like the South, it sounds like the South China Morning News, if anybody's aware of that.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:41Speaker 09

  That, that newspaper, there's a lot of claims. So, I mean, I'm not privy to anything that I would call, I'd call shenanigans on that.

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  Okay, last question. Talk about the decision to expand to El Segundo. Incredibly cool community. At the same time, three time zones away. It feels difficult to manage a team. Is it about talent? Is it about resources? What's the thesis?

• 1:44:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's talent. It's talent, talent and tacos. Talent and tacos, right? You've got the core engineering talent that knows how to iterate on hard, heavy hardware, heavy, high-speed hardware is really resident there and nowhere else. And, you know, ultimately, as much as the hardware we're building is exciting and innovative, the sort of the team we are reconstructing, reconstructing is really the unlock for this business. Because aviation has not seen this pace of iteration or these flight conditions in a generation. And so it's not like we can go and hire somebody from insert company that's done this before. We have to effectively take the best we can find from, you know, the closest parallel and then, you know, bring them into the aircraft world and say, take what you learned from, you know, innovating and

• 1:44:52Speaker 09

  and working quickly on rockets and now apply that to aircraft. And so if you really want that talent and you want to draw that talent, the best place in the world to be is El Segundo.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress and enjoy the rest of the conference. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:45:07Speaker 09

  All right, guys. Thanks so much.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have Hongwei Liu from Matapin in the waiting room. Let's bring them in to the ultra dome.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Still figuring out the transitions between gas.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  We're working on it.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  How you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:45:28Speaker 10

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:45:35Speaker 10

  Sure, John. My name is Hongwei. I'm one of the founders here at MapDin and we are mapping all of the indoors, one building at a time.

• 1:45:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:41Speaker 10

  From Waterloo, Canada.

• 1:45:43John Coogan?

  How are you mapping it? What is the sensor?

• 1:45:47Speaker 10

  So, look, there's low tech and there's high tech. You can download the MapDin scan app, grab any iPhone, grab any 360 camera these days and just walk through buildings.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Speaker 10

  Everyone thinks that that's what you have to do and you don't. The amazing thing is that 70,000 people have now mapped, you know, all sorts of stuff, schools, their own house, offices, malls, just by scanning in the piece of paper that's on every wall. I bet somewhere in that room of yours, there's an emergency escape app on the wall somewhere in the studio.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:46:18Speaker 10

  And you can take a photo of that and you can get it in. The problem, of course, is it's a picture. And so how do we turn that into vector data? How do we make that interoperable and useful to all the other apps that you already use and take for granted? That's what we're trying to do here at MapDin.

• 1:46:31Jordi Hays?

  What are all the different use cases for indoor mapping data?

• 1:46:38Speaker 10

  So, the one that, you know, I've become known for, because I've been at this for a while, is you know that touchscreen in the mall that you guys probably use at Santa Monica Place and stuff?

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 10

  That gives people directions?

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48Speaker 10

  That's us.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:46:50Speaker 10

  So we do that for, yeah, we do that for a third of the malls in the world. We do it for the Super Bowl, four years in a row. We do it at LAX, where you guys are, trying to make that airport experience a little bit better.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:00Speaker 10

  We think we touch about a third of Americans a year with our products. They probably wouldn't know it's us, but we're trying. And now increasingly, we're starting to be embedded in safety applications. We've mapped thousands of K-12 schools now in the United States, unfortunately, because when something that happens, you need a map of the inside for the good guys to know how to run inside.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, when I think about those customers, you mentioned malls, the Super Bowl, LAX, I feel like they have reasonable budgets. So is it about cost savings to use an image based on a floor plan as opposed to just walking around with a 360 camera? Because that doesn't feel that cumbersome when I think about the price of an Insta360 or a GoPro or even your phone. It feels like the data collection shouldn't be that cumbersome, but what is motivating the desire to sort of go lighter on the data collection side?

• 1:47:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, fair question. And first, I assure you, they all negotiate very hard. So to any customers listening, they got a good deal. But I think the hardest part about mapping the indoors is not mapping it once, but keeping it up to date. The goofy example is like Santa Claus moves every year in the mall at Christmas. So if you want to know where Santa Claus is going to be this Christmas, the only person who knows is the person on the ground planning Christmas at the mall in that back office. And if you wait until that's already happened and then you somehow try to scan it, it's too late. Never mind that it's private property and someone would escort you outside. So a lot of managing and mapping the indoors for you and I and for everyone else who needs

• 1:48:40Speaker 10

  that information is getting ahead and being able to plan ahead and managing that constant change. You can scrape the outdoors with a lidar sensor or with a satellite with a car. It's good for about five years. Even if you manage to scrape the 100 million buildings that are privately owned indoors, it's good for about five days. So how do we enable those folks to plan ahead?

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I mean, the tagline is Google Maps for the indoor spaces. Are you going to partner with Google? Are you going to partner with Apple Maps? Is there an API that you can just expose these things to? Because I imagine if I'm LAX, I pay you, I'd want the data to be as available as possible to my customers and patrons.

• 1:49:24Speaker 10

  I wish I could use that tagline. I'm glad you did, so I don't have to. But, look, I think from their perspective, and obviously I can't speak for Google and Apple, but, you know, Google wants better data so that they can serve more users. Apple wants better data so they can sell more phones.

• 1:49:42Speaker 10

  They, I think they're generally pretty happy when someone does all the hard work of mapping the indoors and makes that information accessible and standardized. So we publish a lot of data on behalf of our many clients, the LAXs of the world, the, you know, SoFi stadiums of the world, to platforms like that. I can't speak specifically to which ones and who, because they're all pretty sensitive about, like, this is my private property, you, Mr. Big Tech, can't have it. But to your point, you know, consumers need this information. It's on the wall, so we're just about standardizing the pipes and enabling building owners to publish their information.

• 1:50:20John Coogan?

  How do you think this interacts with the potentially coming robotics boom?

• 1:50:27Speaker 10

  I've been getting a lot of calls about that. Wouldn't surprise you, of course. So I think there's enough problems to solve outdoors for robotics that I'm, you know, I'm still kind of holding my breath for when this becomes more real indoors. There's more constraints, I'll just say that. If you, you know, we're only now solving for self-driving cars outside. It's been, what, 20 years since we've been talking about it? And that's actually a much simpler problem, right? Like, streets, buildings, lampposts, pylons. There's like, you know, far fewer things you have to recognize outdoors to be able to move around. Indoors, there's way more. And, and the training data is not actually easily available, because unless you're a Roomba,

• 1:51:10Speaker 10

  you can't just scan people's houses, and even if you could, it's incomplete. So, you know, we're, we're building up, we think, a pretty large training data set. We, you know, have seen our technology now deployed for Department of Homeland Security, various fire departments, police departments throughout the United States. But going, you know, I guess I'm sometimes accused of being too Canadian in that we don't, we don't sell ahead of reality. I think we're a couple of years out of, uh...

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  You gotta be like, we're going to map the inside of Saturn's moons soon. You gotta think like 50 years ahead.

• 1:51:46Speaker 10

  How about Mach 3 jets for starters? I'll do that first.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe airplane hangars, you know?

• 1:51:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, we're headed that way. I'll say this, if we don't pull it off, I don't know who would. We have by far the most amount of training at this point of the indoors, but we're doing it on behalf of our clients. And I really do think that the indoors belongs to the landlord, belongs to the people operating it. And so it's about who can enable them to realize that future.

• 1:52:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And to help their customers. Makes a ton of sense. Tell us, how much did you raise?

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  I love how you've you just got a third of the market. Like, it's just like, it is, it is such a, such a large, so much market share and, and those early, early pitches. Yeah, it's, it's a fascinating market overall. But anyway.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  Tell us about the round.

• 1:52:33Speaker 10

  Yeah. Well, my fiance hates that I don't like going to malls anymore, if you would believe it. It's really not fun.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  Going to the office?

• 1:52:40Speaker 10

  It just feels like working. Yeah. Oh dude, all right. We raised $24.5 million. Hey, there we go.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:52:51Speaker 10

  That's a lot bigger than the sales goal we have in our office. So thank you, man.

• 1:52:55John Coogan?

  It's a huge one.

• 1:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:52:57John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations on the progress and we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:53:03Speaker 10

  Love you guys.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Love you. Love you is a great sign off.

• 1:53:08Jordi Hays?

  That's a new exit.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  Our next guest is live here in the TVP in UltraDome with us, Zach Kukoff.

• 1:53:13Jordi Hays?

  I love you.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 1:53:14Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:53:15John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How you doing? Thank you.

• 1:53:18Zak Kukoff?

  Big, big day for you guys.

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  It has been far too long since you've been on the show. Last time we were talking.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Why are you in, why are you in LA? Why is a man like you in Los Angeles?

• 1:53:27Zak Kukoff?

  What does a man like me have to gain in Los Angeles? A nice tan, a little bit of relaxation.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Everyone who's joined the show has been outside. I mean, a few people, but it's, spring is fully in.

• 1:53:40Zak Kukoff?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, in full swing. Did you get snowed in in DC? Did you go through that crazy blizzard?

• 1:53:45Zak Kukoff?

  We had Snow Creek. So we were stuck.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 1:53:47Zak Kukoff?

  Snow Creek? I had never heard of this before Washington. It's the only east coast city I've ever seen. They haven't figured out how to plow snow. Because the snow, here's the problem with Washington. The snow lands, everybody just sits there and there's a wait for it to melt. So their only plan is to like help it gets warm.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  Work smarter, not harder.

• 1:54:03Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, except neither. They just let it sit there and it didn't melt and it stayed really cold for a week. And it merged into like a weird hard soft, hard soft, the water and the snow and somebody who's smarter than me can do like chemical side. But basically, once it melts and freezes over like four times in a row, it becomes this thing called snow creep and you're basically stuck and you can't leave your house. So we couldn't like drive basically for the better part of like two weeks.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 1:54:30Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, it was wonderful.

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  But how is business broadly? Reintroduce yourself, re- re- describe your role and then we can go into some of the hot topics.

• 1:54:40Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, I run a lobbying firm.

• 1:54:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:42Zak Kukoff?

  Lobbying firm, I run the tech practice of a lobbying firm. Firm's called Lewis Burke. We do science, tech, education. Wow, that's so nice. Wow, that should be in every room I walk into. They should always applaud for me. We do science, tech, education, healthcare. I run the tech side of the house.

• 1:55:01Zak Kukoff?

  Like, I was watching you guys on the way over.

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Taking the most like straightforward explanation.

• 1:55:05Zak Kukoff?

  I really like your jazz. I was like really into it. Anyway, I run the tech side of the house. So I lobby for venture firms, I lobby for private equity, I lobby for high net worth individuals, mostly who come out of venture, private equity, and then I lobby for a whole bunch of tech companies.

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  And specifically on the federal side?

• 1:55:20Zak Kukoff?

  On the federal side, that's right. So we do everything at the federal level.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  So give me your sort of postmortem on Big Beautiful Bill. That was the last thing we talked about.

• 1:55:29Zak Kukoff?

  Wow.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  What were the key decision points? I know the government was shut down for a while. There's a lot of back and forth. Like, how did it all shake out?

• 1:55:37Zak Kukoff?

  Okay, basically every, this is, it didn't used to be this way. It used to be in Washington that things operated, I wouldn't say smoothly, but like, go back to the 90s, West Wing, optimism, Newt Gingrich, Contract with America, Bill Clinton, like, yeah, we got a sound effect for that one. That's nice. And things pretty functioned pretty well. Now in Washington, basically every time something happens, it sets up the seed for the next issue. It's like if you only had the Treaty of Versailles over and over and over again, okay? So Big Beautiful Bill comes What happens after big beautiful bill, you lead up to the big conflict, which is around homeland security, ICE enforcement. And you basically have a variety of issues that come out. Most recently, you guys, I'm sure we're tracking Kristi Noem out, right?

• 1:56:19Zak Kukoff?

  At DHS. Others may be coming out soon too, right? You know, AG, many others in that case too. A lot of this stems from the inability to get the entire government funded, right? Big beautiful bill and by the way reconciliation reconciliation as a whole guaranteed funding for border enforcement for ICE, right? So when the Dems later come back and say, hey, I want to be able to stop some of these things that are happening in Minnesota and things like that. The only lever they have to pull is to stop funding DHS as a whole. That's why you get these airport shutdowns. That's why you get these super long lines at TSA and so on and so forth.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, but from a tech perspective, how many like all of that like flows through to whatever tech leaders want to happen in Washington? Just is slower, but what was on the top, what's on the top of the, the, the stack in terms of to do's in Washington for Silicon Valley broadly?

• 1:57:13Zak Kukoff?

  I mean, I will tell you it's less of a policy to do and the biggest political issue right now is probably the data center stuff. You guys are, I'm sure tracking, I'm sure people on talking about it. You saw the thing in Indiana, right? City councilman, it was horrible, terrible. I had 13 shots in his house. Okay. Putting aside how horrible that was, there is like a very broad bipartisan emerging consensus. That data centers rise, great energy costs, water and all sort and you know, create pollution and whatever. You saw like they increased heat temperatures for, you know, parking lots. A lot of that's not true, but because the perception of it is real. You have this big, huge armed basically opportunity for candidates who are populist sometimes, but opportunist always.

• 1:57:58Zak Kukoff?

  To come in and run on that issue in 28. So the big, the problem with tech right now in DC. Is you have a bunch of tech money coming in. You guys know, leading the future is the OpenAI associated super PAC. And public action or public for something along those lines is the anthropic aligned super PAC. Both have been putting tons of money into races like New York 12, I think with Boris, right? All sorts of people. Who have been either pro or anti data center and AI development as a whole. There are now hundreds of millions of dollars of tech money.

• 1:58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:29Zak Kukoff?

  Going to try to arm those. That's the big issue for tech. Like, if you want to get anything else done, you basically are saying, how do I play now in midterms, but also looking ahead to 28? Even if I'm not talking about data centers directly, to make sure my preferred candidates get in to actually open the doors for the things I want to be able to do.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And how much of the data center question is about research, education on those issues? Like, there was a full back and forth on the water issue. I think that one landed in a pretty good place. With energy, less so, because no one debates that these data centers use a ton of electricity. I mean, they're measured in electricity. That's how we refer to how big they are. It's a gigawatt or a megawatt or...

• 1:59:10Zak Kukoff?

  Well, it's a proportionality problem, right? Like, the data center issue is, yeah, do they use a lot of electricity? Sure.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Zak Kukoff?

  But in comparison to things like growing almonds, right, or raising a cow.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:20Zak Kukoff?

  It's actually not that much. And it turns out, we love cheeseburgers, and we find cheeseburgers have huge value in America. And so, we accept the trade off that in order to have cheeseburgers, we have to pay a little bit of electricity, right? It turns out, there's a lot of value in AI. By the way, this is not a winning political argument. I wouldn't go up and down and make the argument that, hey, everyone's going to have to get used to paying a little bit more to pay for AI.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  No one wants that.

• 1:59:41Zak Kukoff?

  No. Who would want that?

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  And that's the backbone of the ratepayer protection pledge, correct?

• 1:59:45Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  How is that going? Because that is a pledge right now, but it feels like it could be codified into law at some point?

• 1:59:52Zak Kukoff?

  I don't know that I'm super bullish on it being codified, but what I'll tell you is, anything that tech can do to get in front of the issue, like, do you guys know the account on Twitter, MorePerfectUnion?

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Yes, of course.

• 2:00:02Zak Kukoff?

  Okay. Okay. I think they are the most effective messengers, by the way, in politics today.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:06Zak Kukoff?

  They have one narrative they push, and it's very, very well done, which is, look at these great, local, small-town, salt-of-the-earth people, fighting back against the evil tech firms who want to do things like build data centers, right? And so, the more that you see that, and the more salient the issue becomes, and it's already so salient as it stands today. You guys saw Leaking the Future played in the sort of two Illinois races. That just happened recently during the midterm. They won one out of the two. If you look at what they ran on, in neither case do they run ads saying, "We love data centers, please fund data centers," right? The ads were about saving democracy and it's great to have Jesse Jackson Jr.

• 2:00:45Zak Kukoff?

  and the other candidate and so on and so forth. Like, the more the tech can come out and head of these things and then change the topic to the variety of other issues voters care about, the better position we are in. The more that we just try to take this on, because we don't need thirty more years, right? We need to have a window of time where we can come in and get data centers built and actually start to operationalize a lot of the future value of AI. If you wait too long, there's a window where adversaries pull ahead of us and the opportunity for American AI to dominate goes away. And if we're too aggressive, right, the other inverse of this is we risk really alienating a lot of the communities that are local. So you need to thread the needle on getting out ahead with things like the pledge, right?

• 2:01:23Zak Kukoff?

  Making sure we can come out and show that we're listening to constituent needs while also at the same time actually delivering on some of the positive benefits that are not just more doom around AI is going to take your job and kill your horse and burn down your house and whatever.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure. What has messaging been like around the band? Like, I think for a lot of people, they're like, okay, data center in my area. What does it do for me? They're like, am I still going to be able to use LLMs or video models? They're like, even if it doesn't go in, they're like, yes. So, okay, so what are you going to do for me? And so I think like one of the best, one of the best arguments for it today has been like tax revenues. Is there any that can be repurposed for a bunch of other things? Seems to be pretty significant based on some of the numbers I've heard, but is that kind of messaging resonating? Or are people still just saying, you know, flat out, not in my backyard?

• 2:02:20Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, it is. I would say it's very NIMBY. I don't think the tax stuff is breaking through to people. And the reason it's not breaking through in part is because for every person like you and me and John who says, of course, these things are going to throw off cash. How could you not look at them and think you can fund an entire school district with one data center, right? You have somebody else who goes, well, that doesn't logically track to me because you have five. Employees manning these things and they're going to be more and more automated as time goes on. And more to the point, why not put them somewhere else where I don't have to deal with it and see the negative externalities? Like the messaging thing that tech hasn't figured out yet, and partially we do it to ourselves. Every time you have somebody come out and say, AI is going to take your job, it's going to totally disrupt society. It's going to end. You didn't have, the people who built NAFTA weren't selling NAFTA by saying,

• 2:03:04Zak Kukoff?

  "Hey, NAFTA is going to ship all of these jobs overseas and be horrible." And by the way, NAFTA, whatever you think about it, did set up the conditions for a lot of jobs moving overseas. Like tech has to get out of its own way a little bit and stop saying things, even if there is some, some tail chance of it being true. Like we've left the context bubble, right? We're not in, I lived in SF for seven years, like we're not in Berkeley right now where we're having a great conversation in front of the light cone and whatever, and having sort of in-depth intellectual discussion. We're in persuasion mode and you can't come out and say that.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the, just taxes broadly? Because when I hear a data center will throw off a lot of taxes, I think, well, maybe corporate taxes, wherever that company is headquartered. And they'll certainly pay real estate taxes, but it's a very small real estate footprint. And so are there any local, uh, led, local regions that have figured out how to rethink the tax base to actually capture some of the value and say, "Look, we're down, but you're going to have to pay. And here's the actual deal and let's, let's think about it more in those terms to make sure that we're actually internalizing the value."

• 2:04:14Zak Kukoff?

  In some ways you're a Georgist, right? You're like, "Hey, I'd like to have a land value tax." And we just capture some of the improvement we've created. Which I'm very sympathetic to. I hear the argument. The big tax conversation today, it's been, um, a little bit back and forth. And the back and forth has been between some people who are saying, "Hey, we need tax breaks to lure in data centers." Like for all that we hear about local community hate data center, whatever, there's a huge swath of like offline people who are saying things like, "Actually, I would like to have any job in my area, right? I'd love to have any good construction job, any job running these things." So that's okay. So one side of the issue. Do we have people who are saying we need tax breaks or tax incentives to lure, right?

• 2:04:57Zak Kukoff?

  And that's actually a wedge issue even within Republicans too, by the way, who say, hey, some of whom say, hey, you're putting this in my backyard, you're destroying the character of my community, very sort of the classic NIMBY arguments we've heard, and some of whom are saying things like, gosh, I would love to have more industry in my community. Okay, so that's one. The other side of it, on the tax side, are people who are saying, okay, we already have them, right? And so what are the other things that we can levy? Sometimes it's land improvement. Sometimes, by the way, it's a consumption tax on energy, right? So you can actually, there are people who are saying, look, should we craft more narrowly targeted energy consumption taxes, commercial in their orientation, which is not a perfect...

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  And it's not something we've historically done, because if I'm using energy to do my dishes and you're using energy to watch Netflix, we don't typically put a value on that differently, but maybe extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary...

• 2:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Many, many have pushed for, you know, podcast tax.

• 2:05:47Zak Kukoff?

  Podcasts are the backbone of America. Okay, we cannot tax them. And so you see this back and forth in Georgia. Like, I would tell you, okay, Virginia, which is, I think, the largest concentration of data centers in the country, in part, the reason Spanberger, the Democrat, won the recent gubernatorial race in Virginia, is because she campaigned on the sort of very kitchen table issue of your energy cost has gone up, I am going to do the things to make it go down, one of which is slow down on data centers, right? And in Georgia, if you look there right now, I would tell you, the best chance the Dems have of flipping the Georgia gubernatorial race in the last 20 something years is running on, they, by the way, they flipped some of the Georgia Public Utility Commissioner seats, which are like, super nerdy, low salience, but they flipped them on this question of,

• 2:06:32Zak Kukoff?

  I am paying more for my energy. I don't want that to happen. How do we prevent these data centers from going on? So it's a big problem. And the super PACs are doing a good job, but they could be doing a lot better of a job of articulating, by the way, non-AI related messaging to support AI candidates.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  What about zooming out to just energy broadly? Because I feel like, while the AI companies might be, and the tech companies might be narrowly focused on data center construction, a lot of them do have bets in solar and nuclear, and a lot of venture capital firms have funded solar and nuclear efforts, and that feels like potentially a more pro bipartisan issue. How do you see that breaking? How do you see the, like, when we talk to nuclear founders, we get extremely excited, and then they give us their timelines, and it's like, it'll be online in 2030. And I'm wondering if there's anything that the government can do to pull that forward. Are there any efforts or any reframing, like if you were to put on your strategist hat on like, how do we, I mean, how do we just get excited about clean energy?

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  Because that feels like it's longer term, but it's potentially the release valve for everyone, makes everyone happy.

• 2:07:40Zak Kukoff?

  So, okay, I'll say two things. One, and I should disclose, we lobby on basically all of these issues. So everyone should just count appropriately, because I'm talking my own book. Okay. One is, you can think about what are the ways.

• 2:07:54Zak Kukoff?

  Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

• 2:07:59Zak Kukoff?

  One is, we could think about what are the ways that we can co-locate, by the way, data centers with currently stranded sources of energy. Right? So if you have like, there's, there's two components to energy. There's production and there's transmission.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Zak Kukoff?

  And the government can do a lot, the federal government can do a lot on both the research side and some of the permitting side on the construction consideration. The transmission side is a lot more nuanced and sort of a boring conversation. But suffice it to say, like, there are very limited ways in which the federal government can really make a big impact on transmission. And so you might think to yourself, okay, what are the ways where we can take places we've already built energy, right? Everything from all of the above, right? From nuclear to solar to coal to natural gas and build data centers that already exist. Same thing, by the way, that crypto mining did, right? For many, many years. Call that door number one. Door number two is I am very bullish on nuclear and things of that nature, and partially because we do lobby for it. But also, like, if you're thinking about what are the ways in which nuclear moves forward,

• 2:08:55Zak Kukoff?

  what you actually want is for the federal government to think about what are ways that we can centralize authority over permitting more and more. Because you don't want to have, like, the local permitting group up in arms saying, we don't want a three-mile island. What you actually want is for like, a much more centralized, one-stop-shop authority.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:11Zak Kukoff?

  And so in that way, you're not, you can call it industrial policy, call it big government, call it whatever you like, but you're getting back to the idea that the government plays a much firmer hand in actually driving where these things go over the short and medium term.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  Is the data centers in space thing bullish or bearish for building more data centers on Earth? Because it feels like a get out of jail free card a little bit. It's like, hey, now that we can build them in space potentially, like, let's just not build anymore here.

• 2:09:38Zak Kukoff?

  Well, it's my position that America owns space too. Okay, let's just start there for a second, or at least a little bit of space. Okay, in all seriousness, the honest answer is, I find it hard to believe that the economics of building data centers in space flip before we have a government that needs, that is more flexible and more amenable to people who want to build locally. Like, part of the challenge is this, you saw the, here's a quintessential example, okay? The Germans get very excited about decommissioning nuclear energy, right? They lobby for it for years and years. They have the famous tweet you've all seen of the Green Party candidates, you know, announcing the shutdown of the last reactor. Then a crisis happens, in this case, Russia, Ukraine, and suddenly Germany is saying, gosh, I wish we had nuclear energy, any source of energy we would take today, okay? You have the strait

• 2:10:22Zak Kukoff?

  getting closed, you're saying to yourself, gosh, I wish we had any source of energy.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  I think oil's at 140 a barrel right now.

• 2:10:28Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, I don't know the exact, but that sounds about right.

• 2:10:30Jordi Hays?

  Which was where it was at when Russia, Ukraine...

• 2:10:33Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that's right. Okay, what's the common thread across all these different things? Government is reactive and people are reactive to crisis. And so, it is, I don't, you would never root for a crisis, you don't want a crisis to ever happen, but it's...

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  You don't let it go to waste.

• 2:10:46Zak Kukoff?

  But don't let it go to waste, to quote Rahm Emanuel, right? And so you're far more likely to say, hey, what's more likely to me on a short and medium time horizon? The economics of building in space rapidly flip, possible, but I don't know how likely, or something happens on Earth. And there are millions of things that could happen, such that people now are newly incentivized to build and allow for building at home. And I hope it doesn't require a Sputnik moment, right? I hope, by the way, another Sputnik moment, because maybe DeepSeek was already one. I hope that's not the outcome, but if it is, the outcome will be people are much more amenable to building, I think, locally here on Earth and in America.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

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

• 2:11:24Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, thanks always. I appreciate it. Congratulations, guys, again.

• 2:11:28John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon. We have some breaking news I can take you through while we bring in... Thomas Laffont from Co2. The alley has officially been auctioned fully. The naming rights to Riley Walls's alley have just sold to Notion for $140,000. It's now

• 2:11:48Jordi Hays?

  They came in, they sniped it.

• 2:11:50John Coogan?

  It does seem like they sniped it. The Notion, I like that in

• 2:11:54Jordi Hays?

  What was WordPress doing?

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  They called it "The Notion Way." Yeah, WordPress was asleep at the wheel. They let it get away from them for just $5,000 more.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Do not pay, just, just absolutely gave up.

• 2:12:06John Coogan?

  I like that someone was trying to make it Bags Street. Core Automation Inc. The Way also was there.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Gumroad.

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  Someone went back and tried to keep it named Dirt Alley for $111,000. Gumroad was a good one. Well, we can bring in our next guest, Thomas Laffont from Co2. He is here live with us in the TD Penn UltraDome. Thomas, great to see you. How are you doing? Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  It's been too long.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  It has been too long. I want to, I want to actually begin at the very beginning. Can you tell us where you grew up?

• 2:12:41Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, I was born in Paris in 1976. I'll be turning 50 in

• 2:12:47John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:12:48Thomas Laffont?

  Actually about a month and a half or so. Overnight success. Thank you. And really split my growing up between the US and France. My father was an executive who kind of moved around. So between Paris and New York, did a back and forth twice. Was kind of used to moving around.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:06Thomas Laffont?

  Settled in New York in 1988. One of the first questions I get is why I don't have an accent when my brother does.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Thomas Laffont?

  And I think it's really related to our, kind of where we grew up and our difference in ages when we moved to the US. But obviously incredibly grateful to have moved to the US. What I do remember from France is the feeling of a country that kind of felt stuck in neutral.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:30Thomas Laffont?

  And so coming to especially a city like New York with the dynamic economy and just the, the feeling of life, just in the buildings, construction was incredibly motivating.

• 2:13:42Thomas Laffont?

  I went to a really international school in New York that had a lot of different types of people. It was a French language school, so you had your kind of classic expats. You had a lot of diplomats from all over the world, since French is a diplomatic language in a lot of countries. So I was really grateful to that exposure. And then I went to Yale. I studied computer science. My junior year, I realized what a good programmer was. Yeah. And that I wasn't one of them. Wow. Because what would take a good programmer, you know, an hour would take me six days. Wow. So that was kind of sobering, and I thought, okay, I gotta think about something else.

• 2:14:27Thomas Laffont?

  And I love movies. I always watched a ton of movies. It was kind of the peak for, I think, kind of the movie business. We were about to roll into the DVD era. Yeah. Which, if you think about it now as an analyst, was essentially the studios monetizing a library, again. Yep. At virtually no cost. Yep. So, everybody's building DVDs. Media's at the peak. You had Mike Ovitz on the cover of Newsweek. Yeah. So I learned as much about that industry, kind of reading The New York Times on Mondays, which was kind of the digital edition, reading Vanity Fair and Premier magazine and anything

• 2:15:08Thomas Laffont?

  I could get my hands on. I said, okay, well, Hollywood sounds like a lot of fun. And CAA has this training program. Well, I don't know anything. I don't know anybody. I've never really been there. So getting trained sounded pretty good. Yeah. I went to my alumni house, and I, we had these binders, and you could look up industries, and there was one that said entertainment. And I saw there was one agent who had gone to Yale who was at CAA, so that were now in my senior year. I called her every day for six months at the same time. Wow. And I got to actually know her assistant pretty well because agents have to pick up the phone.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Thomas Laffont?

  Right, because that's how their business is built.

• 2:15:49John Coogan?

  Wait, what time of day, like early morning, late?

• 2:15:52Thomas Laffont?

  Uh, no.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  How did you settle on one particular time? Because.

• 2:15:55Thomas Laffont?

  3pm Pacific.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  I would like mix it up and try.

• 2:15:57Thomas Laffont?

  I knew first thing in the morning.

• 2:15:58Jordi Hays?

  No, it's kind of an interesting thing. Like, if you just get a random call here or there, you're not really paying attention to it, but if every single day at 3 o'clock, you get the same call by the third or fourth day, you're like.

• 2:16:08Thomas Laffont?

  I knew she would take my call first thing in the morning.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Sure, too busy.

• 2:16:12Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:14Thomas Laffont?

  So I'm like right about right after lunch.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Thomas Laffont?

  Right? It's like the mid morning, the mid afternoon nap, maybe I'll hit them in a weak spot. So I got to know the assistant and we would kind of joke around and, um, but finally, uh, one day I got a call back from, uh, from her. Her name was Sally Wilcox. She was a book agent and she said, well, what's it going to take for you to stop calling me? I said, well, I want an interview. And she actually gave me, I found, an amazing answer to that. She said, well, if you agree to move out and you call me after you've moved out to LA, I'll get you the interview.

• 2:16:51Jordi Hays?

  She wanted you to move.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Move. Before you even get the interview, that is a crazy.

• 2:16:57Thomas Laffont?

  What I realized what she was doing was she was kind of testing my conviction.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:02Thomas Laffont?

  And she probably got a lot of calls from people who said, oh, I want to do this. I want to do that.

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06Thomas Laffont?

  And she's like, well, if you have the conviction in yourself to move out with no job, that shows you really kind of wanted. It was probably a filter on her part.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15Thomas Laffont?

  So I did and it was my second time, I think, in LA and I called her and I only had one egg in the basket. There was no other egg in the basket. This was the only egg in the basket. So I called her, I said, well, you remember you told me if I moved, you would give me the interview and she did. I interviewed, I think, on, uh, Some, I moved out, May 22nd, I think after I graduated. I got here first week of June and by July 7th was my first day of 1997 in the CA mailroom.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  In the mailroom.

• 2:17:49Thomas Laffont?

  And I think you guys were just maybe there, right? It was just this iconic place and a lot of people I kind of looked up to had started in the mailroom. Ron Meyer had started in the mailroom, David Geffen, Barry Diller. So I'd read about all these legends of the business kind of starting.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  There was a dress code back then, too.

• 2:18:10Thomas Laffont?

  What's that?

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  There was a dress code back then.

• 2:18:12Thomas Laffont?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  Because, yeah, there's still a dress code today. And I think that's the thing that sticks out the most about the mailroom is just the number of talented young people that you have in a pretty small space.

• 2:18:23Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  And they're all dressed perfectly.

• 2:18:25Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Which is just-

• 2:18:26Thomas Laffont?

  And every experience you have in that mailroom is kind of unique.

• 2:18:30John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:18:30Thomas Laffont?

  So I'll tell you guys this story. I don't think I've ever shared this one publicly, but we did a lot of work for Ralph Lauren.

• 2:18:39Thomas Laffont?

  And this is back kind of in the Friends era. And if you remember, Jennifer Aniston's character on Friends worked at Ralph Lauren.

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45Thomas Laffont?

  So he's coming in and he's doing a taping. And so I'm asked to go pick him up at the Beverly Hills Hotel and just escort him for the day while he's shooting the scene. And if you remember the scene, it's in an elevator and Jennifer's character, Rachel, bumps into Ralph and it's like a 12-second scene. You can look it up on YouTube.

• 2:19:09Thomas Laffont?

  So it took like three minutes to shoot.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:12Thomas Laffont?

  So we get on set at nine. I think he's in denim on denim, just classic Ralph. And right before he goes on, he's like, "Call her up or call her down?" And I'm like, "Call her up."

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 2:19:23Thomas Laffont?

  Let's go. We're rolling with this. And so it takes like three seconds. And so we arrived at nine and like 9:08 and we're kind of done. And Ralph says, "Well, I didn't think this would be that quick and my next meeting's not till four o'clock, so why don't we go?" Spent some time together and I'm really kind of interested to go where you shop.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:19:46Thomas Laffont?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Ready, he wanted to jump right into market research.

• 2:19:48Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, so we spent the whole day going together, shopping around. One member of one was going to Fred Segal, like when Fred Segal and Melrose was, every new brand was kind of getting broken into there. I just watched him walking around and the way he engaged with every single salesperson, never talked down to him. To your point, did market research. Why are people buying this style, not that one? It was just amazing to watch and how just curious he was and how much he wanted to learn. So, we finish and I'll get to the end of the story, but at the end of the day, he's like, "Look, I gotta ask you something. It's really bothered me the whole day." I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "Why aren't you wearing Ralph Lauren?"

• 2:20:31Thomas Laffont?

  And I said, "Look, honestly, the cut's not great and the store on Beverly Drive's a little old and then there's a lot of wood. It doesn't really feel kind of new." And he's like, "Man, you're so right."

• 2:20:41Thomas Laffont?

  But he's like, "You really should be wearing Ralph, so go there and just tell them I sent you and you can get anything you want."

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:20:47Thomas Laffont?

  So, we kind of parted ways and he was, he was really lovely, but I debated whether I should go or not. And the next week, I go and I go and I introduce myself to the very pretty lady at the counter and I said, "Look, I'm sure you get this all the time. You're gonna think I'm a crank, but Ralph sent me and he said I could get whatever I want." And she paused for a minute and she looked me up and down and she said, "Oh, we've been waiting for you."

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:21:10Thomas Laffont?

  And I kind of spent the, you know, an hour kind of going through the store. But, you know, the exposure that you got to people through that job was really amazing. Watching, you know, actors, watching directors, watching entrepreneurs like Ralph. So, I was really grateful for that opportunity.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, you, you had a, we were catching up yesterday off air and you had a story about, you can just talk generally about.

• 2:21:40Jordi Hays?

  What maybe entrepreneurs could learn from actors and actresses that are breaking in through Hollywood and what they have to go through from a competitive standpoint to actually break out. I'm sure you got to see a bunch of different stars over the years, but everything from the rejection to constantly having to, you know, constant hustle because as soon as a project ends, it's like, okay, what's the next thing?

• 2:22:08Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, I think people underestimate, first of all, how hard it is to be an actor and how competitive it is. First of all, especially in the movie industry, right? You have to kind of find a new job every, you know, six or seven weeks. So you're constantly unemployed. You're constantly, I'm going to search the new job. Not only that, when you go and you actually interview for a job, you might run into 10 other people that look exactly like you, right? All of your competition, like imagine if I was pitching an entrepreneur and I'm like, oh, there's Sequoia and Andreessen and Benchmark and we're all kind of sitting, lined up next to each other, waiting. That's kind of what actors go through when they audition. And then, by the way, when we give you feedback, it's not even feedback on your business, it's on you. We don't like how you talk, how you look.

• 2:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or your ears, your ears are...

• 2:22:55Thomas Laffont?

  I represented Jordana Brewster, who's a friend now and is married to a friend of mine, but one day on one of the casting sheets, it said, hey, a Jordana Brewster-like actress for this role. So I called and I said, well, what about Jordana Brewster? This is literally who you said. They're like, no, no, no, we just want someone like her. I said, well, what about her? Right? But that is the kind of stuff. And obviously, the competition is intense, right? And it actually reminds me a little bit of what it was like to be an entrepreneur in China, right? Very similar. Like you would have, if you had a ride-sharing company, there were 150 other ride-sharing companies that you had to kind of get through just to then win your city, to then go and compete with all the other cities, to then, at the end, compete against Uber in China as an example, and Dee Dee kind of won that.

• 2:23:39Thomas Laffont?

  So it's an extremely competitive kind of industry, and I relate to that. As someone who worked with actors, you would sometimes talk to an actor and say, how'd the audition go? They would tell you, I nailed it. It was just so good. And then you'd call the casting director or the director and they would say, that was the most unprepared, bad audition. And so you have to figure out how to communicate that feedback in a way that's constructive to the client.

• 2:24:07Thomas Laffont?

  Right, because just telling them, "Oh, you did great, but you didn't get it," isn't necessarily useful.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:13Thomas Laffont?

  But in a way, that doesn't also, you know, is detrimental, right, to their mental health and things like that. So, it's very much a people, a reputation kind of business, and I really enjoyed it for the seven years I did it.

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the process of getting out of the mailroom? I imagine that you have, you know, a few really iconic stories from the mailroom, but there were plenty of days that were just photocopying. Is that roughly correct?

• 2:24:41Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, I mean, we did, we did shopping for groceries.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:24:47Thomas Laffont?

  We copied scripts.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Thomas Laffont?

  We delivered scripts.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:51Thomas Laffont?

  So, there was a whole set of kind of stories on that, and honestly, we could, we could fill a lot of podcasts.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:55Thomas Laffont?

  Just the different things that we kind of did. But, look, it rewarded hard work, it rewarded attention to detail.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:01Thomas Laffont?

  Ultimately, and you got invited to the retreats, right? And CIA did these retreats every year, and after one of them, I had some thoughts, I wrote them down, and I hand-delivered a letter to the managing partner saying, "I was at the retreat, and here are my thoughts," right? I wish I still had it. I don't know what I said. And then I didn't hear anything for a long time, but when I came off what was called the runs, where you delivered scripts, you then waited to be picked for a desk. And only the top five got to interview for desks to try and not keep people jammed there too long. But the desk of Brian Lord opened up, and he was the co-chairman and is now the CEO. And he asked to interview me, because he had read my memo, and he said, "I want to interview

• 2:25:43Thomas Laffont?

  the kid from the memo, even though he's not in the top five, I don't care." So, I went up, and I'd never really met him or spent any time with him before, but we sat down, and somehow, we got talking to, about John Steinbeck, which was my favorite writer, and I was reading a biography of him at the time, and we spent 30 minutes talking about John Steinbeck. Nothing about business, or how do you answer the phone, or what he's looking for in an assistant. So, I came back down, and all the guys were like, "How'd it go?" I'm like, "Well, I don't think it went well, because he didn't ask me a single question other than, you know, talking about John Steinbeck." So, I'm like, "There's no way I got this job."

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Thomas Laffont?

  And then, he ultimately kind of gave me the job.

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 2:26:24Thomas Laffont?

  And I worked with him for almost three years.

• 2:26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:28Thomas Laffont?

  Unbelievable. Experience coming off of Mike Ovitz having gone to Disney, then having flamed out and starting his own company, so much kind of turbulence in the industry. He was an amazing guy and it was a great formative experience for me.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Since we are in Hollywood, running a show that covers venture, was there anyone in that era of Hollywood that was from the talent side that was leaning in and investing in startups of any kind?

• 2:27:01Thomas Laffont?

  No, I mean, what I remember from that era is no one really thought about the investing side of it per se. People thought that, wow, the business is going to be digitized, so let's think of creating content for these new digital channels. And so it was more on the monetization side of here's a new distribution channel called the internet and how can we adapt our businesses to that new channel?

• 2:27:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:28Thomas Laffont?

  I had always loved kind of investing, so I was kind of trading public market stocks on the side. And my brother and I kind of started kind of doing that together and I just bought companies that I liked and was kind of doing it as a hobby. Eventually, when I was promoted to an agent, I kind of realized two things. One is I preferred being an assistant to an agent. I preferred being an assistant rather than an agent. So that was one. And then two, I kind of really liked this stock thing on the side, right? And someone said, well, always invest in someone's hobbies because that's what they choose to do in their spare time. And so Philippe called me and this was a couple of years into Co2 and said, well, we're kind of trading this account together anyways, why don't you come over and do this?

• 2:28:13Thomas Laffont?

  And, you know, that's how I got started.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  And, yeah, what year did you get started at Co2? What was the strategy then? Walk us through post.com crash, how are you feeling? What's the strategy?

• 2:28:25Thomas Laffont?

  2003, so we're just coming off of 2000, 2001, 2002, and down 80% on the market. 03 kind of had a snapback, so the market was up 50%. We were well positioned for the downturn, not as well for the snapback. But now it's about, okay, what are the next decade look like? Right, the easy money's been made on the quick rebound, right? Nasdaq, I think, was up 50% year-to-date or something like that. And we were really looking for a semiconductor analyst and couldn't find one. And this is something I'll forever be grateful to my brother for, but eventually he said, "Look, since we can't find one," he dropped a copy of the universe.

• 2:29:05Thomas Laffont?

  And this universe was a printed memo of essentially all the stocks and key metrics about each name: P/E, volume, sector, the semiconductor universe. And he said, "You know, why don't you go ahead and do it? Can't find anybody anyways." And, you know, I had no real training as an analyst and, you know, I would sit in our bullpen and there were analysts from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. And I thought, "Man, my training was in a mailroom. I don't know anything." But what I started to realize is, the downside is I didn't know anything. The upside is, I didn't have any bad habits either in terms of how... So I really learned from my brother directly and I started to define how "we" want to

• 2:29:50Thomas Laffont?

  invest versus how maybe you learned it at Goldman or a mutual fund or something like that. And so I kind of relearned from first principles, you know, Philippe and I kind of working hand-in-hand. And I started learning semis and pretty soon, if you started in semis at the time, all the roads led to one company. And that was in Cupertino and it was Apple. Why? Well, because the iPod was starting to really gain traction and an iPod was a semiconductor product. It had NAND flash. It had a processor. So that was the gateway into Apple, which eventually led to the iPhone. And it was kind of an iconic investment for us and we got to know that management team really well.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that. How much of your investing philosophy at the time was quantitative, pulling metrics, building models versus... Doing expert calls, talking to management teams, listening to earnings calls.

• 2:30:46Thomas Laffont?

  The model was a really sacred place for me and because I hadn't trained as an analyst, I felt I needed to build every model myself because I didn't trust myself with someone else's work because I wasn't good enough. So I'm like, well, I'm going to build every single cell myself. That's going to mean I'm going to understand it if I built it myself, right? Versus if I take someone else's complex model, I'm not going to understand. I'm going to rip a DC since I'm number 10 for the day. So let's go. I knew when you had coffee, by the way, after dinner last night, I was like, okay.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Get ready for the caffeine.

• 2:31:23Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah. So I felt like I had to rebuild every model myself because I couldn't understand someone else's model.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:31:29Thomas Laffont?

  And what happened in the process of building that model is as I would go through a sell-side model and there were lines that I thought were irrelevant, I said, well, why should I add that to my model? Like this is driving no value. But it was kind of a verboten thing at the time. It was like, well, hold on, the company reports it this way, or this is a revenue line and for the sake of accuracy, you kind of need it in there. But like, I didn't know enough to basically say, well, to me, it doesn't drive any value to my investment thesis. So I'm just going to lump it into this other bucket. Yeah, called other. And I'm going to rename things the way I understand them, not the way the company chooses to report it or... Yeah, basically just what made sense to me

• 2:32:11Thomas Laffont?

  and what my thesis was about. So that when I pitched my thesis, my model actually reflected what my thesis was, right? Not let me pitch you my thesis, but now I have a thousand line model and I have to go from row two to row seven to like the other tab, then back to line 250 to kind of explain it to you. Like that made no sense to me. Like the narrative was no, let me show you from the top line all the way to the bottom, how it flows and what the key functions are.

• 2:32:38John Coogan?

  What's pitching a thesis look like?

• 2:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Isn't that kind of still define like a partner meeting? Like, aren't you guys like, let's say you meet an entrepreneur, you're excited about them, you do the work, and then...

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  From what I've heard, you guys will spend like hours and hours and hours still just in the model, like ignoring, ignoring whatever.

• 2:33:00Thomas Laffont?

  And we will, but a lot of times you might be getting a model from the sell side.

• 2:33:04Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:33:04Thomas Laffont?

  Right, because it's faster and it's more convenient, but it might not be exactly how your thesis is being laid out, right? So one of the things I try and talk to all of our analysts and say, well, let's have a model that really reflects our simple view of what the thesis is and what the drivers are. So I think a model to me is kind of a sacred place. And in fact, our Apple model, which I then passed on to Jamin Rangwal, who's now our CIO, was kind of this sacred, I didn't let anyone edit a sell on that model. I knew every single sell, I knew the color. I wanted a very specific kind of color for the background of certain sells, right? And eventually that kind of got passed on.

• 2:33:44Thomas Laffont?

  But to me, at the end of the day, I learned this, actually back in Hollywood, we had all the trainees one day got brought into a meeting with Steven Spielberg. And Steven said, every great story can be pitched in three sentences, no matter what the story was. And I said, so pitch me a story or a movie and I'll pitch it to you. And no matter how complex the movie was, he understood the essence of it, and in three sentences, you got the whole movie. And what I realized is, it takes a true understanding of story to be able to crystallize it in three sentences, right? If you don't understand something, you'll say, okay, well, TVPN is a podcast and it's about these two guys and they do this.

• 2:34:29Thomas Laffont?

  Well, do you really understand what it's about? Because you just gave me 10 minutes of rambling stuff.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:34:34Thomas Laffont?

  Right? And all the great investors that I've met, like Stan Druckenmiller, or, you know, my brother Philippe, or Dan Loeb, or some of these kind of legends of the hedge fund world, right? They have an ability to take any kind of story and just drill it down into its essence, to what the key pivot points are that are going to make or break that stock at that particular moment. And so, we really try and say, our thesis should be simple, we should be able to explain them. Very in, you know, few sentences, right? And you should have a model that reflects that thesis. So on the public side in particular, then we dive into, okay, let's go into your model and let's say, okay, can Apple sell 50 million phones?

• 2:35:20Thomas Laffont?

  Can the ARPU be in the out year? Is it going to increase? Is it going to decrease? You know, when I look back at our old Apple model, I actually think we did a pretty good job on units. Where we were way off is we had the price of the phone declining 5 to 10% a year because that's what every consumer electronics product did.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, TVs.

• 2:35:39Thomas Laffont?

  And in fact, the ARPU doubled, right?

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:41Thomas Laffont?

  The first iPhone was like 600, right? Unsubsidized and 1,200, right?

• 2:35:47John Coogan?

  Easily, yeah.

• 2:35:48Thomas Laffont?

  So never would have kind of forecast that.

• 2:35:51John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:35:52Thomas Laffont?

  So, um, yeah, so models are quite important to us.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  What was the, what was the mood in the hedge fund industry broadly during that time around different strategic expansion opportunities? There's obviously a high frequency trading boom that's happening. There's more quantitative strategies. There's debt strategies. There's so many, hedge fund can mean so many things. How were you thinking about defining what you would do best and where you would expand to or decline to expand to?

• 2:36:23Thomas Laffont?

  Look, I think for tech, it was an amazing, um, environment to be in because almost every company was getting swallowed up or...

• 2:36:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:33Thomas Laffont?

  So if you were in TMT, you really felt like you were the center of the universe.

• 2:36:37John Coogan?

  So there wasn't much pull for distractions.

• 2:36:39Thomas Laffont?

  Correct.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:36:40Thomas Laffont?

  And then also we had companies going public pretty early on. So you could do a lot of differentiated work in companies that the market cap was a couple billion.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:51Thomas Laffont?

  Right? I think what really changed for us in the early 2010s was Meta, then Facebook and Alibaba, staying private for longer.

• 2:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:02Thomas Laffont?

  We'd just never seen companies of that scale. Who were that important to our research in our market not go public?

• 2:37:08John Coogan?

  It was Meta or Facebook went out at like 60 billion, I believe, something around there.

• 2:37:12Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, I think around there, right, and right around 2012, 2013.

• 2:37:15John Coogan?

  So if you're used to buying a company potentially at two or three or six billion, that's a big miss.

• 2:37:21Thomas Laffont?

  It's like a 10x difference.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:23Thomas Laffont?

  Not only that, we actually were an investor in Google from pretty shortly after the IPO.

• 2:37:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:28Thomas Laffont?

  And Google had this stretch post-financial crisis where it kind of traded sideways for a long time.

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:34Thomas Laffont?

  And the reason was here comes Meta or Facebook and they're going to replicate a private internet that Google won't be able to search and so Google's going to be under pressure.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:44Thomas Laffont?

  And we weren't able to talk to Meta, so we didn't know what they were thinking.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:48Thomas Laffont?

  As soon as the company went public, ironically, Google's stock started working.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:53Thomas Laffont?

  Because they didn't come out and tell you, we want to kill Google or we're replicating the internet. We're doing kind of something different. Both stocks ended up working.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:38:02Thomas Laffont?

  So that was kind of a big eye-opener to us.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:04Thomas Laffont?

  It felt both offensively minded and defensively minded.

• 2:38:07John Coogan?

  But how could you tell at that moment, obviously it was correct that companies would stay private longer, but I'm sure you were debating the question, is Meta the outlier or the exception that will eventually prove the rule? Versus there's a structural shift in private equity, venture capital, that will propel many more companies to stay private well into the tens of billions of dollars in market cap?

• 2:38:31Thomas Laffont?

  We would not have foreseen what ended up happening.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:34Thomas Laffont?

  We had an instinct that it might happen.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:36Thomas Laffont?

  And remember that Spotify is kind of getting built at the same time, right? And it's redefining music and we really, you know, as I mentioned, Apple was a core thesis for us. And now we'd, here comes subscription music, which goes directly against Apple's model of selling you an album. And so what's going on? They just did a round at 3 billion, felt like a lot. And then Uber.

• 2:38:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:59Thomas Laffont?

  Right? So it was, it was just kind of, you felt. And Airbnb, right? So I would say like those two companies, the mobile internet coming out, these companies getting big in, in private markets. It felt like undeniable momentum, right? And so, and China, by the way, right, the same. So we felt like we had to participate.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  So what was the first private investment you made?

• 2:39:24Thomas Laffont?

  Evernote.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Evernote.

• 2:39:25Thomas Laffont?

  I think was one of the first and we said, look, we're going to do later stage deals, a hundred million plus in revenue. So we did deals like Evernote and Box and ironically, our most successful deal is one that broke all of the rules. Uh, that I just laid out, which was Snapchat.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:43Thomas Laffont?

  Where I think we led the series C in that at a valuation of about a billion and a half.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:49Jordi Hays?

  And what was the reaction from other more traditional venture investors when you guys started leading around?

• 2:39:58Thomas Laffont?

  I think that, um, look, venture felt very different back then. There was fewer firms. There was more uh, atrophied thinking, right? Andreessen is just kind of starting. We actually shared a building with them. So we were kind of starting at the same time about as they were. Um, and it felt like, wow, we're going to bring a bit of a different competitive energy to this market. Um, it felt very clubby.

• 2:40:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:28Thomas Laffont?

  You hadn't seen like these new firms, like founders that obviously you know, and a bunch of others kind of really make their mark.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:34Thomas Laffont?

  So, uh, it was sharp elbowed for sure.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:40:38Thomas Laffont?

  And, and still is in many respects, which is probably what I like the least about that market. Cause I love talking about ideas. I love trying to be a positive some thinker, which the public.

• 2:40:47Jordi Hays?

  Easier to do in the public market.

• 2:40:48Thomas Laffont?

  Correct.

• 2:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Did you bring the, the models to private markets? Were you building financial models or the team?

• 2:40:56Thomas Laffont?

  We did. I think we brought that. We brought analytical thinking. We brought kind of deep research. Like I remember reverse pitching Aaron Levy at Box, a big deck that we had done. And we had just done what we thought was kind of public market like research, but we brought that to a private entrepreneur. And, um, he hadn't seen that kind of work before. So that was a differentiator for a minute. Until other firms realized, wait, we can do that. Or even better, we can outsource it to Bain.

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:24Thomas Laffont?

  Right? And so we had to kind of quickly kind of adapt to that.

• 2:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:29Thomas Laffont?

  Um, but in the beginning it was novel.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:32Thomas Laffont?

  And that was an industry that was really done in Word and we were Excel thinkers.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep.

• 2:41:37Thomas Laffont?

  So that was kind of a very different kind of mindset that we were bringing to the table.

• 2:41:41John Coogan?

  Was there any? Shift required in the messaging to LPs, the fund structuring, anything that you had to work through in order to actually set up the fund for success in the private markets?

• 2:41:57Thomas Laffont?

  I think our LPs, first of all, LPs are not talked a lot about in venture, which is kind of interesting. Like, we talk a lot about the founder. We talk a lot about the companies. But I would say for us, we are pretty clear that our customer, at the end of the day, is our LPs. And so the trust that they give us means a lot. I virtually know outside investments, right?

• 2:42:20Thomas Laffont?

  I do some as favors and things like that. But almost everything I have and own is in our funds. So we kind of act as entrepreneurs and as owners ourselves. And we ask for trust from our LPs. And I think at the end of the day, they were willing to give us a chance in our first fund. I don't think they held us specifically to exactly what we said we were going to do. But they're like, these guys are pretty disciplined and they're pretty smart and they're entrepreneurial and aggressive. And let's see what they can do, right? And so I think over the years, what's helped us most in our business, and I think why we're still in business 25, almost years,

• 2:43:03Thomas Laffont?

  or 27-plus years later, when a lot of our peers have disappeared over time, is we never lose sight of our investors. And hopefully, we've made some good decisions, but we've also made some bad ones. But I think our investors learn more about us on how we deal with our bad decisions, right? And so I think we've earned, hopefully, some trust from them over the years. So I remember distinctly an investor, when I called about the SNAP deal and saying, look, I know this is a bit off-brand. This was one of the largest investors in the fund, but I just have a lot of conviction in this deal. And he said, then do it. That's what ultimately why we're investing in you.

• 2:43:46Thomas Laffont?

  And so I think the trust that you build, the relationships that you build with your own investors over those periods of time are really important.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Relationships with entrepreneurs, building models for, you know, Apple, ARPU, projecting units, that feels all very micro.

• 2:44:03Thomas Laffont?

  Yep.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  How have you processed macro statistics and factors like interest rates? Everyone talks about when interest rates rise, all the DCFs change, there's a pullback in the private markets, we live through this with like the end of Zerp. But how much are you tracking the labor market, the GDP numbers, the interest rates? And how much of a factor is that on the strategy, day to day, month to month, year to year, or even like broader terms?

• 2:44:33Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, so data science has really become a much larger part of our business than it was back then.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:39Thomas Laffont?

  So we now have, I don't know, maybe 20 or 20-ish, 20 to 30 people, something like that in data science that are just processing different types of data and alternative data. So I think it's not just macro data, it's App Store data, it's Clickstream data, it's credit card data.

• 2:44:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:56Thomas Laffont?

  So we use a lot of that for our investment research, right? And some of that we even make accessible to our portfolio companies, right? So that made us smart about a trend. We were early customers of Databricks and Snowflake as an example, that let us invest in those companies.

• 2:45:14Thomas Laffont?

  So that is way more of a presence in today's world than it was, you know, 20 years ago.

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:21Thomas Laffont?

  So we're constantly looking at data as an example. You know, I think OpenAI is probably the most important company in the world today in the sense that it's the driver of AI, both consumption and spending. So I look almost every day at the chart of ChatGPT users, Download Share, how it's weathering the storm versus other competitors. You know, that's really something that wasn't available 10, 15 years ago.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:49Thomas Laffont?

  We had this amazing dataset called Onava, which actually gave you engagement data from users on phone, and then Zuck bought it. And turned it off.

• 2:45:57John Coogan?

  And turned it off.

• 2:45:58Thomas Laffont?

  And I remember thinking like, damn, that guy, that's a great move. It was the only dataset that really gave you engagement data.

• 2:46:08Thomas Laffont?

  So we're always looking for kind of new datasets, right? And then obviously, so that felt like a major shift, right? Going from, you know, data science enabled research, and now obviously we're getting to AI and agentic research and.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about AI as a category from an investor perspective versus the Databricks and Snowflakes, which to me feel it's easier for me to maybe understand the financials, the model that I would build, how I think about value accrual and competition in Databricks and Snowflake, fantastic businesses, but feels like easier to pattern match against previous eras of software and tech innovation versus AI where you have infrastructure and CapEx and training costs and inference budgets and all sorts of different, your entire product's getting copied by open source every three months. And it just feels like a different

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  puzzle to solve when you're thinking about underrating those businesses. Like, how have you grappled with that? Do you see it as an extension of the tech investing or is it an entirely new motion?

• 2:47:20Thomas Laffont?

  Well, for me, it was almost coming back home to what I knew because the infrastructure layer was really semiconductor driven.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:47:26Thomas Laffont?

  Right. So I think our knowledge of semis and our team's knowledge of semis was a great head start because a lot of people just hadn't done semis. So we're kind of new to semis and I had a lot of relationships in the industry and that led us to leave the series being Cerebras, that I think will be kind of a generational kind of company.

• 2:47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's been on multiple times.

• 2:47:50Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:51John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:47:51Thomas Laffont?

  So that felt very natural to us. And pretty quickly, when we saw what Jensen was building and the momentum that Nvidia was building in the data center.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:02Thomas Laffont?

  So that was kind of our first telltale that, wow, something big is going on here. So we had seen semis before in the mobile era.

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:48:09Thomas Laffont?

  So we felt very equipped when AI first came around to look at it from a semiconductor, GPUs, memory, TSMC. I've personally been to Taiwan many times, visited TSMC. Great anecdote, I'm driving back to Taipei City with my host from TSMC and we're on the highway and there's a golf course and it's nighttime. So there's, there's lights and people playing and I just very innocently turned to him and said, wow, you guys, you guys play golf at night here? And he very innocently looked back at me and said, well, when do you play?

• 2:48:43Thomas Laffont?

  And that's when I realized like that's we're in a different level of of of work here.

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:50Thomas Laffont?

  So we saw it at the infrastructure layer first, right? Where it just became obvious you didn't have to necessarily worry about who was going to win. Like the whole infrastructure layer will win.

• 2:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:00Thomas Laffont?

  So I think that was kind of layer one. I think layer two then came kind of the models. And obviously, we're investors in a number of them. I'd say the most complex element of AI today is you can almost talk yourself into a bull case and a bear case for almost any name.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:19Thomas Laffont?

  In tech. And I think software is kind of seeing that right now, right? So is software going to win because of AI or get displaced? Right? So you've got that. In infrastructure, you've got the, well, when is the peak? And what multiple peaks should things kind of trade at? Right? So it's both an exhilarating dynamic, but also very complicated environment in the sense that like, for example, when when Databricks came around, no one thought, well, gee, Databricks is going to put Salesforce out of business.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:51Thomas Laffont?

  It just felt like a new architecture.

• 2:49:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:53Thomas Laffont?

  There's something about AI that feels a lot more disruptive. And what if your model, not today, but in two years, can just build you a workday right off the bat?

• 2:50:07Thomas Laffont?

  What does that mean for workday? Does that mean their data is more valuable?

• 2:50:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:10Thomas Laffont?

  And on the left hand side, or no, does that mean they get fully wiped out?

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:14Thomas Laffont?

  So I think that battle, and it's being played out kind of in the public market today, right? You kind of see it in in these names is.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  How can a public company CEO actually communicate a vision for that case? The bull and bear case around AI, what effect AI will have on their company?

• 2:50:38Thomas Laffont?

  I mean, you're seeing it. It's I read. I read something that we're kind of moving into a selection market. Right? So now like. Some companies are going to do well, some companies are not. I mean, look at Square, right? Yeah. Jack came out and just said, no, I'm pivoting the entire infrastructure of this company for an AI era. We think you're going to need to be remote, right? Because you're going to move faster if you're remote. And so he's kind of laid out a whole vision about how he wants to run the company.

• 2:51:11Jordi Hays?

  And that's because you're sort of generating the necessary context because you're not getting the in-person interaction.

• 2:51:15Thomas Laffont?

  And small teams.

• 2:51:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, small teams. You'll more easily be able to be AI-native if you're basically explaining process.

• 2:51:23Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah. Very small teams, moving really quickly without a central organization, or you know, kind of like the Borg, right? No central organizing force. The model drives everything. And then you have other companies that are saying, no, product, well, the labs themselves, right, are all in-person. And they believe, right, that you, product development needs to be done kind of in-person. So you're kind of seeing a lot of these different ways of, you have different models. Some people are going to charge for tokens. Some people are going to charge for data access, or ingress and egress. Mm-hmm. So I think what we're seeing right now play out is a true Darwin-like survival of the fittest, where software companies are going...

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  It's like the mailroom.

• 2:52:05Thomas Laffont?

  Exactly.

• 2:52:07Thomas Laffont?

  Right? You saw Anil come back to Workday, right? He probably thought that, I think Carl is an amazing executive and is a good friend of mine, but maybe he thought, in order to make the changes, I need to be, have that kind of founder mindset, right? Founder mode, as Brian calls it, right? So we're seeing now a lot of these different approaches kind of compete with each other. I think it's too early to tell who's going to win, but eventually, I think we should see kind of separation between winners and losers, right? Which should be good for our business. But I think right now, it's still so early. That it's not clear who will win.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Is it enough to look at re-accelerating top lines? I imagine we've talked to a lot of founder CEOs. Maybe they're unicorn status, decade in, completely reinvigorated by AI. They come on, they see that the growth has returned. It feels like a new startup, even though they're maybe coming back from a sabbatical. Maybe they're coming back in after hiring an outside CEO. Maybe they're just coming back in with a new vigor. But what are you seeing more at the earlier stage or mid-market stage around companies that are starting to show signs of being winners in the AI age?

• 2:53:26Thomas Laffont?

  I think, look, the good news is no one is head in the sand about this. So I do think in prior cycles, you had more of a head in the sand mentality, right? So for example, if I remember when cloud got started, there was, do you remember virtual cloud, right? That was going to be the big thing, right? I can't just have my stuff in Amazon. I'm going to have this virtual cloud and, you know, obviously that hybrid cloud was another one. No, it's going to be half, all the big data, right? All those things basically just got torched and went by the wayside, right? So there was a lot of head in the sand. Similarly with the iPhone. You need a keyboard. It doesn't have 3G. It doesn't support Adobe.

• 2:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't have copy and paste.

• 2:54:08Thomas Laffont?

  Exactly. The battery life, right? Ben Gate, you may remember that one. That was a whole weekend.

• 2:54:14John Coogan?

  iPhone 4 or something.

• 2:54:15Thomas Laffont?

  Whole weekend wasted on Ben Gate. So there was a lot more to me head in the sand in prior

• 2:54:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:54:22Thomas Laffont?

  Investments, cycles, right? In prior tech themes where people were just pushing back against the idea that this was going to work. I think AI is one where the consensus view is it is going to work. It's not, it's an extension, extinction level event. And so the sense of urgency is high. So that does feel a little bit different to me than maybe prior cycles where I think that took time for, right? The cares are like, well, I'm not going to allow Apple to have an App Store and I don't want to be a dump pipe and, right? So they, all these things that they fought. And over time, tech won. The difference to me with this specific cycle is everybody agrees.

• 2:55:05Thomas Laffont?

  It's going to happen and it's happening quicker and the stakes are higher than any other.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:11Thomas Laffont?

  So I think every board is ultra motivated. Every founder is focused on this. Now, they're bringing different approaches and you know, we'll see which ones went out, but I would say they're tracking token consumption. Right. So how much of my revenue is token based, right? How much of my COGS is token based? How much of my GNA is token based? How much of my spend per developer on cursor, OpenAI and Anthropic is happening. Right. So that in, you know, I do sit on a bunch of boards as an observer most, most of the time. So I kind of see a lot of that kind of happening. So the awareness is absolutely there. People are doing different approaches.

• 2:55:53Thomas Laffont?

  There's some that are, no, I'm in a white box, a totally new product, right? Then where I think I'm uniquely positioned to build it. And then there's others where like, no, my data set is so valuable. I'm not going to allow my customers to build apps directly using my data. So you're seeing a lot of kind of different approaches.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:12Thomas Laffont?

  Right. But everyone's awareness is at a 12 out of 10. So there's no convincing needed, right? Everybody's aligned, every board member's aligned, every investor. And now it's about, okay, what does that sense of urgency mean for this company? What are the things that we need to track and the things that we really need to go and execute on?

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  What does it take to make it as a new hire at COTU?

• 2:56:36Thomas Laffont?

  So we do, and I'm assuming you mean on the investment.

• 2:56:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:40Thomas Laffont?

  Staff, right? We do case studies. Very important part of the process for me. We usually pick a public name, right? Cause we want to test your thinking. And my favorite types of names are names where there's a good bull case and a bear case. And whichever one the prospective analyst argues, I will vehemently argue the opposite.

• 2:57:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:03Thomas Laffont?

  Right, just to test their thinking. Exactly. Understand their thinking. So that's really, really important.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Are you trying to pick obscure names or household names, everything?

• 2:57:13Thomas Laffont?

  No, I mean, for a long time, we used Netflix.

• 2:57:16John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 2:57:16Thomas Laffont?

  Right, as an example, that was a really controversial stock, both in the DVD era, then when they moved into streaming, then when they moved into proprietary content. And it was a heavily shorted stock over that period of time, so there was a lot of interesting ways to look at that name, right? And you could ask interesting questions like, well, if they increase, you know, price by a dollar, what happens to EPS? And what you realize is it was almost all profit, so EPS went up a lot.

• 2:57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:47Thomas Laffont?

  So we're just really trying to test thinking.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  Have you ever had to revisit a candidate who made a really great bull case or bear case that the firm maybe didn't agree with, and then they came back with an I told you so five years later?

• 2:58:01Thomas Laffont?

  You know, I've never had someone kind of email me that, which is surprising, because we've done a lot of cases.

• 2:58:07John Coogan?

  You've done a lot of case studies, I can imagine there's a couple I told you so's where it's like, oh.

• 2:58:11Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:12John Coogan?

  I called Domino's or whatever.

• 2:58:14Thomas Laffont?

  And honestly, to me, it's not about whether they say the right, you know, sometimes people think, oh, it has to be, if I say bull or bear, it's the, it doesn't really matter. It's like, how did you articulate your thinking? Did you lay out a clear model? A lot of kind of where we were starting, right? And so that's my favorite part of this job is thinking through a name and the opportunity and what could happen. And it's kind of the intellectual backbone of what we do. You know, I always say that I think the key to our platform is, number one, like seeking big themes and big ideas, that's a big one, and then the kind of the risk management piece, right? That's kind of kept us in business for a long period of time.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  How is AI changing the role of early analysts or career, or analysts who are earlier in their career on the investment side?

• 2:59:06Thomas Laffont?

  Too early to tell.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  Too early to tell.

• 2:59:08Thomas Laffont?

  Um, obviously, look, we use AI every single day.

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:12Thomas Laffont?

  Um, I use it a lot to test my thinking, to clarify my thinking. Uh, I've always had a weird dichotomy personally where I'm, I love reading, but I'm a terrible writer.

• 2:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:59:25Thomas Laffont?

  And one of the things I like about AI and ChatGPT specifically is it's helped me actually write in a way that I can be proud of, not just, sometimes I write, you know, I'll write something, an email to somebody, I'm like, ah, this is just so badly written, you know, and it's just, I don't know how to make it better.

• 2:59:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:43Thomas Laffont?

  I know it's not good.

• 2:59:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:44Thomas Laffont?

  I don't know how to improve it.

• 2:59:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:46Thomas Laffont?

  And it's so frustrating because I know what great writing is from my reading, but I just can't do it.

• 2:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And at least now. I've had a, had a, a family member send me some, something that was very obviously, obvious to me, AI-generated. And, uh, I think people have an aversion to AI-generated texts.

• 3:00:06Thomas Laffont?

  I totally don't get that.

• 3:00:06Jordi Hays?

  But, but, yeah, but, but the thing is, like, I was reading through it and I was like, this is very cool. Because I know this person would not have been able to articulate their thoughts in this way. But they went line by line and I know they, they mean it, right? And so they were able to communicate something that they never would have been able to communicate with text. Maybe if we sat down and spent, you know, uh, uh, a couple hours talking through it, I would have been able to get the gist.

• 3:00:31Thomas Laffont?

  Exactly.

• 3:00:31Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 3:00:32Thomas Laffont?

  Some people take out the M dash because they, right?

• 3:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to tell.

• 3:00:35Thomas Laffont?

  They're like, oh, I don't want it. And I'm like, what do I care?

• 3:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:37Thomas Laffont?

  Like, I don't.

• 3:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Leave it in.

• 3:00:39Thomas Laffont?

  Yes. A lot of emails that I write are helped by ChatGPT.

• 3:00:42Jordi Hays?

  It's like the, the Arnold Schwarzenegger line, you know, he's, I, he's, I smoke my stogie.

• 3:00:47Thomas Laffont?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Everywhere.

• 3:00:49Thomas Laffont?

  Why judge me on what I've said?

• 3:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:52Thomas Laffont?

  And my idea and whether it's well-written.

• 3:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:56Thomas Laffont?

  Who cares whether it's, was written by AI or not? I, that, that I totally don't get that.

• 3:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or polished by.

• 3:01:02Thomas Laffont?

  In fact, I hope that more, uh, people are able to communicate things that maybe they couldn't before.

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:09Thomas Laffont?

  Right?

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:09Thomas Laffont?

  Because they didn't know how, or they only knew granular.

• 3:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:13Thomas Laffont?

  Things, you know, and now more people can write, more people can communicate.

• 3:01:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:18Thomas Laffont?

  More people can express themselves. Like, to me, that's an incredibly empowering. Right vision.

• 3:01:25Jordi Hays?

  Talk about how you guys have approached investing in multiple companies in the same category or the same general category. How has that evolved over time? Were you mocked early for doing that from maybe some of the more traditional funds? And then how have you managed to make it work in practice and maintain the trust of entrepreneurs?

• 3:01:51Thomas Laffont?

  I think conflicts, which is kind of what you're... has definitely changed a lot in the valley as companies have stayed private longer. And I think we have to be kind of precise by what we mean by conflict. So as an example, funding two Series A companies at the same time that are pursuing the same opportunity is an obvious conflict that I think no firm, including us, would ever do. So let's just kind of be very clear on that. I think it's quite different when now you're talking about these very late-stage companies that are kind of competing with each other. But, look, every company is kind of competing, cooperating. Apple and Google are great examples.

• 3:02:34Thomas Laffont?

  They compete, but they're partners. So I think the distinction and the conflicts distinction has to be, kind of changes as companies and markets kind of mature. So I think you're seeing that become much less of an issue in mid-to-later stages, even by firms that typically viewed conflict as core to what they do, like traditional venture firms, have not kind of moved in that direction. And I think it's just the nature of the market. So that would be my first point. I think the second point is the execution of it, I think, really matters. So if I view a perceived conflict between companies, even if they're

• 3:03:16Thomas Laffont?

  later stage, I will always let the founders know directly. And I'm not asking for their permission, so I think you also have to be clear with the founder. Because what if they say no, and you still want to do it, then you're in trouble. Now you've just broken your word, and I won't do that.

• 3:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:33Thomas Laffont?

  But I will inform them. I'll be very direct. I won't let them hear about it from somebody else or something like that, and I'll explain kind of the rationale, right? So I think communicating directly, both good news and bad news, that is something that I learned as an agent. I'm not afraid to have difficult conversations, because I think we can grow from them. And I ask the same of founders or employees that I work with to both come to me and say, "If you have an issue, let's just kind of talk about it." And look, I've hired a lot of people, I've fired a lot of people over the years. I've asked a lot of people to go and look for different career paths, so I'm comfortable having those conversations.

• 3:04:15Thomas Laffont?

  So, you know, that's not something that, you know... I think your reputation and trust then is kind of the second point on the execution, right?

• 3:04:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:25Thomas Laffont?

  We take information security incredibly strongly. That's where SEC registered, and even before coming here, I got like a four-page memo from my lawyer about, "You can talk about this, but not that," and SEC this, and so of course, you know, I have to read it and...

• 3:04:42John Coogan?

  You can tell the Ralph Lauren story.

• 3:04:44Thomas Laffont?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:04:45John Coogan?

  The lawyer who laid that out specifically.

• 3:04:47Thomas Laffont?

  By the way, the way... Well, you know, so, side note, I believe that meetings should be recorded.

• 3:04:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:53Thomas Laffont?

  As an example. Now, my compliance will say, "Shit, we can't have meetings be recorded, because it creates a paper trail."

• 3:05:01John Coogan?

  Yep, insane in discovery, they can take anything out of context.

• 3:05:04Thomas Laffont?

  And let's just not even talk so too specifically, let's just talk an enterprise.

• 3:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:07Thomas Laffont?

  But then I say, "Okay, let me posit..." Enterprise CIO says, "No, I can't have my meetings recorded, I'm too afraid." I'm like, "Okay, let me posit two scenarios to you, okay? Scenario one is, in each you have a bad actor that's doing bad things, right? Whatever that is, you know, like belligerent, talking down to people, whatever. So, scenario one, nothing gets recorded, you know nothing, and 10 years later, someone comes out of the woodwork and says, "By the way..." X, Y, and Z, 10-year pattern of deception, nothing happened. Okay, so that's scenario one, right? Scenario two is every meeting is recorded. The first time said person does something that's not right, the compliance system, right, which is always listening,

• 3:05:51Thomas Laffont?

  sends that person an email and says, "Hey, by the way, better you didn't do this, talk to that person that way, disclose this piece of information, depending on the severity." Right? Second time person does it again, says, "Hey, I now have to flag this to HR."

• 3:06:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:08Thomas Laffont?

  Right? I would much rather live in world number two. Right? Because you know what the problem is. There's a system.

• 3:06:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:17Thomas Laffont?

  There's flags that have been raised.

• 3:06:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:20Thomas Laffont?

  And eventually, you know, someone kind of gets involved and you either remediate or you terminate the person or whatever, right?

• 3:06:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:06:27Thomas Laffont?

  So, to me...

• 3:06:29John Coogan?

  The back and forth of he said, she said, all of that, yeah.

• 3:06:32Thomas Laffont?

  Exactly. And who knows? Maybe that person, if they had gone that first warning...

• 3:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:38Thomas Laffont?

  Might have realized, "Oh, wait. Yeah, you're right, I'm being abusive." Or whatever the case may be of whatever they were violating, right? So, I think to me, that's a better world, right? Than kind of the ignorance of, well, getting no feedback and then you just learn much later that kind of you had a problem.

• 3:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly seems like a trend. I mean, Bridgewater's written about it a lot, Redalio, but then also...

• 3:07:01Thomas Laffont?

  And he did that with no analytics, right?

• 3:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:03Thomas Laffont?

  So, that's...

• 3:07:04John Coogan?

  Different, but yeah.

• 3:07:05Thomas Laffont?

  Correct. I think to me, what will happen is the analytics are going to get so much better.

• 3:07:10John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:07:11Thomas Laffont?

  Right? And the systems are gonna know.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:13Thomas Laffont?

  And they're gonna be able to look at your WhatsApp and your messages and your emails and all of your calls and they're gonna be able to just say, "Hey, by the way, just don't say this." Or, "Did you think about this?" Or maybe you could have... They're gonna coach you. They're gonna say, "Hey, you told this customer to fuck off." Be like, "Well, maybe you shouldn't do that. And here's like two other ways you might have mentioned, you know, like whatever this situation may be."

• 3:07:38John Coogan?

  Your frustration or the situation.

• 3:07:39Thomas Laffont?

  Right?

• 3:07:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 3:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Instead of the token maxing dashboard, you're going to have the social credit score. It's the bottom 20%. No, no, there's a lot of environments that it can make.

• 3:07:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe there's a divide on like the in-person versus remote work crowd like.

• 3:07:58Thomas Laffont?

  Well, let me be clear, I'm talking about work context.

• 3:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:00Thomas Laffont?

  This is, I'm not talking about after work.

• 3:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:02John Coogan?

  I just wonder if that would become something that employees select into or out of for various reasons. Just like some people are huge fans of remote work, some people can't stand it.

• 3:08:14Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:15John Coogan?

  And there's a variety of reasons.

• 3:08:16Thomas Laffont?

  By the way, I also think there's a clear distinction between transcription and recording.

• 3:08:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:08:20Thomas Laffont?

  Right? They don't necessarily go hand in hand to me, right? So I don't necessarily need a system that transcribes every word that was said and keeps it in some database somewhere.

• 3:08:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:30Thomas Laffont?

  I'm not sure that's necessary, but key takeaways from the meeting, what was said, what was agreed upon.

• 3:08:36John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:08:37Thomas Laffont?

  Like, that's useful. That's a good corpus of data.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40Thomas Laffont?

  To me, just because someone's quote "recording" doesn't necessarily mean that it's transcribed.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can be compressed already.

• 3:08:45Thomas Laffont?

  I like the option of deleting.

• 3:08:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:47Thomas Laffont?

  In an ideal world, I would recommend, well, you can delete the transcript. The transcript's not that relevant.

• 3:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:53Thomas Laffont?

  Because maybe you batted an idea back and forth three times and you said something that turned out not to be true, but you figured that out later. So you don't need any of that. What you do need is what was said, what was agreed upon, was anything done out of compliance or not, right? So it doesn't mean, it doesn't imply a world where everything you say is recorded.

• 3:09:10John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:09:11Thomas Laffont?

  Right?

• 3:09:11John Coogan?

  No, it's funny because there's so many opinions on this, but we record everything all day and live stream it on the internet.

• 3:09:17Thomas Laffont?

  Right.

• 3:09:18Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how have you processed a number of these venture funds that have become publicly listed? That are taking a lot of the different names that Co2 is in, you know, trying to find basically the most in-demand secondaries, putting them into funds. As I've watched, I think what I've seen is like, yes, it's very obvious, there's an incredible. Amount of demand from the public to invest in these names, but the big issue is that as soon as that demand floods in, you know, supply and demand, price shoots up and then you have a bunch of people investing at effectively, you know, 10 times what the private valuation or the underlying asset value. But how have you processed it? Do

• 3:10:03Jordi Hays?

  you think there's a more elegant solution over time?

• 3:10:06Thomas Laffont?

  So we do have a fund called CTECH that I'm allowed to mention that addresses some of this and, you know, people can kind of go online and research more about it. What I would say generally is people want access to these companies. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of arguments for going public. One of, I think, the most powerful, in my opinion, is to democratize access to companies. Let's take an Anthropic, let's take an OpenAI, right? And enabling the retail investor, enabling the Trump accounts, which I think is a marvelous idea, that my friend Brad Gerstner, really spearheaded,

• 3:10:49Thomas Laffont?

  and I give him a lot of credit for this idea of, wow, why can't we have every single new child already have, be invested in the market and participate in the value creation of these companies? So I love that democratized nature of it. So what I think it speaks to is there is incredible demand, right? Let's say you were sitting, you're not a VC investor, you're, you know, maybe a dentist, and you're like seeing OpenAI and Anthropic and you're like, wow, why, why am I not able to participate in that? Yeah. You know? Why is it just like an elite group of funds and accredited investors and so forth and so on?

• 3:11:36Thomas Laffont?

  That to me will have to change. Yep. And I think it should be bipartisan, frankly. Totally. Right? And I think there'll need to be some guidelines and stuff put into place. And we don't want bad behavior and, you know, all that kind of stuff. But I think there is incredible demand from the retail investor base to participate in the value creation. And I think, I think what we're learning as a society is the cost of not having broad participation is incredibly high. Completely agree. Right? And will be, right? If you have a whole generation of young people that don't own their house and have student debt

• 3:12:20Thomas Laffont?

  and don't feel like they're economically levered to OpenAI or Anthropic, or even more so are directly threatened by their technologies, I don't think that's a great future for any of us. Totally. So I'm not saying that OpenAI or Anthropic going public is the Solution, but is like the one thing, right? Obviously, there's going to need to be a lot of things that are done. Yeah. But I do think the transparency that comes with it, the democratized nature of it will make a huge difference. Yeah, makes sense. Jordan, anything else?

• 3:12:53Jordi Hays?

  Last question. What, what is, what are

• 3:12:56Thomas Laffont?

  Can I make also one point on in person? I'm so glad I got to do this in person. I did not want to do this remote. Because the tactile feedback you pick up in person, as an example, Yeah. for the viewers at home who have not been to this office, the open jar of creatine just

• 3:13:14Thomas Laffont?

  what, I mean, what a haul.

• 3:13:17Jordi Hays?

  Open jar.

• 3:13:18Thomas Laffont?

  Just the lid, just for everybody to describe it, there's a goody bag. Okay. And there's just a jar of creatine. It's just wide open. The scoop's right in there.

• 3:13:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so inviting.

• 3:13:29Thomas Laffont?

  If you want to power up before you get on, it's just right there. So It helps if you're, if you're sleep deprived. Right. That's just the kind of tactile feedback you

• 3:13:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't get that on Zoom.

• 3:13:38Thomas Laffont?

  On Zoom, no way. I'm really glad you could be here.

• 3:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, I'll save the next, I'll save the last question for your next appearance.

• 3:13:44Thomas Laffont?

  Okay.

• 3:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon.

• 3:13:46Thomas Laffont?

  Well, thank you so much. I love being in the dome.

• 3:13:48Jordi Hays?

  Going way, going way over.

• 3:13:48Thomas Laffont?

  Yeah, yeah, we went way over. Delighted to be partners in OpenAI now with you guys. I'm really proud of your success, honestly. I love Hustle and people that break into industries and so congratulations.

• 3:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we bring a very mailroom approach to podcasting.

• 3:14:04John Coogan?

  We do. Yeah, I can think about this. There's a lot of mailroom here. A lot of suits here, too. Well, thank you for watching. Tune in tomorrow 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:14:18John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:14:18Thomas Laffont?

  See ya.

• 3:14:19Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:14:19John Coogan?

  Goodbye.