Google I/O Reaction, Microsoft Build Recap, OpenAI's Stargate Datacenter | Austen Allred, Jeff Morris Jr., Cliff Weitzman, Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com 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://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (07:21) - Microsoft Build Recap (25:34) - Ben Thompson: The Agentic Web and the Original Sin Breakdown (01:05:06) - OpenAI's Stargate Datacenter (02:03:07) - Austen Allred. Austen is the founder and CEO of Gauntlet AI, a company focused on helping developers evaluate and test AI systems with greater precision. He previously co-founded Lambda School and is known for building tools that improve access to education and technology. (02:21:53) - Jeff Morris Jr. Jeff is the founder and managing partner of Chapter One, a venture fund focused on early-stage consumer and crypto startups. He previously led product and revenue at Tinder and has invested in companies like Lyft, Replit, and Notion. (02:41:42) - Cliff Weitzman. Cliff is the founder and CEO of Speechify, a text-to-speech platform designed to improve accessibility and productivity. He started the company to support people with dyslexia and has grown it into one of the leading tools in assistive technology. (03:03:16) - Logan Kilpatrick & Tulsee Doshi. Logan leads Google AI Studio, a platform that helps developers build with Google’s latest generative AI models. He previously worked in developer relations at OpenAI and is known for his work making cutting-edge AI more accessible. Tulsee Doshi leads Product for Responsible AI at Google DeepMind, where she focuses on building ethical and inclusive AI systems. Her work helps guide both internal development and public tools for fairness and transparency in machine learning.

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP and today is Tuesday, May 20th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortune of Finance, the capital of capital. And we are recapping Microsoft Build, which was yesterday and Google I/O, which is today. We have a bunch of folks coming on from Google, but we're going through what happened at Microsoft. Obviously, they're going even deeper into artificial intelligence, talking about the agentic web, the future where the robots do your work for you and work while you sleep.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  This is why we do three hours a day, folks.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have time to watch and listen to the full thing every single day.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  There's just a crazy amount of news and deep dives this week specifically into AI. Obviously, Microsoft and Google are doing big keynotes right now, but Bloomberg has a fantastic deep dive into OpenAI's Stargate. And then there's also a profile by the same journalist in Bloomberg about Dario Amade over at Anthropic, telling his soul story. And so basically, everyone's getting coverage and AI is the only thing people care about. And so that's what we're talking about today on the show. But let's give you a little bit of a recap of the news. So Microsoft Build 2025 opens, Satya Nadella calling for an open agentic web.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  There's new copilot features, open protocols, they're going all in on MCP, Model Context Protocol, that standard, not a particular tech product, obviously defined by Anthropic, but then open sourced and then adopted by both Microsoft and Google. So the narrative is MCP won, basically. And MCP became a very hot button issue, lots of people posting threads on how to use it.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  We're not sure if it's goaded yet, but it's definitely in the conversation.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  It seems, it seems like it could be goaded. It's doing quite well. It's getting massive adoption and most importantly, I think is like, it's not, it's more of a standard than a particular product. And so you're not seeing a wave of startups, but you're seeing startups use MCP. And then Elon Musk joined Satya Nadella onstage via Zoom, presumably, or probably Microsoft Teams, I guess, that he called in from, and confirmed that Azure will host XAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini. And he kind of talked about his vision for. Grok being a truth-seeking LLM and focused on foundation, a foundation model built on physics

• 2:25John Coogan?

  and first principles, which has been his, his goal with that. But if you look at Satya Nadella's pitch now for the host, the models that are hosted on Azure, it's really just everything.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  Everything.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  They even have, so they have, you can swap quickly between even DeepSeek is on there. And there's a version of DeepSeek that's been fine tuned by Microsoft's AI internal team. There's all the Llama models. There's all the OpenAI models, now the Grok models. Maybe.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  They found him. They asked him to leave. Now they're hosting it.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  We're good. Yeah. And, and then there's even, there's so, so many models now that Azure has a model router for OpenAI models. So you can import the Azure OpenAI model router and, and then it will decide what the cost benefit is for the individual model that you're using.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Oh, do you have a, do you have a plug? Or I guess we're, I guess we have, oh no, I got this one. Cool. Okay. And so, yeah, you should go watch the full conversation between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Elon Musk. He says, with Grok 3.5, which is about to be released, it's trying to reason from first principles. Also, I saw a ton of Tesla battery packs showing up.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  Bad news for product managers who have been, you know, spending their entire life figuring out how to think from first principles. That Grok 5 will just do it out of the box.

• 3:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a golden age for people that never learned first principles. I think you can just say, think from first principles.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Do it for me.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just do it.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  This is golden retriever mode all over again.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep. We've been calling it.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Bull market.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  Bold prediction at the time.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Being dumb. Dan Shipper summed it up. Yesterday, Microsoft rolls out MCP to support, support to Windows. Today, Google officially supports MCP in the Gemini SDK. It's over, MCP wins. And that makes a lot of sense. It's a standard that everyone's building against now. And we, we imagine that that will continue.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Once you have Google and Microsoft and Anthropic, everyone has to conform to it.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Coordinating with Dan, but hoping to get him on the show Thursday. He's got some news to share.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Um, another big announcement from Google I/O. They have real time Google Meet Translation is live now. I feel like we've seen this demo 10 years in a row, but it feels like it's finally here. And so there's a A video where you can be talking to somebody in a different language and it will live translate what you're saying into the local language. So you can just have a conversation. Obviously, this is a, it's like one of the most obvious AI use cases. It's something that Google should do. It's something that seems like extremely beneficial for humanity across the board, just like pure alpha. So excited to see that. They're also releasing a diffusion

• 5:11John Coogan?

  language model that I want to dig in with the Google team more on because we've seen image models move away from diffusion into more token-based structures and transformer-based architectures. Now, language models are going into diffusion. So I don't know enough about this, but I'm going to be digging in this week. They also launched Deep Think 2.5 Pro, new enhanced reasoning mode for using Google's research in parallel thinking techniques, meaning it explores multiple hypotheses before responding, basically branching all the different trees. There's already a little bit of this going on in OpenAI's deep research product, but obviously it's a very competitive space. This enables it to handle incredibly complex

• 5:55John Coogan?

  math and coding problems more effectively. And I was excited about Google Gemini. I've become more bullish on the product since I sent you those incredible AI-generated videos that are generated from VO2. And so I went in to Gemini because remember, I generated three or four of those videos and then it gave me a timeout and it said, look, I know that you've spent millions of dollars with Google over your career.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  The course of your career.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  But $20 is the most money I could accept from you. I couldn't possibly charge you an extra dollar to make one more of these videos.

• 6:30Jordi Hays?

  200 just doesn't feel right.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  The GPUs are on fire.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  Even though you would pay 2,000.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  And we have, even though we have 100 billion of dollars of cash, we have to rate limit you.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  We couldn't possibly light another GPU on fire for you right now.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  We should ask.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  There's no price.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  We should ask Logan later around rate limiting and the plans there. Hopefully they.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  It was a very frustrating experience for me because I would have paid more in that moment to generate one more photo of a Lamborghini Urus with a TVP on livery driving around a track. But I couldn't do it and it was not possible. I mean, I guess I probably could have if I got a separate Google account with a separate Gemini Pro subscription, maybe on a separate phone and then had to do that.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, huge opportunity right now to create a basically a bundled Google subscription where you subscribe to a service that then aggregates like a thousand, you know.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's kind of like how the banks have FDIC insurance and you're insured for up to like a hundred thousand dollars, then 250,000. So some people would take, you know, oh, spread a million dollars across 10 accounts or five, four accounts. You need to do that with Google so you don't hit the rate limits clearly. So they put me on a timeout. They said, John, you have generated too many of these GT3 RSs with TTP and liveries. You need to take a break. We'll see you one day from now. Okay, one day.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  Come back.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Come back.

• 7:49Jordi Hays?

  Run it back.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  It's been three days now since I did that.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  And you should be okay with that because that's kind of a typical workflow with a human, right? You maybe get a few iterations and they say, hey, I gotta go to sleep.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  I gotta take a break.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  I'll see you tomorrow.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're overworking me, boss.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  And so it told me to take a break. It said, one day.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  That is the agentic web.

• 8:07John Coogan?

  Monday night. I remember what it said. It said, Monday night, you can create more. So I wanted to go and create one today because it's Tuesday and I said, generate a vertical video 16 by nine of Sundar Pichai arriving at Google I/O in a Waymo and waving to a crowd of adoring fans who are taking pictures with Android phones. It says, too many requests in a short time period. Try again later. So again, a weird thing where like the product is amazing, but I can't access it enough. And I keep being frustrated with the actual rollout of these products, but hopefully it's getting better. I do wonder if they're getting slammed right now because of Google I/O. Everyone's testing out the new model and so they really are under a ton of demand. What was interesting is that it didn't generate any videos for me today and immediately it just said, it just said, too many requests

• 8:51John Coogan?

  in a short period of time. It didn't say if that, if it's too many requests from me because this is the first request I've sent in today. And so I was very unsure of what's going on there. It's just their systems under load entirely.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Can you prompt it to address you as boss man? Because it might be more. It would feel a little bit better if it said, hey, boss man, that's enough today. Instead of just, you know, hitting, you know, feeling like you're hitting those rate limits.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  I'm working hard.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Going back a little bit, one thing that stood out to me, seeing Elon and Satya having a conversation, working on this product launch, felt significant to me because it was not too long ago that Microsoft was named as a defendant in the OpenAI lawsuit, right? Elon's lawsuit against OpenAI.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Microsoft was a defendant. And at a certain point, I believe it was in 2023 as well. Elon was threatening to sue Microsoft for training on X or Twitter at the time.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  I didn't know that.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  And so these two haven't exactly had the best relationship. I mean, clearly like they're fine on an individual level.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  But the, the, the partnership now is cool to see, just given that there had been quite a bit of friction over the last couple of years. But the funny thing is Musk was actually way back in the day, an intern for Microsoft Windows in the 90s. So very full circle moment.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Isn't there some story about him trying to get a job at Netscape with Marc Andreessen? And he didn't make it past like the first round. And so he went to Microsoft. That might be wrong, but there's something about Elon before he started Zip2 was kind of moving around the valley at different tech companies. It's funny to imagine intern Elon.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  Let me look it up.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Writing some code for, for Microsoft Office at the time or something. But now, now they're partnering and I mean, it's all part of Satya's strategy to be model agnostic. It's always felt like Microsoft Research has been behind the curve on LLM training. Like Zuck, although, although Llama has kind of hit a rough patch with Llama 4.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Apparently so. Elon was rejected from a job at Netscape.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  He sent in his resume, showed up at the office, even lingered in the lobby, but no one acknowledged him.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Wow, just Marc Andreessen walking by, mogged.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  But and now and now Mark's in XAI.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Now they're boys. A big check and a bunch of other companies do, but it's great. What a full circle story, but yeah, so I mean, Satya obviously is is positioning Microsoft to be model agnostic and wants to be a vendor of this in the cloud platform. And I think that's it seems very good for for Azure in the idea that if you're a business and you're building on on Google, you might feel like, oh, they're going to really push the Gemini models on me. Maybe I get locked in at some point, maybe that gets expensive. But if I'm on, if I'm on Azure, I can dance around between different OpenAI models and different Llama models and different Grok models and and have a lot more flexibility because Satya has kind of said like,

• 12:07John Coogan?

  hey, we're we're not, you know, going to push you towards a particular model or particular like.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  They also released an open source VS code.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of like co-pilot product, which is big. So anyways, reaction to that was.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Project Padawan.

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  Was positive as well.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  GitHub Copilot graduates to a full coding agent. Project Padawan, GA for for Copilot Enterprise and Pro Plus, capable of for autonomous feature work, bug fixes and refactors. And so everyone's kind of moving into these autonomous coding agents. We're having Scott Wu from Cognition on the show on Wednesday, tomorrow, to talk about the landscape. And we're also having Lee Marie from Kleiner Perkins on Friday to talk about the same thing. This idea that how is the AI coding landscape shaping up? Is it one market, two, three, four? It feels like there's, as we were talking about it a little bit earlier, it felt like there are, there's AI code that's written.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  I mean, you just gave an example where you asked it to count, you asked ChatGPT to count the number of.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yes, this is funny. So.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  What happened there?

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  So basically, XAI got received 168 Tesla mega packs, which is going to power Colossus 2, which is their second data. And there's this sort of above ground image and I initially saw the image and I didn't, somebody else had had sort of counted them up. So I asked chat GPT to count and it and it spent 13 minutes attacking the problem by by writing code. In that time, of course, I just like, you know, looked at the X axis and the Y axis and multiplied and got the right number. But chat GPT was running in the background, you know, attacking it in the most sophisticated way possible.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, what the number I wanted to figure out that was interesting is that

• 14:08Jordi Hays?

  the retail value of the mega packs, which of course you can buy on the Tesla website, five million dollars, comes out to around eight hundred and fifty million dollars.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Just on mega packs, which is about half of their 2024 revenue, right?

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Wait, half of whose?

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  Not X AIs, but X's revenue, which is now combined.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So. X AI doesn't have any revenue really.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  X has graduated.

• 14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they raise a lot of money, so they're they're spending on Tesla mega packs. That's wild.

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm interested to see how ultimately exactly how this new round shakes out. There's been rumors around the new fundraiser for a while now.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Final details of that round haven't been announced yet, right?

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  It's still just rumors. That's interesting. I wonder 13 minutes is fast, but not that fast. I wonder if there's a world where OpenAI has a function it can call to like Mechanical Turk or Scale AI to just have put a human on the case.

• 15:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, it failed.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  It failed?

• 15:02Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Wait, it didn't even do it in 13 minutes?

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  It just it just basically timed out because I could see it working and

• 15:08John Coogan?

  Just writing code?

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Taking all these different cracks at it.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so so imagine.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  To its credit, it would have taken a human.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Not 13 minutes to count those.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  No, just manually counting them.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Like what I did, not I didn't actually go line by line, but like

• 15:24John Coogan?

  You do some multiplication.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Whatever 20 seconds.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  20 seconds.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  But if, if a human had to run, take that many attacks at solving it.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they wouldn't. Like what I'm saying is that, is that you kick off this, how many whites or how many white squares are in this image? And it just displays that to a mechanical Turk who's just sitting there doing random tasks all day long. And they just one shot it in, you know, two minutes.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I was talking about over the weekend. I was joking around. I'm sure some people took it seriously, but I was saying, I met somebody in the Philippines. Whose job is to make investment decisions for a firm that claims to use AI. That's the final, the final boss of, of, of using AI.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  But, but it's really, you know, a mechanical Turk is just, you know, using, using outsourced labor to just make all investment decisions.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  The overall announcement at any of these keynotes is always, we're 90% of the way there. And the last 10% will be another 90% of the way there. But I mean, there are some, there are some impressive, you know, announcements and, and steps forward, but obviously there's a lot, there's a lot left to do. So Copilot Studio, just running through what else Microsoft announced. Copilot Studio now supports multi-agent systems. So developers can build agents that delegate tasks to one another with Microsoft 365 Agent Builder. NL Web debuts as HTML for the agentic web, letting any size, any site expose a conversational endpoint discoverable by AI agents. So an AI agent shows up and it can just chat with your website.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  We talked about Project Padawan, GitHub Copilot graduating to compete in that space with Codex from OpenAI. And now just in the OpenAI world, you have three products that effectively write code. You can just go into 03 or even 40 and it can write a little bit of Python, like you experienced, which can have mixed results, but is sometimes extremely useful. You have Codex that can actually plug into a GitHub repo and go and write some code and fix bugs and whatnot. And then you have Winserve, which can sit in your IDE alongside and be kind of that ground up adoption. And so there's one mental model where there's like, The consumers are going to ask questions and they don't even know that they should be thinking about writing code. Code will be written. They might never see that code if they don't unfold

• 17:46John Coogan?

  the reasoning tokens. On the flip side, you might have someone who's using Codex to change bugs and make small changes in a GitHub repo without really opening up an IDE constantly, but they're just, they're just interacting with code, but they're aware of what should be done, what should be built. Then you have a product like Windsurf where for basically a full-time programmer, they're, they're working in code constantly and they're solving problems at a much higher level than any of the agents can actually do, but they are enhanced and sped up by these, you know, AI, AI IDEs that are speeding up their, their workflows. And then potentially you have this top-down enterprise AI, which is what Scott's building with cognition where,

• 18:30John Coogan?

  you know, there isn't as much of a groundswell around Devon as a consumer tool. But as I understand it, Devon is something that's been pushed top-down on big corporations as something that is, that needs to be rolled out and it has much more of a, like an enterprise sales,

• 18:54John Coogan?

  like go-to-market and, and sales cycle. So interesting to see if that, if that model holds of like four distinct markets, like consumer, prosumer, ground-up enterprise, top-down enterprise. I don't know if that's the right way to think about it, but I think that's something we'll be digging into over the, over the next couple of days.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, ultimately, some combination of product-led and enterprise is probably the winning combo long-term.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  They all seem to be getting adoption and printing money. The question's just, yeah, churn and how the market looks in the really long-term. It is interesting because like AI coding tools, it does feel like it's a massive market. You looked at the numbers for how much money is spent on software engineering. It's huge. And then it's also just a completely new market in the sense that there isn't anything that's like really established. Like, they're not really displacing spend on anything else. It's all just incremental and additive. So it's kind of hard to, hard to handicap exactly what you're going after.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  I thought this post from Caleb Harris was an interesting call-out. He says, "Last night I dropped 12 backlog bugs from Linear." Into Codex and launched. Graphtile found some nits in the reviews, but they were almost entirely correct. And then Spur QA tested almost entirely human out of the loop at this point.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 20:09Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Well, good time to tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, John.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  They also launched Copilot Tuning, which allows companies to fine tune their models with their own data to create domain-specific agents. Windows AI Foundry launches as a local platform on Windows and Mac for training and fine tuning and running LLMs with Foundry Local. Azure AI Foundry models adds Grok 3, which we talked about. MCP gets first-party support. Windows subsystem for Linux, a bunch of other stuff. SQL Server 2025 hits public preview. Let's go SQL Server. Huge for the database engineers in the crowd.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  Let's give it up. Um, anyway, the, the, I think the big definitive analysis of the, the post-game on Microsoft Build came from Ben Thompson, but Derek Thompson, no relation, I believe, but maybe they're secretly brothers.

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  That would be wild.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  He wrote Abundance with Ezra Klein. He says, fascinating Ben Thompson's vision of the future of the internet, i.e. the agentic web scenario is before I go to sleep, I tell ChatGPT, plan my five-year-old's birthday next Saturday. Budget $500. When you've made the reservation, email these two, these 20 people a printable invitation to attend. Also, my wife wants to go to England in mid-July. Find five plausible flights for the family and make several distinct itineraries. Finally, please edit this work memo. When I go to sleep, the AI agent negotiates slots with two bowling alleys, buys a cake, emails printable invites, plans the trip, copy edits, et cetera. This presents an interesting economic challenge. What happens to ad revenue when more traffic is just AI? Ads make little sense when the reader is a robot.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Well, maybe instead sites ask agents to make tiny payments that are fractions of a cent every time they call up an article. Ben suggests the use of no-fee stable coins, blockchain dollars. But I think microtransactions could work with old-fashioned dollars. I have no idea if this cashes out. But very interesting vision of how AI would necessarily transform internet economies as traffic shifts to from humans to agents. Interesting. So I want to, I want to dig through this strategy article, but I also don't.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  And this is significant because so every business, every consumer tech company eventually becomes an advertising business from Instacart to Uber to Apple.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  And if you remove these ad businesses, it typically will just rip out a lot of the actual earnings, right? Because advertising tends to be very high margin. And so what, what I think we're going to see is ultimately this kind of drawn out war between agentic software and the old internet where the old internet doesn't want to let go of advertising, right? And so I think that, you know, microtransactions are potentially somewhere that you could land, but.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  It's interesting to dig through. I'm not entirely sure that language models and AI agents will be entirely resistant to advertising.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Because I imagine.

• 23:26Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's, it's more so if you're Uber.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  And you have a great ads, ads business.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you thrilled to have an agent trawling and booking things and buying groceries and all this stuff? You're not, right? You're like, I would prefer.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Unless, unless the ads that you run on your platform influence the future training of those AI models. So for example, if an LLM is training on transcript of this show right now, and then we start talking about how Ramp can save time and money.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, it does, John.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. We're stating the facts here.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  And we're explaining that Ramp has easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  Not even to mention Ramp Travel.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, we didn't even get to mention Ramp Travel, which makes travel so seamless and streamlined.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  We use it every time we hit the road.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  We do. And so an LLM, as it's trolling through the internet, it comes across a, you know, a host read ad like that. That influences the future recommendations it makes, right? It gets baked in the training data. So perhaps ads could be just as, as, as influential in the sense that, you know, LLMs are simulating human behavior. Everyone likes to say that advertising doesn't work on them, but time and time again, data shows that it does. And so if you have an agent that's actually perfectly simulating a human, it should also be simulating receptivity to advertising. You would think that it would. That's right. But, but let's dig into Ben's article because I think I agree,

• 24:59John Coogan?

  and I think you agree more than we're letting on right now. But let's dig into it. So he starts with this, with this 2014 article in the Atlantic by Ethan Zuckerman about like the death of the web. I remember this, this iconic article. He says, from Ethan Zuckerman, "I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our internet is a direct..."

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Nobody's taking this serious. Taking this serious. Yeah, I forget what, Jordy has, Jordy has a laugh track now. It's called "The Internet's Original Sin." And... Keep going, John.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  You're making this very hard. "The fallen state of our internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we've trained internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles, which they cannot review, challenge, or change, that shape both what, both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technology savvy, the technologically savvy, but hasn't shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience."

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Marc Andreessen.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Marc Andreessen. Marc Andreessen, who was there when the web was born, explained in his 2019 podcast why this sin was committed. The quote is edited lightly for clarity. "One would think the most obvious thing to do would be building in the browser the ability to actually spend money, right? You'll notice that didn't happen. And in a lot of ways, we didn't even think it's unusual that it didn't happen because maybe that shouldn't have happened." I think the original sin was we couldn't actually build economics, which is to say money into the core of the internet. And so therefore, advertising became the primary business model. We tried very hard to build payments into the browser. It was not possible. We made a huge mistake. We tried to work with the banks and we tried to work with the credit card companies.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  It was sort of this classic, single point of failure bottleneck, or at least in this case, two points of failure. Visa and Mastercard essentially had a duopoly at the time. And so they were just literally, if they didn't want you to be in the switch, they didn't want you to be able to do transactions. You simply weren't going to do it. And what's interesting is like, I feel like the modern entrepreneur, like the Sam Altman style dealmaker, if you transported it back in time, you put the you can just do things mindset in there, you'd just be like, oh yeah, like whoever's building the browser did some crazy deal with Visa and is bundling these transactions. And so, yeah, they're totally waiving the 3% fee, but they're aggregating it this way and they're also investing.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. It's interesting that the credit card companies at the time too, you can imagine, I would pay an incremental fee to have my credit card data perfectly stored in my browser. Like you could capture bips on that pretty easily, right?

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  And so you'd think there would have been a deal to be done. But remember, this was at a time when people were scared of the internet. People generally weren't even fully convicted at the time that it was, it still had nonbelievers.

• 28:24John Coogan?

  I wonder if it was more of a failure of imagination from Visa and Mastercard executives or a failure of aggression in the deal making of the web 1.0 entrepreneurs?

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Because the web, whatever generation we're in right now.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  You think you're basically saying entrepreneurs today are built different?

• 28:44John Coogan?

  It's not just that they're built different, it's that they're very willing to go and do crazy deals with huge companies.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Like, I mean, think about that.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, one thing that's real is, one thing, one thing that's real back then, there was more, there was more

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  almost technical risk to something, to something like this.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  No, no, it's reasonable why it didn't happen, but yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of it is just the maturity of the industry. People take startups seriously.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  But I'm thinking of that, what is that Anker Jane company where you can pay your rent with credit card? And Wells Fargo like totally took a bath on the deal, at least in the short term. You remember this? It was some sort of credit card.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Built?

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Built, yeah, Built Rewards. And so like, doing a deal with Wells Fargo at that scale as like a startup is crazy. But like, Anker is clearly just a really, really great like deal maker. And so he was able to get it done. And if, if points on housing actually does play out to be a real thing in a big business, like it will be on the back of that crazy deal that needed to get done to make this happen. Like, it wasn't just going to be some ground up, small company deal. Like, you had to go in and do this, this big thing.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting in some ways.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  He also got Ken Scholz on the board.

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Apple Pay enables what would have been the goal at this time, but it does it effectively at the hardware layer.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not even that good.

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  I think it's pretty, it's getting to the point where it's pretty good.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. But I mean, still, like you, you hit web checkout forms all the time and have to hit the autofill, which is like such a kludge, because it could just not even be there.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  It could just be as native as you click a link or, you know, even just like the integration of email or the integration of the, the share sheet. Like, there's so many different aspects that are built into the web browser natively. Like, the ability to play video on the web. Like, that was something that all the browsers needed to figure out. And like, it just works now. Like, every browser supports video. Mark Andreessen was talking about all the different things, like, like why the hyperlinks are blue. Like, he's the one that decided that, because he was like, we need hyperlinks, so we should make them blue. And it's like, there could have been a version of money. So, anyway. Ben Thompson goes on to say, I think Andreessen is too hard on himself, and I think Zuckerman is too harsh on the model Andreessen created, on the model.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Andreessen created the conditions for the original web was the human web and advertising was one of the best possible ways to monetize the scarce resource in digital human attention. The incentives all align. Users get access to vastly, to a vastly larger amount of content and services because they're free, which I really like. It's great that anyone can access the internet for basically free and they can go all over and most of these services are free. The information spreads very quickly. Content makers get to reach the largest

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, the information doesn't spread quickly, always because there's a paywall, but there's the black market of PDFs as well, that I think it's Paula has talked about in SV.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Content makers get to reach the largest possible audience because the access is free and advertisers have the opportunity to find customers they would never have been able to reach otherwise. Yes, there are downsides to advertising. Zuckerman fretted about, but everything is a trade-off and the particular set of trade-offs that led to advertising, the advertising centric web were, on balance, a win-win-win that generated an astronomical amount of economic value. Yeah, it's hard to go back and play, play out the Google story and say like, oh, they left a lot on the table.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, in so many ways, content, content wants to be free, right? The second that you put webpages or anything behind a paywall, the attention they get drops by 99%, usually more, right?

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:34Jordi Hays?

  And...

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's just way better to be advertising-led. It's way better to just, you know, as you're talking about one story, just start talking about Figma, you know, think bigger, design, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Anyway.

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  It is the backbone of our show and we can't thank them enough.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Okay. Moreover, I disagree with Andreessen that we could have ended up with a better system if the banks and credit card companies had been willing to play ball. In fact, over the last 30 years, the credit card companies have, in particular, have in part, thanks to companies like Stripe, gotten their digital acts together and are integral to a huge amount of web-based commerce, which itself is driven And through digital advertising, the largest category of advertising for both Google and Meta. That too is human in the biggest in that the biggest outcome of digital advertising is physical products and real world experiences like travel. Digital products like apps and games meanwhile are themselves pursuing human attention. What was not viable in the 1990s, nor at any time since then, was something like microtransactions for content.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  One obvious problem is that the fee structure of credit cards don't allow for very small transactions. Another problem is that costs to to produce content are front loaded. And the potential payoff is both back loaded and unpredictable, making it impossible to make a living. The biggest problem of all, however, is that microtransactions are anti-human, forcing a potential content consumer to continually decide on whether or not to pay for a piece of content. Is alienating, particularly when plenty of alternatives for their scarce attention exist.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  I really believe that a large amount of the Substack economy is effectively crowdfunding. Somebody's ability to just nerd out on a specific set of topics.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's beautiful.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  I agree. Yeah, it does seem like if there's, yeah, sorry.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, but a lot of the content creators that are paywalled on Substack would be bigger and more influential if it was just completely free.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a big question in my mind of like. Where does investigative journalism go in the era of going direct and modern tech media? Like where is Tech Seymour Hersh? Like you need someone who can just be like Seymour Hersh was just on the payroll of big newspapers for a long time. And then could go and like hang out at a bar and talk to former soldiers about what they did in Vietnam. And then figure out that the My Lai massacre happened and like uncover this like massive scandal and. We see this in Silicon Valley where there are companies that are like, you're not going to be able to put a bunch of sponsored content on a takedown of some company that's defrauding

• 35:18John Coogan?

  their investors. The, the win case is the John Kerry story with Theranos where he was able to be on the Wall Street Journal payroll for a long time, hunt that story down for a long time, do a lot of sourcing and a lot of confirmation because it's extremely risky to write something negative about a $10 billion company that has incredible resources. I mean, they hybrid.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  You kind of need the heat shield.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 35:39Jordi Hays?

  A big organization.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. And also just you need, you need to be able to pay your mortgage while you're doing the research and not publishing and, and just doing nothing, basically. And, and being a hundred percent focused on, on chasing down a really big story. And then when you do it, there's a huge outcome because he, of course, sold a book and then the rights to the documentary and the movie and the TV show and all this stuff. And I, I don't even know if he's, I don't know what he's up to now, but it seems like.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Should reach out.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Really well. It'd be great to get him on the show. Here, if he's getting back in the game, digging into some of the, the, maybe he's already worked on.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  New blood testing.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, Theranos 2.0 is coming right now.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm back.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  He's like, I'm, I'm, I'm ready to start talking to the employees of this new, the new blood testing company.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  It would have been a huge missed opportunity to not just name the company Theranos 2.0 Inc.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Do we know what the name is yet? I don't know.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  I missed it.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  But we'll have to look it up. Anyway, subscriptions do work at smaller scales, says Ben Thompson, because they are ultimately not about paying for content, but giving money to another human, which you've mentioned, or human institution from the local news business model, which Ben wrote, "It is very important to clearly define what a subscription means. First, it's not a donation. It is asking a customer to pay for money for a product. What then is the product? It is not, in fact, any one article, a point that is missed by the misguided focus on microtransactions. Rather, a subscriber is paying for the regularly, regular delivery of well-defined value." Each of those words is meaningful. Paying a subscription is an ongoing commitment to the production of content, not a one-off payment for a one-off, one piece of content that catches the eye.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  Regular delivery. A subscriber does not need to depend on the random discovery of content. Said content can be delivered to the subscriber directly, whether it be email, a bookmark, or an app. Well-defined value. A subscriber needs to know what they are paying for. The last point is the crux of why many ad-based newspapers will find it all but impossible to switch to a real subscription business model. When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quality, and the ratio matters. A publication with one valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will easily earn more subscriptions than one with three valuable articles but 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects. Yet, all too many local newspapers built for an ad-based business model that calls

• 37:58John Coogan?

  for daily content to wrap ads around, spend their limited resources churning out daily filler even if those ads no longer exist. Ben says, "I expect that this model will endure in the age of AI. Obviously, I'm biased at this point, but in a world of infinite content on demand, common content becomes community. And if I'm successful, this essay will generate a lot of discussion amongst a lot of people, precisely because it is both original and widely accessible, funded by an audience that wants me to keep writing articles exactly like this." So, of course, Ben writes free articles and then also private ad-supported articles and goes back and forth, so he gets a little bit of the reach.

• 38:35Jordi Hays?

  So, he goes in here, "The death of the ad-supported web. The ad-supported web, particularly tech-based sites, is going to fare considerably worse. In fact, the most substantive pushback to my defense of advertising was in my own excerpt. Most ad-supported content is already terrible, thanks to the bad incentives both Zuckerman and Andreessen bemoaned, and the impossible economics enabled by zero marginal cost content generation and consumption. Google, in its most idealized form, aggregated content consumers by mastering discovery in this world of abundance, directing users to exactly the site they were looking for, which was monetized through ads that were sold and served by Google. Indeed, this is the great irony in the ads' antitrust case in which Google is currently embroiled."

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Eric Soufert asked on Mobile Dub Memo, I've heard arguments that because Google suppressed competition in open web advertising markets, those markets should flourish when Google's monopoly is broken. But my sense is that this ignores two realities. First, that consumer engagement has shifted into apps and walled gardens irreversibly. Of course, like, most people get their news from X or Instagram or Facebook.

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this was the logic for X to say, yeah, we don't want you posting links. We're fine for you to post an excerpt or a screenshot.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Let's build those walls a little bit higher.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Because we want you to click into the content and see another ad and then click out, go see something else, see another ad, and just do that forever.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  And second, that Google was keeping the open web on life support, and the open web's demise will be hastened when Google no longer has an incentive to support it. What happens to the open web when its biggest, albeit imperfect benefactor, loses the motivation to sustain it? Well, everyone's going in the walled garden. Walled gardens, like social networks, are both more attractive to most users and also better for advertisers. Google might soon lose what little motivation they had left to support the open web. However, that's not Google's and the web's only problem. Why go through the hassle of typing a search term and choosing the best link, particularly if search results are polluted by an increasingly overwhelming amount of SEO spam, now augmented by generative AI, when ChatGPT or Google itself will simply just give you the answer

• 40:43John Coogan?

  that you're looking for?

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  In short, every leg of the stool that supported the open web is at best wobbly. Users are less likely to go to ad-supported, content-based websites, even as the long tail of advertisers might soon lose their conduit to place ads on those websites, leaving said websites even less viable than they are today, and they're barely hanging on as it is.

• 41:04John Coogan?

  I mean, can you think of a single?

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  The classic example of this is like, historically trying to find an ingredient, like a recipe, right? You're like, I want to make oatmeal. And the site, like, buries the only information you actually need, which is like, how many cups of oatmeal to water, the ratio, whatever. And you have to see, you have to scroll by, you know, two pop-ups and six ads to get to that little nugget of information, and now it can just be immediately surfaced by an L M.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  I'm trying to think about the last time I visited, like, a truly ad-supported website. Like, I'm scrolling through here, and it's just...

• 41:44John Coogan?

  It's just nothing in my tabs. Everything is either a marketplace that monetizes by transaction fees or a paywalled website for news or just Google search generally finding stuff. But like, there are very, very few websites that I visit today on a regular basis that are purely ad-supported. Like, I do go to the Wall Street Journal, or The Economist, or Stratechery, or any of these, but none of them are purely ad-supported. The Wall Street Journal does have ads, but they also have a big paywall and an actual subscription fee.

• 42:24John Coogan?

  So, it's interesting. Yeah, the open web, I mean, is it dying, or is it already dead? Like, it seems like, like, you know, the Vice News and the BuzzFeed, like, that boom and bust has already happened.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  So, I don't know. Anyway, he moves on to the...

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean...

• 42:41John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  It'd be interesting to try to honestly run a deep research report on trying to understand traffic to these websites that are effectively dying but not dead, right?

• 42:53John Coogan?

  I wonder what the best example is.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Because if you have a website that's, I would imagine, like, how many websites have recipes for, you know, cooking various things that still get people trickling in, and they're technically still monetizing?

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Maybe WebMD is probably out there.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is, like, at what point does it cost more to even host the website than it's generating traffic, right?

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, there's been a couple of those rollups, right?

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  Because if you're making, whatever, if you're making a thousand dollars a month in ads, and it costs you a couple hundred bucks to maintain the website, in theory, somebody would just keep that running indefinitely.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, TechCrunch was obviously famously ad-supported. They were bought by Regent, which is a private equity rollup of brands. Let's look at their portfolio. It's all very hyper-specific stuff. They own TechCrunch now, but they also own Computer World, Network World, PC World, Mac World, Tech Hive. They own Cheddar News. News, they own Defense News, Air Force Times, Navy Times, Army Times. So I imagine that Navy Times is probably ad-supported. I mean, I'm just clicking around on the website and there's not a lot of like paywalls I'm hitting. But they are running ads and I'm sure that they have other ways to monetize, whether it's through

• 44:12John Coogan?

  premium, you know, reports or maybe conferences or something like that. But in general, it seems like there aren't that many companies. I would struggle to name companies that are generating over a billion dollars in revenue off of purely ad-based website that's not an ad exchange, for example.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Right?

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  I doubt it exists.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  It doesn't really exist. Anyway, so Ben takes all of this, all this preliminary thesis and weaves it into Microsoft and the open agentic web, says this reality is the fly in the ointment of an intriguing set of proposals that Microsoft put forward yesterday at the Build 2025 Developer Conference about the open agentic web. And so the quote from the CTO is, "The thing that is super important, if you think about what an open agentic web could be, is you need agents to be able to take actions on your behalf. And one of the really important things about agents being able to take actions on your behalf is that they have to be plumbed up to the greater world.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  So you need protocols, things like MCP and A2A, and things that are likely going to be emerging over the coming year that will help connect in an open, reliable, interoperable way, the way agents that you are writing and agents that are being used so actively now by hundreds of millions of people to be able to go access content, to access services, to take action on behalf of users in fulfilling the tasks that have been delegated to them." One aspect of this vision of the agentic web, says Ben Thompson, was Microsoft's commitment to MCP, which we talked about a little bit, created by Anthropic. Scott told Neelai Patel in an excellent interview on The Verge, that while MCP wasn't exactly what he would have designed from scratch, ubiquity is more important than semantic differences, particularly when you're trying to create HTTP for AI agents.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  The second part of Scott's vision was something Microsoft created called NL Web, Natural Language Web, and these are natural language interfaces for websites that make them more directly accessible for agents. He says, "If you think back to the web, we have HTTP and then we had things that sit on top of HTTP, like HTML mainly, that are opinionated about the payload. So today we're announcing NL Web."

• 46:21John Coogan?

  The idea behind NLWeb is that it is a way for anyone who has a website or an API already to very easily make their website or API an agentic application, lets you implement and leverage the full power of language, large language models to enrich the services and products that you're already offering. And because NLWeb endpoint, every NLWeb endpoint is by default an MCP server, it means that those things that people are offering up via NLWeb will be accessible to any agent that speaks MCP. So you really can think about it a little bit like HTML for the agentic web. I always thought this was odd because I thought that the layer to go between APIs and HTML for an agent to just transform HTML into something that an agent could understand would be very, very simple. I didn't think

• 47:06John Coogan?

  that we'd need a new protocol, but it seems like it's getting tons of adoption. So I guess this makes sense. We've done a bunch of work already with our partners who have been really excited to be able to very quickly get to implementation and prototypes using NLWeb. They've worked with TripAdvisor, O'Reilly Media, a ton of really great companies that offer important products. So Scott concluded by reemphasizing how important it was that layers, that the layers of the agentic web be open and use the evolution of the internet as his reason of why.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  So he says, "So the last thing that I want to say before handing things back over to Satya is just sort of press on these two points about why open is so important here. You know, it is unbelievable. What can happen in the world when simple components and simple protocols that are composable with one another are out there, exposed to the full scrutiny and creativity of every developer in the world who wants to participate or who has an idea? This thought game that I play with myself all the time is trying to imagine what the web would have looked like if one of the actors in the early development of the web say that browser manufacturers..." Browser manufacturers is a great terminology.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to call Marc Andreessen a browser manufacturer.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he made his money in browser manufacturing.

• 48:16John Coogan?

  Domestic browser manufacturing.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Domestic browser manufacturing. American dynamism, browsing.

• 48:21John Coogan?

  Living the reemphasization.

• 48:22Jordi Hays?

  So had decided that they wanted to vertically integrate and own the entire web, 100% of the web would have been dictated by the limits of their imagination. And it's just obvious with 30 years of history that that wouldn't have been a very interesting web. The web is interesting because, yeah, think of the iPhone app layer. If Apple wasn't controlling, it would be extremely chaotic, but there would undoubtedly be sort of cool, you know, things that would emerge.

• 48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm kind of split on it because like there's so much creativity that you can do within a JPEG or an MP4. And so if you get on YouTube, I mean, it requires more production value, but you know, we, we, like, we are not constrained by anything other than just pixels here. And we can put tickers and do all sorts of things within the confines of the MP4 box. I guess it is a little bit more narrow than, than a web UI that anyone can use and click around. So we, in some ways, we are being constrained, but there, like, you just scroll on, on any social network and you see the amount of creativity that, that occurs even within the constraints of like, no links, right?

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, despite Apple's control of the App Store, you still get the benefits of the web, which he goes on to describe here. The web is interesting because millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people are participating to make it this rich, dynamic thing. That's what we think we need with the agentic web, and that's what we're hoping you all can get, get inspired to go work on a little bit, to riff on and to use the full extent of your imagination to help make this thing interesting.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he says, so back to Ben Thompson, and he says, "I think the widespread adoption of MCP is a protocol layer and NL Web as markup layer sounds excellent. The big hole in Scott's proposal, however, was pointed out by Neelai Patel in that interview. That's the piece that on the web right now seems the most under threat, the underlying business dynamics of if I start a website, put a bunch of schema on it that allows search engines to read my website and surface content across different distributions. I might add an RSS feed, which is a standardized distribution everyone agrees on. There's lots of ways to do this, but if I wait, if I make a website and I open myself up to different surfaces, what will I get in return for that is not necessarily money. In almost every case, not money. What I'll get is visitors to my website and I'll monetize them however I choose, selling a subscription, display ads, whatever. That's broken, right? As more

• 50:39John Coogan?

  and more of the answers appear directly, particularly AI-based search products, traffic to website has, websites has generally dropped. We see this over and over again. What's going to replace that in the agentic era, where we've created a new schema for agents to come and talk to my website and receive some answers? What's going to make it worth it? And this is a good question. Scott, in his answer, noted that websites would be able to communicate to agents. That that they wanted to make available and on what terms, along with some vague hand waving about new advertising models and transactions. That last point is valid. TripAdvisor sells hotel rooms. O'Reilly sells training courses. And you can see a world where websites based on transactions can not only benefit from exposing themselves to agents, but in fact, transact more and potentially pay an affiliate fee. Patel.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're searching for a car and you're searching across eBay and AutoTempest and Cars and Bids and Bring a Trailer, all of a sudden, it doesn't really matter if someone's landing on your website. All that matters is that they're transaction, transacting and that they found the car that they're looking for. And so for all those transaction based websites, they're going to do fine. Yes, someone who's just making content and putting ads on it is kind of screwed.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about these transaction based websites, right? I mean, thinking of cars as an example, right? You have CarGurus, you have probably what cars.com.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Bring a Trailer, Cars and Bids.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the auction ones. But imagine a world where I just have, CarGurus is like an ad based business model. They want to drive leads to dealerships and get that. But in a world where I just say, hey, find me every single Ford GT between this year and this year that's publicly available online. Bring me the contact information and actually reach out to the people.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. But, but I don't think you can disintermediate entirely. I think that, I think that the agent would, would say, hey, there's a Ford GT that's available on Bring a Trailer right now. Here's the current price. Do you want me to sit here and bid on it for you?

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but here's the issue though, because I can have that, you could have the agent, like in theory, the agent would go to CarGurus and fill out the form and tell the dealer, process a lead to the dealer. And the dealer's like, thank you for this lead, CarGurus. If I sell the car, I will pay you a fee, or maybe it's just paid upfront. But the issue is an agent could theoretically just like find the, see the image of the car and then find, do an image search.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe, yeah.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, do an image search and be like, oh, I found this exact car and this exact photo that the dealer posted on their own site.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  On their own website.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  And I'm not going to pay CarGurus. I'm just going to find, and I'll actually call the dealer and confirm that they have it and I'll negotiate on your behalf. And then.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  But people already do that, right?

• 53:20Jordi Hays?

  CarGurus is. Cooked. Yeah, yeah, they already do that, but it's just much more scalable to say.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, that's not, that's not a marketplace. Like, like if you are on Bring a Trailer and you see a car, like you generally can't disimmediate Bring a Trailer. Like, so if you are a platform that's, that's bringing liquidity to the market and bringing listings that don't exist elsewhere on the internet. But yes, I mean, people see this with Airbnb where they, they, they, they see a beautiful place and they're like, I'm gonna go just look up this place and see if they have their own website. But a lot of people that are selling a one-off car don't have a website where they're listing their car. Like, somebody might do that. Maybe in the future, you would just, you would just, you know, post on X, "Hey, I'm selling my car. I have it listed on Bring a Trailer, but you can just negotiate."

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny. So one of the, one of the companies that's probably pretty cooked in this new era is internet brands. And they own WebMD. They own, but all the way through, they own Ford Truck Enthusiasts, they own Renless.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  That seems rough.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  They own the Dodge Forum. Like, some of these more community-based sites, I think are gonna be fine.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:25Jordi Hays?

  Because it's a place where a discussion is happening. But, again.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Sites that are purely indexing seem...

• 54:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Ben Thompson goes on and says, "The original sin of the internet lacking native payments was not, in my opinion, a sin at all. Advertising supported the human web, not because Andreessen failed to make a deal with the credit card companies, but because it was the only business model that made sense. No, the real neglect and missed opportunity in terms of payments is happening right now. Microsoft is on to the right idea with this adoption of MCP and in, in introduction of NLWeb, but its proposal by virtue of not including native payments isn't nearly compelling as it should be. As compelling as it should be. The key difference from the 1990s is that on the agentic web, native digital payments both, are both viable and the best possible way to not only keep the web alive,

• 55:19John Coogan?

  but also in the process, create better and more useful AI." And so he goes on to talk about stablecoins and agentic microtransactions. Let's start with the viability. This is from Bloomberg. Stablecoin legislation overcame a procedural blockade in the US Senate, marking a major victory for the crypto industry. After a group of Democrats dropped their opposition Monday, the industry-backed regulatory bill is now set for a debate on the Senate floor with a bipartisan group hoping to pass it as soon as this week, although senators said a final vote could slip until after the Memorial Day recess. So hopefully this passes and we can talk to everyone on Crypto Day about this next week. That'll be a lot of interest, a lot of fun. Ben goes on to say, I know I've driven longtime Strategoy readers a bit batty with my long

• 56:02John Coogan?

  running and still enduring in the face of massive grift and seemingly unending scandals interest in crypto, but stablecoins are genuinely a big deal. I wrote a brief explainer last fall when Stripe acquired Bridge, and so I'm sure most people are familiar with stablecoins. He goes on to say, stablecoins solve several of the microtransaction problems I listed above, including dramatically lower or no fees and the fact that they are infinitely divisible and thus can scale to very small amounts. Stablecoins by virtue of being programmable are also well-suited to agents. Agents meanwhile are much more suited to microtransactions because they are not in the end simply software making a decision. Because they are in the end simply software making a decision, unencumbered by the very human feeling of decision paralysis.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  So an agent can just go around and make a bunch of microtransactions. The entire digital ad ecosystem, he writes, is an example of deterministic agents making microtransactions at scale. Every time a human loads a webpage, an awe-inspiring amount of computation and communication happens in milliseconds as an auction is run to fill the inventory on that page with an ad that is likely to appeal to the human. These microtransactions are only worth fractions of a penny, but the aggregate volume of them drives trillions of dollars worth of value. The problem, as I and Patel both noted, is that this ecosystem depends on humans seeing those webpages, not impersonal agents impervious to advertising, which destroys the economics of ad-supported content sites, which in the long run dries up

• 57:30John Coogan?

  The supply of new content for AI. OpenAI and Google in particular are clumsily addressing the supply issue by cutting deals with news providers and user-generated content sites like Reddit. This, however, is bad for the sort of competition Microsoft wants to engender and ultimately won't scale to the amount of new content that needs to be generated. What is possible, not probable, but at least possible, is to, in the long run, build an entirely new marketplace for content that results in a new win-win-win equilibrium. First, the protocol layer should have a mechanism for payments via digital currency, stable coins. Second, providers like OpenAI should build an auction mechanism that pays out content sources based on the frequency which they are cited in AI answers. And this is kind of already happening with Spotify, right? Like, there's a whole bunch of music on Spotify.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  They have a whole pool of capital from all their subscribers. And then the more listens that they get, the more money flows in. And it's not really an ad-based auction system. It's more like just dividing up the pie.

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  The thing there, and it's a good comp, is that that was happening from the very, very beginning and the initial deals that Spotify did with record labels to get the music on in the first place. And now we're in a situation where all the LLMs are just using the internet.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  That's not true, though. Like, OpenAI has a deal with The Wall Street Journal.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  They have some deals, but they certainly don't have deals with every book they've ever ingested.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  No, no, no. But you imagine that they'll kind of go down the power law curve of like the most important information sources and brokered deals more and more and more, which is what Spotify did at the beginning.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  They'll do that if they're sued.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Remember, like, they had, and they have been sued. They've been sued a ton.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  Over and over.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  So they get sued and then they settle and then they do a deal. And like, yeah, it's a little messy, but it's fine because at the end of the day, The Wall Street Journal has a deal with OpenAI where OpenAI can ingest information from this, surface it in chat GPT results, and The Wall Street Journal gets paid for that work. And, and I don't know the structure of the deal, but I imagine that it's something like, like, you know, we're generating this much money from people searching and, and you're driving 1% of our value and so we'll give you 1% of the cut or half a percent. We'll split it with you. Just like, you know, if you're Taylor Swift on Spotify and you're getting, you know, 1% of the listening time, they'll give you half a percent of revenue or something like that, right? Is that not crazy?

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  I love it theoretically.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  I think that's like what what's happening and and the problem is that it's gonna need to go down the stack until it's self serve. Because if you want the open web, you can't do individual deals. And so eventually, anyone can go on Spotify like we're on Spotify. We get, I think we get a check. We get a check from Google at least. And in theory, it's like, we don't need to do a deal with Spotify. Of course, Joe Rogan did do a deal with Spotify directly, like the Wall Street Journal did a deal with OpenAI.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's interesting.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Podcasts go on Spotify. Spotify automatically runs ads and and does premium plays and then sends them a check.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  It's just such an interesting dynamic, right? Because

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Why would it play out differently?

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  So often, LLMs are not just serving the content. They're effectively

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  remixing it, right?

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Totally, but but they're

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  And the precedent for that is like historically

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  They're hitting the page.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Historically, if the journal went into the, you know, somebody from the journal goes into the library, public library, reads a bunch of books, forms its own kind of summary of, nobody's getting paid for that, right?

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, but

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  And so there's an argument, the the models can make an argument that there's enough precedent that says there's nothing illegal about ingesting

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. But there is this, there is this win, win, win that Ben Thompson's talking about this, this idea that Google has an incentive to keep the open web alive and the LLM providers might have a similar incentive because they want more journalism and more facts to hit the internet that they can scrape and pull into results. And so what is the value of a single Wall Street Journal page loading logged out, right?

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can see a scenario, I can see a scenario, I can see a scenario where it's like net new content, something like that. Where like OpenAI doesn't deal with Substack.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  Why not every time? Why not? Why not on a user basis? I asked for a summary of the Wall Street Journal mansion section.

• 1:01:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm I'm saying

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  And it went read 10 articles and that's five cents.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying every, I'm saying every time. I'm just saying it's possible that like there needs to be some type of cutoff date where where, you know, again, how does this actually? It sounds really simple and finding this win, win, win. But the actual mechanics of getting a deal done between The internet and a relatively small group of foundation model providers.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Jordi Hays?

  But again.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Are you saying that there's a tremendous amount of complexity?

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying there's a tremendous amount of complexity, John.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Because that's exactly what Ben Thompson's concluded with. He said, there is to be sure a tremendous amount of complexity in what I'm proposing. But and the path to marketplace for data generation is quite unclear at the moment. Who, however, could have predicted exactly how the ad supported web would have evolved or centrally designed the incredible complexity that undergirds it? This is where Scott's exhortation of openness is spot on. A world of one dominant AI making business development deals with a few blessed content creators and scraping the carcass of what remains on the web for everything else is a far less interesting one than one driven by a marketplace, auctions and aligned incentives. To get there, however, means realizing that the internet's so-called original sin was

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  in fact key to realizing the human web's potential. While the actual mistake would be in not building payments now for the coming agentic web. And so bull market and stable coins, we can see stable coins trading at 1.0001 dollars.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  So funny. It's so funny because everybody's so bullish and convicted on stable coins now, but it's like, how do we make money on this? How do we make money? I don't think it's launching the next circle, right? Or another stablecoin provider, even though that clearly is a great business if you look at.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, some of the different providers. I was actually wanting to get, uh, there had been rumors that Circle is talking with Coinbase and Ripple about a sale because they put out their S1. The market hated it and they're basically like, you.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Are completely dependent on Coinbase in many ways and paying all such a large part of your revenue to Coinbase, you know, does this so anyways, could make a lot of sense for those two to join forces, but Coinbase is also dealing with a lot right now.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, that concludes Microsoft and we've talked about Google a little bit. Should we move over to Stargate and

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  I would like to do that, John.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  We're taking a full tour today. We were just going around the horn to all the big labs, one story after another.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get boots on the ground in Abilene.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta go there. I mean, Chase was texting me earlier. We gotta have him on the show, but I think visiting would be worth it. It seems like Sharon Gaffare, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, but Sharon over at Bloomberg got an exclusive look inside Project Stargate, the $500 billion AI infrastructure project, including an on the ground tour of its first massive data center in Abilene, Texas with interviews of Sam Altman. Love it. She's been on absolute tear, wrote this today, dropped the anthropic profile of Dario yesterday. Just banger after banger. So, "Inside the first Stargate AI data center, OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank hope the site in Texas is the first of many

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  across the United States." Let's dig in. "Trucks carrying concrete and electrical wiring plod over red clay weaving in between cranes and excavators. Two symmetrical buildings stand in a massive plot of land where thousands of people in brightly colored vests work day and night to construct six more near identical structures that will make up the first site for Stargate project. Stargate is a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank with promotional support from Donald Trump." Love it.

• 1:05:47Jordi Hays?

  Throwing that in. Still unbelievable that they got him to just go and announce it, even though

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  The guy loves building in America, you know, this is like his whole brand.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Showbiz.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Loves to build the big things. "To build data centers and other infrastructure for artificial intelligence throughout the United States, the companies have pledged to spend as much as $500 billion, a number so large it's hard to believe it'll actually happen."

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  But at least for one, for this one, in Abilene, Texas, 180 miles west of Dallas, Chase Lockmiller says they're good for the money. Chase Lockmiller.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  This is an incredible.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  He chases the energy, he locks it down, then it's Miller time. Chase Lockmiller, baby.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  The nominative determinism is wild.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Let's pull up a photo of Chase. He's looking great. He's hanging out.

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's been on this for so long.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Lockmiller is the co-founder.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  You can go to the next slide, so he's more centered. I met him four or five years ago when they were doing oil and gas flaring for crypto mining.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  And it was, I mean, the business was doing really well back then.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  It's funny because it was very low status to do the crypto to AI pivot.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  Yet you get CoreWeave and Crusoe out of it.

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Just absolute monsters.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Always ignore the meme. Whatever the meme is, just ignore it. Build a GPT wrapper and sell it to OpenAI for 3 billion. Like pivot from crypto to AI and IPO for 40 billion.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Do it.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  It's fine. It doesn't matter. Ignore what the haters think.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Lockmiller is of course the co-founder and chief executive officer of Crusoe, a startup that helps develop AI data centers. Crusoe's cost to build the one in Abilene are expected to reach 12 billion, Lockmiller says. And that's not counting the billions of dollars worth of Nvidia Corp chips that will be installed in the finished facility.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  I've never built anything of this scale, Lockmiller says. I've had to learn a lot on the job. So the three main companies behind Stargate could say the same thing. OpenAI knows AI but has relied on Microsoft for data centers. Oracle knows databases but only holds 3% of the cloud market. SoftBank once raised a $100 billion fund, but that didn't go so well. Let's give him some time. Let's let him cook, you know? 10-year horizon, got a few years left on that one.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We got to pivot really quickly to The Economist because The Economist has an article about will OpenAI ever make real money? We should do a whole deep dive on this one, but the way they describe SoftBank is hilarious. Here.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  It says that they're talking about the latest OpenAI fundraising. Happily for the CFO of OpenAI, money men swept up in the AI mania need little persuading. They are falling over themselves to fund OpenAI. On May 13th, SoftBank, a Japanese tech piggy bank, said that its $30 billion investment in the firm was unaffected by OpenAI's recent decision not to ditch its odd governance structure, a nonprofit board with control of its for-profit arm. It's a whole, it's a whole great article.

• 1:08:58Jordi Hays?

  We were talking about this off air. I mean, it's absolutely credit to Sam for not completing the conversion, but not having to renegotiate at least the top level numbers, right? The 30 on 330 or whatever it was. One of the best dealmakers of all time and Masa doesn't clearly, clearly doesn't care what price he pays.

• 1:09:23John Coogan?

  So like simultaneously, the SoftBank deal is like crazy and unprecedented and wild and Japanese piggy bank and all that. But the premise of like, will Soft, will OpenAI ever make real money is like ridiculous to me.

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Will the next, will the next consumer tech giant make money online?

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Will a company with 500 million users make money?

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  I was saying, saying this yesterday off air. It was like, you remember it was only, it was less than a year ago. People, Anthropic was ripping and everybody was just saying, yeah, OpenAI is Yahoo. OpenAI is Yahoo.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  I was thinking about this a lot and I was like, what, what was the problem with Yahoo? Like they got, like, they got disrupted by Google, obviously, but like more specifically what happened? Like it was, it was a shift from, from non-algorithmic links, right? To a better algorithm in PageRank. Like it was a development of a better algorithm that really smoked them. And I'm wondering, like, is that, is that a point of fragility for OpenAI? Like, you could imagine someone comes up with a different model for AI. Like, they say, like, the transformer architecture is fundamentally not it.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  It's V1, and we're coming out with V2, and it's completely different architecture. Fine, maybe that happens. Is OpenAI agile enough to implement that within six months? Like, probably, right? If DeepSeek can clone transformers and reasoning models in just a few months, you would think that, like, I guess the question is, like, Yahoo failed not just because Google invented PageRank, which sorted the links by the number of links to a specific website. And so if everyone is linking to Stratechery and you search for tech news, that increases the page rank and that shows up at the top. And that was the, that was the key insight by Larry Page, the creator of PageRank. And it, and it created much, much better results.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Like, when you went to Google, it was dramatically better of a product. I remember when it came out, like, I was a kid, and, and I remember using AltaVista.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  You were what, like, 30 at that point?

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, a little late, late teens. I think I was actually like eight or something, but, um, anyway. So, so I had been using Yahoo and AltaVista, and you would search, and it would just be kind of like random links, or they'd be like, kind of curated. It would literally just be, it would, it would basically just search based on the keyword. So if you searched for, like, tech news, you would more than likely just see, like, technews.com come up because it had really strong, like, SEO just from keyword searching.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Google brought in PageRank and said, well, if, if, it doesn't matter that Stratechery, the name, the word doesn't make any sense, and Ben Thompson never actually writes, I am tech news, technology news, hashtag technology. It doesn't matter that he says that. All that matters is that everyone is linking to Stratechery, and it's actually a great source for tech news. And so we're going to put that at the top of the results. Now, That was a better algorithm and it was a better product very quickly. But if Yahoo had implemented PageRank, which I don't know if it was like patented or something, but if they'd been able to keep up with that, people probably would have just stuck with Yahoo for a lot longer. But something about where the company was and the culture didn't allow them to upgrade their search results. And so they fell behind very quickly.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  And so for OpenAI to become the Yahoo of AI, there would have to be a new company that comes out with a dramatically different technology or paradigm and either is able to patent it or, or keep it locked up in some way that OpenAI can't just port that innovation back. Because they've obviously been able to do that with other advances in image models that are happening elsewhere, reasoning or tool use. Like, it would be crazy. And this is something that's always interesting in tech is like, there just don't seem to be that many patents that hold. Like, how amazing would it be if you're just like, I'm the person that thought of MCP, or I'm the person that thought of image diffusion and I have the patent. And so I'm the only one that can build the company, or you have to pay me to license this. Like, that's just not a conversation at all.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  How many designers, for example, have patents from big tech companies and then can leave and effectively rebuild the same features?

• 1:13:39John Coogan?

  And the patents don't even seem to hold. Like, like, did you know that the swipe down to refresh, pull to refresh, that was patented by a designer at Twitter, like 10 years ago or 15 years ago?

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, they created the slot machine for the mind.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, endless scroll was another one.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Slot machine for the mind.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, endless scroll. Now, now you don't even really pull to refresh. I mean, I guess you do every once in a while, but mostly it's just end the scroll. But that was another thing that was invented at one of the big tech companies and then immediately ported across every other platform. And like Stories, Snapchat, Evan Spiegel created the Stories format. Thank you, Evan Spiegel, for creating Stories. We love innovation.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for creating a low risk way to just share what you're up to.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  Really shocking stories, but he wasn't able to patent it or like, or like, you know, keep meta from rolling it out to every single thing. LinkedIn has stories now and there's this question is like, it's kind of this weird failure potentially of the IP system. Maybe it's better because stuff just goes everywhere. But if you're, if you're OpenAI and you're on top of the, of the innovations that are happening, even at other labs, you would imagine that you'd be able to port back anything and stay on top as long as you're that front door and you have the scale that Yahoo or Google eventually got to hundreds of millions of users, you should be fine. Anyway, that was just my thinking on the Yahoo thing. It feels like a stretch.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02John Coogan?

  Especially given the recent, the recent innovations.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Anyways, back to, back to Abilene.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Where we don't use Manus, we use, we use ChatGPT around these parts. Anyway, so the article, the article here is basically pointing out that OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle are funding this $500 billion project and yet none of them have

• 1:15:27John Coogan?

  Hyperscalers.

• 1:15:28Jordi Hays?

  Hyperscalers sort of data center.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  Microsoft, but yeah.

• 1:15:31Jordi Hays?

  Experience. No, Microsoft, I mean, Microsoft is not in Stargate. It's OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. True, true, true. And so the only companies that have built cloud infrastructure on the scale are Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Oracle knows databases, but they only have 3% of the cloud market, right?

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Oh, Larry Ellison isn't capable.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Don't count out Larry.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, right. Oh, Sharon, you're in the, you're in the truth zone. Larry's good. He's good. Don't, don't come for Larry. Larry's on top of it.

• 1:16:02Jordi Hays?

  We will defend Larry.

• 1:16:02John Coogan?

  He's 87 years old and he looks like he's 42. He looks great.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. And he follows TBN. So.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  He's gonna be fine.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  We love you, Larry.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  He can, he can build some cement. He's got Chase on the case.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right. He's got Chase on the case. Anyway, so in interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek, the CEOs of OpenAI and SoftBank acknowledged that they've promised a lot and that to some extent, they're figuring things out as they go. And we knew this, right? They announced this. It was like, you know, Elon was pointing it out. He was saying, where's the money coming from?

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Jordi Hays?

  It's very, you know, pulling $500 billion together is not. Not the easiest thing in the world.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  So they dismissed critics, the loudest being Elon Musk, who says the full scope will never be realized because they don't have the money. We don't, and Masa says, founder of SoftBank, infamous Japanese piggy bank is this article, and The Economist says, "We don't need $500 billion in one day. We'll go step by step."

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  Do you think more founders should be pitching stuff like Stargates? Like, yeah, like, I need to realize my full vision, I need 500 billion. I don't need it right now. So like, if you're, if you're gonna come at me for that, that's ridiculous. Like, I didn't say I needed it right now. But over the course of this company, we will consume 500 billion in capital.

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of the nuclear companies might, you know? Who knows?

• 1:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Produce trillions. So OpenAI CEO Sam Altman knew they'd need construction crews and lots of computers.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Computers.

• 1:17:27Jordi Hays?

  Hey, folks, we're gonna need lots of computers.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  We're gonna need computers.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  But data centers also have extensive electricity and water needs to keep the machines running at a safe temperature, often requiring infrastructure upgrades that can take years. For Abilene, which will have mighty capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, the team built its own gas power plant to get the place running more quickly. Yeah, the, the, the.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  We talked a little bit with Augustus, but there's this whole meme about like, every time you search GATGPT, it like, empties out an entire lake and like, we're running out of water and like, I mean, I'm sure it uses some water, but I have no idea exactly how that's calculated and that feels like something that's.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is what percentage evaporates during cooling process?

• 1:18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  And is it?

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Like, a lot of, a lot of cooling systems are pretty closed loop because you're just piping, you're piping the water through, through tubes and then the water goes on to the chip, the chip heats up, the water goes, the water gets hot and then you pipe the water out. That's like a water cooled GPU rig on like a gaming PC. And like, yeah, you need to change out the water every once in a while, but like, not constantly. And so it's not like. I do wonder how, what the actual impact scale is here. And I bet that there's a lot of people with like the incentive to say, doesn't use any water.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if you could.

• 1:18:45John Coogan?

  Way too much water.

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if you could rip out the, the parts of an air cooled Porsche and potentially use those.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, air cool. I want an air cooled AI factory.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  Air cooled Porsches and put, uh, engine swap Tesla motors into that.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  I, I, I think we want to just, is a supercharged AI factory. Just pipe the, pipe the air back in to accelerate it. Take the exhaust fans and reroute them right onto the chip.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, Sam knows he's going to need a lot of computers, uh, but they also have extensive electricity and water needs. So Abilene is going to have 1.2 gigawatts. The team built its own gas power plant to get the place running more quickly.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:19:26Jordi Hays?

  One of the things that really surprised me as we were starting to dig into this, Altman says, was just how many things feed into the main line. The main line is still being assembled at the Abilene site in March. Some rooms are in the process of being wired and are off limits due to the risk of electrocution. In the future, tubes will pump cooling liquid around servers, which will be loaded with Nvidia graphics or sorry GPUs and to the physical brains of AI.

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  GPU actually stands for graphics processing unit, as they thoughtfully noted in this piece.

• 1:19:54Jordi Hays?

  It's good to know. It's good to know. Uh, if you've been living, if you've been living under a cluster, a GPU.

• 1:20:05John Coogan?

  They, they also contextualize it by telling you what a GPU here is. Uh, it's not only a graphics processing unit. You can think of it as the physical brain of AI.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Something there.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  Something there.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  PB, PBAs.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  This is, this is, this is ripped straight from a soft bank deck.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  It's like they're talking to the same audience, retail.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  For now, those tubes dangle from the ceilings beside half lit hallways. We're trying to deliver on the fastest schedule that a hundred megawatt or greater DIA center has ever been built. Locke Miller says, from the front seat of a buggy on a ride through the construction site, in this moment, speed matters a lot. The big reveal for Stargate was at the White House on day two of Trump's second term. I didn't, I forgot it was so early. Altman, Sone and Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison stood behind the president in the Roosevelt Room.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Because it was, it was Elon and Sam, like both around the White House on the same day in the midst of this battle.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Dude.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of an awkward.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Have you, have you seen this, this picture of Masa getting hype mogged so bad by Larry? It's brutal.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Really, John, you're gonna bring up hype mogging?

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  It's a sensitive topic on this show.

• 1:21:14Jordi Hays?

  It's a sensitive topic.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  But we, but I mean, we.

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  We should pull it, we should pull it up.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  We gotta call it out. Anyway, um, lavishing praise and crediting him with help making the pos, the project possible. The whole production came together in a matter of days, according to a person familiar with the events planning who asked not to be identified. Um, Stargate's real origin, according to Peter, the Vice President of Infrastructure and Strategy at Opera, and Operations at OpenAI, uh, Hoshle, Hoshle, I'm not sure how to pronounce the last name, uh, goes back to a research paper published at the beginning of the decade, written by a group at OpenAI that included Dario Amade, who'd go on to start one of the company's main rivals, Anthropic PBC. Um, the paper describes so-called scaling laws, this is GPT-2, which we've talked about a bunch, uh, which assume that

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  the more capable AI requires ever more data and computing resources. What's interesting is like, we're talking about increasing the ums, uh, but like, this has to be synthetic data at this point, because we've kind of already hit the data wall, I believe, or are we, because I, I don't know that there's ever anyone.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  We're expanding it.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I, I don't know that anyone's really mapped out like 10x, uh, yeah, check out that photo.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Rough podium situation. Trump's also pretty big too. Larry's pretty big, but, uh, yeah, Masa.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Tough presentation.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Still a size lord.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes up for it with the checks he rips.

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep. OpenAI, uh, as many know, already had a contract designating Microsoft its primary financial backer as its exclusive cloud provider, but Altman decided he'd eventually need other options. Oracle was looking for partners for the future complex in Abilene and was talking with Musk before Altman came in, says a person familiar with the discussion. Musk obviously chose Memphis for XAI, so went a different direction.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Oh, this is cool. Altman picked the name Stargate because of one of OpenAI's early data center designs resembled the ring-shaped portal that could open a wormhole in the 1990s science fiction movie of the same name, also a TV show. You ever watch Stargate? Absolutely not. Next question. After half a year of Altman selling the idea to prospective backers, Stargate really came into focus in mid 2024, and he says he found himself in a lot of Zoom meetings.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't Stargate also a CIA project around mind-reading?

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know. I'm not familiar with that one. Look it up.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Chat can.

• 1:23:40John Coogan?

  The hardest part was figuring out what the shape of the deal would be. Would it be part of OpenAI? Should it be a separate entity? You know, they love separate entities over at OpenAI, so we know where they landed on this one. Should we just try to get one company to build it all for us?

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the Stargate project was a classified United States Army program. Wasn't affiliated with the CIA, but it was initiated in 1977 by the DIA and SRI International to explore the potential of psychic phenomena in intelligence gathering and military applications.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  How'd it go? Were they successful?

• 1:24:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Seems like it.

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they cooked.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  So OpenAI is responsible for the operation of the business and will be its main customer. SoftBank handles the financial side, including raising additional funds for Abilene. Oracle will lease the data center and fill it with servers. Crusoe declined to comment on whose else is going in. OpenAI and SoftBank will each put in $19 billion to start. Oracle and another equity partner, Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX, are on the hook for $7 billion apiece, according to a person familiar with the matter. So yeah, I mean, 19 and 19 plus 7 and 7, you're getting up into the 40s, 50s, 60s, billions. Not bad. It's not 500, but they're getting there. They're within one oom. That's what they gotta do.

• 1:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Striking distance.

• 1:24:58John Coogan?

  Each project will be financed individually with a mix of equity and debt. With data center firm, primary digital infrastructures helping orchestrate the financing. JP Morgan Chase is doing some loans.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so if you have money over at Chase, you're, I would say at this point entitled to say that you're a financier of Abilene, of the, of the project in Abilene.

• 1:25:21John Coogan?

  That's great. For future signs, SoftBank has held talks with dozens of lenders and alternative asset managers, although it's yet to secure a deal and some of those conversations have slowed due to global market volatility. But now we're kind of flat. Maybe the markets open back up and things move on. That's a structured financing that SoftBank has done many times in the past, so we are very confident. And yeah, I mean, SoftBank took ARM private and so they're clearly, they're clearly capable of operating at this scale. It's not, not crazy. Not everyone is so optimistic about SoftBank's ability to execute. The last time so and did anything close to this scale was the Vision Fund, which depended on a $45 billion contribution from Saudi Arabia's largest sovereign wealth fund. Imagine clipping two and 20 on that. SoftBank's fund racked up losses most disastrously, most disastrously on the

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  So Sun says,

• 1:26:07John Coogan?

  real estate startup.

• 1:26:08Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes I get crazily overexcited and I make a mistake like WeWork, but when you have the conviction and the passion. Moss's mistake was not backing, what's the new company?

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Cursor?

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. The new real estate company by Newman.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen did.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Flo?

• 1:26:26Jordi Hays?

  Flo. He should have doubled down. But when you have the conviction and the passion, you actually learn from those mistakes and the scars, and that will make you stronger. I've made so many more mistakes that I think I'm a little stronger than in the past.

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  He's been very wrong, but he's also been very right and he's been right more than he's wrong. And so he's still in the game and as long as SoftBank is cooking as a company, he can keep ripping checks.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, his calculus is, I believe, can be done on a napkin. And this is. Just my guess.

• 1:26:55John Coogan?

  Huge napkin.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  He has a very large napkin and it's basically if I buy 10%. If I buy 10% of OpenAI and it's a trillion dollar company someday, I'm going to do very well. And I'm going to lever up to do that. So my actual return on equity is going to be fantastic.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  And he's going to be laughing and this is.

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  I mean, this is like, this is like.

• 1:27:17Jordi Hays?

  He's a gambling man.

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  Not as crazy as investing at WeWork.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  One of the best books on Masa is called The Gambling Man. That's the context you need.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did a whole deep dive on it. Complicating matters or Trump's tariffs, cost calculations swing every time the president changes his mind, but the trend line is expected to go up on, is expected to go up on aluminum steel and other construction supplies, not to mention Nvidia GPUs, which are made mainly by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., TSMC. So, and says he expects no significant impact from the trade policies. And I think he's right. I think this is what Trump wants. And I think all of these will get, will get car routes and they've already been negotiated down. So I'm not too worried about that.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Trump, I, I think the bigger question here is just like, like what is the return to scale? Because we've seen the scaling laws kind of maybe potentially drop in terms of pre-training wall and whatnot. And so the question is just like, what does a 10x larger facility actually get you? It better be worth it because we know the, we know the economics of GPT-4 training run were great. Like they, they printed tons and tons of $20 a month subscriptions off of that. And I think the total cost was like a hundred million dollars. Now you're up at 10 billion. Can you get everyone on a $2,000 a month subscription? If you can, no big deal.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and a lot of, I mean, won't a huge amount of Stargate's resources just go towards servicing?

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Models.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Inference potentially, but I mean, I feel like a lot of the narrative is like training, but you know, obviously, obviously it will be both.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai has raised the possibility that we're in the middle of a data center construction bubble and obviously, Amazon, Microsoft have pulled back on some data center plans.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Altman is undeterred, still seeing compute capacity as precious resource. We need more compute, more capital. He says, "We want to have, we want to have access to a lot more of the machinery to make AI and run AI." And I mean, yeah, like the GPUs do go on fire and there are limited resources still, even with the models. I mean, obviously, there's a ton that you can do on.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the fact that you're getting rate limited by Google as a paid customer.

• 1:29:26John Coogan?

  It's insane.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  It's insane. Like, it is the biggest bull case for build more.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Data centers. But I honestly put that less on, on, on their cloud offering than just some PM was like, "Oh, no one would want to generate more than three videos in one day," or whatever.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Or like, "Let's just roll this out slowly." Altman is undeterred, still seeing computing capacity. The Abilene skyline is made up largely of buildings constructed in the 1920s during the Texas oil boom. Among the city's major employers is a nearby Air Force Base and cheese production plant that opened in 2022. Meanwhile, activity at the Stargate site, spanning 900 acres, larger than New York City's Central Park, moves at the pace of a boomtown. And I was, I was talking to some real estate folks and I was saying like, "You should probably just go to Abilene and start building like Walmarts and gas stations and everything, because like, it really will be a boomtown. They're going to be building this for a long time." Yes, these are going to be somewhat human resource light, but

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  there still will be a ton of people working there, ton of people getting paid a lot. They'll want bars and restaurants and like, the local economy should, like, it would be impossible for it not to flourish. Like, the economy booms when you put in like a soccer stadium. Like, you're talking about.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wonder if there's been any, I wonder if there's been any people going, I mean, I'm sure the Stargate project in general has just been buying up surrounding land to just sort of mitigate potential risks or future issues. But if you own like an acre, even just a single acre that's not connected to roads at all within this area, you could probably end up selling it for.

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's smart.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  You know, millions beyond.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  You gotta just hold on and make them build the data center around you.

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Do you need a helicopter to get in?

• 1:31:12John Coogan?

  Helicopter. You just look every, you have this quaint little house on the prairie and then all around you.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  It's its own little microclimate because like the heat coming off.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Have you seen that photo in Virginia where basically there was like this nice little house and then AWS and Amazon just built up these massive? And so you just see this nice house and you pan up and it's just as far as the eye can see.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  It's like, geez.

• 1:31:35Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 1:31:36John Coogan?

  Rough. The team behind the Abilene data center conceived under the code name Project Ludacris. Nice, nice code name. First put shovels on the ground in June of 2024. Crusoe decided to fly in workers from all over the country because of the cities, uh, because the city of 129,000 people didn't have a labor force large enough to support it. Lock Miller says, uh, it's project.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  129,000 is way more than I originally kind of imagined for this town.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  Probably got some good high school football going on.

• 1:32:03Jordi Hays?

  That feels more like a city than it, people, people like to position Abilene as like, oh, this quaint little town.

• 1:32:09John Coogan?

  Don't heat on Abilene. Um, it's projected to take slightly more than two years for the entire project to go from start to finish. Although parts of the data center are slated to go online sooner.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Towns like Abilene are usually on the losing end of technological change, which tends to create most jobs in the largest cities. And data centers traditionally don't employ that many people. Crusoe has promised officials that the Abilene site will deliver 357 full-time jobs once construction has finished. That's not that much. Actually, that's pretty small. I thought it'd be higher.

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  For a $500 billion project.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Well, I guess it's 10 billion in this version or what do they invest in?

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  A little bit more.

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  10 or 50. But yeah, that is crazy low numbers, but the AI agents are grinding.

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Hate to be contributing to this. I backed a company that makes robots for data centers.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Reducing it from three fifths. We're gonna get that number down to five. Yeah, that's the goal.

• 1:33:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's basically the idea that like data centers are flat and there's like routine

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. Yeah.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  That needs to be done.

• 1:33:11John Coogan?

  No, it's reasonable.

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  And it's like very much a controlled environment and just driving a little Wally

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  RC car.

• 1:33:18Jordi Hays?

  robot around makes a lot of sense.

• 1:33:21John Coogan?

  We're talking about like how much of a boomtown it is. It's like 375 jobs for now.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  On a base of 129,000.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  That's like nothing.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Existing.

• 1:33:29John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  People.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  I feel like there will be more knock on effects, though. Anyway, the Abbling government.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  What about the Chip? There's Chipotle opportunities.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  Those 357 people are going to be eating a lot of double steak, lock, burrito bowls.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  The Abbling government is hopeful that it is the start of something bigger. The city and county agreed to extend significant tax breaks to get the deal done and local officials saw an influx of requests in the days after Stargate was announced from housing developers, infrastructure, energy, infrastructure vendors, would be investors and other municipal governments desperate to bring jobs to their town. It will impact the rest of the economy, our restaurants, our home builders, our Chipotles, with many new people coming in and taking these jobs. The city was able to accommodate Stargate's waters, water needs, which are small compared to a typical server farm due to a novel cooling method that recycles most of the liquid. Let's hear it for the fake news that ChatGPT is destroying the ocean. It's not true. Like, they figured out how to recycle the water, of course, because water's expensive and

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  why would you waste it? The trade off is that the data.

• 1:34:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's not, the water's not being massively contaminated like in oil production, fracking.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  And so they need a ton of electricity. Data centers of this scale are unprecedented. The, this was cause for concern where the memory of 2021 Texas blackouts, which led to the death of six people in the county, is still fresh in people's minds. Much of the blame for those outages belongs to Texas's. Deregulated energy grid, but the flexibility that comes with the lack of regulation was part of the allure for Stargate. Crusoe went out and bought gas turbines and oversaw the construction of a natural gas plant on site, which will supplement the, what the data center can get from local utilities. Yeah, I talked to an investor who was, who knows Chase and was like, he's just, he has an uncanny ability to find energy, which

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  is like, I don't know, something I wouldn't even think about in terms of like, what the skills of a founder are necessary, but he's like extremely good at finding like opportunities and pockets of energy that are being underutilized. So.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm technically millennial, but I was fairly close to being Gen Z by a few days. Is that like rizzling energy? Like I'm just trying to put it, he's an energy, he's an energy.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  No, it's like.

• 1:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Rizler, is that what you're?

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like there, I think there are a lot of, there are a lot of companies out there that think kind of along the lines of like a single energy source. So there is a lot of, of natural gas here. Chase is very good at putting together different opportunities. There's a existing plant, we can build a new plant, there's wind, solar, like you're very energy agnostic, but how do you piece all those together to create the, to meet the actual demand on an ongoing basis? Stargates, to Stargates critics, the idea that the project's backers could maintain this pace and scale across the country is reason to think they're living in a fantasy. Amade, co-creator of the Scaling Laws, publicly questioned Stargate's seriousness, calling it chaotic. Musk, breaking with Trump, called it fake Altman's retort.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  He says all sorts of crazy stuff. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff said in a post on X in April that Stargate signaled an end to the honeymoon between OpenAI and Microsoft. The project does reflect a shift in the relationship between the two companies. They revised their cloud contract in January to allow OpenAI to use other vendors such as Oracle, as long as Microsoft has, still has right of first refusal. Microsoft doesn't intend to invest in Stargate, but was listed by OpenAI as a technology partner in the project. And this was interesting because they.

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Can I just put your logo on the deck? Please? Can I please just put your logo on the deck?

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  There's this amazing.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Microsoft is providing exchange.

• 1:37:11Jordi Hays?

  There's this amazing, there's this amazing line from this guy, Aaron, buddy of mine.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  We'll be using Microsoft Excel on site. So they're a technology partner.

• 1:37:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20John Coogan?

  That's it. But yeah, remember the Sasha quote, "I'm good for my 80 billion." He's just like, "I'm good for my 80 billion generically, CapEx, it'll happen somewhere. It's not necessarily an investment target."

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna butcher the exact quote, but Aaron Frank has an iconic post at one point, or maybe he just said this to me in person, he just said, "Some people just want to see my name in their, some people just want my name in their deck." Because there was like this fintech boom and people would just come to him and be like, "Please, can I give you 50 bips to just like put your name?" Because like that, like at some point.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  What did he do?

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  He, he created the card that became the Apple.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  What, what was it called again? You don't even see that, the Apple push.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Apple Pay?

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  No, Apple Card. Remember?

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  Was it called the Apple Card?

• 1:38:05Jordi Hays?

  I think it was called the Apple Card, but his, his company like became that. Yeah, Apple Card. You don't hear much about the Apple Card.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Well, they had a deal with Goldman and then they kind of like fell off and maybe they're not doing it anymore. Did people get those? I never had one. Was it good? Did it have like cash back on stuff?

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  It was pretty good.

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Unlimited daily cash back.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  I'm not really the credit card points maxer or into.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Never been big into that world.

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  Never. Too management consulting coded. It's like every, every guy I know who works at like McKinsey or Bain or BCG is like, "Oh, I'm a spreadsheet of points." And I'm just like, "I don't care. Just tell me which card I'll get and I'll use that for a decade and they'll, they'll squeeze me for annual fee probably." And I'm probably like way underwater on it because I'm not points maxing.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  Anyway, if things go as planned, Abilene could serve as a model for the next of Stargate's developments. The day after Altman first visited the Abilene site in early May, he testified before Congress asking to, for help to fast track data center permitting on future locations. The fa, the first site was incredible. We need a lot more of that. Crusoe is evaluating another potential spot in Amarillo, Texas, which it hopes could be part of Stargate, according to a person with knowledge of deliberations who asked not to be named. OpenAI has said it's also looking in several states, including Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And while Stargate might rent data centers already built, being built elsewhere. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Oracle are taking the spirit of Stargate International with an AI data center under development in Abu Dhabi, which will not be part of Stargate LLC,

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  but will count OpenAI as a customer. It's simple. If all that wasn't enough, Stargate could even expand to include semiconductor production, according to Altman, perhaps as soon as next year. I think of Stargate as the AI factory. If we don't have to be involved here, maybe we wouldn't. But if we could just magically spin up all the compute that we needed in the sky. But at this kind of scale, you can't do that. And so there's another interesting angle here, which is the idea of building an AI data center in space. We're having a couple of folks to come on the show, maybe next week to talk about that. There's a company that's thinking about doing it. There's some investors that are looking into it.

• 1:40:11Jordi Hays?

  It's Sounds silly.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Sounds extremely buzzwordy and sci fi. It's like hard tech space and AI and data centers. But think about it, you get, you get energy from the sun, from solar panels, basically for free. And then you also get cooling because you're in the vacuum of space and it's cold for free. And so you don't need probably water cooling and you don't need as much energy. And so the economics might work out potentially in

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  Don't need land.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  Pretty, yeah, you don't need land. And so you've cut out a bunch of costs and then added Starship or Falcon nine launch costs, which are significant, but maybe small.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait for the day where a satellite is gibbling for me. Just knowing that I can create the most silly picture in my mind and then send it up to space to get made and then have it sent down. Just send it back whenever you get around to it. Could be tomorrow.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  And then it says, you've run out of requests. We don't

• 1:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Too much ghibli.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Do anymore.

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  When's the last time you saw ghibli?

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  It's been a while. I have been using.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  I've been using images and chat GPT, chat GPT a lot, but on a lot more like practical sense, just trying to visualize different things. I like the library.

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  I told you, I've been using, I've been using chat GPT image, images to get my three year old to eat dinner.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, you said that was working really well.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Basically, bite by bite, I will generate a new. If you take another bite of chicken and chew it well, I'll generate another picture of me as a dinosaur.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  My new, my new go to ghibli, instead of asking, turn this into a studio ghibli, I just say, uh, turn these, turn the image into bodybuilders. And I've been having a lot of luck with that. I, I sent one to the chat. We'll try and pull it up, but

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Get this pulled up. It's

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, but that's, that's the original picture.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is.

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  So we'll pull up the original picture first of the OpenAI team. There they are.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay, and then can you?

• 1:42:17John Coogan?

  Can now, now can you pull up?

• 1:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Can you make him look like bodybuilders?

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, I enjoy that. Also, just making, yeah, just a lot of, a lot of Cadillac Escalades with GT3 liveries.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  And a lot of TBP and merch ideas. A lot of stringers, a lot of suits with, with ads on it.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  Speaking of which, we should do some ads. Go to vanta.com, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  If you're doing anything important, you probably should be on Vanta.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  You heard it here first. Go to vanta.com.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  You should also get on numeral, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark Series A.

• 1:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A.

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  Anyway. Do we have time to do? We, well, we only have 15 minutes until our next guest.

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  Do a little timeline?

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  We should do a little timeline. Be good. We got Austin Allred coming in. We're going to ask him about AI coding in the era of agents. We can cover Dario maybe tomorrow. I also want to go through, oh, we didn't get a chance to dig through Craig Federighi and the Apple AI piece in Bloomberg, but there are some really hilarious points in here. One is that apparently when Steve Jobs was trying to acquire Siri, he called the CEO and said, I'd like to buy the company. I think this is the future of computing. I think voice interfaces, artificial intelligence, this is what Apple needs. We want to buy your company, bring them in-house.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  The CEO of Siri said, no, I don't want to be part of Apple. I'm good. And Steve Jobs proceeded to call him every single day for 24 days straight before he got the deal done.

• 1:44:06Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Absolutely insane. You don't hear about that a lot.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have, you get this idea in your head of, of somebody that is a demigod figure. And you think that they don't have to be cringe to get things done.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:21Jordi Hays?

  And turns out, sometimes you gotta cringe max.

• 1:44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:26Jordi Hays?

  And, and do whatever it takes. And sometimes that's calling somebody every single day.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  It must just be so funny to pick up the phone.

• 1:44:33Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're like,

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  24th time.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're like, yeah, walking your dog or, you know, it's like,

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs calling again.

• 1:44:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's leaving a voicemail.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Oh, hey, Steve.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Hey, bud.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Still not interested. Still building my company. Still grinding.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would get sort of total privileges to call people bud.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  One of the few.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  When you're at the top.

• 1:44:58Jordi Hays?

  One of the few that earned it.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  When you're the greatest entrepreneur of all time.

• 1:45:01Jordi Hays?

  So if you're not Steve Jobs, don't use the word.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Remove that from your vocabulary.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Let's go to some timelines. Zach Kukoff's talking about, oh, my God, we're really going to speedrun 2008 with collateralized burritos.

• 1:45:13Jordi Hays?

  Klarner's losses have widened as more consumers fail to repay loans. Unfortunate. Learning,

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  you know, basically probably speedrunning risk management that credit card companies have done for a really long time.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  I wonder what's actually going on here because the whole like, yes, you can buy now, pay later on your burrito. That's silly. But that's probably not the vast majority of their underwriting, right? Like, that's the meme, but that's not actually what's driving buy now, pay later activity. And I wonder if in the lead up to IPO, they, they loosened underwriting restrictions to try and ramp volume. And because it seems like Klarna, have they gotten out? No, right? They're, they're, they're not public yet, right? They have not successfully IPO'd. And so I imagine that in the lead up to the IPO, they're trying to do a bunch of things. There's the whole, that whole news cycle around, oh, we're not going to hire anyone. We're going to use AI for everything. Obviously, that's sending a signal to the market that, hey,

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  we're going to be an ultra efficient business. The margins are going to dramatically improve. We are taking AI super seriously at this company. And so, you know, our OpEx should be really low over the long term. You can underrate the, the IPO against a really low SG&A cost, right?

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:29John Coogan?

  And then also on the revenue side, they're probably saying, they're probably trying to do everything they can. Maybe they went too far and now they're generating losses, which is obviously not.

• 1:46:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes. The issue is they doubled losses. So their net loss for the first three months of 2025 was around a hundred million. A year ago, for the same period, it was 47 million.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  Is this from like the S1 or something like, why is this data public?

• 1:46:56Jordi Hays?

  I think they're, they're trying to get out. And so I imagine they need to do some type of reporting. Revenue increased 13% year over year to 700 million for the quarter. And again, this is a company that in 2021 was valued at $45 billion. Most recent private mark was around 15. So unclear what they'll do. They put their IPO plans on a hold last month, along with StubHub. And again, they had been on this marketing tear, right? Remember the CEO came out and he was like, we're using AI for everything. We're letting everyone go. And then he says, actually, no, we're not doing that. It's not good enough yet.

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  I don't like when the IPO window is closed. I like an open window.

• 1:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  I like companies going out every day.

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  You punched a hole in the wall at the gym when you heard, I remember.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  When the IPO window closed.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  When it closed.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  I was like, John, why is your hand two feet into, or sorry, why, why is your fist two feet into the wall, John? You were trying to get it out.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Too frustrated.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Pissed off.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Well, if you're trying to track all these IPOs, trying to get in on the action, head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Also, Jordy, how did you sleep last night? I put up some good numbers. I'm climbing up the ranks. I'm getting back in the game. I might have beaten you back to back days. Let's see. How'd you do? What's your number? What's mine?

• 1:48:32Jordi Hays?

  No, you go first.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, one second.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Get a Pod5 Ultra. They got a five-year warranty, a 30-night risk-free trial.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  I got an 80, John. I'm sure you beat me.

• 1:48:45John Coogan?

  Oh, I got a 94. Smoked.

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  Smoked.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Get out of here.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  Get out of here.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  Try. 96, actually. 96.

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:48:54John Coogan?

  Boom. 96.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm proud of you.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Still not good on the consistency. Going to bed at all random times. Waking up pretty consistently. 5:45. Anyway.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  All right, coming on. We kind of covered this already. This from, "The lion does not concern himself with SOC 2 compliance."

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  That's because the lion uses Vanta, right?

• 1:49:16Jordi Hays?

  Yes, exactly. So I think this-

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  You don't need to be concerned.

• 1:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Maybe we need a community note this and say-

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is an ad.

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Hey, this is an ad.

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Andy, you gotta be disclosing-

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have to do hashtag ad or hashtag partner.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe he just loves Vanta so much-

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  It's possible. It could just be UGC.

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, but anyway, obviously, don't concern yourself with SOC 2. Be a lion and get on Vanta.

• 1:49:36Jordi Hays?

  Art over at Brex announced a partnership with Zip, a big procurement platform. Apparently Zip is taking a step back from the corporate card market, and so this partnership allows them to each-

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. So Zip had a corporate card?

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  And now they're just partnering with Brex for this?

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  And Brex had a procurement product-

• 1:49:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:58Jordi Hays?

  Which they rolled back.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  And that kind of happened too with Stripe had a corporate card for a little bit and then stopped that, right? Isn't that what happened?

• 1:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody was like, wait, corporate cards, good business.

• 1:50:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Jordi Hays?

  We should do corporate cards.

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:08Jordi Hays?

  Turns out, hard to do.

• 1:50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there's always a question about like, where does the corporate card sit? Because Stripe does not sit in the same place as like Ramp in terms of like the CFO suite. Like it's more of like almost a developer tool.

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  That was their initial wedge.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's less about like an accounting product. It's more about like the, like the payments and engineering product, although obviously it's very tied. But I don't think Stripe's ever gone into travel or, you know, bill pay. Like they haven't focused on that as much. Anyway, Art says, "This is two YC companies with cultures of shipping fast and collaboration, creating something truly special."

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  We love to see YC companies, obviously, the most the recent collaboration between Deal and Rippling. Also, YC companies hasn't been as smooth, right?

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  More tumultuous.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a little tumultuous.

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  I wouldn't necessarily call it a collaboration.

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, they were partnered in some ways because they were both paying the same people.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, they were paying the same employee.

• 1:51:10John Coogan?

  Anyway, back in 2021, Art approached Zip's CEO because I saw Zip doing something remarkable in the enterprise segment. A market Brex was determined to win. At the time, the CEO of Zip pushed back, saying Brex was too focused on startups. What would he get from this? Fast forward to March 2024, Brex has built their base of enterprises and many were demanding our products to work seamlessly together. Both companies had also retrenched to focus on core strengths. Zip stepped back from card. We stepped back from enterprise procurement. This is a classic competitors turned co-creator story. Zip brings world-class procurement orchestration. Brex brings global card capabilities and spend management across 50 countries. So congratulations to Art and Brex.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Art, fellow LA guy.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  And I have some advice for Brex. Why don't you run a billboard to promote this on AdQuick?

• 1:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:03John Coogan?

  Get some, Brex actually has a ton of billboards, right?

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  They, I mean, they ran.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  They invented the billboard in many ways. They did invent the billboard.

• 1:52:10Jordi Hays?

  They put the billboard economy on their backs.

• 1:52:12John Coogan?

  They did.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  In 2020, 2019, right?

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  It was like, it was hard to get a billboard because they were on all of them.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  So head over to adquick.com. Art, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Great, great transition, John. We got a post here from TJ Parker, who will be on the show Thursday. Again, he's coming back on. He says, "One thing I'll never understand about healthcare startups is the instinct to take a strategic route rather than an administrative tactical approach. You don't need a top-to-top meeting to get in-network with a payer. Just fill out the paperwork. You don't need a strategic relationship with Quest, LabCorp to integrate scheduling or get competitive pricing. Just work with an existing vendor. If things go well, you can elevate to strategic relationship over time, but you'll never get off the starting line with a strategic approach."

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Will has a funny reply here. It's very funny when people tell me they're struggling with getting in touch with payers. It's like, have you tried going in the front door? Timeless advice, timeless wisdom.

• 1:53:23John Coogan?

  I wonder what's going on here. Is this just because there's a lot of like tech people who think, I'm going to build tech for healthcare and then they're just completely unfamiliar with it?

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  They think it's all about partnerships versus just making stuff happen.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  Or they're just unfamiliar with this market structure because TJ's been, I mean, he was a pharmacist before, right? Like, he really understands the industry and has continued to understand the industry even post-exit. Whereas I think a lot of people are like, I build software. I know that healthcare is a problem, so I'm going to build healthcare software. But they don't understand like the structure of the market at all, or how the deals get done. And so they got to learn stuff from TJ's posts, I guess. Anyway.

• 1:54:00Jordi Hays?

  We got a post here from Andrew Reed. In the news, Authentic Brands buys Dockers from Levi Strauss. A little mix-up in the pants market. Little switch-up and Andrew says, Docker, the containers overlapping with Dockers, the pants, both making hundreds of millions selling to system admins.

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, Andrew is a great investor, but he puts his pants on one leg at a time like anyone else.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Let's get him some Dockers. Let's see.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  Get him some Dockers.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  I somehow think he's

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  We should get him

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Too stylish for that.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't see him wearing Dockers, but we should get him a TBPN tie.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, tie would be good.

• 1:54:41Jordi Hays?

  Which we've been working on. With ads on it, of course.

• 1:54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, last time he came on the show, he was wearing a actually really nice Figma sweatshirt, but didn't have a collar. So, you know, docked some points from that.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Docked.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  Docked. Well, you know, we should also tell you about Wander.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge services. Vacation home, but better, folks.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  John Andrew, founder of Wander, was teasing how excited he is about some big news. And I couldn't possibly guess what the news is, but we're gonna have him on the show.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Tane, friend of the show, says OpenAI tried to partner with Google to use its search API to power real-time results in ChatGPT's search offering. Google said no, citing too many complexities. And this is from Michelle Fraden, or Fraden. Interestingly, she was at Sequoia. She was on the FTX deal and then went over to OpenAI right before the Sam Altman firing. And so it was just like chaos for a while, but it seems like she's settled in over at OpenAI and is doing well, but getting some pushback from the Google folks. She says, "We hope you're doing well. We wanted to follow up on our discussions over the past few weeks regarding using Google's search API to help power ChatGPT's search GPT prototype and search functionality in ChatGPT. As mentioned, we are currently testing

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  a prototype search GPT and to learn more about how users and publishers use AI chat experiences, coupled with real-time information and search-like features. On July 25th, the day of our public announcement, we reached out to Google about using its search API. We believe having multiple partners, in particular, Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users."

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  Not just destroy you.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  "We also understand Google publicly offers its custom search JSON API to developers looking to incorporate Google's search results into their products, providing additional precedent for us to work together." So basically asking like, "Hey, you have this service that you offer to a lot of people. Like, can you offer it to us?" And they're like, "Absolutely not."

• 1:56:44Jordi Hays?

  Hey, do you mind letting the fox into the hen house?

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Gemma, I summarize this email.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Fox sending the email to a chicken in the hen house. Hey.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Come in. I'd love to come in, check out the house.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  I thought I might ask. It seems like a great house. I think my, I think the other foxes in the fox house would like it.

• 1:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Google's like, ah, the chickens over in the hen house are like, I think it'd be kind of complicated. Google said, no.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  We're going to decline this because we believe that you are a wolf in sheep's clothing.

• 1:57:31John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, cheers to Sundar for not letting the fox in the hen house. And he lives to fight another day, built his own Gemini, built his own apps. And we're excited to talk to some folks.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Frankly, built different.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Built different. We're excited to talk to some folks over at Google about, you know, the hen house protection strategy.

• 1:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  And the Fox defense, defense system.

• 1:57:52Jordi Hays?

  The Fox Defense Network. The Fox Defense Engine.

• 1:57:57John Coogan?

  Should we talk about Coinbase?

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  This is a rough one. Markel Arrington is very upset with the Coinbase news. He says, I'm a longtime investor and champion of Coinbase. Something that has to be said, though, this hack, which includes home addresses and account balances, will lead to people dying. It probably already has. The human cost denominated in misery is much larger than the $400 million or so. They think it will actually cost the company to reimburse people. The consequences to companies who do not adequately protect their customer information should include, without limitation, prison time for executives. Very disappointed in Coinbase right now. Using the cheapest option for customer service has its price, and Coinbase's customers will bear that cost. And so.

• 1:58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So for context, if anybody was living under a data center, Coinbase effectively was offshoring their CX function. Certain CX reps had access to consumer data, including home addresses and account balances, which they then effectively sold or were bribed into passing to nefarious groups who then were threatening Coinbase, saying they were going to leak it. Coinbase came out and said, you know, kick rocks. We're going to pay basically a bounty that leads to the arrest of these people. The issue, obviously, with home addresses and account balances being online, is that bad actors could just find

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  a home address of somebody with a high Bitcoin balance, go there and say, with a, you know, the threat of physical violence and say, send me your Bitcoin right now, or even worse, abducted. And so Michael is basically saying that there's going to be a, you know. Real, real consequences here. Coinbase came out and said, anybody that sort of falls to various social engineering hacks due to the, you know, they're basically going to reimburse them. Apparently, they expect to spend quite a lot of money, hundreds of millions of dollars to reimburse those people. But Michael is saying that the true cost is much higher. And apparently, there'd been just like a bunch of other issues here. I mean, who knows what's actually going on. I'm sure that.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  I do wonder, like, how much of a cost center is customer service for Coinbase? Like, it seems like it's a big company, very profitable, has done very well. Like, if they doubled the cost of the expense, like, would it get better? Is customer service really like a, like a, something that we're spending more money on is a lever? Or is this something that's like a little bit more intractable? The other interesting thing is, like, I do wonder, like, the internet is pretty locked down, I feel like. Like, it is, like, yes, there are addresses that can be sold on the dark web, but like, it's pretty hard to just put up something that is illegal on

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  the internet. Like, like, all the major platforms take it down. Google shadow bans it. The links get banned. The browsers can be, like, it's not that crazy.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's fairly easy for this information to just be like a file.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  An Excel file.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yes, but at the same time.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Then criminals can transact and sell multiple times.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  At the same time, like, let's say that I'm like a, you know, the type of criminal that does, that does just show up to a house and put a gun in someone's face.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, the real, the immediate risk is social engineering. It's somebody calling you from a number that's spoofing Coinbase and saying, hey, I noticed some activity. I need you to verify this. Give me this code. So that's the immediate risk. Second order effect is that a criminal could just show up at somebody's house and demand payment.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the type of criminal that just shows up at people's houses, like, how are they actually going to get this information? Because they're not just going to Google it, and it's not just going to show up there. They're going to have to find it somewhere on, like, through some sort of hacker network. Are they paying for this? Like, it feels like this information can be somewhat controlled. Like, credit card numbers leak all the time. And and like the the global cybersecurity industry is pretty good at making these not just proliferate to like script kiddies and like random criminals. Like, yes, there are organizations that try and like programmatically like to run up a ton of charges and just like spam the network. But in terms of like these one on one dangerous interactions, like I'm

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  not so sure that that it's it's going to happen like in mass. Obviously, it'd be terrible if it did. And it's a very big deal, and it should be taken very seriously. But but but I do I do wonder if there's a way to to kind of like, like not allow this information to proliferate. Ironically, like what if what if it goes on the blockchain? It's just available. It's like it's a very naughty issue with like, you know, censorship and things. But Balge had a good response here to Arrington. I don't have a clip, but we'll have to talk to him about like the future of KYC. His argument was that like, part of the problem is that Coinbase is required to keep all this information when when they they might not actually need to if the government

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  didn't require it. And so there's this double edged sword of the more information that you keep on someone, the more information that can be leaked. Anyway, we'll dive into that more next week. For now, we have Austin Allred coming in to the studio. How are you doing, Austin? Good to hear.

• 2:03:11Speaker 02

  Hey, good. How are you guys doing?

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? How are you?

• 2:03:15Speaker 02

  I guess, yeah, hanging out.

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I wanted to have you on the show for a few reasons. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff happening with AI coding agents.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  What's what's this whole AI thing?

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's this whole AI thing?

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, I think I haven't heard about it. Yeah, I mean.

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  Maybe just start with like an introduction on yourself and what you're up to now, what you've done in the past. And then we can kind of go into the structure of of AI in the workplace, how people are learning to use AI, and then kind of some of the disruption that's potentially happening with AI tools actually replacing jobs.

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure. So a little bit of background, co-founder of Bloom Tech, which used to be known as Lambda School before a trademark lawsuit. It's technically still the same company. But about 18 months ago, we started talking to people about this new-fangled AI thing. And if it had any impact within engineering teams. And frankly, I was pretty skeptical in the early days. But we sent out a research team. They looked at what everybody was doing. And at the time, it's not quite that way anymore. But there were a handful of people who had sat in the basement, playing with LLMs, seeing if they could make them write real code for a couple of years. And when we saw that, we were like, oh, wow, this is actually working. It's not mainstream at all yet, and at the time, even less so.

• 2:04:37Speaker 02

  And then working with a couple of those companies that we were... So we started training engineers to use AI really well. And it's one of those things where there are no best practices. Everybody's learning more every day. The game completely changes every day, let alone every week. And then one of the companies we were working with brought us in to do a fully intensive 100-hour-a-week, find all the people with 98th percentile IQ and above, fly them into Austin, train them over the course of 10 weeks to be expert at using AI and kind of staying on that cutting edge, riding that wave up. And then they hire them on the other side and pay us to do that. Now we're expanding that to more companies.

• 2:05:19Speaker 02

  But I basically spent the past several months holed up in a little office with a bunch of sweaty people, trying to figure out how to max out AI and figure out how to stay on the cutting edge of using AI to build software.

• 2:05:34John Coogan?

  Is the shape of that more like PM who's now able to write code or instantiate their ideas in code? Or is it software engineer who understands some basic programming that can then write more functional code or just be more performant? Like, which angle is it both? Or is one narrative driving more of AI adoption?

• 2:05:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say it's more the latter. So the more experience you have as an engineer, the more it sucks to start using AI because you know, you're going from here to here as far as code writing ability goes. So in the early days of Gauntlet, we force everybody, you know, and the more senior you are, the more you hate it. We say you can't write code manually. We put software on everybody's computer that, you know, watches them. And AI has to do all of the code writing for you. And everybody thinks that's the dumbest thing they've ever heard. And they fight against you for a week, week and a half. And then, you know, the more senior you are, the longer it takes for you to actually get to parity.

• 2:06:40Speaker 02

  But it's, you'll never go back. Once you get there, it will, it has fundamentally changed the software industry forever in ways that people don't fully appreciate yet. Entire companies are going, companies are going to have to rethink the way they do everything. And we're only seeing the very, very, very early stages of that.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys have your own kind of messaging internally with the students around the framing of like vibe coding? Cause it maybe is, it's like this cool viral phrase, people. But it's kind of different when Andre Karpathy does it. It's also different if you're doing it in this hyper intentional way, trying to effectively get to the same quality and consistency as regular software engineering, but just doing it in a super AI native way.

• 2:07:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like that's muddied the waters quite a bit. I mean, the, when I say vibe coding, most people imagine somebody who doesn't understand software kind of blindly trying to one-shot applications. Which it's incredible that that works at all. But when we think of, you know, whether you call it vibe coding or some people called, started calling it superbuilding internally, I don't know if that ever made it out. But using AI to write performant enterprise-grade bulletproof software, there's not a great distinction for that out in the market, but we do view it very, very. Differently. There's a time and a place for both, you know, if you're writing your own personal software or little internal tools like,

• 2:08:14Speaker 02

  yeah, just blindly telling an LLM to do something might work, but most of what our engineers are doing would work in, you know, very enterprise, very legacy, very big, large scale applications, you know, security is taken care of, the, the formatting's done correctly. It's it's scalable and secure and all the things that software needs to be.

• 2:08:36Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing the most success with in terms of tools? There's so many different options. Every week there's a new tool, right? You know, maybe they were using, Devin at some point, then they're using Claude and then they're using now Codex. What what's your kind of, how are people prioritizing? Are they using things like, Replet? You know, what is that actually? What does the stack look like?

• 2:09:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's it's not an exaggeration to say that it changes every week in a very fundamental way. So, you know, I remember when Claude three seven came out, before Claude three seven came out, pretty much everybody was using Claude three five as their daily driver. And I feel like Claude three seven was the first kind of breaking point where that became no longer true anymore. So before Claude had basically a monopoly. If you were to walk around the gauntlet offices, and ask everybody what they're using, 95% was Claude three five. With three seven, it worked better for some people's workflows and worse for other people's workflows. Grok is gaining ground.

• 2:09:46Speaker 02

  It doesn't, you know, most people don't have API access to it yet. So that's a, you know, you have to use repo prompt for something to get it into your IDE. So that's a, you know, separate thing. I would say on average, if for people who are working on really big, really enterprise applications, Claude three five still seems to be winning out even over Claude three seven. And Gemini, I think, kind of changed the game. When was that? Was that two weeks ago or a year ago? I kind of lose track at this point. But it has a much broader context window. So if you have a small code base, you can get most of the code base, inside the context window as opposed to Claude three five.

• 2:10:27Speaker 02

  Claude three five is, has proven to be better for more surgical stuff. Claude three seven is like Claude three five, but it kind of runs away and tries to do. A lot. So some people like that. Some people don't. Every engineer ends up with their very ordinate, well orchestrated workflow at Gauntlet and they, you know, they do things their own way, whether it's, you know, I build all the front end stuff really, really well and make sure that's all working. And then I try to build a backend behind that, or I diagram everything and plan everything out with a model like O3. And then I'm creating a checklist and pulling pieces off the checklist. Everybody has slightly different workflows, but it's

• 2:11:07Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing on the other side on the, on the, on the hiring side? Are companies expressing preferences already to you to some degree around, hey, you know, this is the stack we're using internally. We want people to kind of be ramped already on, on this set of tools? Or is it more kind of, you know, bring your own toolkit?

• 2:11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's, there's, there's spectrum, of course. On one side, I would say the companies that I, I call them the companies that don't really get it yet. They're like, okay, give me somebody who has five years of experience with TypeScript and they understand a little bit of AI and we'll drop them into our traditional engineering org. The companies that are on the other side of that spectrum are more actually this, what was this entire team can now be one person. And what language we use matters a whole lot less than how good they are at utilizing AI, because anything that you don't know, AI is better at writing code academically than any

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  engineer you're going to talk to. Knowing how to get it to write the right code at the right time in the right place is where all the magic happens. So on the other end of that spectrum, there are companies who are, I mean, the average company that we bring into Gauntlet and we show them what students are doing, they walk away saying, oh, my gosh, I need to rethink our hiring. I need to rethink our entire strategy. Our roadmap needs to change. It is a fundamentally different world when you're utilizing AI in the correct way. And, and then I guess even Further on the other end of the spectrum, there are a lot of companies who tried it once and wholesale rejected it and aren't going to really use it.

• 2:12:53Speaker 02

  Or if an engineer does it at all, it's on their own time and against the will of the manager. There's more of that than people would anticipate if you're spending all day on X like I am. But, but yeah, there's a pretty broad spectrum and I go back and forth with frankly, how much time I'm going to spend trying to convince people to do it all the right way. Or to experiment with new ways of building companies versus just, okay, you know what, I'm gonna go create a holding company and spin up 10 companies myself and show everybody what can happen. I, I go back and forth on that, but, but yeah, it's, it's wildly wildly different.

• 2:13:31Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what, what's your read on the, on the hiring market right now? Obviously there was big headlines, maybe it was last, last week, I believe, midweek, Microsoft. Again, our, our read on that situation was Microsoft has always taken, taken the approach of kind of cutting the bottom 3%. There still was a bunch of stories that came out from people being like, I've been here however many years, working 12 hours a day.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Korn says they're not gonna hire anyone, but kind of went back on that, like, yeah, overall hiring market temperature, what's it looking like?

• 2:14:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I think, so first of all, I agree with you that when there's a 3% riff, that's rarely actually a riff. That's performance management being done in as kind of way as possible, so you can give people severance. Which if you're a company like Microsoft with as much cash as they have, you probably should do it that way. That said, generally say, generally speaking, what we're seeing is a, if you're really, really good at being an AI engineer. I mean, we had, there were times when we had multiple billionaires wandering around our office with printed out offer letters for people, begging them to come work for them. That's what it looks like if you're really good at AI. Most companies are not really understanding that, so that's not everybody.

• 2:14:51Speaker 02

  It is interesting, I, I think it's fair to say the junior engineering market is completely decimated. It's pretty well gone. Even, I mean, if you're at, at Stanford, maybe you can get an okay internship somewhere, but it is, it's. Armageddon.

• 2:15:07John Coogan?

  What does that mean? Does that mean that like junior engineers should be vibe coding companies and starting more apps and trying to just like build lifestyle businesses almost like what? What is your advice for people entering the workforce in software engineering capacities?

• 2:15:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really good question. It's it's a tough one. Because the way that I describe it is someone who's not very good at AI and AI engineering can still get roughly the output of, you know, starting junior engineer out of AI. And that's what a lot of companies are doing. Instead of hiring a junior engineer, I'll just get, you know, the output that I need. There's still and there always is crazy demand for senior and, you know, high end and everything else. I think it'll take a while to figure out how that plays out because the flip side of that is you don't get super senior engineers if you don't have junior engineers.

• 2:16:04Speaker 02

  My and then you talk to the universities and the average university that I talked to is closer to explicitly and permanently forbidding any type of AI usage in the classroom than they are to interweaving it or adopting it in any material way.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Why is that?

• 2:16:26Speaker 02

  Because it's cheating. It's so much better at writing code than you are that the professor has no idea if you know how to write code because the AI will write the code for you.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Send him.

• 2:16:38Jordi Hays?

  I talked to a I was at the I was at the park a couple of days ago and was, you know, at the swings, you know, pushing a little guy. And there was another dad there who was a teacher and he said that that a high school teacher, he said they basically now wait homework at effectively zero. Like it's like kind of check the box. It maybe contributes to like a few percentage points of your grade and then tests are now just 100% because it's the only environment in which you can actually prove.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  Would you advise people to learn to code now? Or has the idea of learn to code changed in some fundamental way?

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  So I still think, I feel like I'm almost on an island on this. I still think you should learn to use AI. And if you want to use AI in software environments, you should learn to code. Now, to me, that looks very different than it did five years ago. And our, you know, our learn to code uh, business, we've, we've basically shut down. It no longer operates. Um, I'm not interested in teaching people to code in the traditional way. Um, now, the flip side of that is normally, when you would train people to code, you would start kind of close to the metal and at the bottom of the stack. And so you would start with, okay, let's write binary and then we'll figure out how to write some, you know, low level Java.

• 2:18:01Speaker 02

  And eventually, a year and a half later, you start actually building programs that can do things that are interesting to you. The right way to learn to code is actually, in my mind, the inverse, where you start by building applications. And then you figure out what's broken and what's missing and what you don't understand. And the thing that is different about that than, you know, just a, creating a different curriculum is AI understands that. AI understands. Um, you know, so we had software that would basically watch what you were doing on your computer. And from that, we could derive what CS principles you understood, what CS principles you didn't understand. We could have AI generate a custom curriculum that, you know, meets those guidelines specifically.

• 2:18:46Speaker 02

  And we can fill any gaps in a way that I would have killed to a decade ago, training people how to code. So I think you can actually just start by building stuff and then figure out how it works down and, you know, start at the top of the stack and slowly work your way down. Um, and to what extent you get down the stack depends on what you want to do, right? Not the average engineer today isn't, you know, playing with a Linux kernel or writing C. They're, you know, writing JavaScript and they're building applications. Um, to be at that level, you can probably get there relatively quickly. Um, but I think I'll credit Martin Casado, uh, from A16Z with this.

• 2:19:24Speaker 02

  Um, who said basically, for, to be a good engineer, you've always wanted to understand one layer of the stack beneath what you were actually working on. And I think that remains true.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give me your view on the AI software engineer market. OpenAI now has like three offerings between, you know, oh, three, we'll just write code randomly for you. Codex is a new product. They now own Windsurf. There's top-down enterprise companies like Cognition and Devon. There's bottoms-up enterprise like Windsurf and Cursor. How does this all play out? What do you look, what do you seeing in the like new, this entirely new market of AI tooling?

• 2:20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, my first point here is we're in an incredibly lucky position because as a, as a consumer, you don't have to predict who will win. You can just figure out what's gaining momentum and latch on to the best. And so, you know, I have a lot of empathy for the companies trying to build those products and spend a billion dollars building a model. And if something is 1% better, I'm switching to it tomorrow. So that's a great place to be in as a consumer. How is that playing out? I think everybody's trying to fight similar battles. Cursor and Windsurf, I think, are uniquely positioned because they're focused primarily on the UX of the experience as opposed to the data.

• 2:20:52Speaker 02

  It's kind of in AI companies' DNA to think that every problem is a data problem and they're generally speaking, right. But where a Christian Windsor for getting better and better is, okay, it's really cool that there's this model. I'd say on average, that is the problem that AI companies have. People have no idea what they can do with the models or how they should be using them. I think that gets simplified over time, the same way every product becomes, you know, I shouldn't have to know whether I want to use oh, three mini or four oh, no normal humans ever going to care about the difference between those. So I think they'll just get better and better. Who wins? High eyes. I don't have a clue.

• 2:21:34Jordi Hays?

  Trillion dollar question.

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. If you, it'd probably be a VC if you're in that game. But thanks so much for stopping by. We'd love to have you back. This is, this is great.

• 2:21:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, keep, keep us posted.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:21:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Austin.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 2:21:47Speaker 02

  See ya.

• 2:21:47John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Jeff Morris Jr.

• 2:21:50Jordi Hays?

  Junior himself.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Coming in from Chapter One Ventures.

• 2:21:54Jordi Hays?

  He's got some big news today.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Are you ready to hit something?

• 2:21:57Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna press this button.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  Okay, welcome Jeff.

• 2:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Jeff.

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Welcome to the studio.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:22:03Speaker 03

  Guys.

• 2:22:05Jordi Hays?

  There he is. Our technology brother.

• 2:22:08Speaker 03

  This is a life goal achieved. I feel like I'm like.

• 2:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:22:14Speaker 03

  No, I've seen, I've seen this progress and I'm just such a big fan of you both and I won't flatter you for 20 minutes, but really you guys are killing it. It's awesome.

• 2:22:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, I remember, I think we got breakfast burritos in Santa Monica, like right around the time that we were starting the show and you probably thought I was a little bit crazy for going full time on a podcast, but, but you, you never, you, you always had faith. I think you saw the, the potential from the beginning. So it's great, great to have, have you on and maybe give a quick intro and then I'll let you talk about the, the news today and then we'll get into a bunch of other stuff.

• 2:22:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I've, I've been an investor, I guess for the past five years, full time, started a firm called Chapter One. We call ourselves the product fund mainly because all of our backgrounds are in product, engineering, design, data science, and kind of take a product centric view towards what we invest in. But part of that grew up in the area, probably most famously as an operator was a VP of Product at Tinder for a bunch of years, ran revenue over there, kind of during like the hyper growth period of 2015 to 2019, when the company was growing. And then now, now run the veteran firm full time. And, and yeah, we've evolved quite a bit today. We're sharing some of that news.

• 2:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. What's, what's the news? And we're, we're not quite set up to have multiple guests on, but we'll have to have your new partner, well, new GP. So why don't, why don't you break down the news and kind of talk about the evolution of the firm?

• 2:23:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the big news today is Jameson Sedell is being promoted to a general partner. We started the firm in 2019 when. There we go. You know, I think it kind of marks a moment in time for us as a venture fund, but also maybe more broadly in venture. We started chapter one as a solo GP firm when being a solo GP, I think was pretty new, but also I call it trendy in 2019. And it's been just really interesting to see the peer group go in different directions. So people who were solo GPs at the time, some have continued on that path. Other people have gone back to operating. And then I think there was another cohort of people who wanted to build partnerships and firms.

• 2:24:34Speaker 03

  And so I think, you know, there's all these right ways to do venture, whether it's building a firm, equal partnerships, solo GPs, and there's this constant debate. But I think we've really been clear on what we want to become. And today, building a partnership is is obviously what we're announcing today.

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing. Had this been your plan from the beginning, like, did you realize quickly that that you wanted investing at the firm to be a team sport versus something that, you know, was was more of this, again, solo endeavor, at least like it was in the beginning?

• 2:25:12Speaker 03

  I think a lot of us in 2019, like, really, like, we had a plan, but it wasn't

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  There's concepts of a plan.

• 2:25:21Speaker 03

  what we've become. And so I think I realized in like, 2020, probably a year and a half, two years in, that I didn't want to just do it on my own. And I think there's a lot of people who are who are really happy with that lifestyle. And frankly, it's probably a better financial decision just to do raise funds, do it on your own. But I think to be competitive and to build a great product for founders, you likely can do a better job with that if you bring on partners and build a firm. And so that was the goal in 2021. It took a while. To figure out who that person would be and also the right way to do it. So a lot of people will tell you to kind of like promote people from within, build, you know, you kind of like

• 2:26:06Speaker 03

  people buy into the culture. They know what, what, what, what you're doing and you, you kind of elevate internally, then other people will say, go, they go find a superstar externally, which, which at times we also thought about doing. So, you know, they, do you want to go bring, bring in like a fancy GPs spinning out or, or maybe a former CEO type and those things are just really hard to, to get right. And so I think we were really lucky where Jameson was doing an outstanding job internally, bought into what we are doing and it's kind of like a head coaching search, right? You guys kind of a TV PM model, like it's really, I think, alluring to go hire like the

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  big fancy head coaching name, but oftentimes like promoting the person from within is the best move because they know, they know your players, your players trust them and they know the system. And I think, and maybe like the Boston Celtics did that really well, right? And so I think it's really,

• 2:27:12Speaker 03

  I think that's kind of the decision most, most firms have to make as, as they're growing their teams.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  She's focused on, I mean, in her bio, she says, AI, ML infra, how you guys making money off of Stargate? There's 500 billion floating around. What's the angle? We were talking about just go set up a Chipotle there, become a, become a, you know,

• 2:27:36Jordi Hays?

  Set up like a, the, the, basically recreate the product, the 2007 Chipotle.

• 2:27:43John Coogan?

  In Abilene.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  Massive opportunity.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  There's 357 workers there, but I mean, seriously, like, like, obviously there's this AI boom. A lot of the, a lot of the trains have left the station. I don't imagine you're participating in the next OpenAI round. But, but, but how, how do you make money in the, in the current AI boom or, or is it, or are we into like the next, next trend?

• 2:28:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of angles like one is um location. So there's Jameson lives in London. And I think this is a popular narrative right now that all the like all the value is happening, value creation is happening in the Bay Area. And so obviously, um, I grew up in the Bay Area and I live in Los Angeles and we've made a decision to to focus kind of on the other most important areas in the in in tech. And so um her view and it's my view being staying more time in London is that there's actually a lot of talent um in the in the universities of Cambridge, um Oxford, et cetera. And also, we we had a conference in London, maybe two months ago, we had

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  the founder of Granola, we had, you know, Anthropic, we had um all a lot of people from DeepMind.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  Is there a plan to help those founders like escape the backwater that is the UK and the Europe? Because I can't imagine that they're gonna try and build businesses there, right? That's crazy.

• 2:29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  So like, but it makes sense because you go there, you give them money and you tell them, here, go to San Francisco because then you have an actual shot. Is that the plan?

• 2:29:15Speaker 03

  I think I think it's it's a bit um like there's the there's like the the Project Europe movement, which obviously like love Harry and think that's important, but there's another views is like meeting founders where they are today. And often that that is, hey, we want to raise a seed round and and go, you know,

• 2:29:35John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the story of Anthropic and and Granola, right? Like, like international founders who eventually came to the US. There's always this question I have about like

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  There's also Sweden, right?

• 2:29:44John Coogan?

  Sweden's pretty goated, pretty good.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  The Nordics, the Nordics.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:48Jordi Hays?

  There's something in the water.

• 2:29:50John Coogan?

  There's something brewing there, yeah. Capital flow, like there are a lot of great LPs there that want to invest in American companies, a lot of founders that want to come invest in America. Obviously, there are some great companies in Europe, we're we're joking around. Um, but but but getting that capital flow right, so you don't just expatriate US dollars to underperforming countries is probably a risk you want to avoid. But at the same time, it's probably really underpriced assets that are going to go find niche markets all over the world. And, you know, who knows? Maybe the next power law company comes from some bizarre country like

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you have, do you have strong beliefs around the intersection of AI and crypto? There's been a lot of different attempts and people attacking it from different angles. You obviously have backed a bunch of crypto companies historically. Uh.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do we make money off of stable coins? Ben Thompson was writing about this today, how stable coins are gonna power the agentic web and I want to get in on the action. I'm super long on stable coins, but they haven't moved at all. My portfolio is flat.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  No, it is. It is a tough thing where everyone's just so bullish on stables and yet, and yet it's kind of unclear.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Can we do like a meme coin about stable coin? USD on pump dot fun. Just USD coins.

• 2:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Potentially.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  Just one trillion coins USD. It should be a dollar eventually.

• 2:31:08Jordi Hays?

  No, but more seriously.

• 2:31:09Speaker 03

  Zero, zero fiat backing. It's just, it completely unbacked.

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's just completely, it's just complete me.

• 2:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Unstable coins. I think people have tried these.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  I think people have tried. Everything's been tried. But, but seriously, like, stable coins, what is exciting or again, like with the Bridge acquisition, is that the end of the story or the beginning?

• 2:31:27Speaker 03

  I think you're seeing a lot of app application, their payments, applications that are using stable coins to enable their payments. But there's not, there hasn't been a lot of value accrual to like net new circle competitors are trying to compete with a tether or USDC.

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:47Speaker 03

  And so, stable coins are like the easiest thing to talk about at a AGM or LP conference, because it's like, okay, like, I can kind of see that use case. And so I think there's, there's a shift to emphasizing stable coins today. I think the combination of like, stable coins and agents starts to get, like, it does make sense, but it's, it's, gets pretty, pretty blurry in like, the current use cases of, of, of agents and what's possible today.

• 2:32:19Speaker 03

  I don't, for what's worth, we don't have a strong belief on the intersection between crypto and AI today being, there's, there aren't a lot of, the, the primary use case we like is giving open source developers a way to actually make money. Like, I think that's a pretty clear thing that's been missing. If you look at any open source ecosystem, ecosystem, so you look at, I don't know, like, now as researcher.

• 2:32:46Speaker 03

  Different like BitTensor is trying to do this a little bit too, but the, you know, I, I, I, I think the, the worlds are, are very separate today. If you go spend time in the area and actually talk to the best AI researchers like this, nobody cares about crypto in the area for the most part. And that's totally okay. Like, I kind of like that crypto is still very weird and unlike by, by most people.

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Let's get Linus Torvalds a mega yacht. Let's get Guido Van Rossum a private jet. This guy created Linux, like Guido created Python, open source software. He didn't get comped.

• 2:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's get him some stables.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Immense, immense value.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's get him some greenbacks on chain.

• 2:33:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. I, I want to talk about the, the, the venture dynamics for these mega platform funds and smaller funds. There was this, there was this trend during the Zerp era where it seemed like the mega funds were just preempting everything. You had the crossover investors and that made it pretty hard for early stage investors to kind of make the decision on whether or not to write pro rata checks into the, in, into their earlier portfolio because they just wrote the seed check. Maybe they did find the great company early, but then there was this pressure to say, hey, these companies are graduating to series A immediately.

• 2:34:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you want to defend your ownership.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so has, has that dynamic changed or has the early stage market adjusted to spinning up growth vehicles so that they can ride that wave as the overall market gets hotter? I mean, some of these, some of these rounds for these AI companies, they get up a series A and a hundred million like happens pretty frequently now. And how do you set yourself up for that as a manager?

• 2:34:34Speaker 03

  I think that's probably the, the hardest part of the 2019 to 2021 vintage, right?

• 2:34:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  And you look back at, at your following decisions and at least speaking for ourselves, I think that was probably the, the part of our investment we wish we could get back the most.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:51Speaker 03

  And so like today, the markups are just as crazy, except there's, there's obviously more revenue that you can, you can kind of lean on to, to underwrite the companies. And so it's actually, it might be harder today because you have, like before, it's like, okay, like Excel or index is marking up the company. We did the seed, you know, we should maybe do the series A out of principle. Now it's, now it's like, okay, one of those firms is doing it plus they have, you know, 10 or 20 million dollars in revenue. And so it's, it's equally hard. And I think for seed managers, the growth fund thing for seed managers is pretty much done from what I've seen. Like people aren't going to raising growth funds.

• 2:35:35Speaker 03

  And if they do, they have to have a very special reason why they're the seed fund who can do both. So I think there's a lot more, like we've seen SPV volume pick up again. That's become a bigger part of the ecosystem. And then I think a lot of, a lot of LPs are looking for co-invest. Like that's always been the case, but especially so today. I think you see a lot of LPs coming to funds so they can co-invest. And that's, I think, a bigger trend today than when I started in 2019.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  What's the sophistication level when they're looking at co-invest opportunities? Are they saying, okay, I'm going to back an emerging manager, let's say a $30 million fund. And then I'm planning to do one or two, you know, take one or two co-invest opportunities per fund and really just try to get into those winners? Or is there more of a, you know, we just want broad, direct exposure? And, you know, I'm curious what, what you've seen or what you're seeing broadly.

• 2:36:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's both. Our preference is that you do broad exposure mainly because the odds of doing one co-invest and having that be the, the right company are just extremely low. And so we, you know, we don't, we don't do a ton of SPVs, but the messaging is always like, please don't overshoot on, on any single deal. Because if you're doing a series B SPV, and we all know the amount of risk even at the series B that, especially today, like that's even more pronounced. And so, but yeah, I think.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Series B risk is more pronounced now?

• 2:37:15Speaker 03

  I think if you look at the, the amount of competition, the amount of change happening on a daily basis in, in just technology advancements, then the pricing and size of these rounds, I would think if we look back two or three years from now, we'll, we'll see the series B risk in 2025 was probably on par with the 2021 vintage would be my, would be my guess.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Calling a bubble.

• 2:37:45Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. I mean, I, I just see this having probably 60 plus different angel investments now. I'll, I'll get an update and see that a company is getting a markup. And I'm like, I don't really think like,

• 2:37:59John Coogan?

  They're there.

• 2:38:00Jordi Hays?

  They've made progress.

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Are they any closer to being a, a business that truly has the intrinsic?

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  Series B used to be like pre-IPO.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:08John Coogan?

  It used to be like, this is an extremely solid business, like within, you know, within sightlines of like true profitability and like.

• 2:38:16Jordi Hays?

  I think we need, I think we need a new stock exchange, probably in Texas, just called DOGS, which is like venture backed, venture backed companies that like have a little bit of revenue, still got a lot of work to do. Let's just get them out in the public market. Let's let them trade at like two, three million bucks, clear the prep stack, and then maybe they 100X, right? Maybe they figure it out, right? Uh, so anyways.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  Well, what was that, what was that SPAC that, that holds?

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  There's that one, there's that one destiny right now. I don't know if you, I don't know if you've seen this.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. The inverse destiny of the DOGS, the companies that are underperforming private markets. You wrap all those into a SPAC.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, investors can kind of sell to DOGS, take a little bit of a loss.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  But it has such a huge portfolio, maybe one of them pops.

• 2:38:58Jordi Hays?

  One banger in here.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  It's actually, there's something there.

• 2:39:01Jordi Hays?

  There's already businesses that do, that, that buy underperforming. But yeah, this, this, this index destiny, I don't know if you've seen it. They hold a bunch of basically SP, like.

• 2:39:12John Coogan?

  They have like some look to exposure to SpaceX, but they trade at like 10 times the underlying asset value.

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:17Speaker 03

  That is crazy.

• 2:39:18John Coogan?

  It's like, I mean, people want access to those, to those stocks. So they're going for it.

• 2:39:22Jordi Hays?

  The Destiny Tech 100.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we'll build it out.

• 2:39:25Jordi Hays?

  Last question I have, what's your updated thinking on incubations? I know, uh, there's some stuff in the works that you probably can't announce, but, um, is that, uh, is, is part of bringing on a GP to, to free you up to, to kind of be able to spend a bit more time on, on internal stuff?

• 2:39:44Speaker 03

  That's been a part of our strategy we want to expand on. I think we're doing one incubation, which I'd love to come on the show in like three months to announce. It's partnering with a really big piece of IP, like a globally known piece of IP to build an application for that property. And so I'm, I'm, I'm really excited about this because obviously building software.

• 2:40:08John Coogan?

  Payroll software. It's Mickey Mouse payroll software for sure.

• 2:40:12Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, good execution in payroll. You're at least a hundred million dollar company.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:20Speaker 03

  That's actually kind of genius.

• 2:40:22Jordi Hays?

  Just hyper commodity, like you go after these markets that are just hyper commoditized. Yeah. Yeah. We're partnering with, with Disney. It's just going to be Disney themed.

• 2:40:31John Coogan?

  Oh, you don't want the Batman VPN? Why don't you want the Batman VPN? You don't want the Dark Knight protecting you while you're browsing online? Uh, you're going to go with what Nord? What's Nord?

• 2:40:43Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, Jeff, this is your new, this is your new playbook. You live in LA. Let's, let's go on a road show.

• 2:40:49Speaker 03

  It's genius.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise SaaS meets legacy IP, buying it for pennies on the dollar. You give them like 5% of the company.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Good to go. Anyways, I do know, I do know what Jeff's working on.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  What if Tony Stark built your ERP? Iron Man ERP.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Stark.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Stark ERP. Stark Enterprises ERP. This is the future.

• 2:41:12Jordi Hays?

  Jeff could actually run this playbook.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  It'd be great.

• 2:41:14Speaker 03

  I kind of love this.

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, definitely, definitely come back on. Uh, I, I think it's going to really break the internet when you launch it. So I'm excited to see it.

• 2:41:23Speaker 03

  All right. Thanks, guys.

• 2:41:24Jordi Hays?

  Congrats again to the whole team. Cheers.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  Next up, we got Cliff Weitzman coming in from Speechify. Uh, great entrepreneur, great founder, good friend of mine.

• 2:41:33Jordi Hays?

  Are we talking about business or lifting?

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  We're talking about lifting mostly. So he, he's been on an absolute tear in the gym. He's super jacked. No, it's not a joke. It's not a joke. Hit the Ashton Hall. Hit the Ashton Hall. Bring, bring Cliff in. Welcome to the stream, Cliff. Welcome to the stream. Oh, we were expecting shirtless.

• 2:41:52Jordi Hays?

  John said you were gonna be shirtless.

• 2:41:54Speaker 04

  We can do shirtless as well.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 2:41:56Jordi Hays?

  We're making, we're making TVP and stringers.

• 2:41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I worked out with him in, in this building where we record this. Uh, he put up some fantastic numbers on the bench press. Showed me a spreadsheet where he's, uh, what's it called? Thor 2.0?

• 2:42:11Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 2:42:11John Coogan?

  He's trying to become Thor 2.0. And so I've been telling him I'm trying to do Thor 3.0 and it's been getting under his skin.

• 2:42:19John Coogan?

  But, uh,

• 2:42:19Speaker 04

  The limits in his gym.

• 2:42:22John Coogan?

  How's it been?

• 2:42:23Speaker 04

  Of all the PRs of anyone who's ever worked out in that gym.

• 2:42:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're, we're getting there. Uh, are you in LA now? Well, where are you at these days?

• 2:42:34Speaker 04

  I'm in LA.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 2:42:35Speaker 04

  I'm in LA in Studio City. Uh, but I'm about to, we, we move every four months or so. So I'm about to do SF, New York, Prague, back to New York, London, Rome, back to London, back to New York.

• 2:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Those are all four month, those are all four month states.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  So you're planning like two years out?

• 2:42:55Speaker 04

  That's the next, that's the next 40 days.

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:42:57Speaker 04

  Then back to face in Florida for, for a set period of time.

• 2:43:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. So, so I mean, take us through the structure of the business. Obviously you can travel a lot, but, uh, I, it's a fantastic story. And I just want to hear, uh, what you built, how you wound up there and kind of the, the, the state of the union with Speechify.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I give, I, I guess to give people a sense for the scale, which I think is important because typically people just think companies are big. If enough VCs post about it, but you haven't raised very much money. Speechify has over 500,000 five-star reviews, over 50 million users, Chrome extension of the year, app of the day. I'm just gonna keep, I'm gonna hit this a couple of times. Um, but, uh, but anyways, uh, continue.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us through it.

• 2:43:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, happy to share more. So I'm super dyslexic and I have ADHD. So first, second, third, fourth grade, I had a really tough time learning how to read. And when I was right about to start college, I built this text-to-speech tool that would read out everything to me. And in high school, my mom used to read my summer reading books to me. And just, we didn't have time to finish the summer reading book for college. So I cobbled together this thing that would read the stuff into my iPhone, and then I'd listen to that on the plane, and it worked. And when I was in school, I studied renewable energy engineering at Brown. I ended up building about thirty-six different products, everything from 3D printed skateboard brakes, to iPhone apps, to websites, and payment systems. Wait, skateboard brakes? Skateboard brakes. I'll show you an example. Yeah, tell me, tell me about that.

• 2:44:23John Coogan?

  You wanna go slower?

• 2:44:25Speaker 04

  So if you ride a longboard or a skateboard, and you go down a concrete hill, you don't want to stop by putting your face against the pavement. So I did 3D printed the series of brakes that would attach to the back axle.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, that actually works really well. Ah, that's great. That's a good product. That's probably be huge on Shark Tank. That's like the perfect product for that.

• 2:44:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could have been on the tank.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you did? No way.

• 2:44:48Speaker 04

  That's the most Shark Tank-coded product. I was considering going on a show, but it's like you end up sitting for like forty-eight hours in a trailer waiting to get called. And other big opportunity that I had at the same time was like Shark Tank isn't worth it enough. So at a certain point, I realized that software is much better. So I built this kind of meme maker on a flight from Logan Airport to SFO, published it, checked in on it thirty, forty days later, and it had ninety thousand users. And I was like, oh, software is way easier than injecting molding stuff, and way easier than like board-on doping silicon wafers. My thesis was on a more efficient solar cell that I was building. I was like, all right. And around this time, I read this paper about narrow applications of deep learning. A bunch of academic papers,

• 2:45:31Speaker 04

  one of them was called WaveNet, about autoregressive speech. It came out of DeepMind. And I was like, I can make a one hundred X better text-to-speech experience, and a one hundred X better audiobooks experience. And

• 2:45:43Speaker 04

  I wasn't sure what to work on. I knew I didn't want to go get a job at Google or Palantir or Meta. And I was like, all right, well, I don't know what I want to do, so let me just write. So I wrote a thirty page paper about my worldviews. And the conclusion was, I wanted to be the person that I needed the most when I was a kid. And the thing I really needed was someone to do my readings for me. I was like, okay, I'm gonna fully send it on this. So I convinced two of my professors to sponsor me to stay in school as a visiting scholar. Basically, I guest taught classes. I got to be on meal plan, live on campus, use the gym, but not pay tuition or do homework.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  Gym's important.

• 2:46:11Speaker 04

  Amazing. I was gonna do that, work teaching computer science over the summer, unlimited indefinitely until something took off. And so six months in, it took off. And so now there's like fifty million people who use it. But the goal is to make sure that reading is never a barrier for learning for anyone, no matter what your background is. So if you download the Speechify iPhone app, or Chrome extension, or Mac app, or Android app, it lets you take a picture of a physical book. It reads, it gives you play buttons throughout the internet. It's like the voice of the internet. You click play, it reads. And it coaches you to listen fast. So I listen to two audiobooks a week. I've done that since I was fourteen. So I've read more than one thousand eight hundred books by listening.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Do you listen on like three X or something?

• 2:46:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I listen on three X.

• 2:46:51John Coogan?

  That's so intense.

• 2:46:53Speaker 04

  And so.

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  You can listen to the whole show in just one hour, because it's a three hour show.

• 2:46:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a one hour show.

• 2:46:57Speaker 04

  Why streaming doesn't work for me. It's gotta be something that I can react.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  We're in RSS speed, we're in, we're in, we're on YouTube, so you can pull it in there, listen.

• 2:47:05Speaker 04

  That's exactly what I do. I show up to live streams, you know, eight percent.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  Catch up at the end.

• 2:47:11Speaker 04

  But look, I, I learned English when I was thirteen. So in the beginning, I would listen at point seven five X speed, build up to point five, two X, two point five, three X. And I'm obsessed with biographies, theology, philosophy, fantasy. And so in the beginning, nobody wanted to back a dyslexia education startup. AI was not yet hot. The toughest point was around twenty seventeen, we didn't have the level of engagement and retention that I wanted. And there were a bunch of other sexy projects I could have done. But from first principles, my conclusion was, I think that the trend that I most back is in our applications of deep learning today, we call it generative AI. From a supply side and from a demand side, it's audio.

• 2:47:53Speaker 04

  As a user interface and I was like the intersection of these two if I wanted to build something in that intersection. It's speechify, so I might as well stick with it. Um, I ended up putting a gigantic help button on the app. It made like 20% of the screen real estate bright red helps message us. And if you clicked it, it just put you into an iMessage conversation with me. So like, I didn't need you to enable notifications. There was no intercom. There was no uh, email. And if I messaged you back and you didn't respond, I would FaceTime audio call you. And spreadsheet of all of our users. And if for whatever reason, you didn't use the product, I would call you every day until you used it.

• 2:48:26Speaker 04

  Didn't use it. Um, and then the product became really good.

• 2:48:28Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:48:29Speaker 04

  Um, we, when we were 25, 18 of the folks who worked at speech fiber previously, either CEO, CTO of VP of Engineering at their last company, a lot of them were X Y C founders or folks who exited their company after their series A. Nice tidbit on fitness. 12 of the original teammates got six packs within 10 weeks of joining. Uh, and we had

• 2:48:49Speaker 04

  we had at least 17 people who gained 10 pounds of muscle um, in the first 10.

• 2:48:55Speaker 04

  Everyone back in here. Um, and we get a big Airbnb in a different city every four months or so. And so at the time we were in LA. And I convinced one person to move from India, one person to move from Bulgaria, one person to move from Mexico, one person who was in San Francisco. And I went and bought a bench press and I rented a truck, installed it in the apartment in my room. Uh, and so we had me and Valentin were sleeping in.

• 2:49:17Jordi Hays?

  And that's like the only kind of weights you need, right? It's just a bench.

• 2:49:23Speaker 04

  And actually it gets even more deep because I went up to Marin to make sure that I was buying food for my parents because I didn't want them to go out during COVID. And so two of the guys were in the apartment working out just body weight. And they did a DEXA scan before and after, and they found that they had to like, not gained any muscle, even though they were working out like animals. And I was like, no, you guys need more weight. And so I brought the bench press. Um, and we had two guys sleeping in a bedroom in the living room that we partitioned with a window, two guys sleeping in the bed in the uh, in the room and then one guy on an air mattress. And that was like the best time ever, like incredible time. And then we found just very strong product market fit and ended up scaling really quickly. We closed partnerships with all the top publishers to resell their audiobooks and ebooks. My little brother Tyler started coding when he was.

• 2:50:07Speaker 04

  Seven, Billy Draggoldy websites when he was AT Times up assembly to hack video games. He went to Exeter for high school, skipped four and a half years of math, skipped five years of computer science, did Stanford as an undergrad, dropped out to run a cybersecurity company, went back to Stanford to do his masters in AI. And I was like, hey, if you can help me build a model that will compile in three X real time, has better quality than any API that's currently out there and meets the following requirements, I will like do anything, you know, I gave him a very nice compensation offer and he did it. Took him about ten months. He joined Speechify five years in as head of AI. So now we have a forty person AI engineering team and we make the highest quality digital voices in the world. We are the largest supplier of speech AI in the world for consumers. And then, so that's like level one, level two, level three. The vibe now is we make everything multimodal.

• 2:50:52Speaker 04

  So if you imagine that five percent of the population would read books for fun on their own. And let's imagine fifteen percent of the population would listen if you provided it as audio. Now we're using text to video models to turn everything into like a full

• 2:51:04Speaker 04

  audio and visual experience. That's like super high level for Speechify, but happy to refund anything. How big is the company now? We're a hundred and seventy six people now. Wow, that's huge. Thirty two countries. So a hundred and five software engineers, forty people on the AI engineering team and the rest is growth.

• 2:51:20Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, talk about the things that venture has tried to make you, that the venture industrial complex has maybe tried to make you do that you've rejected. Because in, in an alternate reality, you would have raised five hundred million dollars by now. And, you know, and, and, you know, decided not to do that. And that's influenced a lot of decisions, I'm sure.

• 2:51:42Speaker 04

  So part of it is the fact that between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, I read four hundred and sixty one books. A lot of them were about economics, philosophy, biographies. And I also listened to a lot of fantasy. And when you listen to fantasy, you think, would I make the decision this character would have made in this point in time? So my favorite book is The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I'm obsessed with this character named Calliden. I based my entire leadership style after Calliden. And so when I was writing that thirty page paper to figure out what I wanted to do in my life. I became one of those lucky kids who, when they were 21, figured out what they were put on earth to do. And for me, it was to solve dyslexia. And so I love what I do.

• 2:52:25Speaker 04

  Like, I wake up every morning early and I go to sleep very late. I sleep very little because I just, I can't get enough of working on this. And so I don't want to sell it. I want to own as much of it as possible and I consider equity holy. Mind you, I was a solo founder for five years working on Speechify. And again, we had an amazing leadership team that, blood, sweat and tears, we figured out how to hire. Last year, 50,000 people applied to work in the technical positions at Speechify. 10,000 people took the asynchronous engineering challenges. But we had like incredible offers for our Series A from like literally the top firms. We said no, they doubled the offers. We still said no because I didn't want to sell 20% of the company. And even with Seed, we just picked folks who we thought were really good.

• 2:53:09Speaker 04

  So founders of Instagram, of Twitter, of Robinhood, of, you know, all these companies that I could learn from, who did consumer subscription really well. And that was, was key. So for example, Dylan Field from Figma taught me a ton very early on.

• 2:53:27Speaker 04

  And my nuance is if you take money from a fund, by and large, they have a fiduciary duty to their LPs. If you take money from an individual, they have just a duty to themselves. And so you get a Rolodex of someone who's really great, but you're not beholden. That being said, there are some businesses where it makes a lot of sense to raise money. In our case, we have a very simple business and we understand the user extremely well. And it's a very niche audience initially for people who have dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, autism, anxiety, concussion, second language learners, and then the entire productivity suite. And at this point, we've worked on Speechify for eight and a half years. So it's really hard to catch up to the product innovations as well as the AI side. And so we are always talking to investors. And don't get me wrong, we have raised money from, you know, funds as well.

• 2:54:11Speaker 04

  But we've just done it where we typically look for three things. Number one, it's folks who either have an evergreen model so they can ride with us because I'm going to be CEO of Speechify in 80 years. They have a history of philanthropy and education or an experience with dyslexia, ADHD in their family. And we think really highly of them. They can see around corners that we can't. Either they've done an amazing job taking multiple companies public or they've backed founders in ways- So you would go public? We would go public, but into the future, not in the short term.

• 2:54:43John Coogan?

  Well, what are you thinking about competition from the hyperscalers, the big tech companies? Google I O S today, Microsoft had their build keynote yesterday. It seems like an obvious place that competition could come from, and yet on the product side, a lot of the big tech companies just don't seem to be iterating on the application layer side as fast as most people expected. So what's that been like? Has anything slowed you down over the past two years with competition from the big guys?

• 2:55:12Speaker 04

  Oh, they've helped us a ton. So I'll give you two heuristics that are relevant to any founders, then I'll give you the specifics on Speechify. The first one is, in my personal opinion, value accrues at the application layer more than it accrues at the model layer, and models become commoditized.

• 2:55:26Jordi Hays?

  But you ever, did you ever doubt yourself? Did you ever think, oh, maybe value is going to accrue to the model layer? Because there was like a, there was like an 18 month period where everyone was like.

• 2:55:36John Coogan?

  Models will do everything.

• 2:55:37Speaker 04

  Well, I'm giving you what my opinion is today, and the only reason I have a strong opinion is I've gone deeper into it than almost anyone has, right? We bought millions of dollars of H100 GPUs, we set them up in our own data center. We have a 40 person team who does research and development on models. So the second part I was going to say is, but if you really want to be indestructible, you've got to own both the model and the data and the application layer. That's what made ChatGPT and OpenAI so successful, is they had Brockman work on the user facing side, and they had Ilya work on the research side. And if they just had the research, they'd just be another lab. It, application layer that made it incredible. And so that's the first thing, because you want to be able to control the quality and the cost as well as the user experience.

• 2:56:20Speaker 04

  And then why did WhatsApp get acquired by Meta for $19 billion? It's because they had all the users. And so you own the end relationship. You want to have the phone number, the credit card, the email of that user, which we talk in a minute about kind of the changes that came with Apple. So that's the first thing. The second thing is, and this is very unique, sorry, not unique, ubiquitous. If you are Apple, Meta, Google, Netflix, there is no point in doing any project unless you think that project is going to make you one to $100 billion per year in the long term. We had a point where we introduced translation in this feature fine. This is in 2020, 2021. And Mike Krieger, who was the founder of Instagram, CEO of Instagram, was like, you should consider removing this feature. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Do you know how long I spent building this feature?

• 2:57:04Speaker 04

  But I have respect for Mike, so I took it out. Install to trial increased, activation increased, users use the product more. I gotta remove this.

• 2:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Why?

• 2:57:13Speaker 04

  Why? Because it was distracting. Speechify is one thing to give you the best experience listening to something. The second you add an extra button, users go down that path. So you know Clippy from Word?

• 2:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:57:23Speaker 04

  Word had a problem, but they had all.

• 2:57:24Jordi Hays?

  And you guys have such insane scale that you could immediately see something that, again, just removing some complexity.

• 2:57:33Speaker 04

  Back then, we didn't have mad scale, but you could see it in three days of usage. Like, there's enough. No. So Clippy is horrible because Word is horrible because the design is terrible. But you know who has amazing design? Google. One, uh, uh, uh, one text field. Who else has amazing design? ChatGPT. One text field, one button. And that's why they're successful. If they had multiple buttons, they would be far less successful. Now, here's the key. Text to speech is buried five levels deep in the menu. When I was 19, I made a video on YouTube under an anonymous account because at the time I was embarrassed for people to learn I was dyslexic. And it was called how to text to speech Mac free. And if you search that phrase on Google even today, my video from when I was 19 is number one. Why? Because it's so difficult to activate text to speech that you need 19 year old Cliff to show you how to do it.

• 2:58:19Speaker 04

  You can't pause, you can't play. And by the way, if you want to listen like me, what I ended up doing in college is I would use the terminal to change the speed because the GUI didn't go fast enough. And it backed down, I had to restart my computer. So I was restarting my MacBook multiple times a day when I was in college. And then I was like, screw this, I'm going to build a Mac app with keyboard shortcuts. I'm going to build a thing that OCRs the screen. And so my dream is for Google in mobile Chrome to add a gigantic play button that appears in every website that lets you listen to it. Why? Because it will make everyone addicted to listening. And then when they want to listen to a long PDF and they want to do it offline, or they want to do it in my voice, a stoop dog voice, or their own voice, or they want to translate it to another language, or they want to scan a physical document, Google doesn't cover that, Apple doesn't cover that, and people use multiple platforms. So you need to use Speechify.

• 2:59:04Speaker 04

  And so Speechify is the premium experience for text to speech. What I need is for people to become educated about the idea that you can listen to stuff. And so a lot of our work over the last. Eight years has been to educate the market. And so there's really two goals. Number one, build the most exceptional product, like extreme product. We have four core principles, extreme product quality, leading with love, frugality and speed. So we talk to users a lot. We take really good care of each other. We don't waste money on anything. We build our own SaaS tools and we move really fast. We ship a lot to production. And the second goal is to educate people that, hey, you can practice being a fast listener. And if you practice, anyone could do it. My dad is sixty five years old and the English is not his first language. And the joke we have in my family is he wishes he had a mute button for me and I wish I had a speed up button for him.

• 2:59:50Speaker 04

  It's very sweet. He now listens at two and a half X speed to everything. And so my life is better because my dad listens and talks faster now. But anyone can learn how to do this. It's just a matter of practice. When you come into first grade, no one expects you to be a good reader. For second, third, fourth, fifth, twelfth grade, we expect twelve years for you to become a good reader. But you can become a good listener after listening to fifteen audiobooks. You're not going to be good on the first one. You're not going to be good on the tenth one. And being a good listener means three things. Number one, you can do something else and listen at the same time. Drive, cook, walk, whatever. Number two, you can listen to more than two X speed. Number three, five weeks later, I ask you about the book. You have great retention of everything that you read in the book. And it will not happen when you start, you have to practice. But here's the thing, reading is a hack we invented, right? Twenty four characters on some dead trees.

• 3:00:34Speaker 04

  Listening, we evolved to be good at listening, right? Telling stories over the fire. So if you were a bad listener, you were removed from the genetic pool. If you're a bad reader, you were not removed from the genetic pool because otherwise I wouldn't be around. And so when you read, thirty percent of your brain is dedicated towards decoding. Seventy percent is comprehending. When you listen, like three percent is dedicated toward decoding. The rest is comprehending. And so you can understand a lot better. And once you practice listening fast, you have that skill for life. And especially if you have ADHD and you get distracted easily. The speed of listening matches the speed at which their mind is working and that helps people focus, especially in school, but also in work. And so that's the goal of the company is to just make that accessible to everybody. And right now there's 450,000 audiobooks,

• 3:01:17Speaker 04

  but there's 100 million books. We make all those accessible, plus your emails, plus PDFs and everything else.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 3:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. You are cracked. Wish we had more time.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're gonna get a workout in soon.

• 3:01:27Speaker 04

  We will.

• 3:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, come by before you, before you take off.

• 3:01:30Speaker 04

  We gotta make sure you break that PR.

• 3:01:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm working on it. I think I'm pretty close. We'll talk to you soon, Cliff.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for coming on. You're the man.

• 3:01:38Speaker 04

  You got it.

• 3:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Bunch of VCs are gonna reach out to him now.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  He really is a fantastic business. Let me tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. They got Rolexes. They got the GMT Master II, the Batman, the precursor to the Batman payroll suite, the Batman.

• 3:02:05Jordi Hays?

  You're really onto something there.

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  I think it's good. I think that's a feature.

• 3:02:08Jordi Hays?

  The Disney payroll.

• 3:02:10John Coogan?

  I mean, Logan Paul, Logan Paul has a energy drink. Why not?

• 3:02:15Jordi Hays?

  Jake Paul has deodorant.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  Jake Paul has deodorant. Why doesn't Batman have a ERP system? Why not?

• 3:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Or Shaq payroll.

• 3:02:24John Coogan?

  Shaq payroll would be pretty good. Before we bring in the Google folks, we should talk about Joe Weisenthal. He says, "Your neighbor is online. He thinks the bricks are creating a new currency that will soon replace the dollar. He thinks Blackstone owns 60% of single-family homes. He's Long Cardano." And this is a response to Bucow Capital bloke says, "Your neighbor isn't online. He doesn't think about tariffs. His Honda CR-V only has 80K miles on it. Good for another 100K. He doesn't have an opinion on the rating of our sovereign debt. Only, the only inflation he cares about is shrinkflation, yet his 401K goes up just the same." I think the, the Blackstone owning 60% of family homes is the funniest meme. This whole idea of like, you know, oh, like Blackstone's the most powerful financial institution in the world, just because they index everything.

• 3:03:10Jordi Hays?

  They're turning single-family homes into pods.

• 3:03:12John Coogan?

  They are.

• 3:03:13Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 3:03:14John Coogan?

  Let's bring in.

• 3:03:15Jordi Hays?

  You know what time it is. There they are. Hugh J.

• 3:03:19John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 3:03:20Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:03:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations on today. What's new? Would you mind introducing yourselves and then just giving a quick breakdown of what's going on today over Google?

• 3:03:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I can go first. I'm Tulsi. I lead the product team for Gemini.

• 3:03:32Logan Kilpatrick?

  Cool. And I work on some of the Gemini developer tools.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  What are the top three announcements today? What's the most exciting thing? What is the one takeaway for the audience?

• 3:03:45Speaker 05

  Ooh, I'll start with one takeaway. I think the one takeaway is like Gemini, at least from my perspective, Gemini 2.5 is just getting better. And it's not just getting better in terms of like the quality of the models themselves, but we're now bringing that capability everywhere. So AI mode is coming to everyone, which is kind of our advanced version of search. Gemini is coming to glasses, which is going to be amazing. Gemini is coming in even better ways to Gemini app with more rate limits and just more access and better features.

• 3:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna have to spend-

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  Gemini glasses, is this like a return of Google Glass? Is this a new product?

• 3:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so part of the issue for us today is that we got to watch like 20 minutes of I/O and then we started our own show. So we still have to catch up. But yeah, and then it's good you mentioned rate limiting because I was worried I was gonna have to spend, you know, this entire conversation moderating John asking for higher rate limits from you guys. So it's good.

• 3:04:46John Coogan?

  I hit a rate limit on VO2.

• 3:04:47Logan Kilpatrick?

  Whatever you need.

• 3:04:48John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, sorry Tulsi, continue.

• 3:04:53Speaker 05

  Oh no, I think it's like an exciting time for us because I think the models continue to get better. We released a new version of Gemini 2.5 Flash today. We introduced like improved versions of 2.5 Pro with the Deep Think, kind of deeper reasoning version of the model. And so I think the models are getting better, but it's also amazing to now see them actually really landing in Google products and in a very real way. I don't know, what are your takeaways or top three are?

• 3:05:19Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I think my TLDR is Google's firing on all cylinders across every vertical, across every dimension. And like I/O is this like weird manifestation of this actually happening, where you just like, I'm like holy, like even as someone who spends all day working with Tulsi, working with our teams and seeing this happen, like I/O is this crazy reminder of like just how much breadth Google has in the product areas and just how many people the model innovation touches. And it's, yeah, I think- Today's a celebration of all that hard work and making all that happen.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the messaging from like the continuum of like Google is so big that like consumers will watch a developer focused keynote?

• 3:05:59John Coogan?

  Some of the products that are launched are very consumer facing, but then there's obviously developers that want to build on top of these tools. And then there's also stock analysts that are probably watching for how things are going on benchmarks or MAUs or any new data points. And so what are you focused on kind of messaging to the different audiences? Is there a concept of speaking to multiple audiences or do you just try and laser focused in on dev specifically?

• 3:06:23Speaker 05

  No, I think we really do want to speak to multiple audiences. I think you hit the nail on the head in saying like, there are definitely experiences that we talk about here at I O that are very consumer focused. We also know though, that developers are trying to build for consumers.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:35Speaker 05

  Right? So when you showcase amazing consumer experiences, you are also able to speak to devs because you can speak to them about how you actually were able to build that experience and what they can do to build experiences like the ones that you're trying to build, right? And those, and so I think there's an art to try to figure out what are the right demos? What are the right stories that really can land cross audience? And then we try to create sections that are maybe more targeted. So for example, I spoke earlier today, Logan spoke in the developer keynote, really targeted at developers and what developers can do. And then there are obviously sections around search or glasses or Gemini app that are much more targeted at consumers.

• 3:07:10Logan Kilpatrick?

  Walked straight off the dev demo stage right here.

• 3:07:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's true.

• 3:07:14Jordi Hays?

  You said you could do two and you also said your keynote was starting at 1:30. I was like, are you worried somebody might ask an extra question?

• 3:07:21Speaker 05

  We can be in multiple places at once. It's a skill.

• 3:07:23John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 3:07:26John Coogan?

  How important do you think those demos are? Because you know, we saw chat GPT breakthrough with the, the studio Ghibli moment. Everyone was memeing the Gibleys. I was recently using VO2 to generate video of cars with specific liveries and decals on them driving around. And the result was fantastic, but it hasn't broken through in the same way, even though I feel like the model and just more importantly, the accessibility, because I was able to generate a video from a Gemini. Chat box and I didn't have to go to a different app for that. And I saw in the Apple App Store, the Gemini promoted post is basically like VO2 is here.

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  And the output was so good that I showed it to somebody and they, they said he was, John had generated an image of a Lamborghini that had full TVPN branding on it. And I showed it to somebody and they're like, when did you do that? And I was like, and they were like,

• 3:08:22Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 3:08:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  Was this how you made your promo video? It's really just VO behind this?

• 3:08:26Jordi Hays?

  No, that's our, that's our next promo video.

• 3:08:28Speaker 05

  But actually also on that note, I think you probably haven't seen that part of the keynote yet, but we shipped VO3 today.

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 3:08:34Speaker 05

  And it's awesome. And it has audio. It's amazing.

• 3:08:37John Coogan?

  Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, I was thinking about that because it was missing audio and I was like, this is the missing thing. I need to go find another model and then figure out how to inference that or whatever. But yeah, I mean, in terms of, in terms of creating these like memeable moments or something that can go viral. Is that something that's even thought of? Or is it more just like turn it loose and hopefully?

• 3:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I think the question is like, you know, you want to distribute the capability. And the question is like, is that Google's job or is it the developers building on your guys' platform to do that? Sort of last mile delivery to users?

• 3:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:09Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think the use case bit is actually really important because I think despite like where I feel like we're all sort of seeing everything that's happening and we're close to it, but like there's so many people who actually have no idea. And it's like every day, I think we need like a tracker of like the number of new people entering the AI world every day. But like, I imagine it's like some reasonable percentage of all people who are using these products. And like, you know, most products are still a blank, empty chat screen somewhere. So like showing that use case of what's possible is super important. And I feel like a lot of the demos from I/O today were like pushing that frontier in a, in a really meaningful way.

• 3:09:46Logan Kilpatrick?

  But I think also to answer the question of like, whose responsibility is it? Like, I think Google, we get to do both, which is fun. Like we get to go and build a lot of these use cases for developers and make it possible for them to, you know, bring that to their consumers. But then we also get to be like dog food and like really walk the walk and build those consumer experiences ourselves and find a way to make a memeable moment.

• 3:10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of what is announced are more like showcases that could be built into other products long term? Because I was looking at, somebody was saying like, Google Assistant has less five star ratings than Gemini. But you could imagine Gemini being like a demo for what's coming in Google Assistant, but it seems like Gemini has just gotten so big that it's like bigger than Assistant now. And so you have this weird thing where you're experimenting in this fun sandbox. But if you're really successful, then people just start using that and then you just move off of the other thing. Is that, is that like a deliberate part of the strategy or just like a natural outgrowth of like the modern AI development strategy that you put stuff out and if it goes really big, you just let

• 3:10:51John Coogan?

  your winners ride?

• 3:10:52Speaker 05

  I think it's a, it's a good problem to have, I think, if we're in a world where the experiments we're trying, or the new kind of surfaces we're building, or the new types of use cases we're building actually really resonate with users. And then we're in a place where we actually want to build those and scale those out. I think what we're trying to do, so at the end of the day, what we want to build is products that people love and really want to use. Right? And I think there's three ways you can do that. You can try to build new features into your existing products. I think in a lot of cases that makes sense, right? So for example, like AI mode on search today. But in some cases, if you do too much of that, you bloat the existing products, it becomes harder to use and understand versus being able to create a new surface where you actually can really rethink the UX, really rethink how users are supposed to think about the product.

• 3:11:37Speaker 05

  And then you can look at that and say, well, does this really make sense as a standalone? Or does it actually merge with other ways that users are using different products, right? And actually fits into their existing workflows in some way. And so I don't think we want to pigeonhole ourselves into just, hey, we need to consistently build on one product, right? We want to give ourselves the flexibility to create ways for users to Build new mental models and then figure out how those things come together.

• 3:12:02Logan Kilpatrick?

  And I think this search example is actually a great one because you, if you saw, we announced deep research in the Gemini app came out, I think all the way back in December and it was like pioneered the deep research category and Google launched that in the Gemini app and people love it. It's a crazy product experience. And then like that's now of it, like I think the, you know, the feedback was this is an incredible experience. Not everyone in the world is a Gemini app customer. There's a whole lot of people in search and like now I think it's called deep search is available as part of AI mode inside of just like basic Google search, which is going to reach hopefully even many, many millions of more users than are using the.

• 3:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Couple billion.

• 3:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Just a, just a B or two.

• 3:12:43John Coogan?

  Talk about MCP, was there, was there like a sigh of relief that Google's leaning into MCP? Was it ever a question or was it something that was like pretty easily adopted across Google?

• 3:12:56Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think it's been fascinating to see like how quickly the world has like, I feel like with standards, like people I feel like are often like very slow moving to be like, do we adopt this? There's like a whole, you know, many year battles with different standards competing. And I feel like everyone was just like MCP came out, everyone's like, okay, we'll use MCP.

• 3:13:15John Coogan?

  X K C D, it's that X K C D meme, there's 10 standards, we need another, we just need one standard. Now there's 11 standards, but in this case, we actually got the good ending.

• 3:13:24Logan Kilpatrick?

  It's important though, like I think developers are building stuff, I think in this moment where like, you know, the world is still trying to figure out how to build robust agentic systems, like having people not spend all the time just rewriting the same framework 50 times over like is, I think is like actually a net benefit for the world. So, and I think the, the team that built, that built MCP at Anthropic did a really, really good job and it was a smart move by them to like actually make it an open standard, which they could have easily not done. And I think it's, it's the right thing for the ecosystem.

• 3:13:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, puts developers first in the right way.

• 3:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what is the overall messaging to developers? It seemed like Satya on stage at Microsoft's build was very much like, we host every single model, we'll, we'll give you deep seek if you want, we're partnering with X. Google in my mind has always just been like, look, we invented the transformer, we have the biggest like best models that we're, we're dominating the Pareto curve. Are, are you guys seen more as like a one stop shop or do you think there'll be more model agnosticism in the future with regard to GCP?

• 3:14:28Logan Kilpatrick?

  I think GCP already has this. So do you see like we do like I'd be saying, you know, Tulsi and the team do a great job with Gemini models. We want the world to use Gemini, but yeah, GCP does actually have like, I think it's over 175 different models that are available through the model garden. You can get anthropics models, you can get a lot of models. So I think the and like for customers on cloud, like that makes perfect sense. They need that. Like that's a requirement. Like the world doesn't want to, you know, be locked into a single model. But I think like we get to see these like really, really interesting experiences that can only be built on into Gemini because of the like stack of of Google's model innovation. So we're going to keep pushing on Gemini models too. That's the goal.

• 3:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then on the developers that might be working with Google, I imagine that the conversation is a little more nuanced. If you're actually scaling a growing app on on on Google infrastructure, like I ran into a rate limit as a random user, but if you're if you're actually thinking about scaling a startup, unless you're, you know, thinking about building Stargate, you're probably able to scale pretty, pretty efficiently. But have you been seeing companies run into any sort of like scaling or rate limits or challenges as they kind of grow on Google?

• 3:15:43Logan Kilpatrick?

  Email me. My email. My email's online. I'm on Twitter 14 hours a day. So whatever you need, email me. We'll make sure it doesn't happen. I think in general, like this is like as far as like a class of problems that developers have in this moment. I think they're like very real. Like I hear this and see people all the time. The challenge is like compute is like a, it's like literally a currency almost. So like we have to make sure we get the right compute to the right people who are actually building stuff. And like it is a, it's not an easy process to do that. But I think if people need stuff, please reach out to the team. Actually, reach out to Tulsi too. We'll get.

• 3:16:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, spread the, spread the love, you know, don't just send your, don't just, don't just create CX tickets for Logan.

• 3:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Talk about a couple of the other kind of product level announcements. You guys had Jules, an asynchronous coding agent. You want to speak to that a little bit? I'm curious to get your.

• 3:16:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're really excited about Jules. So actually like at Jules dot Google today, you can sign up for the beta. But basically, the idea with Jules is we really want to start thinking through more and more use cases for how we can build essentially assistance for an age, a gent of assistance for developers, right? And so you can think about Jules as trying to take aspects of the workload that are frustrating, that are time consuming, and can actually operate on them in the background, right? So the example I gave earlier today is node.js being able to like update an outdated codebase for like the latest version, right? But I think it's really about how can you actually be able to assign tasks and let the model run and complete those tasks and come back and actually

• 3:17:20Speaker 05

  then have this like relationship with the developer where these tasks can get completed, can come back, can iterate together and build that kind of collaboration setup.

• 3:17:28Jordi Hays?

  And you can run multiple at once?

• 3:17:31Speaker 05

  You can run multiple at once.

• 3:17:32Logan Kilpatrick?

  And I think as at Google fashion, you can sign up and use it for free right now, which I think is really cool. Like, I think part of this is if you look at what's Google's job in the world right now, like, I think part of this is like, we have this stewardship role of making sure, you know, developers, people who are using search, all et cetera, et cetera, like, know what's happening with this AI technology and can actually get their hands on it.

• 3:17:52Speaker 05

  I can try it, yeah.

• 3:17:53Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah, I can try it and like know that it's available to them. So anyone can sign up. I think the queue time for tasks is kind of high right now because everyone is flooding Jules, but hopefully as they scale up capacity, we'll.

• 3:18:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, also, and I think like what what's been actually really exciting today is to see and get the feedback on Jules because we've obviously been trying it internally and using it, but actually getting it in the hands of real developers, getting that feedback. That's how we can actually a prioritize what types of activities do we need to prioritize in Jules? What use cases and features are most valuable for developers? How do we build that up? And so it's actually like a very self fulfilling prophecy, I think, for for how this will go, hopefully.

• 3:18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have either of you had a chance to actually sit and get the project star line demo? I remember a couple of years ago, this is the the 3D. How would you describe it? 3D video conferencing?

• 3:18:43Speaker 05

  Like video conferencing plus plus.

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, plus plus. And and there were a whole bunch of videos from influencers who were there who got the demo and like blown away and they were like. I filmed it with my camera and I, you can't really see the effect, but you'll see my reaction. But it's, it's exciting that it sounds like that's going into production in partnership with HP. But is there anything else to, to say there? Have you had a reaction or, or any, any test demos?

• 3:19:09Logan Kilpatrick?

  I'll be honest, which I've had, I had that same experience that the influencers had, which is I used the, the project star line room to take us, to take a meet call. But I was meeting with someone who wasn't in one of the other groups. So I have no idea, like maybe I looked different or something like that, but they weren't, they were just like.

• 3:19:25Speaker 05

  They were a normal.

• 3:19:29Logan Kilpatrick?

  So, but it looks cool. Like I, I'm hopeful.

• 3:19:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a very cool setup.

• 3:19:33Logan Kilpatrick?

  As somebody who works at home too much, I'm interested so that people can sort of feel my presence hopefully in the future.

• 3:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you get in your car and drive, you're going to miss all the DMs from developers that are, you know.

• 3:19:45Speaker 05

  Need Logan to stay home with his star line setup.

• 3:19:47Jordi Hays?

  Stay locked in.

• 3:19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we've been kind of in like, I mean, I, I remember I bought a 3D TV like a, like a decade ago, probably. And we've been waiting for like, okay, yeah, 4K. We can't really see anything past 4K, but something like this would be very, very cool.

• 3:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Notebook LM number four in the charts, big launch, new mobile app. Did, uh, I'm sure you guys never lost faith internally, but I think people externally were kind of, had been frustrated because they liked the product so much.

• 3:20:15John Coogan?

  We felt like it just disappeared.

• 3:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Feel like it wasn't getting kind of the investment. Uh, any, any color to add there?

• 3:20:23Logan Kilpatrick?

  Lots of notebook LM progress. I think people sort of felt this, which is interesting. And I've had, we had a bunch of conversations around why, but it was like, the team is still cooking. Like they're still shipping a bunch of stuff. I think that, I think part of it was like, the expectations were just like super, super high now because a lot of the stuff they shipped was awesome. But they had a ton of new features that just landed and it's been awesome.

• 3:20:41Speaker 05

  I think also this team is one, if, even if you look at the history of notebook LM, like we actually shipped notebook LM relatively quietly. And then it got a lot of pickup because it was just such an amazing product to use. And so I think we've taken this strategy with notebook LM where we've sort of tried to lead with the product leading almost. As opposed to just trying to like cook up a bunch of noise. And I think the notebook LM, his team has just been silently making the product better and better and better.

• 3:21:04Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah. We are going to have Tulsi cook up a bunch more noise for notebook LM. This is a great way for you to get more, more tweets. It's just firing off notebook LM updates.

• 3:21:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's good. I mean, the fact that there was like organic, real pull from the market and it wasn't just like, hey, we have a bunch of distribution. Let's make everybody aware of this right away.

• 3:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:21:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the original Notebook LM? Because I mean, there's research previews, there's developer previews now, there's alphas, betas. I feel like there's 25 different ways to say like, don't hold us accountable to we launching this product. What is the actual flow these days for just getting a product? Wasn't Gmail in beta for like a decade or something like that? This is kind of like in tech culture broadly. But I mean, a lot of things people are just like, if I can use it, I expect it to be a consumer product. But did Notebook LM go through like a particular pipeline? Or do you have like a structure for these launches over there?

• 3:22:00Logan Kilpatrick?

  Notebook LM came through Google Labs. Google Labs is the, Josh, I don't know if y'all follow Josh Woodward, but Josh Woodward runs Google Labs and the Gemini app now. And Gemini app is obviously generally available and not in Labs, but Labs does all the early stage bets. So actually AI Studio, the project that I work on. Out of Labs, same with the Gemini API, Notebook LM, Jules came out of Labs.

• 3:22:22Speaker 05

  Today, some things we showcased. So we showcased, Stavy showcased Pinhole, showcased Stitch and with Jules.

• 3:22:30Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:30Speaker 05

  Right. All of these are products that kind of came out of.

• 3:22:32Logan Kilpatrick?

  And it's like a.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  Break those down really quickly. Those other Labs products, Stitch and.

• 3:22:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I mean, you were actually demoing Stitch earlier, right?

• 3:22:41Logan Kilpatrick?

  Yeah. I didn't, Josh demoed Stitch right before I got on stage. But Stitch, similar sort of vibe coding, vibe designing setup. Where you can go ahead and ask the models to like go and build native mobile apps, I think is what it's actually building out of.

• 3:22:55Speaker 05

  And then Pinhole basically builds off the magic of VO3 and sort of multi, multimodal generation. So I think really what we're trying to do with Labs is, or Josh is trying to do with Labs, what we're trying to do with Labs is use it as a way to take these technologies and start testing. What new surfaces, what new UX, what new types of products can you build?

• 3:23:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23:17Speaker 05

  And then like ideally like Notebook LM, they're well loved and we actually like can hit a moment in the market where we can find new product market fit. And that's really why we're trying to create this incubation engine. And then we can take those ideas and both bring them to our products as well as actually ship them as standalone products.

• 3:23:32Logan Kilpatrick?

  And principally, they're also like. Very close to the model teams. So it's not this like, you know, they're the, you know, they're collaborating with Tulsi's team, like PMS are all sitting in the same places. So there is this like innovation at the model level, turns into innovation at the product level. And I think those teams are like some, some of the first recipients of that stuff.

• 3:23:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because like I, I feel like Gemini has a voice mode now that you can click over and, and talk to the LLM and it's kind of like almost a separate feature path from just dictating and then having it read to you, even though that's a very similar auditory experience. You could imagine Notebook LM being like a feature inside the Gemini app, but right now it's kind of going down separate tech trees.

• 3:24:14Logan Kilpatrick?

  It kind of is. So we brought audio overviews and deep research and like I think the play between these things are like all kind of connect. I think there's like some like very bespoke Notebook LM stuff that you'll like probably not have in the demo app. But I think the stuff that works, like there's no reason to not. It's like all, it's all under Josh's umbrella. So like he gets to easily be able to.

• 3:24:33Speaker 05

  Yeah. And I think like the underlying technology, like Logan said, we're, we're trying to make sure that the model teams and these products are very close together. So for example, Notebook LM has now native audio, which is one of the things we talked about today, which is really like Gemini being able to natively generate audio, which makes it more like multilingual friendly, more natural. And so that kind of technology, A, we can use to make Notebook LM better. We're also bringing that to Gemini Live. We're bringing that to, um, you know, other parts of the Gemini app over the course of the next, you know, months. And I think that kind of synergy means that you're going to get the best of these experiences, depending on your use case in different places.

• 3:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, it's an interesting product challenge. I've run into weird scenarios with chat GPT, deep research. I'll generate some huge research report and then I'll be like, listen to like, read this to me, but it clearly gets lost. Once it's reading halfway through and starts hallucinating and stuff. So like, there's some interesting challenge to actually make all of this. Like if you generate 5,000 words of text, actually getting it into the human's brain, it's not enough just to be like, here's your research report. You actually have to make it accessible.

• 3:25:40Logan Kilpatrick?

  Deep research audio overview, I think is that flow.

• 3:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 3:25:44Logan Kilpatrick?

  Work. It's like.

• 3:25:44Speaker 05

  It's actually awesome.

• 3:25:46Logan Kilpatrick?

  Because the deep research reports are like forty six pages.

• 3:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I don't have time for that.

• 3:25:51Speaker 05

  Forty six whole pages.

• 3:25:52Logan Kilpatrick?

  Six pages.

• 3:25:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:25:54Logan Kilpatrick?

  Like, give me a one pager or give me like three minutes of someone like, you know, having a casual conversation.

• 3:25:59John Coogan?

  Give me a YouTube short generated by VO three. That's what I need.

• 3:26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:04Logan Kilpatrick?

  That makes sense. Eventually you two are just gonna be an audio overview.

• 3:26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:10Logan Kilpatrick?

  With your, you know, your own spoke tastes.

• 3:26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, we're not letting Notebook LM disrupt us. We're coming into the show completely unprepared, but we listened to a ten minute Notebook LM on the thing we're about to talk about. So we have a little bit of context. Uh, anyways, you guys have been chipping like crazy. Uh, what can people expect from you now? Are you gonna rest on your laurels? Are you gonna, you know, uh, you know, uh, just get a little overconfident or is it, you know, business as usual?

• 3:26:39John Coogan?

  Sabbatical time.

• 3:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Back to the grind.

• 3:26:41Logan Kilpatrick?

  A little overconfident, I think, will be good because I think like we've done a lot of, there's, there's just been so much stuff that the team has done. So I think like people should be proud of all the work that's gone into it. Um, but I think the work just starts now. I was just, I woke up this morning and I was like, I'm writing the doc about how we need to go heads down for the next six months and land on fifty things that need to happen because there's like so much stuff that's still cooking in the pipeline. And it's gonna be awesome to see all that.

• 3:27:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think also like, we're really, I really do think we're hitting our stride in so many of these areas.

• 3:27:12Jordi Hays?

  It feels like it. Even, even some of the posts, like even Sundar's posts, like of the last twenty four hours, I was like, he's feeling good going into IO. You could tell, you could tell. So the energy, the energy is palpable.

• 3:27:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so we want to, I think we want to use that energy. Like, I think, I think the momentum coming out from today is really about like, okay, how do we take the excitement? How do we take the energy? How do we take the feedback? And like actually really use it to continue to just build awesome things. Um, so I think we're just at the beginning. Like this actually really is the start of, of what's gonna be an exciting year, I think.

• 3:27:45Logan Kilpatrick?

  And we'll make sure that you two are in person for the next, uh.

• 3:27:48Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Let's do it.

• 3:27:50Logan Kilpatrick?

  Be more than twenty four hours heads up if you wanna come in person.

• 3:27:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a whole calendar for these things.

• 3:27:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you both for, for making time to come on. It's really great to hear and congratulations on all the progress. We'll do it again soon.

• 3:28:05Speaker 05

  Thanks for having us.

• 3:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. All right. Have fun, guys.

• 3:28:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, the interesting thing is

• 3:28:09Jordi Hays?

  They are cooking.

• 3:28:10John Coogan?

  They're cooking. I mean, yeah, they they delivered in a bunch of different ways. And I mean, obviously, like, you know, what like tech Twitter is not real life in many ways. And you see that with the the Gemini Mao's and Dow's and just five star ratings and stuff. But I mean, you saw with the the video I generated, like, like, the models are really, really good.

• 3:28:32Jordi Hays?

  They're really good.

• 3:28:33John Coogan?

  Performing really well.

• 3:28:34Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like Google has been, there's so much chatter on Twitter, people making fun of, oh, I was in Gmail and I asked it to do this.

• 3:28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of the products are misses for sure.

• 3:28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but but clearly, they're aware of deficiencies and like rapidly shipping on a bunch of different dimensions.

• 3:28:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:28:53Jordi Hays?

  And that, you know, the the energy they even are bringing to this call and the fact that they're going even just going direct.

• 3:29:03John Coogan?

  I think the really interesting thing is like,

• 3:29:05Jordi Hays?

  Super bullish.

• 3:29:06John Coogan?

  Mark Andreessen had that quote about like, chat, you, OpenAI is becoming Google, Google's becoming OpenAI. You remember this? He said this to us. And and I think his his take was that, like, you know, OpenAI is becoming a consumer tech company. And Google's like most advanced in research. And I think that's going back to the Yahoo question we were talking about is like, is like, if there is a, like, they invented the transformer, right? And so if there is a new architecture, and it and it does come out of like an academic lab, it's totally possible. It's still, it comes out of DeepMind again. Right? Like, they did invent the transformer there. And Ilya just kind of picked up the paper and was like, this is amazing. We need to implement this and go really hard at this. And then and then everyone did.

• 3:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:49John Coogan?

  But it would be very interesting to to see, like, like, we didn't even get to the diffusion language model, but what other, what other foundational innovations they're trying, because they've been ahead of the curve on getting bigger context windows, faster inference on that parade of frontier. And if there's a new paradigm and they implement it quickly, like, that that that could be an entirely new thing. Very interesting.

• 3:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall, Google has been so successful for so long and so dominant that I think that it creates this effect where people almost want them to lose.

• 3:30:22John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 3:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Or want them to, you know, get taken down a notch in some way.

• 3:30:26John Coogan?

  But they're gonna have to go through us. Because we will take a bullet for Big Tech.

• 3:30:30Jordi Hays?

  We will.

• 3:30:31John Coogan?

  We.

• 3:30:31Jordi Hays?

  We would. We will. We would. We.

• 3:30:34John Coogan?

  We won't. We won't, because we won't have to, because you will never challenge the supremacy of Big Tech.

• 3:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Google is one of the greatest high-technology companies in history.

• 3:30:42John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 3:30:43Jordi Hays?

  And it deserves to be celebrated. And I, we need to just put this phrase to bed, but founder mode.

• 3:30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, Google feels like, at an individual level, people are, you know,

• 3:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30:55Jordi Hays?

  taking, you know, massive autonomy and, and really have a lot of momentum. And even I'm, I'm on jewels.google.com right now.

• 3:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:02Jordi Hays?

  And they're rate limited, uh, but it looks and feels like the product that a startup would create.

• 3:31:08John Coogan?

  Hmm, that's good.

• 3:31:09Jordi Hays?

  It looks like they just raised like 300 on a billion.

• 3:31:13John Coogan?

  They probably did, from.

• 3:31:14Jordi Hays?

  Internally. Internally. Um, well, anyways, we should get out of here. I did get some extra context on the Coinbase.

• 3:31:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:31:24Jordi Hays?

  Issue. Uh, a friend of the show said, re Coinbase hack, he was sending it live while we were in that.

• 3:31:31John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he said, "The information that isn't the customer data is sold at a granular level, i.e. info on the individual. So it'll go on a dark web market and be sold individually. Based on the Bitcoin balance of the individual, think of it like a standard three-tier, regular, silver, and gold would be a balance over 50K. Uh, and these accounts are already vulnerable to like SIM swapping and things like that.

• 3:31:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, appreciate the intel. Uh, the Lone Ranger shot that over to us.

• 3:32:04John Coogan?

  Very helpful.

• 3:32:05Jordi Hays?

  But, uh.

• 3:32:06John Coogan?

  Last thing, congratulations to Tyler Cowen, a friend of the show, who's made the Time Magazine list of the 100 most influential people in philanthropy. So congratulations to Tyler Cowen. And we will see you tomorrow.

• 3:32:21Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you tomorrow, folks.

• 3:32:22John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll see you on Wednesday.

• 3:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Fun show.

• 3:32:25John Coogan?

  Bye.