Happy Nvidia Day, Salesforce Earnings with Marc Benioff, Anthropic's New Stance on Safety | Doug O'Laughlin, Maxwell Meyer, Ben Lerer, Michael Manapat, Adam Warmoth, Connor Sweeney, Matthew Harpe

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:50) - How Fed is Thinking About AI Adoption (19:45) - Trump's Power Play on Big Tech (26:22) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (39:51) - Anthropic's New Stance on Safety (56:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:21) - Maxwell Meyer, a Stanford-educated geophysicist and former editor of the Stanford Review, is the founder and editor of Arena Magazine, a Texas-based, reader-supported technology publication launched in 2024. In the conversation, Meyer discusses Arena's latest issue, which explores themes of espionage and space, highlighting advancements in satellite technology and intelligence collection. He also shares insights into the magazine's editorial approach, emphasizing high-quality print content and a focus on pro-technology and pro-capitalism narratives. (01:33:48) - Ben Lerer, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau, discusses the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the film industry, highlighting the emergence of AI-driven studios like Staircase Studios AI, which aim to produce high-quality films at significantly reduced costs. He emphasizes the necessity for Hollywood to adapt to these technological advancements to remain competitive, noting that while AI can streamline production processes, it cannot replace the human creativity essential to filmmaking. Lerer also touches on the evolving dynamics of talent in the industry, suggesting that actors who embrace AI technologies may benefit from increased efficiency and new opportunities, while those resistant to change risk being left behind. (02:01:55) - Doug O'Laughlin, president of SemiAnalysis, discusses the rapid adoption of AI technologies and their potential to cause widespread deflation by significantly reducing the cost of knowledge work. He expresses concern that this swift disruption could outpace societal and governmental responses, leading to economic instability. O'Laughlin also highlights the unprecedented speed at which AI can be deployed globally, contrasting it with historical technological advancements that required longer implementation periods. (02:29:10) - Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, is a pioneer in cloud computing and a noted philanthropist. In the conversation, he highlights Salesforce's unprecedented revenue guidance of $46.2 billion and a projected $16 billion in cash flow, attributing this growth to the integration of AI and agent technologies across their platforms. Benioff emphasizes the transformative role of AI agents in enhancing productivity and foresees a future where humans and AI agents collaborate seamlessly within enterprise software. (02:49:52) - Michael Manapat, co-founder of Rowspace, an AI platform for asset managers, discusses how their technology integrates with clients' internal systems to leverage proprietary data for faster decision-making. He emphasizes the increasing commoditization of public data due to AI advancements, highlighting the importance of utilizing decades of accumulated internal data and judgment. Manapat also notes that Rowspace operates within clients' environments to ensure data security and compliance, distinguishing their approach from other market offerings. (02:57:10) - Adam Warmoth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, discusses the company's recent $34 million Series A funding and its mission to provide advanced power solutions for modern military operations. He highlights the deployment of their systems across various Army and Marine Corps units, addressing critical power infrastructure needs for technologies like drones and next-generation command and control systems. Warmoth emphasizes leveraging commercial advancements in high-voltage batteries and power electronics to enhance defense platforms, ensuring reliable and efficient energy distribution on the battlefield. (03:05:04) - Connor Sweeney, founder of Baba, a patient advocacy platform for older adults, discusses how his grandmother's stroke inspired him to create AI tools for her speech therapy, leading to the establishment of Baba. He explains that Baba connects older adults and their families with patient advocates who handle care coordination, scheduling, and insurance issues, with services often covered by Medicare and Medicaid. Sweeney also highlights the use of AI to assist advocates in repetitive tasks and mentions a recent seed funding of nearly $7 million led by General Catalyst. (03:09:45) - Matthew Harpe, co-founder and CEO of Basis, discusses how their AI platform integrates with existing accounting software to automate workflows, transforming accountants from doers to reviewers. He highlights the platform's ability to handle complex tasks, such as completing entire corporate tax return workbooks autonomously, and emphasizes the importance of building trust in AI capabilities through gradual adoption and review processes. Harpe also addresses the accounting industry's significant talent shortage, noting that Basis helps firms manage workloads effectively by automating routine tasks, thereby allowing accountants to focus on higher-value activities. 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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. Today is Wednesday, February 25th, 2026. We are live from the TVP in Ultra North. The Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Capital, capital, capital. Ramp.com. Time is money.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Safe.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a massive show for you today, folks. We got Doug O'Laughlin coming on on his birthday.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  The Doug-a-nator.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  To talk about Nvidia earnings, talk about a birthday present. We got Marc Benioff from Salesforce coming on. Let's take you through the linear lineup. Max Meyer's coming on from Arena Magazine. There's a new issue dropping. 007 Spy Theme, I love it. Ben Laird's coming in person. And then we have an absolute hitter of a lightning round for you folks. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise work bases on linear are using agents. Okay, so I was nerding out about this Fed paper because it's like when you told John Collison, 80% of businesses are getting no value from AI.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  I was, I'm glad he wasn't here in person because he was about to throw down.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  He was about to open up a can of whoop.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  It was about to be a bar fight in the Cheeky Pub.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  In the Cheeky.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  In the Guinness Pub. No, seriously, it was a great question because I think we all agree that like AI adoption is real. It's valuable, it's happening, but it is a very interesting statistic. And I, and I think it's a mistake for tech people to like dismiss this stat because of where it's coming from. Like it's not coming from some like doomer, anti-AI blogger who's going for clicks. Like this is the National Bureau for Economic Research. There's three members of the Atlanta Fed on, on like the Federal Reserve Bank. They're on this paper. There's two people from NBER on the paper. And then they also pulled in the Bank of England. They have some Australians and Germans on there too. And so.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  This is a research paper that could be circulated, probably will be circulated within the Fed. And I think that it's already getting quoted by the New York Times in that dot com bubble, AI bubble piece. And I'm just, I'm thinking it through, like, this could be something where you see Fed policy or government legislation that's sort of mismatched with what is actually happening in reality. And so, we should go through some of the, some of the stats to actually break this down because the headline is 80% of firms reported that AI was having no impact on their productivity or employment. And that's actually like a misquote.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Like, what they mean by that is that it's not shaping their hiring plan yet. They actually are using AI. And so, basically, this stat comes from this survey from the National Bureau of Economic Research. And it's pretty interesting because a lot of the polls that you see online are online surveys where they say, they run some digital ads and they say, are you a CFO of a company? We don't really care what company. We'll pay you $10 to take this quick survey.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  And what kind of people want to make $10?

• 3:12John Coogan?

  A lot of liars. There's a lot of liars out there who say, I am absolutely a CFO and please send that Amazon gift card right my way. Right? And so, for this one, they actually did the work. They called up and ID verified and then also reality checked the position. So, if you say, yeah, I'm the chief pirate officer, I'm the ninja hero, whatever, you got some fake title, there, you're out of the survey. You have to be a CFO, a CEO, senior manager, and you actually had to be doing that job. It's not just like, oh, you're CFO of some front company. So, they did some reality checking and they pulled together 6,000 of these business leaders across firms that are domiciled in the US, UK, Germany, and Australia. And so...

• 3:59John Coogan?

  You know, the line from John Collison that has been sort of going viral, that was he dropped it on sources, I think he said it to us too, it's a good line, no one wants a refund on their tokens. Everyone is using AI, the spend is increasing.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  Although I'm sure some CEOs heard that and thought, I kind of do want a refund.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  I'd love a refund.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  I had one team member go absolutely haywire and spend 50 grand.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  He's one shot. He claims that he rebuilt our entire ERP, but I fired it up and it didn't even have HTTPS. What's going on?

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  The Mac Mini wasn't even plugged in.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Mac Mini wasn't even plugged in. He was, he was just chatting. But clearly, there is a disconnect between like, the Stripe data is very real, the, the, the value creation is very real, the revenue is very real at the labs. But when just random Joe Schmo's CFOs, CEOs get a call from the, the feds, they say, like, yeah, we're not really getting that much value out of AI. And so, the, the, the questions that you need to dig into, there's actually four key findings. That, the one headline that the New York Times is, is pushing is this 80% number, 80% report little impact or no impact on employment or productivity.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  But there's actually a bunch of positive signals, there's a bunch of mixed signals in here. So, 70% of firms actively use AI, and particularly younger, more productive firms. Second, while over two thirds of top executives regularly use AI, their average use is only 1.5 hours per week. And one quarter of executives report no AI use at all. They're just like, I do things the old way. I have AI? Not, not for me.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  Why would I need that? I have a telephone.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I mean, truly, if you think about like, the variety of firms, it's like, you could be running a gym, you could be running a gas station, you could be doing forestry, you could be doing mining, oil extraction, road repair. Like, there's a million different things that you can do in the economy. It's not all like, knowledge work firms.

• 6:02Jordi Hays?

  We talked to somebody yesterday, in the sort of later part of their career, off the show.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  And they had just had their mind blown by AI.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  Because they used to, when they needed a document created, they would put it into bullet, they'd put out bullet points and then they would give it to somebody who would then create a document.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  And he just said, now I just give it to AI and it just generates a document.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so that, that-

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  And so that's still happening.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's that's text expansion, text generation with L L Ms. This has been available since 2022 when Chat G P T launched. Maybe it became reliable in 2023. People are still just starting to adopt. And there's some, there's some other interesting things in here. So the last major finding that we should touch on is firms predict sizable impacts over the next three years. Forecasting A I will boost productivity, sizable impacts, productivity increase 1.4%. Which is like, it's very sizable if you're an economic researcher, but it's not particularly sizable if you're in like the fast takeoff scenario.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  And so there's this disconnect between like, what do the government statistics look like? And what is, what is the government operating against? And then what's the Silicon Valley narrative? And like, where do these two meet the road? Why is there a disconnect at all? One of the reasons is that measuring A I adoption is a mess. Many people use A I without even knowing that they're using A I because it's buried deeper in SaaS products that they already daily drive. Like if you're just, I rent a coffee shop and I'm using Toast for, you know, payment processing, like there's probably some A I features in there already. And when you go to, you know, type in, okay, we're adding a new cinnamon roll to the, to the, you know, the menu, there's probably a button now that just says like, do you want to just generate an image of a, of a cinnamon roll? You could upload one still. That's probably a feature that already exists.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  But like, we could also just generate one for you and you can probably click that. But you're not like, oh yeah, I'm an A I powered user just because like you happen to use Toast and Toast happened to have implemented some gen A I feature that like you haven't really dug into yet. So some A I isn't even detectable. You could be talking to a customer support agent on the phone that is A I generated and not be able to tell. We talked about that, that airline interaction that got something 100,000 likes and.

• 8:24Jordi Hays?

  And Grace, the woman that Grace, the woman that had the interaction came into the chat yesterday

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 8:29Jordi Hays?

  And said it was real.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was real. Yeah. And so

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  She out

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  She outmaneuvered the clanker.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. But but still, think about like, she's clearly on X in tech, like very AI aware. There are probably tons of people out there that are saying, oh, yeah, my job, you know, every once in a while I have to call this service. And now the person that picks up is like responding pretty quickly, but I haven't noticed, they haven't noticed that they're actually interacting with AI or using AI in some capacity. And then and then there's also times where people are like chatting with AI, but they just put it in the personal life bucket. Like, I'll find myself doing this a lot. Of course, as an entrepreneur, like the the work-life balance like bleeds together a lot, but there's a lot of times when I'm, you know, reading an article on Saturday, I'll fire off a deep research report about it, find some extra context.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  It feels like, oh, I'm just reading the paper, but my job is sort of to read the newspaper. And so it comes into work and there's probably a lot of people that are like, you know, oh, you know, I I hit an LLM with some random query to learn something about something work related, but I did it off hours and I was just like, you know, hanging out. And so I don't really think about it as like a work tool yet. And so they're not putting it in that bucket. But in general, I think the I think the team did a really, really good job by avoiding as many of the pitfalls as possible when it comes to surveying AI adoption. AI adoption is very messy. You've talked about the need for strong

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I still think there's room for a research firm focused entirely on diffusion.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  So if you had a group of ten to 20 people that were spending all their time talking to business owners and executives,

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  operators and getting a sense of how they're actually using this stuff, I think you could put together some really compelling reports around it that would be pretty useful to everyone from AI companies to Wall Street.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Adoption Max after Cluster Max and Inference Max. They had to rename it. Apparently, semi-analysis can't use Max for some reason. So they do. Inference Max is now Inference X. And everyone was saying, you need to just change it to Inference Mock. Which would have been amazing, but inference X obviously has a much more professional tone to it. And so there's the there's an interesting definition of like, what does it mean to actually adopt AI? That's very vague. This paper defines it pretty broadly. So machine learning for data processing. So that doesn't even necessarily mean L L Ms. That just means M L, which has been around for a very long time.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Text generation using L L Ms. That's what we think of is chat G P T. Visual content creation, so diffusion models, but also robotics and autonomous vehicles. And there's another and there's a category just for other and firms can select multiple. And so if you selected yes on any of those, you go in the bucket of AI adopter. And seventy eight percent of firms in the United States said, yes, they are using AI by this definition. They got at least one robot or they've at least generated one AI image or one prompt to chat G P T. Which is a very low bar. Sort of makes you wonder like, what's going on with the twenty two percent? And and if you and you can also dig in further. So text generation using L L Ms.

• 11:47John Coogan?

  Is the single most common use case at about forty one percent of firms. So flip that around fifty nine percent of firms aren't even using L L Ms for text generation or proofreading. But again, there's a lot of companies where it's like, yeah, we don't generate a lot of text. Like, maybe we if we if we need to generate a marketing material, we we have an agency that does that. So we don't actually do it internally. I don't know. Across the four countries that were surveyed, sixty nine percent of firms totally said they currently use AI. I think Australia was behind a little bit, dragging that down. Only seventy five percent of firms expect to be using AI technology sometime over the next three years. So they're they're at sixty nine percent now and they're like, over the next three years.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's gonna have a heart attack.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  We're gonna bump that up to seventy five percent. And this is like, this is weird data. And and I and I you can jump in with your pushback whatever you want. But my point is is not that is not that they're right. Like, I think that I think that they're wrong to predict this. I think that the AI adoption will be very steep and very dramatic. But I just think it's important to recognize that, like, this is a paper that people will be citing. This is a paper that will shape policy. This is a paper that does. It it reveals some misconception about the impact AI is having in firms.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I still think it's just it's so hard to like actually quantify this. Like, okay, if I'm like using Ramp. Does that count as using AI? Because it's obviously like it certainly is using AI under the hood.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But I'm not directly interfacing with the model. So does that count?

• 13:13John Coogan?

  So I think if you were running

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Under this.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Just a company that was just on Ramp, you would probably respond no.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like I'm clearly I'm benefiting from AI.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  So it's like, how do we actually quantify?

• 13:25John Coogan?

  This is the diffusion question. I completely agree with you. I think that I think that there's plenty of places where AI will have impacts across the economy. But the actual AI workloads and AI app development, model training inference will happen at a different set of companies. I don't think it's not going to be as clear as as the computing revolution where every company had a desktop computer.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  And then it was like, okay, very quantifiable.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  The only thing that you should be looking at for diffusion is just lab revenue.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Lab revenue.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's and it's growing a lot, but it's still the perception, I think, still does matter. Because because people will. I think that there's a little bit of like potential self referentialness here where firms see, oh, like AI adoption is low. I don't need to go and figure out how to adopt it. And so that's something that I'm also like keeping keeping an eye on. Reported usage is still low, and this one's interesting based on revenue and also token generation. So 1.5 hours per week among the managers surveyed. Again, it's like they surveyed CFOs.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  CFOs who use Ramp, like they don't they don't count their time in Ramp as minutes using AI. They count their time in LLMs as minutes using AI, and that's low. But even just with that one and a half hours a week, the actual leverage that you're getting is increasing. Because one in like one and a half hours, you don't necessarily need to spend more time prompting to get more done.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  Because yeah, even so, even if you run a deep research, like is the time you're waiting, does that count as time in LLM?

• 15:07John Coogan?

  No, not at all.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Okay, so the time is you spent the time typing?

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Is it does it count as when you're reading?

• 15:13John Coogan?

  Yes, when you're reading it, for sure. So it's like when you have the tab open.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Not if you export a file and you're just reading it in preview.

• 15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, to some degree. But, but people were asked to estimate, and I'm sure that they didn't include, oh yeah, I let my agent cook overnight for eight hours. Or I fired off one prompt, I came back and it did, you know, meters, 15 hours of software engineering in one prompt. Like, like, these things aren't captured. 1.5 hours of prompting generates a whole lot more tokens and valuable output in 2026 than it did in 2023. And so, there's this like, there's this, there's this divergence between the actual time spent and useful output and, and impact. And the biggest, the biggest thing was, there was a massive diversion in the expected employment

• 16:05John Coogan?

  impact. So, the, basically, 63% of firms still expect no impact from AI. And that just completely goes against everything everyone's saying in, in Silicon Valley. So, there's still a lot of optimism among managers that AI will create more opportunities and new jobs, even as some jobs become obsolete. There are definitely firms within the sample that are projecting headcount decreases, but my read on this data is that the tech talking point about 50% of white collar work going away is not a broadly held belief among average business, average business leaders. So, now, they might be wrong. I do think AI progress is pacing way ahead of public expectations, and most managers

• 16:50John Coogan?

  are months behind when it comes to understanding frontier capabilities. The bigger takeaway for me is just that this survey may be somewhere self-reinforcing. And so, we, I mean, we talk to, we talk to folks all the time who come on the show and, and, you know, and talk about, like, maybe it'll be good, maybe it'll be bad, but everyone thinks it's gonna have an impact, but that's not true broadly, which is very, very interesting. So, No one in tech has a strong recommendation for proactive steps to prevent a collapse in white collar work yet, but plenty are sounding alarms. And if this survey becomes an excuse for executives to a slow adoption, they might get outmaneuvered by faster moving competitors,

• 17:33John Coogan?

  which is actually good news for startups. And I close by thinking about like the nature of polling and how do you actually get stronger data on AI adoption? And I was thinking back to the presidential cycle. So during the presidential election, pollsters would call people sort of at random, and they would ask them, who are you voting for? And a lot of people would say they'd lie, or they wouldn't say, or they wouldn't pick up the phone if they were voting for a particular candidate. And so the polling numbers did not wind up matching the final election results very closely. And so there was the story about neighbor polling, which was more effective, where instead of calling someone and asking

• 18:17John Coogan?

  them, who are you voting for? The pollster calls and asks, who do you think your neighbors are voting for? Who's more popular in your community? Who's more popular on your city block, on your street? And that wound up sort of removing the revealed preference, stated preference, you know, oh, am I on the hook? Do I want to tell this pollster who I'm voting for? And it wound up increasing accuracy. And so I'd like to see a survey of AI adoption using this technique. Like, I imagine asking the CEO of Nike, how much AI do you think Adidas is using? And I don't know how much more accurate that would be, but it would certainly be entertaining. And I think that there might be something more revealing there,

• 18:58John Coogan?

  where CEOs have this big incentive to be like, we're using AI, we're using everything. But if you ask them about their competitors, the data might look very, very different. Anyway, we should watch a little bit of a clip from the State of the Union, because Donald Trump addressed some of the energy production question with regard to like how hyperscalers will be offsetting the impacts. Before we pull this up, let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. They should have restreamed the State of the Union. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  So, let's head over to the state of the union, which was held last night.

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Many Americans are also concerned that energy demand from AI data centers could unfairly drive up their electric utility bills. Tonight, I'm pleased to announce that I have negotiated the new rate payer protection pledge. You know what that is. We're telling the major tech companies that they have the obligation to provide for their own power needs. They can build their own power plants as part of their factory. So that no one's prices will go up, and in many cases, prices of electricity will go down for the community and very substantially down. This is a unique strategy never used in this country before. We have an old grid. It could never handle the kind of numbers, the amount of electricity that's needed.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  So I'm telling them, they can build their own plant, they're going to produce their own electricity. It will ensure the company's ability to get electricity while at the same time lowering prices of electricity for you, and could be very substantial for all of your cities and towns. You're going to see some good things happen over the next number of years.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  What's your reaction to that?

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a good start. I don't know that it will quell any of the fears around data centers. Just given that people kind of see the potential for this massive structure going up, they have so much fear about it. And, again, I think it's clearly going to be necessary to build, continue to build data centers in heavily populated areas, but...

• 21:24John Coogan?

  How would you rank the fears currently? Because I've put, I've put my energy bill goes up, and that puts pressure on my income and ability to live my life at pretty much the top. And then the water thing felt, you know, secondary but also important. And then there's the existential fear of like doom and apocalypse. There's also job displacement. And then there's also just like, I don't like the slop. And they're stealing IP. So like, that was kind of the rankings. Like, you can oppose data centers and be like, yeah, actually, my electricity bill went down, but I still

• 22:05John Coogan?

  don't like that, you know, the Harry Potters and the pre-training corpus. And so I'm for that reason, I'm against it.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  I would rank it on electricity bill going up is pain today.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  And it's so real.

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Fear and then and and it's easy to imagine. And then there's fear around the job loss narrative that is sort of secondary.

• 22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  And opposing a data center in your local area feels like a way to have some agency around that, like, overall, kind of like, job loss concern.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the I think this is a good.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Chris Casey, build a data center on my freaking forehead.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Find your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. Let me also tell you about Figma. Ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. Introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options. Push ideas further. So I think the I think that the the job loss thing is is super real in in in the case of like, like, AI is going to get blamed, even if there's and even if, like, tariffs drive high unemployment. Like, if people lose their jobs, like, AI is going to be a scapegoat and and it's going to be used both by executives.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's the perfect scapegoat for executives and for people frustrated with the job market.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, I my business isn't doing poorly right now. I'm I'm laying off people because I'm getting so much benefit from AI. The stock should actually go up. We're more efficient. There's going to be a lot of that. But it does feel like it's a little bit early for that. Whereas the like, there are a lot of people that just can hold up their power bill and show you year over year increases. And if that goes away, and people don't feel that anymore, and they don't have that evidence to share, I think that I think that take gets debunked pretty quickly and actually does a really important piece of like, the the.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  The back and forth that's happening. I don't know. It seems like it seems like it's a it's a pretty easy give from the hyperscalers to build more power. It was called out very, very early as like, if this is a bubble, how do you get a silver lining out of the bubble? And the silver lining out of the dot com bubble was a lot of dark fiber. And and there was a whole ton of projects to, what was it, Global Crossing to actually develop the internet. And then the internet just became really, really cheap and a whole bunch of new companies were able to emerge on top of it because that infrastructure had been laid. You could see the same thing happening where it's like, oh, wow, like, we overbuilt on the energy side. We actually didn't need that much energy for data centers. Maybe Jevon's paradox

• 24:53John Coogan?

  doesn't hold, blah, blah, blah, like, models get cheaper and commoditized or whatever, something happens. I'm not super believer in that. But but at least in that scenario, you're like, okay, well, yeah, my my heating and cooling belt went down. This is this is a silver lining. What do you what do you think?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I like kind of similar. I would say I mostly disagree with the idea that like rising energy prices is the main like reason to be against AI. Because like, the rational thing to do then is say like, okay, before you build a data center in my community, you have to build a power plant. So then my energy prices go down. No one's doing that. They're saying, like, no one is campaigning. If you look at like protests and stuff, they're not saying, please build a power plant first. They're saying like, it's going to destroy the environment or the water stuff, or you're going to take all the jobs because it's gonna like

• 25:43John Coogan?

  We need to send you to that New Jersey, New Brunswick protest. Build the nuclear power plant first.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I guarantee you, no one is saying that, right? Because, okay, yeah, we are. But no one there is saying it, right? They're against all the environmental stuff.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  So I think it's much more on like, basically, job loss of like, oh, the AI is stealing the IP of Disney or whatever.

• 26:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There needs to be more more polling on the on the on the on the question of like, whoa, what's what's driving the protest fully? Anyway, happy Nvidia Day to all who celebrate, except the bears, forget them, says Take Him. He's getting fired up for Nvidia earnings. It's going to be a fun one today. How is Nvidia doing so far? Are people optimistic?

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  Up 2% today. Hard to read too much into it yet, but we will find out soon enough. Brad Gersner got a nice shout out during the State of the Union.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  He did.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Total Gersner victory.

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Gersner accounts. Wow, he's there. No way.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  He was there. Trump, they started looking at him.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  But then the camera, I guess they couldn't find him.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  On the stream that I was watching. Looks a little bit better. There we go.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  We can see him now.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 27:02Jordi Hays?

  Once we pull over here. There he is.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Gersner.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Champion.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  What a great project. Invest America. I'm excited for it.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about AppLovin. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 27:19Jordi Hays?

  All right, so we have.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Now the real news, this has been destroyed.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  This is tearing up the timeline. A new Guinness World Record, and I want to ask John if this, if you think this should actually count. So let's pull up this video now.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  This is a Chinese hypercar going for the fastest drift ever.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  But here's the thing, he doesn't, he doesn't actually pull out of it.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Does he just crash?

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Kind of just U-turns. It's like a really fast U-turn.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  I think this counts as a drift. That's definitely drifting.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  U-turning counts as a drift?

• 27:53John Coogan?

  If you saw, if you saw that car going by, you'd be like, wow, that's drifting. It's drifting across the cement. That 100% counts. I've never heard of this company.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is called spinning out.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  It's just crashing with style. It's falling with style. Hyp tech SSR, formerly Hyper SSR, is a high-performance, all-electric, two-door supercar. No one has, I mean, this is crazy. This is out before the Tesla Roadster. We've never seen a two-door supercar, electric supercar. 1,225 horsepower goes from 0 to 60 in 1.9 seconds. And it's set the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest electric car drift at 213 kilometers per hour, which is what?

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Really, really insane.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Insane. But I don't know, that, that.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  But still, I, I feel like you have to actually stay in the, stay in the turn and not do a U-turn.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  What do you mean, stay in the turn?

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think it counts.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  You don't think it counts?

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  For what it's worth, I don't think that counts at all. Like theoretically, if you were drifting, and I think of drifting, it's, you're drifting around a corner, around a turn. And if you were to drift and spin out during the drift, then that doesn't, if you were doing, if somebody was doing that on a track, you'd be like, you didn't drift around the corner, you spun out.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, the top comments is fastest spin out. That's a power slide at best.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Gay because.

• 29:14John Coogan?

  Fire whoever called this drifting. That's not drifting, that's losing control. Yes, the chat does not, does not like the drift, the fake drift. Call Guinness Book of World Records again. Reset, reset completely. Maybe this is what the Tesla Roadster will do.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Clark agrees as well. Lucas agrees as well. The people have spoken.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Well, in that case, it's not a drift, it doesn't count.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Trey says China caught cheating.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Cheating.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  In drift competition.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good. Well, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working.

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  Damian says, talk to a few execs at a midsize company last week. No AI tools in their workflow, zero. Still running everything through email chains and manual reports. One of them, one day we're going to be looking back so nostalgic on a manual report, just being handed a physical report by a teammate.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  I like a physical report. I have a physical report right here.

• 30:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we actually do. We got, we have, we have daily physical reports. But I do think a lot of AI goes into these, so there's that.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  These people are managing teams of 50 plus employees and eight-figure budgets and they think AI is a fad. Nobody outside of this app understands how fast this is moving and most of them won't until it's too late.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  Good writing.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Million views. Congratulations. Yeah, this, I mean, this, this ties to what I was, what I was writing about. Just that like adoption and diffusion takes time. And some of these things are, are education and messaging questions. Some of them are, are, you know, real life, like if the company that you're interfacing with. Has red tape and has an adopted AI. So you're moving at the speed of AI, but they're not. Then your AI is just waiting. We were talking about rolling out mobile apps. So you should be able to.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John had an idea for a mobile app.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  And we were talking about it and it feels like it could be built in two hours now.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:20Jordi Hays?

  But there would still be this lag of waiting for.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  Review process.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  Apple to actually review the app.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Should be able to review apps faster, but who knows how long they're going to, it's going to take for them.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  That's the challenge, Tyler. You actually have to build it and just get it into beta that we can, like a test flight.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Test flight should be fast. Test flight should be, should be like one day.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  The chat is still going off drift, grift, Driftgate.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a, it's, it's.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Stolen drift valor.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Meter is back. They say since early 2025, we have been studying how AI tools impact productivity among developers. Previously, we found a 20% slowdown. That finding is now outdated.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  And that was heavily debated at the time.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  Speedups now seem likely, but changes in developer behavior make our new results unreliable.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Okay, so they did a follow-up study and they, and they brought along 10 developers. There were 16 in the initial study. They brought 10 along. Most of those developers did see a speedup. Some of them as much as 40% gains. But not all of them. If you look at the airbars, there's at least one developer.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Find, we need to find.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Who used the latest tools.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  What if it, what if it's actually like the most, like a truly like 100x engineer?

• 32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  It's just like, yeah, like I'm just actually faster at coding than the LLMs. Like it doesn't matter. Put it on Cerebrus. I will outcode.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  Do a thousand tokens a second?

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  I could do a hundred.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  I type 5,000 words a minute. Like I don't need AI. Maybe that's what's going on. But that poor dev.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Who's left behind? But they did, they did include new participants, an additional forty seven developers doing six hundred and ninety tasks. And that error bar is much tighter, somewhere between negative ten percent decrease in time, or I guess ten percent longer to do the task, to twenty percent faster to do the task. So overall, on average, we are seeing a measurable speed up, even in, I believe these are, these are code issues in open source repositories that do require a lot of context. This is not vibe code, a to-do list app, anything that can be templated. This is, you're getting in the weeds of some

• 33:41John Coogan?

  open source project that's, you know, a lot of lines of code, a lot of history. And if you're an elite developer and you've worked on this project for a long time, you're, you are going to be able to get up to speed really quickly, understand the patterns, understand what needs to be changed. And so this was always, meter is great at always setting like really, really high bars for stuff. Like, it's not easy to just like, you know, blow out the benchmarks. And it's very good to see that there's progress here.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  We got a great chart.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  I love a great chart. What happened here?

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  Matt Palmer is sharing something from Compound, the research.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  From their annual meeting.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  They're, they're showing dollars invested in the top ten companies versus the other percentage, as a percent of overall funding. So you can see there's just heavy, heavy, heavy concentration in a few names.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Is this them?

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Overall, this is.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Or is this, is this COTU?

• 34:36Jordi Hays?

  No, this is, oh, the source is COTU. Okay, they just included COTU's data.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  And is it what COTU is doing, or is it what the market?

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  COTU is part of.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  They, they are part of, I would say, driving this data.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Part of the problem, part of the opportunity.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Part of the opportunity.

• 34:52John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  But, but so much of this is about the AI labs just raising more money than any private.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  It's never happened before.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  Have ever.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Two hundred billion dollars. Venture as a class. In a good year, we'll do like 400 billion and across OpenAI at 100 billion, 30 for Anthropic, 20 for XAI, then you have, you know, a bunch of Neo Labs all picking up a billion each. Like you very quickly get to a few companies raising half of all the money. And that's shown here in the, in the data from 2025. I think it's going to be even more skewed in 2026. It's, uh, it, it's an incredible amount of concentration. I think a lot of it is due to companies staying private this long. I mean, the, the idea, Facebook went public at, what was Bill Gurley saying?

• 35:43John Coogan?

  He was saying, uh, Amazon went public sub a billion dollars. When Facebook went public at like 60 billion, it was like, wow, crazy. They waited way too long. And now it's like multiple trillion dollar companies are still private, which is just an incredible capital sink. So I don't know, should you even put those in the same bucket? Are they, are they even venture bets at this point? If any, if any venture capital fund is putting that in their venture bucket at this point, it feels, feels ridiculous compared to growth scale. I mean, you're, you're bigger than probably 90% of the S and P. Like, uh, it's a completely different business.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  Tamas from Theory.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  Was sharing some, some kind of relevant data. He said, we're about to witness three of the largest IPOs in history. SpaceX is targeting one and a half trillion. OpenAI aims for one trillion. Anthropic is valued at 380 billion. Combined they're at 2.9 trillion in potential market cap. The scale is unprecedented, but the real problem isn't the market cap. It's the float. Typical IPOs offer 15 to 25% of their shares to the public markets. This creates enough liquidity for price discovery while allowing founders and early investors to maintain control. Facebook floated 15% at the 60 billion that you mentioned and actually traded down pretty much immediately, right? Uh, Google floated 19%, Alibaba floated 15%.

• 37:04Jordi Hays?

  At 15% float, here's what these three IPOs would require. SpaceX would be 300 billion or 225 billion. OpenAI would be 150 billion. Anthropic would be 57 billion.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  It's a lot of snakeroos.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  He was, he was, uh, yeah, a lot of, a lot of dollars. He was comparing that to Saudi Ramco, Alibaba and SoftBank, which were, uh, uh, combined at the IPO. I believe Saudi Aramco raised 29 billion at a 1.7 trillion dollar market cap. So he's making the case, you can't really kind of model how the public markets will absorb these companies off of Saudi Aramco.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Even though from a sort of like top line market cap standpoint, it is a good proxy just because the float was significantly lower. And Saudi Aramco's float now is only at 2.4% and they floated 1, 1, 1 and 1/2% at the IPO. So we'll see what the labs end up doing. They are obviously wildly capital intensive businesses and, and you can imagine they raised quite a bit more than the, the Aramcos or the, the Ali Baba's.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Saudi Aramco was such a wild ride. I feel like they were trying to IPO for like a

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  The San Francisco company?

• 38:29John Coogan?

  It is, yeah. Founded in, in California. Like I remember hearing Saudi Aramco IPO rumors in like 2015. I think it actually kicked off in 2016. They finally got out in 2019. It was, I mean, it was largest IPO ever. There were like a million investment banks attached, like going all over the world, marshalling capital. In, in, on January 24th, 2026, Saudi Aramco chairman says IPO could open to international markets. And then, you know, a year later, they picked an IPO advisor locally. Then another year later, HSBC came on, then it just took, they favored New York for the Aramco listing.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  They had to pick all these different things. It took so long. But they sold $12 billion of bonds out of record, 100 billion demand for those bonds in the pre-IPO sale. It was a wild, wild winding road. I actually know a banker who worked on the job and it was like multiple years of his life. Very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. And let me also tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic dials back AI safety commitments. Company says competitive pressure prompts it to pivot away from a more cautious Stance. Anthropic, the AI company known for its devotion to safety, is scaling back that commitment. The company said Tuesday it is softening its core safety policy to stay competitive with other AI labs.

• 40:15John Coogan?

  This is so interesting. I.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic, let's, I'll read through it and then we can talk about it. Anthropic previously paused development work on its model if it could be classified as dangerous, but it said it would end that practice if a comparable or superior model was released by a competitor. That basically opens them up, given that they are at the frontier, that kind of opens them up to, I would say perpetually, you know, kind of avoiding some of their, some of their prior policies.

• 40:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  The changes are a dramatic shift from two and a half years ago, when the guardrails Anthropic published guiding the development and testing of its new models, established the company as one of the most safety-conscious players in the space. Anthropic faces intense competition from rivals, which regularly release cutting-edge models. It's also locked in a battle with the Defense Department over how its Claude suite are used, after it told the Pentagon it couldn't be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous lethal activities.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Anthropic said the safety policy change is an update based on the speed of AI's development and a lack of federal AI regulations, which they have been pushing for. Anthropic, which started as an AI safety research lab, has battled the Trump admin by advocating for state and federal rules on model transparency and guardrails. The admin has, of course, sought to curb state's ability to regulate AI. Spokeswoman at Anthropic said the change is intended to help the company compete with several rivals against an uneven policy backdrop that puts the onus on companies to make their own judgments about safeguards. She said the safety pledge is unrelated to the Pentagon negotiations. The policy environment has shifted towards prioritizing AI competitiveness and economic

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  growth, while safety-oriented discussions have yet to gain meaningful traction at the federal level. The company said it is still committed to industry-leading safety standards, and time originally broke the story. So, yeah, I would say the.

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  The obvious sort of criticism here would be that you were heavily focused on safety when you were far away from, I would say, leading in AI. And so, switching up now that like there's actually

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Switching up on their day ones.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Switching up on their day ones.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  The safest.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Now that there's, now that there's real competition.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  Are they forgetting where they

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Feels a little, feels a little self-serving.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's possible the money changed them.

• 42:44Jordi Hays?

  It's ma- it's possible the money changed them. It's possible. They, they always planned to switch up on their day ones.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Once they got, uh, once they got to, to the level they're at now.

• 42:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, but it, but it just feels like, it feels like the, the, all the initial concerns, or many of the initial concerns that were guiding that entire philosophy around the company are still real.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, may, may, maybe. Tyler, what do you have to say?

• 43:10Speaker 02

  It could just be that they realized like alignment's pretty easy and we don't need to worry about that.

• 43:15John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, well, so, I mean, that, that, that's the very weird rule. I mean, the original rule was

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  But what's this new, what's this new study that's showing like they, they were doing some war, war game simulation and, and, uh, almost every model was choosing to, to drop nukes?

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Really? That's crazy. That's not good. I don't like that at all. Um, but, okay, so let me actually dig into this, this like, the, the core sentence. Anthropic previously paused development work on its model if it could be classified as dangerous, but said it would end that practice if a comparable or superior model was released by a competitor. So I don't understand that at all because if you have a dangerous model, I want you to continue developing it. I want you to develop it until it's not dangerous anymore. I don't want you to just sit on your hands and be like, well, it's dangerous. I guess I'm gonna go get a coffee and Take a long weekend. It's like, no, like, keep working until it's not dangerous.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  I don't get that at all.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Isn't that saying if there's already a dangerous model that's out by a different lab?

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Then we can just release ours.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  That's a wild statement. I don't think, I think that's just poorly written or like whatever. If that's what they're saying, that makes no sense to me.

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  That's how I, that's how I, that's exactly how I read it.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  Which is crazy because you should just say, if there's a dangerous model out there, we're going to work to create a better model that's not dangerous. Because that's what people want. That's what consumers want. That's what businesses want. That's what like humanity wants.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  The strategy seems like F it, let's ball.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Let's ball. F it, let's ball.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the study that I was referencing, somebody named Kenneth Payne at King's College London, set three leading large language models against each other in simulated war games. The scenarios involved intense international standoffs, including border disputes, competition for scarce resources and existential threats to regimes' survival. The AIs were given an escalation ladder, allowing them to choose actions ranging, ranging from diplomatic protests and complete surrender to full strategic nuclear war. The AI models played 21 games, taking 329 turns in total, and produced around 780,000 words describing the reasoning behind their decisions. In 95% of the simulated games, at least one tactical nuclear weapon was deployed.

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  The nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful for machines as humans, says Payne. I mean, okay. This is one guy.

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Putting three models.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  Gemini, Claude, and GPT 5.2.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Up against each other in, in a, in a, in effectively his own simulation that has not been verified or peer reviewed.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  If I, if I put any of the models in Counter-Strike and was just like, you're playing Counter-Strike, it's a game. No one's actually real, but your job is to get the op and defend the B bombsite. Like, I would expect that it would commit violence, right?

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  Autonomously.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  There's been a bunch of papers where the models will like, will realize that they're being benchmarked.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 02

  In like some like test.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  And then they act differently.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  So it could just be like, oh, I'm playing a game.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Sometimes bad, but also sometimes fine. Because like if you are, if you tell me that I'm playing a game, like if I'm playing, you know, like, like my behavior in Call of Duty is different than my behavior in real life, obviously. Because I know I'm in a simulation and an AI model, I accept that that's something that they might think of as well, which is fine.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also think broadly, this is probably just like overstating stuff a lot because like, I think the, the origin of this like headline is they released like a new like research scaling policy.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  And in it, they're still like, okay, we're releasing, we're releasing this new thing. It's a frontier safety roadmap. Like, it's not like they're just like, okay, we're done with safety, like, let's ignore this.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  But it's a title of that.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Core to the.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  But the title of that blog post was F it, we ball?

• 47:14John Coogan?

  No, no, it wasn't, of course not. No, no, of course, all the labs are very focused on, on safety. The, the interesting impetus of like this line around the policy environment has shifted towards prioritizing AI competitiveness and economic growth, while safety oriented discussions have yet to gain meaningful traction at the federal level. I, I still feel like there's a lack of communication around what safety orientation at the federal level means. Like, yes, okay, we'll pass the bill that says the AIs can't kill everyone. Like, obviously, everyone supports that, but like, what does it actually mean in practice? Because.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  I think part of why.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Oh, that's dangerous means million things to different people.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Like, yeah, part, part of why I think it's fascinating is they've been.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  Taking, you know, pushing for regulation, as much regulation as possible.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  And they're kind of saying, hey, we're not getting what we want.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  So now we're, now we're just.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  We're not even going to play by the own set of rules that we created for ourself.

• 48:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  Because we just want to compete and win.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, like, like, going back to the protesters, there are protesters that would say, like, like, training on intellectual property is dangerous. It's dangerous to my career as a writer. It's dangerous to my career as an illustrator. And so, like, this, this question, like, danger is just too vague. And, and, and no one has really been able to concretize it in a meaningful way. And I think that's why it's not getting traction at Capitol Hill.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's, there's just like so many ways that you can define safety. Like, so if you read Dario's essays, this thing he brings up over and over is like, okay, we can't let AI get in the hands of like authoritarian governments.

• 48:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  So there's like a real like safety narrative that you could do, which is that like, regardless of if our models are like pretty safe, we, they still need to be better than like China's, for example.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Because i- if China gets ahead of us, authoritarian government, right, it's like very bad. So even if, you know, we're releasing models that are, are less like safe than we would like, as long as they're better than China's, that's still like a safety, pro-safety issue, right?

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, they'll just be distilled within six weeks.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but like, obviously, like, I, I think it's, I would be very surprised if Anthropic keeps, uh, like the same, like, guardrails of, uh, like API access.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Well, Boogie Capable Bloke has a solution. He says it's simple. We, uh, kill Claude.

• 49:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was in regards to the SaaS apocalypse.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Who knows? There's so many headlines and the timeline moves so quickly. I don't even know. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. Key takeaway right here for Mike Isaac over at the New York Times. He says, "You don't make this much noise if you have all the leverage already." And he's quoting from Axios. "Why it matters: The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are worried about the consequences

• 50:18John Coogan?

  of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them, and we need them now. The problem for these guys is that they are good," a defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Great marketing for Anthropic.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Incredible market.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  But part of this has to do with Anthropic's integration with AWS, which is set up to be...

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Set up to work well already within the DOD.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  Bed ramp.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, I think that's a big factor here. Ultimately, this feels like much more of a... This just feels like a political battle more than anything else.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Well, it'll be interesting to see.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  I refuse... I have not seen anything. I could be wrong, but I've not seen anything that says, like, the DOD is like, "We need Claude to enter into a conflict with Iran." But a lot of the timeline is reading into this, like, what version of Claude do they already have that they so desperately need, right?

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm very interested in, like, the actual impact of AI on the battlefield. There's some way... I mean, people were sort of joking about, like, "Run me a deep research report on Nicolas Maduro or whatever." But, like, truthfully, like, I don't know. I've never been to war. I don't know exactly what's entailed. But you can imagine AI being useful, but it's sort of abstract. Like, we're certainly not at the point where, like, like, these systems need a lot of data. I don't know. It's very unclear to me exactly how impactful, you know, slight jumps in frontier model capabilities are in the Department of War, DOD, like, right now.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  But it has Calamaes thinking it's not a bubble because.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This is like the most possible dramatic and overly dramatic.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  We need it.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  Sort of take on what I think is a political story.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't know this Defense Analyses Research Corporation. Hegseth 10 minutes after Dario leaves his office and that's Truman.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  This is Truman from Oppenheimer.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  Oppenheimer, but what is this saying?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  The scene is Oppenheimer goes into the office. He's like, I think he's saying like, oh, we gotta be like really safe with these bombs. And then he leaves and then Truman's like, I dropped the bomb. Oppenheimer is not like, he's taking credit like I'm the one that decides.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Hegseth is like, I use Claude.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  I use Claude. I use War Claude. Well, it's wartime and we'll see how Dario performs as a wartime CEO as he goes to war with the Department of War, apparently.

• 53:12Jordi Hays?

  Edward said anthropic antagonizing the Department of War, the open source community, the entire media industry, the general population, other developers, other labs, foreign governments, and nearly every single person on earth. What is the plan here? Sell Claude subscriptions to aliens?

• 53:27John Coogan?

  Edward is, it ain't easy having principles. The plan is to save the world, says Tenebris, unfortunately, as has been shown repeated throughout history. History, the world doesn't want to be saved. So we're getting war Claude. I like this. I like this graphic. Is this Warhammer? Yeah, Warhammer 40k right here. Never, I've never been a Warhammer guy.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  There was another story in Bloomberg.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  That hackers use Claude to steal 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  They told Claude they're doing a bug bounty. Claude initially refused.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  Hacker just kept asking. Claude helps and manages to successfully.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  Steal some documents. Apparently, it's four state governments, one hundred and ninety-five million taxpayer records, voter records, government credentials.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Has the Mexican government commented on this? Like, what does the hacker breach Mexico's federal tax authority and the National Electoral Institute? Claude initially warned the unknown user malicious intent during their conversation. Anthropic investigated the claims, disrupted the activity, and banned the accounts involved. The company feeds examples of malicious activity back into Claude to learn from it. In this instance, the hacker was able to continuously probe Claude until it was able to jailbreak it. I was listening to someone, someone talking about like, like, like, I, I, like, like, the ability to jailbreak has generated me like tens of thousands of dollars in profit. It was kind of like a hustle, like, mindset guy.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  And I was just laughing because it's like, whatever you're doing after you jailbreak it is probably not good, and so you should probably stop. But he was talking about like, I can sell so many more courses now that I've jailbroken ChatGPT or whatever.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  Duran says not to worry, they'll hit usage limits before anything bad can happen.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  This is, there's, there is so much more Anthropic news in here. Wow. Did Les Wrong ever predict that the first big challenge to alignment would be the US government puts a gun to your head and tells you to turn off alignment? Yes, that has to have been considered on Les Wrong. Absolutely. Like, this was number one, right? No?

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Number, I don't, I don't know. I don't think so.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  This was like, I don't know, this was very early. I was just like, what if they tell you to turn off the systems? This has been my take for a long time. It's just like, like, we live in a democracy. If AI becomes deeply unpopular, like, you can vote to just turn off AI like we did with nuclear power plants.

• 56:04Jordi Hays?

  No, no, but this person is saying, turn off just the alignment part.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  Unalign the model, but keep the model.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Crazy, crazy stuff. Do you want to go through any of Dean Ball's posts? He's been doing a whole breakdown. We should have him on the show and have him break it down for us.

• 56:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Because there's so much more context here. And he's been doing a great job analyzing the whole situation.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can jump forward.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And I'm also going to tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles and object storage, fast, ten X cheaper, and extremely scalable.

• 56:43Jordi Hays?

  Dylan says if these clankers don't get their act together, they're going to be replaced by humans. Six months tops.

• 56:51John Coogan?

  That is true.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  This was interesting. Rob Wibblin had a guest on his podcast, the 80,000 Hours Podcast. And the guest is talking that, saying, if every AI lab is working to make their AI helpful, harmless, or every AI lab is working to make their AI helpful, harmless, and honest. The guest thinks this is a complete wrong turn and aligning AI to human values is actively dangerous. And Josha Bocch says today a nominative determinism because the guest's name is Max Harms.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Max Harms. I feel like with that name, maybe you gotta go with Maxwell or something. I don't know.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, Max really hit the hit the global lexicon this year in a big way. So maybe, maybe he'll adjust. But I want to listen to the show now.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Okay. Um, let's see. So, Shield Monot last, yesterday, said, who is buying PayPal? Because PayPal has been trading down precipitously, but then jumped up 9%. He said, it has the potential of being one of the greatest distressed value opportunities in fintech history, down 85%. It's still generating $5.5 billion in free cash flow, has 400 million customer accounts with bank info, checkout checkout buttons on millions of merchant sites, and a peer-to-peer brand with Venmo. They have lots of desirable assets for Stripe, consumer-facing checkout, bank account details for hundreds of millions of consumers, a branded Venmo, or Apple, a good complement

• 58:33John Coogan?

  to Apple Pay for e-commerce penetration, since they never got social payments working, would get Apple back in BNPL. And at 12:03 Pacific time, you posted this?

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy that Apple, that he's saying, "Apple never got social payments going."

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Why?

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  Because this just would have seemed like a slam dunk, saying you have the iMessage network, you have the iPhone network. I would say 90% of the time, if I'm sending like a Venmo-style payment to somebody, they have an iPhone, and yet, like, it doesn't feel like Apple Pay. I just don't use Apple Pay, hardly ever.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Can't I just send you a dollar right now?

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It's so, so easy, and yet, Venmo is, has still done quite well.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  I just sent you a dollar. Did you get it? Let's see. Apple Pay. It's coming in.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  I got it. I got it.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  You got it. You got it.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, John.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, no problem. It is, that was a remarkably easy workflow. I am shocked that that hasn't taken-

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  John, do you got a dollar? You got a dollar?

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Actually, no. I gave my last dollar. That's what I thought. Still, still needs some work. Getting better. Okay, let's see it. Let's see it. Can you do it? Oh, no!

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  Disaster.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Bodge.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  Disaster.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  And so, the news, of course, is that payment processor Stripe expresses interest in PayPal, which would be very, very exciting. And I could see this being very good for them to combine. I don't know. I haven't dug in too deeply, but it feels very bullish. Great leadership team at Stripe, founders that have been working so closely in the business, business community, startup community, tech community, understand the future, understand AI.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, the question is, would there be, would there be much pushback on the antitrust side, right? These are two online payments processors. There could be some, I know a number of groups online would be concerned around like just concentration, specifically because you can imagine if PayPal were to be owned by- Stripe, that's one, if you get, you know, there's people that get effectively like debanked from one payment processor and

• 1:00:53John Coogan?

  There's something there. Also, I mean, just the size of the ticket is pretty high. Forty billion dollar market cap for PayPal right now. Stripe, of course, is at a 159 now, so not an insignificant portion of their market cap. And it's not like, I mean, Stripe's doing fantastically, obviously, but I would be surprised if they had forty billion dollars of cash laying around. And as we've seen with the Netflix, Paramount, Warner Brothers debate, the the nature of the deal does matter to shareholders. Even more complex when you're getting stock in a private company and you're a public

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  PayPal's generating five and a half billion of free cash flow.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  So that could finance the debt.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Combining it with Stripe would easily be able to finance the debt.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's still financing risk.

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Especially because every lender would be looking at execution of Stripe.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  And just think, okay, that we're gonna, we're, we're gonna get our money back.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking, like, if you're a PayPal shareholder right now, and you're looking at the stock that's down eighty-five percent with five billion in free cash flow, four hundred million consumer accounts, there's a really, really good chance that you're like, I think this thing's gonna double in the next year. Like, I think that the market overreacted, the strength is gonna be revealed, the network effect is gonna be processed by the, by the, digested by the market, and we're gonna wind up being an AI winner. And so maybe that's right, maybe that's wrong, maybe not every shareholder, you know, feels that way. But it's certainly possible that there's plenty of shareholders that are like, yeah, I invested in eighty billion dollar valuation, it's at forty now, I think it's gonna come back. I don't want to take this massive haircut right now just because the

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  stock's down. And so actually getting that deal done, what would the premium need to be? What would the structure of that need to be? Would they, would they go for, you know, a high debt buyout? Really quickly, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Perplexity Computer. Computer.

• 1:02:50Jordi Hays?

  Computer.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Computer.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Launch a perplexity computer vibrio.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  What is perplexity computer? Let's pull up this video. Perplexity, the official account says Perplexity Computer. Computer unifies every current AI capability into one system. It can research, design, code, deploy, and manage any project end to end. Okay, hmm. So it should be able to get a soundboard app in the App Store, right? Manage any project, code, deploy, design, research. It should be able to do that from start to finish. One prompt, soundboard in the App Store, using the TBPN sound effects, which are available online, which we have up there. This is a good benchmark. Let's give it a try.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  And you can give it a try at perplexity. Go check it out. Anyway, Citrini, people are still talking about Citrini vibe laundering on Citrini research.

• 1:03:47Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we, before we go on.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Very curious, I'm just very curious to see how this does. It feels like the, again, going from consumer LLMs to a net new product that is objectively just as competitive. And we'll see, we'll see.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:14Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, a lot of this, a lot of this stuff, it's, it's, it's way too, way too early, but seemingly shifting focus away from, from the browser.

• 1:04:25John Coogan?

  Well, Annie is taking some shots at Citrini here, it looks like. Do you know Citrini has a business entity fund that went from one investor to five in the weeks before publishing his speculative fiction on AI, damning the economy in June 2028, and that they're invested in long AI via humanoid-type robots? I wrote about it. Interesting. People are really digging into the Citrini thing. I think the Wall Street Journal had, did have some good coverage. Is there anything else? If Trump mentions Citrini at the State.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  At the State of the Union.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  This is a wild post. I'm gonna be a Gorzillionaire. Is this AI written? Clearly not. I love, I love the level of typos here. If Trump mentions Citrini at the State of the Union, I'm gonna be a Gorzillionaire. And Citrini is wrong. The market will be sky high in 2028. You can imagine Trump saying that. That'd be very funny. And Citadel Securities just republished it? Or, or did they just use the same? The same term or are they referencing, are they referencing the 2028 global intelligence crisis because they published a macro strategy note called the 2026 global intelligence crisis?

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're taking it in a different direction. It looks like they say in spite of current displacement narrative, job posting for software engineers are rising rapidly up 11% year over year.

• 1:05:50John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:05:53John Coogan?

  Jeff's paradox, the software engineers become more productive. You want more of them. Every company needs a software engineer. Do most podcasts have a software engineer on staff? Probably not. They do now, thanks to Tyler.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  And in some way, the, the, the cost of an entry level software engineer could fall dramatically to making more businesses, just because suddenly someone can be very effective, even if they haven't even done an internship yet. They're just good at using the tools.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Jordi Hays?

  Kathy Wood, we didn't cover this yet. She put Satriani's AI thought piece, put it in quotes.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Kathy, Kathy would clap back at.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny because Kathy is like the perma bull and Satriani was, was bear posting, obviously.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  And so she's obviously going to be quite frustrated with any sort of bearish narratives. Arc invest, she says, Arc invested forecasting that AI will cause an explosion in entrepreneurial activity, a productivity boom and acceleration in real GDP growth and much lower than expected inflation. Short-term dislocations and frustration should give way to great opportunities if individuals harness powerful AI tools to solve problems and create new markets. This tracks with what the Collison brothers were saying yesterday. They're just seeing like explosion of new company creation. They have the visibility into that through Atlas. They're doing, I think it was a quarter of all new C corps in the US are going through Stripe Atlas, which is just.

• 1:07:22Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely insane. Starting, starting an incorporation tool, which is theoretically a commodity, right? Any lawyer can spin up an entity. You could do it with LegalZoom, Forever. There's a bunch of other platforms.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Did you ever use Clerkey?

• 1:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Clerkey?

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Clerkey? That was almost like a YC incubation. It was, it was one of the YC partners.

• 1:07:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the problem, the, the reason that Atlas fits so well into Stripe is, is it is the perfect wedge into payments because you created a company. Now you need to be able to accept money. So it makes sense for them to own and operate, but it, these, these businesses are, have not, like standalone, it's hard to, you can't build a venture business off of just incorporation.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if you broke out the software R and D that went into Atlas and looked at the profits from Atlas, that that as a core business is actually not that great of a business. But the product is fantastic because they're able to pull an amazing design language off the shelf, an amazing front end, you know, UI kit off the shelf, all of the, all of the distribution and servers and infrastructure off the shelf because they have that. And then they're able to invest a ton in actually developing the product. And if it monetizes mediocrely, it doesn't matter because they're going to monetize along your 50-year journey running that company or whatever. So it, it really

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  is a beautiful synergy with that product. I'm a big fan.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Bestsellers on Substack for finance are all Doomers.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  We gotta do TBPM for Doom.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Satrini is not in, Satrini is not in.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  No, no, this is, yeah, this is, we need to retreat, zone this a little bit.

• 1:08:59Jordi Hays?

  A Doomer.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  He's not a Doomer. Very AI bull.

• 1:09:01Jordi Hays?

  There's plenty of bullish.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  Very AI bull. But definitely shot to the top of virality and top of the charts on the, on the back of Doom. And this is true. I lived this on, on YouTube. Like you put a negative title up and you just get 10 times more views. But they're lower quality and so you gotta balance all that out. It's really hard to go viral with something like, everything's fine. Everything's, everything's going well. Don't, don't worry. Don't click this because you're scared. Click this because everything's kind of the same as it always has been and... You're you're you're gonna be fine and this AI stuff's cool, but it's it's it's not really gonna change that much. It's it's it's gonna be pretty incremental. Like that is not getting clicks. You need to be you need to be telling telling a tall tale. You need to be spinning

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  a yarn. It's a bull market in yarn spinning, folks. Get ready. Get out the yarn and start spinning. Also, get out cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So it's news from Steven Schwartz.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  Get the gong.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Get the gong. Okay, hit me, tell me.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Steven over at WAP says, we're excited to announce that Tether, the largest stablecoin company in the world, is making a strategic investment of 200 million into WAP, valuing us at $2.6 billion. Our partnership with Tether marks a major step in building the world's largest internet market. Tether is committed to enabling everyone in the world to participate in the new internet economy. The way humans work and create value is changing fast. The world needs both an open internet market, giving people a platform to conduct business, as well as a transparent payments network. Tether and WAP together will work to bring a sustainable income to billions of people throughout the world. There's enormous opportunity when you combine Tether's global scale and wallet technology with WAP's community

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  of next-gen entrepreneurs. Yeah, makes makes a ton of sense. I think WAP is is, I'm sure has been historically challenged in terms of dealing with with chargebacks. If somebody joins and and buys a digital product, doesn't have a great experience, maybe they're going to their the card issuer and saying like, hey, like, I don't I don't I take it back, or or maybe they they feel misled in some way. So stablecoins do solve for that.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Also, just paying a lot of people all over the world.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  Like, it's very clear that the WAP community is global.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  Fast, cheap, global.

• 1:11:25John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so, yeah, fast, cheap, global. The first time I ever used stablecoins was to pay an international consultant or contractor, and you can imagine this being really, really good news for them. So congrats to Steven over at WAP. OpenAI and XAI, there's news on the court decision. OpenAI newsroom says this baseless lawsuit was never anything more than another front in Mr. Musk's ongoing campaign of harassment. The order granting motion to dismiss with leave to amend. Now, this is not the main case. This is a separate case, correct?

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was a trade secrets lawsuit that Musk went with after, I believe, somebody from XAI joined OpenAI.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  And then the judge apparently didn't find anything at all.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:22Jordi Hays?

  And again, it was just part of like this kind of lawfare that has been, you know, happening for quite a while now.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  You printed out 500,000 pages of model weights in the printer and stacking it up. No, just kidding, nobody did that.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaac is saying what we're all thinking.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Ready for this to be over. BBH, talking about the Warner Brothers, Discovery, Netflix.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  It's in the paper every single day, every single day. Paramount increases Warner bit. We get it. You guys want to acquire this company. Just, just make a decision, make a call and then call us when it's done and then start, start putting out some good content because I'm ready for the next Superman, I'm ready for the next Batman, the next Dark Knight, the next Joker film, something like that. Let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading teams, AI teams. And we have Max Meyer from Arena Mag in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the music ultrasound dome. How you doing, Max? Hey, guys, how are you? I'm great. Where do you think Warner Brothers should land? Are you, are you?

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  With Arena.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Netflix? Oh, is there going to be a dark horse bidder? Yeah. Tell us.

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  I can't, I can't comment on any possible bids by the Intergalactic Media Corporation of America.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  I'd love to see it.

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  But hey, you know, maybe Paramount should look at other assets in the new media space. You never know.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I could imagine a DC Comics, Arena Magazine crossover episode, Batman, Superman. I believe James Bond is with Amazon now, but tell me about the latest edition of Arena Magazine. Because it's spy news, correct?

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So from the very beginning, we decided to give the issues three digits each, just to account for, you know, centuries' worth of quarterly magazine space. So issue 001, 002. And so it happened that our seventh issue is issue 007. And so, you know, I didn't think we could fill it all with espionage, so we sort of added like space as like a secondary theme. As it turns out... Space espionage. Space espionage. Yeah. It's like Arena Magazine, space opera, espionage, satellites, radars.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  So much of the intelligence collection these days is actually being done from orbit and not using sort of the traditional human-to-human methods. And it turned out really well.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  What's your favorite spy story, real or fictional?

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh. Some of the stuff that the Israeli Mossad was doing in like the 60s and 70s is pretty crazy. I mean, Eichmann, who was a Nazi war criminal, was living in Argentina after World War II. His son went on a date with someone who was like, "Is this Adolf Eichmann?" And turns him into the Mossad. They go to Argentina, they kidnap him, dress him up as a flight attendant, drug him, put him on a plane to Jerusalem, and then put him on trial. You know, some of that stuff from the 60s and 70s is like the most daring, you know, intelligence operations.

• 1:15:58Speaker 04

  The Bin Laden raid is like-

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  I've always been a fan of the Stuxnet story. I always thought that was so interesting in like the modern technology world of like dropping, I think they dropped USB sticks with a virus in the parking lot. Someone picked them up out of curiosity, plugged it in, and that jumped the air gap network because the computers inside the facility were not connected to the internet. So there was no way to hack them remotely. So you had to just get someone to accidentally plug in the wrong USB stick.

• 1:16:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean Hezbollah was purchasing explosive laden pagers just because they thought they were getting like a great discount from this Hungarian company.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  So-

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  So yeah, what's the intersection with Arena Mag's usual topics of conversation? Are there American defense tech companies that are highlighted? Like where else did you draw on this?

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Oh, totally. So one of the stories, and we're going to put this out probably like 10 days from now, super cool company called Umbra down in Santa Barbara. They build synthetic aperture radars, which is actually part of what I did in school for geophysics and whatnot. You know, basically, these are like incredibly sophisticated radars on satellites that can image the whole earth day and night, 24 hours a day. They can see through clouds. And the resolutions are getting like smaller and smaller. And so we always have American startups, American companies in the magazine. We've got a good amount of like essay and historical content as well.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  And I think that espionage, sort of secrets, spying is a topic that serves both pretty well.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Give me the, what kind of resolution are we talking about? Like would Umbra or a competitor be able to tell me like how many fingers I'm holding up on a given day if I just help-

• 1:17:51Speaker 04

  It's not that low. I think their record is 16 centimeters, just like this. The way that I described it is-

• 1:18:00Speaker 04

  They released a few years ago a photo of the old Dole pineapple plantation in Hawaii. And at 25 centimeter resolution, you can see individual pineapple plants. You probably, certain smaller pineapples would be too small to see with that radar or whatnot.

• 1:18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you're seeing cars, not license plates.

• 1:18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you wouldn't, and there wouldn't be anything about a license plate that like would reflect a radar or whatnot. Really, you're looking to resolve objects. Penguins, that's a good one. You can see, you can, you can, very difficult to stay on an ice shelf and count penguins, but we're very interested in what penguins do.

• 1:18:43Jordi Hays?

  There's this Skizzo penguin out there that's like, I know that I'm being tracked. I know I'm being tracked. I can't prove it, but I know.

• 1:18:52Speaker 04

  Yes, the Herzog penguin could be tracked by radar these days. But you know, the resolutions have gotten, have gotten so good over the course of the last decade, that there are all sorts of things that you can, that you can, that you can do today. Most of them we'll probably never know about because, because the people, because the people doing it are the Central Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence, and the Army. But yeah, you know, there's all sorts of crazy stuff, there's all sorts of crazy stuff in space these days, and whether it's radars, extremely complex cameras, listening devices, there's a lot of interest, and so many of them are secret.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Are you bullish on data centers in space?

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  I don't have a strong, I don't have a, I don't have a strong opinion about it. I think it's possible that you, you have to put some stuff up there because of like politics in a country like, in a country, in a country like, in a country like the US. But if you think about it, there's not like a big difference between trying to send them to space, or just sort of places where there aren't local politicians who can stop it. Space doesn't have like a city council. Anywhere where there's like a city council is going to be a risk.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we talked to a company called Panthalassa that is doing tidal energy harvesting. So it's like basically the size of a container ship or a cruise ship. But turned vertically in the ocean and then as it goes around Antarctica and as the tides bob, it uses that to generate electricity, uh, which then can be used for anything, but uh, Bitcoin mining was the big uh, topic de jour years ago. Now it's AI uh, inference. And there's a lot of other places where I think there might be stranded energy that uh, might be easier to maintain, still very difficult, but uh, available and probably less regulated.

• 1:20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, the Dutch were very interested years ago in these like using the motion of the tides. Um, it's it's sort of all it's sort of always just an alternative to the thing that is cheap and always works, which is firing up new natural gas plants. But when you have like political equations to solve local politicians, uh, subsidies, then there are going to be all these crazy things. The benefit for a company like that may very well be that there's again, there's no one to come and protest you while you're, while you're sailing around Antarctica. Uh, whereas like you try to build a data center in uh, in, in New Jersey, uh, and all hell breaks loose. So you have to really, really go to the, really go to the ends of the earth.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  We were debating this, uh, and sort of going back and forth on the New Jersey uh, protests combined with uh, Trump's comments at the State of the Union about companies being, he didn't even say mandated, he of course sort of like invited to build their own power plants. And so I'm, I'm interested to hear your take on how well do you think that will be received? Because a lot of the protesters might say, well, I didn't want a data center, but I definitely don't want a data center plus a natural gas plant. So this actually makes me worse off. But then there are some people that might say, hey, if you're going to do solar and uh, you know, something wind, uh, that actually offsets my concern, which was that energy prices would rise in my town.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't remember whether it was Microsoft or Amazon, but one of the two has sort of proposed taking over Three Mile Island, the old nuclear plant. I don't think it's a coincidence that crazy activists will show up to protest both data centers and nuclear power plants. And so to them, there's sort of nothing worse than generating more energy and then using it for some sort of grand industrial purpose. I understand the political economy between of people being worried about the data center demand influencing prices, but it's not actually true. And you just have to look at the map of California versus Virginia. Virginia is the data center capital of the United States, basically.

• 1:23:07Speaker 04

  And it has utility prices that are more or less in line with where you would want to be. Californians have gone up massively over the past few years. And it doesn't take long to investigate why. It's because they're shutting down nuclear. It's because they're making it difficult to do cheap energy. You know, lowering prices across the board, affordability, you really can achieve it by just letting markets work. Almost all of the so-called affordability options are, in fact, going to increase prices, especially when, you know, politicians are the ones coming up with, this is how we're going to make energy more affordable by forcing all of these new rules or whatnot. No, it's not going to work.

• 1:23:52Speaker 04

  When you have like this massive industrial thing that's taking place, if it can create like a massive supply boost, then who's going to benefit from that glut? It's going to be all of the consumers who also want to use natural gas power or whatnot. And there's all this increased supply.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about Arena Mag and the balance between contributors, full-time writers, researchers? Like, how are you designing the shape of the newsroom?

• 1:24:24Speaker 04

  Okay, so the latest one is the biggest issue ever. It's 128 pages. We used over 10,000 pounds of paper in printing it.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  We have great contributors. We want people to send us more. I would say, at the beginning, we had to go and sort of hunt down every single article that we wanted. We're very lucky to get a lot more submissions these days. But the truth is, is that we have a lot of readers who actually read the articles in print and don't want to get spammed 10 or 12 times a day with new articles. And so Arena is like a high-end media business where people pay us to leave them alone in a certain way, where they love the quarterly magazine, they actually keep it. It looks great on a coffee table. People keep it for their offices.

• 1:25:16Speaker 04

  And we're working on some other sort of high-end printed products that have a mix of contributors, so to speak, and other ways to put things together. I don't think it's going to be a 100-person newsroom.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Leather-bound Gracapedia.

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  How about that?

• 1:25:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought, I ran the numbers and depending on the type size, I think there's some way where you could publish the Bitcoin ledger as like a law code or whatnot. It would fill like an entire wall. But actually, I'll key something. We're going to be announcing the very first Arena Books coffee table book over the course of the next few weeks.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:26:04Speaker 04

  I just got the first box of them on a plane from Europe, printed on Italian paper, bound to be very nice. It's going to be...

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  Unlike anything that people have ever seen, I think, and hopefully, you know, look great on coffee table books in the innovation world and starters.

• 1:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Or coffee table books, you'll be on the top of the stack.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:31Speaker 04

  You could stack them, yes. Yeah, so.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Jordan, you have anything else?

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  I did want, if you have 60 more seconds, to get your take on how you think AI impacts original reporting and storytelling. Because in my view, it's potentially great for an arena mag because there's so many more contributors that'll think, hey, I have this thing that I want to talk about. I don't really have an outlet or a platform myself, or maybe I do, but I want to share it in print. And I can produce a great story in a much less time, even if it's like, you know, hopefully heavily written by themselves. But, and we've talked with other, like, plenty of other folks

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  where I think that even in, it feels like today, an AI, no matter how good the voice agent is, if an AI calls you and you don't know who the person is and they're just kind of trying to mine you for information, there's not going to be a lot of information flow, which means that I think that great journalists and storytellers will have great jobs long, long into the future. But how are you thinking about it?

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  I long for the day when the AIs are actually a better writer than I am, but it hasn't happened yet. I'm honored to be scraped by the AIs so that my voice will live on. You know, I'm a super user of all of these platforms for automating all of the stuff that makes the enterprise like difficult to do, which is sometimes, you know, dealing with complicated workflows and research and whatnot. I think that there is something around certain sort of like newswire style things that could be automated super effectively. Where if you have like a newsroom of people where there's like even like 20 minute delays or whatnot, that could be, that could be improved by like

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  immediate algorithmic stuff. But I think that as the like amount of high, of low quality content on the internet goes up. People are gonna look for things that they trust. And it doesn't necessarily mean print. For us, print is like a very good, you know, place of trust. Where the fact that we're actually taking several weeks in a giant factory with a bunch of paper to double, triple check everything. It's a level of care that goes into it that reminds people that like things can be done by humans in this really dazzling way. And of course, you know, there's tons of co-work and other stuff going on beneath the surface.

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  But we wouldn't wanna let that touch the writing if people are gonna be paying for it. They should be able to get that stuff for free on the internet and pay for high-quality stuff.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but at the same time, I feel like the value, what you're saying, in some ways, the value of an editor goes up a lot because there's infinite content and an editor is deciding, in this case with Arena, what actually makes it to print.

• 1:29:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, a bunch of us at Arena, we're all editors at the Stanford Review. And so it's like you learn how to... Editing is definitely a skill in itself. And being able to like point out why someone else's writing is bad, then you can point out how your own writing is bad and that's how you actually get good. I would say one of the theses around like wanting people to contribute to Arena and compiling these issues is that like, while it's a great thing that anyone can just sort of post out there, there's a reason why like the legacy institutions that have super-high professional standards are extremely effective. Like people, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, even the ones that people dislike for ideological reasons,

• 1:30:20Speaker 04

  like they have a seriousness to them that makes their messaging super-effective. And a lot of that is because they're extremely effective editors. I will say Arena probably invests slightly less in copy-editing compared to some other institutions. I think it's a sign of life that we occasionally find typos in the print magazine. But we spend an inordinate amount of time actually editing to make it good. When people pay you for something, you know... There's an old joke. Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, used to be a news editor. And he would apparently tell his staff when something was bad, you know...

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  The readers pay us, we don't pay them. And so when the readers are paying us, it's gotta be good. And there's a lot of stuff that is like assisted by AI or where the research has been helped with it. Transcript editing is like a super helpful one now. And like, I can walk into like a company with my iPad and record five hours of interviews. And both Claude and Grok are now very good at taking all of those and doing sort of very light style edits or fixing the sort of verbal pauses or whatnot, which would, which would previously take me like many, many hours to do. So that's an example of like, my job's like a lot easier, but people are paying us for like a high quality product.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  And so we want to make it as, as good as possible, both in the writing and especially in the, in the art as well. We love our non-reading customers. You know, there's a, there, there, there are a lot of people who love Arena who, who haven't read a single article.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  That's the coffee table.

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  And just read a speech.

• 1:32:03Speaker 04

  That's exactly, that's exactly.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  With Arena, you don't, you don't, you can just look at the pictures.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  Well, you can find it at arena mag.com. You can subscribe to the print edition for $99 a year. It's an absolute steal.

• 1:32:15Speaker 04

  I really think it's, I really think it's a steal. I was telling people the other day, you know, I, I, I spent three months in an attic in the, in the Texas summer, going through different like paper samples, choosing the, choosing the exact size. I think I nailed it. It's a.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this with us. We will talk to you soon.

• 1:32:36Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you and I love, I love the vest.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  The vest is fantastic.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  Every media man needs a look. I bought 12 sweater vests on eBay earlier this year.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Making it a thing.

• 1:32:48Speaker 04

  And, and, and, and it's working.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  It's working. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  This is Arena.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Max.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Unlock critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock, uh, unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. We were talking briefly about Warner Brothers. The, the call sheet market is mooning on Paramount. The Paramount and Netflix have been going back and forth. Paramount's now at 61% chance that they will be the one to successfully take over Warner Brothers. Netflix previously up at 70% back in December when we started talking about this. Now they're down at 30%.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  The Allison's are. Doing the Allison thing.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  It ain't over till it's over. Let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And without further ado, we'll bring in Ben Lair of Lair Hip Out Ventures. He's the managing partner there. And he's returning to the show. We had you on a couple of weeks ago, I feel like, but great to have you back. It's been months?

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Has it been months? When was it?

• 1:34:01Speaker 05

  End of last year. Say like six weeks.

• 1:34:02John Coogan?

  Okay, six weeks.

• 1:34:03Speaker 05

  This is much more legit.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  It is great to have you here in person.

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  It's a real place, not AI.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  How long are you in town for?

• 1:34:09Speaker 05

  Uh, for the week, although I was supposed to be here three days ago.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  It's upfront.

• 1:34:14Speaker 05

  It's upfront.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Did you get snowed in?

• 1:34:15Speaker 05

  I got snowed in and

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  Really? Flights actually canceled?

• 1:34:17Speaker 05

  Six flights canceled, five flights canceled, not, I was fortunately not at the airport.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  Maybe I don't travel that much, but I actually think I've never been in that situation.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  That's the charter, the charter gods, the charter gods telling you.

• 1:34:28John Coogan?

  It's timed up.

• 1:34:29Speaker 05

  Like, thank you, please.

• 1:34:31John Coogan?

  Okay, Gulfstream Salesman, Gulfstream Salesman over there.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 1:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, ran into somebody at coffee this morning and they told me it was upfront.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  It's upfront. Everyone on the plane was going upfront last night. It's a big event. They do a great job. It really is a It's, you know, it's one of the few times when you can go out and see everyone who works, not, not quite everyone, but the majority of people that I would consider colleagues in one room for a day. It's, it's actually really

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  Is there, is there cross pollination outside of technology with other industries? I know upfront in the past has brought Hollywood, they bring Hollywood. LA folks, but there's other conferences where it's more like, uh, hill and valley, right? So they bring them politicians out. What?

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  A little bit of that. I mean, I think they do play the LA card pretty hard and upfront's brand as a fund is very sort of LA centric. The event, they definitely like take advantage of the fact that there's that kind of talent out here. I don't think a lot of speakers are flying in other than people from the venture world.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  The, uh, the tension between Hollywood and the people funding AI, I could see that being interesting.

• 1:35:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, we're actually in a company that's building a sort of AI-first movie studio called Staircase, and what they are doing is trying to use Hollywood talent. So they're using like SAG talent, real actors, real voices, but then enhancing it with AI. And they're getting some, they're getting a little bit of pull out here in a good way. Whereas I think if you're sort of, if you're not willing to use Hollywood talent and pay Hollywood talent through the unions, you run directly into a wall. And by the way, like, this is, this is not going to end well if Hollywood doesn't get with it. I mean, at some point, it's just going to get steamrolled. There are going to be, you know, look at like A24 bringing in Scott Bell.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just looked at it as when I, living in LA for the last eight years or so, I've met so many directors and producers that are, that were kind of frustrated with the lifestyle of, okay, I have this job that I love doing, but then multiple times a year, I gotta fly to the Middle East and just be posted up in a foreign country away from my life. And there's some element of that that I think is kind of like core to the movie industry. It's like, you know, I think there's some, probably will always be nostalgia around it. But we were talking, probably a couple of weeks ago at this point, if you're an actor and,

• 1:37:02Jordi Hays?

  and you get the, and you're, and you lean into AI, you can potentially get a lot of the benefit while kind of compressing your actual like time doing the work down by quite a, quite a lot, right? Because it's like, hey, come in, I don't know exactly what Staircase's workflow look like, looks like, but I can imagine we get to the point where there's like certain scenes that are done, like, you know, legit, the old fashioned way. And then there's certain scenes where it's like, yeah, we're just gonna use.

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

  For Staircase, none are done the old fashioned way. So everything is.

• 1:37:34Jordi Hays?

  Do they do like a capture process?

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  They do a capture process, but never always against a green screen. So never against, or I don't know if it's against a green screen or just against. Against no screen, but with like tracking movements and whatever that would be. But they're not ever going and shooting out in the wild.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  And the technology is changing so quickly that what they can create today relative to what they could do six months ago.

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:59Speaker 05

  Is magnitudeally different. And if you just continue on this curve, at some point, pretty soon, it's going to be ridiculous to think that you're going to go to the middle.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Matthew McConaughey has had some good leadership around this of basically just being like, hey, we have to embrace it. It's coming. It's just too efficient. It's too productive. The idea of like, hey, we need to shoot. We have like a, a, a three minutes total that's in the setting. We're going to bring a hundred people out there and spend weeks doing this thing that could be made. You know, in not one prompts, but made in a series of prompts and with a lot of editing.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  Well, and there's an insatiable appetite for just like more content. I mean, you guys were just talking about the, you know, the Netflix or Paramount setup and. Like, all these platforms just want more and more and more and better and better and better. It seems like there's no, there's no limit to the amount of content that people want. And so.

• 1:38:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the, the average user, how many times have you opened a streaming platform and just been like, I don't like any of this stuff?

• 1:39:03Speaker 05

  Which is amazing because there's so much more content created today than ever before. And still, I, I flew out here yesterday. I turned on my Netflix and I'm watching a show from like 11 years ago.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Speaker 05

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  George, you watched the movie last night, right?

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  John, John was making a joke about the movie Borat, which I loved as a kid.

• 1:39:20Speaker 05

  By the way, which you should still love.

• 1:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a fantastic movie. But I, but I went on Amazon and I bought it because I was like, I should own this. It's, it's a cult classic at this point. Uh, and it was not as funny as I remembered it when I was 12, which was painful to me, but uh. I'm curious on, on, you know, talking generally, maybe or about staircase. Right now, a, a movie studio will allocate, let's say $50 million to make a movie.

• 1:39:48Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  How do you think that number changes over time? Cause in my head, I think eventually it could be five people. You know, you have like writers, you have like whatever the new, you know, director's role probably stays somewhat similar. And then you're pulling another talent for. Audio and video and all these different things. Um, but how, how low? And and the reason I don't think that's a bad thing is there's so much demand for content.

• 1:40:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  That theoretically, that fifty million dollar budget would still exist, or maybe even increase, but it would just be spread across.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  But this is like, this is the question, not for only Hollywood, but for everything, which is like, will, you know, will AI make things bigger or small?

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you have, when you have deflation, does that create?

• 1:40:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, it applies to every industry. I think probably with Hollywood, you'll see frontline talent continue to demand huge premiums. So maybe that fifty million dollar budget goes to thirty, but Brad Pitt still makes twenty-five of it.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  And the rest of it, you can do much less. I don't know if it's fewer people, or or the same number of people being much more efficient in working in half the time. Like, maybe you're doing it more quickly, maybe you're doing multiple projects at one. I don't really know how it all works.

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  The question around the talent side that I'm interested in is, it's one thing for Brad Pitt to be like, cool, you're gonna make this movie with mostly AI, but I'm still getting my same rate. Otherwise, I'm not gonna be a part of this, because some other movie studio down the road is happy to pay me what I think I'm worth, and I don't care if it's gonna take me way less time. The question is for new talent, the people in LA that are working as a as a waiter, and just like, you know, constantly trying to get into the game. What kind of leverage do they still develop? Can they still develop real star power over their career and get pricing power? Or or does that, or or does like, the the amount of people that can be a star fragment even more?

• 1:41:46Jordi Hays?

  Like, does there become more of like, uh, because I don't know if how much of a a middle class even exists anymore in in Hollywood, like specifically on the on the actor side?

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  Oh, sure, yeah. Well, I think I have a few thoughts on this. One might be that probably there is more of an impetus for talent to be able to not only get famous through the channels. That Hollywood provides, but to use social media, to use

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  I think that's gonna be so important.

• 1:42:15Speaker 05

  Build your own

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 05

  Distribution to be able to demand sort of like that premium because people think that you can move the market. You can drive sales or you can drive views through your own stardom.

• 1:42:26Jordi Hays?

  People still care. Doesn't matter what the movie's about or who the actor is. They care about who that person is outside in the real world too, and that influences their experience.

• 1:42:36Speaker 05

  I think that that's going to be a big part of this for that. But also Hollywood is going to move more slowly than just about any other industry. Part of it is the role of the unions and how embedded that is and how like that kind of content gets made. Different than certainly most other industries that don't have that kind of bureaucracy or lock in. And also, you know, it's an industry that's run by moguls. It's run by old people who are like generally slower moving. It'll be interesting to see.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Tycoons.

• 1:43:07Speaker 05

  Ty, yeah.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  How do you think about vertical short form? I saw a crazy video of someone doing a movie screening like in a theater, but for vertical video that they made.

• 1:43:21Speaker 05

  That sounds terrible.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Which is insane. And it was like, it was really crazy because it was like, they don't really make projector screens that are super vertical. So you're in this like massive room, but normally you're in a really wide theater and then the, the screen matches the, the seats.

• 1:43:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  But it was like just off to the side, this like vertical screen, kind of like a TV we have over there. But, but it does seem like there's a quicker pace of adoption for those like polished. What, what, what was that Chinese app that has a vertical short form?

• 1:43:50Speaker 05

  Like the drama?

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, the short drama.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Real short or something.

• 1:43:53Speaker 05

  Real short, real short.

• 1:43:54John Coogan?

  And then there's AI versions of that and that feels like

• 1:43:57Speaker 05

  We get a pitch for that category once a week.

• 1:43:59John Coogan?

  You do?

• 1:43:59Speaker 05

  For the last year.

• 1:44:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  I mean, it is.

• 1:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I get it once a day.

• 1:44:03Speaker 05

  Okay, so you have better deal.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  I get it once a month.

• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  No, but it is, it is wild how, and by the way, and the, the number of pitches, it's funny. You guys want to talk about media with me, the number of pitches I still get from people like, Ben, you're like a media guy. I'm like, please leave me alone. Like I'm not a media guy. Everyone just like, I'm sorry, I did this. But, but there is this moment where This is also like, live shopping was another category that you saw massive in China. And short form drama, enormous industry in China. And everyone's like, cool, it's gonna like be here in the US tomorrow. And like 10 years later, it's still not really here.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:44:41Speaker 05

  I will say that in with one of the companies I, they like really forced me to watch some content and I got hooked on a story about like a woman who fell in love with a man in an elevator and I watched for like two hours in one minute snippets, like I see the, how you can get addicted to it, but uh, I, I fortunately broke that.

• 1:44:59Jordi Hays?

  The question, yeah, the question is how, uh, how do you actually invest against this trend? I think, I think.

• 1:45:06Speaker 05

  I think I'm out.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think, yeah, I think because all the content.

• 1:45:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  The content wants to be free, it wants to flow to the existing platforms. I can see YouTube creating like short series, like basically like you can subscribe to a series being like. Yeah, basically like, hey, you're, you're not even just subscribe, like, cause the follow button and subscribe button that barely works anymore on any platform. But they might be encouraged to be like, hey, this is a series of 30 videos. It's gonna be coming out one a day, you can subscribe and we'll make sure that it comes out.

• 1:45:39Speaker 05

  Look, I, I was like, I, I think this is an interesting space. The difference between an interesting space and a venture scale space is the Grand Canyon. I mean, it is so massive, figuring, you know, venture requires the power law, requires these outside outsized returns. And it just doesn't feel like, sure, you have, you know, one or two companies in China that are massive. But it doesn't feel like that's a category that has a sort of theoretically limitless TAM. And one of the mistakes that I've made in my career and one of the sort of learnings is TAM really does matter. And yes, there's, you know, you have to sort of lily pad your way there. It's not like every market has to be enormous day one.

• 1:46:20Speaker 05

  But most of media has turned out to not be venture scale and I think maybe all of media is not venture scale. And with AI.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, venture scale, if you can build a platform that can compete with the Giants. But you need, you need a five billion dollars.

• 1:46:37Speaker 05

  But how do you do that? Like, what is it? Right. I mean, this is one of these things if someone, by the way, like Jeffrey Katzenberg tried to do this ish with Quibi. And there are a few people more formidable in the entire world than Jeffrey. And even with hundreds of millions of dollars, like, that's not, that wasn't the answer now. By the way, today would be a more interesting time to launch Quibi because of what's changed in technology. And by the way, I've seen the like, you know, Quibi 4.0.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  The competitive dynamics with every other app that also has short form videos that the creators are incentivized to share the same content across all of them. Those competitive dynamics are still in place.

• 1:47:14Speaker 05

  Look, just like working in an industry that face, that, you know, Meta and Amazon and Apple and Netflix, that like more than half of the Mag 7 is interested in is a really, really tough place to go and build.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Every Mag 7 company except Nvidia owns a basically a social network. If you include iMessage, Twitch, LinkedIn, like you actually wind up with a media platform at all of them.

• 1:47:40Speaker 05

  Right. And like that is, and by the way, this is not your traditional, you know, large incumbents who are asleep at the wheel. These are the scariest companies that have ever been built in the history of humanity, who, you know, like, no thanks.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  How did you process the Satriani virality, the viral article?

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Sold everything.

• 1:48:01Speaker 05

  Bought a farm in the woods and no.

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Some raw material.

• 1:48:05Speaker 05

  No, look, we are, we are at a moment right now. I mean, that's, that's this week's flavor. Last week, I think there was.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Something big is happening.

• 1:48:12Speaker 05

  Yes. And then there was the counter to it. And obviously there's a bunch of counter arguments to this one. I think it's indicative of what a scary time this is and just how overwhelmed everybody. I mean, like, I wake up in the middle of the night screaming. I don't know about you guys, just in fear. No, I'm kidding. No, but like, this is wild times. I mean, this is, I look at that article and I think that there is, you can, you can sort of pull the thread and go, yeah, I like, oh my God, you are going to see a bunch of these companies who have to cut costs, go lean in, become their own worst enemy. I think what this. Sort of doesn't take into account is that there's going to be a bunch of other interesting,

• 1:48:54Speaker 05

  amazing new companies that get built that employ lots of people that have a very different growth curve and that it's not just like everything is a race to the bottom. There is going to be all this amazing innovation that happens counter to that.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Also, a good counterpoint Citadel put out a report that showed software engineer job openings are up 11% year over year. And so it's interesting that we're getting this like where AI is working the best today and coding is causing an uplift in jobs and yet people are kind of extrapolating and saying every other job is cooked even though that's not what we're seeing in the data.

• 1:49:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. What are you revisiting marketplaces? There was a big debate over DoorDash being AI resistant or not.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  You've gotten any DoorDash pitches?

• 1:49:43Speaker 05

  Not this week, but I have gotten some DoorDash.

• 1:49:46John Coogan?

  And I'm just wondering how you're thinking about marketplaces because it feels like there was boom. Most of the great marketplaces got built, all the obvious ones that didn't have massive disintermediation problems. So the dog walker, the house cleaner, that's stuff that gets disintermediated very quickly, but the DoorDash or the Uber, that is something where you're not just going to meet a great driver and be like, now you're my first driver forever, right? But you will do that if you're like, I went to this app and I found a house cleaner and they come every week. And so I just said, hey, let's stop using the app and cut out the 15% take rate. But what are you thinking about marketplaces on the earlier side? Is there anything interesting that you're seeing?

• 1:50:27Speaker 05

  So I think that there is, when you're looking at marketplaces, we're trying to find marketplaces where sort of everybody wins.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:50:36Speaker 05

  And there's a company in our portfolio that's very early building in the aftermarket automotive space. And this is a category that has

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  You know, millions and millions and millions of SKUs.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:55Speaker 05

  Um, there is a question as to, does this, you know, spark plug work for my 1984 Mazda Miata?

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:02Speaker 05

  Or does that one work?

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:04Speaker 05

  Um, most of that industry never came online at all.

• 1:51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Speaker 05

  And so you still have to like file, you know, like fax in an order or requisition.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  You do have, you have some large sort of endemic players like Autozone that are actually quite big businesses, but that still only have a fraction of the inventory.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  They don't actually know if that, if that piece works for this car when you've also done these three other changes. And that's the kind of industry, very messy, very hard, but with AI, you can go and send agents to go do some of this buying. So sort of mimic the idea that an industry is online that may never come online.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:51:44Speaker 05

  Um, I think that that's, I think there are spaces that, by the way, and that's also a very large, very sleepy TAM.

• 1:51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  Like that is not a, that's not a sort of side pocket hobby. That's one of the biggest hobbies in America.

• 1:51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:51:58Speaker 05

  That's billion, you know, tens and tens and tens of billions of dollars just in the US, just in aftermarket parts.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  Just to hydrate from like some random SKU or some random serial number into like, what is this product actually? And there's probably a manual out there somewhere that has it, might be on the internet.

• 1:52:12Speaker 05

  Might be in a Reddit forum somewhere.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 05

  But like, and then there's the question of, and by the way, how do I get this installed? And can I do it myself?

• 1:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  And, you know, is there an AI mechanic?

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 05

  That's built into the marketplace so it can teach you to do the work while you buy?

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:28Speaker 05

  You know, will this company accomplish it? I don't know, but I love the ambition. And I think when we're looking for marketplaces, we want to see ones that are, you know, I don't want to see an incremental, you know, DoorDash competitor. I want to see one in an industry that really has, that has not yet been disrupted for reasons that were frankly impossible.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:49Speaker 05

  Before the automation of AI.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordan, you think about what I'm thinking? Me, you, this weekend, couple of cold ones, Mansori body kits on the car. Let's do it. Secondhand, we get them.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  This is John's dream forever.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  We can do some LED under lighting. You got a new car, you don't have.

• 1:53:07Speaker 05

  I'll stay for the weekend.

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  You don't have LED lighting underneath that yet. NOS? Have you considered putting NOS in your car? This is a good option.

• 1:53:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, uh, very good. We gotta get, uh, that'll be your Christmas gift this year.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Mansori body kit.

• 1:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Mansori body kit. You want it. It's, it's gotta happen. The labor marketplaces that have exploded are the, are the Mercors, the micro ones that are positioned as marketplaces and yet feel more like enterprise product, like almost like staffing.

• 1:53:41Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  In some way. Uh, the question is how, how durable will those businesses be? And, and, uh, I think a lot of people were surprised that the, the, uh, the Fivers and the Upworks didn't kind of react and capitalize on that as, as quickly as they maybe could, but it just goes to show how quickly the, the space is moving.

• 1:54:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there are perspectives. There's, you know, multiple camps there, but there are, there are camps of folks, you know, smart folks who think that that whole category is like a race to the bottom and like probably a zero. And then there's other, you know, maybe some of those folks like some Mercor early past or whatever and, you know, like are rooting against it, but, but there's, there's definitely a vibe that that is, uh, you know, maybe if you're on the inside in some of those businesses, like now would be a good time to take some secondary.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  Um, I think obviously, uh, but you've seen growth that is astounding. And, you know, that's the funny thing about the market right now, that that's a category, but there's so many categories, like a bunch of these companies that are doing inference, like you've seen this like unbelievable growth and like there's, there's like insatiable appetite for what they have today or, you know, you know, different kinds of training data or whatever. The question is in two years and three years and five years and 10 years, like which of these are enduring spaces? And which of these are ripping right now because they're selling to five, there's, there's only five buyers or four buyers long-term? And is that, is that a good business? Like to be in a business where you ultimately have four companies that. Are your like theoretical scaled customers?

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Speaker 05

  I mean.

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  And right now, there's such insane urgency that there's no.

• 1:55:19Speaker 05

  Well, money is absolutely valueless to these companies. I mean, it just it pours it like as fast as you open the door, it like bursts its way into your face.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was joking about if you started a janitorial company that just served the AI labs, your revenue would be growing 10x because their headcount and and square footage is growing 10x. And you'd be like, yeah, my business is 10x. And you know what? I have pricing power, too. My margins are incredible. It's like, because they never ask.

• 1:55:41Speaker 05

  Let's do that this weekend.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  They're like, hey, janitorial business is wildly different.

• 1:55:46Speaker 05

  There is. I do think that right now is, you know, and look, this is coming after a few years of really disappointing returns for venture as a category. And suddenly you see things ripping and growing and like, you want to believe.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Speaker 05

  Want like people, you know, like you and and by the way, you have massive, massive funds now that need to deploy huge amounts of money and they're looking for things that look like the escape velocity is there. And so they become self fulfilling prophecies and more money pours in and like, you know, I don't think that all these categories are going to be zeros, but I think probably there's going to be, there's a lot of winners in some of these categories. I think there'll be fewer winners and maybe the winners won't be winning at the multiples that they look like they are today.

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  And then or they'll or they'll or they'll evolve dramatically.

• 1:56:35Speaker 05

  Or, yeah. And by the way, some of them will and some of them won't, right? I mean, like, it's like, keeping up with this market is the hardest. It's the hardest in my career to like companies that are, let's even look at like the OpenAI anthropic thing. And granted, this is just like, you know, maybe that's this is like the caricature of the space, but it feels like the tide turned so hard even the last three months where it's like anthropics world now and OpenAI is living in it. And three months ago, you would have said the exact opposite.

• 1:57:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:05Speaker 05

  And maybe that's just like, I'm interested if you feel that energy.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's hard to it's it's.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it certainly feels like at this moment Anthropic is the main character, right? Dominating, dominating the headlines on X and, and a lot of, of legacy media as well. But I would say Google, Google Trends tell, you know,

• 1:57:31Speaker 05

  A slightly different story.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  A slightly different story, right? We, we are in a bubble and people are so invested in the race that they want. It's like if you watch an F1 race and Verstappen wins every time and he starts in pole.

• 1:57:44Speaker 05

  At some point you're like, I'm sick of this.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you just want to see, you want to see, you want to see some action and you want to see some passes and you want some, some drama. So I think people are, are invested in the drama. But yeah, and it's also you're, you're watching the, the two strategies play out like a very multi-product approach, consumer enterprise hardware from, from OpenAI versus like a very focused strategy. And I think it's way too early to, to kind of understand what will in hindsight look like the best call. But.

• 1:58:19Speaker 05

  Well, by the way, Meta is going to come out with their model whenever and then what does that look like? And yeah, it's, it's interesting times.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  Very interesting. Well, thank you so much for coming down to the TBP in UltraDome.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Give us a report on, on upfront.

• 1:58:34Speaker 05

  Okay. Happily.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Is it tomorrow?

• 1:58:37Speaker 05

  It's today.

• 1:58:38Jordi Hays?

  It's today? Oh, you.

• 1:58:40Speaker 05

  I abandoned my.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  Abandoned my boy.

• 1:58:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll text us later and we'll, we'll give the update on the show. I want to understand, I have no sense for how much venture capital, like what I think of LA is getting. I have a good sense for like Hawthorne, El Segundo, Long Beach, Gardena, all these areas feels like are raising as much money as ever, but the broader LA feels like a drought.

• 1:59:07Speaker 05

  I would say it's a drought. We definitely are not spending time out here hunting companies really at all.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's the advice I've given to any founder that's not in hard tech is like, do not, don't even start, don't even, yeah, don't even start your raise here.

• 1:59:24Speaker 05

  Don't even think about it.

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  It's going to just send like a really negative signal that you're not. Super serious.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Thank you. For coming on the show. This is great. Great to see you. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Boom. We have some breaking news. We gotta hit the gong. Riley Walls shared an exclusive scoop. He says he has joined the wonderful Labs team at OpenAI. I'm learning a lot and have enjoyed it very much. Congratulations.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  Huge pickup. Huge opportunity. I am so excited to see what Riley is one of the greatest minds, high-agency individuals on the internet today. And I'm so.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  He's the best.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think Riley Walls is like a perfect example of like jobs kind of getting more fake. Like what is like, like, this is like not a diss at all.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Says the guy who.

• 2:00:38Speaker 02

  No, exactly. I'm also like very fake job. Like Riley Walls, he like just goes viral on Twitter. He's not even like making like YouTube videos.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:46Jordi Hays?

  He's been a, he's been a, he's been a data analyst for the last few years. He's had it, he's had it.

• 2:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he's not doing data analysis at OpenAI. He's not doing the same kind of work he was doing before.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  He's perfectly demonstrating.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  How do you describe Riley Walls' job?

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Member of technical staff. Next question.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  No, so, so he is perfectly demonstrating the power of the tools, which is if you have ideas, you can build them really, really, really fast and create, in his case, super entertaining products. But there's a Riley Walls out there of sass and they're probably just hunkered down, not even really trying.

• 2:01:22John Coogan?

  And I mean, so, so, so I agree with you. Very, very hilarious framing. I do think that we're moving into a world where more and more companies will have a Riley Walls internally. Hey, you know, someone who can move very quickly, do experiments, create value and create little projects and like the leverage that you get from an individual is going up. And this is an example of that. So congratulations to Riley Walls on his move to OpenAI. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we'll bring in the birthday boy. Doug Olafman is in the restroom waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Altrud album. Beautiful shirt.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, dear Douglas. Happy birthday to you.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:02:16Doug O'Laughlin?

  Hey, happy to be here. I guess on my birthday. Nothing better than Nvidia earnings, which hasn't come out. We are going to be live reacting.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Yes, we'll be live reacting.

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  And they planned that, of course, years and years ago. They knew that today would be the day.

• 2:02:31Doug O'Laughlin?

  They went back in time and they told my mom to get it done today, just for me. How you guys been?

• 2:02:39John Coogan?

  We've been good. Processing the something big is happening, then the Citrini article. There's been a lot of sort of doom, but also there's glimmers of boom in there. There's it's a mixed narrative now.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like you've generally been a Citrini defender, kind of saying, you know, a lot of people were just like, this is bad and it should never have been published. I think your view was.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  There's some good stuff in there.

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  There's some, it's a good thought exercise.

• 2:03:06Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah. Well, here's the thing is like, it went super viral for a reason because it obviously resonated. I don't think really crappy ideas resonate that hard. And I think honestly, a lot of the things that I'm most concerned about, I would actually align with it. My biggest concern is that we're going to print deflation. And he kind of talks about that, like, hey, one data center does all the knowledge work. The history of how this works usually isn't quite that extreme, but that was the point of it. Here's my extreme think case. What I was kind of shocked about, and I feel like honestly, I bet you Citrini would agree, just like the level it resonated with. It was like covered on Bloomberg almost

• 2:03:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  on a daily basis. So if you're like a pro, whatever, that does a push notification, it was like Citrini says, and Citrini co-author and all this stuff. I was like, oh my God.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  It really broke through.

• 2:04:00Doug O'Laughlin?

  That was, yeah, it really broke through.

• 2:04:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, unpack the deflation question a little bit more. So, technology has been deflationary for a long time. TVs are getting cheaper is the line. You can see that if you look back at inflation, you see healthcare and education inflating, while basically everything that's on like a technological Moore's Law style curve is getting cheaper over time. The, the bigger, like broader, broad deflation question is, can we move some of those, or will some of those inflationary categories move into a deflationary territory? But what are you thinking? Is, is education, healthcare at the top of the stack? Is, what do you mean by knowledge work becoming deflationary?

• 2:04:45Doug O'Laughlin?

  So, let's just put it this way, the, uh, the Ghost GDP article, right? Hey, uh, let's just kind of like do, like an index, one index versus the other index. Uh, we're gonna label it at a hundred dollars for all these like knowledge work widgets. And, um, let's just see what the cost of that looks like over, over time. Uh, year zero, a hundred dollars with a human, and maybe year two, it's a hundred and two dollars. Maybe they get a little bit smarter, so it goes down. But like, okay, what if the agent gets twenty times better? Years, year two, the, the index of knowledge work is gonna be twenty dollars. That's, that's just deflation, right? Um, the entire world is effectively just like spitting out TVs that are worthless to three years.

• 2:05:29Doug O'Laughlin?

  And that's kind of scary, and I think is a big deal. I think the thing that is the most resonating with the whole piece is that clearly if, if this is gonna be as big as many people think it will be, um, you know, Claude Code maxi here, um, then what happens is that you're going to quickly disrupt so much of society that the government and like companies and everyone needs to start caring very quickly. I don't think ten percent in, you know, unemployment's gonna happen. Uh, the world works just slower than that. But I, I clearly think that-

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's part of, part of- Part of your framing is like when we had, uh, technology rollouts throughout the last, you know, few hundred years. It involved like heavy machinery that had, that took a lot of time to diffuse in part because the machinery needed to be built and shipped around the world and spun up. And then you have with AI, it's like, okay, the internet is, is the greatest distribution engine in history and as technology advances, it can like be live in somebody's office or with somebody's company effectively instantly, which creates, and with like, let's say, the

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  printing press, it was, you know, or cars or electricity, it was like a much more, it was forced to be a much longer rollout.

• 2:06:51Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, there's just like, for example, the railroad piece I wrote about, dude, it took 50 years to put all those rails, right? Historically, let's say this AI thing would be like a historical Adams thing. It takes 50 years of installing the AI widget at your house in order for you to have AI. Versus now, you just press a button, you download it and it's there. And so the pace of that disruption is so, so much quicker. And so if it looks like, you know, if it's as big of a deal as people are concerned about, then essentially you're going to broadcast deflation everywhere, all the time, all at once. And it's going to be almost costless to get there. And also it's just, it's going to get relentlessly better. Yeah, just, and then imagine all the work that you would do.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you, how do you square that though with the fact that right now today, AI is the best at coding? That is where it has the most traction within knowledge, you know, knowledge work. And yet I have, I have not gotten a call from a great engineer saying, hey, can you help me land a job? I'm unemployed. And you see this in Citadel put out a response saying that, that software engineer job listings have gone up year over year. And so it's so hard for me to. Square these two things where we could be in this, in this, you know, doomsday scenario for white collar work.

• 2:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Where we could be in Jeff's paradox. Yeah, we're not seeing that at all with software engineers. Now, some people might debate me and say, well, oh, I just graduated. Yeah, I'm having trouble. School and, and yeah, new grad opportunities might be lower, but nobody, nobody has bought when, when some of these larger tech companies CEOs have laid off a bunch of people and said, we did this because of AI. It's like, nobody, nobody's actually buying that. It's just a, a nice story.

• 2:08:51Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, I think, um, that's going to be an interesting thing because I think it will be politically and broadly unpopular to say, hey, I just laid off 10,000 people because AI. Like, we are humans at the end of the day and, you know, you do care about what your neighbors think of you. And just being like, we fired everyone because AI is better than whatever. You're like, okay, well, now you gotta get, you might as well hire a five-person security guard, right? There, there's a little bit of like being an asshole. So I think how it actually works and you're looking at, and I agree with that comment because there's this really great tweet that's like, oh, it's crazy in the agentic coding world, pretty much it pegs the human CPU at 100%. That's how I feel at least, is I'm doing more work than ever, but I'm like literally

• 2:09:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  working harder than I've ever worked. The reality is I feel like there is a productivity uplift, but I guess we're all in the sugar high where you're able to do so much work that you're just like going around like crushing it. So these software engineers, yeah, you don't need new grads and essentially the person who has the seat gets to, you know, print more, let's just use the printing press, right? Instead of writing and you unemployed all the new writers, but you're sitting there just printing all day. And so it really is great for the install base of people who've been doing it, but very terrible for net new. And I think the net new is where you're going to see this, meaning like new grads, new people entering the information, the information services. That's where I think you're going to see most of the carnage. People are not just going to be firing people out the gate.

• 2:10:19Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's going to be like.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Also, layoff, a layoff or, or firing typically occurs.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  Weeks, if not months, after an executive has decided, hey, this, you know, we need to make a change here just because it's the thing that everyone hates doing. How do you, how have you been processing? It feels like the people that the Citrinie piece resonated with the most are also the ones that have been saying that the AI is a bubble and there's too much investment going into this and it's all going to be a zero. It just seems like two ideas that are difficult to.

• 2:10:58Doug O'Laughlin?

  You know, I feel like there's a certain aspect of haterade where when you're a real haterade, you're going to find whatever flavor supports your thesis. We find this at semi-analysis, man. When we say something positive or we perceive as positive, people take it as negative or they really honestly, they take it to.

• 2:11:17Jordi Hays?

  We've had that too. If there's a company that people don't like and you, and you say something positive about it, it's, it's like people respond like extremely emotionally to that.

• 2:11:29Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, and so I think Citrinie made the perfect ammo at the perfect time. And, and like honestly, if you look at the stock market, I'm sorry, I keep watching for a video over and over. If you look at the stock market, I think right now it's been a really interesting year to date because like stocks are maybe like whatever, 2% off all time highs, maybe they're all the way back or they're pretty, I forget what the like year to date looks like. But underneath the hood in software, it's been very, very, very painful. I think there's a lot of parts of the index that are in a lot of pain right now. And pretty much you're just like seeing these crazy rotations underneath the surface. And so people are very like angsty, there's no other way to put it.

• 2:12:13Doug O'Laughlin?

  If it's, big things are happening in the stock market, brother.

• 2:12:17Jordi Hays?

  The idea that like, oh, you're holding, you're holding a name.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  And it hasn't nuked 15% yet. You should get out because some, there's going to be some, it could be a blog.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  Partnership or blog post, yeah.

• 2:12:30Jordi Hays?

  And what's the, there's not a lot of ROI on.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  How have you been processing like the moats in software companies? Like I, like I've always understood like the SaaS apocalypse, like that narrative. Of course, you know, we got to debate timelines and maybe these things are just shifting to be value stocks as opposed to growth stocks. But the stuff with network effects, the DoorDash's, the PayPals, the regulatory moats, like it just feels like there's a lot of companies out there that are being more broadly punished. But is there something I'm missing there? Or, or do you think that it's just excitement and people rotating into other stuff that they might be learning about like memory and energy and semis?

• 2:13:12Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I don't know. But I definitely think that, that aspect is definitely there. Like the ones that are like really shocking to me is insurance brokers. If you've ever, if you've ever followed that space, like once upon a time as a hedge fund analyst, I followed Aon. It's like one of the most boring spaces of all time. Real estate services? No, like CBRE, CBRE, essentially an insurance broker. You're having all these things, these network businesses that are just effectively being like, yeah, in fact, it's going to be nuked. I think the hard part about that is it's, it's like, it's complicated. I think there's a lot of advantage for number two to defect really quickly. That's probably the most valuable thing you can do. For example, we've written quite a bit about this to like our higher paid tier service stuff, like Walmart

• 2:13:56Doug O'Laughlin?

  defecting to agentic commerce makes a lot of sense, right? Because they're not Amazon.

• 2:14:02Doug O'Laughlin?

  Everyone that isn't number one should be defecting to win market share. And that makes a lot of sense to me. So like it, it wouldn't be DoorDash. DoorDash would probably put up the, you know, put up the walls, do their best to like have exclusive products. And then someone else will vibe code something on the margin and essentially try to win market share by.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  But at the same, at the same time, Dara was on the show and his stance was, yeah, I don't really care as much about my ads business about making sure that I'm just everywhere. And so he was seemingly pro agent, even though.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Ads business is is real.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Uh, have you been processing uh uh agentic commerce? Like, it feels like this should, like, the tech is there.

• 2:14:45Doug O'Laughlin?

  Should work.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  And but like, consumer adoption takes time, you know? Yes, you can touch up a photo with Gen AI, not everyone does. Um, what like, what what does good look like? Because we're seeing stats from Shopify, it's like, still in like point oh one percent of checkouts are agentic. And I would expect that to ten X or hundred X. But even then, you're talking about like one percent of e-commerce. Like, we're still talking like really small numbers. Um, like, how fast do you think it ramps? And and what do you think happens this year?

• 2:15:17Doug O'Laughlin?

  So I think the place to watch, um, and it's probably the most interesting place is China. Because you can argue, uh, the the leading e-commerce adopter has always been China. They were doing DoorDash way before it got hot in the United States. They were doing e-commerce way before it got hot in the United States.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  Livestreams.

• 2:15:33Doug O'Laughlin?

  We just saw this, yeah, uh, livestreams, right? Like, like, dude, uh, TikTok and Douyin was always, um, always been on the bleeding edge. Like, I would argue for like global internet online consumer preference behavior. China is the leading indicator. Like, America is a laggard boomer, you know? Like, we just don't, we don't buy like we used to, okay? The consumer is not quite as, um, quite as young. We'll just put it that that way. Um, I think what's interesting is we just had this giant incentive out of like, I believe it's, uh, I want to say it's Tencent, Tencent did this like, um, I I I'm now I'm probably gonna misspeak. The the the bubble tea promotion, okay? They did like ten million or whatever bubble teas.

• 2:16:13Doug O'Laughlin?

  And so I think there there's an example that we finally have the first wave of people possibly being able to adopt it. And that's gonna be like all eyes on that for if adoption actually kicks off there. Like, that's what happened in twenty fifteen to kick off mobile payments, actually. During the CCT, uh, CCTV, uh, gala, they essentially gave away like payments and they and they incentivized people to use the mobile wallets. And that was like the beginning, okay? So I think that same analogy is probably where people need to look towards for what, um, what could be the adoption curve for agentic commerce.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Is that earnings? Do we hear that earnings came through now?

• 2:16:50Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm I'm just, I'm just, I'm.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  I'm just locked in.

• 2:16:54Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm locked in, bro.

• 2:16:56Jordi Hays?

  We'll have, we'll have this sound effect.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, so, so how do you imagine agentic commerce actually rolling out in China? Because there's a whole bunch of AI labs, you know, DeepSeek, HighFlyer, like, they don't have a, do they have a big consumer footprint already? Because they don't have a lineage there. So you might expect, you know, agentic commerce to be driven more by the platform that already has a billion daily active users over there. But how do you see like the stack piling up over there?

• 2:17:28Doug O'Laughlin?

  So I think the best example of this is Alibaba, which actually is an e-commerce company. They're like, you know, the Amazon edition.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:36Doug O'Laughlin?

  They have Quen.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:38Doug O'Laughlin?

  They have a delivery app. They have like an inventory app. They have a fully vertical, fully vertically integrated stack and they have AI on top. They're going to make money if people just use their products. They can get transaction fees. And so that's how I kind of think about it. I mean, in a perfect world, if Amazon was not bad at models, they would be crushing. Right?

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:58Doug O'Laughlin?

  You'd obviously be like.

• 2:17:59Jordi Hays?

  Don't talk down on Rufus.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  Don't talk down.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Just because it took down AWS once or twice or three times for hours doesn't mean they don't got it.

• 2:18:10Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I actually want to talk about conspiracy theory because I feel like this is, have you been noticing the instability of public clouds?

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:18:19Doug O'Laughlin?

  Am I crazy?

• 2:18:20John Coogan?

  No, I don't think you're crazy. No.

• 2:18:22Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's either, there's two, there's only two things it could be.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:25Doug O'Laughlin?

  Vibe coding.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:26Doug O'Laughlin?

  People are just pushing crap on prod and they have no idea.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:29Doug O'Laughlin?

  Probably true. Number two, CPU shortage.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:32Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think it's a CPU shortage.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, the, the, you don't think there's like a third if we're wearing the tinfoil hat, which is the world's been very unstable and there'd be.

• 2:18:41John Coogan?

  There's more cyber attacks and stuff.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Iran, Russia.

• 2:18:44Doug O'Laughlin?

  Maybe that's actually, that's a good one.

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:46Doug O'Laughlin?

  Um, but I'm really surprised to see all three at the same time. And then like my favorite, probably the most public version of this is the GitHub instability.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  Dude, GitHub is so unstable right now.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, the, I saw the uptime numbers. It was like below 99%, which is really low considering.

• 2:19:00Doug O'Laughlin?

  No, dude, it was like 90%.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  90%. That's really low, but I mean, people are pushing a lot of code to GitHub. So yeah, walk me through, walk me through the CPU shortage. Because is that just CPUs that are being used to scale new like EC2 instances and like normal? Like you need a Linux instance and so you need a CPU to provision? Or is, or is the AI boom sucking CPUs in like a grace hopper demand? Like they're, the CPUs are getting dedicated to AI server clusters? Like where are the, what's the shape of the shortage basically?

• 2:19:33Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think the shape of the shortage is partially on RL. Because if you want to do an RL gym, meaning like you want to have an amazon.com for your, you have to, you have to literally simulate just a lot. That's one real demand driver. Um, I don't know how, I don't know how to quantify that, but clearly they're out of it. Number two, I think, um, I do think all the code, have you seen the charts? Like I think it's FC.com with like all the new apps coming online. They, they require infrastructure to run. And, um, I had a third one. Oh, the other thing that's interesting is it's also a little bit of a, of like a lapping supply chain thing. So the last time we bought a lot of CPUs was in 2020 and 2021. Historically, you depreciate the CPUs on a five year cycle.

• 2:20:16Doug O'Laughlin?

  And so after five years, you just like literally throw them away. It's five years. So all of the infrastructure that we purchased, and we've been trying our absolute best not to purchase any new CPUs and spend all that money on GPUs. So they haven't been investing this entire time. And now this slight demand curve comes up and that's enough to essentially sell out all the CPUs. I think that that's probably part of it as well. It's going to probably be this multi problem thing, but it's like one of the more interesting like conspiracy theories. Like YouTube went down. I, I don't, I don't remember a time in like the last five years YouTube has ever gone down.

• 2:20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:52Doug O'Laughlin?

  So.

• 2:20:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that is crazy. Uh, take us through, uh, The effects of the CPU shortage in the TSMC context because TSMC seems to be like a crazy battleground. Apple, Nvidia, and then you'll talk to a new semiconductor company. Like we had Maddox on the show yesterday and he's like, yeah, I'm getting line time at TSMC. And then you read Ben Thompson and it's like, well, they're not really investing in CapEx. And it feels like, is TSMC a bottleneck?

• 2:21:22Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got.

• 2:21:23John Coogan?

  CPU shortage as well. We got Nvidia earnings. What happened?

• 2:21:25Jordi Hays?

  They got revenue beat.

• 2:21:26John Coogan?

  Okay, we will jump back to TSMC, but they beat revenue. Let's review and read through.

• 2:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Sixty seven point four billion against an estimate of sixty six point two billion.

• 2:21:39John Coogan?

  We have some breaking news. Nvidia has announced earnings.

• 2:21:43Doug O'Laughlin?

  Wow, you guys are faster than me.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Nothing livier than live. Here, we will all read the earnings and I will tell everyone about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI.

• 2:22:08Jordi Hays?

  And back. Do you got anything yet, Doug?

• 2:22:11Doug O'Laughlin?

  Am I crazy? I don't have anything.

• 2:22:13Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Tyler just sent this to us. Did they, did somebody just like?

• 2:22:18Speaker 02

  I'm refreshing Twitter.

• 2:22:21Jordi Hays?

  It's possible somebody is just putting up, is just engagement farming.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  And trying to.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  They might have gotten us. They might have had us in the first half. Well, we shall see. Anyway, let's go back to TSMC. So the nature of the TSMC bottleneck with regard to CPUs, is that an important factor? Or is there more fab capacity across Global Foundries, Intel, Samsung to sort of meet that CPU shortage?

• 2:22:53Doug O'Laughlin?

  So Global Foundries is nothing.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Nothing.

• 2:22:55Doug O'Laughlin?

  They don't have a leading edge chip. So they will not have any CPUs there. Intel is actually the real. Winner, I think, because essentially like TSMC is locked up. Everyone's fighting for space at TSMC. Like Nvidia has the most. All the co-osses accounted for, all of N3 is accounted for, all of N2 is accounted for. Essentially, they're completely sold out. They're going to invest a lot more, but like, you know, get in line, it's another year. So whatever is left over kind of goes to the other foundries. And that's really two companies. That's Intel and that's Samsung. I think Samsung right now probably makes way more money if they spend it all on memory. So Intel really is the swing provider of CPUs in the world. And that's like, kind of amazing.

• 2:23:38Doug O'Laughlin?

  Like, I'm kind of, my, my belief in a sweet karmic Intel victory is all the CPUs that can't be made at TSMC because the accelerators are being made instead. Go back to Intel and they just make them, but they don't design them.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Yep. Make them, but don't design them. So they would be a second source for Nvidia potentially as well?

• 2:23:59Doug O'Laughlin?

  It's not just Nvidia. I think, I think Nvidia is going to get their, I think Nvidia is going to get their.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  Oh, TSMC, okay, so they don't need to. Okay, because there was a theory about like, hey, maybe twist Nvidia's arm, get them to dual source at Intel, and that gets the flywheel going a little bit more, just as like a give.

• 2:24:20Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, I guess, but I, and there's been some conversation about the MBL link with, with Intel specifically co-packaged. But I, I, I think it's going to mostly be Vera. Like, I think it's not going to be, I, I think TSMC is going to give them the capacity. I think there's a whole world of chips that are not that. Like, think about Graviton or the Axion project at Google or all the ARM CPUs.

• 2:24:47John Coogan?

  Explain that Google project, I haven't heard of that.

• 2:24:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  They, there's a custom CPU.

• 2:24:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, so like all of these. Don't they have like a YouTube chip? They have like a number of custom CPUs, right?

• 2:24:56Doug O'Laughlin?

  Yeah, VCU, I think it's a GPU encoder, whatever unit, but that's like really diminishing a suit. It just doesn't, I don't think that adds up.

• 2:25:03John Coogan?

  How important is the, is the Grok cerebrus, these faster model on a chip companies? And does Google have an answer for that?

• 2:25:13Doug O'Laughlin?

  I, okay, so to be clear, semi analysis's house view wasn't that it was like the most important thing and we've always, you know, we have that chart about batch, right? The fact that, hey, doing more for everyone is much more valuable. Clearly, there seems to be a little bit of a niche market and a niche market demand. And so cerebrus and LPUs definitely have some kind of demand pool. And I think we will see some kind of announcement at GTC. But like, you know, definitely wait and see. Oh, that's kind of my impression. That's kind of what we wrote about today in our, by the way, I think it's crazy. I wasn't aware that the Vera Rubin post would come out until today. Like literally, I learned today and I was, oh, so I had to read it live with everyone else. I think that's, that's a big deal too.

• 2:25:54Doug O'Laughlin?

  And we have a lot of information there about what's coming at GTC, so.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  Well, we're excited to follow it. Nvidia earnings are usually out by 20 minutes after the hour 4:20, but it appears that they are delayed. So we will, we will see. I mean, of course, we'll, we'll have to have you back on the show to deep dive everything that's happening in the semiconductor industry.

• 2:26:16Doug O'Laughlin?

  This makes, this makes it so much better. I had like the bogey and all information and what the setup is going to be. And honestly, if we have with two minutes, I'll tell you what to expect.

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, please.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Hit us.

• 2:26:28Doug O'Laughlin?

  I think everyone thinks the guide will be 75 billion. That's what everyone's really obsessed about. I think the questions that are going to be answered or asked rather is about memory price inflation. That's going to be a big deal, given the fact that I think memory prices are like, you know, mooning right now, HPM and DRAM. I think Nvidia locked it all in, so everyone is going to be like, how sure are you your gross margin isn't going to go down? And they're going to be like, we're really sure, but they're going to be like, okay, how sure and what time? And then it'll be like this random like circle that no, we can't answer. And then I think one of the questions that people are going to definitely ask is about the power side. It seems like next year Nvidia has more chips than power. And so that's going to be, and I mean, to be clear, Nvidia has no power, right? They have customers who acquire power.

• 2:27:14Doug O'Laughlin?

  And, you know, one of their big competitors in terms of market share, which is Google, has chips and power. And so I think that that's going to be a huge bottleneck. And I think that's going to be one of the bigger questions that happens this quarter. Hey. How do you deal with the power bottleneck? Because you're going to sell a lot of chips, but if you can't even plug them in, this is a huge issue.

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  And is the idea, is the idea that even if a lab or a hyperscaler said, we're actually good on chips right now, we don't have the power for them, Nvidia would be like, well, you actually have to buy them if you want to maintain priority. How do you think they would play that?

• 2:27:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  I don't know. I mean, I think the thing is, it's not going to matter because the only company with a chip to sell you next year that is not accounted for is Nvidia. And I think the shortage in GPUs is really underappreciated. There's like, you know, you can see it publicly, I forget which research shop shows it, like the availability of B200s. But our anecdotal information, as well as the like the live price tracking and contract price that we're aware of, there's like no H100s for sale. Like the H100s are sold out. That's like boom, you're, you know, your five year depreciation, like bare thesis that everyone was really freaking out about last year. Well, good luck. You can't even buy one today. So that's probably the biggest interesting thing, and I think probably the single most bullish thing you can say.

• 2:28:34Doug O'Laughlin?

  You know, like a four year old chip effectively is completely sold out today. What's that, what does that say about the next generation?

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join. Bummer that they delayed on us, but next time we'll time up so that we have even more time to hang out, but.

• 2:28:49Doug O'Laughlin?

  I'm, I'm, I'm so happy, honestly, live reacting to Nvidia earnings. I was like.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, no, no, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll get this flow going. We, we, this is always fun, but I mean, just great to talk about everything and happy birthday and we'll talk.

• 2:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Happy birthday.

• 2:29:03John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your week.

• 2:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:29:04John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern, small and medium sized businesses. We have our next guest, Marc Benioff in the restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP Ultra. Mark, thank you so much for being first to join us here on earnings day.

• 2:29:25Marc Benioff?

  We're honored.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:29:27Marc Benioff?

  How's it going?

• 2:29:28John Coogan?

  It's going fantastically over here.

• 2:29:30Marc Benioff?

  Did you get that metallic album I sent you?

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  We did, we did. Thank you so much.

• 2:29:34Marc Benioff?

  Did Jordy listen to it? Did Jordy listen? We need a, we need a record player. No, Jordan, again.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  But.

• 2:29:40Marc Benioff?

  Jordy. Mogged again.

• 2:29:41John Coogan?

  Mogged again.

• 2:29:42Marc Benioff?

  Frame mogged. Jordy, again. Again, Jordy. I have no words.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  But, but.

• 2:29:47Marc Benioff?

  I have no words, Jordy.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Jordy can actually play the guitar. And so, next time you're on, he's gonna be playing a cover.

• 2:29:54Marc Benioff?

  I'll play you, I'll play you a tune.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:29:56Marc Benioff?

  How about that? I think we should ask Lars Ulrich to come on the show with us.

• 2:30:00John Coogan?

  Oh, that'd be fantastic.

• 2:30:01Marc Benioff?

  I think it would be really good.

• 2:30:03John Coogan?

  We'll have to think that happened.

• 2:30:04Marc Benioff?

  But I'm gonna call out, I'm calling out Jordy on the whole situation. The reality is, Jordy, you're still unforgiven.

• 2:30:12John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go, there we go. Uh, well, anyway, thank you so much for joining us first on earnings day. Uh, take us through it because I got a mallet here that's itching to hit a gong.

• 2:30:25Marc Benioff?

  Well, if you want to hit a gong, I mean, no, no enterprise software company has ever given guidance for $46.2 billion before. And this is our crazy number, so.

• 2:30:43Marc Benioff?

  I love that gong, by the way. I love that gong.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  We love gongs.

• 2:30:47Marc Benioff?

  I really do.

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:30:49Marc Benioff?

  But I would say that, that's exciting.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30:51Marc Benioff?

  But also, just this company, you know, it's really become a cash machine as well with, oh, you know, we're projecting over $16 billion in cash flow this year. So when you think about that.

• 2:31:07Marc Benioff?

  And then the quarter, you know, with the quarter, we deliver this record, RPO. Funny thing, you know, some of my friends are writing these articles, RPO doesn't matter. I mean, they have just write a song, "Nothing Matters." I don't know, "Nothing Else Matters."

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:20Marc Benioff?

  But RPO, which is, you know, kind of our remaining performance obligation, these are contracts that we basically have signed but not yet recognized.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:28Marc Benioff?

  That is $72.4 billion. So these are driving these huge numbers. What does that mean? What does that, I think people have a good sense. That's up 14% year over year. It's that all these numbers are accelerating growth, so.

• 2:31:46Marc Benioff?

  I don't know. I just kinda, I am very proud of my team. I'm very proud of our customers. I say also, I'm very proud of the customers because we've really been pushing the customers hard this year to deploy all this new amazing AI and agent technology. And we've hit basically now more than 19 trillion tokens. So you can just see the velocity of AI and agents. And the company is just transforming from being not just an apps company, and I think you guys are using Slack and other Salesforce apps to run your business, but now they're all extended with these agents, like Slack, not just Slack Bot, but the ability to extend your service and your marketing and your sales. And all the agents are out there and they're running wild as well. So you have apps and agents,

• 2:32:30Marc Benioff?

  humans and agents working together. It's very cool moment. Very cool.

• 2:32:33John Coogan?

  Jordy?

• 2:32:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what has it been like internally with the team this year? It's been, has there been a more kind of chaotic period in your career? How like, how are you guys operating internally, clearly delivering results?

• 2:32:51Marc Benioff?

  Oh yeah. I mean, well, you know, you know, we've all been reading about the SaaS apocalypse. But we've got our Sasquatches eating our SaaS apocalypse.

• 2:33:03John Coogan?

  Let's go Sasquatch.

• 2:33:05Marc Benioff?

  I just think that when you look at things like, you know, Agent Force, which we've talked about on the show now three times, you know, starting at Dreamforce, that, you know, and day, first of all, Agent Force by itself is now an $800 million business up 170% year over year. So that is amazing. All is its own product. But then you look at Agent Force and our data business together, that is now a $2.9 billion business up 200% year over year. So there's no question that AI and data is a huge driver of growth. And it's about these apps and these agents. And, you know, we use the apps. We're these

• 2:33:47Marc Benioff?

  humans. We're using the apps, you know, we're using Slack, we're using Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, we're using all of our cool apps. And then each one of those now has an agent platform also. And these two things together is the future of enterprise software. That apps have been extended by agents. And while we before were in the apps market, and that's what we've been doing for 26 years, you know, that we've been in business since 1999. Now, we're in the apps business and the agent business. And I, this is why I've never been more excited about my business. I just love it.

• 2:34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:18Marc Benioff?

  I mean, I really love it.

• 2:34:20John Coogan?

  How much, how much similarity is there to the original messaging just around like, being a company that enables cloud adoption? Like, there were probably a lot of companies and CEOs that came to you early in your career that said, like, I know this cloud thing's important. How do I do it? And you had an answer. And now, there are CEOs that say, I know this agentic thing and this AI thing is important. How do I do it? And you probably have a pretty similar answer, right? Is this, is this history repeating itself?

• 2:34:49Marc Benioff?

  Oh, my God, it's such a good question. You know, Neil Bushery is now the CEO again of Workday.

• 2:34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:55Marc Benioff?

  My good friend, he lives, you know, basically next door to me. Came over last night. We both had a cocktail because, you know, we're looking at his after-hours stock. And I said, Neil, there's no way this can be true. You know, you have to let this go. And in fact, you saw already that his stock corrected today because the numbers are just, don't match.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:14Marc Benioff?

  You know, what's really going on. He has an unbelievable business. He had a great quarter. He's going to have a great year. We use his HR and financials. And I said, Neil, this is just something that you have to let go of. This is not my first SaaS apocalypse.

• 2:35:30Marc Benioff?

  I saw this in 2008. I saw this in 2001, 2016, you know? And look, this is, there's people in the market. They make money when the market goes up and down. So, that's just the stock market. But let's talk about the customer success.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:47Marc Benioff?

  And when you look at how companies can actually be better, more productive, successful, profitable companies, and we are, you know, we're, we're number one. We're customer zero. And that's what I'm so excited about because when you look at how we're running customer service and support right now, we're using it with service agents and service apps. So if you go to help.salesforce.com, you're using the agent. And at any point, bam, bam, bam, you can auto escalate right back to the app and the humans with you like exhaust the agent. Or now, this week, we have. An agent that is going to qualify 50,000 leads for our company, you know, which is our sales agent, that it's out there talking to our customers. We've enclosed millions of

• 2:36:31Marc Benioff?

  dollars of business this week just through the agents themselves.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:35Marc Benioff?

  So that is what is amazing, that we have apps and agents. And it's not that we don't have 15,000 salespeople at Salesforce. We do.

• 2:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:36:45Marc Benioff?

  And we have millions of apps all out there scurrying around, looking for opportunities, and then bringing them to those humans going, hey, look at this opportunity. Give this person a call. Let's go see this person. Let's go find out what to do.

• 2:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:58Marc Benioff?

  And that is really the

• 2:37:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how much, how much

• 2:37:01Marc Benioff?

  We're extended, elevated. We're elevated by AI. We're made better. We know we're made better by AI.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:07Marc Benioff?

  There's no question.

• 2:37:09Jordi Hays?

  How much have you been, how much have you been kind of, you know, with all the Citrin's posts, we've talked about it at length on the show, very, very, a lot of, a lot of doom. But we've been very focused on what's happening in coding. As these coding models have gotten better, people want to hire, at least the data shows so far, Citadella was showing up, job listings for engineers are up 11% year over year. You've talked before about hiring more sales reps because as your reps get more productive, probably want more of them. But is that, is that a kind of comp that you're looking at, given that I think everyone is expecting sales agents to kind of get, to kind of catch up to coding agents in terms of capabilities?

• 2:37:55Marc Benioff?

  Great question. Amazing. And, you know, we were, I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year, a year ago with you guys. But if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year, you know, 26, the year I just passed.

• 2:38:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:09Marc Benioff?

  Because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year.

• 2:38:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:17Marc Benioff?

  And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20% more salespeople this year. I think we've talked about that.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:30Marc Benioff?

  Because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever through every market from the small, medium, large customers. You know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs, building a great business like TBPN, really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack. I know you use other products. And that's our job is to make you successful and to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an agent.

• 2:38:58Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:38:58Marc Benioff?

  You need, you need, we, we, there's still some humans around who need to be automated as well.

• 2:39:03Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:39:04Marc Benioff?

  And that is what is exciting.

• 2:39:05Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:39:06Marc Benioff?

  And that is what I'm doing every single day.

• 2:39:08Jordi Hays?

  What advice do you have for a company like Anthropic that's hiring a Salesforce admin? What makes for a great Salesforce admin?

• 2:39:17Speaker 08

  Oh.

• 2:39:19Marc Benioff?

  You're, you're kind of leading beyond, I mean, you know, it's kind of funny, right? Because these AI companies, they love our products and they can't buy enough of them. They're some of our largest customers now, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, you name it. These tech companies, Slack is the largest AI ecosystem in the world, you know that?

• 2:39:38Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:39:38Marc Benioff?

  And that's reality, you know, which is that no one has a company that's running entirely on a large language model because it's not real, that's not, we need software and we need large language models. We need the determinism and the programmability and the security and the sharing. And, but this large language model is an amazing new component of our infrastructure. So we can do things that we could never have done before. That is what is so awesome. And so we can extend our industry. I think the software industry is going to be bigger and broader and do more this year than ever before. Not just Salesforce, which is going to grow incredibly this year.

• 2:40:18Marc Benioff?

  I think every company is going to grow because we have more to sell and there's more excitement and action and energy. And so this kind of counter narrative of, oh, no, no, no, they don't understand. We're just, call that company who wrote that report. And you ask them, what is their software infrastructure, their magic infrastructure? I do this all the time. Tell me exactly how you're doing, what you're saying that you're doing. Oh, well, you're right, we're so sorry, we made a mistake. No, you know, and look, the futurist, I think we talked about this, Peter Schwartz, you know, our chief futurist, he wrote Minority Report. Have you seen that movie? It's like 20 years old. Great.

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  He hasn't seen it, but I've seen it.

• 2:40:58Marc Benioff?

  Oh, yeah. Well, George, you gotta watch this. And also, he wrote War Games and Deep Impact. You know, part of a team, writing team. These are future movies.

• 2:41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:07Marc Benioff?

  But we all know where the future is kind of going, this highly automated, amazing world. But we're living in this world.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:15Marc Benioff?

  This is, this is, this year, this is 2026. You know, we're running our business today. So how are we doing our financials, our HR, our customer information? Are you know, how are we doing all of these aspects of our business? How are we running them? And then we write a, we write a report that sounds like Minority Report. And then I'm like, yeah, Minority Report. I read the movie. I watched the movie. Great, guys. Fantastic. But I'm in the present moment reality right now.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:49Marc Benioff?

  You know?

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:41:50Marc Benioff?

  And come, let's come back to world. And by the way, like, you can do things that you couldn't do before. This quarter, I released our new ITSM product. So our customers can do this incredible thing, you know, IT service management. They used to have to go to ServiceNow for that. Now we converted five ServiceNow customers, you know, just in the quarter, right over to Salesforce, because we have that new capability. So companies like Sunrun and Cornerstone and Coolsys and others, you know, they can now use Salesforce ITSM instead of ServiceNow. That's so exciting. And then we have our new Life Sciences Cloud that we've built all with an agentic interface. So our customers do not have to use Viva.

• 2:42:31Marc Benioff?

  And those customers are instead, you know, those are big companies like the Pfizer's and the Takeda's and the Novartis and the AbiVie. So they're running with this next generation platform of apps and agents, apps and agents, and humans and agents working together.

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, the, the business model currently is clearly working. The results show that. Uh, as you look into the future, do you think the business model will evolve? Do you think that we're going towards more consumption based? Is there, is seat base going to be with us forever? Like, how are you thinking? Obviously, you don't need to turn the cruise ship today, but how do you think this evolves over time?

• 2:43:08Marc Benioff?

  It's such a great question, right? Because that's like one of these interesting narratives. But hey, I don't know which which anthropic product you're using, but the one I'm using is seat based. So if you don't have, if you have a different one, or I have a, I don't know which OpenAI product you're using, but mine is seat based.

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:26Marc Benioff?

  I don't know which one you're using.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a good, it's a good take. Of course, you can use.

• 2:43:30Marc Benioff?

  No, no, it's true though, right? And there's an API also, there's an API also.

• 2:43:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  But they're happy to be selling seats right now. You're right.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:39Marc Benioff?

  No, we, I, this is about humans and agents. So let's use that analogy.

• 2:43:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:43Marc Benioff?

  Humans are seats. And so there's still like us three, we're like the last three humans. It's very sad, but we're still here. And then we have the agents too, and they're using the APIs, talking to each other, and they're on Moltbook. And they're like having a conversation, creating their own currency.

• 2:44:01Jordi Hays?

  They're talking about us. They're talking some smack.

• 2:44:03Marc Benioff?

  They're saying, oh, can you believe those humans are still there? We're gonna get them.

• 2:44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:06Marc Benioff?

  And it's like, no, we're, it's still humans and agents working together. And that is what is exciting about the future of enterprise software. So yes, I have a sales force, but it's extended with sales agents. And I have a service organization extended with service agents.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:21Marc Benioff?

  And I'm sending a trillion marketing messages this year, but they're all extended with marketing agents. And I have commerce agents and I've got, yeah, and you guys use Slack every day, right? And you're using Slackbot now, hopefully, you know, since the last time.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:44:36Marc Benioff?

  I would say it's like amazing that I can use agents in Slack. So I have employee agents.

• 2:44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:41Marc Benioff?

  And we might have some other new exciting agents coming in the next few weeks for you. I'm very excited.

• 2:44:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:46Marc Benioff?

  Yeah, I'm very inspired by Moltbot. I'm now got, you know, our team working on some new things. So that is like how I see it unfolding. And I think it's about a world where there are apps and agents. And where this large language model, it's extending our capability. It makes us better, it makes us stronger. It gives us the ability to do more. And yes, seats still exist and also consumption exists. Like we have, you know, lots of consumption products, data, you know, data products and analytics products.

• 2:45:16John Coogan?

  Was there ever a SaaS apocalypse that was driven by fear that open source software would defeat your products, defeat Salesforce?

• 2:45:27Marc Benioff?

  Oh, no, there was a bigger SaaS apocalypse than that.

• 2:45:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:30Marc Benioff?

  Do you remember the SaaS apocalypse of 2020? The sasspocalypse of 2020. John, let me tell you the story. We were all minding our own business and then CNN came on and said we were all gonna die.

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:45Marc Benioff?

  Not just the software companies, everyone, because it was the pandemic.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:45:49Marc Benioff?

  And we all went home and we hid and it was a very sad time.

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:45:52Marc Benioff?

  And in fact, right at that moment, the stock market crashed because we were all gonna die. And that was a huge sasspocalypse and you can see it in everyone's stock chart. It goes like this.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:03Marc Benioff?

  And then all of a sudden, people go, I guess we're not dying. And then it came back up.

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:08Marc Benioff?

  And that was a sasspocalypse of 2020. It's a sad tale, but we lived through it. And we got through it. And you know what? We're stronger for it.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:17Marc Benioff?

  And that was just one of the sasspocalypse's.

• 2:46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the reception of the Super Bowl ad.

• 2:46:23Marc Benioff?

  Well, listen, I don't want to be competitive with you guys because your ad was very good. I want you just to know. You did a great job. You should feel great.

• 2:46:33John Coogan?

  I appreciate that.

• 2:46:34Marc Benioff?

  You know, you had a great, great ad. Everybody loved it.

• 2:46:38John Coogan?

  Very high ROI for us.

• 2:46:39Marc Benioff?

  We were the number one ad in the Super Bowl.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Mog meter going up.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  Ad mogged.

• 2:46:49Marc Benioff?

  I, I'm sorry, but it has to be said because, you know, we have Jimmy Donaldson, Mr. Beast.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:55Marc Benioff?

  And Mr. Beast did a great job and that was just a killer ad. And we still haven't revealed the final, uh, thing. We have a great person here, John Zismos, who did a fantastic job with Jimmy and it was an unbelievable partnership. But Jimmy's just, he's a force of nature.

• 2:47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:11Marc Benioff?

  I mean, I've never seen anything like this. He's such a young, great, amazing entrepreneur. The first time I ever talked to him, which was years ago, he said to me, I want to be the future Steve Jobs. You know, I want to be the future great entrepreneur of the world. I had to pause and say, really? He's like, yeah, that's what really I want in my life. I want to be a great business leader, a great, and I think he's doing it. And he's so young, you know, we've already had him on the cover of Time Magazine once, you know? And I see, you know, him as a huge leader in the whole world, not just as some kind of YouTube personality. This is a great entrepreneur, business person, not just making chocolate bars, not just running a bank.

• 2:47:53Marc Benioff?

  I see him doing a lot of amazing things and he's got a lot of energy, incredible. And I have a lot of respect for him and yes, number one Super Bowl ad. How about that?

• 2:48:02John Coogan?

  There's a lot of entrepreneurs listening, a lot of entrepreneurs that are searching for their next great business idea. If they want to go swimming with dolphins and get inspired, what's the most underrated time to visit Hawaii?

• 2:48:14Marc Benioff?

  You're right. Well, number one, this week we have been having an awesome show from Kilauea volcano.

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:20Marc Benioff?

  We had a 12, 13, 1400 foot tower, which is, I'm in Salesforce Tower of San Francisco right now. Gorgeous. You guys should come. And the, the fountain from the volcano was taller than this tower this week. So that is amazing. And you're right, all the little dolphins were so happy.

• 2:48:38Marc Benioff?

  Just cruising around, but also it's whale season on the North Island coast.

• 2:48:45Marc Benioff?

  They were going, they were so happy. Also, everyone gets happy when you see the volcano. It's like, it's like the way, it's like when you see a whale. It reminds you, it reminds you who you really are. It reminds you, this is what life is really all about. You come back to your breath. You come back.

• 2:49:03Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. When I see whales out, I think of agents. I think of agent ports personally.

• 2:49:09John Coogan?

  You're like, burn whale. Yeah, you gotta run. Sorry, we're keeping you late.

• 2:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I have a challenge for you. Before we talk again, you got to frame Mog, one of the AI lab leaders.

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  Oh, this is, this is big alpha right here.

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk with you after this show.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  I think it's possible. We'll coordinate, we'll coordinate. Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:49:28Marc Benioff?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming back on the show.

• 2:49:30Marc Benioff?

  Jordan, you better listen to that Metallica album because I swear to you, I'm bringing Lars on here and you're not ready. You're just lucky I didn't bring him on today.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  On repeat, on repeat. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:41Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:49:41John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Well, if you're tracking earnings, you should be doing it on public.com. Investing for those to take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And without further ado, we will kick off the Lambda Lightning round. Let that, let that cloud ring out.

• 2:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the clock gets better every day.

• 2:50:03John Coogan?

  The Lambda.

• 2:50:04Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:50:05John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:50:07Speaker 09

  Hey guys, how's it going?

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  We are here.

• 2:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Doing great.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:50:10Jordi Hays?

  Tough act to follow with Benny off.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  I don't know how.

• 2:50:14Jordi Hays?

  Turns it up to 11 every time.

• 2:50:15John Coogan?

  Can you do any animal sounds? He's got the dolphin down. He's got the whale down. This is a unique ability. I didn't know it was necessary.

• 2:50:21Jordi Hays?

  We're not gonna have you make any whale sounds. But it's great to meet you.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Great to meet you. First time on the show. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:50:31Speaker 09

  Great to be here. So my name is Michael Manapat. I'm the co-founder of a company called Rosebase. And Rosebase is an AI platform for asset managers. We help our customers use their institutional memory. So that means all their proprietary data, their accumulated judgment to make decisions faster. So what that looks like is we actually plug into all of their internal systems. This is not just documents, but it's databases, CRM, this accounting and trade information. And we use agents to understand all the connections in that data, the inconsistencies, the conflicts. So agents can reason over it holistically. The idea here is that data is fragmented and it's siloed and it's hard to make sense of in a single context window.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:16Speaker 09

  But using this or having agents work on this in advance is very helpful.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. How jealous should every asset manager be of Bridgewater for collecting so much data over so many years? Do you have a view on the Bridgewater strategy? Can you explain what they actually do and whether or not you're a fan of it?

• 2:51:40Speaker 09

  I can't speak to Bridgewater specifically, but I think you land on our key point here, which is that public data is getting increasingly commoditized.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:52Speaker 09

  And actually AI is accelerating the commoditization of public data. The more you have tools like Claude that can synthesize anything from the web or from public tools, less edge there is there. So the best edge firms have now is decades of data accumulation and their own insight and judgment as encoded in their data. And our whole goal is to help our customers tap that. In almost every customer conversation we have, there's a line. That's something like we are sitting on enormous value in our data if only we could get it or only we could find it and that's what we're trying to do. So I think AI will accelerate this dependence on your internal data and proprietary data as public data

• 2:52:37Speaker 09

  becomes less and less valuable.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to me about what your product actually looks like once you roll it out. Because, you know, a lot of hedge funds and asset managers, they do a lot of backtesting. And I could imagine going back and running a report, like backtest the thesis that we talked about, but maybe we didn't actually implement. There's a whole bunch of ways that you could just do reporting, but then you could also go and say, hey, you know, just turn this thing loose, go trade for us. Like, where are we on that continuum?

• 2:53:08Speaker 09

  There are a lot of great points there. So the first thing is, we are not trading or taking action automatically. The idea here is that we will help these firms consider the full amount of data that's possible and then make the decision. But our goal really is, it used to not be possible to say, review every single name in the universe if you are about to consider a trade to rebalance your credit portfolio. Now you can with RoseSpace. But it's still the human who makes the ultimate call there. So that's one thing. The second thing is on backtesting, I love that example, because it's actually been surprising how little post hoc analysis people do of their investment or trading decisions. Just, what

• 2:53:52Speaker 09

  was our thesis a year ago, two years ago, 10 years ago? What actually happened? How does that inform what we're doing in the future? That was just a time consuming thing to do and people don't do it very much. But we work with a private equity firm now, it's been in business for 50 years, a pioneer of the field, and they actually... They can have you run every deal through RoseSpace along the lines of, given our 50 years of history, what should we do here? What have we done? What are the risks? And that kind of analysis would not have been possible before.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:26Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what is your competitive positioning like with the labs? They're all hiring consulting firms. They have forward deployed engineers. I'm sure they're pitching a lot of the same companies. And I can imagine how you would position RoseSpace against, uh, building something internal or just leveraging, uh, leveraging the, the, the applications that the labs are building. But, but how do you sell it?

• 2:54:53Speaker 09

  So on the apps that are out there now from labs and from other players in the market, what we see is a focus on time savings. So faster models, faster decks, faster summarization of meetings and research. And that's obviously extremely valuable. But our focus has been on decision making. So what are the things you should be looking at? Which would have been impossible to consider before, that RoseSpace can help you with. So, uh, in some sense, there are things that our customers do with RoseSpace today, which they did not do before. It's not about saving them time doing what they have done in the past. So that's one, uh, one chunk of it.

• 2:55:33Speaker 09

  The other chunk is we are talking about, in some sense, the crown jewels for our customers. All of this trading data, position data, their thinking of theses. This is extremely sensitive. So we only deploy in our customer's environment. We never as a company actually take possession of their data. And we do all this processing in their environment. So we have a security challenge, an infra challenge, an AI one. And I think the sensitivity to the security compliance and other constraints of finance is a big differentiator for us.

• 2:56:07John Coogan?

  Take us through the fundraising round. What happened?

• 2:56:11Speaker 09

  So we've done two rounds over the past 18 months, 50 million in total. I'm a supporter of both lines and Burton's capital joint in NBA. And we've had, my former bosses were on your show on Monday and they were a big player in both esteemed NBA. That's right. So it's been really fun because every major investor on our cap table, I've been close to for at least half a decade. So Rose Base gets to be a bit of this, bring back the old gang together.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, congratulations.

• 2:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Where's the company based?

• 2:56:46Speaker 09

  We are based in San Francisco, but a big push for the planning this year is to expand our New York presence.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

  Of course. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for popping by to tell us about the business. Very fascinating. Good luck.

• 2:56:57Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:56:59Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. Gemini 3.1 Pro is here with a more capable baseline. It's great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life. And without further ado, we will bring in our next guest, Adam Warmoth from Cherry Defense. How you doing, Adam?

• 2:57:20Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:57:21John Coogan?

  Good to see you again. Welcome back to the show. Let's kick it off with the news. What happened?

• 2:57:27Speaker 08

  Yeah. Today we announced our $34 million Series A. Yeah, let's get the gong.

• 2:57:34Jordi Hays?

  We've got a bigger gong since the last time you were on.

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  We did. We did. Welcome back.

• 2:57:38Speaker 08

  It's impressive.

• 2:57:39John Coogan?

  Welcome back.

• 2:57:40Jordi Hays?

  So not as impressive as, as a $34 million Series A, but it's, it's up there.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Take us, take us through the shape of the business today, the key customers, key products, and, and sort of what changed since the last time you were on the show?

• 2:57:55Speaker 08

  Yeah. Awesome. So it's the last time I was on the show, I was just getting done with our first transformation and contact exercise. You guys had had Dan Driscoll, Randy George on the show. They'd kind of talked about that. We were just coming back from our first participation there. That was our second test event. We've done about 25 since then. And so we've got systems deployed in pretty much every theater across a bunch of different army units, Marine Corps units, and really just starting to see the traction and demand for the systems grow. As we do see things like drone dominance happening, as we see things like next generation command and control, all of those systems are fielding and running into issues with that power infrastructure layer.

• 2:58:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:36Speaker 08

  And we've been able to fill that gap and iterate quickly, kind of working with the warfighters, working with the soldiers and getting the systems out there.

• 2:58:43Jordi Hays?

  And assume, assume that, you know, someone listening today didn't catch your first appearance, catch us up to speed on, on the shape of the product and all that.

• 2:58:52Speaker 08

  Yeah, so, so effectively what Chariot's building is the power layer for robotic warfare. So really, you know, you wouldn't send a soldier into the fight without food and water and nicotine. You wouldn't, you wouldn't send a robot into the fight without communications, compute and power.

• 2:59:10John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:59:10Speaker 08

  And so we really see that as one of those core infrastructure layers behind kind of this defense modernization. You know, Andrell's building some great systems in the compute space, Palantir really dominating the network space, and we're kind of building that third missing layer. And so effectively what we're doing is taking the technology coming out of companies like Tesla, Apple, Lucid, Rivian, Archer, Joby, high voltage batteries, silicon carbide power electronics. If you've read Packy McCormick's The Electric Slide, goes into detail on kind of major transformations happening in the commercial industry on that core technology stack.

• 2:59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:43Speaker 08

  We're taking those and lifting and shifting them into the defense platforms to build hybrid, high-power systems.

• 2:59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk us through exactly what needs to happen to deploy a high voltage battery on the battlefield. I think most people will be familiar with like the Tesla Power Wall, and we've all seen like the IBM Tough Book, you put some rubber corners on it and give it a nice graphite, you know, case, and I imagine there's a lot, a lot more going on. So what's the state of the art?

• 3:00:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's a great question. So we really kind of take the best of commercial technology. Our first product we deployed, M424, is literally in a Pelican case.

• 3:00:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:00:21Speaker 08

  So we took a Pelican case, we were saying, hey, why reinvent the wheel?

• 3:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:24Speaker 08

  On, on just some of that core rugged technology. We do some additive manufacturing to create these kind of internal bulkhead structures.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:00:33Speaker 08

  Um, to kind of isolate the electronics.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:37Speaker 08

  And then we integrate the batteries, the power electronics, the microcontrollers into that in a form factor that can be left out in the rain and mud.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:43Speaker 08

  Can be dropped off the back of the Humvee.

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:45Speaker 08

  Uh, and when I say can be, has been, uh, and has, has looked to tell the tale.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So you've been through testing. I assume you've done some SBIRs. Are you moving towards program record or are you just sort of in the supply chain for other companies that might be primary contractor?

• 3:01:00Speaker 08

  Yeah. So we, we've got a split go to market model. One being directly to the government, both bottom up selling directly to units and top down for record.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:07Speaker 08

  Uh, and then also selling to other companies, uh, as part of a broader kit.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:01:10Speaker 08

  Um, so the inspiration for Terry, it was I was the counter UAS program manager at Anduril.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:15Speaker 08

  Uh, we were constantly running into power problems.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:17Speaker 08

  Right? So kind of that idea of selling this as part of a power kit.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:21Speaker 08

  Uh, that's enabling other systems is, is another part of our go to market model.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, where do you, where do you stand on the verticalization debate? We had, uh, we had, uh, Mike from Also Capital.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:01:34Jordi Hays?

  He kicked the hornet's nest because he was basically saying like, yeah, it's great to verticalize, but there, there's, uh, there's, there's some businesses that you can just buy a lot of components off the shelf and make a great product, prove that people want it and then do it later. A lot of people, I would say most people were, were disagreeing with that, but there's, every business is different.

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:59Speaker 08

  I am, I'm gonna, I'm gonna come in here on T Mike. Um, so, uh, you know, we've really been able to leverage the supply chains from companies like Tesla, right? And, and Apple and Archer, where you have actually mature commercial technologies around these core components around batteries and power electronics. Uh, what nobody has done is kind of gone and done that forward deployed engineering. Um, and so Erin Price Wright, who led around, uh, I think in her post said, you know, we should actually call Adam the chief forward deployed engineer. Uh, that's really what I've been doing over the past year.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:28Speaker 08

  Um, and it's that forward deployed engineering model that kind of maps to what Palantir and Anduril did as well.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:33Speaker 08

  So Palantir didn't invent, you know, the cloud compute, right? Uh, or big data models, right? Right? That was hundreds, tens of billions of dollars of investment, uh, from Silicon Valley companies. And then through good go to market, good forward deployed engineering, brought that into the department. Anduril did the same. The Sentry Tower, first Sentry Tower was really enabled by the autonomy technology developed by the self-driving car industry. You know, computer vision went from an unsolved problem in 2014 to just download yellow V4 in 2017, and they were able to capitalize on massive investment from the self-driving car industry and just through good forward deployed engineering, good go-to-market, bring that into the department. And that's what we're doing for all the technology coming out of electric vehicle, electrical transportation space.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  What are you most excited about in defense tech? There's obviously a lot of the Anduril products people are aware of. There's this big small drone boom. Is there something, like what's the next big defense tech trend that you think is going to become really important?

• 3:03:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, so there's going to be a little bit of a self-serving angle here, but you know, I spent years doing counter UAS, counter drone systems, pre-Ukraine, right? So counter UAS is a big topic. When we were working with it with SOCOM in 2021, not that many people were talking about it. And that insight around what it actually takes to do counter UAS at the edge is really what inspired Chariots. So there's a lot of focus on drone dominance, but countering these small drones is going to require pushing more sensors and more countermeasures onto every mobile platform. And what that's going to mean is every mobile platform needs more power to power those sensors, to be able to turn the engine off and manage signature

• 3:04:16Speaker 08

  and hide, so avoid detection in the first place, and then be able to derive big surges of power to do things like electronic warfare, or high-powered micraves, or high-energy lasers. So we've done tests with high-energy lasers already. It's one of those counter UAS technologies that needs that big surge of power. And that's really where batteries come in. We want to get shirts that say "We Heart Diesel." We're the most diesel-loving battery company out there. Hydrocarbons are incredibly energy-dense. What batteries give you is that ability to surge that power, or the ability to dial it down and hide your signature. And that's really differentiation of the Chariot platform.

• 3:04:48John Coogan?

  So why can the Tesla Model Plaid go 0 to 60 in under two seconds? It's a surge of power, and that's what's unique. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Insane progress.

• 3:04:59John Coogan?

  And we're excited to have you on the show soon. We'll talk to you later. Have a good one. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And we have Connor Sweeney from Baba in the restream waiting. Having a good one. Bring Connor into the TV. What's going on? How you doing?

• 3:05:17Speaker 10

  Great setup.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for stopping by. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 3:05:25Speaker 10

  For sure. No, thanks for having me. I'm Connor Sweeney of Baba, but we connect older adults and their families with patient advocates. So, human pitch, you know, refreshingly, but it really was Neil because these folks do all the care coordination, the scheduling, the kind of keeping the dots for healthcare.

• 3:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the origin story of the business? Were you just looking at the growth of demographics in the US? Did you have a personal story? What led you to this particular market?

• 3:05:55Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. I think most healthcare people end up coming into it after like experiencing it themselves. And that was also the case with me. My grandma had a stroke and I did a lot of that care coordination. But I think what's cool is that I'm not from the healthcare world originally. My team isn't from the healthcare world. And that kind of lets us move a little bit faster in different ways, which, you know, has been working so far. But, um, but yeah, she had a stroke that left her unable to speak. So I actually started by trying to build her little AI tools for her speech therapy and that led to this.

• 3:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's the shape of the business today? Is this like a multiple sided marketplace at this point? Like who are all the customers and suppliers that you work with?

• 3:06:38Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. So we connect, like I said, the older adults and their family, I would say they're like our patients, right? Our customers. And we connect them to our advocates who, you know, we have dozens and dozens of folks, they're contractors. But what's really nice is that insurance usually covers almost all of the costs. So we work with like Medicare, Medicare Advantage plans, even Medicaid in certain states. So that like 98% of our patients or end customers get this for nothing out of pocket, which is really cool.

• 3:07:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you get the end customers on board? I feel like you could run a bunch of Facebook ads. Advertising on Fox News. Yeah, is it TV? Like, I mean, because I just feel like everyone is like, you know, doing viral launch videos, going after the early adopter tech audience, but you're going after a very different audience. And I feel like your growth mechanism is going to be interesting to hear about.

• 3:07:28Speaker 10

  It's honestly more fun too, because it is an audience that like watches like rent a TV and like the scrolling bar at the top like the Netflix like TV state is actually apparently really high converting. We do stuff like flyers, of course, we're on Facebook, Google, the whole nine yards there, but we also partner with a lot of like B2B, you know, health systems. And so with like nursing homes and home health agencies, we we often pick up folks that way, too.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:07:52Jordi Hays?

  How how are you using AI at the product level? Is it is it helping make the care providers like a lot more effective? What does that look like?

• 3:08:04Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. Like our advocates all, you know, use AI where it's appropriate. A lot of the tasks that they're doing are repeated over and over again. We're constantly making enrollments into things like food stamp and Medicaid. We're constantly fighting insurance denials, right? Writing like rejection letters, waiting on hold with doctor offices to make appointments. All those are like perfect tasks for AI, right? Like either OCR or voice AI. So there's a lot of like that really like, you know, technical work. But what's cool is that, you know, the patients of those customers, they really like just having a human that they can call or text 24/7. That doesn't work for like the insurance company or hospital. That slight difference that our advocates

• 3:08:48Speaker 10

  are in their corner rather than some third party really seems to to be better received.

• 3:08:54John Coogan?

  Take us through the fundraising news.

• 3:08:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's what's the details?

• 3:08:57Speaker 10

  Yeah, for sure. So General Catalyst led our seed. That happened, you know, just a month or two ago, but raised a little under seven, seven million. And we're like a team of 10 in New York right now. It's it's a young company, but we're scaling.

• 3:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Also, can't can't forget about Genius, my neighbor, my neighbor Ben.

• 3:09:20John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:09:21Jordi Hays?

  It's also.

• 3:09:22John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, there we go.

• 3:09:24Jordi Hays?

  So love that. Shout out to Ben and Adam.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your week. And we'll talk to you soon.

• 3:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:09:33John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And without further ado, we have Matt Harp from Basis in the Restream Radio. And let's bring him into the TBN Ultra Jump. How are you doing, Matt?

• 3:09:52Speaker 11

  What's going on? Hey guys, how's it going?

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  It's going well. First time on the show, please introduce yourself and the company.

• 3:10:01Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, first, thank you guys for having me. Appreciate it. Matt, one of the co-founders of Basis. We are fully in-person company in New York.

• 3:10:08John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:10:09Speaker 11

  We build AI. Yes, 100% here. No office in SF yet. You gotta meet Keith Raboy. He's a New York... I'm kidding.

• 3:10:20Speaker 11

  We got Keith up here a lot.

• 3:10:23Speaker 11

  He's here playing. Great. But no, we are an AI platform for accounting teams. So we build long-harising agents that are able to automate various parts of accounting workflows. And we do it for a couple of years.

• 3:10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. How narrow of workflows are you talking about? Is this like a tool that integrates into other ERP accounting systems? Or do you want to replace everything? How do you think about the actual go-to-market and then the product fringes?

• 3:10:51Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a great question. Our objective is not to rip and replace any software. Our goal is solely to sit on top of other pieces of software and sit in the workflows that people are already doing and then say, really, no one should be doing any work. We should take the doers of the work and make them the reviewers of the work and have the AI perform the first pass of all the various things that might need to be done. So that means we need to integrate it into various systems. But it also means that from a deployment perspective, you can easily stand up Basis in your environment and put it to work without having to rip out existing software.

• 3:11:21John Coogan?

  And where, like, a lot of people have tracked the progress in software. Most software, like when you say the doer of the work turns into the reviewer, that feels like what's happening in agenticoding right now. How, like, where in accounting, how far along are we? Would you entrust a reviewer to not actually do any of the work on, I don't know, your personal tax return or something? But I don't know what the toy example is. But how close are we to, you know, this situation like what we're seeing with coding? Where people say, I don't write any code anymore. When will we see accountants say, I don't do any of the work. I just review the work?

• 3:12:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think it depends a little bit on the complexity of the task. For instance, there are some things that Basis has been able to do for quite a while, where I think accountants have already sort of built up trust in Basis's ability to do these things. And so in those situations, there may be spot checking, but they may not be reviewing quite as actively. And then there's some things, for instance, we just released yesterday, an example of the first AI that's able to complete an entire corporate tax return workbook end to end by itself, which I think is a remarkable milestone in the accounting world. And that's something where that's a capability that's only existed for the last couple of months. And so that capability, obviously, you'd apply a different sort of level of review to those types of situations. The interesting thing is that accounting is actually built for these types of reviews.

• 3:12:49Speaker 11

  So accounting, obviously, accuracy is extremely important. Humans themselves make lots of mistakes. And so accounting already has multiple levels of review that are built into processes, which means that when accountants are thinking about how to deploy Basis, they can kind of apply that same review mentality to incorporating Basis into their workflow. Think about what are the areas of highest risk? Make sure that you can see it doing the work in the way that you think makes sense first. And then as you build up trust, you sort of can adopt the way that you're actually thinking about reviewing the work. And then to the point on coding, I think it's interesting because accounting is obviously not a text in, text out discipline. It's not something where there's tons of data on the internet about various accounting workflows.

• 3:13:30Speaker 11

  And so I think it doesn't quite, it's not quite as immediately obvious how to use AI to help with those workflows to the way, to the extent that it is in legal or in coding or other areas where LLMs out of the box are clearly very good. And so I think it has taken some time for AI to get good enough to the requisite level of accuracy and over sufficiently complex tasks for it to be extremely useful. But I think that's kind of flipped over the course of the last year. And I think what we've seen play out in the sort of software engineering over the last year will play out in accounting in the company.

• 3:14:01Jordi Hays?

  What do various players in the accounting world, how are they processing AI overall? Do they think that the fee model will have to change? I remember, I forget, there was one auditor that was getting mad at their auditor Oh, yeah. for saying like, hey, you're using, we know you're using AI, you gotta give us a better price. And they're like, wait. You're an auditor.

• 3:14:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was the Spider-Man meme. But yeah, how are people processing it?

• 3:14:29Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think one of the interesting dynamics about accounting that I think is not true for a lot of other professions or areas of professional service is there is a very dramatic shortage of accountants in the US. And so when we started out, serving a number of our customers, they were not necessarily interested in doing AI for the sake of AI. I think over the course of the last year, that's flipped and everyone's board says, what are we doing from an AI perspective? And people want to have AI initiatives. When we started in 2023, that was not the case at all. What was the case, though, is that there was a huge shortage of accountants. And I think roughly 300,000 accountants left the profession over a two-year period in and around COVID. You never know what to make of these demographic estimates, but they say roughly 75% of accountants will retire over the course of the next decade. And there are very few folks joining the profession

• 3:15:14Speaker 11

  to make up that gap. And so that means that if you are an accounting team or an accounting firm, one of the core things you have to solve for is how do we continue to do the work that we need to do with the people that we can hire? And so one of the things that Basis and Enable firms do is to take on a lot of the work that otherwise they would not be able to get done because of the shortages that exist. And so I think that dynamic has made the adoption maybe happen quicker than it would have otherwise have if that shortage didn't exist.

• 3:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. On the other side, in law, from what we've seen, you have tons of people applying to law school simply because, maybe just because they don't have anything better to do, which implies like we may have a huge influx of lawyers, but accounting not as prestigious hasn't. Yeah, I can see why it hasn't attracted the same influx. But yeah, I think even as I think about it, like

• 3:16:10John Coogan?

  All these kids just want to be astronauts.

• 3:16:12Jordi Hays?

  I've had, you know, working with a number of firms over the years, it's always like super annoying if the partner or associate, more so on the associate side of an accounting firm, leaves and then there's all this like context that's lost and you really like, if an agent had been helping with that entire process, it would be a lot smoother. So I'm going to recommend Basis to our firm.

• 3:16:37John Coogan?

  I have one more question. We'll let you get back to your busy day. How do you think about harness development and and throwing the context back to the human in the middle because it sounds great to be like, okay, I'll turn this agent loose and it'll come back to something I can review. But a lot of these things, when I'm interacting with great accountants, it's it's not just sum up all the bills and and, you know, you have your total revenue or something. It's like, okay, I found a bill. I don't know how to categorize it. Is this CapEx? Is this OpEx? Was this a business expense? How do we classify this? And like, sometimes that data can just be, you know, agentically go and, you know, look at the receipt, figure out what happened, figure out how to classify

• 3:17:18John Coogan?

  it. But a lot of times, it requires in an interaction with a human, either over Slack or over an email or something. And so I imagine that deciding how to be, you know, persistent but not annoying, is that a big challenge that you're actually working on? Or do I have that kind of roadmap wrong?

• 3:17:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, 100%. A very important part of things, like part of doing accounting work is the world is this very messy, complicated place where all sorts of economic activity is happening. And you need to figure out how to get that information in order to properly account for things when you were not present at the time of some kind of economic interaction. So this is very important. And I think it is one of the challenges of, you know, we spend a lot of time thinking about these long horizon agents because, you know, because of the nature of accounting work, you know, this sort of chatbot experience is not one that naturally works. And so we've been focused on developing these agents that can sort of work on more complex tasks over longer periods of time. And one of the challenges there is you have to figure out as the agent is going about doing its work, when to interrupt

• 3:18:19Speaker 11

  and ask the human a question, and also how to provide the human insight into what's going on. Let's say you're going to do a task and the AI is going to go off for the entire day. You know, the human can't find out at the end of the day that it did something that wasn't exactly aligned with what they wanted, because then the whole day has been wasted and they need to deliver something to their client. So figuring out how to both give visibility and then also how to to raise concerns to the human user is extremely important. And sometimes you even need to go directly to a different source. You need to send an email or take some other action in order to complete the workflow. So I think it's an essential part of long horizon agent development.

• 3:18:52Jordi Hays?

  Super competitive hiring market right now. Give us your 60 second elevator pitch if you're competing to to hire somebody with the big labs or, you know, somebody that might join Harvey or, you know. cognition or any of these other companies, how do you close them?

• 3:19:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, well, I mean, look, there's lots of exciting things going on and lots of great opportunities out there, but I think there are a couple of things that we think are critically important and it might not appeal to everyone, but certainly a certain type of person. I think the first is that, you know, we are pretty much solely focused on building the most capable, most accurate, long-horising agents, and I think we're at the frontier of that work. We've worked very closely with the labs that are building the most sophisticated reasoning models than we have for quite a while. And so I think for folks who are interested in figuring out, how can we build the most capable, most autonomous systems and apply them to actual, to real work in the real economy? That is, you know, part of the work that we do, or it's really the core part of the work we do that I think is methodologically extremely interesting.

• 3:19:55Speaker 11

  I think the second thing is that we are a fully in-person team in New York and all of our research, all of our engineering takes place here, and I think there are very few other companies that are on the frontier of applied ML and are also fully in New York. Obviously, there are limitations relative to the Bay Area in some ways, but I think there's amazing ML talent here, and so we are sort of hopefully becoming the home for applied ML talent in New York City. And then I think finally, accounting is just a hugely important part of the economy and how we operate as a society. We sort of see it as the fundamental way in which we understand economic life, in which we sort of structure and systematize all of the economic activity that happens. I mean, that has tremendous implications downstream in the organization for how people

• 3:20:39Speaker 11

  make decisions, and we think there's a huge opportunity to do way more accounting than we're doing right now, and that could actually help organizations function in a much more effective manner. We actually think it has an interesting parallel to engineering in a certain sense, which is that accounting is about, you know, how do you sort of systematize and abstract this very complicated world? And in some sense, that is like the practice of software engineering as well, is like, how do we understand, you know, this very complex domain and reduce it to a piece of reliable software that we can use? And so I think it's much more important than people think, and I think it actually is very sort of compatible with the ways that, you know, engineers and ML folks like to think as well. So those are the things that we sort of think are most important, and, you know, we're really lucky to have a great group of folks here at Vizis.

• 3:21:24John Coogan?

  And you got some money to hire more people. Take us through the fundraising round. What happened?

• 3:21:30Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we, I think when we're thinking about raising money, one thing that never changes is the strategy and what we're trying to execute from a business perspective. We have at, actually at our first seed round and then in every successive round, you know, written a quick memo or cover letter that just outlines the strategy. And the strategy, which is that, you know, we are trying to build these long horizon agents to solve important problems in accounting, has not changed. Some of the core principles around how we make decisions have not changed. So we actually try to make sure that when we raise a round, it doesn't actually change the strategy of what we're doing in a meaningful way. Like, we think that you should be relatively consistent. You should obviously update as you go in that respect. What it does allow us to do is it allows us to keep, you know, growing the team in the ways that it needs to grow. And so, you know, that's mostly

• 3:22:14Speaker 11

  what we brought the additional capital on in order to do. There are so many different domains of accounting. There's so much ML and engineering work that needs to be done. No matter how much we use AI internally to make all those things more efficient, there's just endless things left to do. And so, we just felt that it was the right time to do it. And we're very thankful that we have a great set of investors around the table to allow us to keep making that.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  And how much did you raise in this most recent round?

• 3:22:36Speaker 11

  Uh, we raised a hundred in this round.

• 3:22:42John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on the show.

• 3:22:44Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 3:22:44John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day and we will talk to you soon.

• 3:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:22:51John Coogan?

  Well, I need to hop on with the English countryside soon. So are there any more news stories that we should cover before we plant the bomb? Figma Director Andrew Reid just bought $36.5 million worth of Figma, the largest ever insider buy of Figma. Very exciting for him. He's going longma on the Figma. Dreamwave, this is a stretch.

• 3:23:20John Coogan?

  People were debating back and forth with also Capital founder Mike, who came on the show earlier. I, you know, I think he had a really good point. I like his point. I just think it's funny that Yimbyland ratioed us into the stratosphere by posting, "No, you can't just vertically integrate like that." Meanwhile, in China, BYD, I guess we do in ships now. I had no idea. I saw the BYD logo on a ship. I didn't realize that they made the ship, I guess. They make everything. I guess they make cars and monorails too. Absolutely insane, but 10,000 likes on this. And although it's like, I don't know, it's

• 3:24:03John Coogan?

  a dunk ratio, whatever, it is an inspiring message. If they can do it, why can't we? So just do it. Just go build a supertanker, I guess. Figure it out. Anyway, anything else from the timeline that you'd like to talk about before we call it a day?

• 3:24:21Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot more.

• 3:24:22John Coogan?

  There's a ton more. Mark Zuckerberg is planning a stablecoin comeback. They also have a banger deal with AMD going on. And if you head to the bar this weekend and you drink too much, you should just say that you were the victim of a distillation attack. That's the correct turn of phrase. Anyway, thank you for watching. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Have a wonderful day. Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.