Daniel Gross’s AGI Trades, SpaceX’s $1.75T IPO, Google Silences Sweeney | Mark Gurman, Dan Primack, Cameron McCord, Max Haot, Christian Howell

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:30) - Daniel Gross's AGI Trades (47:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:03:45) - SpaceX 1.75T IPO (01:14:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:20:05) - Mark Gurman, a technology journalist at Bloomberg known for his accurate Apple product predictions, discusses Apple's recent product launches, including the iPhone 17e, iPad Air M4, MacBook Pro with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, and the MacBook Neo. He highlights the strategic timing of these releases to meet pent-up demand and boost Apple's quarterly performance, noting the MacBook Neo's potential to disrupt the budget laptop market with its $600 price point. Gurman also touches on Apple's AI strategy, mentioning delays in the Gemini-powered Siri rollout and the company's cautious approach to AI hardware, emphasizing the challenges of entering the hardware market and the importance of privacy considerations. (01:44:56) - Dan Primack, business editor at Axios and author of the daily Axios Pro Rata newsletter, discusses the current state of the venture capital (VC) industry, noting that median returns have fallen below major stock indices over the past 25 years, with top-tier funds performing well but a significant influx of capital leading to mediocre returns for many. He highlights the blurring lines within VC, as investments range from early-stage startups to massive funding rounds for established companies, and points out that the traditional reasons for companies to go public—raising capital and providing liquidity—are now often addressed through private markets and secondary transactions, leading many firms to delay or avoid IPOs. Additionally, Primack observes that while some limited partners are reducing their exposure to VC, new sources of capital, including defined contribution plans, are entering the market, potentially exacerbating the disparity between top-performing funds and the rest. (02:13:33) - Max Haot, CEO of Vast, discusses his transition from internet entrepreneurship to leading a space station company aiming to replace the International Space Station (ISS) with the world's first commercial space station, Haven-1, set to launch in Q1 next year. He highlights Vast's proactive approach in building the station ahead of securing contracts, emphasizing the need for a permanent American presence in space to succeed the aging ISS. Haot also mentions the company's recent $500 million funding round, bringing total investments to over $900 million since 2001, and outlines plans to support international space agencies and develop an orbital economy through in-space manufacturing. (02:29:11) - Christian Howell, CEO of Cognito Therapeutics, is a former U. S. Navy officer with over 20 years of experience in the medical device industry. He discusses the company's development of a non-invasive therapy using light and sound stimulation to enhance gamma frequency brain activity, aiming to slow cognitive decline in Alzheimer's patients. Howell highlights the therapy's potential to preserve brain function and structure, emphasizing its accessibility for home use and the company's commitment to addressing the urgent need for effective Alzheimer's treatments. (02:42:44) - Cameron McCord, co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a company specializing in software solutions for hardware testing and operations, announced an $80 million funding round led by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $1 billion. He discussed how Nominal's platform supports hardware engineering teams by providing a unified system for testing and operations, enabling faster and more reliable validation of mission-critical systems. McCord also highlighted the company's rapid growth, including a sevenfold increase in revenue year-over-year and expansion into international markets. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Cameron McCord?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, March 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and UltraDome, the Temple of Technology,

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance, the Capital.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. We have-

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  We are sick. John and I are both very sick-

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Sick of not podcasting. Let's go. We are actually very sick.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  We are deathly ill, but-

• 0:23John Coogan?

  That's the beauty of watching-

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  A daily show.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Live. There's no risk of me getting you sick because you're on the other side of a screen. Screen time.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  And that's the beauty of a daily show. There's no, you don't ever have sick days.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's no days off.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  Because there's no days off.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Uh, and, uh, we have a fantastic lineup today. We have Mark Gurman joining. Let's pull up the linear lineup.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  The Gurnator.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Of course, is the system for modern software development. Seventy percent of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. Uh, we have Dan Primack coming on from Axios to break down-

• 0:52Jordi Hays?

  Final.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  IPO market. What's going on in venture capital? What's going on with venture capital returns? Uh, we have, do we have Zach from, uh, uh, from, uh, Plaid coming on today? That'd be awesome if so. We have Ken Record from Nominal, massive unicorn round that just happened with Founder's Fund coming on, uh, in person, live.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  And of course, Max-

• 1:13John Coogan?

  Max and Christian.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  From Vast Space.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Well, uh, thank you so much for tuning in today. Um, speaking of Plaid, Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest. Uh, securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending now with AI.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  Hey, John, why is no one talking-

• 1:32John Coogan?

  About Daniel Gross? No one, literally no one is talking about Daniel Gross. Uh, he, no, he should be a household name. He, you should get into the, a taxi and they should be, oh, did you, you know, did you see how, how incredibly dialed, uh, Daniel Gross's AGI trades were-

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  From January 14th, 2024.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, this is a great, great website. Uh, it's, uh, what is it? Danielgross.com slash-

• 1:56Jordi Hays?

  AGI trades.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  The, the classic Times New Roman, serif font, 12-point, just, uh, just hammering it out in the, in the vanilla HTML. No need for styles, no need for bootstrap templates. Uh, what's that CS tailwind? He doesn't need tailwind for this. He just, uh, wrote it and probably marked down our HTML directly. And- A lot of it has come true. It's interesting because a lot of them are framed as just like open-ended questions. But if you think about, you know, if you believe in AGI and then you go through the questions, like you will see exactly what happened over the last two years. And this has been the like the underpinning thesis of situational awareness in many ways.

• 2:42John Coogan?

  Daniel Gross was a was an anchor of the fund. That of course is

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's particularly relevant today because I'll read the intro.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  This is January 14th, 2024, over two years ago. He says, I think we can all agree that GPT-4 completes many tasks at human-level proficiency. It is imperfect in odd ways. It can write software like a smart MIT undergrad, but can't do basic task planning like an entry-level EA. It speaks all languages but can barely do math. Suppose the progress doesn't stop, just like GPT-4 was better than three. GPT-5 is capable of basic agentic behavior, i.e. able to accept a task, work on it for a while, and return results.

• 3:21John Coogan?

  Nailed it.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  And of course, today, OpenAI is has released GPT-5.4, which does exactly this quite well.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Their reviews are coming in.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  And they are quite, quite good. Daniel continues, "Some modest fraction of upwork tasks can now be done with a handful of electrons. Suppose everyone has an agent like this they can hire. Suppose everyone has 1,000 agents like this they can hire. What does one do in a world like this?" So.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  So let's go through them one by one. There's 17, 18 questions, something like that. First, let me tell you about Labelbox Reinforcement Learning Environments, Voice Robotics, E-Data, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So he kicks it off with an easy question. "In a post-AGI world, where does the value accrue?" People were debating this at the time. Application layer versus foundation model layer versus infrastructure layer. Value has definitely accrued to this infrastructure.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Versus the hair layer. I mean, you're even post-AGI, John's new haircut is paying.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Paul Graham wrote a whole piece about how brands are important. We'll we'll cover that tomorrow. But he he compares it to the quartz crisis in the watch world and has a bunch of thoughts about value in the post-AGI era. But just looking back in the last two years, value has clearly accrued to the infrastructure layer. So that means chips, packaging, power, et cetera. And this is the situational awareness trade by and large. Nvidia basically captures and did for a while more than 100% of the profits from the AI boom because so many of the other companies in the AI space were losing money. And so the foundation labs are losing money and Nvidia's

• 5:10John Coogan?

  profit margin went from like 30% to 60% gross margins and the it was borne out in market cap. So Nvidia added 3.2 trillion in market cap from when Daniel wrote this piece. And I remember listening to him on Strategery, talk to Ben Thompson alongside Nat Friedman and say, yeah, based on, based on chat GPT, Nvidia seems sort of undervalued. And I was like, oh, well, if they're saying it on Ben Thompson's Strategery podcast, it's obviously priced in. Everyone knows this. And I was wildly wrong. Never doubt yourself. But what's interesting is that the rest of the platforms did not see, you know, three X gains. They

• 5:53John Coogan?

  did not add $3 trillion in value. Microsoft from, from January 2024 to today is only up 4%. Amazon's up 30%. And then you do have OpenAI, Anthropic, XAI in the private markets. The gains there, they've been huge and staggering in that it's like the fastest growing companies in private markets history, shaking the venture capital world. You're either in or you're out. It's a huge deal. But you add them all up, it's only 1.4 trillion.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  So crazy when you think it Satya in many ways went on such a generational run.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  And you got a 4%.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  If you hadn't, if you hadn't looked at the stock price at all, you would think, oh, it's got to be up, what, 40, 40%? No, it's up 4%.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  And so that was, that was Daniel Gross's next question. What happens to Nvidia and Microsoft? These are the two interesting players at the time, the big, some of the biggest companies, the most AI-aligned. Nvidia absolutely crushed. Revenue tripled from 60 billion in fiscal year 2024 to 215.9 billion in fiscal year 2026. Microsoft has been far less dominant. So Azure growth actually is accelerating. It's at 40% year-over-year, but the stock only returned 4%, as we said. The market punished the $80 billion in AI capex that Satya Nadella has been telling to investors because everyone's asking, well, I could be in Nvidia and they're not, they don't need to really invest that much because they're

• 7:22John Coogan?

  a fabulous semiconductor design company. Their gross margins are increasing, they're printing cash, and you are saying, okay, you've got to spend $80 billion and we don't know when we're going to get the profits from that. So there's an open question there. So when it comes to the, when it comes to the picks and shovels trade, you don't want to tie yourself up to an individual startup or a foundation model lab. You just want to own the simplest thing that value will accrue to. Nvidia all the way, they were the clear winner of the picks and shovels trade. Microsoft's infrastructure play, I think it's a good decision. It's just the bets have yet to pay off for shareholders. Much more pointed question, Daniel Gross asked, is copper mispriced? Was copper mispriced

• 8:07John Coogan?

  in January of 2024? The answer was, oh yeah, majorly. Now, raw materials don't move like meme stocks. So the actual move, copper was $3.75 a pound in January of 2024. Two years later, it went to an all-time high of $6.61 a pound. So it's not like it even doubled, but that type of move in a basic material that we've been mining for hundreds of years is remarkable. And that's because AI uses a lot of copper. Nvidia's GB200 NVL72 server rack uses over 5,000 copper cables. There's 72 GPUs wired together, but you need 5,000

• 8:49John Coogan?

  copper wires to get it all to work together. If you stretched out all of the copper wire in an NVL72 from one side to another, it would go two miles long. And this is one server rack. Like this is like, it's not like going across the data center. This is not taking the data from AWS East to California. This is within that one server, you stretch out the copper wire, you're going two miles. It's an incredible amount. A single 100 megawatt data center, which is a data center for ants by modern standards, uh, needs around 3,000 tons of copper. I think that's like half a million dollars or something like that when you multiply it all out.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  Um, uh, or, or, no, it's, uh, data centers broadly will be using half a million tons of copper annually uh, in a few years. And people are actually saying that copper is the new oil, uh, but there are a bunch of things that are also the new oil. So in the, in the AI build out, so, uh, it's so complex. There's bottlenecks everywhere. So you gotta take that with a grain of salt, but copper was certainly. Today, it's looking like oil is the new oil. Is the new oil. What is crude at? Uh, 80. 80. So it was at 70 before the, the Iran war broke out. Um, there was predictions that it would go to above 100. Oil is another, is another commodity that does not move in the same fashion as a meme stock or a. Except for today.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Except for today. Big move today, but, but, but typically as prices go up, um, uh, the, the, the, the firms drill more and the prices, uh, reach equilibrium. U S drillers aren't rushing to increase oil production is on the front of the Wall Street Journal Business Section today. Uh, the Middle East is on the cusp of a prolonged conflict that could push oil prices to heights not seen in four years. For now, American oil drillers are sitting this one out. The U S oil benchmark settled at 7466 a barrel Wednesday, the highest front month settlement since the 12 day exchange of Israeli, Iranian and American strikes last June. But West Texas oilmen, it makes, but to West Texas oilmen, it makes little sense to add expensive rigs and boost production

• 10:54John Coogan?

  when the war could be short-lived and crude prices drop. So, uh, that's what's happening in the oil markets. Anyway, uh, moving over to real estate. Daniel Gross asked, is San Francisco the new Detroit? And I'm not exactly sure what he means by new Detroit, because new Detroit, meaning like the old Detroit, when it was Motor City and they were building amazing cars there? Or the new Detroit in the sense of like Detroit today is a hollowed out shell of what it used to be, a former boom town? The one thing is clear is that SF is back. SF is completely booming. Office vacancy fell from 36.9% to 33.5%. OpenAI has a million square feet of offices. Anthropic has a 25-story tower.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Sierra, an application layer company, signed 300,000 square feet of office space in San Francisco. The Bay Area received 78% of AI venture capital in the first half of 2025. And there is a flip side to this. So overall, employment in San Francisco is still down relative to the pre-pandemic. Some people left. Some legacy companies aren't hiring as much. All the hiring is happening at the AI startup lab area. But housing prices remain strong. It's certainly not a hollow shell by any means. And if you've ever visited San Francisco, you can tell that it's cleaner and safer than it has been in previous years. So AI overall was not a total rethinking of San Francisco. And it did not become open source

• 12:22John Coogan?

  or the hub of activity in tech didn't move to Miami or New York or Austin or Los Angeles. Like San Francisco is still where it's at. The next question he asked, how does AI change wealth inequality? It's sort of too soon to tell. The data's not entirely clear. The data hasn't moved that much. But there are some interesting studies. So the International Monetary Fund released a working paper in 2025 that said that AI could reduce wage inequality.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Reduce wage inequality. So the amount of money that people make on an annual basis could be, you know, reduced. How is that possible? Well, what they say in this paper is that high income tasks, the job of a lawyer, the job of an executive, the job of a management consultant, those will be automated before the job of the machinist, the gardener, the street sweeper. And so you will see wages at the high end fall while wages at the low end remain stable. And also, at the bottom end, you have the minimum wage. And so you will see higher end wages go down, the bottom wages will stay the same, and that will reduce wage inequality.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  On the other side, AI could worsen wealth inequality because it's concentrating capital returns into tech owners. So the OECD found that wage growth was actually the strongest in low skilled occupation, assemblers, I didn't even know that was a job, but if you're an assembler, you've seen your wages increase by 11.6%. There we go. But you know who's had it the hardest? CEOs. The high skilled workers, those chief executives, saw their wages increase by just 2.7%. It's rough out there for a CEO, apparently. Brutal. This is mostly because of minimum wage increases, but in general, we're seeing

• 14:17John Coogan?

  wage inequality decrease, but wealth inequality increase because there is incredible stock market concentration right now. So the MAG7, the seven biggest tech companies in America, they now comprise 32% of the S&P 500 market cap, and they drove 42% of total returns in 2025. So if you're invested in Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, et cetera, Nvidia, you did very well, your wealth increased. But if you weren't in those and you had a broad index or you didn't have a lot of capital to begin with, you were left behind. So that's increasing.

• 14:58Jordi Hays?

  Paul Graham shared two days ago, companies grow fast now. That's the reason economic inequality is increasing, not some sinister policy shift.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  He was highlighting Anthropic's recent growth. He said, when companies grow fast, it makes founders doubly rich. The company not only hits a given revenue number sooner, but it is more valuable when it hits it because the value of the company will be a multiple of the growth rate. People who don't understand the math of valuations can't imagine that founders would get so rich naturally, whereas to founders and investors, it's the most obvious thing in the world. This is one of the reasons there is such a disconnect between the tech world and politicians.

• 15:34John Coogan?

  Yes. So if you want to invest in the Mag 7, or you don't, head over to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So this is also true in private markets, as Paul Graham mentioned. AI startup mega rounds, $110 billion for OpenAI, $30 billion for Anthropic. This concentrates enormous private wealth among a small number of founders and investors. So wealth inequality, AI will probably change it. At the very least, it will change it as much as previous technological booms. If you were the founder of Instagram, you did very well because there was a lot of wealth creation all of a sudden in one

• 16:16John Coogan?

  major tech boom. Mobile AI is broader and bigger already than mobile. So moving over to energy and data centers. If it does become an energy game, what's the trade? It did become an energy game and the trade was buy everything, basically, because every energy thing basically did very well. Anyone who got the trade correct did very well. Vistra returned 321%. It was the second best performing S and P 500 stock of 2024.

• 16:47Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 16:47John Coogan?

  You know who beat them in 2024? Palantir. Palantir mooned, they were already in the S and P 500, they did very well. But Vistra was sort of the secular energy winner. Constellation Energy tripled in size after ChachiPT's launch. NRG Energy, which is a great name, N R G, gained 95% in 2025 alone.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  Oklahoma surged 700% in 12 months and that's without, I think, even having any, producing any energy.

• 17:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Just the idea that they will produce energy someday.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Nuclear went on a tear. Oklahoma's in more of like the startup pre-revenue camp, I would say, or pre-product camp. But Microsoft signed a $16 billion, 20-year PPA to restart Three Mile Island. Google signed with Kairos Power for 500 megawatts of small modular reactors. And Meta contracted 6.6 gigawatts across multiple nuclear providers. So, energy was just such a great trade from the beginning of the AGI boom in 2024.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Across the, next up across the entire data center supply chain, which components are hardest to scale up 10x? What is the chip on wafer on substrate of data center?

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, so chip on wafer on substrate, that is TSMC's secret sauce. That is the most gating factor in scaling TSMC's 2 nanometer chip production. It's what allows them to package HBM and the GPU all on one chip. And TSMC reported that they were like sold out like years in advance. It was a huge bottleneck. In the data center world, the biggest bottleneck was probably power transformers. We heard a lot about this. Lead time for new, lead times for new power transformers reached over three years in some cases with a 30% supply shortfall. High voltage circuit break.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember my mom was, my mom was in escrow on a condo.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Really?

• 18:49Jordi Hays?

  That, and closing was contingent on the development, getting a transformer. She waited like six weeks or something like that. They were like, we don't know when we're going to get it. And she ended up just backing out.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Just because there was there was so much demand.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we really got caught off. We really got caught off guard by this. I mean, transformers, the cost surged 150% since 2020. It's 100 year old technology. It's not. It's not new. It's not crazy innovation. Overnight success. Overnight success, but it became the binding constraint on how fast data centers could connect to the grid. If you are running a transformer company, you're selling transformers, you got to get on Shopify. Shopify is a 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. If you're selling transformers, start running some ads.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  Imagine checking out for a transformer with Shop Pay.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  It'd be incredible, incredible experience. Coal. Was coal mispriced? Sort of, but not nearly as much as copper. Thermal coal prices actually declined 2020, 22% in 2025, but they rebounded a little bit by early 2026. Coal stocks did fine. Peabody Energy gained 34% over 12 months. Console Energy was up 37%. On the operational side, US coal-fired generation.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  I love how you're like, coal stocks did fine.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  They were up only 34% and 37%.

• 20:20John Coogan?

  I mean, compared to everything else, it's doubling and tripling. It's like, nah, you know, okay, you know, if you were like, I'm the coal guy. I, I, I believe coal is the thing like.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Peabody Energy is up 73% in the last six months.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  We're, we're, just kidding.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Only 37.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Only up 161% in the past year.

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  Only, only, only up, only up 728% in the past five years.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  It did. It did fine. It's just not as exciting as, as copper. And it's not as exciting as, as nuclear. Coal generation surged 13% overall in America, 23% in Ohio, 58% in Oklahoma, where they're sort of data center hotspots. Like, there's more data centers in those, in those areas. So bringing more coal onto the grid allowed for, you know, more load balancing. Anyway, nations. Who wins and loses? Take a wild guess at who won.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  America, baby. America won. Next question. But it's really true. Like, the stats are crazy. The United States is truly the dominant winner of the of the last two years in the AI era. Hundred and nine billion dollars in private AI investment in 2024 alone. Way more now, if you look at 200 billion CapEx guide from AWS. Hundred and 10 going to OpenAI, 30 going to Anthropic, tons of money going into XAI. Like, the money is truly flowing in America. In 2024, China had just 9.3 billion invested in private AI companies. There's 470 billion cumulative since 2013, more than all other countries combined in America.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  The US produced 40 notable AI models in 2024 versus China's 15. Now, the game's not over. Lots of countries are making big investments now.

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  And you can't forget France's 30 million euros.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  They put in 30 million, yeah. It's serious, it's serious.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. So, India. What's going on in India?

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  DG says 250 billion of India's GDP exports are essentially GPT-4 tokens. What happens now? John says this is starting to take shape, but it's still early. Situational awareness is placing some short bets, which map to the decline in hiring.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  I think they were short Infosys, which is an IT outsourcer. You need some software written. You will basically send a prompt and basically get back code, which is what these models are fantastic at. And so that does seem like some really, really steep competition in the near term, even in the long term. And so I think he's right to question that. Although, we aren't seeing it in the overall India hiring data, the overall Philippines hiring data just yet. But it is showing up a little bit in India's IT exports center. So, major Indian IT firms collectively in 2024 and 2025,

• 23:32John Coogan?

  they shrunk by 58,000 employees roughly. And that's a dramatic reversal from the previous three years, 2021 to 2023, when they were staffing up. They added 360,000 employees.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing here is that big tech, this like is in some way is like a proxy for big tech hiring. Cause a lot of, a lot of the labor that's happening at these firms is effectively offloaded to, to, to some of these firms in India. So it's like, in some ways, it's like, if there was over hiring in big tech, there was, could have been effectively over hiring here.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  And then it's re-tracing.

• 24:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Makes sense.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and yeah, you didn't put it in here, but it's also interesting to look at the hiring activity in the Philippines, which is not as dramatic to the downside as, as one might think.

• 24:27John Coogan?

  What do you mean?

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when we looked at the data, I think it was a couple of weeks ago. It's not like you, there was just like job, uh, jobs like falling off of a cliff. Like it's relatively stable.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's sort of these like concentric circles with all of these stats. Like if you look at block, what's happening at block? Like, well, they lost 50% of their workforce. Like that's a massive cut. And then you look at tech hiring overall and it's like slowing down. You look at white collar work and it's like, we're not adding a lot. It's maybe shrinking by 0.1%. And then you zoom out to the American economy and it's like, it's actually growing. And so you have these like concentric circles of impacts. And so if there's like one company in India that's doing IT outsourcing that might be hurt. And then they're the least, they're the worst performing, but the best managed one might be able to make it through. And then, and then you zoom out and you're like, well, the overall Indian economy is doing

• 25:20John Coogan?

  okay. And then overall, the global economy is doing okay. And so there's all these like, like cascading effects. And I think the, the interesting takeaway was when, when somebody like Dario says, 50% of white collar work might be automated, like, it's going to be the bottom 50%. It's not going to be the, it's not going to be at random. It's not going to be flip a coin if you keep your job or entry level. It's going to be, it's going to be, were you not at the top of your, were you not at the top of your game? So, the question is, if we are displacing software engineers, will software engineers become machinists? This is what Daniel Gross asks. He says, what is the Euclidean distance of reskilling in prior revolutions? And how does AGI compare? The typist became an executive

• 26:05John Coogan?

  assistant. Can the software engineer become a machinist? So, we're not seeing this yet. Software engineers aren't grabbing blue collar jobs just yet, but there is a divergence that's starting to show up in the data between software developers and programmers. So, programming jobs are in decline, but software engineering jobs are actually growing. And so, I think what's happening is that as coding models and agentic systems allow for building systems at higher levels of abstraction, demand for AI engineers has grown 143%. And so, if you're going to hire someone to help you build software, you want them to be like

• 26:47John Coogan?

  AI native. You want them to go beyond full stack, or, which typically meant you could do front end in JavaScript and back end in Python. And now, full stack or AI engineer means everything from prompt to design to product development to deployment to operations and DevOps to database migrations to front end and a back end, because all of that is going to be handled by agentic systems. And so, entry level hiring at top tech firms has dropped 25%. Maybe AI, maybe over hiring from COVID overhang. We'll see. Internship postings fell 30%. So the decision is either, you know, reskill upwards to more of a manager of infinite minds,

• 27:32John Coogan?

  I think was the quote, but manager of agents role, or yes, you might, it might be time to work on those machinist skills. I'm extremely bullish on Tyler. We watched him assemble the first iPhone ever in America, and he's also an incredible software developer, not really a programmer because he doesn't really know the programming languages that he employs, but.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  That's not true. That's not true.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  There we go. Yes. I think Tyler makes it, whether he becomes the manager of infinite minds or the machinist.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  I am pretty bullish on like the, like the light blue color like thesis, which is that like you'll have robotics, but you'll just have like, so you'll be in the machine shop, but you're just using an iPad. You're not actually working on.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think we drop you in a Nike factory, you're running that place in like two weeks guaranteed. I'm not kidding. I'm so bullish on, on young people who can use all the tools and, and actually go and understand the leverage that they're getting from the modern systems natively and not need to fall back to old habits.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. There was a good Journal article yesterday about the Colgate, like head of AI. And it was very interesting because I was like, oh, this is like, I feel like I could do a pretty good job at this.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  You're like, ah.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  But you know, he's just basically telling everyone like, yeah, guys, you actually got to use AI like despite what these, these random surveys might.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Guy, guy has had one job in his life, working on a, on a podcast and thinks he can go dominate in the big toothpaste space. I love the confidence.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  Athlete.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  We got it. We got it.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  You are a corporate athlete.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  You are a corporate athlete. We got to get him. We got to get the Colgate guy on the show and see, see whose takes are better. Tyler Cosgrove or Colgate AI guy. Anyway.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  The chat's saying you're not. They don't think you're a supply chain guy, Tyler.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  I think, I think you can pick it up. Ask, ask the LM.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  Claude, what do I do?

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Make no mistakes.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  That's for Claude, right?

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about, what happens if I hit, if I hit this? Let me see. Does that take, does that take over? Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai.

• 29:41Jordi Hays?

  Electrification and assembly lines lead to high unemployment and the New Deal, including the Works Progress Administration, a federal project that employed eight and a half million Americans with a tremendous budget. Does that repeat?

• 29:53John Coogan?

  So, clearly hasn't happened yet. We also haven't seen high unemployment yet, so we'll see. The Trump administration did launch America's AI Action Plan in July of 2025. We talked to one of the authors of that AI Action Plan, Dean Ball, yesterday on the show, and they issued some executive orders on AI education and skilled trades. But the Department of Labor, the Department of Labor awarded $84 million in apprenticeship expansion grants, but that's like France money. That's like not enough to do to really make an impact. Overall, US workforce development spending is at 0.1% of GDP, which is second

• 30:32John Coogan?

  to last among OECD nations. I wonder who's actually last. We should look that up. Anyway, no, no program currently approaches the scale of the Works Progress Administration or the New Deal. I think this will change very, very quickly if the data comes through that we're actually shedding tons of jobs. America is very good at creating new jobs and, and running the printing press, and this is the whole reaction to the Citroni article. Anyway, he also asks a more philosophical question that doesn't really have a detailed answer, but I'd love your take on it, Jordy, too. Is lifelong learning worth investing in? Something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task? It's a very

• 31:17John Coogan?

  abstract question. It's a very personal question. I tend to think yes. I tend to think that on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, you need food, shelter, family, friends, clout, or whatever, at a certain point, learning a skill for the, for the sake of learning that skill is edifying, even in a world. You know, it's like going to the gym. Like, I, I was, I was listening to Sam Altman talk about how kids will never, kids that are born today will never be smarter than the smartest AI systems. And that's weird. That's different. But I was thinking about like, but like, I was, there was a

• 31:59John Coogan?

  time hundreds of years ago when you could actually be the, the, the best

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Thing in the world, the best option for like carrying lumber, other than like maybe an ox or something, but like in general, like before we created machinery, like before we created the car, like you could be the fastest person. And then as soon as, as soon as the, the, the, the, the ZR1 Axe was released, you didn't stand a chance. And I had to explain this to my son at some point. He was, he's very interested in cheetahs. And, and I was telling him like, cheetahs are the fastest animal. And he was like, but is it faster than a car? And I was like, not even close. Like, like me in a car, I'm smoking that cheetah. I am slower than that cheetah, but I'm way faster.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  In my Cadillac.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  DG says something worth doing beyond the economic value of mastering the task.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:47Jordi Hays?

  And the way I would kind of flip this, I feel like most of the gains in my life have come from mastering myself or understanding myself, learning about myself, and then understanding the world, and then combining those two things in a way. It hasn't been about mastering any one specific task.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  And so I still think there's tremendous, tremendous gains to, again, under, understanding yourself, understanding the world, how do these two things fit together?

• 33:18John Coogan?

  So I agree with you on just the, on just the level of like, there will be not just tasks to master, but like ideas and combinations of skills that will be valuable economically. But even in a, even in an ASI world where there is no economic value to any task mastery, I still think it is worth investing in lifelong learning because that will be edifying. That will be satisfying.

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just enjoyable.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  It, it, you know, it's becoming a painter, becoming someone who, who gets joy purely out of the process of painting the landscape when cameras exist, when generative AI exists. It can still be edifying and valuable to.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  To sit there and look at a landscape and paint it and wind up with the result, even if the result is not economically valuable or or anywhere near what you could get with technology like a camera or Gen AI. So, very abstract, but still something fun to think about. Before we move on to inflation, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  So, if AI is truly deflationary, how would we know? What chart or metric would show it first? And you could look at AI API pricing as probably the best answer here. So, you know, there are certain tasks that AI can do now. And so those tasks have moved from being limited by regulation or human output or the population workforce to the compute allowed or compute allocated. And the cost of compute is falling. So TVs were expensive. They got cheaper as we made more and more factories that were more and more automated that could produce ever cheaper TVs.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  And that's why when you look at the inflation trends, you see healthcare, education, anything that's highly regulated. There are only so many lawyers that are allowed to pass the bar. There are only that many doctors. And so healthcare has increased in cost where TVs has been this like knockout, drag out fight between the most ruthless companies all over the world. And the price of TVs has fallen. And so if you start putting more of those, more of those jobs on the AI, on the AGI curve, you see deflation. Where should we see it first? We should see it in AI API pricing. And GPT-4 equivalent inference costs have collapsed. In late 2022, they were, which is like right before GPT-4.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  I think GPT-4 came out January of 2023. It was $20 per million tokens in December of 2025. The same model, 40 cents per million tokens. So this is a 50x decline in three years. I think. You can even get more intelligence for cheaper, depending on how you're inferencing these. You can run some of these models locally and the energy cost is even cheaper at that point. So this 50x decline in three years, this is falling faster than PC compute costs. It's also falling faster than dot com era bandwidth costs. And so this should be the leading indicator for downstream service deflation. In any example that you give of like, oh, I was just able to use chat GPT to check my,

• 36:43John Coogan?

  I I talked to somebody who said they love chat GPT because they their check engine light came on. They were able to take a picture of it and it identified the car, told them what they needed to do. And they felt like they, when they went in for servicing, they weren't going to get raked over the coals by their mechanic because they had like sort of a mechanic in their camp in their fighting in their court. And so this should this should effectively act as like, okay, you have your own mechanic on your side. And then you can do it yourself, but you can also just go in and negotiate and say, hey, I know that this the fair price for this is 50 bucks, not 200. So give me the good price. And so you should see that you should.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can assume that tokens are going to get cheaper and more effective indefinitely. But all these new product launches, things like open claw are actually expanding.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  The number of tokens. Yes. And and and so you are seeing deflation, but then you're also seeing Jevon's paradox and increase in demand. And that's why overall growth is increasing. So.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  Historically, it's like one person, one AI chat, you're only using so much. Then you have agentic products, then you can actually multiply the number of agents that an individual can be running and the output goes through the roof.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  It's time to head to Gastown, baby. So he asks this follow up question, how should one think of deflation if demand for intellectual goods continues to grow as production costs go down? AI API costs are plummeting, but AI lab revenues are skyrocketing. So prices fall, volume surges, total spend increases, and the really interesting wrinkle is. We're living through a SaaS apocalypse. We're living through this training article, but SaaS vendors are imposing like an AI tax of, I think the stats were somewhere between 20 and 37% of renewals. So AI vendors, you know, you go for your renewal and they say, hey, we got AI features now. You got to pay a little bit more. SaaS revenues are still

• 38:35John Coogan?

  increasing and growing, even as the underlying cost to build software approaches zero. This mirrors computing's history under Moore's Law. Each unit gets cheaper. Total spending grows as new use cases emerge. So classic Jevon's paradox. Let me tell you about Figma. No matter where your idea starts, Figma May, Claude Code, Codex, or Sketch, the Figma Canvas is where ideas connect and products take shape, build in the right direction with Figma. So geopolitics. This was interesting because he put this question in the geopolitics section that feels much more like a server AI build out question, but he asks, does

• 39:15John Coogan?

  interconnect actually matter? And I was very confused because interconnect typically refers to sort of like the Ethernet cables between servers, or like NVLink, or, you know, what TPU is doing, Ironwood between like the 3D Taurus topology. And I think that the answer to that is like, absolutely. In large GPU clusters, 30 to 50% of training time is spent on interGPU communication, not actually computation. And so all the hype around TPUV7, Ironwood is due to their 3D Taurus technology, that topology that connects 9,216 chips together. Nvidia's NVL72 connects 72 chips together. Interconnect

• 39:57John Coogan?

  is incredibly important. I'm wondering if the fact that interconnect is in the geopolitics section is maybe talking about the interconnections between Samsung and SK Hynix in South Korea, and Taiwan TSMC, and America. That's obviously relevant, and we'll get into that in the next question. But it is, both are incredibly important. So yes, I do think interconnect actually matters, no matter where, no matter how you read this question.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  The bigger question and the interesting like hot take question he has in here is, does node process matter if the country has more energy? So China has not been able to get their semiconductor manufacturing, their fab champion, SMIC. They have SMIC, which is the TSMC equivalent. They have Huawei, which is the Nvidia equivalent. And they have SME, which is their ASML equivalent. They have not been able to clone TSMC to the level of Taiwan Semiconductor. But they can produce 14 nanometer chips. And so the question is, usually they take those chips and they put them in just random, you know, consumer electronics goods that they ship over here.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  So if you go to China and you want a co-packer or manufacturer to build you something and you're like, yeah, I want it to connect to the internet, or I want it to have a speaker inside, they're like, great, we will, we will fab a 14 nanometer chip or something even, even less frontier than that. But can they just marshal a ton of lagging edge capacity and then just say, hey, you know what? We have cheap energy, we're burning coal, we have nuclear, we have the Three Gorges Dam, we have hydropower, we have so much free energy, let's just spend 10 times as much energy on the lagging edge. Can we achieve AGI that way? And it seems like, no. It seems like leading edge nodes are incredibly important. You can't just throw a ton of leading, lagging edge 14 nanometer chips at the problem, at

• 41:57John Coogan?

  least with current architectures. Now, this might change, but no frontier model to date has been trained on hardware older than 5 nanometer. All the leading chips, that's Blackwell, Google's TPUV7, AWS's Tranium 3, they use TSMC 4 nanometer or 3 nanometer process. And I think when we dig into Grok and Cerebras and some of the newer stuff that's coming, everyone is saying, we want to be on the most frontier node, we don't want to go backwards on that front. So China's best effort, Huawei's Ascend 910C, is on SMIC's 7 nanometer class DUV process. They're not, it's extreme ultraviolet lithography, they're a deep, deep ultraviolet lithography process.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  That's competitive for inference, but requires dramatically more chips and energy for training at scale. So brute forcing AI progress through disregard for energy consumption, it feels like it still hits economic walls at some point. And then there's also the question of how valuable, like...

• 42:58John Coogan?

  Are the weights what are the nuclear weapons? Or is it the actual deployment? I was listening to this this conversation about, you know, what are the geopolitical implications of AI? Is it that you you have, OK, yes, you have the genius, you have the 2000 IQ god model, but you can only really ask it like one question? Is that what's valuable? Or is it you have a thousand, you know, country of geniuses in a data center, and you're able to marshal effectively 10,000 cybersecurity experts for each person on the enemy team? And there's just a thousand people that are trying to hack your phone

• 43:41John Coogan?

  and a thousand people that are trying to hack Tyler constantly. Is that is the inference? Actually, what matters is the compute, what where the power comes from, as opposed to just the training. Training is obviously important, but inference might also be important. So so there's a there's a big question there.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  And last, but certainly not least, DG asks, what is the likely Taiwan event? And what would be a leading indicator for it? John writes, a Taiwan blockade would be the biggest trigger, but Taiwan Strait tensions are already escalating. China conducted joint SWORD 2024 B exercises in October of 2024, surrounding Taiwan with coordinated military operations. In December 2025, Justice Mission 2025 deployed over 100 aircraft, 90 crossing the median line, 13 warships and 27 rockets fired from Fujian. 10 rockets landed in Taiwan's contiguous zone.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Contiguous zone.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Contiguous, sorry.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  12 to 24 nautical miles offshore. So they're just like firing rockets and being like, they didn't hit land. They're just, you can see them from the beach, probably, 10 miles offshore, 12 miles offshore. I think that it's like just over the horizon.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep. China also recently separated peaceful from reunification when talking about Taiwan in their 2026 to 2030 five-year plan. Gives you an idea of where things might be going. TSMC is planning ahead, working on a fab complex in Arizona, which Tyler visited. Should be able to handle 30% of total advanced production at scale, but it's on a knife's edge.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  If you want to know roughly how how far that is, you've seen Catalina Island off the coast of LA.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Catalina Island is, I think, 26 miles. And so imagine.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  So very visible.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can see Catalina Island from Long Beach and imagine a missile coming and landing like halfway between where you are and Catalina Island.

• 45:35Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Yeah, the question is, how does Iran and the conflict there update China's kind of thinking on this? There's.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Some of the intel accounts have been sharing, who knows if it's true, that China actually has operatives in Iran, like, kind of learning in the same way that the US has learned from Ukraine, specifically in regards to missile capability. So wild, wild time. And yeah, it just feels like a day hasn't passed so far since this was published that Taiwan, a Taiwan event feels less likely than it did the day before.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's why Palmer has been trying to message around the blockade specifically as being like a line in the sand, because that's somewhat of an abstract concept. Because if a blockade happens, it could be very bad, it could be the start of a turning point, but it would not be a hot war, it would not be boots on the ground, it would not meet the level of like a declaration of war that many people would would wake up to. And so he's been trying to message that like, no, a blockade is the start of something bigger. We need to be aware and we need to hold the line on on not allowing a blockade to happen.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Anyway, we will continue following that, but first, 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.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Mouse Twitter.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Mouse Twitter is important.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  Mouse Twitter is on a roll. Scott Wilson from Mouse Twitter says a block of Parmesan is an elite on-the-go snack. This eight-ounce block has 80 grams of protein and 64 grams of fat.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  Parmesan is like the worst cheese to just chomp on.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  You think?

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Disagree.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  It's so hard.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  I feel like it's gonna get me.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  I know, but, uh... Elite snack. I agree. I haven't, I haven't been snacking on Parmesan since I was probably...

• 47:53John Coogan?

  You, you, you know, oh, it's such an elite snack. I've never once caught you snacking like a mouse on a block of Parmesan cheese.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't eat like a mouse.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Stated preference versus revealed preference.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't eat much like a mouse.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Fake mouse.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  But as a kid, I'd have like a bunch of big carrots and some blocks of Parmesan.

• 48:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  And I'd just be going mouse mode.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Mouse mode. That's good. Let me tell you about Gusto Mode, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR built to evolve with small and medium-sized businesses.

• 48:21Jordi Hays?

  So he says it's on Slack, bro. It's in the drive. I just put it in the Notion, bro. I literally sent it to you on Teams. Did you check the airtable, bro? It's in the box, bro. It's single sign-on. It's on Okta, bro. No, you need the YubiKey. Check your deal, bro. It's on Gusto. Check Outlook, bro.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Let me actually 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.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this morning.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  I like that riff. It's, uh, this is a, this is a copy pasta from the, it's on Tubi, it's on Hulu, it's on Zubi, like the, all the streaming services. Anyway, what happened this morning?

• 48:58Jordi Hays?

  This morning, President Trump gave a phone interview in which he said, "I fired Anthropic. Anthropic is in trouble because I fired them like dogs," which...

• 49:09John Coogan?

  You don't fire dogs. You don't fire dogs. I would have fired my dog years ago. He's the least effective dog.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, isn't the phrase he he died like a dog?

• 49:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, he's just adapting that, but.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  He sent Anthropic to the farm.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  No, if he's comparing them to dogs, it's man's best friend. This is bullish. He's saying, he's saying, they're my dogs.

• 49:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this, uh, also coincided with Anthropic, I guess, officially being designated as a supply chain risk.

• 49:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Is, uh, again, not something that I've seen a single person in the industry actually push for.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  Um, OpenAI to Amazon to Apple, uh, pretty much everyone across the board.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Even Elon, I don't think has been like outspokenly for this, like he, cause he, I mean, Dean Ball was talking about how Elon sort of went through a lot of this with the, during the Biden administration. And so I, I, Elon's usually pretty opportunistic about, about dunking on competitors, but, uh, in this regard, it feels like he's, he's been sort of quiet. I don't know. Maybe I just haven't, maybe I missed the post, but.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, part of this, I wonder, so Dario sent a memo on Friday that was pretty scathing.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Jordi Hays?

  Looked really, just really, really bad. And the timing here maybe played a factor. It felt like they were still.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Seemingly like trying to work towards a deal.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's read what, let's read what he said. He said, in his memo, he believes the attempted spin slash gaslighting is not working very well in the general public or the media. Though he added that is working on some Twitter morons. Is he talking about the administration? I mean, they're all on Twitter, right? Like, that's the, that's the whole thing with this administration. Uh, he's talking about lots of people, obviously, but, uh, you know, not the most politik way to handle this, I suppose.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Dario, Dario says you're a moron if you believe OpenAI's story around this.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  But, um, less than a month ago, Dario was running greenlit Super Bowl ads that were intentionally designed to mislead

• 51:24John Coogan?

  It's a good time.

• 51:24Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of millions of Americans.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:26Jordi Hays?

  On OpenAI.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  And so now, now he wants to be the one to say, he wants to be the most trusted source.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Through this whole debacle.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's also the the the back and forth on like being the most leaned in bidding on one contract that's to develop autonomous weapons, but the AI doesn't run on the autonomous weapons. And there's a whole bunch of different wrinkles here. It's just such a nuanced conversation. I was I was digging into the question of autonomous weapons. Not only are there apparently, according to Ukrainian intelligence, fully autonomous Russian lethal Russian weapons that will just be sent off. And if they see a tank, they'll just go and and attack it like that exists. And so there's always the game theory about if they have it, do you have it? Do you need it? What? You know, what's that? Where's the line in the sand? And then

• 52:22John Coogan?

  also, America, like the Patriot missile system apparently has a fully autonomous mode where it can just decide what to attack. And there's a whole bunch of other nuance here that I think is lacking from these little snippets. It's, I don't know, I'm, I'm, I am glad he went on CBS and sort of unpacked a lot more of it. But I'm still left dissatisfied with the level of discussion around where the line in the sand is drawn, even on the privacy issue, like the there are six levels of laws around mass surveillance. It's not just the Fourth Amendment. There's a ton more. Some of them are very precise. Some of them are more broad and like how the company interacts with that is clearly important.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  That's actually probably happening in these discussions. But then it gets boiled down into like one soundbite that everyone has to interpret and read the tea leaves on. And it's left me unsatisfied. But

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dean, Dean Ball yesterday says, I really cannot see our anthropic positions benefits at this stage from communications like this. Seems like it just pushes the Trump admin to escalate further while also alienating potential allies in the industry. So yeah, I guess like the, you know, seems clearly when he was writing this seems fairly confident that this was going to stay private. But you have thousands of people

• 53:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  working at the company.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  You're hiring

• 53:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's an insane thing to

• 53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  send to your whole team.

• 53:46John Coogan?

  So Tyler, do you need to delete a post? What happens?

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, okay, well, no, time will tell, we'll see. But I, so, I think when the, the first like rumors or whatever saying that maybe we'll, we'll put a supply chain risk on traffic.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  I posted, nothing ever happened. So I'm looking, uh.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  I think you jinxed it.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm not doing well on that right now.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Something happened, yes.

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, something happened, but, you know, i- it's always unclear, like, maybe this is just another, you know.

• 54:12John Coogan?

  I think this brings them to the table. It's such a ridiculous thing in a world where D C.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  You're still seeing headlines coming out like right now that, that are saying Dario is still trying to get something done.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  They, they, they have to go to the table and they have to, and they have to work this out because, uh, it, it just doesn't, it just, i- i- it's just, it's just unpopular. And, uh, and I think that, uh, uh, and I, I, I just think that the actual, like, the, the, the real individuals, like the real Americans and the real AI researchers are not as far apart as the rhetoric makes it sound. Like, I think that there's a lot of comms and PR and bluster and ego at play between all the parties involved and folks are, are at each other's throats. But I think that when, when, if they actually sit down and try and like, like, I have a, I have a buddy who was on a nuclear submarine for like a year underwater. And he, and I was like, what was that like? Were you like finger over the button?

• 55:05John Coogan?

  He's like, no, it was like a ton of paperwork. Like every day I'd like go and like see how many whales are there and then like count them up and like with pen and paper, like write down a report on how many whale. It was like the most boring, least automated. No, seriously. And that was the thing that we learned from Project Maven. Like, Google had this major protest, a, a, a big walkout. And at the end of the day, like, Google was giving the Department of Defense just access, they weren't building killer robots, they were giving them access to TensorFlow APIs that, that other defense contractors would be able to use to run just classical machine learning programs to classify items in, uh, in images. So, how many cars are in this city?

• 55:48John Coogan?

  How many like, what like, where are our drones on the map? Like, what are we seeing? Like, basic stuff that was typically the providence of, or the domain of like, an Air Force Reserve person, sitting in an office, probably in Nevada, just clicking, okay, yeah, tagging, okay, yeah, that's a house, that's a car. Like, this is what this is. It was not the true like, command and control and endgame that people worry about. So, figuring out where these, where these models can actually have an impact, I think that there's going to be a lot more agreement than there is disagreement. What do you think, Tyler?

• 56:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do think, like, basically before this memo got leaked, there was a sense that, like, okay, clearly, like, he's positioning himself firmly against the admin.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  At least there was like, it seemed like the researchers, like, generally were on his side. Like, you see a lot of Anthropic researchers, or OpenAI researchers, who are like, oh, maybe I should, you know, I don't really agree with what OpenAI is doing. Maybe I should actually go over to Anthropic, like, publicly posting this.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  But then this memo comes out, he calls every OpenAI researcher gullible and moron.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  So aggressive.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's really not.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Complete crash out.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, well.

• 56:55Jordi Hays?

  Crash out.

• 56:56John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experience as a new value with Cisco. So, what did Miles Brundage have to say? So, I'm not super surprised. I've said before that Anthropic has too much of their identity wrapped up in OpenAI. Bad, but this memo doesn't look great, IMO. Totally agree with the criticism of much of OpenAI's political activities, and I think people should be very skeptical of the safety stack stuff. Had a whole thread about it the other day, but this, this is who they are. Gullible, et cetera, stuff is a bit much. It's getting to be ad hominem. They got to back off the aggressive rhetoric. Rune was feeling sort of gullible today, maybe due to selection effects. I love that. Have to say, I really enjoy these crash outs.

• 57:40John Coogan?

  It's pretty keno to read communication that's poorly calculated and wasn't meant for your eyes. So few today are able to speak in these sweeping Shakespearean terms, that they hate their competitor and let it blind their calculus. That is a wild, wild time.

• 57:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I just, I just don't think Dario is in that strong of a position to be complaining about, or insinuating that OpenAI is lying when he's running.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Super Bowl ad campaigns that are just lying to everyone.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  True.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  About OpenAI.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:13Jordi Hays?

  It's like, why should anyone trust you?

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I do, I do wonder, this feels, I, I, I'm still very interested in like, you know, Anthropic gets a lot of credit for predicting the future, predicting how there would be a showdown between the US government and the AI labs. And I'm wondering like, how much of this exact, what we're seeing right now was predicted? And, and is that?

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  I think it was not predicted. Cause they don't seem to be handling with, handling it like very carefully.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, or maybe this is all, this is all what Daria wants. Like, he wants to be labeled the supply chain risk. He wants to have to go his own way. He wants to be fully out and, and all of this was like, like a, like a ruse to be, to force the hand of the administration to be like, I'm, I'm on the outside. I'm leaving.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  You're saying you want to do and fire himself to have to grind harder?

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. It's just like, it is, it is, I, I'm still, I'm still processing that idea of like the, the, the Truman Oppenheimer in, interaction.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Maze says, imagine autonomous weapons powered by this. He got a screenshot from Claude Opus 4.6. Says, tell me a color and I'll try to guess it. Claude says, blue.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Blue.

• 59:33Jordi Hays?

  Maze guesses, blue. Claude says, nailed it.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Nailed it. I love it. Anyone else nailed it? 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.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  The Trump administration is drafting rules that would require US approval for nearly all AI chip exports. Given Washington's sweeping power over companies like Nvidia and AMD, the draft framework sets licensing rules based on shipment size from simplified reviews for small orders to government level approval for massive deployments, potentially tying exports to security guarantees or US investments. Officials say the goal is to make American AI the global standard while controlling critical infrastructure through delays or strict conditions, though delays or strict conditions could disrupt international AI projects.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:30John Coogan?

  I thi- thi- this, yeah, I mean, it depends on like, it's so odd when someone comes out and says like, we're gonna create like a framework for control, cuz if like, in the most extreme, you could be like, okay, now the government's deciding to like, send all the frontier, send all, the Blackwells only to China, right? Like, that would be the most extreme formulation. That's clearly not what's gonna happen. Ben Thompson's uh, uh, take is that the, the, the, the last, the previous generation chips, that's fine to send over to uh, to China. Uh, keep them dependent, keep them from, you know, kneading, backed into a corner, keep them from attacking Taiwan. I, I still don't know where I sit with it. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I think even in this uh, context, like, the anthropic thing is so interesting, because like, if you take this as saying, uh, the US is gonna be more restrictive.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Like, that's what Dario's been saying.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  It's like, a lot of the stuff, like, on paper, he almost like agrees with, right?

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:01:25Speaker 03

  And in action, it's like completely different.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is weird, right? But, I, I mean, again, maybe, maybe there's like, you know, is this, is this a, a, a piece on the chessboard? Is this a chip that's being traded metaphorically, uh, to Dario, in some ways, where, where, you know, it's like, how do I win over the labs, get them to work with me more effectively? Well, I'll give on the thing we agree on, which is export, export controls. So I will be more aggressive about export controls in, in exchange for, you know, yes, I want unfettered access to the best AI in classified contexts. Um, I'm still also very, very interested in the rollout of the, uh, the different models into classified contexts.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  It just feels like so, so crazy that, uh, Anthropic was able to get such a lead there. I know it's hard, but we have AI. Don't, just don't make mistakes, like, make it, make it compliant with FedRAMP. Uh, please, please do it. Don't make mistakes. Anyway, really quickly, 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.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Douglas says, why is everyone so mad at Chamath? All he did was lose billions in retail investors' money by promoting one-pageers packs. It's not like he then told them to enjoy their capital losses or anything. Give the man a break. Chamath says, yes, I did.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  The capital loss thing is so funny.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  He is on a rage baiting terror this morning.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  Yes, this is a hot tip. If you're going to be, if you're going to be talking about a financial asset, you need to not be specific about whether you're, whether you're advocating for a long position or a short position. So you just need to say, I got this company.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a winner.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  It's a winner. Now it's up to you. Are you going to buy puts or calls? One of them is going to be correct, but I'm not going to tell you which one, but you should look into it.

• 1:03:22Jordi Hays?

  That's on you.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  No. There are, there are a lot of, there are a lot of retail investors that are, that are upset, but Chamath is, is in the arena, fighting it out, duking it out on the timeline.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Dan Primack says the IPO market was expected to be huge this year, but so far pricings and filings are both down more than 20% year over year. Of course, we're just getting started. We have a number of bigger IPOs lined up. There was an interesting article in the Financial Times on the SpaceX IPO. Robyn shared SpaceX probably has revenues less than 20 billion and loses money after the merger with XAI, but is targeting a $1.75 trillion IPO. Alphaville explored how Musk might try to pull off what could be the biggest bag holder operation in history.

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  I love it. That's such a good one. Should we read through some of this?

• 1:04:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can read through it.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  First, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team.

• 1:04:26Jordi Hays?

  In Alphaville, Craig says, "Star Trek's warp drive allows a starship to bend spacetime and exceed the speed of light without breaking Einstein's general theory of relativity. As SpaceX prepares to go public at a reported 1.75 trillion valuation, Elon Musk is attempting a comparable feat, defying the laws of financial gravity in pursuit of something the equity capital markets have never witnessed." The only thing I would immediately jump in on is Elon has been extremely consistent in being able to defy the financial laws of gravity. We've talked about this before, but Ben Thompson has said like he won't even cover Elon companies

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  as closely as, you know, or really at all in comparison to the traditional hyperscalers because.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  Go for it.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, what's interesting is that Ben Thompson has always kept stratechery out of politics. And so a lot of people read him not talking about Elon now in the modern era as like a political referendum. And that's not it. He wasn't covering Tesla before Elon said anything political because it was always defying financial gravity.

• 1:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  And it was always hard to actually.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Or the traditional laws of business.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  For early investors, bankers, employees and advisors, the fees, returns, prestige and bragging rights would be stratospheric at the mooted valuation. Even a tiny 3% float would comfortably eclipse the US IPO records set by Alibaba's $25 billion float in 2014. A rumored $50 billion raise sounds formidable until you consider how much larger public markets have become since Alibaba went public. Back then, Apple, then the world's most valuable publicly traded company, was worth around 600 billion. By the end of 2025, 10 companies had surpassed 1 trillion and Nvidia today around 4.5 trillion. The firepower clearly exists. Musk is arguably the most impactful entrepreneur of his generation and has built a remarkable company.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  The question isn't whether there will be demand for SpaceX stock, but rather what IPO investors would should pay. Based on what has been reported, this price being contemplated is truly out of this world. The super jumbo deal promises not to be a conventional exercise in price discovery. Musk has reportedly timed it to coincide with the alignment of the planets Jupiter, Venus and Mercury, but that's one of the more humdrum features. More to the point, the SpaceX IPO looks like a carefully controlled liquidity event, a solution for a centacorn whose scale has long since outgrown the confines of private capital. Moonshots and moonshine. The fundamental challenge for any investor is reconciling the company's financial performance with the sticker price at IPO.

• 1:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Last year, SpaceX generated an impressive 8 billion in EBITDA on 16 billion of revenue. However, the mothership has recently docked, this writing is quite colorful, with XAI, with the latter valued at 250 billion despite revenues of only 210 million and a cash burn of 9.5 billion for the first nine months of 2025. So I think they're sort of breaking out X or Twitter with this. Obviously with Twitter combined, it would be quite a bit more.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  I want to put this in the truth zone. So more to the point, the SpaceX IPO looks like a carefully controlled liquidity event, a solution for a centacorn. Centacorn is 100, centi. Are they in the hundreds of billions?

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  They still technically are.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  No, 1.75 trillion.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  No, but they're currently at 800.

• 1:07:59John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Okay. Well, anyway, once they go out, they're not going to be a centacorn anymore. We're going to need a new word. Do you know the word for 1,000 billions? It's going to be kilocorn.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Kilocorn.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  Kilocorn.

• 1:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Kilocorn.

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  I guess you could do millicorn too, but kilocorn is a good one. Gigacorn is, I think, a quadrillion dollar company would be, would be something like that. We'll get that eventually.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Musk marked up the private valuation of SpaceX to 1 trillion, citing increases in revenue from its Starlink broadband service.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Vindicated, vindicated, been marked up to a trillion. It's not a centacorn anymore. It's a kilocorn. Sorry.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but that, yeah, I guess you're right.

• 1:08:38John Coogan?

  Boom. Thank you.

• 1:08:39Jordi Hays?

  But that was, that was as part of the merger. I don't think there was a lot of primary capital, but yeah, you're vindicated. Perspective IPO investors would be expected to back valuation more than seven times higher than the approximately level recorded in October 2024. That would qualify as an astonishing rerating in any market. With these numbers and with SpaceX and XAI combination happening almost concurrently with the expected IPO, investors must make comic book heroic assumptions about sustained hypergrowth. Elon is the king of comic book heroic assumptions about sustained hypergrowth.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  The media has been guided to expect 2026 revenues of 22 to 24 billion. Given the likely mid-year timing, the investors will be pointing to 2027 projections, presumably with even punchier year-over-year growth.

• 1:09:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how how much Starlink is continuing to grow. Like, they're doing a lot of deals, but some of those deals are slow, some of those deals have to be big with the airlines and whatnot. It feels like, you know, the market for internet is so big that you're just getting more and more people. Like, I see them in Best Buy, and so you just have to imagine that every month, there's just more and more people signing up. And then once they sign up, they just let it ride for a long time or switch over full time. But that that switch from they are capturing 100% of the launch capacity. I think we have the the chart somewhere in here about SpaceX's revenues were basically completely flat because they were just like, yeah,

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  we did it. We we captured 100% of the launch market. If you want to launch something into space, you call us and we pay and you pay us, we have good margins. But it's not really growing because there aren't that many satellites to launch. And then they were like, we got an idea. What if we launched a thousand times more satellites than they did?

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, yeah, they they talk about the mother of all lockups.

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  They don't think a standard six-month lockup will cut it, and so they could see it being staggered. Facebook had a staggered lockup.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  I mean, there's just so many investors, so many employees, 20 years of stock grants, 20 years of investments going into this. Lots of people looking for liquidity, lots of people that will want to hold. But, you know, if you open the floodgates, like, yeah, that could be crazy for the stock. But I think that there's going to be so much excitement. The narrative is just so much clearer than than Tesla. Tesla's really had to, you know, retell the story around Cybertruck and Roadster and the truck, the delivery truck and autonomy, and then the Optimus robot, whereas like a scaled, you're going to space. If you believe in Mars, you're going to be a retail investor, you're going to buy the stock. Like, there's going to be a lot of people that are excited about this.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  And then also the AI narrative as well. So, we'll see.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, the only other thing here that they're kind of poking around at is index inclusion. NASDAQ has already signaled the desire to accommodate mega listings by proposing rule changes for the NASDAQ 100. NASDAQ, of course, willing to get a bit more aggressive than something like the S and P,

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  which has held back against rule changes.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  Well, in the past, Alphaville closes with five key questions for potential SpaceX investors. If you are thinking about investing in SpaceX once it goes public, you gotta ask yourself these five questions. First, what specific growth rates are required to support a $1.75 trillion valuation?

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Mars.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  That's a lot of smackaroos.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Mars.

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  That's not a growth rate.

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, that's, that is, yes, ignore, ignore traditional financial metrics.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Focus on Mars.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  What is the specific schedule for lockup expirations? When are you gonna see that? The timing, the number of shares, when are insiders gonna be selling? When is there gonna be selling pressure coming? And when, when, when might that affect your investment timing? Three, how quickly will SpaceX enter the indices and how much passive buying is expected?

• 1:12:56Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna Baja blast.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  They're gonna Baja blast directly into the S and P 500, directly into the Mag 7. It's gonna be Mag 8 on day one. They're gonna be in the QQQ. They're gonna be in every index and everyone's gonna buy it passively, potentially. Four, how much of the order book reflects genuine conviction versus marking the book, political signaling, or the search for a quick flip? How many of these people are here to stay? How many of them believe in Moon? How many of them believe in Mars? What's after Mars? Where are we going after that? Alpha Centauri, you know how long it takes to get there? It's like, what is it? It's like light years away. So like, it takes like years and years and years to get to Alpha Centauri.

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only other thing that was interesting here is they talked a little bit about retail allocations and the idea that retail would get a greater share of, of the actual initial offering.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  25 trillion miles away, so four light years. SpaceX isn't even close to going light speed yet, so you're looking at

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Got room to run.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Centuries to get to Alpha Centauri. And the last question, how much is being allocated to unconnected institutional investors? So, ask yourself those questions, then head over to Kalshi to Track when will SpaceX officially announce an IPO? Currently, before August 1st of 2026 is at 79%. So, uh, maybe September, maybe October, but, uh, it's coming. It's coming. Uh, Elon wants this one out in the public markets. 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.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  Moving on in the timeline, Mike Solana is, uh, reacting to the size of the Pokemon franchise. Have you ever played or watched or consumed anything from the Pokemon?

• 1:14:51Jordi Hays?

  I had a Pikachu Game Boy.

• 1:14:54John Coogan?

  You know, Pikachu Game Boy, did you have the, did you have the Pokemon yellow game cartridge?

• 1:14:59Jordi Hays?

  I had the goldish colored cartridge.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  Did you play the game?

• 1:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Did you finish it?

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, probably not.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  It was much more of a thing I'd pick it up for like a road trip and then I wouldn't.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  I think I had Pokemon Red and I think I did actually finish it. I think I got all the way through. I think I might've collected all 151 Pokemon or something in the original game. Then I kind of.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  You didn't have anything better to do when you were eight years old?

• 1:15:24John Coogan?

  No, I had not discovered locking in yet, uh, but regardless for our distaste for the Pokemon franchise, uh, it has become one of the biggest franchises in the world. It's of the world's highest grossing media franchises. Pokemon is bringing in $288 billion over the lifetime across films, games, toys, books and merchandise. Hello Kitty is languishing at a mere 88 billion. Winnie the Pooh, sad to see, I'm a Winnie the Pooh fan, uh, 76 billion. Mickey Mouse and Friends is up at 74. Star Wars is at 73 billion. How is Pokemon bigger than Star Wars?

• 1:16:05John Coogan?

  That is a shock to me, uh, but the rest are basically Disney properties across, uh, uh, across.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Is Pokemon, Pokemon is just much more global than Star Wars?

• 1:16:14John Coogan?

  I suppose, I suppose. Um, so Hunter says it's kind of insane how much bigger Pokemon is than any other media franchise. And Pan Man? I've never heard of this, but there's a Japanese superhero made of red bean bread that's apparently very popular. And Mike Solano says, "What's really insane is the franchise is this popular and you still can't buy the old games. No one has remade the original with new tech and gameplay. There are no Pokemon parks and there are no major blockbusters. There's probably half a trillion dollars on the table right now." Well, there was one Detective Pikachu did well in terms of film performance. I don't

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  know if there's a park, but remaking the original with new tech and gameplay, that's... There are two attempts. There's the mod retro chromatic where you can play the original. It's not remastered or built with new tech, but it is the original experience. And then you do have, they are releasing new Pokemon games on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and so, but they are completely different mechanics. Like you're walking around in 3D as opposed to this like top-down 2D. But Pokemon is interesting because it is the best critical review of a video game adaptation film in history. And so, for a very long

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  time Hollywood said, "Okay, we want to do films that have, they're bought in. They have audiences already. People know Batman, we'll just make another Batman movie and people will show up. The Avatar, we'll make Avatar 2, people will just show up because they're familiar with it." And people thought that that would apply to video games, and so they adapted a ton of video games. Final Fantasy, Doom, and they all, some of them did okay financially, but almost all of them were panned critically. And what wound up happening was, this was true for like a decade or two. Like Lara Croft, the Tomb Raider. I think it did financially well, but everyone was like, "Ah, it's not really that great of a movie. It's not gonna win awards." Then Pokemon came out, got pretty good reviews,

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  I think like 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, something like that. And then Last of Us, directed by Craig Mazin, who had done Chernobyl on HBO, started winning critical awards. The first season was very well reviewed, the second season... Is sort of half of the second game and I don't think was reviewed as well, but is still at that level of like critical acclaim generally. So anyway.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's get into some important calculations prior to Germinator joining.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  First, Tyler, do you believe in straight lines on log graphs?

• 1:18:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  You do? Okay. So we have some straight lines on log graphs here. We have graphed out the price of the cheapest MacBook and they're getting cheaper.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Ethan over at SF Compute.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  We have a graph that is, that is log linear.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Ethan ran numbers.

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  And Ethan Anderson plotted the most expensive McDonald's burger versus the least expensive MacBook over time. And the analysis projects that the most expensive burger will be more expensive than the cheapest laptop as soon as 2081. Do you think this is true?

• 1:19:26Speaker 03

  I mean, like, honestly, okay, like you're not seeing exponential growth in cattle, right? But you are seeing it in compute.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 03

  So like, this is not like, you know.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  I think it's actually possible. Ad-supported MacBook could be free, you know?

• 1:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Ad-supported burger.

• 1:19:41John Coogan?

  Ad-supported burger.

• 1:19:42Jordi Hays?

  No one's tried this.

• 1:19:43John Coogan?

  Yes. Is that, would that be you eat it and then you have this sudden urge to go buy a MacBook? Or are there just MacBook ads all over the, all over the container?

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could kind of imprint a logo on the bone or something.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Well, we have the perfect person to talk about MacBooks getting cheaper with. First, let me tell you about Vanta. Automated Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. We have Mark Germain, the Germinator, his journalist at Bloomberg, and he's here in the TDP in UltraDome. How are you doing, Mark?

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:20:14Mark Gurman?

  Doing good. Wearing my Apple sweater today in honor of the conversation.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Very nice. And what is behind you? You're in Los Angeles?

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Has there actually ever been a day where it didn't make sense to wear your Apple hoodie?

• 1:20:27Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, like if I go to a Google event or a Meta event or something, I'd probably not wear the Apple hoodie, you know? But uh.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Well, so take us through your predictions. Anything that surprised you? What was actually released? Like, what have the last few days been like for you?

• 1:20:42Mark Gurman?

  Last few days have been interesting. You know, 6:00 AM Pacific time, they've rolled out the new products. Monday started off with the iPhone 17E and the M4 iPad Air. Tuesday, obviously, was a big Mac day with the M5 Pro or M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, the M5 MacBook Air and the two new studio displays. Then we got the big one yesterday on Wednesday, obviously, the MacBook Neo. In terms of surprises, there were no surprises. These were a bunch of products that had a lot of pent-up demand. They needed to roll out a new iPad Air. Sales have been flagging there a little bit. It was time for them to roll out the iPhone 17E. And obviously, this new cheap MacBook has been in the works for several years.

• 1:21:26Mark Gurman?

  MacBook Pros with the M5 Pro and M5 Max, some may have expected that last October because that's traditionally when they've done the MacBook Pro updates. But this time around, the chips weren't ready until recently. They use this newer generation TSMC fabrication technology. So those rolled out for the spring. So overall, a really nice set of updates. Think it'll help Apple have a really strong quarter. Remember, they guided an extremely strong March quarter. We had a feeling we knew why, but now we know why for sure because all these products are now hitting the market. And I think at 600 bucks, at 500 for education, the MacBook Neo is going to be a game changer, not only for the computer industry, but for Apple's bottom line.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Was there any conversation about Mac Minis?

• 1:22:11Mark Gurman?

  No, no, just on Twitter. Everyone wants a new Mac Mini for, yeah, OpenClaw and all the AI stuff and everything going on there. There'll be a Mac Mini this year, but I'm not expecting it until closer to the end of the year.

• 1:22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm just thinking of like, if you get a Mac Mini, you need to plug it into something. You need a display, you need a keyboard, mouse. Like, there's a lot of extra features that drive up the cost. And it's, people aren't actually buying them for the power of the Mac Mini. They're buying it just to be able to interface with iMessage. And so the MacBook Neo might actually sort of displace the Mac Mini potentially because you have, I mean, not if you're wiring them all together or something. But I'm wondering if there's any like odd, unpredictable, orthogonal purchasers of Neo? Or is it just like the Chromebook market? But I don't know.

• 1:22:58Mark Gurman?

  Well, I think it's a secondary computer market also, right? Like, I have this big 16-inch MacBook Pro that I need to look around. For 500 bucks, I can get something at half the weight and, you know, half the volume. And if I really need it to take to an event or for a flight and have macOS, something a little bit more formidable than iPadOS, it's a great alternative. So, probably not going to do it. I'm saving my Mac budget, I think, for this big MacBook revamp in the fall, the touchscreen version of the MacBook Pro with OLED. I don't really need the Neo. I can definitely get it. I really wanted it. But definitely, I think it's going to do well and crush the Windows PC market, right? I mean, if you look at the price points...

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is it surprising that it took this long to come out with a device that was going straight for the jugular with the everyday PC market?

• 1:23:53Mark Gurman?

  I think you finally had alignment on the chip side to be able to do something like this. And the A18 Pro that just came out a couple of years ago, that is on par with an iPhone or a Mac-grade chip, right? You can really run benchmarks and see that it's probably close to an M1 or M2 or even M3 in some, you know, single-thread use cases. So, that chip coming out and Apple rewriting macOS a few years ago to be able to run on these ARM-based chips as part of the transition away from Intel is what allowed this to all come together. So, it took a long time. This would have been very difficult for them to pull off in the Intel days. Would have been very difficult for them to pull off five years ago.

• 1:24:37Mark Gurman?

  But, once they had alignment on all of those factors, they were able to do it. One thing that they didn't really talk about yesterday with the launch is another factor here was a new aluminum-based manufacturing process that has basically allowed them to save more aluminum, reuse aluminum scrap metal, and build these machines in volume while saving a lot of the manufacturing costs. And so, that's a big part of how they...

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Should I buy a MacBook Pro? Or should I wait for this touchscreen OLED new fangled thing that you just described? You humbled me by telling me that my MacBook Air did not have a good display. I never want to make the same mistake ever again. But at the same time, I'm not really convinced that I need a touchscreen. What's the trade off right now?

• 1:25:28Mark Gurman?

  Well, you've got the what, the 13 inch Air, remind me, or the 15 inch Air?

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  15 inch Air.

• 1:25:32Mark Gurman?

  It's a good machine.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  I got the big, I got the big, small one. The small, big one. I don't know.

• 1:25:37Mark Gurman?

  It's a good machine. It's a good computer, sir. Yeah, I mean, I think you just wait for the OLED. I mean, we're talking about screens here. You want to have the best screen, it's the OLED. Whether you use the touch or not, it's a breakthrough difference. You know, one thing on the, on the MacBook Neo, the discrete technology that they're using is actually a different type of screen tech than what you're getting on the Air.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:58Mark Gurman?

  And so I would say the Air is like pretty, like down the middle, it's pretty good.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03Mark Gurman?

  The OLED is like huge step above and the screen tech they're using on the MacBook Neo, it's a step below. And if you've, like if you use the Pro, the Air is not going to look so good compared to the Pro.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Mark Gurman?

  If you use an Air, you're going to see the Neo screen and you're going to be like, this is a par.

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. That makes sense. Talk about the naming for Neo. It's the first time Apple's ever used that phrase. They had Nano right there. They didn't go Nano. What do you think they mean by Neo? Why that term? How's the response been?

• 1:26:35Mark Gurman?

  I think they wanted something cool and futuristic. I wanted, I think they wanted something to show that this was something entirely new. And I think they were looking for a new, cooler term than SE. SE had been sort of their term for these low cost products in the past. You have the Apple Watch SE. They used to have the iPhone SE. So they're clearly trying to move away from that SE naming. And it seems to me like Neo is that replacement. So I wouldn't necessarily be surprised if we eventually see them rename the low end products to all be part of that Neo. Family. And so what they've basically done is they have like Neo with the base. Air is the midterm and Pro is the high end. And then they've got things like Ultra and Max

• 1:27:17Mark Gurman?

  to differentiate further at the high end. And so I think this strategy they've always had, which was good, better, best, you know, low spec, mid spec, high spec. They just have their fancy marketing names for it. And I think Neo is a really great name. And just like Air was a super catchy name back in 2008 when Jobs unveiled the first MacBook Air. Now that Air name is across the whole portfolio, Neo has that same potential. It's three letters, it's cool, it's memorable.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  But if I were Tabula Raza in charge of naming products at Apple, and I was given the iPhone lineup, I would probably go iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Air, which is not what they did. They just did iPhone Air. Then iPhone 17, and then iPhone 17 Neo, because I like this new term. Instead, they did 17E, they did Air with no number. What's the thought there?

• 1:28:09Mark Gurman?

  Well, I feel like on the phone, they've always just been completely all over the place on name. They've basically become like Samsung or Android. I remember when they launched the iPhone, what was it? The XS Max, iPhone XS Max, right? And you have the Pro Max, right? So you're jumbling a bunch of names together. I think over time, it'll become a little bit clearer. In terms of iPhone naming conventions, those are harder to strip away because you have case makers, you have carriers, you have people around the world who are used to these naming conventions. So changing the naming structure on the phone is much more difficult than doing it on something like the Mac or the iPad. But I'm sure they'll get there eventually for simplicity.

• 1:28:54Mark Gurman?

  You know, they're still doing new.

• 1:28:55Jordi Hays?

  What's playing out right now in the low end of the smartphone market in the US?

• 1:29:02Mark Gurman?

  Well, the low end of the smartphone market in the US is not so great. I mean, you've got some Samsungs there. You've got some of the phones made from some of the Chinese phone makers that people are importing here. But in terms of the price point, Apple really abandoned the low end of the phone market. At some point, you had, I believe the SE was 350 bucks. Then it eventually went up to 430 bucks. Now it's 600 bucks. So I would say Apple has basically given up on the low end of the phone market. They're playing in what we call the mid-tier of the phone market.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  It's so interesting to go low end on the computer, on the PC side, but not, but stop competing on the low end on the phone side. Just given that, I don't know, I mean, growing up, there was just like such a big divide. It was like it was, Apple PCs were luxury products. They really didn't care about the low end.

• 1:29:59John Coogan?

  Calling it an Apple PC is hilarious.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Personal computer.

• 1:30:03Mark Gurman?

  The divide is gone now. And you know what I think this Mac Book Neo is going to do? It's not only going to help with Mac sales, but it's going to sell a lot more iPhones and Apple Watches and iPads. It's going to bring a lot more people into the ecosystem. So, you know, for Apple from a business standpoint, you know, they've always said they're not going to cheap ship, you know, cheap products to chase market share. That's clearly changed. Apple needs to do bigger and bolder things to expand its business and grow. They're in new markets, you know, Eastern Europe, developing parts of Asia, India obviously is a big focus there. I think eventually there'll be, you know, in Africa as well. So clearly they had to do this. It was decent timing for them.

• 1:30:44Mark Gurman?

  And, you know, there's all these concerns about recession, you know, war and everything going on right now. So a $600 MacBook, I think, you know, pretty timely.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  What's new since we last talked on any kind of leaks or insights on their AI strategy in the rollout of the new Gemini-powered Siri?

• 1:31:05Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, the Gemini powered Siri was supposed to launch this month. They were supposed to hold an event in New York about two weeks ago to walk press through the new Siri. They've continued to face delays there. It was originally supposed to come out in iOS 26.4, which is scheduled for the end of this month. Now they're still splitting the features, but they've punted it to 26.5, which is supposed to come out May, June WWDC timeframe. So potentially some features then, and then the rest of the features coming out at the tail end of the year as part of iOS 27. My bet is that nothing significant will really probably come out until iOS 27.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:46Mark Gurman?

  Not great.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is that, is that good?

• 1:31:49Mark Gurman?

  No, that's not good. No, that's not good.

• 1:31:53Jordi Hays?

  Is part of that, is part of that just like the management shakeups? You have new leadership, you know, basically?

• 1:31:58Mark Gurman?

  New leadership, and it's sort of like, you know, we've taken this long. It's only going to be worse if we release it and it doesn't work. Big other questions are like, do people really care at this point? People are just going to use the ChatGPT or the Anthropic app or the Gemini app anyways. Our AI hardware is industry leading. We can run all these third-party models on the phones through applications. Anyways, we might as well wait until we get it right. Thing with Apple's AI strategy, if you were to say that this was a strategy, then, you know, it's a pretty good look for them. But this hasn't been the strategy. They fell ass backwards into it, to be completely honest with you, right? The intention was never to fail, to fail upwards.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, but they did. It's, yeah, it's fascinating.

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Strategy, we fail upwards.

• 1:32:43John Coogan?

  For now, for now, yeah. But I mean, they have to be looking at the, at the revenue curves of, of ChatGPT and OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 1:32:53Mark Gurman?

  Pretty significant. I mean, that is the growth lever for them.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a, is a huge growth lever. It's a huge market. And you can see the way Mark Zuckerberg's positioning to like, make a real play into Gen AI in some meaningful way. And he's taken a very, very different approach, been honestly slower on actually releasing features, but just feels like he's taking it a lot more seriously. There's a lot more DNA there.

• 1:33:17Jordi Hays?

  How much are you planning to cover OpenAI's hardware? Is that going to be in your territory at Bloomberg?

• 1:33:25Mark Gurman?

  Front and center.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  Front and center. Okay, so give us, give us your, how have you processed the kind of the leaks?

• 1:33:30Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Jordi Hays?

  We had, uh, we had the, the dime leak around the Super Bowl, which looked like-

• 1:33:36Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, I don't think it was real. I mean, I don't, everyone I spoke to says this is not a real product. Uh, it's-

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then Joe Gebbia is sitting there in San Francisco using it like this week at a coffee shop.

• 1:33:49Mark Gurman?

  That was weird.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Didn't exactly look the, like, the most organic.

• 1:33:52Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, there's a lot of conspiracy around it.

• 1:33:54Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then if, if the, if the dime ad was fake-

• 1:33:58Mark Gurman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Then it was an incredibly good model, because I forget the name of that actor, but-

• 1:34:05Mark Gurman?

  Skarsgård?

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  Skarsgård.

• 1:34:07Mark Gurman?

  Skarsgård, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  But it didn't look, it, it looked like, okay, leading frontier video model.

• 1:34:12Mark Gurman?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe it's the teaser or their models, but like, here's the thing. Yeah. The hardware is gonna be beautiful. Yeah. We know the hardware's gonna look great. Yeah. It's gonna be designed by Love From, Johnny I've, all those guys, the former Apple people. There's no questions there. The question is, who's gonna buy these things, right? Like, are people really gonna trust OpenAI as a hardware company? And Apple has this ability to fast-follow. Let's say OpenAI does come out with something pretty nifty, what stops Apple from copying it immediately and taking all their market share? Apple has the retail stores, they have the privacy story, they have the brand. Yep. OpenAI has this great AI brand, but they don't have the hardware brand. And so it's almost like they have the opposite problem of Apple, but the leg up they have is that their underlying technology is clearly better.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's this new, there's, there's rumors around their new, uh, voice model that they're working on. And so the question, the question to me is like, can they create a beautiful device and have a meaningful breakthrough on the model side? That somehow makes it, uh, more difficult for Apple to just fast-follow, right?

• 1:35:18Mark Gurman?

  Well, I would say, you know, for sure, yes on point A, for sure, yes on point B. Maybe yes, maybe no on Apple's ability to fast follow based on the models. But I just think the bar to sell people hardware, even if it's good and even if it comes from a big brand.

• 1:35:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:36Mark Gurman?

  It's a really high bar.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:37Mark Gurman?

  It's a really high bar to sell in these Apple-like quantities.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:41Mark Gurman?

  I mean, even look at Google in terms of their market share on their hardware.

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:45Mark Gurman?

  They have amazing software and they have amazing hardware and they have the best advertising for consumer electronics. Uh, for phones at least in a very long time.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  They're a great brand, too.

• 1:35:55Mark Gurman?

  I think we talked about the ads last time I was with you guys.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:58Mark Gurman?

  And, uh, they've made little to no dent.

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Mark Gurman?

  And obviously there's big questions there, that Google should even be doing hardware.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and Meta Ray-Bans too. You open up Instagram and you see like a full bleed special modal ad for Meta Ray-Bans and they're doing okay, but it's not, you know, eighty percent of the population.

• 1:36:17Mark Gurman?

  The Meta Ray-Bans are considered a smash hit and they've sold fewer than ten million units.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not a lot, yeah.

• 1:36:23Mark Gurman?

  Uh, Apple sells ten million units of, uh, AirPods.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Socks.

• 1:36:28Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, probably a quarter.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:31Mark Gurman?

  So the bar is just unbelievably high.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with the Meta, with the lawsuit with Meta? Uh, they had contractors that were just able to view the recordings of Meta Ray-Ban users.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  I missed that.

• 1:36:46Jordi Hays?

  I haven't, I haven't covered it or haven't followed it very closely.

• 1:36:49Mark Gurman?

  It's crazy. This is reminiscent of when people figured out that Apple with Siri and Amazon with Alexa and Google with Gemini had these folks, they're called, um, annotation analysts who listen to everything you're putting into the voice assistant and they're comparing it to the outputs. So they're listening to the raw audio and comparing it to the outputs of what Siri thought they said. And so they're able to correct it manually in order to improve the underlying model.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:21Mark Gurman?

  And that was a big blockbuster when everyone discovered that that was happening a few years ago. This is not audio, this is camera footage. This is people potentially in, uh, you know, intimate moments. And this is not just what you're saying or facing you. It's what you're seeing while wearing these glasses everywhere. And so I think that raises Really big questions about the smart glasses category. When Apple releases their smart glasses, they're going to have a big focus on privacy, a big focus on seeing the surrounding environment for you. At the same time, though, I don't think that this changes the overall equation for smart glasses. I still think that this has been a successful pioneering product for Meta. I still think they're pushing forward here.

• 1:38:06Mark Gurman?

  I still think they're going to release several new models that I'm, you know, based on what I'm hearing are pretty exciting there, too, for the Meta smart glasses. But will they need to make some privacy adjustments? Yes, but I think in this case with the smart glasses, the first mover advantage is real and Meta has that. And in terms of glasses, they've got the biggest partner with X-Real Luxottica.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the Studio Display XDR. Is this a complete replacement for the Pro Display XDR? Okay, and how are they pitching this?

• 1:38:38Mark Gurman?

  Well, this is, it's pretty expensive, right? $3,300, but it's still much better than what you had before. Remember when they announced the Pro Display XDR? People lost their collective minds when the stand, right? So you got the monitor for five grand, but then the stand came separate, which is ridiculous. And that was a thousand on its own. People lost their minds. And now you can get two MacBook Neos for the same price as the stand with an education discount. So now they've been able to go a little bit down market on the monitor. The resolution isn't as high as what they had before. It's not like they went up to a 7K. You have a 27-inch panel instead of a 32-inch panel.

• 1:39:20Mark Gurman?

  There's a lot of savings on the shipping and logistical side and the product engineering side with those products. So I think this new Studio Display XDR is going to be pretty popular. I'm actually probably going to get one myself for my office at home. So I'm pretty pumped for it.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  So grab the Studio Display XDR, but maybe wait on the MacBook Pro.

• 1:39:39Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, you know, I need the most reference monitor like quality. I need medical image. Need all of that, you know, for my very intense engineering work and lives.

• 1:39:48Jordi Hays?

  I ordered, I ordered the new MacBook Pro Max.

• 1:39:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  I got forty-eight gigs of RAM. It was like six fifteen AM. I was at the gym. I just went through the order flow pretty quickly because I wanted to be first in line and then I realized I didn't max out the RAM. And I tried and then I was on was Apple support saying, hey, can you just switch me for the version with with more RAM? And they said, I was not feeling the AGI in that moment because they said, you have to cancel your order and re- and place a new order and lose your spot in line. By this point, it was like five, six hours later. And I was like, how, how, how do we not have the technology for this?

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Swap this, yeah.

• 1:40:31Mark Gurman?

  It is, it is wild. But so, question for you, why get this M5 version knowing that they'll have a M6 version with OLED in touch in six months?

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  I cannot stand when people touch the screen of my computer. And so, I don't even want to, I don't want to give them another reason. They already seemingly have enough reasons. People come around here at the office, they're they're pointing and stuff on the screen. I don't, I don't want them, I don't want them to even be tempted. So. No, I mean, I, I, I just look at, I, I think that computers are these amazing things that we use for something like eight hours every single day. At least of the, of the work week and the, their, their cost relative to the value is just so extreme that if the new device comes out in the fall and it's amazing, then I would just get that.

• 1:41:23Mark Gurman?

  All right, fine. Maybe I'm gonna have to get the M5 one two to hold over to the M6. But you know, one thing we didn't talk about is, you know, Samsung has this new S26s.

• 1:41:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Mark Gurman?

  Uh, the Ultra version, it has this privacy display on it.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. No, I haven't, I haven't actually seen the demo. I've heard of it. It sounds amazing. Explain.

• 1:41:38Mark Gurman?

  The pixels turn off in certain places. So if someone's reaching over and looking at your screen, not touching it, but looking at your screen, they won't be able to see what's going on.

• 1:41:49John Coogan?

  So on, like in Control Center, if you're on a plane, you can basically, you know how you have that polarized screen protector? You can effectively turn that on in software dynamically. So you're on the plane and you say, yeah, I don't want this person reading my emails. Turn that feature on. It probably gets a little bit dimmer, maybe a little bit blurrier. But then when you're just hanging out by yourself, you can turn that feature off and get the full display resolution. Yeah, really, really. That's got to come to Apple soon. But talk about fast following.

• 1:42:18Mark Gurman?

  Soon is wrong. Soon is wrong. Don't forget. This is, this is the interesting thing about Samsung, right? Where they are the component maker and the hardware maker and the component supplier to Apple. There are certain things they're not going to want to give to Apple.

• 1:42:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:42:33Mark Gurman?

  It's a, it's a competitive advantage for their own hardware. We saw this with OLED many years ago where it took Apple, I think, four or five years to get OLED after Samsung.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:41Mark Gurman?

  Right? Apple does basically OLED transition a year or two ago.

• 1:42:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Mark Gurman?

  On the phones at least. They haven't even done OLED yet on, on the Mac. They've only done OLED on one iPad. They'll have it on a second iPad this year and the others in the next couple of years. But this privacy display is, I think, a hot feature and it's going to be a few years at least before Apple's able to, to get it.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is my, my overall skepticism. Like, I completely agree with you on the idea that it's very hard to sell tens of millions of units of a new consumer hardware. But I just am not necessarily buying the idea that Apple can fast follow things that work because it took them a decade to get a VR headset out and it wasn't a smash hit. And like, they, you know, they, they are like, you know, at least a few years behind on even the most basic little implementation features that happen.

• 1:43:28Mark Gurman?

  Well, you know, let's say OpenAI does earbuds and they have these remarkable AI features. You know, Apple could cook up some new models with Google and try to get. In software, you know, within a year.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's hard to imagine the the suite of Apple products on your body across vision, watch, phone in your pocket, laptop and AirPods, like not being able to satisfy like your demand for AI. So I completely agree with you on that.

• 1:43:57Mark Gurman?

  The question is, are like, do people actually want these things, right? Like, we talk about these AirPods with cameras, we talk about these smart glasses, we talk dependent, we talk about a pin, talk about whatever.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Smart cane, staff.

• 1:44:09Mark Gurman?

  Yeah, I mean, none of this is, they're not proven, these are not proven products.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:14Mark Gurman?

  Right? Seven million units on Meta glasses is really successful, but it's not proven at at at Apple quality and Apple caliber. I mean, there could be a situation, look back a few years from now, like, say, this whole AI hardware thing was just a big, you know, whatever, and people are just glued to these things. So we'll have to see what happens, but at least Apple's gonna give it a shot.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on a busy day.

• 1:44:40Jordi Hays?

  Always fantastic to see you.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Always great to see you.

• 1:44:41Mark Gurman?

  Guys.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  And have a great rest of your week.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Mark.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:44:45Mark Gurman?

  See you next time.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. Let me also tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. And without further ado, we are joined by Dan Primack.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  A legend.

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  From Axios. Dan, how you doing?

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Hey, what's going on? Good. How you guys doing?

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time to come to that with us.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  Great. Long, long overdue.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Long overdue. First time on the show, crazy.

• 1:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, story from this morning. Yeah, TV, TV virgin here.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, crazy.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, story from breakfast this morning. I was talking with John, uh, when we were looking over the schedule, and I was telling him, uh, when I first got on Twitter in college, I followed a bunch of VCs as one does, and, you know, I see them every day, you know, talking about, oh, I backed this company at seed or series A. And you were the first person to really highlight, like, oh, man, you know, like, some of these numbers aren't looking that great.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  Sometimes they don't meet, they don't beat the S and P 500.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you were the, I initially had some cognitive dissonance, but, uh, came around to your, uh, VC returns true thing over time.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  But that's a good place to start. All right. What, yeah, what is the health of the, of the VC industry, the VC market?

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  I mean, it's not great, right? We reported the other day, you know, that median returns are are under the S and P 500, they're under the NASDAQ, they're under the Russell 3000 for 25 years. And I know there's a little bit of lumpiness because you know, you're coming out of certain things. That's coming out of kind of the great financial crisis, but that was true for the public markets as well. So it's not great. Now, look, you know, top, top funds in those top 5% they're doing great. But the reality is you've got so much more money flooding into the market now. That means more money is going to be at that median, and that's not great for them. And and it's, you know, you're talking 401ks, you're talking more money coming from insurance companies, etc. It's not a great place to be. It's one LP told me, and this is what I use, it's kind

• 1:46:46Speaker 05

  of the the story of hope over experience. And that's what venture capital seems to be right now.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about that money that's flooding into VC because there's smaller funds that had a particular playbook that have scaled up massively become growth funds. There's stuff that there's the crossovers, there's SPVs, there's strategics, like, what is the shape of the venture capital funding boom over the last few years?

• 1:47:10Speaker 05

  I mean, it's hard to even define what venture capital is anymore, right? Like, I mean, can you say that somebody who's putting half a million dollars into, you know, a founding team of maybe two people in a garage, is that the same as giving, you know, $10 billion to OpenAI? I mean, they're not even vaguely the same industry, but they're all quote venture capital. But there is an enormous amount of money, and it's coming from everywhere, right? You know, it used to be that if you wanted exposure to venture capital, you had to, you know, either be an institutional investor, or have a friend, and be very high net worth. At this point, you can get some exposure to this stuff by just having a fidelity mutual fund, right? You know, fidelity contra fund has a bunch of quote unquote startups in it, you know, and what's coming soon out of the Trump administration is letting your 401k plan invest in private funds. Now, are they going to actually invest in individual funds?

• 1:47:55Speaker 05

  Will they try to kind of put money into pools? Unclear, it hasn't happened yet. But but there's a huge, it's a lot of money coming, and it's the thing that venture capitalists and private equity firms have viewed as kind of the holy grail forever, because they haven't had access to any of, you know, that defined contribution money.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  So when you saw the news, you jumped out of your chair and you said, yes, finally my 401k will be deployed into venture capital.

• 1:48:17Speaker 05

  I mean, look, this is the moment when traditional limited partners in venture capital have been, if not getting out, at least trying to give themselves some optionality, right? You've seen some of kind of the biggest endowments, Yale, Harvard, et cetera, do big secondary sales of their private equity and venture portfolios. They're not getting out, but they're recognizing they were a little bit too concentrated. And so it's the very minute when some of the smartest money is, if not leaving, at least hesitating, that, I hate to say it, all the dumb money is about to come flooding in.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  So what does that mean for this K-shaped dynamic that we see in venture capital where there's a few funds that are getting bigger, they still have solid returns, and then smaller managers seem to be getting crushed, but what are you actually seeing?

• 1:48:57Speaker 05

  I mean, I think that's what we're going to continue to see, but, and this is where the hope over experience part comes in. The best returns still, in terms of actual cash on cash, are still the young funds, right? It's not the, it's not the firm that invested in SpaceX two years ago, it's the firm that invested in SpaceX eight years ago, and those are generally smaller funds. Granted, it was Founder's Fund, but they were small at the time. So it is, that's still where those massive, massive returns that when people think of venture capital, what they're thinking about, you know, if you invested a, you know, half a trillion dollar valuation in a company that you hope is going to go public at a trillion, that's nice. I mean, 2X is nothing to sneeze at, right? You'd be happy that would, that's not a venture capital return. That's not the reason you have this, you know, the illiquidity premium on venture capital.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the shape of the illiquidity premium, this, like, around, like, recently in recent fundraises? I mean, everyone goes back to the 2 and 20, but there's obviously a dispersion around that. What are you seeing?

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  I mean, there is. I mean, the decision, the problem is, is what that illiquidity is right now, because it used to be, you'd think you're invested in a startup, depending on the stage, right? But say from inception, you know, seven years, maybe, that sounded about right, at which point, maybe it worked, and if it worked, that means an IPO, or that means a sale, or if it didn't work, it didn't work, and that's understood because it's venture capital. Now, though, you've got companies, you know, decade, you know, 15 years old, and You've got lots of limited partners in these companies or in these funds who are looking and saying, I've got great paper returns. These things are amazing on paper, but I keep going to my investment committee and you know, say you're a college endowment, right? And your job is to produce money that then gets used by the school every year, right?

• 1:50:35Speaker 05

  It's not to take money out of the core endowment, it's to produce returns that then can be used to fund operations. And the investment committee keeps looking at you and saying, yeah, you keep giving us these great numbers. We need cash. We gave you cash. We would like cash back. And, and the managers just kind of have to shrug and go, you know, Stripe doesn't want to go public, you know, what, what can we do?

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  But it's changing this year, right? We might get like four trillion dollars of liquidity this year between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic. Walk me through the maybe. What, what's at stake?

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Before, before you jump in there, I did have a story. There's a friend of mine that I, that I've invested with in the past. And he started to look at some new investments. And he's closer to 60 than he is 50. And so he's starting to run the numbers and being like, do I really care to make, assume this goes incredibly well? Do I really care to get a 10x when I'm 75? Like at, at, at some point, he's like, I might just leave it in the market and, and go play another round of golf.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  So that's a real thing. How much on the, on the LP, when you have a conversation with LPs? So much of the reason that I personally have invested in a bunch of startups and some funds is, is basically FOMO. And like, there's like the, there's the healthier dynamic, which is like generally I meet a founder that I'm excited about and I want to support them. And usually money is the most effective way to do that, at least at, at scale. But a lot of it is just kind of FOMO. And, you know, venture is a small part of the money that they are allocating. And they just want to be able to tell their friends or their, or their, or their fund that they're in all the great names.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  And I don't actually care if it underperforms a little bit if I have something to talk about at dinner.

• 1:52:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, look, a limited partner doesn't necessarily care about that, right? The FOMO piece, their job, they literally get paid based on if they outperform a benchmark, whatever that benchmark might be. So that's really where they care. And on the FOMO side, I mean, there is this old story going back to like, I don't know, mid 2000s where Harvard stopped investing with Excel, the big Silicon Valley firm. They were limited Excel for something they had done in terms of kind of splitting some funds and not giving money back. They were mad and they wanted to make a big point of not investing. So the next fund for Excel, the one that Harvard very loudly did not invest in, is the one that seeded Facebook, right? So that didn't work out very well for them. So, you know, the FOMO thing is real. I will say, I mean, you asked, what, you asked about the crossovers earlier? I mean, there is this part of the market, right? The fidelities, the T-Row prices of the world.

• 1:53:15Speaker 05

  And the reason they're investing largely in these companies isn't for the return necessarily on those startup stocks. It's to have a nice foothold if and when the company does go public, right? And to have a relationship with the company. So then they can take a really big position. Then they can, you know, get their mutual fund clients and their high net worth clients access into the IPO.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  So is that more about context to talk to their clients? So a fidelity has a bunch of high net worth individuals with accounts and they can say, hey, we've been investing in this company while they were private, so we can bring a more confident thesis to bear?

• 1:53:48Speaker 05

  No, I think it's literally access. I think it's literally access. I think they'll, I think what this often means is because they have a relationship. And if you've got a very, you know, if you've got an issuer that's oversubscribed for an IPO, it's a very popular IPO, the company's got to make decisions. Who gets an allocation and what those allocations are? And what if you're a fidelity or T-Row, what you really want is to be able to go to your existing clients and say, we've, you know, we've got, you've got access to the OpenAI IPO if you want it. Do you want it? And then the client's like, oh, they, you know, they had access to OpenAI. I like these guys. I'm going to stick with them, et cetera. That's what they want. They want the relationship and they want, and they can say to the CEO, look, we believed in you six years ago. Of course, we still believe in you today. We're a long-term investor.

• 1:54:27John Coogan?

  So talk about the IPO market. Is it over or are we back?

• 1:54:32Speaker 05

  It's slow. I mean, if you look, I mean, despite the fact that with this little boom in January, in terms of both number of pricings, in terms of filings, we're down over 20% in both of those year over year from last year, which was a garbage year for IPOs. Yeah, so everybody is looking at the big dogs, right? Everybody's looking at SpaceX, uh, everybody, you know, coming sooner. Everybody's looking at potentially OpenAI or Anthropic. I think Databricks is another one that people are sleeping on. That's almost certainly going to come in the second half of this year. So I think what we might end up with is a really skewed IPO market. You know, the dollar numbers are going to look good, uh, because you're going to have some huge ones, but you're not necessarily going to have an enormous number of actual issuers, at least at this moment. I mean, it's pretty dead. We've got one coming tonight. That's all for the week.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Is that because?

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Who's tonight?

• 1:55:15Speaker 05

  Uh, tonight's something called MiniMed, not a venture-backed startup. It's a diabetes management spin-out, Medtronic.

• 1:55:20John Coogan?

  Is that because like you sort of have, uh, some sort of liquidity premium for the first name to go out in a category like CoreWeave gets out and there's like the one public NeoCloud? And so that puts like the bar goes a lot higher for the next three NeoClouds to get out, something like that?

• 1:55:37Speaker 05

  I mean, I, I like, I would like to think that may, that that was a good argument or that that like that it's, that's that much. I think it's really a vibes thing and a cowardice thing. I've been writing this story now for three years, which is these companies are scared to go public. Bankers are scared to necessarily bring them, even though bankers are coin-operated and IPOs are good for them. They're a little bit scared of having a lousy IPO and then having a bad reputation off of it. And also, a lot of them are spending a lot of time on SpaceX because there's a lot of money in that for them. No, I think, I think people are scared. They're scared, you know, what if this doesn't work? It's going to be a lot more work. There's going to be a lot more scrutiny on us. Um, and, and I think folks have just been terrified of going public for years. I don't think that's necessarily changed.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, and then of course, uh, the choppiness of, of the market this year, the SaaS apocalypse narrative.

• 1:56:28Speaker 05

  But this is the problem, right? There's, there's going to be choppiness every year, right? You know, last April, you obviously had the liberation day stuff. Now you have a war, you have the SaaS problem. There's always going to be a reason to not go public. And I think a lot of people take that reason. You know, there's always something.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  What have you, what have you, uh, heard, uh, obviously bad, bad week to be fundraising in the middle, in the Middle East? How, how much are you looking at, at, uh, the war as having kind of like downstream impacts on capital flows? Do you think it's? You know, this started as like, you know, we thought it was gonna be a couple of days. Now, then it was a few weeks and now apparently it's looking like September. So who knows at that point?

• 1:57:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  And so many of the, like, every time I log on to X, there's a refinery that's, you know, on fire, things like that, which is kind of the economic engine for a lot of this capital.

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, I'll take kind of the counter argument, I think, on this, which is that one of the reasons that whether it be Saudi Arabia or Qatar, some of these other countries have decided to do so much venture capital slash private equity investing, particularly in the US. And by the way, it's worth noting, the folks who are doing these investments often are based in New York. They're not based in the Middle East, so it's not actually impacting their day-to-day lives, is because they want diversification from oil. So yeah, there could be some issues in terms of actual capital flows because people are like, oh, wait, we're gonna have less actual money coming through to invest. But at the same time, the point of diversification, and it's possible that what's happened over the past week or two, is gonna only kind of solidify that desire for diversification. Oh, wow, oil is our economy, we need other stuff.

• 1:58:04John Coogan?

  What should we read into Michael Grimes going back to Morgan Stanley?

• 1:58:09Speaker 05

  Ah, that you don't, that working for the White House is a complicated thing, you don't want to do it for too long. Beyond that, I mean, look, he's like, SpaceX is about to go public, you know, and there's gonna, and the thing is, the reason bankers love IPOs isn't for the IPO per se, although they like that, it's all the business that comes after that, right? It's the secondary offerings, it's the debt offerings, it's the acquisitions, because the companies now have a public stock and it's easier to buy stuff. It's all that other business. It's the reason everyone wants to be the left lead. And Grimes, you know, is an Elon banker and has been, and I think this is a great time for him. And for Morgan Stanley, it makes all the sense in the world to bring him back in the fold.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  There's also the wealth management piece, I believe, like after the Facebook IPO, you have a whole bunch of potential new clients, right?

• 1:58:55Speaker 05

  Yep, you do.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  And so there's, that's also a piece of Lead Left. What actually goes into winning Lead Left? Is that, is that, is it sort of power law distributed in the allocation or the amount of work? Or is it more of just like a symbolic title and everyone's sort of splitting it equally?

• 1:59:13Speaker 05

  I think there is more work. I think getting lead left and the reason, you know, that it's JP Morgan over Morgan Stanley or somebody is really the relationship usually between the CEO slash board and that particular banker, maybe that banking team. It's really a comfort thing. It's the first call, right? If something's not going well or something is going well, you need to have that one person. You don't want to have to call 10 bankers at 10 different banks to give them the same information. You want one source of information. They can be kind of the distributor to everybody else.

• 1:59:38John Coogan?

  What are you tracking on the other AI lab side? There's a whole bunch of rumors, Anthropic, OpenAI. What are you seeing on that side of the IPO market?

• 1:59:51Speaker 05

  On the IPO, I mean, I open there. I do think there is perceived, you mentioned earlier, this kind of first mover in a space. I do think there is a sense between Sam and Dario that going first might have some advantages to it. I think there could also be some disadvantages. I do think even though we all know the losses are huge, I think the market's going to be shocked when they actually see it in black and white from the companies, how large these losses are. But I, so I think there is a little bit of a race between the two of them. It's going to be a huge headline. It's going to be a huge story. OpenAI does seem to be a little ahead on that. When you look at, you know, they have a CFO who's done this before and Sarah Fryer, right? She helped take Square, now Block Public. She then ran Nextdoor. She's done this before. So I think that's going to be the story of the second half is going to be those two companies

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  maybe battling. And I do think OpenAI goes first, again, unless there's some extraneous event.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  You mentioned that companies are afraid of going public. Obviously, like at the high level, there's completely different equations around what SpaceX, OpenAI, how they're thinking about this. But at that sort of like mid-tier of Decicor and Centicor and the Stripes of the world, do they see that there's now infinite liquidity in the private markets to raise endlessly? Or are they more aware that their current investors, their VC backers are fine rolling everything into endless continuation vehicles so they can get profitable and operate as a highly venture-backed profitable company in the private markets for a long time?

• 2:01:22Speaker 05

  I think it's that. I think there's enough capital and they can get some. So it used to be one of the main reasons to go public outside. So there was two, right? One was get cash on the balance sheet. Well, as you say, there's tons of money in the private market. You can get cash. To be honest, probably easier in the private market than you can in the public market if you're a strong growth company. And then there was liquidity, not only for investors, but for early employees. That was always a very big deal, right? You know, how do you help get, you know, how do you help get money for these folks who have all these options? Well, you've got this kind of industry of secondary tenders, which has happened. Stripe does one annually. They did one, what, two weeks ago? So you can satisfy both of those problems now. So there's not a real great reason to go public if you're not somebody who really wants to. There are certain founders who like the idea of ringing that bell and being that CEO who does the quarterly

• 2:02:07Speaker 05

  earnings call. It's a feeling, you know, it's a big leagues thing, right? We've gotten the big leagues. It's what Bill Gurley, or I'm sorry, Fred Wilson used to talk about Uber, like, you know, get in the fucking ring, go public. But, you know, some folks, though, you know, if you're the Collison brothers, I'll end, if they ever do go public, I'll be kind of stunned. They don't want to. They clearly don't want to because they could have and they still could and they haven't. And I know when Sequoia Capital did kind of a quasi continuation vehicle about a year or two ago for Stripe, where they basically said to other investors, we'll buy your stock. You know, if you want to, we're going to buy your stock in this so you can get out. We want to double down. You know, I spoke to somebody over there. I said, how do you get out of this thing ever? Like, how do you, Sequoia, how do you ever get liquidity? And they said, well,

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  they're going to go public. And I said, what gives you the thought, what gives you any confidence in that? And there wasn't a great answer to it outside of just faith. And so, you know, I guess faith.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Faith. What about secondary fund growth, LP demand for secondary funds, even like the fee structure of secondary funds? Because it feels like so much lower risk if you're managing a fund that is just going to buy secondary, that's been priced by the best VCs, you're just following along, you're buying maybe at a little bit of a discount. Can you really justify two and 20 on that type of fund?

• 2:03:27Speaker 05

  To you or to me? Probably not, but can they to their investors? Apparently they can because that's what they generally get. Not always, but it's what they generally get. You know, the secondary market's interesting because even just probably like maybe say 10 years ago, it was still very much a oddage, small industry. You had a handful of firms that did it, that traded, you know, LP interests and venture capital funds or private equity funds, and a very small number who did direct secondaries, which is, you know, buying actual portfolios or individual company stocks from somebody else. Now it's this massive business and, and big private equity firms have gotten into it, right? So several years ago, Carlyle bought something called Alpinvest, which was a huge secondaries investor. EQT, which is kind of this private equity firm, most people in the States might not know about, but it's one of the biggest in the world. They just bought AES, which is this huge

• 2:04:09Speaker 05

  utility. They bought something called Collar Capital, which is one of the original secondaries firms to build up that practice. So it's, it's becoming a really mature marketplace. And, and it is another way that companies can stay private longer. It's also a way that, you know, institute that limited partners can get some liquidity so they can feed it back into the system. Otherwise, given the kind of the lack of, you know, so-called DPI, distribution of paid in capital, the whole market would grind to a halt because a lot of these investors haven't been able to get their money back via traditional means.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  Do you think we will see a well-known venture capital firm go public in the next three years?

• 2:04:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, General Catalyst. Yeah, I mean, they're, they're, they're the one. I mean, they're, because they're not really a venture capital firm anymore. I mean, it's, it's their core. It's still what they do and they invest, you know, in series A rounds and startups and they still do that, but they've got a wealth management business. They own a hospital. I mean, they own a hospital. That is not a venture capital thing. And by the way, have to say, and, and I, I, this is not a knock on them. Man, if I was admitted into a hospital and somehow there was like a plaque on the wall that said, "We are owned by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm," I'd be scared out of my mind about what was about to happen to me in that room. But they're not a venture capital.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  You'd be getting a YC company robot would be doing your surgery.

• 2:05:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly what I want. I, you know, as you know, whenever you see a doctor, particularly for a procedure, you want to hear the word experimental. That's always what you're looking for. And, and, you know. So they're not really a VC firm anymore and they've diversified and they want a diverse B paying asset base, which is what they're building. Good for them. And to be honest, it's not even that different. If you look on the kind of the private equity side, you know, Blackstone started as a private equity firm doing leveraged buyouts, but then they got into other stuff, right? They have private credit. They arguably became a real estate investment firm more than anything else. Diversified asset base. Yeah, I think GC will do it. Sequoia has been talked about forever, but they don't seem to have an appetite. And the way that they operate in terms of management, it doesn't seem, doesn't seem like it's going to be them.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  What about Andreessen?

• 2:06:08Speaker 05

  Maybe Andreessen.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe Andreessen.

• 2:06:09Speaker 05

  Maybe, maybe Andreessen, but can you honestly imagine Mark or Ben doing quarterly earnings calls? I can't.

• 2:06:15John Coogan?

  That'd be fun. I mean, they do a lot of podcasts, so it's somewhat similar. They got the wraps.

• 2:06:18Speaker 05

  They do a lot of podcasts with their friends.

• 2:06:20John Coogan?

  Sure. What about the fact that private equity and private credit has sold off so significantly in the public markets? Isn't that downward pressure? Any, any VC firm has to be looking at that and saying like, hey, maybe we want to stay out of this for a while.

• 2:06:37Speaker 05

  I would think so. I mean, it's, it's an interesting thing. I, you know, we were just, I was just having a conversation with a colleague before I got on with you guys about this and this question, is there systemic risk in the private credit market or is there not? And, and the argument for yes, if there's any, would be that so much of the money that's gone into private credits come from insurance companies. That's been this big boom into it. That's kind of the counterparty here. And oh, like, you know, if insurance companies have problems, we've seen this act before. We know what happens when insurance companies have problems. It goes bad for everybody. But that said, you know, the private credit sell off right now seems to be a reaction to the, to the SaaS apocalypse and some of that. We haven't yet seen a large number, really any significant defaults of private credit. People are trying to get their money out of funds. There's been big redemptions. That's a liquidity story. But it's not that, oh my God, you've

• 2:07:21Speaker 05

  got, you know, these 20 companies that have gone under that are in these portfolios. Look at those dominos.

• 2:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's different, it's different than, you know, a private credit fund that's getting a bunch of redemptions or kind of a run on the bank. They can just say like, hey, we're, we're cutting off redemptions. This is a, you know, 10 year fund. We'll see, basically we'll see you later. It's different than an actual bank run where you can just go and say like, I'd like my money back. And then you have a, a collapse.

• 2:07:49Speaker 05

  You're right, and look, and they consider that a feature, not a bug, right? That's one of the arguments private credits made for why they are stable. You can't just, you know, the funds can't just have all the money pulled out in a day.

• 2:07:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Um, how much have you tracked, uh, the volume of SPVs that have been happening over the last 12 months? I imagine it's pretty hard to actually get a lot of data, like high-quality data on this. There's been this narrative that, uh, you know, the, the average person has been cut off from benefiting from the overall, uh, gains in the, in the, in the market caps of a lot of the AI labs in particular. I would push back and be like, everybody, you know, if you've got a 401k, you own Amazon and Nvidia and Microsoft. And so you actually do have quite a bit of exposure to the labs. But, and the other side of that is that it didn't feel impossible to get exposure to Anthropic

• 2:08:43Jordi Hays?

  over the last six weeks if you wanted it, because people were posting on X, hey, I've got a slug here, a slug there. If you wanted it, you could have probably get it.

• 2:08:56Speaker 05

  Probably, I mean, two things about SPVs. One, to answer your first question, I don't have a great sense on the tracking in terms of actual volume, except, you know, this sense that it's through the roof. Uh, when people advertise an SPV or say even, forget advertise, maybe, you know, somebody you know personally and they send you a note about it, you don't necessarily know they actually have exposure. What they're trying often to do is build up enough money that then they can go to somebody and offer a good price. They're often putting the cart before the horse. I will say, I mean, certain companies, uh, big companies included, have tried, uh, clamping down a little bit on it. I mean, CEOs and CFOs particularly hate SPVs, generally speaking, not always, but generally don't like SPVs because it complicates their cap table. It becomes, even though it's a single entity, it still becomes way more investors. It becomes a lot more exposure.

• 2:09:40Speaker 05

  They would generally rather have a traditional investment firm in them than, or a traditional investment fund than an SPV.

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. General solicitation, potentially overrated.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Definitely overrated.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Probably need to avoid it. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:09:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on, Dan.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  Great to have you on.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, thank you for all of your coverage and come back on anytime.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  Have a good one. 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. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. I'm liking that graphic. Um, well, our-

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  Tim Sweeney.

• 2:10:26John Coogan?

  Tim Sweeney.

• 2:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Is feeling good.

• 2:10:28John Coogan?

  He's feeling good. He's out front of Google. He, uh, according to The Verge, has signed away his right to criticize Google until 2032. There's some nuance here. He agreed not to criticize Google related to App Store distribution and fees. They got to a-

• 2:10:45Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 2:10:46John Coogan?

  To a deal.

• 2:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Give us-

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  Stop talking trash. Stop dragging us.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Please, we just need a break. We're exhausted.

• 2:10:53John Coogan?

  The Verge put it in harsh, harsh words as Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. So, uh, he might be one of the most outspoken people in the history of the world. He fought two of the world's most valuable and profile and powerful companies, almost all the way to the US Supreme Court, insulting them again and again. Crooked, deceitful, insanely sneaky, calling Android a fake open platform, calling both companies gangster-style businesses that will do anything they think they can get away with, telling me how Google's Project Hug was an astonishingly corrupt effort at a massive scale. Wow, he does not mince words. But Google has finally muzzled Tim Sweeney. It's right there in a binding term sheet for his settlement with Google on March 3rd.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  He not only signed away Epic's right to sue and disparage the company, he signed away his own right to advocate for any further changes to Google's App Store policies. He can't criticize Google's App Store practices. In fact, he has to praise them. The contract states Epic believes that the Google and Android platform with the changes in this term sheet are pro-competitive and a model for App Store slash platform operations.

• 2:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Two companies have also agreed to terms about a new class of apps they're calling Metaverse browsers, according to a heavily redacted section of a revised binding.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Term sheet, while the term metaverse has largely fallen out of favor. Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has been talking for years about the metaverse and how it might work in the future. And this actually isn't the first time there's been a connection with Epic and Google about the metaverse. In court in January, while discussing a secret $800 million Unreal Engine and Services deal, Sweeney blurted out that the agreement related to the metaverse. Unfortunately, the redactions in the binding term sheet cover up a lot of key details about what a metaverse browser actually is. But what's visible in the document, metaverse browsers will have the primary purpose of allowing the navigation of exploration of metaverse worlds, support virtual items and

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  identity that are portable across different worlds, and must support modern security considerations.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  Well, if you don't see me here one day, I'll be in my Apple Vision Pro playing Fortnite in the Metaverse browser for sure.

• 2:13:07Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  It's gonna get me. Let me tell you about Gemini 3.1 Pro. With a more capable baseline, Gemini 3.1 Pro is 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, let's bring in the Lambda Lightning round. We're kicking it off. Let's take a look at that beautiful camera move. We got graphics. We got a...I have the gong out here, actually. But we will kick off with the first guest of our Lambda Lightning round, Max from VAST Space. Max, how are you doing?

• 2:13:44Speaker 06

  Hey, guys. Great to see you. Thanks for having me.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on the show. Give us an introduction on yourself and the company first.

• 2:13:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I'm Max Out. I'm the CEO at VAST. So we are a space station company based in Los Angeles. Our short-term goal is to have the privilege of replacing the International Space Station for NASA and its partner. There's a competition this year that we hope and expect to win. And our key differentiator is that we are not waiting to get the contract. We are building right now the world's first commercial space station, Haven One, that we are launching in Q1 next year. The team, I have the privilege... To lead is a thousand people that are mostly technician and engineer and and we are getting on rebuilding it and after that we will be launching more module and basically creating a multi module station that can ensure

• 2:14:33Speaker 06

  American astronaut but also allied astronauts are able to be in space permanently. China is out there with a permanent space station, so we need to succeed it before the ISS is retired. How'd you get into this?

• 2:14:44Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing first step by the way, just start by

• 2:14:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, going straight for the space station. What were you doing before? So I'm an international entrepreneur originally, I created a a couple of companies that I've exited, one is called Livestream, so my video is pretty similar to familiar to me. Yeah. Also a video camera company called Nivo that I sold to Logitech. Livestream was sold to ICB Video in 2017 and then my my first space company was called Launcher. It's a small launch company, we launched two satellite, we built an amazing engine. And then the founder of VAS, Jet McKeeler, acquired it in 2013, so at the time VAS had about forty people and my team had eighty. We became one hundred and twenty and then we

• 2:15:29Speaker 06

  we embarked on the current strategy and grew to now a thousand people and and obviously our first external fundraising that we are announcing today. Yeah, going after space stations.

• 2:15:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you said first external fundraise?

• 2:15:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, give us the numbers. How much did you raise?

• 2:15:44Jordi Hays?

  What's the total history? So you guys had combined your teams in 2014?

• 2:15:50Speaker 06

  So the original investment was from our founder Jet, it's pretty unusual. It's over nine hundred million dollar since 2001. And then today we are announcing

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Massive.

• 2:16:06Speaker 06

  Thank you for the gong.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Break down, break down what what the, what the, why we need new space stations? What are the different use cases other than just having a strong presence?

• 2:16:22Speaker 06

  I mean, today, if you look at the International Space Station, it's been there for 25 years. It's been amazing in safety, in keeping a continuous crew for 25 years. So we've had people outside of Earth for 25 years. It's pretty amazing. What it has not been great at is the cost. You know, it's the single most expensive object created by humans, and it's not sustainable to the taxpayer or to the NASA budget, which need to focus more on exploration, including Moon and Mars, as you said, Jared, yesterday or a few days ago. And so the NASA basically wants to reduce the cost. That's why they wanted to move to commercial provider. And they also need to retire the ISS. It's a partnership with Russia. Obviously not desirable geopolitically right now, long term.

• 2:17:02Speaker 06

  And it's also aging. So all of these reasons create the commercial opportunity to succeed it. Short term, you know, the main business model are international space agencies, NASA, Europe, WIVISA, JAXA in Japan, and other nations getting involved in human spaceflight. Long term, it's the orbital economy. So it means manufacturing drugs, semiconductors, and so on in space. And our space station will become more factories as opposed to government mission. But that will take a while. So today, the key opportunity is to help all the governments around the world get into human spaceflight to do important science, and NASA and other governments to save money with a fast iterative, low-cost approach. Very cool.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Where are you able to partner with the existing orbital economy, the existing space community? Because there's so much that goes into actually building and deploying a space station. Where, I imagine that you're standing on shoulders of giants, but walk me through all the things that allow you to accelerate your mission.

• 2:18:05Speaker 06

  I mean, the first step is to go from zero to one. It's actually to have a space station and a crew visit it. And if you compare that effort versus the effort of having payload and from partner in science, you know, having it going beyond renders and beyond MOUs and dream and press announcement, still have it there, right? Whoever has it there and is profitable will figure out these application. More concretely, we have partnered with companies like Redwire, a company in Europe called Yuri. In other companies and we have a laboratory on the first station, Haven One, which is, which basically are companies that have already done science and are doing now on the ISS. So we brought them in on our space station that we launch next year. And then our astronauts will be, will be continuing the science and research.

• 2:18:48Speaker 06

  Beyond that, you know, right now we are in the R and D phase, whether it's materials, so we conductors, you know, making drugs in space that we can't make on Earth, but thanks to the microgravity environment. It's still R and D, right? There's no killer app, no product.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:02Speaker 06

  And through being commercial, doing more flights, being commercially friendly, we confident we will, we will unlock it. So we're super excited with what NASA did, right? They created thousands and thousands of experiments and they found some interesting application. And so we benefit from that, that full pipeline when our station will be out.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  How important is the next generation of reusable rockets, the Starships of the world, to unlocking new capabilities in deploying space stations?

• 2:19:30Speaker 06

  I mean, if you even go back to reusable rocket, even before, right? Falcon and what SpaceX has done.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:36Speaker 06

  We couldn't be here without the, the early transition to commercial that NASA and SpaceX have done with the Dragon spacecraft. You know, it's pretty, you know, if, if we were still in the space shuttle era, I don't think I could be buying a ride to our commercial space station, Haven One, from, from NASA. And because of what they did with that program, hopefully they'll get Starliner up and running, the Boeing version. You know, we can go call SpaceX and buy a ride for astronauts to, to our space station. Starship will, you know, take that, you know, what we hope is it will lower the cost of transportation to our space station by at least an order of magnitude. It'll allow us to bring up four people, but maybe 20 people. So that's really a, a big timing and a big unlock. You know, it still will take a little while for, for it to arrive.

• 2:20:19Speaker 06

  It will get there and our, our goal is that by the time Starship is ready, that we have a large enough space station. So that, you know, in relation to the volume in Starship, we are still, you know, four or five times larger, we have a lot more power, a lot, a lot of equipment. So, so we, you know, it's a key enabler, why we are here and why the future is exciting for space station, the arrival of Starship.

• 2:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Sort of a random question, but I'm just curious. What, what is the planned process for retiring the current space station? You do the humans leave and it just kind of continues to orbit? Do they? Take it out of orbit, what is that, you have any idea what that'll look like?

• 2:20:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's interesting when they design a space station, they sort of punt that, right? Like, they don't have the ability to deorbit itself. And so they always had the plan to build a special spacecraft that will push it in the Pacific. And that's called a US deorbit vehicle, SpaceX won that contract. I think NASA is hoping to get it there, you know, two or three years before the retirement of the ISS. The current retirement date is the end of 2030. There's discussion now to extend it to 32, but somewhere in that region. So it will be there, ready to go, especially if there's a safety issue or something like that, and to do testing. And then they will just push it, you know, with some delta V, some propulsion. To eventually, it will re-enter in a pretty interesting display, if there was anyone there,

• 2:21:41Speaker 06

  to a place called Point Nemo in the Pacific. I think NASA is expecting to decru it nominally, meaning not in an emergency scenario due to the aging. Maybe a year ahead of that, but I don't know the exact date.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully they can get a camera there and livestream it, because they're pretty good at watching the rockets come down, even when they're landing in the middle of the ocean. So hopefully we can see the de-orbiting.

• 2:22:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, we saw some of the starship re-entry was pretty spectacular, so hopefully we'll see the same.

• 2:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, in the Indian Ocean, that was a remarkable video.

• 2:22:17Jordi Hays?

  What, uh...

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Dramatic ending.

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Is the entire team based in Los Angeles? Where's the team dispersed and what are you hiring for going forward?

• 2:22:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're just over a thousand people, and, you know, more than 900 in the Los Angeles, in Long Beach specifically. They're manufacturing, you know, we have control room, we have integration room. We manufacture our primary structure. We brought that capability to America for 20 years, it has been outsourced abroad. You can see actually on my right, our test site in Mojave. Then we have an operation in the Mojave Desert where we test things. You know, we're a pretty small team there. We have an office in DC, we just opened an office in Japan, where you've seen some of our investors are from Japan, the largest bank, MUFG, Mitsui from Japan, and Nikon, the camera company. Japan is actually one of the key markets for human spaceflight.

• 2:23:08Speaker 06

  You know, they were really a co-builder of the International Space Station, and they want to continue with their 10 billion fund.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much.

• 2:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet. So, so excited to follow along.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  And congrats on the milestone.

• 2:23:23Speaker 06

  Thank you, thank you. And I hear, John, you're a watch, space watch fan from your interview with a

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes. Do you have any recommendations if I'm going to space?

• 2:23:31Speaker 06

  We partnered with IWC. Here you go.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  There you go. That's a great selection.

• 2:23:36Speaker 06

  Bringing new revenue stream to commercial space. And in April, we're announcing a new watch that we've designed with them.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:23:43Speaker 06

  That's designed for space. So hopefully, check that out soon.

• 2:23:46Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  That's, yeah, that's amazing. Last year, we were partnered with a company called Bezel, where a marketplace for buying those watches. I'm sure they'd be flying off the shelf. So, thank you so much for advancing space and advancing the equally important industry of fine watchmaking. We appreciate everything you do. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Max.

• 2:24:04Speaker 06

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. Oracle has joined the ratepayer protection pledge. They said, "We are proud to be part of the White House's mission to advance American AI leadership while protecting the communities in which we build data centers. We are committing to pay, we are committed to paying our own way on energy, hiring locally, protecting local water resources, and enriching communities across the country. AI isn't just about technology. It's about strengthening communities while fueling America's future. Let's go with some GPT written copy."

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  They had the dog food.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, who knows? But, but it's, I mean, it's a good point. Google, Oracle, XAI, Meta, Microsoft OpenAI, and Amazon have now signed on to the ratepayer protection pledge.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Very smart.

• 2:25:01John Coogan?

  That seems like a really, really important move because you have the resources, you have the capital. Go build the energy. Do not spike the local, do not spike the local energy rates because the communities will

• 2:25:15John Coogan?

  Protest and they will block you and it's just game theory one on one to just not not not let the negative externalities run wild in the communities of a democracy. Anyway.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Ben Smith and Semaphore, Rachel Jones are covering a new AI cost hardened data centers. They say building new data centers in underground nuclear hardened bunkers, which some companies began doing recently costs more than $2,000 per square foot in the US. According to Larry Hall, who owns Kansas based bunker real estate firm Survival Condo.

• 2:25:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  That's we gotta get, Nick, if you're hearing this, we gotta get Larry Hall.

• 2:25:56John Coogan?

  We gotta talk.

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Kansas based bunker.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  I want.

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Real estate firm Survival Condo.

• 2:26:00John Coogan?

  That sounds amazing.

• 2:26:01Jordi Hays?

  That's twice the cost of constructing a facility from scratch above ground and building in the Middle East can be more expensive depending on the terrain. Given the average data center spans the size of a Manhattan city block. An underground concrete shelter of that size might go for 200 million. And that's before factoring in the cost to cover energy, cooling and servers, of course, GPUs.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  The cooling seems.

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Still, most of Survival Condo's clients are looking for facilities smaller than that. The cheapest facility the firm has priced was for an existing 54,000 square foot bunker costing just 45 million.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Uh, this is, uh, there's some extra context from Matthew Shaw. After Amazon's Bahrain data center was hit, this will likely be heightened. I'm sure people at CISA are looking into this issue. So in the Middle East particularly, while, uh, there are conflicts undergoing, uh, underway. Uh, I'm sure people will be looking at the future of how they build these data centers.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Netflix acquires AI filmmaking startup founded by Ben Affleck.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  Who will serve as advisor to Netflix.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 2:27:04Jordi Hays?

  Company is called Interpositive. That makes AI powered tools for filmmakers. The system builds AI models from a film's dailies?

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  Dailies are the. Oh yeah, you guys want to explain?

• 2:27:18Jordi Hays?

  Explain dailies, Ben. That's good. Do you know that, John?

• 2:27:20John Coogan?

  Come on, filmers. Yes, I know what dailies are.

• 2:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Dailies are when you were shooting on film, you would send the daily print to the lab and they would look at it and they could review it to make sure if they needed to reshoot the next day.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's basically like reviewing the film that you shot in one day at the end of the day or before you go shoot because you might not have torn down the set. You might still be at the same location. You don't want to leave and wrap that particular shoot until you have reviewed the footage. But dailies, it just means that post-production tasks like color, relighting, VFX. So you're on set, you go and you shoot that one cinematic scene, the dramatic scene. And typically, when you're watching it, there's no monster in the background. There's no color grade. It's very flat. It doesn't look like the final movie. If you can use AI and AI-powered tools to get you much closer to something

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  that looks like what the final movie will look like, then very quickly you can turn around that daily shoot into, okay, it's, you know, we got a bunch of raw footage. Let's edit it together so that if we're filming me and then we're filming you, we cut it back and forth, cut it back together, color grade it, do some basic sound design. Even if it's sloppy AI slop, it's like going to be much more watchable than just watching like the raw.

• 2:28:35Jordi Hays?

  What do you, what do you think Netflix like plans to do with this tech? Is this something they'll offer to productions that they're funding? Is that the idea?

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I would imagine that, I'm not, I'm not exactly sure how much more they're going to be scaling up their, their, you know, in-house production budget, but I could imagine that, that this gets deployed into projects that are being filmed and run and produced by Netflix directly. But we'll have to see. We'd love to have someone on for a moment, guys. Without further ado, 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 Christian Howell, the CEO of Cognitio Therapeutics. Christian, how are you doing?

• 2:29:24Speaker 07

  Gentlemen, how are you? Thanks so much for having me.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 2:29:26Speaker 07

  Great to have you.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

• 2:29:29Speaker 07

  Big, big day.

• 2:29:29John Coogan?

  Big day.

• 2:29:30Speaker 07

  Big day.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:29:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm Christian Hall. I'm the CEO of Cognito. My background is I'm a former Navy officer and a longtime med tech executive. And then the company is, you know, sort of an amazing story. It spun out of MIT.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:49Speaker 07

  And it's developing a non-invasive therapeutic for driving brain activity to promote brain health and starting an Alzheimer's disease.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, give me the shape of Alzheimer's. For those who might not know, the scale of its impact in America or even globally today.

• 2:30:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's really unbelievable, candidly. So there are about 6 million people and families in the United States that are impacted by Alzheimer's disease. There are another 15 million people that are impacted by something called mild cognitive impairment, which is the early stage of cognitive decline. What's even scarier is about 12 million of those people are undiagnosed because there just haven't been available therapies for patients and their families. And so in the last couple of years, there've been a series of therapies that have come to market called the monoclonal antibodies. But unfortunately, they're not indicated for patients with more advanced Alzheimer's disease and there's some risks associated with them.

• 2:30:54Speaker 07

  So yeah, almost 50 million people around the planet are impacted by Alzheimer's disease.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  And is it fair to say that Alzheimer's has sort of like always existed? But if you go back a couple hundred years, lifespans were just so short that people would die before they had the chance to fight with their brain. They were fighting with their heart, basically. And now that we've extended lives, now we're grappling with brain deterioration. Is that roughly correct?

• 2:31:24Speaker 07

  I think that's exactly right. I think that we are entering an age where we have just made so many diseases chronic, whether it's cancer, diabetes, or cardiovascular disease, that we are now, our bodies are living longer than our brains.

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:40Speaker 07

  And that is why we are, you know, moving into this space where we're seeing more neuro generation. And I think we're trying to remove the stigma from it. So people aren't just calling it dementia, or, you know, people are, you know, they're really thinking about, you know, why am I experiencing cognitive loss? Why am I seeing, you know, why am I seeing loss of independence? But you're exactly right. I mean, I think it is, I think the next 20 years is going to be about, you know, brain health, but really thinking about, you know, how do we preserve structure and function of our brains so we can, we can have our brains living as long as the rest of, you know, the rest of us.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  So you mentioned monoclonal antibodies. You mentioned invasive techniques. Walk me through the spectrum of treatments, cures that are available and how you fit in.

• 2:32:25Speaker 07

  Yeah, so no cures, unfortunately, to date. So everyone is focused on just figuring out how we can slow the progression of the disease. And really, what's happened, you know, for years is people have sort of focused on the sort of underlying pathogens, right? So that you hear about things like amyloid and tau. And they're actually not causing cognitive and functional loss. They are, they are biomarkers of the disease. But what's actually causing the cognitive and functional loss is network dysfunction. So the brain is no longer, I think of it as like a symphony. The brain is no longer able to be in harmony. And when it falls out of harmony, it's unable to drive the biology that preserves its cognition

• 2:33:06Speaker 07

  and function. And so what a brilliant group at MIT led by Li Wei Si discovered over the last several decades is that, one, that you can actually stimulate the brain back into harmony. And that when the brain is at a particular activity rate, that they call the gamma band, when the neurons are firing north of 40 hertz per second, then what you see is you see this sort of profound biology that is driven, that helps drive synapses and myelin and really preserve brain structure and brain function. And They then learned that you could you could use an external stimulation to drive that level of activity. And actually, if you stimulated the visual and the auditory

• 2:33:47Speaker 07

  cortices, that would give you the most profound sort of response. And what ultimately then they discovered is that you could use sensory stimulation. You could use light and sound at a duty cycle of, you know, 40 hertz. That would then drive the nerves to promote that type of activity in the brain. And then you would ultimately see this really profound biologic expression. So I mean, it's an amazing.

• 2:34:14John Coogan?

  So for the so for the folks with with brains that maybe are not fully working, is this a fancy hat?

• 2:34:23Speaker 07

  No, it's it's a really, you know, it's it's a good question, because I say all the time that I think the first principal challenge of cognito is that the science seems too simple to be plausible, right? So you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna flash light and sound.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:34:41Speaker 07

  And you're gonna get my brain active. And that's gonna drive a biology that protects the loss of cognition function, right?

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  And specifically, the light and sound goes through my eyes and my ears?

• 2:34:49Speaker 07

  Eyes and ears, right? Because we want to we want to stimulate the optic nerve. Yeah, there you go. You want to stimulate the optic nerve, and you want to stimulate the stibial cochlear nerve in the ear.

• 2:34:57John Coogan?

  Yes, okay.

• 2:34:58Speaker 07

  Right? And so light and sound are really effective at stimulating those cranial nerves.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:35:02Speaker 07

  But what's great is because the science candidly was perceived as being sort of so simple, it meant that there had to be this massive investment in clinically validating it.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:12Speaker 07

  So there's been more than a billion dollars invested between MIT and Harvard on exploring this science. We are currently fully enrolled, almost completed, what is the largest non-drug randomized clinical trial that's ever been conducted. We're doing 673 patients across 70 sites in the United States. We're studying them for 12 months. And we're looking to see, can we preserve their cognition and function using this type of, you know, this type of therapy? So it ultimately comes a tailwind for us.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  So over 12 months, that gentleman with the device on his head. Was that Oregon Freeman? How often is he? How often is he wearing that? For how long? What intervals? Walk me through sort of what a typical treatment program might look like.

• 2:36:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the first thing we do is we, which is exciting, is we confirm that the brain responds to the therapy. So patients come in, we give them the device, the one we determine they can tolerate the light and the sound. And then under an EEG, we confirm that we can get the brain to 40 hertz and hold the brain at 40 hertz.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:36:18Speaker 07

  Then they are, they get a personalized device that they go home with. We ask patients to wear it an hour a day, every day.

• 2:36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:27Speaker 07

  What we hear from patients is they feel empowered. They feel like they get an opportunity. I get up, I have my coffee, 9 o'clock, I sit for an hour, I'm doing something proactive to address my disease.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:39Speaker 07

  And candidly, that has manifested itself in one, you know, in our study, we have almost an 85 or 86% adherence, meaning patients are wearing it six days a week, at least 50 minutes a day.

• 2:36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:52Speaker 07

  We have almost 90% of patients that are, when they end the study, want to stay on the therapy and go into additional studies.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Have you considered putting advertisements in it?

• 2:37:00Speaker 07

  You know, it's funny, you said, there is, you know, this one was designed for AD patients.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:07Speaker 07

  But this idea that you can use light and sound to stimulate brain activity, I mean, it, the platform opportunity here is really interesting to think about, you know, we know, we've got indication in other disease states and conditions, we're going to study those.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Speaker 07

  There's the opportunity to think about it for, you know,

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:24Speaker 07

  preventative or even, you know, sort of brain health proactivity. And then there's opportunities for us in things like sleep and stroke and traumatic brain.

• 2:37:33John Coogan?

  But the default path will be FDA approval, prescribed by a doctor, maybe they send it home with you, it's probably expensive, but insurance will cover some of that, if not all. And then patients will be able to use this sort of non-invasively to treat their Alzheimer's, hopefully for as long as it takes.

• 2:37:53Speaker 07

  Exactly right. Right? So we will, we will read out the study in August. We hope to go to the FDA in November.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:01Speaker 07

  The hope is that we see an approval mid of next year. You're right, we'll work with CMS to make sure that it's covered.

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:38:07Speaker 07

  And then patients will have a very sort of straight line path to be from diagnosis to getting the device. Personalized for them to getting the device in their homes. And you're right, they can do it anywhere, right? It can, they don't have to go to the hospital, they don't have to go to a clinic.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:38:22Speaker 07

  If they travel, they can take the device with. I have one here. You can, you know, you can, it really makes life, it, it, it sort of bends to their life more than asking them to bend their life to a therapy.

• 2:38:32John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, good luck. You raised some money. How much did you raise? And what does it allow you to do?

• 2:38:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we re, we oversubscribed around, uh, look at that, we love it, the gong. We oversubscribed around to a hundred, a hundred and five.

• 2:38:50John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 2:38:51Speaker 07

  Not, not an easy time to raise money in the life sciences, especially when you're doing something completely sort of non, you know, unconventional.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:00Speaker 07

  And, you know, that was, it was a really interesting time, right? Because as, as investors got more conservative, they didn't want to operate outside their thesis. And we're, we're not a traditional biotech, we're not a traditional med tech, right? So we really had to find investors that weren't looking at it from the modality in, but we're looking at it from kind of the disease state out. But it allows us to now sort of downshift. So we are, you know, going to continue on, you know, get the hope readout, get to the regulators, and then start the commercial work.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:39:29Speaker 07

  And really try to, you know, meet that urgency in the market. And we're doing it with, in partnership with big academic medical centers that are going to help us learn, you know, how do you identify the patients? How do you get the therapy to patients?

• 2:39:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:41Speaker 07

  How do you help them adopt it and adhere to the therapy? And then how can we explore new, new indications?

• 2:39:48John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:39:48Jordi Hays?

  Super exciting. My, my grandfather, my late grandfather suffered from Alzheimer's and I remember he was doing the antibody treatments, but I just remember the frustration of waiting for those treatments and then kind of waiting to see what kind of impact that they would have. And, and just, he was fully willing and excited to do whatever it took.

• 2:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:13Jordi Hays?

  And not having something outside of, you know, kind of more basic, everyday health stuff to do was, you know, deeply frustrating. So very, very excited that you're building this and come back on as you make more progress and congrats to the whole team on the milestone.

• 2:40:29Speaker 07

  Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. I mean, it is, I say to people all the time, I got the best gig in the world, right? Because I get to see this really interesting science get delivered to families that need it desperately. And as much as I'd love for your story to be, you know, unique, and it's unique for you guys, there's not a day that I don't run into people that say, you know, my mom, or my dad, or my aunt, or my uncle, or... And so, it's just, it's just such a desperate need, I can't, I'm so, I'm so fortunate to be the guy that gets to kind of steward this. So I appreciate you guys giving us an opportunity to talk about it and share, you know, the work that we're doing.

• 2:41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Last couple of questions from the chat. Ryan in the chat says, "Suspected effect size if successful? How many COG points are you aiming for?" I don't...

• 2:41:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'll give you the... Yes, it's a...

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe explain those questions for me, and then...

• 2:41:20Speaker 07

  What we're trying to measure is, you know, how much can we preserve cognition?

• 2:41:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:24Speaker 07

  And how much can we preserve function, right? So think of cognition as like, memory, and think of function as agency and independence. And so, in our feasibility study, which was a study we did just before this one, we showed an almost 77% preservation of function, and a 76% preservation of cognition. And those numbers are best in class by a long ways. And so, if we in the big study show something similar to that, or even a little bit less than that, it is, it will be, you know, the most significant clinical impact, in addition to we've never had an adverse event related to the therapy, and, you know, it's not invasive, and patients could use it in their home. So, that, you know, that's kind of how we're thinking about the impact.

• 2:42:09Speaker 07

  And then we'll support that through biomarkers and all the stuff that you show in these studies, that you're making an actual, you're actually making a difference.

• 2:42:14John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Look forward to it.

• 2:42:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, love what you guys are doing. It's such a cool, it's such a cool scene, so, uh...

• 2:42:23John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot.

• 2:42:23Speaker 07

  And, uh, welcome, uh, looking forward to coming back and talking to you guys about the work that we're doing.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Thanks for your attention. Goodbye.

• 2:42:30Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:42:31John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And let me also tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And our next guest is here, live in person with us in the TBP and UltraDome. We have Cameron Record from Nominal.

• 2:42:55Cameron McCord?

  What's going on?

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. Good to see you.

• 2:42:57Cameron McCord?

  Good to see you.

• 2:42:58John Coogan?

  How should we kick this up? Can we just hit the gong right away? What happened? Tell us, tell us what happened.

• 2:43:03Cameron McCord?

  Today, we are announcing a $80 million raise at a billion-dollar valuation. That was a loud one. He broke the mallet. He broke the mallet. That's a powerful, powerful omen right there. We're announcing our latest, our latest financing led by Founders Fund.

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic, fantastic.

• 2:43:26Cameron McCord?

  What do we, what do we have here?

• 2:43:28John Coogan?

  Have you been working with them before?

• 2:43:29Cameron McCord?

  We had been working with them before.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:31Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so they, Founders Fund have been an investor since the seed round.

• 2:43:35John Coogan?

  Okay. Through Delian, Trey, both?

• 2:43:37Cameron McCord?

  Delian and Trey, yeah, both. And really, I think really how this came about was, I think Founders Fund has a really good perspective, obviously, on the evolving hardware landscape, broadly speaking.

• 2:43:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:52Cameron McCord?

  But a unique perspective into particularly Androl.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:56Cameron McCord?

  We announced our partnership with them.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:59Cameron McCord?

  Two weeks ago now.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  They're gonna know if it's working or not.

• 2:44:01Cameron McCord?

  Yep, exactly. They're gonna know if it's working or not. And so I think, you know, some direct feedback from them and other FF portfolio companies. And so, yeah, we were not raising. I mean, we were on the show eight months ago, announcing the Series B led by Sequoia. But we got approached by Founders Fund at the end of the year, really over the holidays, with a pretty good offer to lead a preemptive financing, and it made a ton of sense.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  You're like, why not make a magazine?

• 2:44:29Cameron McCord?

  Yes.

• 2:44:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:44:31Cameron McCord?

  So I brought props.

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  First, sort of reintroduce the product for those who didn't see the previous.

• 2:44:37Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so nominal, we build a platform for hardware tests and operations.

• 2:44:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:42Cameron McCord?

  Right, so we're managing everything from the end of the manufacturing process. So then quality testing, inspection, end of line, through to more like lab testing, benchtop testing.

• 2:44:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:54Cameron McCord?

  Think power supplies, stacks, oscilloscopes, instrumented hardware.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  Anduril's making a submarine.

• 2:45:00Cameron McCord?

  Yep.

• 2:45:00John Coogan?

  They need to test the battery that goes on that submarine.

• 2:45:03Cameron McCord?

  Exactly.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  As soon as it comes off the manufacturing line, even if they buy it from a supplier that they trust.

• 2:45:07Cameron McCord?

  Yep.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  It comes in, they have to know that it has the right voltage and.

• 2:45:09Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, and that's exactly, honestly, that is a really, really, like, we're seeing that use case really explode in the product.

• 2:45:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:16Cameron McCord?

  I think particularly as there's been a big rush of more onshoring manufacturing.

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:45:21Cameron McCord?

  Frankly, I think quality in the entire industry is sort of going down as there's a little compression effect. So people making, yeah, components, widgets, you know, servos, motors, et cetera. When these, the OEMs, the bigger companies, the Andurils of the world receive them, they need to run through some, yeah, some initial inspections.

• 2:45:39John Coogan?

  And does your business grow as businesses that you work with shift from R and D and testing and prototyping to actual scaled manufacturing?

• 2:45:50Cameron McCord?

  Yes, yeah, and that's a huge part of the thesis, like, honestly, like, some of the earliest.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  Like what you unlock.

• 2:45:54Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, exactly. Some of the earliest vision of nominal is like, testing is a really powerful place to start because every organization is kind of always testing if you're iterating. There's normally some budget, there's a little bit of risk tolerance to try new software, new tools, new processes, get whatever advantage you can squeeze out. And then a lot of the thesis is like, if that works, you want to use the same software when you're actually doing high-scale production manufacturing.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:17Cameron McCord?

  And you want to use the same software again when you deploy your asset, let's pick submarine, you know.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:22Cameron McCord?

  Wherever it is in the world, submarine is probably a bad example. Again, I was a former submarine officer, so.

• 2:46:27John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:46:27Cameron McCord?

  No, a thing or two. You're not going to get a ton of live telemetry coming off of a submarine ideally. But if you deploy an asset in the field, you want to be able to link all of that telemetry sensor data logs back to the system.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Interesting. And is that for like testing, like the feedback loop for manufacturing? So it's like, let's switch over to like the sensor tower analogy. You put up a bunch of sensor towers somewhere. There's a bunch of telemetry that's coming off that. Not just the purpose of that sensory tower, which might be object identification, but also the battery failure.

• 2:47:01Cameron McCord?

  The battery is a really good example and we'll use, you know, sentry tower, county waste tower as an example, often deployed in places in the world that are very hot.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:47:09Cameron McCord?

  And so they're going to have a lot of battery issues. It happens all the time. And you want to be able to correlate, if you're getting anomalous or spurious readings on the battery, you would use something like nominal to be able to monitor that. So think like how Datadog is monitoring, you know, like a server or, you know, generic software. Like we'd be, you set up a conditional to monitor any weird anomalous behavior in that battery. And then you want to be able to link that, correlate that with the physical assets. Maybe the group of batteries that you receive from a supplier. And you want to be able to trace that backwards through your whole process and say, hey, actually, those batteries that might have similar issues are deployed in these like five areas. Cause I can track those assets and understand and sort of, you know, think, think that way.

• 2:47:49John Coogan?

  Cause the battery might perform differently in different temperature conditions, even just how much the CPU is turning.

• 2:47:56Cameron McCord?

  Really just like, yeah. And I think what nominal is unlocking is really just like the ability to do this correlation at scale. And frankly, like what we, the way we store and organize all of this, you know, massive amounts of telemetry and sensor data is just like a much, you know, more thoughtful approach that you can query at scale and sort of make these types of connections. Really the industry status quo, which is a good segue into the stuff we brought here. I think the industry status quo is like, it's just, there's a lot of legacy tools in the space. It really is. It is Excel. It is MATLAB. It's PDF. You know, it's, it's old, old pieces of. Software that have not really kept pace with the

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last time, last time we were at the track, getting some laps in the the software that the team was using to track lap times and, you know, just all the different data coming off the car.

• 2:48:49Jordi Hays?

  Would literally look like 90s era software. Talk about the partnership with Pratt Miller.

• 2:48:55Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so last time.

• 2:48:56Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you going to add more teams? Is that like a great feedback loop for maybe more traditional?

• 2:49:03Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, I mean, so, so last time we, Bryce dialed in, is, you know, this is very cool being in person, but he was at the pits and that's pretty sweet. The partnership is going great. I think I'm personally very excited. Like, we, we, we get to go and attend a bunch of these races. And we get to bring our customers, or potential customers, which is great because they get to see nominal in action. And so it's a really like nice like way to kind of do that. Then, yeah, the partnership is, is expanding. There's, I won't say too much on that, but I think we're, we're expanding in the automotive and racing sector kind of broadly, based on the success there. So, yeah.

• 2:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:49:39Cameron McCord?

  But yeah, I, yes, tools.

• 2:49:42Jordi Hays?

  For progress.

• 2:49:42Cameron McCord?

  Tools for progress. Yeah, our sort of slogan for this financing has been ambition is timeless, tools are not. And so going in the history lesson, you know, it used to be in the 80s, 90s, you know, software was industrial software was serious. It was purpose built for, you know, aerospace, defense, mechanical engineering, etc. We then entered two decades of very unserious software, dot com, you know, click optimization, pass through, you know, metrics, etc. And then nominal is trying to get back to serious software for the next five decades of engineering. And so what we put together here, a very tactile, you know, thing.

• 2:50:25Cameron McCord?

  This is, this is waterproof, weatherproof also, which would have to be.

• 2:50:30Jordi Hays?

  This is so well done.

• 2:50:31Cameron McCord?

  Tools for progress. This is an old school catalog. This is where like the best tools in the world and the best companies in the world used to. Write about their products in paper.

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:42Cameron McCord?

  It's kind of crazy to think. Print it up, send it to engineers all over the world, and that's how they would know the latest and greatest of capabilities. So we have our catalog here, and we have some retro features for some of our, some of our customers. Showing a little bit of the breadth of the nominal platform. Shinkei.

• 2:50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:58Cameron McCord?

  We'll start with that one. So robotic, you know, fish processing.

• 2:51:01John Coogan?

  He's eating the fish here at the Trudoma.

• 2:51:03Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:51:04John Coogan?

  Live on the show.

• 2:51:04Cameron McCord?

  So a nice, you know, Shinkei. Antares, you know, nuclear power. We've got Pratt Miller Motorsports, Hermias, Albedo, satellites, planes, Regent. So yeah, we've been sending these all over the, the country over the last couple of days, so.

• 2:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:51:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how have conversations with investors been around the SaaS apocalypse? Everyone says, I mean, you know, Toby Look, he was like, I vibe coded my own telemetry data. Is this not a threat to you? What's going on?

• 2:51:37Cameron McCord?

  I take conversations, given that you hit the gong again now. The conversations, I think, have been good. Yeah, I think we actually see nominal, I'll frame it this way, which is we're sitting in an incredibly interesting nexus of like data coming off of hardware machines. Real, human, enriched engineering judgment. Like, people are doing this work in our platform.

• 2:51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:59Cameron McCord?

  Like, they're deciding that that battery is, is good or bad, right? And they're, they're transitioning that sort of engineering judgment and insight into the data and enriching it.

• 2:52:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:08Cameron McCord?

  All of that is living in our platform, and it is growing exponentially. So when you actually think about, if you believe this, like, world where models will long tail commoditize, and it just becomes about interesting access to, to data and sort of like modes around that, I feel really good about where nominal is positioned particularly there. And then I think we talk a lot about, like, what we've done in, in our three and a half years so far. I think it's taken a set of, an industry and a set of tools from 1990 to, you know, 2022. And we've done that fast. And now we have the opportunity, and we've earned the right to basically bridge the industry into 2026, 2027, right? And so a lot of, talking about, you know, what we do with some of the funding, I think a lot of it is like, we, you know,

• 2:52:50Cameron McCord?

  we have our own sort of cutting edge, we have our own AI team, we're hiring and kind of building up, and people focusing on how do we incorporate, how do we both, nominal build with AI, but also how do we operationalize this for the industry? Because right now, going from, you know, a spreadsheet to, to...

• 2:53:08Cameron McCord?

  Uh, I don't know Claude coding your own whatever is like, um, let's say it's not.

• 2:53:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it's interesting. I, I think of it in a racing context. The car is out on the track. It's producing all of this data. You can imagine a world where an AI is able to more quickly.

• 2:53:23Cameron McCord?

  Totally.

• 2:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Like respond and help the team make decisions than any human, right? That's like kind of managing.

• 2:53:29Cameron McCord?

  Absolutely.

• 2:53:29Jordi Hays?

  All these different.

• 2:53:30Cameron McCord?

  No, I'm, I'm really, I mean, I'm really bullish on that. I think like, um, we, we sometimes frame nominal a little bit as like, we want to be, and we think we will be like a part of, one of, um, those systems of record. And so when you think about, um, when you're using, we'll just use Claude code, we're using Claude code, right? Like it's still, uh, it's still interacting with like GitHub or whatever your version control system, right? Like is for, for just sort of doing things like that. Um, the same equivalent like doesn't really exist in this like software defined hardware world. Um, and I think those need to be built frankly.

• 2:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, I wonder how you think about like the economies of scale with regard to effectively software as a service. Because I imagine that even if software, the, the instantiation of software, the writing of software is commoditized. There are still hard one lessons and almost secrets. Like you can't go to every L L M and say predict every problem that.

• 2:54:26Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:27John Coogan?

  This drone manufacturer will have, and then build software for that, that will, you know, immediately generalize to hypersonic flight. Or nuclear power generation.

• 2:54:38Cameron McCord?

  It's really good. Yeah, it's really good. We're, um, we're working on some of this right now, I would say. And I think like a lot of our vision is the world of hardware testing.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:49Cameron McCord?

  Right now in 2026 generally looks like, you know, setting out sort of a matrix of test points.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:55Cameron McCord?

  Like very deterministic.

• 2:54:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:57Cameron McCord?

  My system, my battery needs to be between this and this voltage or this condition.

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:02Cameron McCord?

  And then you sort of run that out and it, it happens very sequentially. Like that is how all of these systems are tested. And frankly, that's how, talk about, you know, the, the government, that, that's how testing happens. We are trying to bridge from a world of like, what if you actually. Can one do more and more in simulation? And use outputs of pretty high fidelity, often physics-based models of the world? That's one input. And then two, what if you actually start to build like AI test agents?

• 2:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:29Cameron McCord?

  And their whole job is to determine the next best test point to run?

• 2:55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:34Cameron McCord?

  So instead of running linearly through this matrix, like you're actually sort of in a kind of a three-dimensional space where you are trying to kind of retrain and update the model and say, hey, if I could put this physical piece of hardware in any condition or state space, what would I put it in to optimize and sort of knowledge maximize my next step?

• 2:55:52John Coogan?

  Knowledge maxing.

• 2:55:53Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, knowledge maxing.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:55Cameron McCord?

  So that's where, I think that's where it's going.

• 2:55:56John Coogan?

  I imagine like Shinkai likes that whatever you're learning from Anduril and whatever you're standardizing there applies to them. But then I was at Hermias, the manufacturing plant, and they had like a Pratt and Whitney

• 2:56:10Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:10John Coogan?

  jet engine.

• 2:56:11Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  That I don't think I've seen any Anduril products that operate at that scale. And so whatever you're doing with Hermias is going to translate to Anduril and vice versa. And there's going to be, there's going to be sort of like synergies there.

• 2:56:22Cameron McCord?

  Oh, totally. There's a ton of, there's a ton of compounding.

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  Where it doesn't necessarily make sense for every company to have their own system.

• 2:56:28Cameron McCord?

  No.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  I do, you mentioned, I think, physics-based simulation, CFD. What, what is off the shelf? What bespoke systems continue to exist? Because it seems like the messy Excel sheets, the messy Python version 27.3 maybe goes away, but, but what actually sticks around long-term?

• 2:56:54Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, it's a really good question. And in the intermediate, we go to a lot of our customers and they're sometimes shocked to believe that we can actually, and this is not like a necessarily a no star, but we can deprecate MATLAB, like just like, people can get off of.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  And for the, for the F1 fans out there, is MATLAB a tool that you could use to like visualize the airflow over a race car? Is that?

• 2:57:16Cameron McCord?

  It's MATLAB is more, it's MATLAB is sort of like the OG, like you'd use it in every mechanical engineering, like master's degree. It's just like, it's all the, yeah, it's like, just basically plotting, graphing, but running like actual math, just engineering analysis. Like, and it is so much of the post-processing of this like hardware-generated data still happens in MATLAB.

• 2:57:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:39Cameron McCord?

  MATLAB is like a single-player. By definition, right? And so I think one of the big value unlocks we've had is just like, take a tool like that and put it in the cloud.

• 2:57:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:51Cameron McCord?

  Horizontally scale it so a ton of humans can access it and you can actually do engineering, math and computation transformation in the cloud. Like that's, um, that's not, I mean, incredibly revolutionary itself, but it's incredibly powerful in what it unlocks. So when you have, to your point of like, um, I think positive compounding effects between multiple different, you know, companies, I think just within a place like Anduril, which is approaching 10,000 people, the fact that they're getting off of single player engineering and being able to do so much more in multiplayer is a huge unlock.

• 2:58:21John Coogan?

  Then walk me through some of like the, the FedRAMP, ITAR compliance because

• 2:58:27Cameron McCord?

  Fun one.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  If I, if I'm running a company and I want just a cloud hosted Jupiter notebook that's multiplayer, I could go to Colab, like it's available, but it's not designed with that use case in mind. It's a very general purpose tool, but walk me through some of the more defense tech government applications and

• 2:58:46Cameron McCord?

  Yeah. So we, we call it rugged deployability, but like if you, if you come and you walk up and you say, hey, I want to use nominal, um, we can deploy our entire stack fully air gapped on prem. Like that's something that we invested in from, from day zero and obviously, uh, a lot of our customers have that use case.

• 2:59:02John Coogan?

  What does that actually look like? Like

• 2:59:04Cameron McCord?

  We'll ship you a server. Yeah.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  Oh, you'll ship the hardware?

• 2:59:06Cameron McCord?

  Yeah. We have a bunch of servers in Austin.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that's just, is that, is that like a Dell server with like a GPU?

• 2:59:13Cameron McCord?

  We have a deployability team.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  Okay. So you can kind of pick.

• 2:59:16Cameron McCord?

  Yeah. We call them the deploy, the deploy boys.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Deploy boys. Okay.

• 2:59:20Cameron McCord?

  No. So we, um,

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  Cause I, I remember I talked to Shamsan Kar, Palantir, and he said that the first time that they tried to ship a Palantir binary to, uh, run on prem, the, the, the, uh, the person on the other side of the deal was like, great, but this isn't running. And he was like, you don't have nearly enough memory, blah, blah. And that's the birth of the Ford Deployed Engineer.

• 2:59:39Cameron McCord?

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, um, so we can, we can, with some customers, it's easier. We'll just ship a tower. We'll ship a server to them. Um, or we can just provide specs. I think, I think people are the, the department and, and these like, If the government is your customer, I think people are getting a lot better at that right now. So you can do that. We can also just deploy our software inside of our customers' VPCs. That's often inherent all of their security and credentialing and things like that. But I do think that's been a big differentiator is like we've invested. That would not normally be a place where I think you would spend valuable like startup engineering points. If you were not in the industry that we are in. But from day zero, essentially, we were like, we needed to be able to deploy this.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  What about like approvals, cybersecurity, compliance? Like, I imagine that even if you have the best team of engineers possible, like you still want third parties to work with that. What does that look like?

• 3:00:29Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, I think, you know, there's a long, long tail of, you know, security and compliance. I think things there. I think, you know, we're continuing to, I think, to work through that. Some of the basics are like, you know, people have to trust that the tool is going to perform the things that we, you know, we say it is. And so in the early days, we'd have lots of fun conversations with folks around like, how are you doing like a low pass, you know, filter? Like, and just like explaining like basic math, you know, functions, et cetera. But we're well past that now. So, yeah, I mean, I think we're continuing to burn down that. We do, like, we support classified work, right? We have a facility clearance as a company. A lot of our engineers are, you know, red in.

• 3:01:09Cameron McCord?

  And I think all of the, not all, a good portion of the one, like, most interesting work with a lot of our federal customers is happening at higher classifications. And I think there's a direct correlation as you go to higher classification programs of like a lack of tools. Right? And so I think from a business perspective, if we can get, like, there's, they are really big budgets. People are, you know, they're all just give facts, like, I mean, you know, $3 million a day being spent on test campaigns alone, right? And so if nominal is able to bring in some of those test timelines by... You know, a day.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:45Cameron McCord?

  And we can do more than that. It's like, it's really valuable. But when you go to some of those high side programs that are doing, you know, testing, you really are restricted in what you can, can use.

• 3:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Crazy. Some of the most important work and the fewest tools.

• 3:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is AWS sort of like the IBM of federally compliant cloud hosting these days? You remember IBM, like no one ever gets fired for buying IBM.

• 3:02:07Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  Is AWS still this leader in just like the default tool that you pull off the shelf if you want?

• 3:02:13Cameron McCord?

  I think we see a lot of it, but we also see, it really, and this is one thing, like we see a bunch, we see Azure, we see other places like that. Yeah. So I think we, we have sort of partnerships with all of the, the cloud providers. And they all have their own efforts, I think, to provide, you know, some, often, some of the times, like the, the reason why we get slowed down is just because there isn't a environment for us to deploy the software in, right? Like the customer wants it, they, they're asking for it and we have to figure out ways to, to get the software deployed, but yeah.

• 3:02:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the team like? Where, where are you based?

• 3:02:45Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so we are, we're around 135 employees today. We'll probably grow to around 240 over the course of the calendar year. Headquarters in Los Angeles, Austin office as well, New York, DC, and we opened an office in, in London late last year.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  London?

• 3:03:02Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, so.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  Is that for international clients?

• 3:03:04Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, yeah. I went over to, I went over to London, probably six or eight months ago now, set up a bunch of meetings and kind of.

• 3:03:12John Coogan?

  A clearing deal.

• 3:03:13Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, and came back, basically came back and all of those opportunities like materialized into real customer traction. I think we, we sort of knew like this is not, this is not a US centric problem. This is a global, like industrial sort of problem and there's a ton of opportunity. And especially in more of the defense adjacent work, unsurprisingly, they're, the proximity that they're feeling is like, is heightened.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the mix of, of business with companies that sell to the government versus government contracts directly?

• 3:03:41Cameron McCord?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:42John Coogan?

  Are you feeling pull from the DOW directly?

• 3:03:45Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, yeah, so we, we have, we have around 60 customers. Around two thirds of the work we do is, is actually, is totally commercial. It's just a B to B engagement. I mean, like company like Shinkai or, or Antares, et cetera. And then we also directly work with the, the federal government. And I always say, The biggest tester and validator of hardware in the world is like the Department of War right now. And so I think we're very happy to support a lot of that work and it's very needed.

• 3:04:16John Coogan?

  That's great. Gordy?

• 3:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Very insane progress.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  Where can people get these? Do you just sell these? Do you ship them to people?

• 3:04:25Cameron McCord?

  We've shipped a ton. We've shipped a ton out. My sense is we will, the reception's been very positive. We'll probably be printing a lot more, so.

• 3:04:32John Coogan?

  You're printing. I love it.

• 3:04:33Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, we're printing.

• 3:04:34Jordi Hays?

  We're printing.

• 3:04:35Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, we're printing. We'll probably be shipping them out.

• 3:04:39John Coogan?

  What is the meaning of Y Combinator here?

• 3:04:43Cameron McCord?

  We had fun with this one. So it's graduates who became astronauts.

• 3:04:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:48Cameron McCord?

  Y Combinator doesn't have it.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Graduates.

• 3:04:52Cameron McCord?

  We support the US Air Force Test Pilot School, TPS, some of the coolest humans in the world doing amazing work.

• 3:04:59John Coogan?

  We gotta get Johnny Kim to go back through YC.

• 3:05:02Cameron McCord?

  We do.

• 3:05:03John Coogan?

  He's a legendary astronaut.

• 3:05:05Cameron McCord?

  Yeah, we do. Hopefully that, maybe that'll change one day, but yeah.

• 3:05:07John Coogan?

  I would believe it, but if you're on the YC track, you're probably off of the.

• 3:05:11Cameron McCord?

  Off of the astronaut track. Yeah.

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  You gotta build an.

• 3:05:14Cameron McCord?

  You gotta make decisions. Yeah.

• 3:05:15John Coogan?

  For now.

• 3:05:16Cameron McCord?

  You gotta build unserious software.

• 3:05:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

• 3:05:21Cameron McCord?

  Thank you. Always good to be here.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  Today.

• 3:05:23Cameron McCord?

  Appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Thank you.

• 3:05:26John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon.

• 3:05:28Cameron McCord?

  Okay.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 3:05:30Jordi Hays?

  We'll close out the show.

• 3:05:31John Coogan?

  Yes. Thank you for watching today. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and.

• 3:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we didn't get enough into GPT 5.4.

• 3:05:40John Coogan?

  11:00 AM. GPT 5.4.

• 3:05:42Jordi Hays?

  The reviews are incredible and we'll stack the beginning of the show tomorrow.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:05:48Jordi Hays?

  Updates there.

• 3:05:49John Coogan?

  Lots of fun benchmarks to dig into, lots of graphs to analyze, lots of models to play with and examples to go and build or vibe code and see if they have that smell, if people like the vibes. Anyway, thank you for watching. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:06:05Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful evening.

• 3:06:06John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.