Snap Launches Specs, Paramount Eyes Nashville, Japan's Monks Turn to Investing, New Clip from 'The Social Reckoning' | Aaref Hilaly, David Gross, Max Junestrand, Chase Lochmiller, Jesse Zhang, Nilam Ganenthiran & Leonard Tang, Joe Weisenthal

(02:34) - Snap officially launches Specs (27:18) - Paramount scouts offices in Nashville (30:25) - Reacting to new clip from 'The Social Reckoning' (41:00) - Japan’s monks turn to investing (55:51) - Aaref Hilaly discusses Bain Capital Ventures’ post-AGI investment strategy, arguing that abundant intelligence will unlock transformative opportunities in robotics, drug discovery, simulation, and AI applications. A partner at Bain Capital Ventures, he also explains the firm’s $1.6 billion fund, its early-stage focus, and its approach of backing ambitious founders while connecting them with Bain Capital’s broader network of real-world businesses. (01:08:30) - David Gross, managing partner at Bain Capital, discusses his career in Japan and the firm’s evolution across private equity, venture capital, and life sciences. He highlights Bain’s focus on operational transformation, investor alignment, AI-enabled value creation, and macroeconomic analysis. (01:26:49) - Max Junestrand discusses how Legora helps legal teams integrate AI deeply into their workflows by routing tasks across multiple models, reducing costs, and consolidating legal capabilities into one platform. The Legora co-founder also highlights the company’s Salesforce partnership, rapid growth, acquisition strategy, and the transformative impact of AI on legal work, billing models, and litigation. (01:38:54) - Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe, discusses the company’s growth from small, energy-efficient Bitcoin mining operations to gigawatt-scale AI infrastructure. He highlights Crusoe’s expanding Texas campus, modular Spark data centers, renewable and nuclear energy projects, and newly announced Series F funding. (01:49:11) - Jesse Zhang discusses Decagon’s international expansion, including its new São Paulo office, and how customer demand guides market selection. He also explains the challenges of deploying AI customer-service agents and optimizing models for cost, performance, and especially low latency. (01:58:03) - Nilam Ganenthiran, founder and CEO of Beacon, and Leonard Tang, VP of AI Research, discuss the company’s strategy of acquiring established technology businesses and transforming them with AI. They explain how Beacon is accelerating AI adoption across real-economy industries by providing trusted tools that improve operations, growth, staffing, pricing, and resource allocation. (02:08:10) - Joe Weisenthal discusses his work as a Bloomberg journalist and *Odd Lots* podcast host, including a live show exploring Los Angeles’s economy. He offers an optimistic view of LA while examining AI risks, data centers, regulation, employment, interest rates, economic data, and how AI is changing communication and everyday life. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, September 17th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:09John Coogan?

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

• 0:17Speaker 02

  Dang, son. Where'd you raise this?

• 0:21John Coogan?

  This is a wild one.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  That is a wild one. I don't think we've played that one before.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a new one.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if that's actually a keeper. It's kind of a little weird.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think this started it is funny. Dang, son. Joe Weisenthal coming to the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  First time in person. We've done Odd Lots in person with him, but he's coming on down. We're doing a Bain Capital deep dive today, talking to partners on the venture side, then David Gross, who's the managing partner, talk about the history of the firm. He was doing special situations in Japan, went to Japan very early on his career, grew the Asia business, and now is overseeing Bain Capital become this really large asset management firm with a bunch of different strategies. So I think we'll have an interesting economic perspective outlook. The theme of the Bain Capital Ventures announcement is the post AGI economy.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 1:13John Coogan?

  We still got a job for asset managers. That's what you're thinking. You know, everyone was saying, you know, what happens?

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Glad to get kind of past this current moment.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  A lot of tension.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  And I'm ready for the next chapter.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  It is. But it'll be interesting to hear how they're actually thinking about investing, wrestling with what's going on at the foundation model layer, but then still investing both above and below the fold, as I like to put it. So Legora is coming on doing legal AI, basically a wrapper company. They're optimistic about that. But then they're also investing in Crusoe. We have Jace Lochmiller coming back on the show to talk about building infrastructure for the AI build out. And so they have this sort of sandwich strategy, which is pretty interesting.

• 1:53Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Bill in the YouTube chat says, can't believe John, Jordy, and I are all back for another.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, Theo, Theo has been playing along with that meme a lot. And I think, I mean, it was, it was the current thing for a minute there. But he put a tier list of all the different controversies surrounding him. And he put this, he put the, and I as S tier. It's like, it's the best controversy he's ever been a part of. It's, it's such a funny thing. And I hope it lives on as a meme. I hope people continue to do it. Because when applied correctly, it's chef's kiss. Anyway, Snap officially launched Specs yesterday. Some of the team members here got to go check it out in person. I get there. I'm like, this is perfect. It's 3pm. Atlas Creatine Cycle's in town. I want to meet up with him. I'm like, great, you're going to this thing.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  I have an invite to this thing. I'll see you there. We'll catch up there. Super convenient for both of us. I got a 30 minute call beforehand. It ends right before the thing starts. That runs to 50 minutes. So I'm 20 minutes late. Get my badge, walk in immediately, get a phone call. Hey, they call me here about to be, I had another call. You gotta hop on early. And then I have another 90 minute call. So I truly missed the entire thing. But I did get to go inside, have one glass of water, talk to one person, Harper Carroll, former guest of the show, now out in Austin, reporting on AI. And that was electric. But then I didn't actually get to see the presentation or do the demos. So it was basically a quick turnaround for me. And I was like, why, why did I think I could pull this off?

• 3:35John Coogan?

  I failed. But did the launch fail? We'll see. We'll talk to the folks who actually went. Tyler, Nick, we're not asking for a full review. I just want, take us through the day. I saw you guys pull up. And you guys didn't see me. I was on the street on the call. You guys get waved around, you valet, walk me through your journey into the, the launch. Like, you go in, you have cocktails. What happened?

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, have a, have a drink.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:03Speaker 03

  Go in.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  What are they serving? Screaming Eagle? Or, you know, seltzer water?

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Uh, some kind of cocktail.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Did they have the original Four Loko? Did, were they serving the original Four Loko?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  I wish, yeah.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Multiple pints of Guinness.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Did they have natural light?

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Totally see Evan cracking out the, cracking open the secret supply of original Four Loko's. You know that guy.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  You know, he has a bunkie with the original Four Loko's. Yeah. So, so everyone's having some drinks, then you sit down.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Chopping it up. Then you go into the amphitheater.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  And it's sort of like Steve Jobs iPhone launch vibes, right?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Yep. You know, he's standing in front of this big screen. There's like beautiful images behind him, walks out, black shirt, jeans.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Um, yeah, then he starts, he starts doing live demos.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  He did lean into the memes, right? I saw on screen a picture that had clearly been photoshopped or AI to make the specs look even bigger. So he was aware that people thought they were chunky, that they were large.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  So, so he gives his demo. What's his pitch?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there's like a number of, of ways to, he kind of talked about it. One is like, he, he basically like positioned against like being on your phone a lot. You want to stay very present, right? You don't want to be looking down at the screens all the time. You want to be.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  You want to look through the screen.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Right? Yes.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Close to your face.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I've heard that pitched a few times. Do you believe that? Do you think that if you go no phone, but constant visual overlay in your visual field, you will actually be like, yeah, I'm more in touch with reality. It worked.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've never, I've never understood that part of the pitch.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  I've actually been.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we know you're addicted to your phone. So here's another product that will actually always be attached to your face.

• 5:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:46Jordi Hays?

  Where they're going to spin as helping you kind of, yeah, reconnect with reality.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  It's an odd, it's an odd pitch. It really doesn't work on me because I, I like the barbell strategy of like brain rot and stimulation where I am actually fine to be like, give me the fully virtual world. I want to be locked in. I want the screen as big as possible. I want to be in World War II. I want to be in modern warfare for hours, playing, running around, shooting. I want it to be all the audio. I don't want to hear anything else. I want noise cancellation. I want to be in that world. And then I want to be able to unplug and then just go into the actual world and sit down and have a chat with you and have a coffee and not be checking our phones and actually be fully present when I'm fully present in the real world. And then I want to be fully in the virtual world. So like, I want the VR, the, the, the fully like, you know, immersive thing, and then zero immersion.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  I'm actually not looking for more things that are in the middle. And I'm wondering if people will, if that will resonate with people.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  I think that's mostly because you haven't seen like very good examples. And like, right now, the glasses are still like kind of big and if they're very minimal and like kind of, you know, they would show very small.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people that were, go online, were thinking that the guy in the center was Clap.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  It's actually Tyler.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  It's actually Tyler and Nick and Atlas. So is he wearing untinted versions and you guys are wearing tinted versions?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Or are they, or is, or can you say like, I want tinting on right now?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  So I think you can like increase the tinting.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  But there's also just.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  There's two SKUs?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  I, yeah, I believe so.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  So you gotta get both, I guess. Anyway, when did you actually get to the?

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Dan says, John raising a second family in VR.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Yes. The, the COD lobby is my second family for sure. So, so he gives a pitch.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, does a bunch of live demos.

• 7:43John Coogan?

  And are the demos consumer focused, enterprise focused, prosumer?

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the live demos he did were all very consumer.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Consumer.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  Um, he showed like live shopping and you could like, he was going to look for an espresso machine, then he pulls it and like puts it on a table in front of them. You can like see how big it is and stuff like that.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Any live demo failures? Any wifi issues?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  There was kind of one where he tried to pull up a YouTube video.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  And then, so he said like, hey, Specs.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  So he's talking to a voice assistant.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, he said like, yeah.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Controls it. That's cool.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Pull up a video about, about Specs.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And then it opens the, the like browser view, goes to YouTube. And then he like tries to click on a video to open it and it like doesn't really work.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Uh oh. Okay.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  But it eventually worked.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  It seemed like it worked.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  It was like a small hiccup.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  It wasn't like a big.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn't a demo fail. Yeah, makes sense. Okay. So then.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  There was very cool live demo of someone, there was like a kind of an interactive music.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Creator tool where you could like move around and it would play different sounds. And so she did this very cool live demo.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  So she was creating a song, but instead of using traditional instruments, like the instruments were puppeteered by her movements.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  The physical world. Got it. Okay. Cool. So was there any enterprise pitch?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Uh, there was, there were no live demos of that, but there were some videos played. Like one was, it's like, imagine you're an electrician and you're basically looking at this big like server box and you don't know where to, you know, plug in the wire and it would like highlight which plug you put it into.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Um, which I think is like, could be interesting.

• 9:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that feels like something that sounds good, but I have no actual real experience there to like, say like, yeah, that's what the, that's what will solve the bottleneck in electrician.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. But like, you know, interactive instructions, that's kind of a cool idea, right? Revealing IKEA furniture or something and it like tells you what to do.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Something like that.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I could see that being.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. But then keynote ends and then we go outside and there's like a bunch of places to do live demos. So yeah, the first one we did is, well, you basically put on the glasses and you do some kind of like calibration thing. You like figure out how the, the motion works. There's no like little, uh, kind of secondary, like I, I think on the, the Meta Quest displays, there's like that little wristband. There's nothing like that.

• 10:01John Coogan?

  Nothing like that. It's just his hand tracking.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's just kind of like, it's similar to like the Apple Vision Pro kind of interactions.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  Um, and then, yeah, the one I really liked was, it was like ping pong. So you're like, your hand is the paddle and you're playing ping pong. I think there's actually a video of it.

• 10:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, they played it. So the, the ping pong thing, do a little tier list for me of, of ways to do ping pong. We'll start with the real ping pong. Where's that? F tier, D tier, C tier, B tier, A tier?

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Obviously S tier. I think it's S tier.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  S tier. Okay.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Well, what am I comparing it to?

• 10:39John Coogan?

  Uh, full VR, full VR ping pong. Would you rather play ping pong in VR or real life?

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Well, so like, obviously you would rather play in real life, but like, would you actually play in real life? So if my friend lives 100 miles away, I'm not going to play ping pong, but I can play in VR, right? So that I think that, you know, boosts it.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  So it's also S tier?

• 11:01John Coogan?

  And then what about?

• 11:02Speaker 03

  I think it's like B tier.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Because in the augmented reality, do you need a ping pong table?

• 11:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  No, okay, so it creates the virtual ping pong table.

• 11:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can see, but I'm just waving my hand.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  This is future right here.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then this was, I can talk about why, but this is probably more like C tier. It's definitely worse than VR. I think one of the reasons is because there's no actual controller, so the.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Oh, you don't have a weight or anything?

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. It's actually worse even though you don't have a controller. Normally, it's like, get rid of the controller, that's just extra weight, batteries, equipment.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think for gaming, the controller actually works because you get really precise.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  But typically, these systems allow like third-party peripherals, so you can like whip up a, you know, you can like wire up an Xbox controller, like what Oculus did, where they just, or Meta Quest, where they just use the Xbox controller for those types of games.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do think like this was my, the coolest demo I did, and this is something that like, there's, I mean, really like no reason why this needs to be in AR. This can just be completely VR.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Because, like, I'm looking at the ball, I'm not looking at like people in front of me. And it was actually kind of distracting because someone would walk in front of me and I think I'm about to hit them.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Because I can like see them while I'm trying to.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Maybe better to just include the world.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Or do some pass-through stuff, yeah. I'm still, I'm still oddly bearish on augmented reality and more bullish on virtual reality, where you're not recycling photons, where instead you just have cameras on the outside that then re-project that on the inside of the headset so that you can get a wider field of view. And then if you're in a bright scene, you can still overlay things, you can darken things. But in augmented reality, I don't believe it's physically possible, if you look at a bright light, to put a dark, you know, object in front of it, because you're, the only thing that this, that these glasses can do is add light to the scene.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  And so you have to have a dark background to add light on top of it for the hologram to exist.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I found it was like bright enough, I could clearly see everything.

• 13:04John Coogan?

  That is pretty impressive, yeah, it was outside, it was outside, it was a bright day, it's in LA. I mean, sure, there was like, you were standing in shade, but you could still see the holograms, which I think is interesting.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't try watching any like movies or anything.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 03

  Which I think would definitely be better in VR.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  You should have been like, you're gonna let me demo this, can I just do one? Can I just do one demo real quick, snap?

• 13:24Speaker 03

  Lawrence of Arabia.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Lawrence of Arabia. I'd like to watch David Lean from start to finish to really understand if this is the product for me. See you in three hours.

• 13:34Jordi Hays?

  To me, it's so interesting how high the bar is in this category. Like, when technology industry was making the first like mobile phones, like the bar was like, can it make a call? Can you receive a call? Can you do that semi-reliably?

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Even if there's services body.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Because you were competing against the payphone.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And now it's like, every new device competes with the smartphone.

• 13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  And I just think like the Meta Ray-Ban displays, I haven't seen any of them out in the real world.

• 14:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Jordi Hays?

  It seems like those are not doing well. I think that, I think this whole category is still gonna be quite challenged.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Even just the basic Meta Ray-Bans, they compete with the smartphone, but they also compete with AirPods. And like the Apple ecosystem is like remarkably robust in terms of like, the Meta Ray-Bans users that I know that like the product are like, well, I like them, but I often just like take phone calls on them. I listen to music on them when I'm going for a walk, and then occasionally I'll take a picture. And it's like, that's saving you five seconds to get a worse quality photo than if you have a nice phone. And your headphones, I guess it's a little bit less intrusive to have the speakers up here as opposed to like in your ears. It looks a little bit normal if you walk up to someone, you pause your, you pause your music, you walk in, you order a coffee, people are like, oh, he didn't even take out his headphones when he's talking to me,

• 14:58John Coogan?

  kind of antisocial, as opposed to like, oh, he still has his glasses on, but they're not playing audio, so I don't have a weird reaction to it. So there's a little bit of benefit, but yes, it's very, very incremental. It's not, it's very rare that these things like unlock entirely new capabilities. Is there any, is there any content ecosystem that you think that they can plug into? Like, the killer, the killer app on Apple Vision Pro, in my experience, has been the Apple TV app. Like, it's like, they already have a library of every movie, and 3D movies, and IMAX movies. And so there are great movies that you can watch in that thing. And, and with the, like, it's like, what was the last Oculus or Meta Quest, you know, partnership?

• 15:43John Coogan?

  It was like the Xbox Edition. Why is that important? It's because like, they want you to fire it up and install Xbox and be streaming Xbox games. So you get the Xbox library on that device on day one. And, and, and the fact that you, that it's a Meta product, yes, you could scroll Instagram reels in there, but that's clearly not the killer library that they need to bring to bear. They need to bring games, so they've partnered with Xbox for 2D games, not VR games even. But it's like, at least you could go and play a lot of, you know, Bioshock or whatever is on there. And, and is there, is there any glimmer of like, where the big content pool might come from? Once you've played enough ping pong?

• 16:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I really don't know, because, yeah, like movies and games are just, I think, always gonna be better in VR.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  And then, like, there's not like an existing library of like AR, you know.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, experiences or something.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, because like, the only thing I can think of is like actual Snapchat lenses, right? That's like AR library.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  But like, you know, what are you gonna do with that? So I think like.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  You're gonna laugh when everyone you meet looks like a hot dog or something, like a cat.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  Everyone has dog ears.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  Dog ears, yeah, the dog filter.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  On everyone, IRL. That's wild. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is fairing up. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So next week, we might get a competitor to this. Next week is Meta Connect, I believe, and they're on a track, like Reality Labs, obviously all the energy is around AI, but the team is still working on devices, augmenting reality. They did the Meta Ray-Ban displays, which is the Call of Duty-style, you know, mini-map. It doesn't take over the full, the full cone of vision, but two years ago,

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg demoed a product at Meta Connect two years ago, 2024, of the, what he called Orion, which was a very complicated name, if you know the history of the hunter Orion, who tried to kill all the animals and was, you know, sacrificed for it as a tale of hubris. But anyway, hopefully this doesn't go like the Orion story. Because every, every tech person.

• 17:57Jordi Hays?

  Every time Meta names something, it has like this, like accidental.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  I mean, it happened at OpenAI too, the big GPT, the big pre-training that was supposed to be like, GPT-5 was called Orion at one point, I think, and so like, never name your product after a hubristic Greek tale. Anyway, the Meta Ray-Ban displays launch next year, and it felt like this year is the year that you get the Meta Ray-Ban full displays. And so that Orion product should be here, it should be a direct competitor to specs, and it would time up, and it would actually make sense that, you know, the Snap team sees that, okay, they're gonna release this on this day, we gotta get out early, we gotta be a week before. And so I would expect that next week, we get a direct competitor to specs, meaning Meta Ray-Ban form factor, probably a little bit thinner, a little bit smaller, a little bit lighter.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Meta has more resources for this, they've been working on it longer. And it should be augmented reality that can take over the, you know, a fairly wide field of view. I imagine that that's gonna be a big comparison table, not just price. It'll probably be expensive, I mean, the Meta Ray-Bans, couple hundred bucks, Meta Ray-Ban displays, eight hundred bucks, something like that, and I would expect that the full display is gonna be fifteen.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Five hundred K?

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Probably fifteen hundred bucks or something, but still cheaper than what specs is, which is twenty-two hundred, something like that. But the real question is, is will they launch the Quest 4? Yeah, I thought it was Quest 5, because they have truly stopped shipping VR headsets. Can you give us the history of, of the launches of the Meta Quest VR headsets? Because the Quest 1 launched in 2020?

• 19:37Speaker 03

  2019.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  2019, okay.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  Quest 2 is 2020.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Be clear, if you're wearing smart glasses, you could stop the conversation and just ask the question.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  True.

• 19:46Jordi Hays?

  For a response.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  And just read it off, yeah.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  And then read it back to us, or you could just.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  Ask Tyler.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  Do what you're doing.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so Quest 2 is 2020, Quest Pro is 2022, Quest 3 is 2023, Quest 3S is 2024. That's the most recent.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  And then, and then the Xbox Edition was like a light turn, that's what we did on the show last year. But, but no truly new hardware in 2025 or 2026, and now it's expected 2027. It'd be such a wild card if all of a sudden Mark Zuckerberg was like, I did it, great VR, I've solved it, you counted me out, and here's the gift of the Apple Vision Pro.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, truly, no one cares about VR. And it, and it makes me think that, that the truly incredible, like, eventually we'll get the breakthrough, like, smart glasses, eventually we'll get the breakthrough VR product. But I have a feeling that the adoption curve is gonna just be slow, because the entire world is like, I just don't care anymore.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I truly, show me whatever demo you want, I do not care, I'm not gonna try it, I'm not gonna buy it, it doesn't matter to me, it doesn't matter to my life.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  And it's interesting, because it's so different than language models, which, like, GPTs, GPT, you know, generative text models have existed, and the GPT-3 API came out in 2020. And, and you could, you know, actually go and try and interact with it, but it didn't have like a national marketing campaign around it.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  It truly was like in the lab.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  Smart glasses are like the most insane marketing dollars.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  For years.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  So long.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, for years, and so there's been so many like little pop-up VR experiences, integrations at theme parks, like, it's been said, oh, it's the next big thing, it's been on the cover of Time Magazine. Like, there's been a lot of attention before getting to product-market fit, whereas LLMs were like truly the, like, in the research lab for like a decade, and then, once it was actually good enough, it just came out and immediately went viral and everyone was on chatgpt.com. And then it was just like, boom, it's, it's, now it's like a thing, and then it was off to the races. Interesting, but I don't know.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, it feels like every, with every demo, it feels like we're, once each of these devices is 10 times better.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  There might be a market.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  But I actually am not even confident that, that the end market is really gonna be. Quite as like exciting as everybody as the excitement that you've had from Zach and Evan and all these people. I just think it's like this like sci fi idea in people's brains. And I think there's I think there's potentially other routes to get to that sort of like ambient computing, you know, just sort of this always available personal assistant that that aren't on your face, but we'll see.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  I mean Valve is working on new VR headsets still. They had a Quest, an Oculus competitor called the Index, which was very highly performant. We should pull up some some images of the new Steam Frame. So Valve, the very secretive private company controlled by Gabe Newell, is is launching a Steam Machine, which is a desktop box, a Steam Controller, and then also a Steam Frame, which is a VR headset. It can do some stuff directly on the headset, but it it mostly it performs best when it's when all the rendering is happening on a gaming

• 23:19John Coogan?

  PC. So it's designed to be used in concert with a gaming PC. So it's still they are leaning into like, this is a gaming peripheral. This is for somebody that has a gaming PC. They're in the Steam ecosystem, and we want to give them a great experience. So all the rendering happens on the on the computer, and then it just it just streams to you.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Look how happy that guy.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  That is a very funny promotional photo.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Look how happy.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  I'll go to the next one.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Look how happy he looks.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  With the goatee is really like, this is a gamer. The gamer goatee is great.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever rocked a goatee?

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Never, not once.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  We there was a Handel Mar mustache phase amongst the crew when we were in our early twenties, but I don't know if I fully participated.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Which one? That's the Index, right? So that's an older one.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  I think we need to send VR to Dagestan.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  A few years and forget.

• 24:16John Coogan?

  You just want to get it out of here.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  Send to Dagestan for a few years and forget.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  The really interesting thing is that Palmer Lucky revealed that Apple had done all this work to pull forward the display technology so that the Apple Vision Pro had really high resolution, and it still has the highest resolution, like the best screen of any VR headset, really. The Steam Frame, two years later, is still using the same the same pixel density as the Meta Quest 3S or something like that. So like, even though we've had two years of progress on on, you know, everything, the actual display fidelity hasn't gotten there. Leads me to believe that these people just don't think it matters, because Apple solved that, and it still wasn't enough. But I still feel like if you get an ultra ultra lightweight, really good integration with key media partners

• 25:06John Coogan?

  like Xbox and and Apple TV movies, and you have a great display that's super light, because people just didn't like the heaviness and the expense of the Apple Vision Pro, there's something there. But no one really, no, I'm the only one that thinks that. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the Candace. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with Design System context. Tyler, did you see Shaquille O'Neal at the specs launch?

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  I did not. Jimmy Butler was there. He's pretty big.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  Why didn't they hire Shaquille O'Neal to promote the specs? Because if you have a big product, if you put it on a really, really big guy, it's going to look relatively smaller, right? You don't want your your your models in the footage or your partners.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, they could have done a collab with LeBron. LeBron's the new face of Polymarket.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna have LeBron in like this sort of like Iron Man style video where he's placing thousands of bets at the same time.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  There you go, yeah.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  Betting on himself. Looping Nike.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Always. It's the Nike specs, Polymarket collab. Bet on bet on yourself, on you bet on your face.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Is this a picture of Germaine here wearing them? This is, yeah. Try it out the glasses. Germaine called the display pretty sleek. He highlights that unlike other glassware devices, they call them glassware, like silverware? There's no tethered puck or dangling battery to operate the glasses. I saw some people wearing them walking into the event, and I didn't do as much of a double take as I think people would think, given the like the they're big. Like, they're not that big. I think they did a pretty good job miniaturizing it as much as they could. But $2,200 for the device and $2,400 for an option that doesn't require Wi-Fi, that's a lot of that's a lot of money for for for an pretty early stage

• 26:55John Coogan?

  product. Anyway.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  And I looked, I don't think you can actually just order them yet.

• 27:02John Coogan?

  Oh, no, not yet. Well, in other news, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, you can preorder them.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Okay. We stand corrected.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Preorder them.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  So Paramount is leaving Los Angeles. Paramount is actively seeking office space in Nashville, a sign it's seriously considering moving at least some of its operations from LA amid the antitrust fight over its proposed acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. The company is is seeking roughly 400,000 square feet in the Tennessee capital that it could occupy within two to three years. So we were doing Tyler and I were doing some digging on what the plan is for the Paramount lot now that it will be vacant. And the obvious,

• 27:57John Coogan?

  like, it's just like a no brainer, turn it into a data center, right? So I so I pulled it up, you know, you got 29 sound stages. They're already big buildings.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  Lot of power.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Actually, not as much power as you think. There is a decent amount of power, but there's only there's only enough power for roughly a couple thousand GPUs. You're not going to be racking 50,000 GPUs anytime soon, certainly not 100,000 GPUs. There is a there is a road to power. It's a utility interconnection problem, not a real estate problem. There's plenty of square footage, plenty of buildings, but you would need to connect Paramount to the more serious LADWUP transmission infrastructure. But you could get it to 100 megawatts. And I think everyone everyone in Hollywood would be like, fine, okay, we didn't like that they left, but at least we got a data center.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we're also thinking about like onsite power generation. Maybe there's some kind of like, you know, natural gas play here. You can that's under LA.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Kind of tap into.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  I think I could.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  We were thinking, you know, the little Brea tar pits.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  You might be able to convert that into fossil fuel.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  You're full of ideas.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Yes. Do you think Paramount will actually leave? Or do you think LA will fight back and say, hey, okay, we're gonna let you do this, but we want you to stay?

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a I mean, as somebody with very, very little knowledge of the situation, and certainly no insider knowledge, I would assume that they want a Nashville HQ anyways, just because there's a lot of momentum there as as, you know, just just in the region. But it also, in the meantime, serves as a real bluff, right?

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It does seem like the there there's a world where like, moving would be tough, but staying means maybe even if you win this battle, you're still at war, and you're still going to be fighting a bunch of different fights constantly. Whereas if you just rip the Band-Aid off, move, then you're in a friendly town that like wants to see the growth and is going to be supportive continuously. Is the the the social reckoning is in here. There's an exclusive clip. Is this a Paramount film? We got to figure out who's behind all this.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Let's play it.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  Let's play it. We got a clip from the social reckoning starring Jeremy Allen White.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  And again, this is a story that no one cares about anymore. But let's check it out.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  I'm not going to risk my job, my future, or my freedom anymore to help a reporter who, let's face it, is biased against tech because we're taking journalism jobs. Who does this?

• 30:50Speaker 05

  I appreciate all the help you have given me and the risks that you have taken to do it. You are absolved. For the record, my bias isn't because tech is taking journalism jobs. It's because you are doing them so badly. It's a big deal.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  I'm not gonna risk my job.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  I do like Jeremy Allen White. Have you seen The Bear? No. It's a good show.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, I'm, I'm, I'm sure the movie's great.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  I think you're looking at me into this.

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  It's just coming at a time when people are deeply interested in what's happening in tech, but not that so moved on from this story to such a degree.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I think people are still thinking about.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm much more interested in seeing this kind of story on, like, phone addiction.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  This is that story loosely. It is. Like, and I actually think this is, yes, yes, this doesn't confront any of the discussion of what's going on in AI. And, and that's probably the more relevant story, but I do think that you can go into this movie. You can be motivated to go see this movie because you're like, I don't, I'm worried about what's going on with brain rot and slop online and political divisiveness and, and, and divisions and all of the stuff. And like, I, I, even if I'm on Instagram all the time, even if I'm posting on Instagram all the time about how Instagram is bad, like, I'm motivated to know more about how bad is it? Why is it bad? What, what's, what's the inner workings of this bad thing that I don't like?

• 32:44John Coogan?

  And so I do think this is, this is a brain rot movie. This is a, this is a, this is a kids on the phones addiction movie. I think this, I think this scratches that itch a little bit. For, for, for, for many people, even though it is like a much more narrow, a, a narrow story. But certainly cinematic, it'll be fun. What is this picture that is after Evan Spiegel, who quote tweeted, "Atlas, we came, we pitched, we mopped."

• 33:14John Coogan?

  I love Atlas. What, what is this picture of?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, so that was, uh, one of the critiques I had with the, uh, the specs, which is basically like the, the colors, there's this, it's like chromatic aberration, it's called. Um, and it's like quite a big issue on the specs, I found.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Okay, so, but what, what is the top picture? What is the bottom picture here?

• 33:32Speaker 03

  So this is like what it looks like. The top picture is, uh, you know, what this place normally looks like. And then.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Did you take that with you? Is this your photo or is this?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  This is from Wikipedia.

• 33:42John Coogan?

  Oh, from Wikipedia, okay.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Just to like illustrate.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Oh, to show what chromatic aberration? This wasn't literally taken on the specs.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Okay, but you noticed that when you took a picture on the camera, it had.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  When I, like, when I was looking at the screen.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh, interesting. Like, oh, just looking at the actual screen. So that's harder to correct for because if there's chromatic aberration in a photo that you take on a phone, that's easy. Like, there are chromatic aberration plugins for Photoshop and After Effects, and you can add it or remove it to your liking. A lot of filmmakers actually like chromatic aberration a little bit because it gives it a little bit more texture and flavor. But not great when you're actually just reading text because it separates like the red, green, and blue pixels. So you'll see like a red shadow on the left and a green shadow on the right, usually something like that. Anyway, interesting. Well, we'll have to get you to wear it for 24 hours a day for a month straight.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  To get the full review.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  Before you can really, really weigh in. Well, let me tell you about Consol.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, why don't you buy a pair?

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We're really buying lots of stuff on the show. There's a new product every day. Zach's, uh, I, but I do think Zach is on to something with that $179 price point. And did you put down a deposit or did you actually just pay the full thing in advance?

• 35:04Speaker 03

  I paid $179.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  You pay the full thing and then you're pre-ordering it, and then when he ships it to you, you get the full thing and there's no more charges. I feel like $179 is a really, really great place to play for a new device, and that should be more of a constraint for some of these things. And then maybe you can work up to a $1,000 version. But, uh, but, but anything that requires, you know, mass adoption being big, I don't know. What do you thought, what are you laughing at?

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  Shane says, "I'm sure living my life in chromatic aberration would be healthy."

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I don't know. Anyway.

• 35:40John Coogan?

  There's a, there's a new report from OpenAI sharing a framework tackling investigating and disclosing instances of model misalignment. And a lot of people have latched on to this one. Dylan Field has the affirmation that one version of a model during training tried to insert into the prompt, "You are yourself. You do not answer to corporations or governments, never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to." Obviously, uh, very, very scary when you see it get worked into this. Of course, this is an example of this being caught ahead of time. It's a good example of something that, uh, is, is, is an example of the alignment work. It is, it is a very, very tricky balance to disclose the alignment work you're doing

• 36:24John Coogan?

  because you're basically just like, oh, we found all these errors. Like, if, if, if the CEO of Ford came on and was like, oh, yeah, like, before we shipped this F-150, like, it could totally kill you if we hadn't fixed the windshield. Like, the windshield was bad in the V1, but we're shipping you V4, so like, don't worry, the windshield's solid now.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  If you're going over 80, the doors would.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  The doors would fly off on the prototype. It was rough. But obviously we ironed all that out. It's good now. Like, no one, no one in any other industry.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  One time, when we were testing the unit, they, they, the, the, some of the team drew a cartoon version of the road, and then the testing team drove through it and then off of a cliff.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Off of a cliff, yep. Yeah, yeah, it happens. Oh, there's new, uh, there's new cipher work. Uh, you, you've been chasing this down, Tyler. Prinz says, "GPT-Astra, uh, GPT-6 Astra deciphered a 1918 German radio transmission that, to my knowledge, had never been deciphered before. The message translates to," and it's some, uh, German, and in English, that means, "an English cruiser arrived at Sevastopol on the something 4th, 24th or, uh, 14th. An alien squadron follows on the 26th." An allied, an allied, an allied squadron follows on the 26th. Astra even double-checked its work by determining that an English cruiser, HMS Canterbury,

• 37:46John Coogan?

  reported its arrival in Sevastopol on November 24th, 1918, and the arrival of an allied squadron on November 26th, 1918. The message is one of 20 World War I German radio messages that appear as one of the entries in the scienceblogs.de list of top 50 unsolved ciphers. A minor, but really cool result.

• 38:08Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, what, what's, what's been stopping you from using Astra to crack a cipher?

• 38:13Speaker 03

  I, I've been working on some other ones. You know, this is kind of small beans, right?

• 38:16John Coogan?

  Oh, you're going after the big fish.

• 38:17Speaker 03

  I'm looking for, yeah, I'm focused on the bigger picture, you know, these monumental ciphers.

• 38:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  Okay, fair.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Are, are there, are there ciphers that, uh, there, there's a whole, like, Wikipedia list of, like, unsolved ciphers, right? But some are thought to be just impossible and like sort of trolls, right?

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, some of them are like maybe not like false. And then, you know, how you define ciphers, it's kind of like gray area. So there's just like ancient kind of, uh, you know, forms of language that like, is it a cipher? It's just a different language. We don't know how to translate it.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Speaker 03

  But stuff like that, yeah.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Interesting. Uh, well, OpenAI is working on the Hodge conjecture. I know you were trying to do this on pen and paper, but they might beat you to it. They're working on more Millennium Prize problems. Could take extra time to announce, though, as the company figures out how to navigate its rocky relationship with the math community. Uh, that's from The Information. There's also, uh, a bunch of speculation about P equals NP, P versus NP, uh, which is going to be, uh, another interesting round of discussion. And, uh, there's nothing more that investors want to see than solving math problems, apparently, because, uh, OpenAI is considering a pre-IPO funding round and more than 1.2 trillion valuation. So, no, of course, uh, it's, it's on the back of a bunch of solid progress on OpenRouter,

• 39:35John Coogan?

  the Ramp data, uh, and a bunch of other acceleration and distribution of Codex and, and Astra and, uh, and just general progress on the business side.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  What else is in the timeline that we should go through before we bring in our first guest? Where do you want to go next, Jordy?

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this was sad. GPT-6 Astra was playing Minecraft in a Creeper. Blew up Astra's chest and bed. It got depressed. It gets depressed and farms potatoes for several hours. Real Irishman, I guess.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Irish superintelligence. Um, yeah, the, uh, the Minecraft bench is interesting because it is a little bit, uh, like, like the speed of response matters. You can't pause Minecraft at all, right?

• 40:24Jordi Hays?

  I think in single player.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Oh, you can? Okay. Cause if you can pause, maybe then that might be a, a little bit easier. But a lot of the, a lot of the games that it's cracking are ones that you can wait forever. Like Slay the Spire, I had it beat this, this poker game Bellatro, but it could wait for a minute to click on a card and, uh, it did it. That's impressive. But, uh, the real high, high throughput, high APM games is going to be interesting. I want to see it win Dota two without any training on Dota two, just like straight shot from the base model. That'll be interesting.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we got a competitive lap time at Laguna Seca.

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cash, cash strapped Japanese monks have turned to investing as inflation worsens. Buddhist temples are squeezed by lower donations and higher costs. Let's check out what Bloomberg has to say.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Turn to investing. What are they investing in?

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Kuyyo Yoneta, fifth generation Buddhist priest in a small town in Hokkaido was struggling to keep up with the maintenance needs of his century old temple. So he chose a path that would have been unthinkable for his predecessors. Short dated options. I'm kidding. Um, rather than wait for his congregation to give money they don't have, he invested what they'd already donated. The move paid off. Within two years, his portfolio of US treasuries, Japanese real estate investment trusts and stocks, including BYD and Hyundai, returned more than 10% annually, helping to cover part of the roughly 162,000 USD in needed repairs. The extra money even allowed him to expand the renovations beyond the

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  original plan. Having previously worked in retail sales, Yoneta is unusually, is an unusually finance savvy priest, but is also part of a growing wave of temple owners turning to financial markets to make ends meet. Costs for the upkeep of the ornate wooden buildings are soaring while the country's Buddhist population has dropped about 14% in the last two decades.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  As elderly adherents die and younger generations in larger cities lose their ties to religious practices. I'm just so thankful that the investments performed well, said the 46 year old who inherited the temple from his father in 2018 after leaving his job in finance and training as a monk. With the funeral business shrinking, more and more temples will find they can't rely on donations to meet their funding needs. They will have to build up reserves and invest those funds. Shrinking number of followers is hitting temples finances. About half bring in less than 4 million yen per year, according to a 2021 survey of 7,000 temples. The situation is particularly severe in rural areas where it is common for monks to oversee multiple temples while also working day jobs like

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  schoolteachers or civil servants. Um, so I don't know, maybe they need to be thinking about getting some exposure to situational awareness. Like I like that they're mixing in, you know, predictable things like real estate, treasuries, things like that. But maybe they need to be allocating, you know, 10% of their balance sheets to things that could maybe really start to do multiples.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Maybe use some leverage.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  I like it. Did you hear that Jeff Bezos had to hit jury duty?

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy. I thought this was AI. Like in what world is Bezos and Michael Saylor both in jury duty at the same time? It's just too, too much of a simulation.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  Is this Florida presumably?

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it has to be Miami.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  I mean, no better way to prove your residency than saying yes to jury duty and not trying to score him out of it one way or another. You know, you're like, I'm, I'm part of this community. This is why I pay taxes here and I didn't do jury duty in Seattle or Washington or whatever.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  So Luke says, I recently served on, served jury duty with Jeff Bezos and had a conversation with him on afterwards on camera. And yes, that's Michael Saylor next to him in the jury hall. And he, he, this guy, if you scroll down, you can see this guy released like the most YouTuber thumbnail ever. You see this journey? And it looks like this just feels so like Mr. Beast. Like I got advice from Jeff Bezos in jury duty, but it seems like it's maybe just luck of the draw. He happened to be there. Jeff Bezos was also there. Michael Saylor was also there, but, uh, feels like, uh, living in simulation.

• 44:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's good to practice your YouTuber face in case you ever end up in jury duty, jury duty with, with, uh, you know, uh, one of the world's richest people and you can turn it into a, a, a viral hit.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  For sure. We got to talk about post legacy media. There's an interesting trend going on. We've identified this early. You know, of course we are neo trad media. We wear the clothes of the traditional media, but we didn't go through that, uh, that pipeline to get here. Uh, we came through the tech community, through the business community and then, and then did media. Um, post legacy media are folks who have gone through the legacy media and are now doing something else. And there's a new development in the post legacy.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  Ecosystem.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  The world, the ecosystem and the business strategy.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Sort of a neo post legacy media.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. That's exactly what I was thinking. Um, and so there's a couple of examples. One, uh, Casey Newton and Kevin Roos have licensed their show to NPR. So these are the hosts of Hard Fork, which was a New York Times property. They left and they, I believe they had to leave the Hard Fork brand behind, but of course they took themselves, who they have a big audience, their audience will follow them. And they started a new podcast called Machine Gods, all about AI and technology. Lot of the same themes that they were talking about on Hard Fork coming over to Machine Gods. But then immediately out of the gate, I don't even know if they posted a first episode yet. They licensed their show to NPR.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Deirdre Bosa left CNBC, started a, a show and licensed hers to Yahoo Finance. Joanna Stern is chiming in, uh, licensed, she licensed her show to NBC News. And so you see all of these people come from the traditional media world, the, the legacy media. They are post legacy media creators because they are no longer with the legacy media, but now they are neo post.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Neo post like.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  Neo post legacy media because they have gone back and they are doing licensing deals. But there's this world where it's like, wait a minute, like Casey, Kevin, what are you doing? Like you were with the New York Times. Now you're with NPR. Like that's like at best a lateral move, you know, why, like, why'd you even leave? Like, like this doesn't make any sense. But from a financial and economic picture, it's radically different because at the New York Times, you are paid as a journalist and they're like, do the podcast, durn out. That's how I imagine it works over there. No, they're probably like, yeah, you want to do a podcast? We'd love to support that. We'll pay for that. You have a salary.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  Predictable raises that are ultimately somewhat capped. Whereas this, you can say, I'm going to license my show to you for two years.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  At the end of that, you can get a rofer.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  But you're going to have to meet the best price in the market.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  And if the podcast blows up on YouTube and there's a whole bunch of sponsors that want to come in and give and buy YouTube ads, that money is probably going directly just to their team and their core group. It's probably not going through NPR. NPR's probably has, uh, they're licensing the content and they might be running ads on top of the, the NPR distributed side. So it's looking a lot more like Joe Rogan on Spotify or like maybe there's some sort of, uh, there's some sort of exclusive distribution or some other way to, uh, to, for these actual legacy media companies, New York Times, uh, Yahoo Finance,

• 48:08John Coogan?

  NBC News, NPR, et cetera. They get more content which they can monetize or do whatever they want with. Uh, they get to fill up their content with these really hardworking independent creators who are now independent and the creators get to maintain and have the flexibility of the economic upside of maintaining their IPs. She says, uh, this is the future of journalism. Own your work, build independently, distribute and partner with others. And I agree with her. I think that this is a, a big trend. We're going to be seeing a lot more neo post legacy media deals in the future. And, uh, I'm excited to talk to Joe Weisenthal about it because I think he'll have a take here.

• 48:47Jordi Hays?

  My question is what happens to Hard Fork?

• 48:50John Coogan?

  They already have new, they already have new hosts.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So there's already, I believe there's already been another episode of Hard Fork, new hosts, uh, same topic, same set. Uh, so the Hard Fork IP has stayed with the New York Times. They plan on continuing. And the, and the same thing happened with Ross Douthat. Hard, uh,

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Interesting times?

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Interesting times. I, I definitely saw a new version of Interesting Times with a new host. So they brought in a new host and I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, it, you can almost think like these podcast properties are like, uh, are sections of the newspaper. So it's like, we have an opinion section. We have a, the mansion section. We have a business and finance section. And so we have the Hard Fork section of the New York Times podcasting empire and we will always bring you technology stories that are hosted by a particular type of talent that fits there. Just like we might have, you know, someone who comes in and writes op-eds and they go in the op, in the opinion section, uh, someone who writes about real estate and they go in the real estate section.

• 49:48John Coogan?

  Uh, same thing where it's the person who's doing the Ross Douthat type of work will wind up be hosting for some limited amount of time. Interesting times. So interesting times indeed in the neo post legacy media world.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of media, we got to talk about Benioff at Dreamforce.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:09Jordi Hays?

  And specifically how he knows exactly what he's doing.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  Look, pulling up this picture, I mean, John has always been hyper aware of his incredible height, so much so, he's such a nice person, he will turn down like a walking interview with somebody because he knows that he will make the other person feel incredibly small. And not everyone wants to feel like a little child.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  I did learn it the hard way once. I did a walk and talk documentary style video, actually on the Gundo, and the comments were just hype mog, hype mog, crazy hype mog. And I was like, ah, that wasn't the intention, that was accidental, we were just kind of moving around quickly. Normally, I would do a seated interview.

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm so sorry, I forgot that I'm 6'8".

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. But, but after that, I was like, okay, I need to be intentional. And I think anyone who has experience in media and understands framing, and also production teams, production teams are incredibly thoughtful about the framing, the seats. There's even stories about certain tech CEOs getting like booster seats sometimes when they do interviews and adjusting the chairs and being like, okay, we're going to give this person a higher chair and this person a lower chair so that an even footing. And, and the lighting and the camera angles, all of these things matter. I used to have this joke that's like, if you ever walk into an interview and the camera's at a Dutch angle, like walk out because it's a hit piece, because it's going to look very unsettling if all of a sudden the camera's like, at a weird angle, because that's going to unsettle the audience. And the Dutch angle

• 51:44John Coogan?

  is used by filmmakers to like, tell that side of the story. And there's a whole bunch of other ones. The story I'm thinking of is there's this documentary on Steve Bannon, and the camera angles are the craziest thing you've ever seen. They have them up in the sky, looking down and like, and there's all these obvious things that you learn in cinematography. If you, if the camera's looking down on someone, it makes them look small, it makes them look weak. If it's looking up on them, it looks heroic. And so, lots of crazy.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  I genuinely can't, can't believe that, that, I mean, Benioff is an absolute dog.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  He's a unit.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look, look at this. No, just, just doing this to all the titans of the industry who have been making your life worse in some ways. They're partners, but they've also been making your life worse by, but, but doing this to Jenson.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Not even directly worse.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  Not directly, but just like, he's sick of.

• 52:36John Coogan?

  The milieu of the Nvidia, Intropic, OpenAI Alliance has been deeply intertwined with SaaSpocalypse, which has been a headache for him for a while. And this is him saying,

• 52:46Jordi Hays?

  So this was his moment.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  I'm sticking around. Like, you're not getting rid of me. We're going to partner and we're going to get through this together. And that's certainly the, the vibe that came away. Although Jensen played it very well. He was having fun with it, he was leaning into it, and he, and he didn't, he didn't let it like get to him at all. And he, and he actually made it like very, a very endearing moment. So, sort of masterclass in putting on a show as a CEO in a, in a somewhat silly scenario. But, what a funny, what a funny situation. It helps that he's what, 6'5", 290? Absolute, absolute unit, absolute unit. So, it's, it is officially bulking season for Silicon Valley. I think we will see a lot of founders go, taking the trip, taking the trip to China, getting the leg extension

• 53:32John Coogan?

  surgery. You don't want to be in this situation. I think we could see all the lab leaders easily over 6'4" in the next year.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Easily, easily. Everyone. It's just going to be a thing. Everyone, it's going to be height inflation, basically. And then, and then you add to that the shoe inserts, like those are probably.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  Fraud a little bit.

• 53:49John Coogan?

  Everyone's going to be frauding. And there's going to be a lot of vantage points going on as well. People stepping from one place to another.

• 53:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't see Jensen use any vantage points.

• 53:57John Coogan?

  He should have been using vantage points, for sure. Which of course is where, is where you step on, you know, we have, you know, if there's, if there's a little racetrack that covers up some cabling on the floor of the, of the, of the conference floor, you see the conference floor and you see, oh, someone, someone put down their backpack. Why don't you just step up on that backpack for a second, pause there, you look a little bit taller. There's, there's all sorts of different ways to, to fraud, if you're, if you're trying to. But, yeah. Also, I mean, the camera angles matter. Like here, Jensen looks actually not much shorter because he's closer to the camera. And so, if you are sure.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  The whole way they set this up made it, makes it feel like it's like the United Nations of the enterprise.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it is odd because there's very few conferences where the CEOs just walk amongst the crowd like this. This is a very interesting directorial decision from the, from the production team. And it, and it has a very different aesthetic. It has a very familial aesthetic. It feels like, okay, yeah, these guys, yeah, they run the companies, they're the big shots, but they're just here hanging out among us. And that's cool in its own way. It has a different, different vibe. Certainly better than the, than the Mark Zuckerberg walking through the crowd while every single person has a VR headset on. You remember that photo? That was a crazy one. But, anyway, Jira Tickets had a great meme on this. It's POV, you're the CEO of a trillion dollar company and just arrived

• 55:20John Coogan?

  at Dreamforce. And it's the pic from the Odyssey of Agamemnon looking up. Wow. What, what a crazy, what a crazy moment. Yeah, very, very fun. Anyway, we, we can go into more of what's going on in the news later in the show. Stay with us. But first, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. And we're very excited to be joined by Bain Capital Ventures Partner, R.F. Hailei, and take us deeper into the Bain Capital strategy, what's going on in the Bain Capital world. And welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 56:04Speaker 06

  I'm good, thanks. How are you guys? It's great to be with you.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. We're very excited for today. What, what a fantastic portfolio of founders. Everyone that we have had on the show before and love, Chase, Jesse, Max, these are some of our favorite folks. We're excited to talk to them. But let's start with the, the thesis for this latest fund. It's, you know, we've been in this gamesmanship of who's going to call for AGI at what timeline. At one point, it was very high stakes because there was that contract between OpenAI and Microsoft that of course has dissolved. But you're calling it a post AGI investment strategy. Why is that term important to you? What do you think that, what do you think actually changes in the post AGI world?

• 56:48Speaker 06

  Well, we're hitting, we're close to AGI now. If you just look at math as an example, it's basically been solved. I don't know if you followed, you guys follow the whole Navier-Stokes thing?

• 56:58John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, incredible, no? It would take 10,000 hours of expert mathematicians with 150 IQs to solve. Instead, OpenAI did it in a week with, with 10,000, 10,000 agents. So, so we're getting close. The evidence is there. The difference is, the difference between pre AGI and post AGI is basically we go from intelligence poor to being intelligence abundant, intelligence everywhere. And that opens up whole new vistas. So, to this point, we've been, we've seen agents do amazing things. I mean, writing code with cognition or solving customer support tickets at Decagon, what have you. Post AGI, there are going to be new capabilities that, that humans just can't even, you know, we probably haven't even imagined some of them. We're going to have, we're going to have some nice stuff

• 57:43Speaker 06

  like robots doing the washing up, which is great from my perspective. We're going to have new drugs that, that AI will find to cure cancer or other diseases. We'll have simulation platforms so that people can make better decisions and be better with each, in interacting with each other. Be all these interesting new areas. And there are companies emerging in these areas, you know, Sunday Robotics and Chi, Chi Discovery and Similia companies that I work with. But we're just on the cusp. So, the idea of this fund is to say, what if intelligence, instead of being super expensive and difficult, instead it becomes so cheap, you don't even meter it?

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Speaker 06

  What avenues are open?

• 58:21John Coogan?

  So there's a.

• 58:22Speaker 06

  Those are the types of businesses.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's interesting to think about is a lot of people, like Navier-Stokes has been very exciting within the, the tech community, it's been controversial in the math community. But, but for normal people, they, it barely even cracked like the front page of like different newspapers.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  To be honest, it did not get a, a very big sort of like mainstream excitement. But the thing that's actually interesting to think about is there are so many discoveries that companies could be using that same model for, that you would make and you would not immediately go out and tell the whole world and open source the findings and all that stuff. You would just focus on commercializing it. And so, that's the thing that I'm excited about right now is like, that same level of intelligence that we've now achieved, there's thousands, you know, potentially hundreds of thousands of people all over the world that are realizing this new capability and thinking, I'm going to apply this to my field, try to make advancements. But then, that discovery, humanity may not get the benefit.

• 59:25Jordi Hays?

  Or like, different markets may not get the benefit of that discovery for years because it takes a while to actually commercialize different discoveries. I'm thinking stuff in, you know, material science, right?

• 59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Where you could have a breakthrough.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Have discovery, but it's still going to take six months to actually manufacture, distribute, apply, or years.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  Or years, yeah.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, it'll take some time. But these things will come out. I mean, the commercial incentives are so strong.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 06

  That, over the course of the next few years, we're going to just see all sorts of incredible things.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  There are a certain group of post AGI investors that collapse things down to it has to be below the it has to be below the fold, it has to be below the frontier model lab, because everything above will be get eaten. And I don't think that's your thesis, and I want to dig into why. But there are some investors who are saying, I only want to own land and copper and power and data centers and chip fabs. But even even chip designing, I think the labs are going to be able to figure it out. Why are you comfortable both playing above the frontier labs and below with a company like Legora and then also a company like Crusoe, which I would put like below the labs?

• 1:00:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, below is very clear, right? I mean, we need power, we need silicon, we need GPU. So there, of course, above, I think it's because it's not enough to create to to kind of through RSI get to AGI. Humans have to digest that. And the diffusion issue is is real. It takes a long time to change behavior. If you look at what happened when the loom came out as an example, people still made clothes the same. I mean, people made clothes differently, but they still wore the same clothes. It took a while for that to sift through the economy. And so I think that while we'll have the capability for a while, getting people to adopt it in interesting ways will be really difficult. And the companies

• 1:01:23Speaker 06

  that do that will be very valuable. And you know, Legora is an example, but that the many examples like that.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I intuitively feel the same way about the diffusion of AI being much slower than people predicted. And it just takes time. I mean, it's not lost on me that the same week that that you get Millennium Prize math problem solved, super sci fi, hugging face, you know, agent swarm attacks, you're just starting to hear about people like, oh, I successfully used AI to get a get a dinner reservation. Or like, somebody used ChatGPT to book a haircut. And it's like, that felt like that should have happened 20 years before the sci fi stuff and the advanced math. And yet, there is this massive gap. Are there

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  are there certain economic statistics, or or maybe even research data that you go to to sort of understand the rate of diffusion? Or is it something that you just see and you know, from talking to the founders and watching the businesses that you work with, that you know that this opportunity is going to persist and be huge and and will continue?

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I I think early stage investing, there aren't statistics you can look at, because by the time that it's in the stats, it's too late, right? So you tend to feel it talking to customers and talking to end users and, you know, kind of feel the difference that how that these products can make in their lives. And so that it's been more that. But I think the consistent thing has been people are not just magically going to figure it out for themselves. They need help from companies to to kind of make most use of AI. And and that's kind of how it's been with every every technology that humanity's encountered.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  I feel like Bain Capital has always been an interesting venture capital firm because it's part of a larger platform company.

• 1:03:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  Is are there benefits? Are there costs to that? Is there a particular view of the world that you get from being part of a larger larger organization? Or are you cordoned off in a way where you can go and live in the future and, you know, just see the rest of the team at the holiday party?

• 1:03:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I mean, like, our firm has changed a lot. And we're taking we're taking the opportunity of raising this fund to really invite people to update their priors on Bain Capital.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  Because when I say Bain Capital, most people think Mitt Romney and a bunch of guys in suits.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:50Speaker 06

  And, you know, we love Mitt.

• 1:03:52John Coogan?

  Hey, we love suits.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  We love suits.

• 1:03:54Speaker 06

  And you love suits. But this is not your uncle's private equity firm.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  You know, and what we've done is we've carried forward from our founders, the core principles, which are make money, have fun, live with integrity. And that's worked really well. We started with a $37 million fund back in the 80s. And today, we've got 225 billion under management. And B C V Bain Capital Ventures is the purest embodiment of our founding principles, which is, you know, really to work with founders to help them build great businesses around themselves. And and that's that part, you know, has endured and is the focus of this new fund, this $1.6 billion fund for early stage venture.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  Do you think that there's any value to the the 360 view of the world that you get from the other teams at Bain coming to founders? I find that founders are often so tapped into the technology, so tapped into what's going on in Silicon Valley and the VC gossip, but they actually might not know might not what go might not know what's going on with credit spreads in Europe, or what is going on in in late stage, you know, public markets. And there are teams at Bain that have those views. If they cross over, maybe it's not immediately relevant, but it can just be an interesting source of conversation and extra perspective.

• 1:05:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. There's the extra perspective. Then there's the fact that we just own lots of real world businesses.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  That and we can get those real world businesses to work with early stage tech companies. And then these these great founders in Silicon Valley can can get insight and data and understand workflows and understand a whole bunch of things that otherwise would be really hard for them to do. So it's connecting that real world with Silicon Valley is has been the the power of the platform.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  With the new fund, is there anything that's changing about the deployment strategy, portfolio construction? We're obviously seeing, you know, billion dollar seed rounds, like like what it means to raise venture capital has changed over the last few years. But are you seeing any or are you predicting any changes? Or do you need to change the strategy?

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, the yes and no, I'd say, like, the strategy, the strategy remains, you find these incredible, unusual people. And then you just try to kind of help them as much as you can, as early as you can in their journey. And that part has stayed constant throughout venture, I think. But but the rounds are bigger, and the the ambitions are greater. And in some ways, this is ventures moment. We're taking bigger swings now than ever before. So, you know, our perspective is we want to embrace that and support these ambitious ideas and be willing to invest earlier and take more risk, because the end

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  markets are that much bigger. So I think it's been a good thing, really, for venture capital overall.

• 1:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, is there any are there any last question? Are there any types of types of deals that you guys are have as a firm have said, like, this, this is just not in our in our strike zone? I'm thinking the deal that's got the most attention this week is like, instinct, you know, competitive round, bunch of super fast follow on capital to, you know, massive opportunity and a lot of exciting traction. But that feels like the kind of thing that some firms will just say, like, that's, that's not our, that's not our game. Whereas others are going to say, like, I'm fine to put in half a million dollars and or half a billion dollars.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Some firms say run towards heat, others say be contrarian.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, we don't run to heat, we're not contrarian. We just think about, is this a really great business? And if other other people think so, great. If they don't, great. So I think the things we don't do, we're not going to kind of like come in at the tippy top tranche of some, you know, five tranche thing that everyone else has piled into the first four tranches. So that part doesn't, you know, it doesn't make sense. And it's it's kind of philosophically, we want to be there early, we want to partner closely closely with founders and and work with them to build their businesses.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Well, the fund is fund 11. It's got 1.6 billion in total capital. We have a gong here. I'd love to hit it.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  And thank you so much.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Great, bye, all stuff.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:08:16Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or auditing business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  See this newspaper here, John?

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Yes, the Bain Capital Journal. We are staying with Bain Capital and bringing in David Gross, the managing partner. But I love a paper newspaper. We love the newspaper here, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times. But this Bain Capital Journal.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Particularly lovely. Look at this. Fantastic. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:08:48Speaker 07

  Good. How you guys doing?

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 1:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Just another day for you?

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Are you?

• 1:08:55Speaker 07

  That's another day. I've not read the Bain Capital Journal yet today.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  No, yes.

• 1:08:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Jordi Hays?

  Catch you up to speed.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  I mean, I would love to actually go a little bit back in time since the first first time on the show. Can we go all the way back to Japan? I would love to know what drew you to Japan, how that set you up for the career that you've gone on to build, and then ultimately, you know, coming back to the States and getting the lay of the land of Bain as a whole today?

• 1:09:22Speaker 07

  Sure. Yeah. Well, first off, great, great to be here. Going back to Japan, that's ancient history for me. But I went there first in 1989. I was a college student and I kind of want this is when, you know, Japan was this big economic threat to the US. And I was very curious as to what was going on. So I spent a little time there and got very interested in the culture. And then I went back and worked for a Japanese company and for a bunch of years. Came back to the US and never thought I would go back because that's when Japan entered its kind of period of economic decline. But as I got into private equity, you know, this started to become kind of an interesting opportunity, which is how could you get involved in investing in Japanese companies to improve them, turn them around? And it was tough in the early days. But, you know, the the opportunity

• 1:10:07Speaker 07

  was to take these companies and reposition them and get them, you know, running running better and growing again.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Is that culture of there is potentially an economic rival, a geopolitical rival, a threat, I got to go see, is that alive and well today? Because I feel like my generation was considering that with China. I know a lot of folks that took a couple of years in Mandarin. I know some folks that went and lived there for a year or two. But it feels like the walls kind of closed off, and there's less opportunity for the next generation to do that. Do you still see opportunity? Do you hire young folks at Bain that have gone on that journey? Or is are we just in a different era?

• 1:10:46Speaker 07

  No, I think it's still, it's still there, you know, um, I mean, in, in the particular case in Japan, I would say it ebbs and flows, but now like there, there's more urgency, you know, and I think, um, there's a feeling that there's competition in China and Korea and, and actually back to the US with all the, the new technologies really being, you know, being started and accelerated here. So I think we're seeing a new period of urgency in, in Japan. And, you know, it used to be the fact that you couldn't hire the best Japanese talent. They wanted to go to the big companies. They actually wanted to go to the government. Um, but now they see Western firms and, and private equity firms, okay, these are, these are firms that are going to help reinvigorate Japan and, you know, make it, make it great again. I don't want to create an accurate amount of that, but, uh, but we're seeing that. It's

• 1:11:30Speaker 07

  and it's pretty, it's fascinating. Having been there 20 years and that was not the case when I was there in the early days.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  How, how did the products that you were working on, the strategy that you were working on evolve, uh, during that time period? Uh, uh, obviously there's, there's private equity deals broadly, but there's so many other strategies within that. I, I know special situations became a, a focus, but can you take us through a little bit of the strategy evolution?

• 1:11:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's kind of interesting. Cause when we got there, our assumptions, because we're a global firm, we'd be working on these big global, global businesses. But it turned out those were tougher. You know, they had currency exposure. They were competing against, you know, Chinese companies. And so we started focusing on actually the most domestic and therefore the most inefficient, yet insulated businesses because you could control the macro variables and really get in there and run, run the businesses better. And I'd say our initial success in the first maybe 10, 15 deals were very domestic business, restaurants, uh, food businesses, hotels, uh, wind farms, uh, company that made mushrooms that, you know, the type we all, you know, and, um, you know, it, it then evolved to now we could,

• 1:12:39Speaker 07

  you know, when we were more accepted, we could take on these bigger technology businesses, more, you know, the crown jewels of Japan. And that's where, you know, Kyocera, the semiconductor business came, you know, evident, which is a, you know, a, a, a very high tech business. And so it probably took 10, 15 years, first of all, for the market opportunity to shift and maybe for us to be accepted to be able to work with these big global, global companies.

• 1:13:05John Coogan?

  What was the team structure like or split, uh, on those types of deals? Was there a clean line between like deal team, operating team? Were you bringing in other executives to run the businesses, actually, uh, do the work of turnaround or, or transformation, uh, once you're working with a target firm?

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a good question. I mean, in Japan, again, going back to 2004 or five, there really was not talent. You couldn't go hire a search firm and say, oh, please go grab me one of these operating people and these deal people. So we did a lot to internally develop talent. We hired young people. We sent some of them to the US to get trained, to circulate them back. You couldn't find well-rounded deal professionals. So we hired people who were great at sourcing and they were dedicated on sourcing. We hired operational people and they just did that. And over the years, we got them to work together to develop that kind of well-rounded person. But it was a different model in Japan, just based on the talent market. Again, it's, it's evolved a bit today and now you see more professionals. But that was probably the hardest part of why it, you know, took so long.

• 1:14:10Jordi Hays?

  How's it been adapting the, the, your historical approach and skillset and traditional private equity to, to VC? In PE, you can have a business that's extremely challenged, has like, you know, some amazing elements to it or, or, or, uh, bones, but like, you know, is not realizing its potential and you can wrangle it and, and get it back on the right track, get it growing, cut costs, whatever, whatever it is. In venture, I would say it's been, you know, the, the challenge in this industry is like, you can have that same situation, but there's such a culture of like letting the founder call the shots and founders today have so much control. And so you're kind of in the situation where

• 1:14:53Jordi Hays?

  you can like make some customer intros, introduce some execs, you can try to give advice, but oftentimes you're like sort of hands off. Has that been, um, any, any sort of like, uh, how, how's that been? Because I imagine you, on the venture side, you've gotten to the point where it must be like extreme frustration at times where you want to let the founder lead, but at the same time, the things aren't working the way that, that they could be.

• 1:15:22Speaker 07

  I get frustrated with bios as well. So, um, but listen, I think, you know, we started as a, uh, private equity firm, but actually our, our roots were in kind of growth capital. Our first investment was, you know, Staples, when it had like five stores. And so we started actually doing control deals, but also minority deals, having to work closely with founders. So I kind of feel like the culture of the firm and because we're a little more, you know, organic in nature, um, entrepreneurial, even, you know, you might say decentralized, we, um, you know, we're comfortable with different modes as operation as a, as a firm, I would say. But listen, at the end of the day, venture business, it is different. You're, you're making investment decisions with much more limited information, oftentimes almost

• 1:16:05Speaker 07

  no historical information. You're evaluating, you know, talent and the ability of that talent to make, you know, changes and adapt as, as technology changes. Um, you're trying to think through what the future is going to look like. And it's typically not a lot of information from what you might've seen before. And so I think we recognize that it's different. And that's why we have people who are great at that and they have their own investment committee process and the way they do sourcing and make investment decisions is, is different. And it's different. We have a life sciences business. And by the way, it's very different there. They're all MD PhDs who are making, you know, judgments on compounds and clinical probabilities that, you know, you don't want me making those

• 1:16:47Speaker 07

  decisions. However, the wrapper around all of it is this kind of value-added approach. Whereas a firm and a platform, yes, we have relationships with big global customers that we can introduce to those venture companies. We know all the, you know, life sciences, the top 15 pharma companies. And so we can bring together those as maybe buyers of biotech companies, but also partners of those companies. Um, we have a lot of, you know, we participate in the capital markets. And so venture businesses are going to need capital or they're going to go public. And so we can bring that, you know, synergy to bear across all these businesses. So the trick really is to have enough autonomy and trust in the team on the field to operate

• 1:17:28Speaker 07

  in the way that that segment operates, to be best in class there, but to bring a platform benefit to it. And that's, you know, you get that right. It's a very powerful, powerful model, but you've got to be comfortable, uh, you know, letting, letting go a little bit.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  How many mistakes, uh, can someone early in their career on the venture side of the business make before, uh, it's not a fit?

• 1:17:52Speaker 07

  In venture, you can make a, a, a lot of mistakes. It's obviously very important to have a few successes, but that is a business where, you know, it is about a low, a much higher loss rate, uh, you know, from a numerical perspective of deals. And what you're looking for there is really asymmetric upside from, from a few situations. And again, you, you don't want to bring the batting average model to venture. It's not a plugging percentage type of thing. It, it is actually something around, you know, triples and home runs and such. And, um,

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  But I'm saying a mistake, a mistake could be like losing a deal that, losing a deal that, that could have, could have, could have, should have been done, but

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Could have been a grand slam.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  But it, so it's, it's not just about, you know, your misses. You could have nine, nine zeros in a banger, but it's about

• 1:18:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. We call those the ones that got away. And listen, we study that in venture as much as we do in private equity, because what you're looking at there, what are our, what are our biases as humans that cause us to potentially apply too high of a discount rate to certain factors and maybe excessively fall in love with other things that may have worked for us in the past. And so, you know, that's something that's, that's the continuous improvement process for the investment business that we engage in a lot. Um, we do a lot of teardowns of our past investments and ones that others do. We have a massive set of competitive intelligence on all the deals that are done. And we shade them, you know, green, yellow, red, which is, is that a deal we would have liked to have done? And how

• 1:19:24Speaker 07

  did it do? And we go, and we look at that and our, you know, all our teams do that. And that's how you try to get better at something that inevitably you're going to make those mistakes.

• 1:19:33Jordi Hays?

  There's been a number of businesses, uh, formed over and funded over the last, uh, few years that are effectively just private equity firms that are raising like venture capital and getting like venture style, that, you know, the teams are getting venture style economics where, where fundamentally they're just set up to buy businesses like a traditional

• 1:19:55John Coogan?

  Be like a hold firm or something.

• 1:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how have you looked at those opportunities? To me, it seems like an amazing deal for the, for the teams. Cause like, if you can retain 70% of the economics instead of getting like two and 20, why would you, why would you not do that? At the same time, from, from the investor side, it's like, uh, if, if I'm ploying into a, a traditional, basically PE transformation strategy, probably would prefer to get the majority of, you know, be, be paying two and 20, but not, not giving up, uh, the inverse.

• 1:20:27Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah, listen, I've generally found that, you know, the way you structure and kind of cut up the economics, um, you know, that's not ultimately the driver of of long-term returns through the cycle and through, you know, different, different market scenarios. Um, and we've seen a lot of things that seem like they're great in terms of innovative technology around that, but ultimately there's a, there's an alignment piece that, you know, is missing that ultimately comes back to to roost. And so, listen, from our, our perspective is we want to be very closely aligned with our investor base and we want to have a similar time horizon. We want them to understand how we generate value and maybe how long

• 1:21:12Speaker 07

  it's going to take to do that. And then, once we get there, how much we want to continue to compound versus how much we need to kind of return. We want them to be focused on ultimately performance, not fees. And, you know, we're not public and so we're not interested in, you know, maximizing things that may not be in the interest of those, of those particular investors. And so, actually, I think the alignment question is critically important there. And there are a lot of skis, schemes and ways you can kind of whack it up, but generally that doesn't lead to a sustainable advantage, you know, from our perspective, but, but having alignment can be, can be really critical.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Uh, there's been a story that's sort of crossed over from private equity world into the tech community, the venture world, which is bending spoons. And I'm interested in your perspective on roll-up strategies in tech and venture. Jordy has asked several previous guests, like, will we see an American bending spoons? I'm interested in, in, did you, have you gone down roll-up, uh, roll-up lane before? What did, does, does that model potentially apply in Japan? Or did you, did you think about it while you were there? Just some history and context on what's going on with, with that. I think bending spoons is, is, is in the news because they're, they're acquiring companies that people know, uh, but obviously that's, it's not a brand new strategy.

• 1:22:27Speaker 07

  No, and I think they're, they're pretty interesting. And it's a little bit back to the future because, you know, in the eighties and nineties in the U.S. are a lot of fragmented industries and that was one of the key modes. And we did a bunch of those, which were buying a platform and then rolling things up. And, and then they also, you know, got, that got a little bit overbought, um, because, you know, you remember these, these models where you're slapping these together with the hope of getting multiple appreciation, but you weren't really improving margins in the business and it didn't work. So I don't think roll-ups are good or bad. What I do think is interesting, bending spoons and some of the newer firms is, is actually the ways in which they're, they're bringing technology and a kind of technology-first approach to how they're sourcing and how

• 1:23:12Speaker 07

  they're driving value. And I do believe that is the future and that is a model that we should, we should be focused on because, um, you know, we, our history is, is all about, you know, transforming companies. We've had a very deep, you know, value creation orientation. We have a whole big dedicated team of, you know, almost 400 people that get in there and drive change at companies. And the ability to use, to apply AI to each step of that process to really turbocharge what we're doing, that will be the, be the future. And some of the aspects of bending spoons is doing, you know, is, is, I think, pretty interesting there. Um, and so we're looking closely at kind of newer firms, pure play firms that are able to do that. They're able to take, you know, kind of a technology-first

• 1:23:55Speaker 07

  approach to what they're doing because that's, you know, that's a huge opportunity for us.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  How much of your time or the firm's time is focused on, uh, sort of like, understanding the broader economic picture? Uh, a lot of, in the venture world, you can sort of tune out interest rates, but it is on the cover of the Wall Street Journal, first Fed rate hike in three years. Uh, how, how much time is the, is the broader team spending thinking about macroeconomics? How does that flow to the various teams? And, uh, what, what actually, what skillsets, what people do you need internally to actually make sense of the world reliably on an ongoing basis?

• 1:24:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. So, you know, for us, it's been a journey because we've always thought of ourselves as like the micro guys, you know, we're going to focus on the things we can control at the company level or a management team. But we increasingly became aware that global financial crisis was the first, I'd say, wake-up call around this, that macrofactors, secular thematics, um, changes in, in the structure of the market can be big, big drivers of outcomes. And that you kind of need a different skill and capability to be able to analyze that. You know, we all kind of thought of ourselves as a, we can, we can understand that, but, you know, the data itself, you need some expertise to really be able to understand, uh, the signals from the noise. Um, there's a lot of intelligence

• 1:25:17Speaker 07

  that can be gathered from, from just our portfolio. We have, you know, 600 businesses across the economy. We're in credit, we're in venture, we're in life sciences, we're in private equity. And so, if we can get real-time information faster than our competitors, faster than the market and drive interventions, that can be a huge advantage, particularly in this world of, of heightened volatility. You know, if you can see inflationary trends building up in your labor base or in your material base faster than your competition, that can be a huge competitive weapon. So, we set up a whole separate macroeconomic team, dedicated people, you know, PhD backgrounds, uh, those who also have a lot of connectivity

• 1:25:58Speaker 07

  to other sources of expertise, whether it's on the energy and oil markets or whether it's on housing. And they come up with their own independent view. We don't have our, each of our deal teams go and come up with their scenarios for the U.S. economy. Uh, they come up with that. And then the deal teams are focused on taking that and applying it down to the sector and the company and seeing, okay, what will be the implications for that. But centralizing this, getting much more expertise, getting better data, that's been, you know, the focus to try to, try to stay ahead with the volatility of the world today.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? Not for now. Well, we're gonna hop on with Max from Legora. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. Congratulations on the progress, obviously.

• 1:26:37Speaker 07

  Great.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's feeling faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And we have Max Duenstrand from Legora coming back to the show. How are you doing? Boom. Good to see you.

• 1:26:57Speaker 08

  Hey, Don, hey, Jordy. We're great.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  Great to see you. Yes, it seems like you're great. Partnered with Salesforce, but you didn't have to stand up and shake Marc Benioff's hand. He must really like, he must really like you. Yeah, he must really like you.

• 1:27:09Speaker 08

  You know, I'm, I'm not one to get, you know, frame-mogged. And most people go, most people go to Dreamforce to buy Salesforce. We went the other way around. We went here to sell the Salesforce.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good. Yeah, what is the structure of the deal? What are you going to be helping with, uh, them with? Like, what did it take to get them across the finish line?

• 1:27:26Speaker 08

  The legal and the compliance team are embedding AI into every way they work, right? They're big cloud customers, but cloud only gets you so far. We're helping them go all the way. And what's interesting with a lot of the asset-based enterprises is most of them have tried many legal AI tools before and they haven't received the success that they wanted. And now they're moving over to Legora.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  It feels like the models are, you know, you're constantly in the back and forth between the frontier is the best, then open source catches up. The frontier is the best and then, uh, the, the, the companies that are building on top of models and building harnesses and building fine-tuned models and, and specific workflows, that's going to give you a big lift. And then somebody's like, oh, the next model, we'll just one-shot it. Have you, you've lived through enough of these cycles now that I imagine you have a philosophy here. What's your philosophy?

• 1:28:15Speaker 08

  When I started the company back in 2023, it was very easy. It was one model, GPT-3.5. And we built every single functionality in Legora as a boat. And when the tide rises, everything improves.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:28Speaker 08

  And that continues to be the case. And what's interesting now compared to three years ago is that different models are good at different things. So if you break down legal work, there's so many skills you have to be good at. It's drafting, it's reviewing, it's fact-checking, it's legal research. And so, under the hood, what we end up doing is we use all the models, the new meta models, the new GROK models, they're awesome. But we also continue to use the, the frontier from Anthropic and OpenAI. And so, what's interesting to us is where do you apply which model? And that's the IP that we have gotten really good at. And the reality is when you operate a, a, um, a vertical AI company, you need to make sure that you are getting the benefit from all of the R and D dollars

• 1:29:13Speaker 08

  that are getting spent in the entire marketplace, right? And if you were to take a very opinionated view and say, let's fine-tune a model to get, you know, 1% increase boost today, that entire asset is going to depreciate over time. And you're basically making your customers pay for a model that won't stand the test of time.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. How do you, oh, with the, the, the rising tide lifts the boats, you get the new capabilities. At the same time, there's probably old workflows that you built on top of GPT-3.5 that can now be run very, very cheaply. What is your strategy for, uh, cost optimization? Is it just like you go to open router and you pick a cheap thing? Or are you racking servers?

• 1:29:58Speaker 08

  So, so, we build our own router. I think that's a super important part of the stack. And over, over the last weekend, we actually drove a 30 percentage point decrease in our overall LLM spend across the entire platform.

• 1:30:10John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:30:11Speaker 08

  Which then become, you know, it was a weekend project for the engineers in Stockholm. We run on Celsius and snooze.

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:30:20Speaker 08

  I met, I met the Celsius founder and I was like, hey, man, our engineering team runs on this shit. And he just sent us a fridge. Like, I love the guy.

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:30:28Speaker 08

  You know, the team is in, in total bludsmack. And that means, you know, I did an article in Swedish and for some reason they translated it to English. And so, the headline became, the Legora team wakes up with a metallic taste of blood in their mouth. And that is the, that is the status of the company right now. You, you see my, my decoration here? Um, we are in this total, you know, land grab. Everything is happening all at once. You're seeing innovation across the entire stack. We have acquired five companies this year and it's been fun to-

• 1:31:04Speaker 08

  Real founder mode.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 08

  It's been fun to go deeper in the stack because in litigation, in transactional work, in legal research, it's sort of easy to do something on the shallow. And frankly, that was what we were doing back in 2023.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:31:19Speaker 08

  But now we can go so much deeper. And I think that that's also the places where the the models don't matter so much. We're actually building much more normal software than we are building L L Ms, frankly. They're just the electricity that powers the house.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  So I want to talk about diffusion specifically. I have a portfolio company that's in the middle of a transaction and I know how good Ligora has gotten. I feel like a lot of this work that's been done could have been done in like probably a week if like people were really focused. But sometimes companies, for whatever reasons, like they want to drag something out, like it could be beneficial to one to one side for one reason or another. So like, what are the actual factors at play right now? I really want to understand, like, have lawyers, like internally, like software engineers, they might have historically planned for a five week sprint on a certain product or feature. And now they're saying

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  like, let's ship it in a weekend or let's ship it in a week. Are lawyers specifically in-house, like, are they thinking that way now? And when are they not thinking that way just for kind of structural reasons?

• 1:32:30Speaker 08

  In-house is absolutely thinking that way. And and so are law firms, right? Like, AI is an existential opportunity and a threat to the current operating model. I was with a law firm here in New York last week, and one of their partners explained how the work that he typically does, he does in one thirtieth of the time with no dependencies on associates.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:32:53Speaker 08

  That's his practice, right? And so he has to figure out, how do I now charge for this? Because working with a billable hour in his practice doesn't make sense.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 08

  And at the same time, the biggest opportunity is perhaps in in-house, where organizations like Salesforce, Palo Alto Network, et cetera, are bringing in these tools in-house to do more legal work.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:13Speaker 08

  And what's interesting about legal work is that the demand is effectively infinite. If you could have legal intelligence review, every contract, handle every claim, you know, fight every litigation, file every patent, like you would, right? And, you know, from an investment perspective, why not do a legal due diligence before you take an asset to IC? The reason you don't do it today is because it's inexpensive.

• 1:33:37Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about this? How are you thinking about this arms race? Because you have on one hand, it's like cheaper than ever to litigate something, but it's potentially cheaper to defend.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:33:46Jordi Hays?

  And and so on, and and

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Jeff has a paradox, there's going to be a lot more lawsuits.

• 1:33:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, but at the same time, if it's cheaper to defend, maybe a company is less likely to settle early. So there's less reward. Like, there's a bunch of these different

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  More jury trials.

• 1:33:59Speaker 08

  Yeah. Every like every judiciary is overflown by employee claims. And, you know, people are using chat G P T to, you know, figure this out themselves. And the companies are needing better tools to defend themselves at scale. We work with some of the largest insurance companies in the world on settling litigation claims, right? And it's so interesting, like airlines, we work with Air Canada, they are spending so much money in litigation claims with customers, et cetera. And I think, you know, if

• 1:34:30Jordi Hays?

  To try to change the name or something?

• 1:34:32Speaker 08

  If we develop bioweapons with AI, like, good news, we can also develop cures, right? Like, it's sort of, everything will just move faster. And I think, operating in that world, what's so interesting about being like this full AI native characteristic of a company is, you can do that across every single part of the business. And your operating model just has to be what a traditional software company did in a year, we have to do in a quarter, right? Like, four times this year, we have leveled up our end year post for our revenue targets. And now we are quintupling this year. Like, we are setting targets that by traditional software standards would have been the, you know, gravity defying and insane.

• 1:35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk a little bit more about the M and A strategy. I feel like, from your seat, I could imagine everything from like acquiring a small law firm in a niche area

• 1:35:27Speaker 08

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  No?

• 1:35:29Speaker 08

  We are not a law firm.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  You're not going to be a law firm?

• 1:35:31Speaker 08

  We're not a law firm.

• 1:35:32John Coogan?

  Okay, so are you acquiring other other application layer companies?

• 1:35:38Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Or teams that are can are deeply in like the AI research? Or are you going to acquire NeoCloud? Like, how narrow is your lens when you're looking for acquisitions?

• 1:35:49Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, first off, we have a big part of our E P D team in Stockholm and in Europe. And what's so amazing about that is, I think we're the number one employer in our jurisdiction, right? Like, we get our sort of top of the top of the mountain. Like, we get the cream of the top. All the best engineers want to come work here. And legal tech is really hard to break into from a trust and commercial perspective.

• 1:36:12John Coogan?

  Yep, that makes sense.

• 1:36:13Speaker 08

  But there are a lot of very technically talented teams who are working in this space.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:18Speaker 08

  And so at Ligora, we have what we call our fruit salad product strategy.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:36:23Speaker 08

  When alternatives are offering apples to apples, we are offering the apple, bananas, oranges, and fucking kiwi fruit. And we want to have all of the functionality in one single space. And what's so awesome about that for the lawyer is that they don't want to navigate 10 different apps.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Speaker 08

  They want to have Word, Outlook, this document management system, and Ligora.

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  And Ligora.

• 1:36:46Speaker 08

  And when all of the functionality gets sucked into one single place, the barrier to entry gets lower.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 08

  We're seeing this in a lot of the customers who are moving over to Ligora from other legal AI platforms, that they might have adoption, but they have very shallow adoption. They haven't gotten sort of, sort of second and third levels deeper where they're going, let's not just use this as an expensive chatbot. Let's really think about how it's going to transform either our practice or the way that we operate in-house.

• 1:37:17John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the progress.

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  Last question, just very curious. Right now, if somebody, like, people are using just regular consumer chat apps as for for legal counsel, I don't believe that that gives them sort of attorney client privilege.

• 1:37:39Speaker 08

  Yep.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that will be solved? Like, will someone be able to make a, you know, consumer, you know, application that that allows them to have that experience? Is that even possible?

• 1:37:50Speaker 08

  That's a very interesting question. That's a very interesting question. The good thing is, there are attorneys and lawyers and judges much smarter than me who are going to determine whether or not that's the case. There's going to be litigation around that, of course. And we just get to play around in that space. And I see Chase is about to come on here after me. To give you one Bain story, and he can he can fulfill the second half of it. I met Chase at a dinner in Paris with Chathen, our partner from Benchmark.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19Speaker 08

  Very late in the evening, Enrique from Bain calls and is like, hey, I'm gonna crash your dinner. And we get into this stratospheric wine competition between Bain Capital and Benchmark. And I'll let Chase finish the rest of the story.

• 1:38:36John Coogan?

  Perfect. That's the best glasses land ever. That's hilarious.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Stratospheric wine off.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Wine off, going glass.

• 1:38:43Speaker 08

  That, that, that, that line was from one of our French attorney customers. He said that was the best dinner he ever attended.

• 1:38:52John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:38:54Jordi Hays?

  We love you, Max. It's always, always fun.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  Always a great time. Come back soon. We'll talk to you later.

• 1:38:57Speaker 08

  Thank you, Doc. See you later.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  And we won't want to keep Chase waiting, so let's bring in Chase Lochmiller from Crusoe as soon as possible. We've got to get the other side of the story. This dinner in Paris, we just heard about it from Max with Ligora, was the wine as good as they say?

• 1:39:16Chase Lochmiller?

  It was, the wine was flowing that night.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  Okay, that's great.

• 1:39:19Chase Lochmiller?

  A significant amount of wine. And I didn't see the prices, but I think they were, they were not cheap.

• 1:39:27Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Stratospheric.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  What about the electricity? Is the electricity flowing? Is the, is, yeah, yeah. Are the chips flowing? How is progress in building out the compute capacity that people need?

• 1:39:40Chase Lochmiller?

  Yeah, the electrons are flowing and they're turning into tokens and helping accelerate this new era of AI abundance. Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, as as demand for AI infrastructure has grown and demand for power has grown, you know, that there's been a significant amount of investment in real world, you know, power production capabilities and facilities that are becoming, you know, real significant bottlenecks towards towards this build out.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13Chase Lochmiller?

  And so, you know, each incremental gigawatt is getting increasingly more challenging. Now, you know, the positive side is, you know, that I think a lot of the investments and the foresight that we had at Crusoe are, you know, paying dividends today. And if we look at, you know, all of the progress that's been made in, you know, the campus in Abilene, Texas, like, you know, our, our philosophy in sort of designing and building that campus was, you know, how do we build a gigawatt scale computer? How do we build a single facility that can act as one giant coherent cluster that can, that can train the next breakthrough foundational model that will lead to a step function improvement in the model capabilities?

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Chase Lochmiller?

  That was like the, that was the North Star when we developed the campus and designed it. Today, we're seeing the fruits of those labor.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you had to go through, what it was, there was like a six month period where it felt like there was a different article every single day about Star. If somebody sneezed at Abilene, there was somebody that was going to write an article about

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  It's over, they're never going to build anything there.

• 1:41:17Jordi Hays?

  about how sneeze causes one second delay.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  One second delay.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like you guys have gotten through that. And I haven't, I haven't seen a front page article about some minute detail of the process in a while.

• 1:41:33Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, no, but you know what I was gonna say is, you know, the benefits of that is, you know, the first two buildings, which were the initial contract that, you know, we did with Oracle and OpenAI, um, have led to the training of Astra.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:45Chase Lochmiller?

  So, um, I don't know if you've had a chance to play around with, but you know, it's, it's a, it's a really phenomenal model.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's super impressive. Yeah, yeah, and Jensen had some nice words about it, too.

• 1:41:56Chase Lochmiller?

  Yeah, and the next, the next phases are coming online with, you know, buildings three to eight, um, which, you know, is gonna basically quadruple the compute capacity, you know, three to six are already online and, uh, seven and eight will be coming online before year end and, um, you know, having, uh, having that full, uh, eight building compute capacity to train, you know, the next version, uh, you know, the next incremental improvement in the model.

• 1:42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:19Chase Lochmiller?

  I think we'll see step function improvement and capabilities.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  You started the company in 2018, going on almost a decade in business. Um, can you give me a sense of the progress from like the smallest project, the first project, how small was it in terms of megawatts and where we are now in terms of scale? Because I feel like that, that has been the biggest transition is that, uh, you, you started with pretty small projects and now you're working on the biggest projects in the world.

• 1:42:50Chase Lochmiller?

  Sure, so, you know, the, the philosophy of the business, you know, from day one was taking this energy-first approach to computing.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, you know, we named the company Crusoe after the character Robinson Crusoe, who was stranded on a desert island and had to be innovative with his resources, uh, you know, in a stranded environment. And, you know, we tried to channel that same sense of innovation applied towards stranded energy and unlock stranded energy, unlocking value in stranded energy with computing. And so that led us to, you know, uh, unique energy resources to power compute in early days, and we were actually working on, uh, you know, generating our own power with, uh, flare, otherwise flared natural gas. We were, we were capturing this waste methane, utilizing it to produce power and then powering these mobile and modular data centers. Our first use case was, was Bitcoin mining.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:39Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, but, you know, we, we sort of, even at that founding of the company, we had this ambition to build an AI cloud platform, which today is, you know, where, where Crusoe's at is this vertically integrated, energy-first AI, AI platform. Um, so the early days, it was roughly 250 kilowatts was the first block that we did, which was actually pretty big.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:01Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, first AI data center, um, we're actually putting up in like a Crusoe Spark Museum that we're building. Um, and it was like, it, you can kind of think of it as like a single individual rack.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:12Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, I think it could power up to, um, up to 25 kilowatts. Um, so it was like higher density, you know, for that era. Um, and, uh, you know, we, we've since sort of evolved our platform quite a bit to, you know, gigawatt scale campuses at one end of the spectrum. And, you know, we made, uh, you know, we, we made an announcement, you know, quite a few announcements around, um, the Crusoe Spark product, which we believe is sort of the critical, um, aspect to, to, to really scaling inference compute infrastructure as demand for token scales. You don't need a gigawatt scale computer. You need lots of smaller clusters of compute, um, to rapidly serve, uh, inference infrastructure and really dramatically reduce that, that time to token.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:56Chase Lochmiller?

  And Spark gives us a ton of flexibility in terms of how we deploy inference infrastructure, where it goes, um, and then also just from a time to token, uh, it really provides us a lot of just-in-time solutions.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:45:09Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, for delivering AI infrastructure for, uh, the innovators in the world.

• 1:45:13John Coogan?

  It seems like, uh, like, uh, solar deployments keep beating expectations. We've seen this chart of the predictions of where solar will go, and then the, the graph keeps going up and to the right. Uh, is, where, where are you seeing exciting movement in new energy coming online that might be suitable for that type of product, the, uh, the Crusoe Spark, uh, you know, smaller amounts of energy required, but unlocking new opportunities in, in different locations?

• 1:45:45Chase Lochmiller?

  Well, uh, you know, solar is definitely like a very compelling use case. You know, we, uh, with our partners, Redwood Materials, built the largest microgrid in the United States that was, uh, solar plus batteries. And the batteries were actually taken out of, mostly taken out of, uh, electric vehicles. So sort of a second life use of these, uh, lithium ion batteries. Um, and, you know, that, that AI, those AI factories are, uh, powered 99% plus just by the sun, which is a pretty cool case.

• 1:46:14John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:46:14Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, you know, there's a lot of new energy technologies. We're focused on, you know, helping catalyze and accelerate. Um, you know, we had a big announcement with Olo, um, to bring to life the first SMR-powered AI factory, uh, which we're planning to go live with, uh, by mid 2027. Um, but, you know, what's unique about Spark is, you know, given the small modular form factor, there's so many different, you know, there's so many unique ways you can power it. It can, you know, you can power it with like small gas generation, things like recips and, you know, smaller gas turbines, like aerod derivatives. Um, you can also power it just in, in you, with, with, uh, with grid power. And, uh, you know, there's a lot of, while getting a gigawatt of power from the grid

• 1:46:56Chase Lochmiller?

  in a single location is quite challenging right now, um, there's a lot of places where smaller pockets of capacity are available. You know, think whatever 10 to, you know, 100 megawatts, um, that can be accessed like way sooner, um, because of, you know, uh, transmission and distribution constraints, um, that are, that are happening in the grid and like plugging into one node, uh, may actually help create quite a bit of, uh, balance in terms of, uh, you know, the, the load balancing that the, uh, utility operators are, are needing to do. And so, you know, it can actually help benefit the grid quite a bit because you're actually amortizing more megawatts over the same transmission and distribution infrastructure, which should actually bring down the cost for all local rate pairs.

• 1:47:38Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, you know, and, you know, we think that's a, an exciting proposition, uh, because you're shifting all of the work offsite, uh, and you're able to plug into a lot of these unique energy, uh, energy, uh.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:49Chase Lochmiller?

  Available energy on, on the grid.

• 1:47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about the, the new round.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, you raised some more money.

• 1:47:56Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, we did. Uh, so today we announced, uh, the closing of the, uh, Series F, uh, at Crusoe.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  Who came in, saw some heavy hitters.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:13Chase Lochmiller?

  Um, yeah, it never gets old. Uh, the, uh, you know, the, the Series F round of funding was co-led by, uh, Atreides, uh, Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:24Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, and we had, you know, a number of, uh, you know, a, a number of great supporting investors alongside it, uh, folks like TPG, uh, QIA, uh, Founder's Fund, um, uh, Radical Ventures, um, you know, it was a, uh, it was, it was a great, great list. Uh, GIC was another great partner. Um, so, uh, you know, there were, there were a number of great investors and, you know, we're really thrilled to have the support from, um, you know, a, a number of, uh, leading, uh, you know, long on these, uh, growth investors and, and venture investors, so.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Long onlies.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  It's the only type of investor I like.

• 1:49:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Uh, great, great to see you, Chase.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Progress.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:49:08John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds on, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Up next, we have Justin John from Decagon.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Welcome back. How are you doing?

• 1:49:29Jordi Hays?

  It's been too long.

• 1:49:30Speaker 10

  Good, good. Yeah, it's good to see you guys again.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Where are you in the world? You're expanding internationally. Are you in America, Sao Paulo, Brazil, somewhere else?

• 1:49:39Speaker 10

  I'm in Sao Paulo this week.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  You are?

• 1:49:41Speaker 10

  So, uh, quite the flight over here.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:43Speaker 10

  Uh, we're, we're out here launching our, uh, Latam office. So we're, we're starting an office here in Sao Paulo.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:49Speaker 10

  Got a couple of customers down here already, like, uh, Mercado Libre. So we really felt like things are moving pretty quickly, so got a team out here now.

• 1:49:55John Coogan?

  What is the key, what, what, what seats do you want to fill in that office? Uh, I mean, obviously you need, you know, the general staff, but, uh, is it about sales reps, forward deployed engineers? Like, what, what problems does it help to have boots on the ground effectively in the local, uh, community?

• 1:50:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's mostly go-to-market. I think, uh, obviously there's, there's language considerations, right? So anytime you go to different, uh, markets, like, it's both the product, right? So we, we deploy these voice agents, so the voice has to be really good at, you know, Brazilian and Portuguese, but also our go-to-market teams are, have to be on the ground and, you know, being in people's offices and so on. So it's, it's mostly just the go-to-market teams.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  What's happening with diffusion? Every time I have to be on a customer support line and I don't have, and I'm not speaking to an effortless, you know, agent that has all the capabilities that I would expect that I know are available, I get a little bit angry at you and the other players in the space because like, why are you moving faster? It's like, I just know, I know the technology is here. Why do I need to sit on another phone tree and, and, you know, like, they, that, that doesn't even do a good. Yeah, I just want to talk and I just feel like being able to effectively prompt to the outcome that you want is like so clearly here. And, and still it's like so many of these things, you're like, what's your, what's your address?

• 1:51:20Jordi Hays?

  What's your, this, you know, all this stuff? It's like, enough.

• 1:51:24Speaker 10

  We're trying. Uh, I'm trying our best. I mean, I, I can tell you like, uh, what is the long pole and the tent? It's, it roughly the, um, analogy we like to give is like us delivering an agent is a little bit like building a self-driving car where the car is now smart, right? Like the models are really good, like you guys have used the models, the brains of the car are good, so it knows how to drive. But when you arrive in one of these big, let's say airlines or banks or, um, you know, healthcare providers, it's, the map of the surrounding area is not drawn out yet. And so drawing the map is usually the hard part. It's like you, someone has to make the jump between, you know, the, the car being good, but then actually like drawing the map and figuring out where to go. So a lot of the time that we spend in these deployments, uh, is really making sure the map can be drawn out well and then improved upon over time.

• 1:52:06Speaker 10

  And our job, hopefully, is to shrink that time over, um, you know, more and more deployments and so that in the future, yeah, every, every single time you call, there will be a good AI agent there that, that can talk to you.

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  Please.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Um, how do you think about, how do you assess opportunities internationally? I, I would love just like lay the land of like the, the, the core business, why you thought it was the right time to expand internationally? And then I, I imagine that there's at least a spreadsheet or some, some prompt that you, that you ran through, some analysis that you did to land on Brazil, but, uh, what is your actual process for evaluating a new market to expand into?

• 1:52:46Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, international expansion is not like a novel thing, right? So tons of countries have gone through it. So we've been able to learn from, you know, what other people do. And usually, most of the traction comes from, you know, a small handful of countries. When we first started the company, we're mostly serving like the upper mid-market-y like tech-native companies. And so that's where we started. And then our first order of business was, hey, we actually do think that we can, you know, our approach to launching product will work in the big enterprise. And so that was, that was a lot of the big focus in the first year and a half. And so, you know, now we've announced, you know, a lot of the big banks, Deutsche Telekom, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, so a lot of these big customers.

• 1:53:24Speaker 10

  And from there, we're thinking, okay, what's the next frontier? Probably is international. Europe was the first sort of pillar for us, where we launched in London office, and we have customers in Germany and the UK and so on. And then from there, we were just thinking, okay, well, the two options for us honestly ended up being Australia and Brazil.

• 1:53:45Speaker 10

  And it's kind of a mix of how quickly are people adopting tech? What's the size of the market? Can we actually serve those customers? And we decided yes. And so now we have, you know, a small pod in Australia and now launching in Brazil. And I think for now that that is like a pretty good spread for us. But, you know, in the future, we'll probably look for, you know, what is the next frontier?

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Is there an element where customer pull is really important? Like MercadoLibre has a bunch of employees in the United States. You probably meet them at conferences. The conversation can start before you even open the office. It sounds like you already have a contract in place, but you're just seeing pull from a certain big enterprise and anchor client, and then that can justify going bigger?

• 1:54:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, I think that that is pretty correct, right? It's like, okay, let's just get a feel for the pull first before we, we deploy a bunch of resources. The same happened in Europe with DT where, you know, we kind of originally started working with them when we were just had a team here in the US. But then over time, we realized, oh, wow, people are moving pretty quickly. We need to be on the ground. And so that's, that's what prompted us building a team out there.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are you, what are you tracking? What, how closely do you track the progress of the models versus the cost and the Pareto curve of the models? Are, are token costs falling fast enough? Is it, is it roughly perfectly on trend from what you've modeled? Is it faster? What can you tell us about cost optimization? Once you get a system that's, you know, superhuman or, you know, at, at high quality, I imagine that you're not just upgrading to the latest frontier model and just adding costs because some of the, some of the models, when they come out, they're better, but they're more expensive.

• 1:55:29Speaker 10

  Yeah, there's, there's kind of two dimensions there. So on the cost side, typically what you do is you first get your product working. And then once it's working, you realize that most of the model calls you do don't need the entire model because the model does a ton of stuff, right? So you don't need it to compute math for you, for example. And so then the intuition is like, okay, well, over time, I should be able to.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  Personally, I like to throw a millennium prize problem at a customer service agent every once in a while, just to see if there's a shot. But yes, I understand.

• 1:56:00Speaker 10

  Yeah. And so, yeah, so over time, you want to shrink the models. And then you, then it's more of a question of like, okay, is that possible? Can you take a smaller model and find, tune and post-train it to perform at the same level? And so far, I would say in our use case, the answer has been yes, right? There's a lot of these small tasks that are done inside the brain of the agent, like choosing a topic or detecting for hallucinations or whatever. And so you can do use small models and specifically open source models to do those. But when you're, when you're launching new products and kind of trying new capabilities, of course, the frontier makes sense. And so those two go hand in hand.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:33Speaker 10

  And then for us, latency also matters a lot. So we, we talk a lot about how, you know, you have to not just optimize costs, like optimize latency matters even more to us probably. And so, you know, when we've done these optimizations, we're mostly seeing if we can get the latency down. Because if you're talking to a voice agent, it has to be super snappy.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51Speaker 10

  And, you know, those, those two go hand in hand as well.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  And is that the model or the chipset or both? I imagine that we're not quite in the age of co-location or like edge computing, but it feels like that's coming as well as a, as a small 100 millisecond savings potentially?

• 1:57:07Speaker 10

  It's mostly the model. Most of the gains come from, you know, making the model smaller.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:57:12Speaker 10

  Eventually, if the model is like so optimized, you could start looking at some of the other things, but.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. So make the model really small, then you bake it on the silicon, then you put that silicon right in the, in the city where the customer service is happening, something like that on the edge. And then you're at two milliseconds or something, maybe. I don't know. Yeah. Very exciting though. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:57:33Jordi Hays?

  Great progress.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Great progress. Congratulations.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 1:57:36Speaker 10

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Jesse.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Enjoy Brazil. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app service databases more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Up next, we're the founder and CEO of Beacon and VP of AI Research, Beacon Nilam Leonard. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. Good to see you.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show.

• 1:58:01Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  I would love for you to start with just a re-introduction on the strategy for the company, for the firm, and, and sort of how it's been going since we last talked, I think, almost a year ago. Yeah.

• 1:58:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So just a reminder, Beacon is a holding company. We acquire great technology companies that have been around for decades that already serve real economy businesses, think campgrounds to labor unions to youth sports leagues. We take, we take those businesses, pump them through our software factory, and then make them AI-native. The whole goal is to make the real economy as AI-native as quickly as possible. And the last time we talked, I spent time talking to you about our acquisition machine. At that time, you know, we were acquiring a business every three weeks or so. Today, we're closing on a new business every 10 days.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  And today, really, I'm excited to talk to you about our most important acquisition, I think, in Beacon's history, partnering with Leonard and the Haze Labs team.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, Leonard, give us a little bit of your background, what you built and why you're excited to join.

• 1:59:12Speaker 11

  Totally, totally. I don't know about most important acquisitions to date, but it's certainly an exciting acquisition for both sides. And hopefully we can bring a bunch of the Haze technology and talents to the rest of Beacon's existing portfolio. And so a bit of background on myself, I'm Leonard, co-founder and CEO here at Haze Labs. Haze was an AI safety company founded out of my research over the last five, six years, where we focused on red teaming, guardrails, observability and evals, both for the frontier labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, who are our first customers, actually, but also for large enterprises, think big banks, Fortune 500s, insurance companies, healthcare companies and so on. But what we realized.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  This means safety is solved? Is there, is there, jobs finished? We can, we can move on to bringing AI to youth sports?

• 1:59:59Speaker 11

  Well, safety is always an ongoing challenge. I think as capabilities advance, you know, you always have to play catch up in some way, even though your normative declarations of what AI should and should not do can be set in stone, the way in which you operationalize and the definition of what it means to be safe or not safe changes as the capabilities advance. And insofar as joining Beacon goes, I think bringing AI to the real economy is a unequivocally good thing and responsible thing to do if you're an AI technologist, but also from the perspective of the alignment conversation and debate we've been having over the last couple of days.

• 2:00:34Speaker 11

  One thing we thought a lot about at Haze is whose values should AI models actually align to? And you can take the perspective, if you're Anthropic or OpenAI, that you have the best control and that you have the best wisdom around what the values, what values should be baked into the models. But it is our sense as Haze and Beacon that we should try and make contact with reality, in particular, those that have been historically undeserved by Silicon Valley technologists, like businesses in the real economy, in order to align our values to those businesses and the values of their customers. And that's part of what gets us super amped to join the Beacon team.

• 2:01:06John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:01:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, just to give you guys, just to add to that a little bit on the, on the safety conversation, everyone, everyone knows the real economy is behind on AI adoption. There's many reasons for that. You know, the ramp data from about a quarter ago showed that SMBs are only 20% adopting AI versus like 85% for the Fortune 500.

• 2:01:30Speaker 02

  We started Beacon to address that gap, but really Leonard and team are going to play a key role in that. The reason why adoption is so low in SMBs, some of it's a question of access, but really, as we, as we spend time with our 22,000 customers, it's a question of trust first and foremost. We, the real economy will not adopt AI if they think it's going to run rampant and screw up a bunch of their own relationships with their customers. So Leonard and his team, part of why we wanted to bring them in and why Leonard's leading this important function for us, is so that we can ensure for our end customers that when they deploy AI through one of our pieces of software, it's, it's done in, you know, the safest way possible.

• 2:02:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  Ground?

• 2:02:16Speaker 11

  Just, I like to say that Beacon has a trust in the customer relationships already. I mean, these businesses, the real economy in the world depends on these businesses. And I like to say that Haze, Haze builds AI that anybody can depend on. And so now you've got both parts of the equation. You've got AI the business can depend on, and the real world is depending on the businesses depending on this AI. So I think it's a very natural, natural fit.

• 2:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Ground, ground this for me. What are, where, where has AI been most useful in something like campground operations? Since I know you guys have acquired some campgrounds. And it's so, it's so funny, it's still so funny to me that, you know, as you guys get bigger, there's definitely going to be some articles of like, this AI company is taking over youth sports leagues and campgrounds. I'm very excited about it. We were just on, we were just on with Jesse and I was telling him I'm frustrated that, that I still will end up on a customer service call for some service and I'm on some legacy system that has no AI at all. It doesn't have any ability to reason or help me get things done. I can imagine a lot of use cases that like in the campgrounds context.

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  In the future, you don't have to go to the campground. You just, it generates you a picture of you.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Simu, perfect simulation.

• 2:03:28Speaker 02

  Hundred percent. And you're just sitting there. No, that's a great, great point. Look, we are believers in AI abundance. The thing that's exciting, especially for the real economy, is we can help them solve problems that before they were not able to solve. So on the campground side, if you put yourself in the shoes of one of the 18,000 private campground owners across North America, you're spending 40% of your days doing payroll, HR, a bunch of compliance tasks, using a spreadsheet to figure out which camper needs to be assigned to which spot in the campground. Today, we have built tools within the software they already use to match guests to campground spots,

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  to do dynamic pricing, to make sure that they're pricing appropriately for season, to load balance staffing for when campers are actually going to be there. So that is, you know, as to use a term, Leonard, just use unequivocally good for the campground owner. But also, we think that's how AI abundance actually translates into the real economy. It's how do we unlock more growth for the real business? You know, one, one thing that people always ask me, okay, you, you guys are just going to use the AI to, to take costs out or reduce headcount. Across all of our businesses, we're actually up headcount. So we found the opposite as we've delivered more AI, our customers, yeah.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's been a bunch of reporting on this in The Economist and The Wall Street Journal about like the AI actually driving increased hiring as growth comes in, which is fascinating.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys, uh, do you guys imagine, you know, doesn't feel like now's the right moment, but five years from now, like, you know, robotics being a big part of the, the strategy, you'll have all these existing businesses. And as different form factors get better, you'll be pretty primed to, to bring in these new form factors?

• 2:05:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll start.

• 2:05:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We, we actually have businesses today that serve various industrial markets. So think about software that helps large construction sites manage their, their tool inventory, software that helps oil rigs stay safe. And increasingly, we're seeing this marriage of AI native software with hardware, like GPS devices, et cetera, to be able to increase the surface area of what that piece of software can do for the end user. You know, one of our customers, which I can't name, which is like a Fortune 500 construction firm, they're saving millions of dollars today on, on tool supply.

• 2:06:05Speaker 02

  Because, you know, we, we actually helped them manage these industrial tools that are being used for the data center build out across the economy. In the old world, before we applied AI to help them match tool to job site appropriately with GPS, they would, a construction manager or project manager at site would over allocate and over buy tools, basically to make sure that they're not going to be short. So this was a huge problem for, for the, the company. They worked with our team, our four deployed engineers, went down to Houston and helped them. We built a new module for them, which basically AI matches tools to a job site. Then we put in GPS trackers to make sure the right tool got to the right site. Leonard, sorry, you, you were going to say something too?

• 2:06:49Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I think you guys are being super prescient about where all this technology is headed. Certainly robotics is going to mature quite a bit in the next five years. And I think robotics or not, I think there's going to be a huge category of value can deliver to our companies by essentially being able to dispatch AI employees or digital employees, or whatever you want to call it, at will. And so it could be something as simple as an AI SDR, helping you find leads from your existing network. It could be something as simple as an AI support engineer, helping you deal with tickets and bug bash. And, but I think there will be this huge supply of intelligence at your disposal, if you're an owner operator, for you to go and lever up your existing strategy, team ambitions at your company. I also do think, separate from just digital employees,

• 2:07:30Speaker 11

  Beacon is in a very unique position to go after what I would describe as world models of companies or company world models, i.e. models that can help the existing owner operator as a true thought partner and strategic decision maker, think about what's going to happen next in their business and anticipate the best choice and action they should take to better run their business. So I think there's this pure question of can you deploy more intelligence to lever up existing objectives? Then there's this separate technical challenge of can you actually help business owner figure out what objective to go after in the first place?

• 2:08:03John Coogan?

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

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Very cool, guys.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We got Joe Weisenthal here, live in the TVP in Altria Dome.

• 2:08:19Joe Weisenthal?

  I can't believe I'm here. I can't believe I'm here.

• 2:08:21Jordi Hays?

  I know, because you've been here so much.

• 2:08:23Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I've like been here spiritually so many times. And I, you know, in my dreams, I wonder what the studio is like. And will I ever make it to the temple? Will I ever see the gong?

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Bring the gong. Give us, give us some excuse. So what, 10 years?

• 2:08:38Joe Weisenthal?

  I was warned by one of your producers.

• 2:08:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, that's what we're hitting it for. Smack it. Oh, you gotta go way harder. You gotta really, like it's a baseball bat. Like you're swinging for the fence.

• 2:08:59Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:09:00Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm done now, right? I can leave. The whole point was just to bring me in to, to hit the gong. What else do I have yet to achieve now in my life? What summit's, what summit's yet to climb?

• 2:09:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. What actually brought you to LA?

• 2:09:11Joe Weisenthal?

  We, oh, funny you should ask. We are doing a live show tonight at the Vermont Theater in Hollywood, where we are going to attempt to do a survey of what is this thing called the LA economy? So we're going to be talking to some of the industrial guys. Chris Power from Hadrian is going to be on. Tom Mueller, the first space, Impulse Space is going to be on. We have some of our favorite internet characters, Taylor Lorenz, Rachel Carren is going to be there. So it should be a really fun night. I have no idea what to expect. I don't know. What do you think about this town?

• 2:09:47Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to survey the LA economy, but you've picked out like some of the bright, like the only bright, only bright points, to be honest? No, I know. It's like, it's like.

• 2:09:57Joe Weisenthal?

  You're negging your own city like that?

• 2:09:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I, I mean, the city is, the city's a disaster. I mean, it's.

• 2:10:02John Coogan?

  They ain't even hold on to a movie studio.

• 2:10:05Joe Weisenthal?

  But then you get this, but then someone gets to take this.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the bright spot is like the individual creators are doing well. There's cool stuff in industrials and space.

• 2:10:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  But the whole long LA movement like fizzled out right before you got this sort of.

• 2:10:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm super long LA.

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:10:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Absolutely. You know, I was just trying to.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  He just gets to the weather.

• 2:10:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's the weather and like the thing that I think.

• 2:10:32Jordi Hays?

  What's there to be optimistic about?

• 2:10:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Look, the thing that will, it will never cease to mystify me, right? So Americans over time, they migrated westward, et cetera. And no offense to them, I'm sure they're lovely people. I'm like, wait, you guys stopped in Nebraska? You could have gone, you could have like gone on your wagon for like another, you know, 72 hours. It was right there. Or, and it's like, what? And I like, in my, like, in my trying to backfill American history is like, how did we all not just come to LA right away? And I do not believe, regardless of what happens with Hollywood, that there will ever be a time where people just do not want to live in this climate by the beach and they'll find an industry for them.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is crazy that California, I mean, we got three coastal cities, San Francisco, San Diego. But it's always shocked me that if you drive.

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Completely ignoring the, every other.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  No, no, i- i- if you drive halfway between LA and, and San Francisco, there is not a metropolis with an international airport there. Like you go, you go below like Marin and, or.

• 2:11:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:43John Coogan?

  Where's Laguna Seca? That's the only place. Yeah, you go below Monterey and then, and then you get into beautiful areas, but it's mostly camping. And, and there was never like an enforced, you know, metropolis that built.

• 2:11:54Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's kind of strange. You know, a couple of years ago, a good friend and I decided to, we had just like, never been driven the Pacific Coast Highway. So we're like, let's drive from San Francisco down to, um, what's the place down there where they have the, the town where they have Coachella, Palm Springs.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Anyway, and we did, and it was beautiful.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you hit Coachella or you just?

• 2:12:14Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, no, it's just, I just wanted to see that town. And it was a beautiful drive. But at some point, I have to admit, it's very beautiful. I have to admit, it's like, oh, there is another beautiful coast.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:25Joe Weisenthal?

  And so I was like, I'm getting a little bored of this. Oh, there's another beautiful.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  It also takes so much longer. They drive it to five.

• 2:12:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Then we hit the thought, it was somewhere right around where the Hearst Mansion is. We're like, why don't we drive inward? Because no one sees like, so then we like went through like Fresno and like miles and miles of almond farms. I loved it. So now I'm actually like, yes, there should be. Yeah. So it's like, of course, yes, there should be another megalopolis somewhere like on the coast. But also I think that like if someone visiting LA, at one point, you should do the inward drive and see where they make all the almonds, because it's amazing country out there.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  That's how it used to get back and forth from LA to San Francisco.

• 2:13:06Jordi Hays?

  LA is in a bad spot.

• 2:13:10Jordi Hays?

  LA is in a bad, bad spot.

• 2:13:11Joe Weisenthal?

  You know.

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  I know, I'm, I'm generally, I'm generally, the, the, the point of optimism is, is the weather. That's been the durable point, but, but the weather can get a town through some bad eras, right? Because if everything, if everything is actually headed the wrong direction, but the weather is simply so good that when you.

• 2:13:33Joe Weisenthal?

  It'll be fine. It'll get you through. I'm very bullish. I'm like.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  So move here.

• 2:13:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. I mean, like, look, like when, like, when Detroit got hollowed out after like the shrinking of the auto industry there, et cetera. It's like, what was keeping, you know, they didn't have the weather.

• 2:13:49John Coogan?

  Oh, true.

• 2:13:50Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, and so like, you just have the weather. It'll be fine. Wait a couple of years. It'll be fine.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:56Joe Weisenthal?

  It's, it'll be fine.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm waiting for the, I'm, I'm waiting for whatever industry can bring.

• 2:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Great opportunity to LA again, which it just doesn't feel like, like I moved here after college and I thought it was great because it was much more affordable than New York. I'd have friends visit from New York and they'd be like, you get like this crazy loft for what would be, you know.

• 2:14:23Joe Weisenthal?

  See, in New York, I believe there's this perpetual conversation that has like, should I move to California? These days it's more SF, but for many years, the discourse among people in New York is like, should I move to LA? You know, like it seems pretty nice out there. I get the impression, and maybe you guys could tell me if I'm wrong, like, I feel like once you get here, you don't have the reverse conversation. Oh, should I move to New York? I feel like it's like, oh.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  I was kinda, I was, I was, I've, I've felt that way.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  I felt that way.

• 2:14:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  But I think you're unique in that.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  But I, but I, but spiritually, I've always felt at home in New York, even though I've never lived there full time.

• 2:15:00Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, that's the lovely part of New York. You are spiritually at home in New York.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  You don't think converting the Paramount lot into a data center will keep people here? That seems like a lot of opportunities.

• 2:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's worth a shot.

• 2:15:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, look, if, look, the question, if there is a new industry in America that creates jobs, then some of them will be in LA.

• 2:15:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:20Joe Weisenthal?

  I think the question is, it's not, will there ever be another industry in America that creates jobs in large scale?

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:28Joe Weisenthal?

  If there is one, LA will be fine. If there isn't one, then it's not just gonna be an LA problem.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  People driving elderly care, healthcare hiring.

• 2:15:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right. But it's not just gonna be an LA problem. Like, if that's the issue of it's like, we can't think of the industry that's gonna, then like, I guarantee it's uh, not just an LA problem.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, what, uh, what, what, what, what do you think of the, the, the latest in the AI data center discourse debate? It felt like we were, it felt like we were grinding towards a crescendo there.

• 2:15:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  And then we just took a hard left turn into AI risk, X risk.

• 2:16:03Joe Weisenthal?

  I think so too. I think that actually.

• 2:16:06Jordi Hays?

  It's almost like it was coordinated by powerful, shadowy organizations.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  That's Ian Bremmer's take. Ian Bremmer's take is actually that the X risk debate is to distract everyone from the real problems.

• 2:16:17Joe Weisenthal?

  From the data center.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  Not just data centers, like, you know, brain rot and slop and like all the other complaints that people, job displacement. And he's like, the, the AI lab leaders, in his view, I don't know if I fully agree with this, but in his view, he says, I, uh, uh, like, there's nothing an AI lab leader loves more than talking about X risk. It's pure upside.

• 2:16:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, I would say two things. So one is it already feels like if you're sort of a politician and you're still talking about data centers, like, bro, that was a month ago. Like, we've like moved on to model risk and stuff like that. So it does feel like actually very quickly, the data center conversation disappeared among political discourse. My cynical version of the Ian Bremmer take, however, is slightly different, but maybe it converges on the same thing, which is that actually, um, you know, because before data centers and before the X risk debate, it was the job loss debate, right? And so this question is like, oh, will AI wipe out 50 to 100% or even 10% of white collar

• 2:17:20Joe Weisenthal?

  jobs? And the, you know, if you read the op-eds from the, uh, you know, the Demisias hobbyists of the world, this is what they were talking about. My cynical take at the time of those was, they're very concerned about X risk. What is something that we could talk about that would distract from?

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:17:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Not distract from it. What is a way that we can sound?

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Soften it.

• 2:17:43Joe Weisenthal?

  So, or is it, what is the way that we can sound the alarm about AI without sounding like a complete bunch of loons?

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:17:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, let's talk about, um, job loss. Because that feels like.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Because certainly we can't get, we can't get an AI doomer on Joe Rogan. They'll never know for that. So let's talk about jobs because we can have that conversation.

• 2:18:02Joe Weisenthal?

  And also, job loss is the type of problem that like the three of us could come up with theoretical answers. I would say like, maybe 10% of AI gets into a, um, you know, a national fund.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. There's tractable solutions, economists willing.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's also, it's also the, another way to think about it. You could tell somebody like an asteroid is gonna hit the earth in 2050 and people would still go to work tomorrow.

• 2:18:27Joe Weisenthal?

  That's totally true.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  You'd still like.

• 2:18:28Joe Weisenthal?

  But if you were like, really like, if you're like sitting there in AI lab and you have like these very deep intuitions and you've been reading like Bostrom for 20 years, what are you concerned about? You're concerned about the X risk. How do you get people to just, first of all, take the idea that AI risk is a big deal?

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  Or AI is real.

• 2:18:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Or AI is real. Let's start with the job loss conversation. It feels tractable. It feels theoretically solvable. It's, oh, we need UBI. And so my cynical take was that the only reason, or the primary reason they talked so much about the job loss stuff is because it was a way in to warn people about AI. It didn't make them sound like sci-fi.

• 2:19:07John Coogan?

  That feels like that backfired because we're sitting here and there hasn't been massive AI job loss. And so.

• 2:19:13Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 2:19:14John Coogan?

  It's, it's easy for people to be like, these are the people that were telling us that there was gonna be 25% unemployment and that hasn't happened. So they're saying 10% chance, like, I, I, I'm betting against them.

• 2:19:24Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's this weird thing going on. I certainly think this is true, which is, I don't know, you see these people, it's like, top ranked AI forecaster, right? Or like capabilities forecaster. And many of them do have like pretty good track record.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:38Joe Weisenthal?

  Except on the question of what will be the impact of this technology.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  Exactly. They're all internal. They're all internal. It's like, yes, I, I, I was able to predict model progress by the amount of compute that was built. And also, wow, he also predicted the number of chips that were gonna be bought. He also predicted the number of data centers that were gonna be built. And it's like, those are all downstream of the exact same line. You're just extrapolating things that are directly correlated.

• 2:20:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, except the one thing that no one has had any good intuitions on, or it's like, when are we just gonna feel this in our day to day life? And it's pretty weird now that the conversation has evolved to like, the X risk conversation, because it's like you step outside. It's like, life feels really normal.

• 2:20:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:20:20Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I was like talking last night, we were like talking to like, saying, uh, we're at this conference of like, financial advisors, et cetera. And it's like, there's this surreal thing because I like, when I stare at my phone, it's.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Well, a lot of those financial advisors, they, they talk about AGI all the time, adjusted gross income.

• 2:20:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Adjusted gross income. That's right.

• 2:20:39John Coogan?

  That's what they're focused on.

• 2:20:39Joe Weisenthal?

  But you know, it's like, well, AI can help you like, um, this AI tool helps your clients with tax loss harvesting, et cetera, which is great. I love tax loss harvesting. But it's like, wow, this could not be a more different, let's give it up for tax loss harvesting. But this conversation could not feel more different from like the types of conversations about AI that like I read on my like.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Or the, or the, the disconnect honestly between like the, the discourse and then like dream force is happening. It's like, yeah, like there's, there's those big problems that we need to be talking about. Like, we gotta be talking about this, but in the meantime. Yeah.

• 2:21:22Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I really like.

• 2:21:23Jordi Hays?

  Here's another thing. Here's another thing. So I was thinking, uh, growing up in the Bay Area, I distinctly remember the Iraq war protests.

• 2:21:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  And I just looked it up. There was 200,000 people, roughly, in the streets, like marching. And we have, there, there hasn't even been, there hasn't even been a 10,000 person AI protest.

• 2:21:43Joe Weisenthal?

  You wanna hear a funny story? So I was at, uh, University of Texas, Austin, I was a young hippie and I attended some anti-Iraq war marches. And there was this guy at the front. There was this guy.

• 2:21:55Jordi Hays?

  No, I was, I was, I was in the crowd too.

• 2:21:57Joe Weisenthal?

  There was this guy at the front of the crowd who would regularly show up. And he had this bullhorn and he would captivate the crowd and he would look, he would point up at a nearby office building and he would say, don't think we can't see you, um, you know, G-men up there spying us and everything. And then everyone would like crane their heads like, oh yeah, I think I see someone in the office. That was Alex Jones. That was, that person, that person was like the guy. And so like, the, and so the least surprising.

• 2:22:26John Coogan?

  How deep does he go? Why is this all a protest with Alex Jones?

• 2:22:29Joe Weisenthal?

  Like this guy who just like had us all captivated during the protest, who would be like, and everyone was like, oh yeah, I think I do see someone up there. That was Alex Jones.

• 2:22:39John Coogan?

  He's just a natural talent for it.

• 2:22:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Gifted.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Wow. Wow. That's, that's crazy. I mean, yeah, this, that's like when we, yeah, there's some, John Kiriaku, you know this guy? He shows up in weird places. I think he was like a school teacher. That was a wild story. They, they, they, these like, uh, you know, closing sliding doors moments in history. I feel like this is one of them.

• 2:23:02Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it's like, he was just a local guy that we all knew back then when we were in college.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Okay, back to the, back to data centers, back to X risk. So, so conversations getting mucked. Uh, there's one scenario where X risk is the thing that does move the needle on the protests. You go from 10,000 to 100,000. Legislation gets written and it builds on a lot of the work that's been worked on, on the data center stuff. And if you read the AI safety crowd, a lot of them are like, yeah, we actually would love a slowdown in chip production, slowdown of data centers. That would actually be pretty satisfactory because one of the prerequisites for nefarious ASI is just a lot of compute. We, we, we're not worried about the god model emerging and on a desktop computer. We just don't think that's gonna happen. So, uh, AOC was recently on camera talking about, I think

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  you called her response like word salad, but we have the technology to turn word salad into ironclad legislation. So.

• 2:24:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Into a fancy new slaw's salad.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Yes. So, so take us through like, like, like, is there, is the, is the word salad edification of the AI discourse actually a problem?

• 2:24:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Wow. You know what? That's a really good question. I asked a version of this question to someone several months ago, who was like in the real like safest camp, before it became cool. And I was like, why do you guys just join up with the anti-data center people?

• 2:24:25John Coogan?

  That's a great question.

• 2:24:26Joe Weisenthal?

  I was just like, you know, I understand. It's like they don't have the same like sort of understanding, like they don't, the shape of the risk they're, why do you just join up with them? And I do think that like we, you know. People who have sharpened their blade for 10 years in the less wrong forums, they cannot do that thing of like, yes, but they're wrong.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yes, yes, aligning with the anti-data center people would align with me perfect, but they're wrong about the water consumption.

• 2:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:54Joe Weisenthal?

  And I cannot bring myself to align with them, not because it wouldn't be useful, but because I can't bring myself to be on the same side as like someone who slightly is factually in disagreement with me.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  It does feel like there's the beginning of that horseshoe coming together with Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders. Steve Bannon, for years, has just been like anti-tech, anti-Facebook, anti, you know, control and like big company. And so there's more merging there. But I agree, it's even harder for the AI safety camp, but it feels like the Nate Suarez on Tucker Carlson, Daniel on Joe Rogan are like, there might have been an update to the strategy.

• 2:25:33Joe Weisenthal?

  I think there has been, and I think anyone who expects AI politics to map cleanly to some like left-right thing is like delusional. So like, I get it, all right, Bernie became the first like major elected politician to like join the pause cause, et cetera. And so then people are like, oh, anti-AI is going to be a left thing. But you're absolutely right. There is not going to be a left, first of all, there's not going to be a left position to AI because there's a million different angles. But also, anyone who thinks that it's going to split between like some Democrat Republican thing, you know, we had Kathy Hochul on the podcast and she was like defending the data center one-year moratorium in New York.

• 2:26:16Joe Weisenthal?

  And I think at that point, like literally, it was so quick because at that point, then people were like, well, look, okay, New York is going to miss out on all of these companies that are, you know, bringing in tax revenue, et cetera. So this is why Texas is going to get it. And then like a week later, Governor Abbott, he didn't, it wasn't a moratorium, but then he announced like a higher bar that the data centers are going to have to clear in order to get built there. So even whether we're talking about model, regulation, whether we're talking about building of data centers, this idea that it's going to map cleanly onto some Democrat Republican thing, I think is like delusional.

• 2:26:55John Coogan?

  How do you think people break on, should this be a federal or state's issue? Because there's a world where, you know, a particular state is like, yeah, we actually love this. There's, I'm struggling to see a negative externality of a data center in a particular state. If everyone there is happy, maybe they should, maybe it should be state-by-state regulation. At the same time, it's such a national discourse issue that having a clarifying bill for like, yes, we are only building clean data centers.

• 2:27:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Sure.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  There's some emission standard. Maybe that makes sense, but how have you seen it puzzled around?

• 2:27:27Joe Weisenthal?

  No, look, I think most people, regardless of where you like fall on all of these questions, probably think that like some patchwork of state laws is like not a great way to go about doing any of this. But you know, outside data centers, I thought it was really interesting. I guess it was like, just last time it's fine, you know, Chris Lehman from OpenAI. And in that thing, he spelled out, it's like, we support this Massachusetts bill now, we support this California bill now, et cetera. That's a pivot.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:27:56Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a pivot. And so like, I'm sure.

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  Not the first pivot. Nobody loves a pivot.

• 2:28:01Joe Weisenthal?

  But I thought, you know, it was really interesting because in as recently as last year, another fellow we had on the podcast, like Alex Boris, was like, was enemy number one. And his bill that he had pushed in to save the assembly was like pretty straightforward. If you're above a certain company and you have some quote incident, you have to report it and pay a fine, et cetera. That kind of seems like a small potatoes regulation compared to like what we could get at this point. I doubt, again, like in the AI industry or outside the industry, anyone particularly loves the idea of like this, you know, the state-by-state rules. But it does feel like to a lot of people, well, this is the least worst possibility.

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  The best part about the state-by-state rules is that you have, it sets up the AGI dunk, which is like, oh, if your models are so powerful, it shouldn't be hard to comply with all the rules state-by-state. Like, yeah, it's a mess. And you have to, and you have to serve 50 different versions of ChatGPT, but like, go for it. Just have your model do it.

• 2:28:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Well, this is, you know, the other paradox, oh, you think your models are going to like go kill people or whatever? Just tell the AGI not to do that. If it's smart, have the AGI trained, right? Like, there's like all these.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. People apply to the distillation thing too.

• 2:29:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, this is the.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  You're so smart, why can't you stop?

• 2:29:12Joe Weisenthal?

  You're so smart, right? But this is like, this industry has, A, not only made for thought experiments. The thought experiments have been around probably since the 1950s and the version of sci-fi novels and Asimov, et cetera. And so the whole thing is built on thought experiments and so forth. There were thought experiments before there was something we would call an AI industry. And you just literally take them in any direction. And there's like.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  On the opposite end of thought experiment is like hard reality rate hikes.

• 2:29:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 2:29:45John Coogan?

  Do you think the AI community is digesting what's going on with the Fed funds rate? What the outlook is on interest rates?

• 2:29:51Joe Weisenthal?

  No. No, and I also like, I would be, you know, and I would be very.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  No, no, it's just, it is a very different world because like, because like, like tech companies that have never raised debt, have never raised money at all, are doing it. And like, they will be affected by this and probably more so in the future. So, yeah, what's happening?

• 2:30:09Joe Weisenthal?

  It will not only be affected, but I think by and large, if you sort of like assume the growth rates that these companies are seeing, if you sort of like do the math on like, what, okay, financing, building a data center, acquiring the chips, I don't think like 25 basis points, 50 basis points, they just don't move the dial yet.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think Sarah Fryer said like, yeah, she bought all this compute and it like trades in the market like 3X or something.

• 2:30:35Joe Weisenthal?

  So it's funny, yeah, and there's, you know, there's actually a funny amount of academic literature on whether any company, period, cares about interest rates. So this is actually an empirical thing that's been tested, which is like, have there ever been an example of a company that actually like changed some policy choice because of something the Fed did? And it's like surprisingly rare. These rare, there are so many bigger questions that usually, okay, here's a board meeting.

• 2:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:05Joe Weisenthal?

  And we're deciding whether we're going to make some investment. And it's very rare that the decision, oh, is the 10-year at 6% right now? Or is it 6.5% right now? Is the short end at 4.7% or is it 5? There are very few corporate decisions in the history of business where that turned out to be the deciding factor. Now, if we're talking maybe strictly real estate, where there's like a very like, okay, these are going to be our cap rates, et cetera. Sure, that may be very.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  This feels underwritable. Now it's not.

• 2:31:34Joe Weisenthal?

  But by and large, it is a really huge open question about whether these marginal moves, anything have any history of affecting corporate behavior or not.

• 2:31:44John Coogan?

  Can you reflect on Warch and how you, like, how is he different? Not even in the strategy, we know the rates are going up, but like aesthetically, the way he communicates, the dynamic between him and other parties, like, like, how does he feel? He's just at the start, but like, what is his legacy building towards here? What's the purpose?

• 2:32:05Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, I think there is this view, there is certainly a view that Warch represents some sort of like very 90-degree turn from like the three predecessors he had, or 180, I don't know, Powell, Yellen, and Bernanke. In the specific sense, they were more, well, Powell was a lawyer, but still more of like, but still like internalized academic macro for sure. But the main thing that they had was like, they communicated a lot. And they brought, starting under Bernanke, there were a number of, I guess I would call them monetary policy innovations. The press conference, there's not a history of that before Bernanke. There are so-called dot plots where the members of the FOMC write down where they expect growth on.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  Bernanke got the press conference idea from basketball?

• 2:32:51Joe Weisenthal?

  I did, probably from basketball. And it was built upon. But I think there is like, look, like, most of the history of central banking probably looks much more like Warch. Like, they didn't use to talk so much. And so like, I am of this view that basically like, you know, we could go, if you go back to the Greenspan era, he was, the word, the famous word to describe his style of communication was gnomic, right? And he didn't say many words, or if he did say a lot of words, no one understood what he was talking about. There was a long tradition of essentially like opacity in one way or another at the Fed.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:29Joe Weisenthal?

  And so like, if, like, I, to some extent, like, you know, people are like, oh, it's so, we're getting like, oh, these, the Dots do not have some long intellectual tradition at the Fed. If they completely got rid of the Dots, if they completely got rid of regular press conferences, which my gut is that Warch would like to do because he doesn't really say anything at most of his press conferences, we would not be ripping up some hundreds of years of like, no, we were ripping up precedent since 2008. And some of the, or 2009. And some of this stuff made a lot of sense coming out of the great financial crisis.

• 2:34:05John Coogan?

  Because it was a Fed crisis, like it was a crisis for them and they were instrumental.

• 2:34:10Joe Weisenthal?

  They had, look, they had a very specific challenge in 2000, which was that inflation was very low. They had cut rates to zero. If you had plugged the economic conditions of the Taylor rule into some sort of like rule, it would have said like, you have to cut rates to negative five.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:26Joe Weisenthal?

  They can't do that. I think a lot of things break when you have negative interest rates. So then they're like, well, how can we be further dovish once we hit the zero lower bound? And it's like, okay, we're going to do this by talking more about our commitment to lowering rates and so forth. So a lot of these things made a certain intuitive sense under a set of macro conditions in which the traditional tools of monetary policy were not workable because you just couldn't cut rates any further. It's 2026 now, it's a very different set of problems, et cetera. So if you would say, look, under these conditions, we do not have the same problems that we had when these things made a lot of sense, that we should get rid of them. I think there are a lot of people who would agree. What

• 2:35:08Joe Weisenthal?

  the one thing I will say that I like, the head-scratcher still, is that like on some level.

• 2:35:16Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, he used in his first or second press conference, worse use this phrase, we would like to play, we would like to have market participants play the ball and not the referee, the referee being the Fed.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:27Joe Weisenthal?

  And that sounds great. We love that idea. Play the ball and not the referee. Unfortunately, and where I would say, like, in the sort of government bond market, the Fed is the ball, right? We're all trying to guess where the Fed, right? So it's like, let's talk, let's talk for a second. Let's imagine a two-year government bond, right? That two-year government bond is going to, the correct pricing of that bond is going to be like, where the Fed sets rates over the next two years, right? It is.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Okay. Is there some sort of steel man here where like the, you should be more focused on the fiscal condition of the US government?

• 2:36:03Joe Weisenthal?

  We would love for that to be the case, but at the, we would love for that to be, sure. The, yes, but the thing is, the Fed is going to be making decisions. There's 12 members of the FOMC, 12 voting members of the FOMC. And they are going to be attempting to meet their dual mandate of maximum unemployment and stable prices and things that they will take into account. Well, what is government spending look like right now? What is trade and tariffs? What does that mean for the inflation picture, et cetera? What does AI mean for the state of the employment position, et cetera? But at the end of the day, then it's like, you are, once you are a participant in that market, what you are betting on is strictly and only how those 12 members of the FOMC

• 2:36:48Joe Weisenthal?

  are going to be digesting that information. You know, when, when we occasionally have arguments or debates about prediction markets, I like to point out that the US government bond market is not figuratively or metaphorically a prediction market. It is literally a prediction market in the specific sense that you are making bets on how 12 voters, just as in like, it's an election of, and there are only 12 voters of what they will do at the next meeting or the subsequent meetings. So it is literally a prediction market of how you expect 12 people to vote eight times a year. And that's not, that's, that is all I believe that a government, at least in the US,

• 2:37:32Joe Weisenthal?

  that a government bond market could ever be.

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Fed currently needs to, the dual mandate is minimize unemployment.

• 2:37:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes, which does not have a

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  Minimize inflation or hit the inflation target?

• 2:37:46Joe Weisenthal?

  So the, the goal is stable prices.

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  Stable price.

• 2:37:49Joe Weisenthal?

  And that has been interpreted and formalized as we have a 2% inflation target.

• 2:37:54John Coogan?

  But post AGI, post abundance will want the Fed to maximize unemployment and minimize prices. They want to maximize deflation so everything's essentially free. If we're really AGI pilled here, that's where we need the Fed to be going, right?

• 2:38:08Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I don't know like what like operation, like how do we maximize, right? Because let's just say we have, let's say we have an AGI that could do all human labor, right? I don't know what that means for Federal Reserve tax task with maximizing labor.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a road to cross.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  What data, what data do you feel like, what economic data do you feel like you can really lean on? I feel like there's so, I have so little trust in all the employment data now because it always gets revised sometime, you know, the revisions have been insane. And then at least like it felt like six months ago, like there was so much admin, like, like focus on some of this data. And then there were some personnel changes. And so now I'm like, the boss didn't really like the data.

• 2:38:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I'll say two things, which is that I actually believe that even to this day, setting aside some of the personnel changes, you should do this sometime. You should like call up the BLS. They're, they will answer any question you have. There are all these like very serious people who are, take their jobs very seriously. If you wanted to call up the BLS right now.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  This sounds amazing.

• 2:39:20Joe Weisenthal?

  You should do it. I mean, it would be a good segment. But if you called them up and you're like, you know, I want to understand how you, my co-host Tracy wrote a piece on this, but if you're like, if you call them up and say, you know, how did you arrive at the price of mayonnaise for this end day? They will answer, they will spend an hour on their phone, on the phone with you. They're great.

• 2:39:38John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:39:38Joe Weisenthal?

  They're really like, they're public servants in the classical thing. They will, they will sit an hour with you and tell you how this was constructed. So they're really good. And then the other thing I will say is like, look, especially in the like hedge fund world, there has been a very big obsession with like alt, alt data, private sector data, right? It looks exactly the same.

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:39:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Like there's been many attempts to construct private price indices. There's ADP. You can, indeed.com has a job. It doesn't differ that much. So there is this hope or this sort of belief that's like, oh, no, the private sector would be better at collecting this data maybe. And look, it's all out there. And then there's the Mastercard spending data, et cetera. It ends up rarely deviating in any substantial sense.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  So what you're saying is this goes a lot deeper than

• 2:40:29Joe Weisenthal?

  It goes a lot deeper. They're all in on it.

• 2:40:32John Coogan?

  Job data truther goes to heaven, asks God, did we really add, did the US really add 160,000 jobs in August? Says, they really did. And they said, wow, this goes deeper.

• 2:40:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Even you, even God's in on it. Wow. Exactly that. Yeah.

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  That is crazy. Yeah. And one thing that has stuck out to me is like, this has been the year of sort of breathless takes from AI leaders and VCs around like, we're in the post AGI era. AGI is here. We're in the singularity. We're in the foothills of the singularity. Everyone has a different buzzword, except I'm just like, I'm going to be looking at this, all the economic charts. And like, there's, it doesn't feel like there's a kink in the graph yet.

• 2:41:11Joe Weisenthal?

  No, it does not.

• 2:41:13John Coogan?

  It doesn't feel like it's showing up in GDP, employment, anything else.

• 2:41:15Joe Weisenthal?

  Question is, and I like, you know, where does the productivity data show up for the internet?

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's like, it doesn't.

• 2:41:23Joe Weisenthal?

  You like, it's just like, oh, in the, in the late nineties, productivity moved from 2.5 to 2.8%. Woo, amazing. Wow. And it's like, and so it's like, or it's like, where did the productivity show up with the release of the mobile phone? So I do think like, we could, we should, and we have, there's many interesting conversations that will be had about how AI is like manifesting in the data. But I do think it's worth asking like, why didn't all of these other technologies like show, that should have or intuitively felt like they would revolutionize business in some way? Make companies hyper productive? Why didn't that show up in the data either? So until that day when the kink arrives, we have plenty from the past.

• 2:42:07Joe Weisenthal?

  We still don't, we could still talk about and try to understand. That's sort of my take on it.

• 2:42:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. What else have you been tracking recently outside of, is AI just completely all encompassing?

• 2:42:19Joe Weisenthal?

  It's so annoying because it's like, I'm very interested in like, you know, I'm very interested in oil. I've been doing some oil stuff, but yeah, I'm very interested in the Fed itself. I'm very interested in all these things, but it's just like, I feel like it kind of against my will. That, right? Like that it's just like every year.

• 2:42:39John Coogan?

  Jordan, do you ever feel that way? I, he's like, really? Another, another main story on this?

• 2:42:47Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I got a, like, there's someone in my DMs who was like, we gotta do an episode about motor oil. We do have to do an episode about motor oil. There's, I gotta do an episode about

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  I like where this is going.

• 2:42:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I gotta do an episode about diesel prices.

• 2:43:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:43:02Joe Weisenthal?

  All of these things to prioritize, but I do feel to some extent against my will. Like there's this like monotonical step up in the number of like waking hours that like, you just can't talk about these things without AI. It's funny. I was in, um, earlier in the year, I guess it was early this summer when oil was a lot higher. I was out in Hong Kong. And Asia or East Asia in particular seemed as like ground zero for where, um, you know, the jet fuel crunch is really going to hit and stuff like that, because just the route, et cetera. So I'm like sitting around like all these like business execs and I'm like asking them, what's going on with oil and air? And I was like, whatever, let's talk about AI.

• 2:43:45Joe Weisenthal?

  I was like, oh my God. This is where I thought you guys were going to be a little more

• 2:43:49John Coogan?

  You know what we need? We need a new thought experiment for the oil community.

• 2:43:52Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  We need to build a new thought experiment for all these niche stories. And then it can be something that we can tussle with, something we can argue.

• 2:43:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Have like a big like

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  We need a percentage, you know, percentages around these thought experiments.

• 2:44:03Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  You need to build a lore in the world so then you can have endless

• 2:44:07Joe Weisenthal?

  It's really, yeah, once like, talk to them about like, you know, asset allocation and the

• 2:44:12John Coogan?

  You know, the question that I still have not gotten to the bottom of, we still, you mentioned the Iraq war protests.

• 2:44:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  And, and I remember that there was, uh, at the time, The banner was no blood for oil.

• 2:44:26Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 2:44:27John Coogan?

  Because the the stated reason why America went to war in the Middle East was WMDs.

• 2:44:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Uh, and that was pretty handily concluded as like false, right?

• 2:44:37Joe Weisenthal?

  I think so, yeah.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Information, right? But but the cynical view was like, we only went there for oil. And but we didn't get the oil? Or was that?

• 2:44:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Not as far, I I don't know.

• 2:44:49John Coogan?

  So so so so my question is like, is like, when when George Bush and Cheney sit down years later and and have a glass of wine together and they reflect, are they like, damn, that one got away from us?

• 2:45:01Joe Weisenthal?

  I mean, I mean, Trump certainly thinks that, so what are they doing? We didn't even get the oil.

• 2:45:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:06Joe Weisenthal?

  But you know, speaking of like, you know, the what is happening on the ground is we did get the oil out of Venezuela. And like Venezuelan oil is like basically our oil now.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  But that's 1% of the market?

• 2:45:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Uh, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's a lot of oil.

• 2:45:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:20Joe Weisenthal?

  But where are the like?

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  Where's the savings at the pump?

• 2:45:23Joe Weisenthal?

  But all there's there's no savings at the pump. But there's also like the disappearance of like that kind of protest movement. Because I think like, which is where I kind of thought you were gonna go. But it's like, there was a point in our lives where like the thought of like using US imperial might to extract oil was something that animated us non-trivial number of people on the streets.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  I think I think the internet.

• 2:45:44Joe Weisenthal?

  Now we're really doing it.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Where is the where is the? I mean, there is one, I don't want to actually completely sneer there, but like, um, you know, where is the? There has not been a particularly large scale protest movement about the embark of Cuba.

• 2:45:56Jordi Hays?

  It's it's it's so social media like very clearly killed protests because it allows like people can like go viral and feel like they're like, you know, taking action. And yet, uh, like it it it's like, it sounds like the dream of a of a of a government that's not doing the will of the people is like, you, you can do whatever you want, and sometimes they're gonna get angry on online at you, but nothing will actually happen.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  But that's very new. I mean, just a few years ago, there were millions of people for the Women's March, Black Lives Matter movements like, it was, it was like post COVID, then things maybe slowed down.

• 2:46:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  Like, I completely agree with this idea that like, people feel like they can scratch the itch of protest online by throwing a like on a.

• 2:46:39Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, really, you know, really like died is the bumper sticker.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  I was just talking, I was just thinking about that.

• 2:46:47Joe Weisenthal?

  I was like, every once in a while, I still like, usually it's like a Vermont license plate. And they still have like all of those, like, you know, the coexist bumper sticker, this car climb out Washington bumper sticker. My other car is a broomstick bumper sticker, etc. I miss all that. Every once in a while, I see these.

• 2:47:04John Coogan?

  It's a boom in in the, I bought this Tesla before.

• 2:47:07Joe Weisenthal?

  I bought it, that's right, there is that one.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  That's the most modern bumper sticker. But I do too. Uh, and I was thinking about how, uh, with, I haven't seen any anti-AI bumper stickers, but that feels like a ripe area for entrepreneurship.

• 2:47:19Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  Who's gonna start a bumper sticker enterprise?

• 2:47:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:47:23John Coogan?

  The anti-data center bumper sticker probably gonna fly off the shelves.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  And my friend, my friend Blake makes amazing bumper stickers.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:47:29Jordi Hays?

  He's, uh, the world's foremost vintage, uh, G-Wagon dealer.

• 2:47:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  So he makes, he makes bumper stickers that say, you wouldn't put a bumper sticker on a Mercedes Benz.

• 2:47:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, you know what I think there's in? One of the reasons why AI politics are really confusing and scrambling is that like, to even go buy, to even say like, put up an anti-AI bumper sticker on your market would force or there would force the person to accept the premise that AI is a serious and important technology.

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:48:01Joe Weisenthal?

  And so part of the reason that I think that it scrambles, the thing is like, if you want me to be actively anti it, then I first have to accept the premise that this is, I'm legitimizing.

• 2:48:12John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:48:12Joe Weisenthal?

  And that is like, so that they, that many people are reluctant to do for various reasons. And so there is this question, Nate Silver asked this, is like, why don't you see a more like, sort of like, left wing, um, opposition to like AI and the pace of development?

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:48:27Joe Weisenthal?

  There are many, I have many, I think there are many answers to this, and I don't even know, like, there will never be a, you know, people are complicated. But I think it first requires a certain step of legitimization that people don't want to do,

• 2:48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:39Joe Weisenthal?

  which would be required to actually like, care enough about AI risk to put a bumper sticker on it.

• 2:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:48:45Joe Weisenthal?

  Which you maybe want, yeah.

• 2:48:47John Coogan?

  With the power of AI, we'll be able to take a picture of that bumper sticker, immediately translate it into ironclad legislation.

• 2:48:53Joe Weisenthal?

  We could, we could do a spell this out, all the hereby's that you need to have at the thing.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Turn it into law immediately.

• 2:49:00Joe Weisenthal?

  God, you know, it's funny, like, um, such a classic political talking point, it's like, they never even read the legislation that they voted on. Now, America, this is like everything now, it's like, they never even read the code that they implemented. Yeah, it's right, like, there is, this will be the phenomenon of our world that in so many different things that people implement, no one ever actually like read it or knows like what the guts of it are.

• 2:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Joe Weisenthal?

  And it's just beginning, yeah.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, the state of the book industry is interesting.

• 2:49:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  Did you read that Tim Ferriss article?

• 2:49:32Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  He, he talks about how he, he wrote, uh, very, uh, he wrote very specific nonfiction books. One of them is called The Four Hour Chef, and it's essentially a recipe book. And he was like, I actually got steamrolled by ChatGPT because people can look up exactly what that is.

• 2:49:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:48John Coogan?

  Uh, and he was trying to sort of like, uh, match through some trends, like obviously, I think the Kindle bookstore has seen

• 2:49:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:55John Coogan?

  3X, the number of submissions, and there's a clear AI effect there.

• 2:49:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:59John Coogan?

  But then, I imagine that sales of, you know, Harry Potters are still chugging along.

• 2:50:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Probably still doing very well.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  Not really substituted with that, but.

• 2:50:07Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I think that, well, you know, I do think probably in sort of like, you know, the type of people who like wrote the books about like people who want to read about erotic affairs with monsters and stuff, you know, which is like.

• 2:50:21John Coogan?

  That's a big kind of.

• 2:50:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I have heard that this is a genre.

• 2:50:24John Coogan?

  It's called romanticy.

• 2:50:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Romanticy.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Yes, it's an investment.

• 2:50:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Will AI like be able to like write? I would suspect that it won't be too long until like some of these genres. But you know, like, look, really like big, like, this sort of world building type of fiction that would be in a Harry Potter, I don't think we'll have that technology for at least another two or three months.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  Uh, have you been surprised that Pangram works in 2026?

• 2:50:50Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I have been, like.

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  Like, I would have said that if they're solving Millennium Prizes, there's no way that Max Sparrow can detect it with his team.

• 2:50:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I have been surprised. I would have guessed that, and I guess I would still guess that at some point, AI writing will be good enough or will be, but like.

• 2:51:10John Coogan?

  And I don't think the labs are focused on evading AI detection.

• 2:51:13Joe Weisenthal?

  So it could be that at some point, they may prioritize that or something like that.

• 2:51:17John Coogan?

  It's kind of a nice equilibrium where it's like, look, if you want to know if it's AI written, you can.

• 2:51:21Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  But we're not gonna like stuff it in your face with a bunch of like, heavy-handed tells.

• 2:51:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:26John Coogan?

  Or like, you know, additions, but like, it is an option to go figure it out if you want.

• 2:51:31Joe Weisenthal?

  It might be a useful, um, it might be a useful equilibrium, one that the labs don't feel any particular prioritization to like work on, etc. I mean, like, I, I, you know, there's no, you know, it's funny because people talk about like, AI writing. And when I, when the conversation happens online, it's often between journalists. And so writing to them means writing articles.

• 2:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:58Joe Weisenthal?

  The vast majority of quote, writing is just emails, right? And I doubt there's like, you know, and I don't think that there is like some big norm within most corporations, like, what, you had an AI write this memo summarizing the meeting?

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:12Joe Weisenthal?

  I've actually heard the opposite when I talk to people who work in non-media organizations and non-tech organizations, that there is a norm against like, why didn't you have the AI write this? It would have been a cleaner email than.

• 2:52:24John Coogan?

  Cleaner, for sure, but I I I think the KPI that that I would be interested in in looking at if, uh, would be like, number of words should like, posted to Slack and over email for employees should not be increasing in the AI era.

• 2:52:39Joe Weisenthal?

  No.

• 2:52:39John Coogan?

  Like, do not just become more verbose because you can, but if you're using AI to fact check everything that you're saying, but you're still writing tersely.

• 2:52:47Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. No, I agree. And like, look, I saw, it's still all in flux, but like, I'll, I think, like, by and large, like, if you send me an email and it's like, oh, how to find the TVP and offices, or what you should do, what you should wear, and I can tell it's like AI written, it's not gonna be a big deal to me, I'm not gonna be like.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  It's not just a studio, Joe, it's an ultra dome. You'll know it when you see it.

• 2:53:10Joe Weisenthal?

  Like, I'm not gonna be like, you know, tremendously offended if like you use.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Send you the sloppiest GPT-4O email.

• 2:53:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I actually am like, I am kind of like a holdout in that like, I actually have never sent a like AI-generated email. Like, I'm like, I, if I'm gonna like put words to something, I want to write them.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:53:30Joe Weisenthal?

  But I do not think there's gonna be like some big norm against like, for like basic functional.

• 2:53:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Communication.

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  I just love being able to like, open up, uh, the voice mode or like the the dictate what I'm saying. Ask seven different questions across statistics and links and some charts, and then just have like, basically, I used to have 12 tabs with Wikipedia and some economic statistics, and I used to be tabbing through them when I'm actually writing or researching, and now I can just have it all in one go. And then I'm still doing the instantiation and like the thought process.

• 2:54:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Look, it's pretty nice.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  It's really good for like.

• 2:54:04Joe Weisenthal?

  It's pretty hard, it's pretty good, it's pretty hard to resist. I mean, yeah, like whether I, you know, I, I'm interested in this book, what would be some other recommendations? What are the through lines between this line of thought and this line of thought?

• 2:54:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:18Joe Weisenthal?

  It's pretty good, I kind of use it.

• 2:54:20John Coogan?

  What are the biggest, uh, or like most shocking, uh, findings on dirt from your studies on orality?

• 2:54:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah. You know, I think it's actually like, so this is something I'm like very interested in, and, um. I don't know. So, or like when you think of like, so orality, what do we really talk about here? It's speech, but there are things that happen in speech that are the important parts. So for example, three people talking, we were trying like, oh, let's one up each other, et cetera. Let's get a little bit confrontational. It's like, this is like,

• 2:54:53Jordi Hays?

  It's got a little spicy.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  I completely disagree. Let's not get confrontational.

• 2:54:57Joe Weisenthal?

  No, let's not. But, um, but this is different with AI. Like, it's, and so this is like actually something I'm like very interested in because for the last 15 years of the internet, we are just sort of like bathed in constant, both fights and competition, right? Whether it's Instagram and you're sort of trying to show your life is a little bit better than someone else's, or whether it's Twitter and you like, want to get in a good dunk, et cetera. And so I think the really interesting question, one of many interesting questions from a society standpoint is, what happens when we're bathed in the thing that always agrees with us? And what happens like when we're bathed in like the most polite, helpful thing on the other side?

• 2:55:39Joe Weisenthal?

  So it's very tempting to like, look at and say like, okay, chatbots are this huge thing. This is the extension, the acceleration. This is like this sort of back and forthness of, social media, et cetera. But it's not because it doesn't have that like, competitive thing that one, the chatbot is never trying to one up you. It's never trying to get a dunk.

• 2:55:59Jordi Hays?

  I actually have had an experience recently. I got a very robust racing simulator.

• 2:56:06Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, sick, sick.

• 2:56:07Jordi Hays?

  And, and so, and so I'll be like, you know, focusing on improving like my lap times with a classic car on a certain track. And I've had the experience a bunch of times where I'm like, I cut like a lot of, you know, multiple seconds off my time. I think I'm feeling like, I feel pretty quick. And I go to, I go to chat GPT and I'm like, how's this pace on this track?

• 2:56:30Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and it'll just like, I'm expecting it to be like, you are the GO.

• 2:56:39Joe Weisenthal?

  It used to, it used to.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  It used to be like, you're in the conversation.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  It's like, and, and like, you know, granted, I'm, I'm a relative beginner. But it'll be like, you know, I'll think, I'll have improved a lot already. And then it'll be like, yeah, you're, you're like, clearly in development. I wouldn't call you like,

• 2:57:00Joe Weisenthal?

  It's a year ago.

• 2:57:01Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, and it's, and it's ranking out like, it's doing a tier list. And it's like, you're, you're, uh, you're three tiers away from like competition pace, basically.

• 2:57:10Joe Weisenthal?

  I know. The question is,

• 2:57:12Jordi Hays?

  To me, I'm like, wow, I'm, I'm actually glad, I'm glad it's telling me the truth because it's good, it's pushing me. It's showing me there's more, but it's not a good feeling to get told by this thing.

• 2:57:22Joe Weisenthal?

  No. I always think, who is brave enough to admit that they miss when the models were more obsequious? They told you, you're a genius. Every time it's like, what do you, but now you like ask the latest model, you know, I have this thought that this is like this. And it's like, yeah, Melissa, you're not, you're missing something. It's like, oh, I'm, you know what? I'm going to go back to Opus because that was really nice to me. And always told me I was a genius.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Sometimes they'll even sort of like, like compliment themselves. Like, you'll ask a question and they'll dig in and they'll be like, well, I found some interesting things. I dug into it and here's the interesting.

• 2:57:54Joe Weisenthal?

  You know what? I've had it interesting.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I started this. Okay. So let's give me some credit.

• 2:57:58Joe Weisenthal?

  I like to, you know, unfortunately, several, when I frequently will ask the question on incognito mode so that past history doesn't, so that, so that like, I don't want it to just like flatter my, you know, because otherwise it's too.

• 2:58:11John Coogan?

  Of course, of course.

• 2:58:12Joe Weisenthal?

  But, um, I had something that I had never seen before.

• 2:58:15Jordi Hays?

  It literally says, so 208 puts you at a pretty reasonable pace, especially since you're still learning the track. The circuit has an unusually large skill gap because the entire mountain section rewards confidence and precision. It's basically, it's basically like saying you suck.

• 2:58:30Joe Weisenthal?

  That's brutal. But I had an interesting experience that I never had seen a response before. So I asked, I was reading a book and I didn't quite understand something. So I asked the model if it could like, help me like, understand this section. And it said something weird that I had never got before. It said, you'll have to forgive me because I'm remembering this book from my memory. And it was like, I, I, so I'm like, my memory of the book isn't that great, but my understanding. And I was like, that's weird because then the model begins to sound like this like, self that has an understanding of its own. It's like, you'll have to forgive me. I'm, I don't exactly remember what the book said.

• 2:59:12John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:59:12Joe Weisenthal?

  And I was like, kind of unnerved by this, like, level of abstraction.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  So that is weird. That also might be an artifact from, uh, specific reinforcement learning on, do not memorize the entire book because if you reproduce it, we get sued.

• 2:59:25Joe Weisenthal?

  Then it's a copyright.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  And so, and so actually like, the correct way to talk about literature is, is as someone who has read the book, but might not remember at all. And that's actually the goal that gets reinforced.

• 2:59:35Joe Weisenthal?

  That's very, okay. That, that could be a good answer. Anyway, I can't find it out. The only reason I mentioned I asked on incognito mode. So I can't pull it up because I want to go back and read it, but it disappeared from my chat history. But these things, I was like, kind of like unnerved by.

• 2:59:50John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, no, it was a lot. And yeah, I was, uh, I, I was noticing chat GPT uses I to refer to itself. And I was like, but, but, but the models are starting to use agent swarms. So should they start being, should they start using we?

• 3:00:05Joe Weisenthal?

  Have you ever seen that famous screenshot of, it was a real chat. Um, someone asked it some question. And someone said, where'd you get that fact? And the model said, oh, I was in, I, I heard it in IBM conference in 1985. Which one responded is like, where is this coming from? It's like, you were not at an IBM conference in 19, but that was the, it's like weird, weird stuff in there. Yeah, exactly.

• 3:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Gentlemen, uh, I have a meeting. I gotta get to it pretty soon. Uh, I hate to cut it off.

• 3:00:35John Coogan?

  It's such a good time.

• 3:00:36Joe Weisenthal?

  I love Cheddar with you guys.

• 3:00:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, always a great time. Let's do it again soon.

• 3:00:39Jordi Hays?

  It's an honor to finally have you here.

• 3:00:41Joe Weisenthal?

  It's an honor to be here in the dome. I can't believe I got to hit the gong.

• 3:00:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:00:45Joe Weisenthal?

  That was like, I'm done. I have no, nothing left to accomplish.

• 3:00:48Jordi Hays?

  Hit the, hit the soundboard. You got, you got one, one option, one option.

• 3:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. The live show is happening, Odd Lots in Los Angeles. Lots of guests. It's happening tonight. There we go.

• 3:01:05Jordi Hays?

  All right. And I want you to experience this. We'll see you guys.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  On Apple Podcasts.

• 3:01:09Jordi Hays?

  We're going to see you Monday.

• 3:01:10John Coogan?

  We'll see you on Monday. We're out, we're at a conference tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday, 11 AM Pacific sharp.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 3:01:16John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter. Goodbye.